WAITING FOR DEATH
The Wednesday morning was dull, with low grey clouds overhead. About eleven o’clock, he noticed a curious dampness which spread in patches over the roads. As time passed this dampness ran together and increased, until by nine o’clock something like a thin sheet of ice or glass covered the paths, and brown water was gushing up from the drains and culverts.
Rostof was surprisingly slow to grasp the meaning of this, until he saw something like a streak of silver shoot up from the road, and another odd one here and there; then the explanation and the thrill of imminent danger shot through his mind, and he leaped for a providential near-by passageway.
Inside five minutes he was gazing out at the strangest rain shower he had ever seen, a shower in which the drops, like deadly silver bullets, shot up at lightning speed from the ground and vanished into the sky. Pools in the road split up into a myriad tiny streams that spread away in all directions and finally dissipated themselves in drops which hurled themselves at the clouds above. Had he been caught out in that queer rainstorm his body would have been slashed to ribbons in a matter of seconds.
After about twenty minutes the shower abated, and presently he could see dry patches between the spots. Then the dry patches joined up and became bigger, while the spots of rain became fewer, until at length the last one had flashed upward out of sight and a bone-dry road was left behind.
Rostof was hampered a good deal in the outlying roads and lanes by grass borders which kept him to the roadway. Where the grass was clipped close it was possible to walk on it, even though it felt like treading on close-packed nails; but where it grew long it would have lacerated his feet like thin slivers of glass.
As Tuesday night drew on, therefore, he was undecided whether to return to the town to find an unfrequented corner to sleep in, or whether to push on farther in the hope of finding a farm. But, seeing a large house standing among trees in its own grounds, he decided to try there, for he was feeling wretchedly weary.
He turned up the winding drive and hunted about for a smooth spot in which to lie down. Passing an open window, a weird cacophony of noise startled him, and he could not think what it was until, looking through the window, he saw a gramophone on the table. It was the first time he had heard a tune played backwards, and try as he might he could not place the melody.
Sounds, of course, were still audible to him, but like all other things they were heard in reverse, and were often totally unrecognisable. Speech came from the lips of the people about him as mere gibberish, while the song of birds was changed to disjointed notes; even the hooting of cars was different. Only sounds without change of note, such as an engine whistle or the clatter of horses’ hooves, seemed familiar.
He spent the night lying on the top of a flat porch over the main entrance of the house though sleep did not come until the Tuesday evening. He ached in every bone and the roof-top seemed terribly hard, though fortunately he was not cold. Throughout his experiences he felt no change of temperature.
He awoke when the Sun was already climbing back into the sky, and lay for a long time reluctant to move. For the first time, utter hopelessness swept over him in a dark flood. He had not eaten for two days and nights, his shoulder was stiff and throbbed unceasingly. He had had nothing with which to staunch the flow of blood from the gash, and loss of blood coupled with hunger and fatigue made him feel sickly and faint.
There seemed no point in rousing himself to continue his wanderings, for sooner or later death would come and bring surcease from the dull gnawing of pain. He wondered vaguely if in death his body would revert to a normal state, or whether it would still be borne on into the vast mausoleum of the Past…?
In the late afternoon he clambered stiffly and slowly down from the porch, and for a time wandered around the house. At the back the kitchen door was open, and the sight of a plate of newly-baked cakes on the table drove him to try to abstract one. It was useless, of course, and after skinning his knuckles in an endeavour to make an impression on them, he went outside again to avoid the sight of them.
He made his way round to the front of the house with the intention of taking to the road again, and was skirting the main lawn when something attracted his attention. A small brown bird was flying backwards across the lawn, about five feet from the ground; but it was not this which seemed so strange. It was the fact that the bird was flying far more slowly than any natural bird ever does.
Previously, all movements about him, although in reverse, had been invariably at normal speeds. But this bird was like something in a slow-motion film; it was simply drifting backwards, and he could count each wing-beat. He watched it with interest, and when it was almost in the centre of the lawn his eyes widened in surprise. For it had stopped in mid-air!
In a moment he was across to it. There, five feet above the ground, the small brown bird hung as if suspended by invisible wires, frozen into an exquisitely carved, tiny statue. He passed his hand all around it, below and above, and finally took hold of it. It was brittle hard and utterly immovable, exactly as all other objects were in this alien Time Stream.
BACK TO NORMAL
He suddenly realised, with a faint thrill of fear, that the whole world seemed to have become noticeably silent. A vast quiet was all about him; not the faintest twitter of a bird, not a rustle of a branch, not a click or tap sounded anywhere. He stood stock-still as if afraid to stir lest some other nightmare was about to beset him.
As he slowly turned his head, he discovered that all motion, too, seemed to have ceased. A gardener who had been bent over a border was grotesquely crouched, one hand half-stretched out. The slight dip and sway of the branches in the breeze had stopped, a film of smoke from a chimney balanced in the air like a spray of blue glass. The whole Earth seemed to be holding its breath.
Then a second of unutterable tension tugged at his body and a shock of reeling nausea struck him. His body seemed to be riven into a million pieces, yet he could not stir or cry. There was a brief flash of all-enveloping darkness. Then the tension snapped like a released rubber band, and he was staggering slightly, wild-eyed.
