Watson, Ian - Novel 10

by Deathhunter (v1. 1)

  “But some people understood: people like our own Norman Harper. They got us to shake hands with friendly, natural death again. Along with some others — who equally deserve our praise and thanks — he started the great movement which has led to the Houses of Death and the reconstruction of our whole society. So at last the Big Fear went away. Now that we accept the death that is part of us, we have a future again. For that we thank you, Norman, from the heart.”

  Mayor Barnes sat down, to quiet applause.

  “The man’s eloquent,” whispered Marta. “He could be a guide himself.”

  “No, he’s an orator, a politician. You shouldn’t make speeches to the dying.”

  “Well, of course not. But even so.”

  Noel Resnick, Master of the House, rose next. He performed a slow mesmeric dance about the focal point of the microphone while he spoke, lifting himself up on right tiptoes then on left tiptoes. Jim recalled that stutterers occasionally ‘danced* like this to lose their stutter.

  “. . . there was no dialogue with one’s own death, ’ ’ Resnick was saying in a firm voice. “Consequently so-called ‘men of good will* spoke out against this country, or that group of people. Traitors were sought and pilloried as scapegoats. All this, because these men of ‘good will* placed their own death out there. They drove it like a stake into the hearts of the enemies they manufactured. Confrontation and victory were the watchwords. So was ‘putting up a fight’ — for freedom, for the individual, you name it — even if it meant mass death for everybody. And the real name of their enemy was always Death itself. But it just so happens that there is no enemy alien named ‘Death*. There is no war. There is no other side. There is only here, and us.”

  Obviously Resnick too was something of a politician. Was he in competition with Mayor Barnes? The answer hardly interested Jim, yet he noted the existence of a question. He noted, too, that this Resnick was a tough Master — even if he had overcome a stutter, and perhaps because of this. The Master of the larger House of Death in Gracchus had been more sympathetic and flexible; but even he had put his foot down in the end.

  A flight of wild ducks winged overhead in a V formation. How did the ducks learn to fly with such perfect symmetry? Why, in much the same way that a young child learns the symmetry of day and night, and of waking and sleeping. In its infant brain the child decides that there must exist a corresponding cycle of life and death too. As death follows life, so must another life follow death . . .

  Was this really such a false decision, if the same instinctive sense of symmetry guided the wild ducks in their flight?

  Jim shook his head as though to clear it of delusions — to shake the malaise of the old deluded days which he had hardly even known.

  Instead, he concentrated on the jolly solidity of Marta Bettijohn — and on being in this crowd which could genuinely celebrate death as part of life. And especially he concentrated on the focus of their celebrations, the white-haired poet whom they all honoured on this, his last day in the public world.

  Presently, Resnick ceased to sway about before the microphone like a vast pendulum bob, and sat down. Norman Harper stood, and embraced his audience with outstretched, gnarled hands.

  “It’s my day to retire,” he said affectionately. “I shall not make a speech.” He chuckled softly. “How could I compete with what has gone before? Instead, let me simply quote a favourite passage from my own Book of Death."

  The poet closed his eyes. Like blind Homer he recited.

  “The embryo bird must partly die If its wings are to emerge, to fly.

  The caterpillar dies, as well,

  To become the butterfly, so swell.

  While man himself dies every seven Years, but goes not up to heaven.

  So here is death, and here is life:

  These Siamese twins shall know no strife ...”

  “Doggerel,” muttered Jim, despite himself.

  “Hush!” said Marta. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing, sorry.”

  “Each life is several generations

  Of births and deaths like transit stations;

  And then the train returns at last

  To where it started, in the past.

  Our death is in us, not ‘out there’;

  It grows out of us, like our hair.

  It falls like hair, like Autumn leaves;

  And in the earth new life achieves.

  There is no Enemy, no Thief:

  A dangerous and a false belief!

  Many times in life we die

  So that our new mind-wings can fly;

  And when we finally fold those wings,

  Our spirit sings, then dies away.

  There is no more; there is no Sting.

  We shall be as we were before.

  The day is over, perfect day ...”

  Someone — a man — pushed roughly between Jim and Marta. The man ran to the front of the dais, where Norman Harper continued to recite, unaware of the disturbance.

  The intruder raised his right hand. Something resembling a pipe stem was clutched in it.

  A sharp crack sounded, then a second crack — no louder than two branches snapping underfoot.

  Blood bloomed on Norman Harper’s throat and chest. Gagging, the poet staggered backwards. He crashed into the chair which he had been occupying so calmly just a few minutes earlier. Chair and poet plunged off the back of the dais on to the lawn. Both lay motionless.

  Uncomprehending silence followed, for a few moments. During this pause the intruder lowered his right hand. He let what he held fall to the turf. Then somebody screamed, and someone else.

  Marta seized Jim’s arm. Her fingers squeezed him cruelly.

  “He — murdered — Norman!’’ she cried in Jim’s face. “He ... a handgunV’

  There was a huge incongruity about what had happened. It was like a TV play — but no TV play like this had been made or screened for many years. It was something from the proscribed archives. Jim sat dumbly watching it. The lead actor — the murderer — seemed to have little idea what to do now that he had performed his act. Nobody else seemed to have much idea what to do about him.

