by Clive Barker
'Poker?' he said.
'I've never played.'
'I'll teach you,' he replied. The thought clearly pleased him. In the adjacent courtyard the players now sent up a din of shouts. It sounded to be some kind of race, to judge by the mingled calls of encouragement, and the subsequent deflation as the winning-post was achieved. Guillemot caught her listening.
'Frogs,' he said. 'They're racing frogs.'
'I wondered.'
Guillemot looked at her almost fondly, and said, 'Better not.'
Despite Guillemot's advice, once her attention focussed on the sound of the games she could not drive the din from her head. It continued through the afternoon, rising and falling. Sometimes laughter would erupt; as often, there would arguments. They were like children, Gomm and his friends, the way they fought over such an inconsequential pursuit as racing frogs. But in lieu of more nourishing diversions, could she blame them? When Gomm's face appeared at the door later that evening, almost the first thing she said was: 'I heard you this morning, in one of the courtyards. And then this afternoon, too. You seemed to be having a good deal of fun.'
'Oh, the games,' Gomm replied. 'It was a busy day. So much to be sorted out.'
'Do you think you could persuade them to let me join you? I'm getting so bored in here.'
'Poor Vanessa. I wish I could help. But it's practically impossible. We're so overworked at the moment, especially with Floyd's escape.'
Overworked?, she thought, racing frogs? Fearing to offend, she didn't voice the doubt. 'What's going on here?' she said. 'You're not criminals, are you?'
Gomm looked outraged. 'Criminals?'
'I'm sorry ...'
'No. I understand why you asked. I suppose it must strike you as odd ... our being locked up here. But no, we're not criminals.
'What then? What's the big secret?'
Gomm took a deep breath before replying. 'If I tell you,' he said, 'will you help us to get out of here?'
'How?'
'Your car. It's at the front.'
'Yes, I saw it...'
'If we could get to it, would you drive us?'
'How many of you?'
'Four. There's me, there's Ireniya, there's Mottershead, and Goldberg. Of course Floyd's probably out there somewhere, but he'll just have to look after himself, won't he?'
'It's a small car,' she warned.
'We're small people,' Gomm returned. 'You shrink with age, you know, like dried fruit. And we're old. With Floyd we had three hundred and ninety-eight years between us. All that bitter experience,' he said, 'and not one of us wise.'
In the yard outside Vanessa's room shouting suddenly erupted. Gomm disappeared from the door, and reappeared again briefly to murmur: 'They found him. Oh my God: they found him.' Then he fled.
Vanessa crossed to the window and peered through. She could not see much of the yard below, but what she could see was full of frenzied activity, sisters hithering and thithering. At the centre of this commotion she could see a small figure - the runaway Floyd, no doubt - struggling in the grip of two guards. He looked to be much the worse for his days and nights of living rough, his drooping features dirtied, his balding pate peeling from an excess of sun. Vanessa heard the voice of Mr Klein rise above the babble, and he stepped into the scene. He approached Floyd and proceeded to berate him mercilessly. Vanessa could not catch more than one in every ten words, but the verbal assault rapidly reduced the old man to tears. She turned away from the window, silently praying that Klein would choke on his next piece of chocolate.
So far, her time here had brought a curious collection of experiences: one moment pleasant (Gomm's smile, the pizza, the sound of games played in a similar courtyard), the next - (the interrogation, the bullying she'd just witnessed) unpalatable. And still she was no nearer understanding what the function of this prison was: why it only had five inmates (six, if she included herself) and all so old -shrunk by age, Gomm had said. But after Klein's humiliation of Floyd she was now certain that no secret, however pressing, would keep her from aiding Gomm in his bid for freedom.
The Professor did not come back that evening, which disappointed her. Perhaps Floyd's recapture had meant stricter regulations about the place, she reasoned, though that principle scarcely applied to her. She, it seemed, was practically forgotten. Though Guillemot brought her food and drink he did not stay to teach her poker as they had arranged, nor was she escorted out to take the air. Left in the stuffy room without company, her mind undisturbed by any entertainment but counting her toes, she rapidly became listless and sleepy.
