The Prisoner (1979)

by Stine, Hank

  A soft, muted chime rang at the door.

  He looked up and nodded. The dwarf went to the door and opened it.

  Janet.

  She stood still, brown eyes staring, mouth (in the moment before surprise) precise, full, English. Her dark brown hair (cut tight around face and shoulders, as it had been when last he’d seen her) stirred him. Then she was moving towards him and he took her in his arms.

  ‘John,’ she said and pressed against him, too relieved even to kiss.

  He held her tightly and, after a moment, said brutally: ‘I can’t tell you anything.’

  She shivered and went tense.

  ‘Isn’t…Can you at least…’She hesitated, chose carefully. ‘Is it a mission for my father?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I certainly can’t tell you that.’

  She straightened and pulled away, smoothing her dress. She looked up at him evenly, face strained and hurt in a way he had never seen before. ‘I can’t take much more of this.’

  ‘Do you remember the message I sent you?’ he said gently.

  ‘John.’ Her eyelids trembled in bewilderment. She seemed reluctant to speak. ‘That was you, wasn’t it? Tell me it was you.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was.’

  Her eyes, on his, were uncomprehending.

  ‘There won’t be much more,’ he said. ‘I promise you that.’

  Her eyes were wide, the deep, luminous brown of the iris hesitant but hopeful. ‘Is it over?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘but it almost is.’

  He stepped away and raised two fingers to the dwarf. ‘Brandy.’

  The little man inclined his head and went off.

  Janet’s hand reached out, seeking his: her eyes denied it, fixed on the cold brick hollow of the fireplace. He closed his fingers around hers (cool and strong to the touch) and moved towards the antique leather divan opposite the logs. Her eyes came around, puzzled, then understanding.

  She settled herself back against the corner, face pale above the stark black of her dress. Mouth and chin were strong, severe, unyielding. There was something sullen and defiant in her expression: an unnatural gauntness in the cheeks.

  ‘All right, darling,’ she said. ‘But it’s a little hard to believe in a man for two years without seeing him.’

  He went to the fireplace, knelt, and grasped the screen, shoving it aside so that he might reach the logs. He brought out his lighter, flipped back the top and snapped the wheel, watching the flame spring from the wick. He leaned forward and extended his arm until the lighter was under the shavings.

  The flame licked out, singed the blond wood black, and a tiny nimbus of fire spilled up across the dry, splintered kindling. It blazed immediately, blue flame cooling upward to yellow. The fire seared the underbelly of the logs, popping and snapping.

  ‘What’s happening now,’ he said, ‘is so different from anything I have been through before that you cannot guess what it is like. Nor can I tell you. Yet it is, in its way, far more important than anything I have ever been involved in.’ He leaned forward and looked straight into her eyes, seeking, by as much as it lay within his power, to insure her understanding: ‘But you must understand this: I will not allow it to come between us or to hurt us any more.’

  She looked at him for a moment, sighed and smiled with a deathly weariness. ‘Yes, John.’ She reached long, slender fingers to him.

  He stepped forward and took them, the fine cool tension of her body (even if by so little) within his grasp. ‘To tell you more would be to endanger you. And I won’t do that.’

  A tired, unhappy look came into her eyes. ‘You are over protective, darling. Not knowing hurts more than anything that might be done to me.’

  ‘Then I’m selfish,’ he said abruptly. ‘But I need your love too much to risk losing you.’

  There was a sound of plastic on metal and footsteps coming across the carpet. The dwarf rolled the teacart up to them and stopped, uncorking the brandy and pouring equal amounts into snifters. The liquid fell and splashed, sparkling darkly.

  The little man recorked the bottle and bowed stiffly, then stood, waiting.

  ‘Good night.’ He dismissed the butler and seated himself by Janet, watching the dwarf go back to his quarters at the rear.

  He closed thumbs and forefingers on the stems of the snifters and handed one to Janet, offering the other in toast. She took hers and sat back, watching him over the rim. Her eyes had a cautious, nervous intensity.

