Weinberger gazed into the scene-screen.
“I’d better get rid of that. Forests are a dead give-away. It’s a pity there aren’t any city scenes!”
Weinberger dialled the forests away, and the winter of the world faced them once again, glazed by the flood of sunlight reflecting off the icebergs.
“We’ll leave tomorrow night,” said Jim. “I’ll tell Resnick that you’re on the verge of agreeing to appear in public.”
“And I will so appear. Only, no one will be up and about to see me. Thus proving that a part of the truth is the biggest lie of all. Oh, that’s neat. I shall eat like a horse till then.”
“In that case, bon appetit to you.”
“No, I’ll just eat like a horse, that’s all.”
TWENTY-ONE
When the time came, Jim opened the door to the monitor room softly. Sorensen sat with his back to the door, reading his eternal magazine. On the little screen a tiny Weinberger lay on his bed studiously ignoring the camera eye and whatever might transpire behind it.
Sorensen looked round and saw the gun in Jim’s hand.
“Don’t make a sound,” said Jim. “Don’t touch anything.
Don’t move. Or you’ll be dead — by murder.” He closed the door behind him.
Sorensen moved rather more than previously. He shook.
“If you shoot me, it’ll make a noise!”
“And that’ll be the noise of your own death. But you won’t hear it.”
“You’re crazy. You’re fucking crazy.”
“That’s as may be. If you don’t do exactly what I tell you, you’ll be on the receiving end of my craziness. And I just told you to shut up!”
Why did he have to speak to the man? Jim felt that he should be just grunting or barking at him. He resented the absurd melodrama. Worse, holding up a man at gunpoint felt like suddenly having a big glass ball or soap bubble balanced in mid-air. Once up, you couldn’t put it down of it would break under its own weight. Once begun, the thing wouldn’t go away.
“Don’t do this, Mr Todhunter, sir! Just because I called in Mr Resnick? I had to do that.”
“Shut up.” The glass ball was making too much noise. “If you do what I tell you, I won’t kill you.” Jim felt like an oversized child playing at some adult activity which he only half understood. He waved the gun.
“Pull your chair over by the wall — next to that pipe.”
Sorensen began jumping his chair towards the pipe while still sitting on it — which caused an almighty scraping and screeching.
“Lift it, you fool! Just off the floor, no higher. Now set it down. And catch this.”
Jim produced a fat roll of adhesive tape, which he tossed to the man. Sorensen fumbled the catch. The tape rolled away across the floor.
Keeping his gun on the man, Jim retrieved the tape and rolled it back in the direction of Sorensen’s feet.
“Right, pick it up. Open it. Now tape your mouth shut. Good. Next, tape your ankles to the chair legs . . .
“Right, now tape your left arm to the chair arm.”
This was not as easy as it sounded, but eventually Sorensen succeeded in binding his left wrist. The tape roll hung loose; Sorensen couldn’t tear the perforations with one hand. He mumbled through his gag apologetically.
Jim edged over to him. He removed the tape roll and bound Sorensen’s right wrist quickly, cursorily. Then he put the gun down on the floor and methodically began to retape his prisoner’s mouth, wrists and ankles firmly till he had used up all the tape. He produced cord and bound the man. Next, he tipped the chair back carefully till Sorensen was lying like an astronaut of old, waiting for lift-off, and he knotted the chair to the pipe. Waiting for lift-off by an angry Resnick . . .
“Mmm-mmm,” said Sorensen. Uncomfortable? Pipe too hot? Blood running to his head?
Jim wondered whether he should bang Sorensen on the head with the gun butt, but he had no idea how hard to hit him. Or how softly. He contented himself with threatening him.
“Shut up. I’m going to be here behind you quite a while, and I don’t want to hear a peep — or I’ll hit you on the head. And that might bust your skull!”
He removed the key to the rear door of the House and left silently, retrieving his packed valise from outside the room.
