The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk

by David Ambrose

  She did not offer to shake hands; nor did Susan, but their eye contact was direct and steady.

  “You seem to be looking after him well, Mrs. Hathaway. At least I’m grateful for that.”

  “He’s a nice boy. We’re all very fond of him here.”

  She looked past Susan to where Christopher was now hugging his grandfather. Susan looked back at them. She was overwhelmed suddenly by a sense of unreality. This wasn’t happening; it was a dream from which she would wake up and breathe a sigh of relief as everything returned to normal: John at her side, Christopher running through the house getting ready for school.

  “Come on, Grandpa, you gotta see Polly—that’s my horse. Well, she’s a pony, really, but she’s like a horse.”

  He began tugging his grandfather along by the hand.

  “Come on, Mom—I want to show you my horse!”

  “Go with them, Dr. Flemyng. It’s best if you let Christopher show you around, then we can have a cup of coffee back at the house.”

  Susan looked at this woman who called herself Mrs. Hathaway, wondering if that was her real name. What sort of woman did it take to do what this woman before her was doing? Could she appeal to her? To her maternal, female instincts? Or was she as cold as the people she worked for obviously were? Anyway, what kind of appeal could she make? Christopher was obviously being well cared for, not abused or ill-treated in any way. What more could she ask in the circumstances? Only that the circumstances change, and this woman couldn’t do that for her.

  “Go on, Dr. Flemyng—they’re waiting for you.”

  She realized that the woman had just read in her eyes every thought that had passed behind them. She felt herself blush faintly. She felt suddenly foolish, naked almost.

  “Christopher’s been so excited about this visit, he’s been planning everything he wants to show you. Go on, now.”

  Susan felt a soft pressure on her arm. Not coercion of any kind. Not a warning or a threat. Just reassurance, a promise that everything would be all right in time and that for now she should just enjoy the moment. She gave a nod. It felt like an odd, jerky movement, but it shook her free of the paralysis that had gripped her. She opened her mouth to say something, but the words refused to form. She half mumbled something under her breath, then turned quickly and walked to where her son and father waited for her, hand in hand.

  Christopher was indeed showing signs of decent horsemanship. Susan met the man who was teaching him. He was called Michael, was around thirty, good-looking and open, with impeccable, rather old-fashioned good manners. She could see at once that Christopher and Michael were fond of each other.

  But who were these people? What were they doing with her son? She wanted to shake them, make them explain how they could do this. By what right? But she couldn’t do that without making things much worse for Christopher, and that was the last thing she had come here to do.

  “Well, if you ask me, you’re a very lucky young man,” she said, as Christopher finished showing them his room. It was filled with every toy and gadget a boy his age could want.

  “I wouldn’t mind a vacation someplace like this myself,” Amery said.

  “Why don’t you stay here, Grandpa?” Christopher shot back, aglow with the certainty that an idea this good could not possibly be turned down.

  Amery looked taken by surprise.” Well, I… I’d love to, Christopher…but I don’t know if I could get away… or even whether there’s room for me here….”

  “Oh, we’ve got lots of rooms.”

  “I’ll try. I can’t promise, but I’ll try.”

  “You’re welcome to stay with us as long as you wish, Mr. Hyde.”

  Susan and her father turned to see Mrs. Hathaway standing in the door.

  “I’m serious. We have no problem with that. We’d be delighted.”

  Amery looked at his daughter, then back at the older woman, more shrewdly this time.

  “Are you telling me that this would be agreeable to your… associates?”

  “Perfectly.”

  Amery looked at his daughter. She said, “Do it, if you can.”

  Christopher watched these exchanges closely, though their meaning went over his head. He was aware only that it was some kind of game that grown-ups got into when they had to make a decision; all he cared about was the outcome.

  “Very well, then,” said Amery, “I shall stay.”

  Christopher gave a whoop of joy and started to cheer, doing a dance of triumph around his grandfather.