  ‘To us.’

  They drank the toast. Fire like velvet over his throat.

  ‘How long will it be, this time?’ Janet’s face was tense, smooth, under control.

  ‘How long…’

  ‘Until you have to go back?’

  He shook his head, ‘I’m not going back. But there are a few things yet to be cleared up.’

  ‘Are they—’She hesitated, visibly trying to come to grips with the question: eyes narrowing, mouth tightening. ‘—urgent?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She sat the snifter down and brought her gaze to his, catching her lip between her teeth. ‘Then I must go. You see that: don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said reluctantly, ‘I see it.’

  ‘Listen to me, John. There are only a few times in our lives when we are given the chance to love greatly. That kind of love is like a work of art. It’s as difficult and demanding a creation as a painting or a symphony. You know that and I know that. We both know how magnificent its rewards can be. Now understand me. We have a chance at that kind of love, and if you think I shall let it be destroyed, you are mistaken. And if it comes to a showdown between you and father—father be damned. I love you and I will have you.’

  He waited.

  ‘There is much I have to ask you,’ she said. ‘But it can wait. Will have to, I suppose.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said, and she was in his arms, crushed to him as his lips met hers.

  They broke apart.

  She smiled, touched his cheek, and was gone.

  He knocked at the door: a sharp penetrating rap and the sound echoing away into the house.

  A sheep bawed in the field behind and he caught its reflection in the great picture window just to the right of the walk. Then he heard the resonant silence of the wind as it rushed swift and cool across the earth. Down the road, near Kingsdown, a horn blared. All else was serene.

  Something moved in the house. There was the muffled sound of a door closing. Then footsteps came towards the front.

  The knob shook, rasped as if the other end were being turned. The door moved inward, opened the length of a chain. A short, white-haired man in a blue denim smock peered up at him.

  ‘Yes?’ the man said. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Sir John Wilkinson, Bart?’

  ‘Yes.’ The repetition was shorter, harsher: impatient: ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I bear a message from Colonel Schjeldahl.’

  The eye visible through the doorway grew brighter. ‘Your identity badge?’

  He slid a hand into the cool lining of his jacket pocket, fingers closing on the stiff plastic card, and brought it out, pushing it forward through the crack of the door.

  Sir John took it (hands as smooth and pink as a child’s) and lifted it to his face, peering at it carefully. Then he looked up, eyes bright and penetrating. He stepped back and closed the door; there was a scrape of metal on metal, and the door opened wide.

  The hall was a sunny amber. An umbrella stand to one side of the door, a porcelain vase to the other. The pile of the carpet was thick and deep, yielding easily to the foot.

  He went into the living-room and turned to the baronet. Sir John offered him the card. He took it reading the familiar words as easily up-side down as right-side up: BY COMMISSION OF HER MAJESTY, THE QUEEN and pocketed it.

  Sir John’s face was kindly, softened by an amiable squint, flesh translucent and freckled. But there was something almost too companionable in its friendliness, as at
the sharing of some off-colour Rotarian joke. Something too corrupt in his smile: the knowledge of some universal and unconfessed guilt.

  There were gold leather divans along the wall facing the window, and antique writing tables at either end of the room. The whole had the faint decadence of eighteenth century Paris: gilt and lacquer.

  Through the window he could see the damp countryside and the blue dome of sky. There was a rainbow over the road and the sun gleamed wetly in the grass.

  Sir John gestured vaguely towards the divan. ‘Make yourself comfortable.’

  ‘I think we’d better have these shut,’ he said abruptly, walking over to the drapes, shoving them aside, and closing his hand on the cord. He drew it down and the fabric swung out along the track, shutting off the view.

  The old man gave him a sly, delighted grin. ‘You know, I thought you were the one. I really thought I remembered your number.’ He seemed to pause and consider. ‘Yes, it was sent to me on a telegram. I’ve got it around here somewhere.’ His head moved in little jerks, like a bird’s movement, more excited than nervous.