The small brown bird was flashing off toward the bushes—flying forwards! The gardener stood gazing at him with a ludicrous look of amazement on his face. Rostof realised, with a sudden wild thrill of hope, that the man could see him. He ran forward, babbling incoherently.
The next instant he was shaking the hand of the astounded Mr. Curle, laughing and weeping at the same time….
Well, there you have Rostof’s own story, and the main facts of the case. But there are one or two more facts which you can call evidence or coincidence, whichever way your inclinations lean.
Rostof said that on the Wednesday night he had been attracted by the crowd to the Elite cinema at Highgate. He was on the outskirts of the crowd, and did not have a very good view; but he at least saw the firemen break in by the second floor balcony, and the clouds of dense black smoke which rolled away on the night breeze. His story appeared in the Wednesday morning papers, and that same evening at six o’clock the Elite caught fire and the fire brigade was called out.
Rostof, of course, wasn’t there. He was in hospital, sleeping peacefully. But it is a coincidence that he should have guessed—or dreamed—that a fire would occur on that identical night.
Again, what can you make of this? Schouten and Matheson went to visit Rostof in hospital, naturally. They were carrying on with the experimental routine at the laboratory, and let him know how the work was progressing. On Thursday evening, they were both working in the main room when a freak thunderstorm came up from the south; unusual for the time of year, but not unprecedented.
There were one or two desultory flashes of lightning, then at 6:31 p.m. precisely a vivid flash struck the roof and passed by the giant copper discharge gap to earth. The gap had been partly charged, and was due for breakdown at seven o’clock. The upper cone was badly melted, the ground plate buckled and fused, and much of the adjacent apparatus w
as fused or burnt.
Unaccountably, immediately after the flash they found a complete suit of grey cloth, underwear, boots and socks, badly singed and burnt, beside the gap, together with a twisted object which at first was unrecognisable. Later, however, they judged it to be the remains of a pair of headphones, though how either they or the suit got there was more than the two men could say.
In my own mind I feel convinced that Rostof actually went on from Tuesday to Thursday in the first place, conducting his classes and behaving in every way as a normal person should. Then, on that Thursday evening, he was twisted into a reversed Time Stream and started to come back on his own tracks, as it were. Thus, he would see himself in his former existence, a helpless spectator of his own past.
But when the process slowed down and stopped, and he was released into the normal Time Stream on Tuesday at 3 p.m., an apparent anomaly appears at once. There would be two Rostofs existing at the same time! Would have been, that is, except for the inflexible law which states that a man cannot exist in two separate places during the same period of time.
But the instant that he came back into the normal Time Stream, and appeared on Mrs. Van der Rorvik’s lawn, his former Tuesday-to-Thursday existence was automatically cancelled, obliterated, washed out as if it had never been. Which explains his startling disappearance from the Grammar School. He had to start the Tuesday-to-Thursday Time journey anew—but this time in a hospital ward. Yet since his metabolism and physical processes were unchanged throughout the adventure, he could still remember his former existence, even if it no longer existed in the minds of other people.
Of the mechanism of his transition I can say little, since, as I remarked before, I am no physicist. It seems possible that the lightning flash struck him, or the main force was diverted through the headphones, with the result that Rostof was twisted out of the normal Time Stream. Whether the presence of the discharge gap had any effect or not, it is hard to say; certainly, the freakish effects of lightning have long proved difficult to explain.
It is a curious case, but I am inclined to think it is not unique. In the past there have been many unexplained disappearances; there are also several authenticated instances of naked men who have suddenly appeared, apparently from nowhere, and been unable to give a coherent account of where they came from or who they were.
Anyway, you have heard Rostof’s story, and may form your own opinion as to the most probable explanation of the whole strange affair. Though you may be inclined to ask: what does Rostof himself think about it all?
I can only tell you this. Nicolai Rostof has changed his name to Norman Robinson, has grown a moustache and wears horn-rimmed spectacles. He has gone to work in a certain industrial town whose name I have promised not to reveal, and where he is not known. Rostof is trying to forget.
THE WOOD THAT TIME FORGOT: THE ENCHANTED WOOD
by Roger Lancelyn Green
* * *
Roger Lancelyn Green matriculated at Oxford in 1937, and came to know C. S. Lewis in 1939 after attending his lectures on medieval and renaissance literature. Green’s 1944 B. Litt. [Bachelor of Letters] thesis on “Andrew Lang as a Writer of Fairy Tales and Romances” was partly supervised by Tolkien and published in 1946 as Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography. Green became a noted authority on children’s literature, and he also published a number of original children’s novels. As he grew close with Lewis, it became understood between the two men that Green would one day write Lewis’s biography. This he did in 1974, co-authored with Walter Hooper. Green’s study of science fiction, Into Other Worlds: Space-Flight in Fiction from Lucian to Lewis (1957), is dedicated to Lewis. Lewis, in turn, dedicated to Green the volume collecting his lecture series on medieval and renaissance literature, The Discarded Image (1964). And it was Green who suggested to Lewis the series title The Chronicles of Narnia for his children’s books, following on Andrew Lang’s The Chronicles of Pantouflia.
