Watson, Ian - Novel 10

by Deathhunter (v1. 1)

  “I sometimes wonder if we guides are not the new immortals? Deep down in our minds, I mean. We see everyone else on their way. But we stay here: the privileged door-keepers.”

  She shook her head firmly. “We have our time and season too. Without that, we’d be . . . well, we’d be . . .”

  “We’d be executioners, if. we didn’t retire when that sixtieth year comes round.’’

  “And even sooner sometimes ...”

  “Oh yes, if a guide gets saturated with the seductive beauty of dying.”

  “I don’t quite understand you, Jim — but I hope we’re going to be good colleagues, and friends.”

  Jim chuckled. “To every guide, his own personal touch. Or hers. Mine may be humour, for those who need humour. It may even be farce! It’s an approach that can work wonders with some people. There are some clients who hate to be contemplative about their demise.”

  “They can be shown.”

  “They still think it’s sanctimonious. And other people are actually scared. For them, a joke can be a fine nerve tonic. What did William Blake say? ‘Mirth braces; bliss relaxes’? Well, if he didn’t, he ought to have. He died laughing, didn’t he? Or was it singing? Norman Harper never quite ...”

  “Quite what?”

  “Quite wrote poetry like Blake.”

  “Norman wrote for an audience of real people, not for his own fevered, mystical brain.” Marta placed her hands on her hips defiantly. “I wish you joy of cracking jokes with his killer!” Yet she stood thus only for a moment. To Jim it was clear that she couldn’t tolerate harsh words — least of all her own.

  “You’re a strange person,” she said quietly, almost caressingly. “Maybe it takes a strange person to guide someone who did . . . what that creature did today.”

  “It’s nice to know I have my uses.”

  “We all do. Everyone’s death has its own precious usefulness.”

  “As Mayor Barnes said just now, of Norman Harper’s.”

  Jim touched Marta lightly on the shoulder. As he well knew from experience with the dying and with those on the path to voluntary death, one moment of such contact spoke volumes of persuasion.

  “Will you show me the refectory? I’d like a cup of coffee before I meet Resnick.”

  Outside the window, the yucca leaves were green knives. Their shadows stabbed the furniture. The fuchsia flowers were drops of blood.

  FOUR

  Resnick draped an arm over Jim’s stooped shoulders, giving the impression of a circus impresario comforting a would-be hunchback who had the misfortune to be taller than most other people. Thus he drew Jim across the room towards a large bean-bag style seat. A seat like a pitcher plant; once in, it would be difficult to struggle out again. Jim subsided into it.

  Since the Master’s office, lit by fluorescents, was deep inside the body of the House one entire wall was devoted to a scene-screen. A sunset seascape opened illusorily out of the office. A woolpack sky was afire with red and salmon-pink; an orange sun balanced exactly on the sea horizon, and a golden road stretched across the waters towards the desk. The ocean from whose bourne no traveller returns,’ thought Jim.

  Alice Huron stood staring along that road. Presently she turned, to acknowledge Jim with a nod, then with a second more thoughtful nod — as she remembered him from the ceremony, he saw.

  “You don’t mind if Alice stays, do you?” asked Resnick. “She’s been ...”

  “Robbed?” prompted Jim.

  The Master smiled appreciatively.

  “Quite so. The whole House was robbed. Egremont was robbed. In a deeper sense, of course, Norman Harper was most grievously robbed.”

  “ ‘There is no Enemy, no Thief,’ ” quoted Alice bitterly. “But there was. Today there was. Norman’s death was out there. What a horrid, obscene thing.” The tall woman summoned a faint smile. “We ought to be welcoming you, Jim. We were planning ...”

  “To have a trout roast — I heard. Don’t worry about it.”

  “We’ll still hold one — on Friday. That, I promise you.”

  And what else was she promising? Her tone implied that she had a minor score to settle with him — for watching her in her moment of weakness, when no one else had eyes for it. But perhaps he was imagining this.

  She rounded on Resnick.

  “How can that beast possibly go to a good death after this?” And Jim realized: he himself was now the custodian of the beast, therefore he was a little monstrous in her eyes . . .