  ‘So it’s finally come, has it? You know, I’ve always thought it would.’ Sir John turned his head towards the divan. ‘Is it all right if I sit down? I mean: is there enough time?’

  ‘Sit down.’

  ‘Good.’ Sir John went over and sat down. He looked up, face relaxed, boyish. ‘I’ve always speculated about what kind of person it would be. Just exactly what they’d be like. I wanted it to be someone, you know’—his eyes had a bright, far away look—‘someone sensitive, intelligent, charming. Not a mindless, guttural assassin. Perhaps that’s only vanity. Maybe I just want to think I was deserving of the best.’ His eyes narrowed and he leaned back against the couch. ‘If it’s not asking too much: for which agency am I being hit? He seemed enormously pleased with the word.

  ‘None.’

  ‘But surely I am to be killed? I would hate to think my gesture had gone for nothing.’

  ‘If I kill you,’ he answered, ‘it will be a personal matter between us.’

  Sir John looked at him slyly. ‘You know, that’s very interesting. I had a conversation with Sir Charles Portland on that very subject.’ He cocked his head. ‘You do know Sir Charles, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Then you’ll know Sir Charles is a very determined man. Well, I said that no one killed for purely personal reasons any more. That it was old-fashioned. That most men suffer so overwhelmingly from corporate guilt that they rationalise their guilt away by placing its responsibility on some larger object. That then they can commit any crime, on any scale, and be free of its consequences. Thus they can start at some relatively minute level, such as cheating on income tax, by deciding the bloody government takes too big a bite of their wages, and hang their guilt on the impersonal workings of the government.’

  He paused and picked up a pair of wire framed glasses, settling them around ear and over his nose. ‘Sir Charles, on the other hand, said that he knew of at least one person who did not suffer from collective guilt and who claimed he killed only from his conscience. Now in light of that, I find your arrival almost too opportune. Don’t you?’

  ‘It seems improbable.’

  ‘But I had the distinct impression,’ Sir John said, squinting upward and removing his glasses, ‘that you wanted to question me. Is that right?’

  ‘I have a few questions to ask.’

  ‘Is that right? Will you use torture if I refuse to answer?’

  ‘I hadn’t considered it, no.’

  ‘That’s too bad. I’ve done a lot of thinking about pain and I’ve decided that, today, we are all too susceptible to pain. We are no longer conditioned to endure it. The surrender of our conscience has only been a symptom of an aversion to hardship. The public figures of our time condition us away from it. They endure nothing, are devoutly corrupt, and profit from their corruption. These are the people we seek to emulate—they fill the vacuum of our need for guidance.’ He brought out a handkerchief and began to polish the lenses.

  ‘People simply refuse to acknowledge evil in themselves or in others. It’s a kind of societal blackmail in which everyone agrees to everyone else’s equality. We expect and give no better than the other man—and we expect and give nothing. We never strain against opposition and our muscles atrophy. Ever wonder why so many American spies sign confessions when they’re caught?’

  ‘What do you know of the Village?’ He had some time (after all) to ask the question.

  ‘Which village?’ The old man peered distrustfully through the lenses. ‘The one just down the road? It’s much like any other.’

  ‘It’s a place where a certain kind of person is sent. Persons who have held positions of some delicacy. Persons who are possessed of secrets vital to their governments. Persons whose freedom might represent a vital threat to their nation’s security.’

  ‘Do you by any chance mean a retirement village?’

  ‘Persons who have been detained against their will.’

  Sir John tilted his head to one side and peered at him from a single, intent eye. ‘But surely, in these times, none of us are where we are entirely from choice. It seems clear to me that the forces of environment and heredity have channelled us down certain inescapable paths. What Negro in America is entirely free; what white in China is entirely safe? Aren’t certain of your thoughts and attitudes a result of your upbringing? Too rigid and controlled a personality because of a strict father; a defiance and resentment of authority because of such fettering strictness.’

  ‘I was thinking rather of deliberate, severe and brutal manipulation.’