  An hour later, when it came time to go, Susan kissed Christopher good-bye, hugged him, and promised to come back as soon as she could. Then she kissed her father and stepped down from the porch. Mrs. Hathaway walked with her to the car. As the driver held open the door, she turned back to see her father and Christopher standing hand in hand. They waved. She waved back. She felt better than she’d expected to feel at this moment, better than she’d felt in some time.

  As she turned to get into the car, she paused again, facing Mrs. Hathaway, searching that kind and pleasant face for some clue as to what lay behind it.

  “Who are you?” was all she could think of asking.

  “I told you,” the older woman said with a gentle smile, “Christopher calls me Auntie May.”

  Chapter 30

  THE DOOR IN the back of his cage slid silently into the wall, leaving a dark opening. He waited awhile before approaching it, in case something came out. When nothing did, he looked cautiously over his shoulder. Nobody was watching him. There was activity in the part of the laboratory that he could see, but none of it directed his way.

  He took a step or two toward the opening. Now he could see a faint wash of light coming from somewhere. He moved closer and saw a tunnel, curving slightly down and to the left. The source of the light was somewhere around the curve and not visible from where he stood.

  Once again he looked behind him. Still nobody was paying any attention to him. Of course, that didn’t mean there weren’t cameras on him. He suspected there were; they were just so small these days you never saw them. And that hole in the wall hadn’t opened up all by itself. Something was going on here. He knew he was being provoked or challenged in some way.

  At least that was the assumption he made. It was the only way he could make sense of the craziness going on around him. He had decided he was in some artificially created nightmare. That was the only explanation. Maybe it was a training course, introduced without warning, meant to take him, if he passed it, to a higher level. Maybe he was learning how to survive mental disorientation induced by drugs and perhaps other methods, and still remain sane at the end of it all. He could see that might be a skill worth learning. He knew brainwashing was a possibility you had to be trained for.

  The thought also struck him that maybe this wasn’t training. Maybe this was the real thing, and he had fallen into enemy hands. The last thing he remembered was blacking out in Kathy’s apartment. What was it she had called herself? Doctor something. Dr. Susan Flemyng, that was it.

  Who was doing this to him? And why? And what was Kathy’s part in it all? Or, rather, this woman who’d said she wasn’t Kathy, who’d said there was no Kathy.

  That wasn’t possible, was it?

  He realized that, almost without thinking, he had taken the first few steps into the tunnel. He checked himself: He must keep his concentration. That was always rule one: Be in the moment. He walked on.

  The tunnel walls were smooth, made of prefabricated sections. There was no sound except the soft pad of his own feet on the concrete floor. As he walked, he became aware of certain odors that he couldn’t quite identify, although he knew them. It was a kind of open-air smell, which made him suspect that the light he could see might be daylight.

  He stopped again, waiting for something to happen, some trap to be sprung. But there was nothing: only a sense, even stronger now, of the sounds and smells of nature, as though someone had left a window or a door open just around the corner. He took a
few more cautious steps, and suddenly everything opened up in front of him. He found himself standing on the edge of a vast open space. Tall trees, mostly oak and beech, rustled gently in a light breeze. He could hear voices somewhere. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but when he listened more closely he realized they were just hoots and grunts. Then he saw them, scattered around singly or in groups, some climbing trees, some grooming one another, here and there babies playing together or huddling by their mothers. It was a colony of chimpanzees, at a quick guess somewhere between twenty and thirty of them.

  None of them seemed to have noticed him yet, but he had a distinct feeling that this would change very soon. He was an outsider and he would be seen as a threat by the dominant males. How he knew this with such certainty he couldn’t say, but he knew it as surely as he had known anything in his life. There would be one dominant male, or possibly a coalition of them, and he would have to face them—unless, of course, he went back the way he had come.

  But that wasn’t his way. Besides, he was pretty sure that the door back into his cage would have closed by now. There had been a purpose behind its opening, and that purpose had been to get him out here with the other chimpanzees.