  “Does one punish a dying man?” parried Resnick. “Does one withhold counselling? Maybe that’s what he was hoping for!”

  “I presume that ‘the beast’ has a name,” said Jim. “Weinberger. Nathan Weinberger. He was once a guide himself. He left the House years ago. He rejected his oath and tore up his contract. It was easier to get away with behaviour like that back then. He’s been working in micro-electronics since — in Egremont, of course. Until the crab got him.”

  Cancer.

  “How long has he left?”

  “Three to four months, maybe less. Obviously he won’t have to run that course to the very end! We were hoping to guide him out in another week or two. What on earth did he think he was doing? He’s set the whole schedule back. It’s all so utterly absurd.” “Maybe it isn’t absurd to him,” said Jim. “As to what he thought he was doing, that’s for me to find out, isn’t it?”

  “Certainly. Absolutely. But this is a major case. All the Houses will be interested. The public too, unfortunately.”

  “Meaning, am I up to it?”

  “Let’s see.” Resnick keyed the data console on his desk.

  “If you hadn’t arrived at this timely — or untimely — moment,” he said, as he scanned the recessed screen, “we’d have been obliged to call a guide in from outside. That would not have looked good. As it is, the whole affair stays securely in this House. Your arrival is . . . yes, timely. I see that you’ve been involved in some afterlife studies in Gracchus?”

  Jim realized with a shock that Resnick was reviewing the Todhunter dossier, not that of . . . what was his name, Weinberger? Reviewing it with a third party, Alice, standing by. Admittedly the Huron woman wasn’t looking over Resnick’s shoulder — but even so.

  “That came to an abrupt end.”

  “Well, that’s the affair of the Gracchus House. Were you hoping to carry on here? My predecessor was interested in such things. He sound-proofed a room down in the basement for astral — no, I shan’t use that word! — for monkeying around with trance states: out-of-the-body illusion stuff. You people at Gracchus seem to have been moving in the same direction. As a tactic, I presume, to bolster up weak minds . . .?” Resnick stared hard at Jim. “So what sent you down the afterlife path? What was your own earliest death encounter?”

  In common with all guide applicants Jim originally had undertaken self-analysis, aided by hypnosis, of his own childhood discovery of death. The results of this analysis — and consequently the answer to the Master’s question — were certainly in the dossier. And the dossier had been transferred from Gracchus to the Egremont computer at least a week ago. Had Resnick not bothered to scan it till now? If not, surely he wouldn’t have appointed Jim as guide to Norman Harper’s murderer? Unless, of course, he was at his wit’s end . . .

  He must want to hear the answer from Jim’s own lips. One’s interpretation of such things sometimes altered as the years went by.

  Or was Resnick doing this for Alice Huron’s benefit — as a sop to recompense her for her loss of Norman Harper? Or even because ... she was the real decision-maker hereabouts? Had he left it to someone else to scan the dossier for him: someone who already knew exactly what it said, and who was in the room right now?

  Alice Huron was once more inspecting the everlasting sunset, as though Resnick’s questions were of no consequence to her. The engorged sun prepared to dip beneath the waters, bringing the darkness of night; but it never actually did so. Jim thought briefly of the freezer freak
s, suspended — yet in reality dead. There was nothing of poised golden evening about their experience: their complete lack of experience.

  Alice Huron. Jim had agreed that she could stay, and now she would eavesdrop on his earliest death encounter — if she was not already privy to it. ‘Always check the small print,* he reflected wryly. Already he had got himself into something of a knot with Marta Bettijohn. Why had he allowed a similar situation to develop with this other woman? Because he wanted her to be present — having seen her naked, too, when she wept.

  At this point Jim decided that Alice must certainly be Resnick’s mistress; and he felt an irrational sense of loss at this discovery — as though somehow she ought to belong to him because they both had to contend with ungenerous doorways.

  ‘I’m eroticising things childishly . . . And imagining the same about other people . . .’ Actually, Marta had been doing just that. Quite definitely she had been eroticising this afternoon’s tragedy. In many respects a House of Death was an erotic hothouse. Inevitably relationships developed between the guides.

  “Well?” asked Resnick.

