If this was an electric chair, and if John Brunt had been killed in it, then where was the body now, and why was this thing manifestly still working?
The questions required previous questions answered first. He turned and strolled slowly along the chasms between the apparatus, careful to touch nothing at all.
In a corner by the door back into the office, there was a cabinet standing open. Clothes hung in it; plastic overalls, skull caps, masks, gloves, overshoes—paraphernalia of scientific insulation. Automatically he wondered how effective against weather and water they would be for fly-fishing.
But in these ranks of overalls there was an ordinary jacket. Hoskins watched it, then took it out and turned down the lip of the inside pocket.
The tailor’s tab said, “Hatter, Son <6 Clarke, Savile Row, W.i.” Beneath that was written the name, John Brunt, Esqre."
Hoskins searched the pockets. In the pockets he found keys, loose change, a wallet with forty pounds, a penknife and a wristwatch.
All the things, Hoskins realized, that no man would leave behind if he had gone of his own volition.
He put the jacket back, looked down the shining-walled
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avenue to the crystal chair, then went quickly out of the office suite.
He had been through the flat briefly, taking a risk that Packard or anyone else might walk in. He had done it as a pilot shot, to get the range on whether this investigation was really justified.
With the jacket he felt that it was. But getting a warrant to search the privileged offices and flats in the Ministry of Science was a matter which would have to be arranged by someone far above him.
Whether he got it or not, there was going to be an appalling stink raised. He chuckled at the idea of it. He had no personal grudge against Packard—in fact, like most other people, he liked him. But he was a Minister, and behind Hoskins’ mask of obedience to Ministers sneered the face of rebellion. The only man of power Hoskins had ever sympathized with was Robespierre. Seagreen Incorruptible was such a wonderful name. Hoskins could imagine himself earning it, for the same reason as the original.
If he could get the same recognition he might retire to the sunlit waters and spend the rest of life thinking and casting, thinking and casting. . . .
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Four
1
Now that Edna had gone, John Brunt saw no one. The country was still in the sunshine. The air caressed with soft little movements and hummed with the living pulse of the corn and the leaves and the smirking weeds of the churchyard.
He remembered Bassington. If anything violent had happened to him, he might be somewhere here still. The strangeness of thinking that struck him with a slight chill. As if he had got used to saying he was dead,' but not to believing it.
He realized his span of two belts of existence. He felt that Helen was alive, and Petra was alive, but knew that Edna was dead. Yet he had felt them all, and heard them and spoken to them. Before now he had only seen Edna, and perhaps heard her sometimes, but that was all. Now he had touched her, but he knew she was still a ghost to Helen and the rest.
So if they were real—at any rate, by ordinary human sensory standards—what was he doing here? Why come back to the same place he had left eighty, a hundred years before?
Just how far was Packard proving anything?
The test had proved there was something, whether it was what you expected or not. Life didn’t just stop. So far, it seemed, it went on with greater sensitivity. You felt things more. Your feelings were less affected by the rules you had—or hadn’t stuck to as an adult, and became more like those of childhood. Which, he supposed they
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always had been. You had had to stifle them, or pretend they had changed. It seemed that being an adult had always been pretense.
Deliberately he pushed to the back of his mind that the only other person he had met in the same case as himself was a woman who had died violently, and was waiting now and for centuries perhaps.
He looked up at a pair of birds wheeling in the sky.
Birds here; no birds outside. A guard in the wood. The way through blocked by an electronic fence, for that must have been what he had run into. That must be what kept the birds this side, an electronic fence several hundred feet high. Years ago they had defended this area by force; it was still being defended by the invisible fence. A fence dividing decay from apparent prosperity. What had happened in the meantime? There must have been some plague outside, which had been kept out of here.
He looked back toward the inn. There could be somebody in there who might know. They had been to school. They still had schools?
He looked round toward the village school, the little stone building by the church. The old bell still hung in an open slot in a little tower, but it was dull and green, as if unused for years.