Indeed, she was dozing through the middle of the afternoon when something hit the wall outside the window. She got up, and was crossing to see what the sound was when an object was hurled through the window. It landed with a clunk on the floor. She went to snatch a glimpse of the sender, but he'd gone.
The tiny parcel was a key wrapped in a note. 'Vanessa,' it read, 'Be ready. Yours, in saecula saeculorum. H.G.'
Latin was not her forte; she hoped the final words were an endearment, not an instruction. She tried the key in the door of her cell. It worked. Clearly Gomm didn't intend her to use it now, however, but to wait for some signal. Be ready, he'd written. Easier said than done, of course. It was so tempting, with the door open and the passageway out to the sun clear, to forget Gomm and the others and make a break for it. But H.G. had doubtless taken some risk acquiring the key. She owed him her allegiance.
After that, there was no more dozing. Every time she heard a footstep in the cloisters, or a shout in the yard, she was up and ready. But Gomm's call didn't come. The afternoon dragged on into evening. Guillemot appeared with another pizza and a bottle of coca-cola for dinner, and before she knew it night had fallen and another day was gone.
Perhaps they would come by cover of darkness, she thought, but they didn't. The moon rose, its seas smirking, and there was still no sign of H.G. or this promised exodus. She began to suspect the worst: that their plan had been discovered, and they were all being punished for it. If so, would not Mr Klein sooner or later root out her involvement? Though her part had been minimal, what sanctions might the chocolate-man take out against her? Sometime after midnight she decided that waiting here for the axe to fall was not her style at all, and she would be wise to do as Floyd had done, and run for it.
She let herself out of the cell, and locked it behind her, then hurried along the cloisters, cleaving to the shadows as best she could. There was no sign of human presence - but she remembered the watchful Virgin, who'd first spied on her. Nothing was to be trusted here. By stealth and sheer good fortune she eventually found her way out into the yard in which Floyd had faced Mr Klein. There she paused, to work out which way the exit lay from here. But clouds had moved across the face of the moon, and in darkness her fitful sense of direction deserted her completely. Trusting to the luck that had got her thus far unarrested, she chose one of the exits from the yard, and slipped through it, following her nose along a covered walkway which twisted and turned before leading out into yet another courtyard, larger than the first. A light breeze teased the leaves of two entwined laurel-trees in the centre of the yard; night-insects tuned up in the walls. Peaceable as it was, the square offered no promising route that she could see, and she was about to go back the way she'd come when the moon shook off its veils and lit the yard from wall to wall.
It was empty, but for the laurel-trees, and the shadow of the laurel-trees, but that shadow fell across an elaborate design which had been painted onto the pavement of the yard. She stared at it, too curious to retreat, though she could make no sense of the thing at first; the pattern seemed to be just that: a pattern. She stalked it along one edge, trying to fathom out its significance. Then it dawned on her that she was viewing the entire picture upside-down. She moved to the other side of the courtyard and the design came clear. It was a map of the world, reproduced down to the most insignificant isle. All the great cities were marked and the oceans and continents crisscrossed w
ith hundreds of fine lines that marked latitudes, longitudes and much else besides. Though many of the symbols were idiosyncratic, it was clear that the map was rife with political detail. Contested borders; territorial waters; exclusion zones. Many of these had been drawn and re-drawn in chalk, as if in response to daily intelligence. In some regions, where events were particularly fraught, the land-mass was all but obscured by scribblings.
Fascination came between her and her safety. She didn't hear the footsteps at the North Pole until their owner was stepping out of hiding and into the moonlight. She was about to make a run for it, when she recognized Gomm.
'Don't move,' he murmured across the world.
She did as she was instructed. Glancing around him like a besieged rabbit until he was certain the yard was deserted, H.G. crossed to where Vanessa stood.
'What are you doing here?' he demanded of her.
'You didn't come,' she accused him. 'I thought you'd forgotten me.'
Things got difficult. They watch us all the time.' 'I couldn't go on waiting, Harvey. This is no place to take a holiday.'
'You're right, of course,' he said, a picture of dejection. 'It's hopeless. Hopeless. You should make your getaway on your own. Forget about us. They'll never let us out. The truth's too terrible.'