  ‘But are we not, in this world of ours, subjected to constant and inescapable manipulation? As subtle and persuasive as mother’s instructions not to play with our penises, and advertisements that link smoking with sex appeal. As crude and overt as the public school’s indoctrination of its pupils with Judeo-Christian morality, or the knowledge that if, alone, we indulge in certain pleasures, our entire society will punish us. And these pressures affect us in ways that are not entirely conscious; for the mind is not meant to be aware of its own defaults. Is not such manipulation, after all, common?’ The old man gave a brief, questioning smile.

  ‘How can you morally justify the existence of such a Village?’

  ‘One can’t, of course. But morality has become old-fashioned and without it anything can be justified. You see, when men begin to justify their actions in terms of something besides morality’—he hooked the earpiece to one lens around his ear, and paused—‘their country, for instance, or their family, or their race, you can be pretty sure they’ve done something wicked. Since they are no longer acting morally, they do not wish to be reminded of morality, and if you talk of other things, they will not mention it.’

  ‘And how do you, personally, feel about this?’

  ‘Personally?’ The glasses went on. ‘We are no longer allowed personal scruples. If our government wages a dishonourable war, do we not have to serve? If our employers engage in shoddy practice, is it safe to protest? If our neighbours are offended, do they not threaten our lives? We are intimidated and circumscribed on all sides. We are forbidden personal feelings. There must be mass approval before we can act’

  ‘And the people who are injured?’

  ‘But isn’t pain a universal of our lives? The pain of too loud a commercial, too long a queue, an unjust remark, a spiteful law, a loved one we cannot trust. Are these not the common experience of our age? And these people you speak of, who are they? Numbers, now, statistics, aggregates, masses, cogs in a system too vast to resist. How much do their individual lives differ—their problems, agonies, pressures and frustrations? Are they not the same in one village as another? Do men not carry their selves, their true problems, from one place to another as they move?’

  ‘What about dignity?’

  ‘Now? Dignity is dead. It went out with high button shoes and honest government. It was not co
mpatible with computers and cost accounting. When a balanced book becomes more important than a human life, there is no room left for dignity.’

  ‘You feel no responsibility towards these people?’

  ‘Responsibility? We have been denied that privilege for some time in the search for a grosser national product. We have forsaken responsibility with guilt, and placed them both on the shoulders of something more nebulous than ourselves, something less accessible to punishment.’

  ‘And’—he had to be absolutely sure—‘you feel no responsibility for the lives you have ruined?’

  The old man sighed and shook his head. ‘There are no lives anymore, only statistics. Any statistic can be sacrificed.’

  He reached into his coat pocket and closed his hand around the chill grip of the Colt. ‘Even your own?’

  Sir John Wilkinson lifted his head and looked up out of tired, cynical eyes. ‘Even my own.’

  What it means,’ the Field Marshal said, leaning forward on the frame and panting heavily, ‘is fitness. We have to keep fit.’

  His haunches lifted and his legs pumped furiously, as if this were indeed a bicycle and not a wheelless frame bolted to the floor. The steel bars on which he was mounted rattled with the pumping, and even the floor seemed to shake slightly.

  ‘We have a duty, as a people and a nation, to keep fit. We cannot afford to be soft at a time when our enemies so completely surround us. It would be a flagrant invitation to conquest.’ He stopped, panting heavily, and looked up. ‘What newspaper did you say you were from?’

  He got off the bicycle, took a few deep breaths, then lay down on the floor, pressing his hands flat by his chest and straightening his legs, rising on his toes. He began doing pushups, talking in measured breaths. ‘Our enemies are ready. They will attack at the first sign of weakness. We must offer them the only thing they will understand: a solid, determined front. We must be strong, alert or they will destroy us.’

  He stood and seized two handles set in the wall. There were weights connected to them. He shoved his right hand forward and a weight rose, ‘What some people fail to realise is that, while freedom’s the ideal goal, you can’t have freedom without discipline.’