When Jim had checked the front foyer of the House earlier on a woman attendant had been sitting there, teasing coloured threads into a half-embroidered sampler. It was a picture of a sperm whale sounding in the open ocean. Apparently she was going to be there all night. Jim hoped that the woman and Sorensen weren’t lovers, in the habit of phoning each other or paying sneak visits. But why should they be? Not everyone loved everybody else.
Really, it was a nuisance that he had needed to immobilize the spy Sorensen. But, key aside, the man couldn’t be trusted to respect a request for all-night privacy. Not any longer. And at least the exercise of mastering the man at gunpoint — despite the gaucherie of it — had given Jim confidence.
An hour later an electric runabout toiled up over the ridge separating Lake Tulane from Egremont. A half moon and cold stars lit the scene faintly in blue: not so much a light as a lessening of darkness. The headbeams picked out the winding road for a little way ahead, and washed against the trees. Behind, the valley was an empty bowl, its pearly spider’s-web of lights extinguished some time ago.
Jim glanced at his watch, but couldn’t read it in the instant during which he dared take his eyes off the road. He knew the time, anyway: shortly after midnight.
“Turn right here.” Weinberger, pencil light in hand, spotted a little yellow circle of lines and symbols upon the otherwise black map sheet. The map would be some help in getting them smoothly away from Egremont, then of increasingly little use as they tried to lose themselves so successfully that nobody else could find them either. So it was a map for getting lost by.
Shortly after the turn-off, Jim glanced through an opening in the trees and thought that he recognized, though from a different angle, the chalet by the waters where trout had been grilled to celebrate his arrival. A light showed down there. If Noel Resnick was sporting in the chalet with Mary-Ann and Alice while Jim and Weinberger slipped by, this indeed added spice to their escape!
But why should it be Resnick with his ladies? Maybe it was a different chalet entirely, sheltering some solitary yachtsman afflicted with insomnia . . .
‘I’m obsessed with sex/ thought Jim grimly. ‘But I haven’t been to bed with anyone. Only with Weinberger, inside his contraption, and that doesn’t count. Is Death my only real sexual encounter, of which all the others are mere echoes and shadows? Is the real act of conception not the engendering of a child in the womb but the fertilisation of one of those crystal prisons by my soul? So here go I, like a self-denying monk, an obsessed St Anthony, into the desert to triumph over that crystal temptation — or succumb to it . . .
‘Yes, I’m a monk.’ He had been sleeping in his coffin or close by it for years now. The House of Death was the coffin that they all lived in. Yet how the others enjoyed themselves in it! How everybody enjoyed themselves now that they all knew how to die . . .
‘Except for me.’ Somewhere, somehow, he had lost out on enjoyment. Maybe it was when he drowned. The joy of that drowning had been so much more intense than any subsequent drowning in the flesh of another . . .
‘‘We stay on this route.” Weinberger whispered, as though sensing his reverie and not wanting to interrupt it but at the same time wishing to be part of it.
The metalled road became pocked and bumpy. The electric runabout lurched on at twenty-five miles per hour, its top speed.
* * *
A little over an hour later the engine began to fade.
By now they were bumping along a forest road which seemed to be proceeding satisfactorily from nowhere to nowhere, though generally northwards. They had already passed off the edge of the local map. Losing the car might not, however, be so simple. Black fir trees hemmed the road
.
Clouds covered the half moon which only occasionally floated clear, a phosphorescent bone. Jim slowed, to hunt for a crack in the darkness of the forest. He had imagined that they might come across a deep little lake with water like oil, and scuttle the car in it. But now he had no means of telling whether there was such a lake fifty yards away, let alone any hope of reaching it on wheels.
Finally he found something wider than a crack and swung the runabout hard into it. Branches scraped the windows. A tree stub screeched across the underside. The wheels spun, and the engine died. Both men had to force their way out through the driver’s door. A needle-studded branch slapped Jim across the cheek.
“Nobody might come along for days,” said Weinberger encouragingly.
And thus they set off along the road.
Five minutes later, Jim shifted his valise to his left hand. Five minutes after that he tried hanging the bag over his shoulder; and another five minutes later he thought of wearing it on his back, rucksack style, with his arms through the handles. But this cramped his shoulders, and the bag butted his spine. He returned it to his right hand.