  Back in the audience people were scrambling and shouting and crashing into each other. Mayor Barnes jumped up, knocking his own chair over. Leaping down from the dais, he knelt beside the poet, looking appalled. Dr Menotti joined him. Resnick rose too, and began oscillating back and forth on the platform in indecision. Alice Huron started to weep. The woman dragged her hair over her face like some ancient mourner. In full view of everyone she wept privately, as though her tears could wash away what had just happened. But no one was noticing her except for Jim. Somehow, she noticed Jim’s eyes upon her. Abruptly she calmed, seeming to freeze her feelings, and directed a quick look of hatred at him for what he had seen.

  Breaking Marta’s grip as gently as he could, Jim scrambled to his feet. He took a few steps towards the murderer. But what should he do? Strike him to the ground? Pinion him? The murderer stood passively. While the murderer waited and Jim hesitated, two Peace Officers arrived and an attendant from the House ran over. These three men positioned themselves around the killer like chess pieces checking yet unable to capture the king. Jim bent and retrieved the gun. Its touch felt utterly strange, as though it had fallen from the stars. He handed it to one of the officers, who quickly hid it in his pocket.

  A news gatherer was moving in now, filming the face of the killer — which was like a starving animal’s, thin and worn. It wore an expression of impassive despair — of a prey cornered by a predator. Yet the eyes were still looking for some exit. They hunted for some crack to slip through — but not for a crack in the real world, since no such crack existed. They looked for a crack in the order of things itself, as though the act of killing had been a magical gesture, a conjuration which might call up some rescuing demon out of a sudden hole in the ground. The murderer was in his fifties, and nearly bald: he was a field gone sterile. What little hair he had was g
rey. He wore one of the yellow tunics of a resident in the House of Death.

  As the TV man moved right up to him, he addressed the camera:

  “There goes he,

  Instead of me,”

  said the killer wryly.

  “You see, I can make up poems too.”

  “Stop filming!” Resnick shouted from the dais. “Stop recording!”

  The news gatherer obediently switched off his camera. However, his colleague round on the other side of the dais had not heard and continued to film the sprawled body of the poet. The newsman was like a simple robot which could not tell when the task set it had become grossly inappropriate. Noticing, and cursing, Resnick dealt with him too.

  Presently, touching the killer as little as possible — as though he was red-hot or radioactive — the two officers and the attendant shepherded him away in the direction of the House.

  Jim rejoined Marta. She was on her hands and knees. Someone must have knocked her over and now — too shocked to stand up on her own — she needed the support of all four limbs. She seemed to be hunting for something lost in the grass — her beliefs?

  Offering her his hand, Jim hauled her up and supported her.

  “I guess,” gasped Marta, “we won’t get out to the lake this evening. * * She concentrated on this disappointment, rather than on the grotesque scene which the celebration had become. This clearly restored a certain sense of reality to her, since what had happened had been quite unreal.

  She smiled coaxingly.

  “I’d better show you your rooms in the House.” She squeezed Jim’s hand.

  “Well, I’ll be —!” thought Jim. Did she want him to make love to her, to burn out the awful experience? He knew that death was a kind of lover to some women. But what had happened here this afternoon had been an act of rape . . .

  THREE

  After collecting his valise from the runabout, Jim walked back with Marta to the stone bridge over the moat. Twin sculptures flanked the way across: aluminium-winged butterflies a couple of feet high, mounted on white marble hourglasses. Gusts of wind set these butterflies rotating like the turnstiles of an auto-shop.

  Following the ceremony of honour, the poet ought to have crossed this same bridge to separate himself from life in Egremont, and presently — in days or weeks, at the discretion of Alice Huron and his own inner promptings — from life itself. Right now the two metal butterflies looked like great sharp spinning knives to Jim. The murder had contaminated everything precious.

  The glass doors whispered apart, and they entered a crowded foyer. At least a score of residents had gathered here. Voices were raised, some shrill and fearful, others angry and complaining. The whole death sequence of these clients had been set back. But at least they had taken refuge in the House, and an attendant and a guide were doing their best to soothe the situation.

  Marta hurried Jim through the small crowd and led him along to the elevator core. They rose up to the twelfth tier.

  This high up the pyramid there was space for just four staff apartments, one at each point of the compass. Jim’s new home faced west. As Marta held the door open for him, the westering sun was flooding through the canted glass louvres, dappling the local pine furnishings with shadows of yucca, holly, firethofn and fuchsia that grew outside on the balcony. Perspex privacy baffles stood at the north- and south-west corners of this balcony, and through the aerial garden was a view of distant suburbs fading into farmland.

  The lounge opened on to a bedroom with white Venetian blinds. Jim dumped his bag on the bed. Returning to the lounge, he switched on the TV set.

  Mayor Barnes stood addressing the camera. To judge by a backdrop of slanted glass and rose bushes with white blooms, he was being filmed elsewhere in the House.