  “Other” chimpanzees? Was that really the thought that had gone through his head? He looked down at himself once again, at the thick black hair, the bent legs with their prehensile toes, the long arms on which, he realized with a shock, he was instinctively leaning, taking the weight of his upper body on the knuckles of his massive hands.

  Shocked, he pulled himself upright. It was that movement that attracted the attention of some member of the group. He heard a different kind of hooting noise, more urgent and with a harder edge. It was picked up and transmitted from one group member to another. He saw an arm outstretched, pointing his way; then more arms and many pairs of eyes. The air was alive now with chattering and calls, and with hurried movements as mothers herded their children to safety and the various members of the group took up their different places.

  The two most powerful of the males who stepped forward were working, Charlie thought, as a team. That was obviously how they ran things in the group. But right now the group was behind them—“to a man,” Charlie thought, not without a sense of irony.

  Because he knew he was a man. He knew that this thing, whatever it was, was being done to him, though he didn’t know how. It was too clear for a dream; it was a remarkably sustained hallucination. It could have been induced by drugs or virtual reality, or a combination of both. He knew little about either, other than that they existed.

  Something glinted in an upper corner of his vision. He looked up and saw a camera. When he looked around he saw another, perched up on poles and protected by wire that must have been electrified, otherwise they’d have been torn down and vandalized long ago.

  The two chimpanzee leaders were still making great physical displays, hauling themselves fully upright, inflating their chests, and making their hair stand on end so they looked even larger than they were. For one extraordinary moment he felt himself start to do the same thing, out of instinct. But he checked the impulse at once: Any fool could see where it would lead.

  Maybe that’s what this was, he suddenly thought. Some kind of response test—rational response versus irrational, that kind of thing. He stood his ground, but made no attempt to show belligerence. Instead, having faced them, he turned in his own time and ambled off in another direction, making it clear, he hoped, that he had no interests or ambitions in anything that might concern them, and that if they left him alone everything would be just fine.

  That was when he saw the other figures moving somewhere beyond the trees—human figures this time, but far off, at least a hundred yards away. They seemed to be watching what was going on between him and the other apes. Now that he looked more closely he could see families walking by, couples hand in hand, women pushing kids in strollers, a group of senior citizens on what looked like an organized day out. They were on a winding path, and the path, he saw as he got closer to it, was on the far side of a stretch of water; and this, he could see as he looked along it, was a kind of moat. There was no way of telling how deep it was, but he could swim across in a few strokes.

  What was obvious was that he was in a zoo. This whole “open space” he’d wandered into was in reality an enclosure. He couldn’t see how big: an acre at least, maybe much more. In another direction he could see a high wall. There was another camera on the top of it. Farther to one side something jutted out over the top of the wall. It was a curved glass window about thirty feet above the ground. Beyond it he could see half a dozen or so people watching him and everything that was going on. He couldn’t make out any details, just their silhouettes.

  How strange, he thought. This really was incredible—in the sense, he corrected himself, that it was incredibly well done. The feel of it all was amazingly real. But not quite real, although maybe that was mainly because he knew it couldn’t be. Would he have known all this wasn’t real if he hadn’t already known that it couldn’t possibly be? That was an interesting question.

  A grunt of surprise and anger burst from him as something hit him on the shoulder. He looked down; a rock lay on the ground. There had been nothing “virtual” about the pain it had caused him; it was as real as pain got. He spun around.

  There was no mistaking which of the two leaders had thrown the missile. He was displaying and roaring and stamping the ground. His number two backed him up and the others looked on expectantly. Very well, Charlie thought, if that was how they wanted it, then so be it.

  As he moved into position to fight, he realized that his body, despite its changed appearance, felt like the body he’d always had. His reflexes were the same, his sense of balance, his sureness of the strength and speed he had at his command. He was still himself, Charlie Monk, inside this ape suit, and he was going to have no problem making it work. That seemed to be how this whole thing was set up. Those were the rules of the game. He had all the physical strength of the apes around him, but he also had the intelligence of a man. He could give direction and control to their strength, which meant he could do things they couldn’t.