Presently they arrived at the top of a great clearing. Felled trees cascaded down the hillside like matchsticks spilled from a box. A log cabin crowned the rise, dark and empty. The road ran nowhere else.
“My arm’s two yards long,” Jim complained.
“Well, we can’t stop here. We’ve only come a couple of miles!’’
Aided rather more, now, by the glowing bone in the sky, they struck off and up into the wild.
To Jim’s surprise, Weinberger had reserves of strength. It was as though the man had converted all the pain dealt out by the creature Death into some honey-energy in his body cells. Now the terrain was rougher, but this very roughness was a help to them since reefs of rock broke through the forest, parting the trees. After half an hour Weinberger allowed them to halt in the lee of a junior crag. He sank down.
“I’m pooped.”
Jim dropped his leaden valise, which had fused his fingers together.
“I’ve been sleepwalking.”
“Okay, let’s sleep.”
“Where?” Jim peered into the night.
“It’s quite easy in theory. Animals do it all the time. You just lie down, curl up and go to sleep.”
“Oh, you funny fellow.”
From his bag Jim pulled the two lightweight capes which he had bought that morning. He spread them on the ground. Weinberger shuffled on to one of them and made a pillow of his arms. Jim copied him, worrying about how crumpled their clothes would look by the time they crossed the border. That border was still immeasurably far off; it felt like a whole country away.
The tussocky ground wasn’t too hard, but a chill clung to it which Jim hadn’t noticed while they were walking. After a while, hesitantly he fitted himself right up against Weinberger, who appeared to be asleep already. He tucked his buttocks into the other man’s belly and folded the hollows of his knees around the other man’s knees. Before, in Egremont, they had been Sleeping Beauties; now they were the Babes in the Wood. Creaky old babes.
TWENTY-TWO
Jim was still wondering how he would ever get to sleep, when he realized that it was already daylight.
He had dreamt troubled, wakeful dreams: complicated, guilty racings of the mind upon the theme of how to switch off those same racings. There existed a maze of switches to do this. As soon as he threw one switch, though, this gave birth to a whole subsidiary maze. Eventually mazes and switches towered to the sky.
And that sky was now bright with the morning sun. He blinked, wondering where all that complex of apparatus had gone to. Surely it couldn’t have packed itself back into his skull? But it had; and he had spent his hours of sleep like a rat in some old torture laboratory, which happened to be his own brain.
Weinberger had gone. Jim sat up in dizzy panic. A bird — but he was not very good on birds, so that it was simply ‘a bird’ — twittered on a branch then flew off suddenly as Weinberger came up through the pines back to the crag.
Weinberger sniffed the air appreciatively.
“Lovely morning, Jim. Good to be alive, as they say.”
Jim shook his head, to clear it of the last switches and mazes. He sniffed the air too — it was like a cool green drink — and he sneezed. Twice, three times, explosively.
Weinberger chuckled.
“Cut it out. You don’t catch cold from lying on the ground. Cold is a virus.”
Jim shivered, and sneezed again.
“Stop it!’’
Amazingly, Jim did stop sneezing.
“When did you wake up?”
“I told you: I don’t use much sleep. I’ve been scouting. There’s a spring down there — fully certified for washing and drinking. Freshen up, take a leak, and we’ll open one of those cans you brought. Oh, it’s just like the old days — give or take a tent. And a fire. We can’t light any fires up here. No fire without smoke. Go on, lazybones, git! I let you sleep in this morning.”
Jim groaned, and massaged his legs.
At mid-day, when they had covered another six or seven miles, they stopped to open another can and eat some chocolate. Both men were ravenous, and Jim realized that the groceries he had brought would hardly last through the next day. When Jim mentioned this, Weinberger airily reminded him that he intended to catch fish with the line and hook he had told Jim to buy. He promised a feast of edible fungi too, which would taste like steaks — and be topped with sweet blackberries. But Jim saw only spruce and pine, grass and sky.