  “I fell into a river,” Jim said. “I drowned. I saw the radiance, I experienced bliss. Then they pulled me out and revived me.” It had all been a very long time ago, but how clearly the experience remained with him! “I wanted to show other people the same light, and let them know how we can die filled with joy. I wanted to show them how not to be afraid.”

  And perhaps, through his clients, he had wanted to catch reflected glimpses of that radiance, to be sure that it was still available.

  “Mr Ananda considers that the ‘death light’ is simply a brain reaction: a perception thing,” remarked Resnick. “Not a tunnel into heaven. Just something natural, not supernatural.”

  “It’s very valuable to know that you will feel joy at the end.”

  “Surely. And death therapy has to be tailored to suit the clients, not dogmatised. But really, afterlife research has led nowhere. We mustn’t promise falsehoods.”

  “Doses of opium,” muttered Alice.

  “Afterlife research has got nowhere for one simple reason,” said Jim. “Because no one is brought back from death nowadays. Instead, everyone is eased into it. So there’s no evidence. Except for odd cases like mine — rescues from drowning.”

  “So it’s all hypothetical,” said Alice sharply. “Fantasies about death are dangerous. They lead to events such as today’s.”

  “Well, I don’t dogmatise — I tailor, as Noel so neatly puts it. Though frankly, there is a way of glimpsing that light: by death mimicry, by playing possum. That’s what was going on in Gracchus: Project Possum.”

  “Yes, and I hear that one guide played possum so successfully that he did genuinely die,” said Resnick. “That’s where the real danger in the afterlife concept lies. It can lead to a denial of this good world — to a fevered intoxication with some ‘other side’, and even to suicide, which is violence against society. We’ve seen enough violence today to last us a lifetime.”

  “Where did Weinberger get the gun?” asked Jim, to change the subject.

  Resnick dangled a key. “Ask him. He’s in room 302.”

  “Aren’t the P.Os questioning him?”

  “He retired, remember? He’s in our custody. I don’t think it matters very much where he got the gun. Not all firearms can have been recalled and destroyed. People hang on to the stupidest of things. Medical poisons. Pills. No, it’s what he did with it. And he did it on his own. Weinberger was a loner, and I guess he was a looney too. But he kept a low profile — right until he popped up on the firing range.”

  “You’ve got that the wrong way round,” said Alice. “Traditionally, it’s the target that pops up.”

  “Oh well yes, I know that. But who needs a tradition like that?” Resnick swung back to Jim.

  “I realize that it’s your very first day here ...”

  “I’ll get on the job. That’s why I came.”

  “But take your time. Weinberger has to adjust. And that can only come from inside him. Obviously he’s a very long way off that right now. But people will want to hear that he adjusted successfully, and it’ll have to be the truth. At the moment he’s a gross example of stage-two anger. He hid it very well — quite as well as he hid the gun! We thought he was into stage-four depression, just prior to acceptance. I suppose his training as an ex-guide helped him mislead us. Here, I’ll give you his cassette — you’ll want to play it before you visit him.”

  Hauling himself out of the floppy chair, Jim accepted the cassette and slipped it into his breast pocket along with the room key. He shook his head.

  “No, I think I’ll see him raw. I’ll let him tell me who he is.” Resnick nodded affably.

  As Jim was opening the door to leave, Alice called, “Friday evening, right? Barbecue time. Let’s hope the weather holds.”

  In the scene-screen behind her, the weather held forever and forever.

  FIVE

  Nathan Weinberger lay on his bed, looking at once wild and passive — as though he had been felled by a tranquilliser dart and could only move his eyes now.

  But Jim doubted that the man had been sedated. Why would Resnick have insisted on early meeting, if Weinberger was drugged?

  No, that wasn’t it. Weinberger looked like a paralysed wild animal because he was caged. He alone in all the House was locked in. And anything potentially lethal had been carefully removed from his cell. Jim noted that a camera eye had been plugged in, up near the ceiling, to allow a duty attendant to monitor the room. A small red light glowed by it.

  Room 302 was deep within the body of the House, as was usual with rooms for clients supposed to be in the final stages of withdrawal. So, of course, there was a scene-screen: one wall held a deep vista of rolling forests. Yet the Weinberger animal had no way of running off into those forests to hide himself and die alone, unguided. He was penned.