'What truth?'
He shook his head. 'Forget about it. Forget we ever met.'
Vanessa took hold of his spindly arm. 'I will not,' she said. 'I have to know what's happening here.'
Gomm shrugged. 'Perhaps you should know. Perhaps the whole world should know.' He took her hand, and they retreated into the relative safety of the cloisters.
'What's the map for?' was her first question.
This is where we play - ' he replied, staring at the turmoil of scrawlings on the courtyard floor. He sighed. 'Of course it wasn't always games. But systems decay, you know. It's an irrefutable condition common to both matter and ideas. You start off with fine intentions and in two decades ... two decades..." he repeated, as if the fact appalled him afresh,'... we're playing with frogs.'
'You're not making much sense, Harvey," Vanessa said. 'Are you being deliberately obtuse or is this senility?'
He prickled at the accusation, but it did the trick. Gaze still fixed on the map of the world, he delivered the next words crisply as if he'd rehearsed this confession.
There was a day of sanity, back in 1962, in which it occurred to the potentates that they were on the verge of destroying the world. Even to potentates the idea of an earth only fit for cockroaches was not particularly beguiling. If annihilation was to be prevented, they decided, our better instincts had to prevail. The mighty gathered behind locked doors at a symposium in Geneva. There had never been such a meeting of minds. The leaders of Politburos and Parliaments, Congresses, Senates - the Lords of the earth - in one colossal debate. And it was decided that in future world affairs should be overseen by a special committee, made up of great and influential minds like my own - men and women who were not subject to the whims of political favour, who could offer some guiding principles to keep the species from mass suicide. This committee was to be made up of people in many areas of human endeavour - the best of the best - an intellectual and moral elite, whose collective wisdom would bring a new golden age. That was the theory anyway
Vanessa listened, without voicing the hundred questions his short speech had so far brought to mind. Gomm went on.
' - and for a while, it worked. It really worked. There were only thirteen of us - to keep some consensus. A Russian, a few of us Europeans - dear Yoniyoko, of course - a New Zealander, a couple of Americans ... we were a high-powered bunch. Two Nobel prize winners, myself included -'
Now she remembered Gomm, or at least where she'd once seen that face. They had both been much younger. She a schoolgirl, taught his theories by rote.
' - our brief was to encourage mutual understanding between the powers-that-be, help shape compassionate economic structures and develop the cultural identity of emergent nations. All platitudes, of course, but they sounded fine at the time. As it was, almost from the beginning our concerns were territorial.'
Territorial?'
Gomm made an expansive gesture, taking in the map in front of him. 'Helping to divide the world up,' he said. 'Regulating little wars so they didn't become big wars, keeping dictatorships from getting too full of themselves. We became the world's domestics, cleaning up wherever the dirt got too thick. It was a great responsibility, but we shouldered it quite happily. It rather pleased us, at the beginning, to think that we thirteen were shaping the world, and that nobody but the highest eschelons of government knew that we even existed.'
This, thought Vanessa, was the Napoleon Syndrome writ large. Gomm was indisputably insane: but what an heroic insanity! And it was essentially harmless. Why did they have to lock him up? He surely wasn't capable of doing damage.
'It seems unfair,' she said, 'that you're locked away in here -'
'Well that's for our own security, of course,' Gomm replied. 'Imagine the chaos if some anarchist group found out where we operated from, and did away with us. We run the world. It wasn't meant to be that way, but as I said, systems decay. As time went by the potentates - knowing they had us to make critical decisions for them - concerned themselves more and more with the pleasures of high office and less and less with thinking. Within five years we were no longer advisers, but surrogate overlords, juggling nations.'
'What fun,' Vanessa said.
'For a while, perhaps,' Gomm replied. 'But the glamour faded very quickly. And after a decade or so, the pressure began to tell. Half of the committee are already dead. Golovatenko threw himself out of a window. Buchanan - the New Zealander - had syphilis and didn't know it. Old age caught up with dear Yoniyoko, and Bernheimer and Sourbutts. It'll catch up with all of us sooner or later, and Klein keeps promising to provide people to take over when we've gone, but they don't care. They don't give a damn! We're functionaries, that's all.' He was getting quite agitated. 'As long as we provide them with judgements, they're happy. Well...' his voice dropped to a whisper, 'we're giving it up.'