  To begin with he tried out a few evasive moves. The leader tried to provoke him with slaps and shoving—punches that were hard enough to knock down a man and even injure him badly. But to a chimpanzee they were little more than taps, designed to arouse anger, to provoke a confrontation; and to Charlie they weren’t even that, shifting his weight as he was doing from foot to foot, so that the force of the blow was absorbed into his own movement. He waited till the moment was perfect, when the other’s frustration was beginning to mount, then delivered a colossal blow to the side of his head.

  His opponent gave a cry more of surprise than pain and stumbled backward. Charlie waited for him to get over the shock, confident that he could handle whatever was coming and maybe even enjoy it. When his opponent charged him with teeth bared, Charlie knew he’d got him mad. That made it easier to swing his weight to one side and bring it down in a terrible punch to the lower back of his opponent’s skull. It didn’t quite connect as Charlie had intended, but the other ape still went down. He was shocked and winded, and it took him a moment to scramble to his feet. Charlie waited, and put him down again. This time he stayed down, unconscious.

  Charlie looked at the shocked and fearful faces around him. The cry that came from his throat was harsh and defiant. He wanted to say, “All right now? Is that enough? Can we get along now without any more of this?”

  It was still a strange feeling to hear the words in his head while still being unable to say them.

  When he fell silent, nothing happened. There were hoots and murmurings, but nothing that sounded to Charlie like a concerted response. The chimpanzee he’d knocked unconscious stirred; two or three others went over to him solicitously.

  Charlie sensed the movement but couldn’t turn before the teeth sank into his side. He hadn’t been ready for that much speed, bu
t he made up for it with his own. He spun his new opponent’s arm, then stamped him underfoot. The other shrieked with pain and struggled to get away, but Charlie didn’t let him until some of the other males attacked him from behind with bites and punches. They didn’t know how to fight, but he was forced to turn around to chase them off. That was when his opponent got away. Charlie saw him shin up a tall oak. This particular oak was absolutely stripped of all greenery and transformed by constant use into a natural climbing frame. Nearby were a couple more like it. The rest of the trees, Charlie saw now, were protected by electric fences.

  He quickly shinned up one of the other two defoliated trees. The rest of the group all remained on the ground looking up while the two antagonists displayed and threatened each other from neighboring branches. It was Charlie who made the first leap; he was getting bored and thought this farce should end. He was fighting, he knew, with a strange detachment, almost as though he weren’t really there. The thought suddenly crossed his mind that perhaps he was a figure in a computer game. Then he wondered who was playing him, and who was playing the other guy. Or was he himself playing both sides? Was this a feedback game?

  The pain that followed a split second later made him realize he’d been kicked in the stomach. He hadn’t seen the blow coming—hadn’t even seen the chimpanzee climb the tree. Careless again. That was obviously the thing he had to watch in this game. He mustn’t let his mind go wandering off into irrelevant reflections and philosophy. What mattered was what was happening now. And to get through what was happening now, he had to forget about what it all meant, if anything.

  He made a leap to the third oak, as stripped and polished by daily use as the other two. The move gave him a moment to gather his wits and get his breath back. Then the first of his opponents played right into his hands. Charlie could see him calculating a leap across into the same tree as Charlie, but a branch or two higher, from where he could use his feet in an attack. Charlie leaped at the same time as the other did. He saw the look of shock on his opponent’s face as he thought they were going to collide in midair, then horror when he realized that Charlie had completely outmaneuvered him. Executing a perfectly timed flip, he kicked the other ape so hard on the behind that he spun out of control, crashing through several hard, strong branches, even breaking a couple, before he got a hold on one. Then he scampered back down to the ground as fast as he could go and ran for his life, screaming.