From 1945 to 1950 (when he moved away from Oxford), Green worked as the deputy librarian of Merton College, Oxford, and during these years he attended many of the pub meetings of the Inklings, though he apparently did not attend the famous evening meetings at Lewis’s college rooms. Green was the model for the character Wilfrid Trewin Jeremy in Tolkien’s unfinished fantasy “The Notion Club Papers,” written around 1946 and based on the Inklings.
In 1945, Green shared with Lewis the manuscript of his unpublished children’s novel called The Wood That Time Forgot. Lewis was enthusiastic, and suggested a number of revisions. Green reworked the book in 1949, but was unable to secure a publisher; then, after Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia began to appear, Green felt that his book would seem too derivative of his friend’s works. In fact, upon the publication of one of Green’s other children’s books, The Land of the Lord High Tiger (1958), one critic on The Times Literary Supplement went so far as to suggest that Green’s book derived from Lewis’s, and Lewis himself was compelled to write in and say that this was not so and chronologically impossible, for Green’s book predated his own.
In 1962, Green proposed to Lewis that they collaborate and rewrite The Wood That Time Forgot, but Lewis felt that work was too personal for Green and that he should rewrite it himself, though he never did. Around 1972–73, Lin Carter planned to publish the book in a series of juvenile fantasies, to be called The Magic Kingdom, as a companion to the acclaimed Ballantine Adult Fantasy series for which Carter was the primary editorial consultant. Unfortunately, the series never materialized, and Green’s novel has remained unpublished.
“The Enchanted Wood” is the second chapter of Green’s novel The Wood That Time Forgot. It shows the setup for the story, in which some children find their way into a lost world. In a later chapter, there is a scene where a raspberry cordial is used by an apparently kindly creature at a house in the wood to turn one of the children against the others. This scene anticipates the similar temptation of Edmund by the White Witch with her Turkish Delight in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Yet despite a few obvious points of influence, The Wood That Time Forgot remains distinctly Green’s vision, and fascinating on its own account, whatever its association with Lewis and the origins of Narnia.
* * *
When Diana came, neither Joanna nor Barbara seemed at all anxious to tell her about their last night’s adventure in the Wood. Indeed they had hardly mentioned it to each other since they got up that morning, each thinking it had probably been a dream of her own.
But when early tea was finished, and with four clear hours before them they set out into the Wood. Joanna led the way without any consultation straight towards the end of the Waingunga valley.
Diana wanted to stop on the way and explore the two dark tracts of fir trees which they had named Wolf Wood and Witch Wood, “because,” she said, “we ought to be able to make up a very exciting story about them, now that we have given them such thrilling names. Then one of us can be the witch, and live in the darkest centre of it all, and catch the wandering Princesses when the cruel wolves chase them into it.” But neither Joanna nor Barbara seemed at all impressed by this idea, and hardly stopped even to say, both in one breath:
“Don’t let’s play that today!”
“Where are we going to?” asked Diana presently in a slightly cross voice.
“It’s so dull just going along these main paths—and I thought we decided last time that we should start a game-story today and really make the Wood exciting.”
“We’ve thought of a much more thrilling idea,” said Joanna. “The Waingunga must go under that strange, thorny embankment, and perhaps we can look right along the tunnel, or whatever it runs through, and see out at the other side.”
“I don’t suppose there is anything to see beyond it,” said Diana, who was still a little bit annoyed. “It will be either a dull bit of wood, or else an even duller bank of grass. Anyhow, it may go through twisty pipes so that we can’t see through at all!”
But neither Joanna nor Barbara were at all d
isposed to argue, and the conversation lapsed until they had passed the clearing where the young rhododendrons and azaleas grow before they are big enough to be planted out by the woodmen.
“Let’s go down the narrow path between the larch trees in Light Wood,” then suggested Diana, “so that we can cross the Waingunga by the fallen tree, and go up through the Grove of Darkness to the bank with the big trees where the primroses grow.”
“Don’t you think it would be fun,” said Joanna diplomatically, “if we just went to look at where the Waingunga disappears, now that we are so near the place. Then we could mark it all in properly on our map.”
“Oh, you’re a bother and a nuisance!” exclaimed Diana, but she followed them without any other protest as they made their way through the tall green bracken towards the big oak tree which marked what seemed the only way down the steep bank into the dark valley where the stream reached the embankment.
It was very quiet that afternoon down there, cool and shady and far away from the bright sunshine up in the main wood.
Joanna and Barbara found themselves walking on tiptoe and speaking in whispers as they drew nearer to the end of the valley. Even Diana, who had no conscious reason for it, seemed to be in awe of something, for she too walked quietly, and presently remarked in a subdued voice:
“I don’t like this place at all: it makes me feel all creepy. I think this must be the part of the Wood where the ghost is.”
This was a new idea, for neither of the others had thought about the ghost on the previous night…
“Ghosts don’t sing, do they?” asked Barbara in an uncertain sort of voice.
Tales Before Narnia Page 36