Was this a moment of self-realization?, Vanessa wondered. Was the sane man in Gomm's head attempting to throw off the fiction of world domination? If so, perhaps she could aid the process.
'You want to get away?' she said.
Gomm nodded. 'I'd like to see my home once more before I die. I've given up so much, Vanessa, for the committee, and it almost drove me mad -' Ah, she thought, he knows. 'Does it sound selfish if I say that my life seems too great a sacrifice to make for global peace?' She smiled at his pretensions to power, but said nothing. 'If it does, it does! I'm unrepentant. I want out! I want -'
'Keep your voice down,' she advised.
Gomm remembered himself, and nodded.
'I want a little freedom before I die. We all do. And we thought you could help us, you see.' He looked at her. 'What's wrong?' he said.
'Wrong?'
'Why are you looking at me like that?'
'You're not well, Harvey. I don't think you're dangerous, but -'
'Wait a minute,' Gomm said. 'What do you think I've been telling you? I go to all this trouble ...'
'Harvey. It's a fine story ...'
'Story? What do you mean, story?' he said, petulantly. 'Oh ... I see. 'You don't believe me, do you? That's it! I just told you the greatest secret in the world, and you don't believe me!'
'I'm not saying you're lying -'
'Is that it?' You think I'm a lunatic!' Gomm exploded. His voice echoed around the rectangular world. Almost immediately there were voices from several of the buildings, and fast upon those the thunder of feet.
'Now look what you've done,' Gomm said.
'I've done?'
'We're in trouble.'
'Look, H.G., this doesn't mean -'
Too late for retractions. You stay where you are - I'm going to make a run for it. Distract them.'
He was about to depart when he tur
ned back to her, caught hold of her hand, and put it to his lips.
'If I'm mad,' he said, 'you made me that way.'
Then he was off, his short legs carrying him at a fair speed across the yard. He did not even reach the laurel-trees however, before the guards arrived. They shouted for him to stop. When he failed to do so one of the men fired. Bullets ploughed the ocean around Gomm's feet.
'All right,' he yelled, coming to halt and putting his hands in the air. 'Mea culpa!'
The firing stopped. The guards parted as their commander stepped through.
'Oh, it's you, Sidney,' H. G. said to the Captain. The man visibly flinched to be so addressed in front of inferior ranks.
'What are you doing out at this time of night?' Sidney demanded.
'Star-gazing,' Gomm replied.
'You weren't alone,' the Captain said. Vanessa's heart sank. There was no route back to her room without crossing the open courtyard; and even now, with the alarm raised, Guillemot would probably be checking on her.
That's true,' said Gomm. 'I wasn't alone.' Had she offended the old man so much he was now going to betray her? 'I saw the woman you brought in -'
'Where?'
'Climbing over the wall,' he said.
'Jesus wept!' the Captain said, and swung around to order his men in pursuit.
'I said to her,' Gomm was prattling. 'I said, you'll break your neck climbing over the wall. You'd be better waiting until they open the gate -'
Open the gate. He wasn't such a lunatic, after all. Phillipenko - ' the Captain said,' - escort Harvey back to his dormitory -'
Gomm protested. 'I don't need a bed-time story, thank you.'
'Go with him.'
The guard crossed to H. G. and escorted him away. The Captain lingered long enough to murmur, 'Who's a clever boy, Sidney?' under his breath, then followed. The courtyard was empty again, but for the moonlight, and the map of the world.
Vanessa waited until every last sound had died, and then slipped out of hiding, taking the route the dispatched guards had followed. It led her, eventually, into an area she vaguely recognized from her walk with Guillemot. Encouraged, she hurried on along a passageway which let out into the yard with Our Lady of the Electric Eyes. She crept along the wall, and ducked beneath the statue's gaze and out, finally, to meet the gates. They were indeed open. As the old man had protested when they'd first met, security was woefully inadequate, and she thanked God for it.