They sat on a spruce-clad ridge, eating. The breeze was very fresh, despite the continuing sunshine. A squirrel scampered up a tree and sat watching them intently, clutching some trophy in its paws, ready to dart to the far side of the trunk. Steep green valleys
lay ahead — and somewhere in the distance a thin waterfall tumbling from its crag into a hidden lake or pool.
Hearing a buzz in the sky, they took shelter behind the squirrel’s tree, sending it leaping to another.
A mile westward a white monoplane flew into view. It veered this way and that. It circled.
“Peace Service plane,’’ remarked Weinberger. “So that means they’ve found the runabout, and the cone of search points this way. Can’t win ‘em all! But that’s a hopeless way of looking for someone. They’d be lucky to spot us even if we were up a tree waving a red sheet at them.”
Gradually the monoplane moved away.
Later, a second monoplane passed almost directly overhead, then swung back towards the north-east. This one had wing-tip floats instead of wheels.
“That’s from Bamaby,’’ said Weinberger. “Hence the floats. That’s because of all the lakes they’ve got over there. It was just a coincidence passing over us like that. They didn’t see a thing.”
“If they do see us —’’
“They’ll drop officers in by parachute, the same as they do for fires.” Weinberger scanned the horizon. By now it had gone into mourning with black crepe along it beneath white cauliflower domes. “Don’t worry. The weather’s going to foul up in another hour or two. Let’s reach a lake. Our supper ought to be able to tell the difference between a few raindrops and a wriggly worm.”
A few raindrops. This was sheer bravado. When it did start to rain steadily a couple of hours later, with grey clouds dredging along below the tops of the slopes, both men were soon soaked through and shivering despite their capes. When they finally did arrive at a lakeside, the lake seemed like a mere local thickening of the water which already filled the air.
Though partly occupied with feeling miserable, Jim had neverthe-less — under the lash of the rain — managed to track down a certain quality of, call it, inattention about their escape into the forests. They had brought food along, yes, and a fishing line, and a couple of capes; and so on. But they were just not geared up for a trek to the border. Therefore they were not really going there. He
understood this now, while the r
ain dripped off him, and through him. The border was an alibi, a lie. They had paced themselves for a sprint, not a marathon. It was all they were good for: a sprint lasting two or three days at the most . . .
‘Give us two or three days, and we’ll damn well prove we’re right!’ As to afterwards, why, the non-existent Gods could see to that. Or Justice, or Fate, or even, incredibly, Truth. Unconsciously, they had made this bargain: this magical, infantile bargain.
Jim found himself remembering an old German poem in favour with the Houses: Friedrich Holderlin’s To the Fates. More accurately, Norman Harper’s version of it was in favour. But out of curiosity Jim had once accessed the original back in Gracchus. The original petitioned the Fates to grant another summer and another autumn of life to ripen the poet’s song. To Jim’s ear the German original sounded very hectoring, but Norman Harper’s ‘translation’ was something of a misrepresentation, to say the least . . .
Norman Harper called his version Windfall. It was another of his rare departures from a rhyme scheme. Jim whispered the ‘translation’ to himself sourly, trying to remember the bargaining German voice that lay hidden beneath Harper’s verses like some buried Troy.
‘Will you let me fade in the Fall,
My kindly Powers That Be?
My poems will be ripe for plucking,
Heart’s pollen will be all sweet honey For the next year’s folk.
‘Hullo there, Stillness, how are you?
I’m goodly glad, even if I’m not to hear My own voice versing any more.
In my own way I’ve lived like Goethe.
But you know, apples overripe go rotten . . .
‘Why don’t you pick my windfall, now?’
Which would have been all very well, and autumny, earlier in the day when the sun was still shining! But of course, it was a different kind of bargain that Norman Harper was intent on striking. Harper bargained not with the Fates, but with the State. Not for a little more lease of life, but for a good death. It was the Httlderlin sort of bargain that they were into now: for a few more hours of freedom, to produce something.
Watson, Ian - Novel 10 Page 14