  “Hello,” said Jim.

  The prisoner made no response.

  Jim picked up the phone by the bed.

  “Guide Todhunter speaking. I require privacy.”

  A voice grumbled at him briefly, then the red light near the camera went out.

  Jim sat by the bed. This is a murderer,’ he thought. A rare and dangerous beast — a zoo specimen. But the man did not look very dangerous.

  “Well, Mr Weinberger — Nathan, if I may — you’ve certainly made a lot of waves here! The ripples are really spreading out. I don’t suppose you’re too bothered about who I am, but my name’s

  Jim Todhunter. I’m your new guide, fresh in from Gracchus — my first day here, in fact. I don’t tell you that to gain sympathy votes; just to underline the fact that my mind’s wide open to you. So far, all I know about you is that you were once a guide yourself. . .”

  Weinberger did look at him now.

  “Death Hunter: that’s what your name is, fellow. Tod is German for death. Do you really know how to hunt for Death?” “As a guide, do you mean?”

  “You don’t understand. How could you?” The man closed his wild eyes, as though to blank Jim out from his attention.

  “Try me, Nathan.”

  “This is a sick society,” said Weinberger, almost to himself. “I know why it’s this way. But nobody understands death.”

  “Surely it’s the first sane society in history, precisely because it takes full account of death? Death is integrated, not locked out.” “Sure, from childhood onwards. It’s like a mockery of ancient Egypt nowadays. Only, we don’t build pyramid tombs or put golden dishes in them . . . Though I guess this House is a passable imitation of a pyramid. I wonder if that was in the architect’s basement of a mind?”

  Jim felt tolerably pleased at the way things were going.

  “Who would eat off those golden dishes?” he asked lightly. “Only the archeologists of the future.”

  “Maybe Death could eat off them.”

  “But death isn’t a person.”

  “Oh, isn’t
it?”

  “You said ‘it*. Is a person neuter?”

  “If it’s Death, fellow.”

  “Is that how you see death? As the Great Neuterer, equipped with gelding shears instead of a scythe? Not as the Great Fulfiller?” “See?” echoed Weinberger. “Nobody sees. Everybody’s blind.”

  “Except for you ...”

  “Oh, I haven’t seen what I could see! It’s as though I’ve got another sense that I don’t know how to use. Another few weeks, and it would have been a different story! But I got retired, by the factory. The medical net caught me. Here lam.”

  “Why did you kill Norman Harper?”

  “Maybe because he was a puffed-up bore. Or because he was the figurehead of lies. Or maybe I did it to save him.”

  “Save him? Whatever from?”

  “From Death, of course. Death gets everybody nowadays — apart from those lucky few who get squashed by a truck when they’re looking the wrong way. Or get electrocuted. The fast ones who get taken by surprise. Even drowning’s probably a bit too slow.”

  “I drowned, Nathan. When I was a boy. I really did drown, and they revived me. I experienced . . . bliss.”

  “Like a shot of heroin? If you remember what heroin was. Death gets everybody nowadays. The signals are all hot and strong. It hears them all, it smells them all.”

  “If you think that death’s like an addictive drug, I might point out that everyone has always died! What difference is there nowadays, except that we know how to approach death in the best frame of mind? And when to.”

  “Death didn’t get everyone, once. Death missed a whole lot of people. They weren’t in the right frame of mind. They weren’t putting out the right signals. Their minds were still fighting their bodies — still refusing them permission. Now it’s too easy for Death — it’s plain sailing. Death grows strong. It grows strong, fellow. It runs the whole damn world, or what’s left of it. It must have been able to get inside our heads to fix things this way.” Weinberger was certainly talkative enough now, but what he was saying seemed not so much insane as inexplicable. This primitive personalising of death should have been washed out of him long ago, especially since he had trained in a House of Death himself. And left it, Jim reminded himself. And torn up his covenant. Weinberger was obviously in a severe rejection phase — mixed up with a desire to negotiate with ‘Death*, and even sacrifice to ‘him*, or ‘it*. (Yes, ‘it*: Death was a non-person for him.) All in all, it was a very odd throwback to the old days.