  Barnes? Had Resnick made a fool of himself by shouting at the news gatherers? True, the electronic news would have been subject to a thirty second delay loop for better editing before transmission — though the first vivid, blood-stained images of the poet crashing back on to the turf would have gone out as filmed; everyone had been struck dumb, to begin with.

  Barnes looked quietly composed.

  “. . . but we must not simply grieve at the manner in which Norman Harper has been cheated of his own good death. I believe that Norman would have wished us all to rededicate ourselves to the ideals represented by these Houses — especially if we hail from the unreconstructed era when a person’s death had no place in the social system but was something outside of it, something alien. If we suspect that we are polluted by the false programming of the old days — if we feel a mad ambition in ourselves to be frozen, or reincarnated, or translated on to some astral plane to avoid the truth of our life’s end — why don’t we all visit our local House of Death to discover the beauty of dying at the proper time? Why don’t we sign on for a seminar? The Houses are places of detachment, yes indeed — but they are not outside of the community. In a real sense they are its heart. The dying are often happy to share their experiences ...”

  ‘More work,’ thought Jim wryly: more open-house seminars for the public, in addition to the school and TV presentations. Conducted discreetly, of course. Sensitively. Without infringing the right to privacy of any of the clients. But still, more work . . .

  Mentally, he rapped himself over the knuckles for pride and selfishness.

  “The alternative is to harbour murder in one’s bosom — and we’ve seen what comes of that today. The person who denies death is someone who mentally destroys the world for others. As Norman Harper wrote elsewhere in his Book of Death, ‘You should go gently into that good night . . .’ ”

  “I told you he could be a guide,” said Marta.

  “He’s using the event.”

  “On the contrary, he’s defusing it. He’s preventing a domino effect. Don’t you realize how dangerous this is? It’s the first violence there’s been on any screen for years! How many kids have had their feelings scrambled by what they saw today? And how about all the poor, disturbed people who have trouble adjusting in any case? It was a direct attack on . . . everything.”

  “Do you think it was planned as such?”

  “Of course not.”

  “In that case, you’re exaggerating. A few people still do murder other people. It happens in the cities, you know. The murder rate is very, very low, and falling. But it isn’t zero.”

  “And it never should be news. Not one single killing should be news.”

  Jim shrugged. “This one is.”

  Marta moved closer to him, and touched his arm.

  He said gently, “I can’t banish this from you, you know? I’d be taking the place of Death, if I tried. But Death isn’t anyone — neither seducer, nor executioner.”

  She drew back suddenly.

  “That may be your interpretation of my feelings. I find it rather insulting.”

  “Even so, it’s what you feel.”

  She looked down at the yellow and brown carpet-tiles.

  “You’re a clever guide,” she said. “Perceptive. I guess you must have helped one or two women clients in your time — by proving that the Seducer is only human? Anyhow,” she rushed on, not wanting to hear the answer, “what did you mean by muttering ‘doggerel’ in the middle of Norman’s poem?”

  “Nothing, really.”

  “No, tell me.”

  Jim realized that Marta had achieved a hold over him — an option on his private feelings — which was unfortunate on such brief acquaintance, though it was partly his own fault. It was as though the gunshots had briefly stripped them both naked to each other; and now they remembered each other’s nakedness.

  “It’s just that so many valuable things did spring from our death anxieties in the past. So much philosophy. So much art.”

  “Therefore Norman’s poetry isn’t really art, because he wasn’t anxious? What an ambivalent character you are!”

  “Do you mean ‘two-faced’? You have to identify with the people you guide, before they can ide
ntify with you. Even when they’re angry or hostile to start with. Even when they’re just protesting. . . at the general lack of protest.”

  “Why did they really transfer you here from Gracchus?”

  Jim was saved from answering her by the warble of the telephone. As Jim switched off the TV set, Mayor Barnes disappeared into a point of light which vanished, just as Mayor Barnes and everyone else would when they died . . .

  Jim put the phone down.

  “That was Resnick.”

  “So I gathered.”

  “I’m to see him in half an hour. Apparently he wants me to guide the killer — because I’m uninvolved. I’m not of Egremont. So I won’t feel any personal bitterness. I guess that answers your question, Marta. They transferred me here from Gracchus so that I could guide Norman Harper’s murderer.”

  He consulted his watch. If Marta still nursed the desires that he suspected, they were not to be fulfilled this afternoon . . .

  “How very ironic you can be,” she said.

  The greater irony, he thought, was that his own brief earlier fantasy of guiding Norman Harper had come true so suddenly, yet at one hideous remove.

  Jim walked to the door as though to open it for Marta. Once there, he merely stood and patted its frame. He felt possessed by an imp of the perverse.

  “I wonder if Death’s doorway will let me pass when my time comes?” he asked her, darkly. “Or might I get stuck in it? Halfway in and half-way out? Perhaps the old legends of Zombies are really based on people who get stuck in that doorway. Their conscious mind has gone through, but the automatic mind is left on our side, still running the body — how about that?”

  Surprisingly, she joined in his humour.

  “So the freezer freaks are zombies on ice — now there’s an idea!”