There had been a library at the school. Would a history book go back to the time when he had died?
He laughed suddenly. He was like a madman talking to himself.
He got up and began to walk along the path back to where the inn yard opened out. The path ran by to the school. He remembered the path lined with dancing, yelling, laughing, fighting, romping children. And they were all dead.
As he went along he saw a figure steal out of the inn gateway and look up and down, her unruly blond hair shining in the sun as it fell on her white shoulders. She looked his way, and he stopped. She picked up her big skirts and ran toward him, the loose top almost slipping off her shoulders as she came.
“Johnny, Johnny, she’s looking for you!” she said breathlessly.
He gripped her soft upper arm and felt an urge for her again with the touch so that he let go. Fear started bump
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ing inside him once more. Fear such as he had known as
a child.
Why does she want me?”
“To make you do something. She always makes them do things. That’s why she made you wash the floor. It doesn’t need washing but she makes them do things like that, love. And it’s part of her job, like, to make men do things like that then they get so they tell.”
“What if they run away, like me?”
“She waits for them to come back.” She looked at him with puzzled, china blue eyes. “She doesn’t usually look for them,' love. You want to watch out.”
“Will you be in trouble for telling me?” he said quickly. “If you are, I’ll come back.”
“Will you?” Her eyes grew very bright, and she laughed and her peach cheeks colored. “I say, you are funny, aren’t you? No, I’m not in trouble. She won’t do anything to me, love.”
“What do you do there, then?” he asked. “Aren’t you employed?”
“I serve the food,” she said, and added, “and that.” He looked toward the inn yard, with its silent pump, like a mourner on the cobbles, praying at a bucket.
“Where is she now?”
“Looking for you. She thinks you’re in the house somewhere. There are three other girls, too. That Margaret that works with the guards. She came.” She took his arm and looked up into his face with an odd anxiety. “You won’t forget me, will you?”
“Forget you!” he said. “Not likely!”
She shook his arm and as she half turned away, yet still kept her big eyes on him.
“Then when you come back, you’ll find me, love? You’ll look for me?”
“The first thing,” he said.
“Don’t go a minute,” he said quickly. ‘Tell me. How long does this go on? This endless questioning, trying to find out?”
“I don’t know, love. But when you first come I suppose they have to. When anybody new comes to the inn they’re always watched all the time to make sure about them.” “To make sure of what?”
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“To make sure they really are the government people.” She looked puzzled.
“What happens if they aren’t?”
“There aren’t many. Not for a long time—”
“Yes, but what happens to them?”
“You don’t ask.” She shook her head.
“You were sent to find out from me what you find out from them?” He felt a sudden spurt of jealousy.
“Don’t worry, love, yes. They tell you things, like that, though it’s usually about their mothers. But you were different. I told you, love. It’s different.”
He looked into her face. It was Helen Murphy, it must be. “Yes,” he said.
“I’d better get back,” she said. “But what will you do?” “What can I do?” he asked. “There’s no way out of this place except by the guard house, and they won’t let me by. And I don’t want to get out, not now.”
“Just don’t show yourself, love. Hide.” She gripped his arm and squeezed. “Hide and they’ll get tired.”
She let go his arm, picked up her skirts and ran back. She gave a little wave just before she disappeared through the gateway.
He felt his heart beating fast for her, and then changing into another rhythm as he thought of Petra and her three girls. If there were three and they were anything like she was, he had best hide. He felt his back begin to smart again.
He went quickly past the gateway and along the high stone wall of the yard. The school grounds looked as bad as those of the church, high with weeds, like a sea creeping up to the faded gray wood of the long-unpainted door. The iron ring door handles were red with dust, the high windows dull brown with dust and dirt. The roller blinds had been half pulled down, one-sidedly. It made the place look blotched and drunk.
He looked up and down the pathway, then pushed the broken gate inward. The school doors were not locked. He got inside the big old room that he remembered when he had been very small.
Miss Hardwicke who had taught them. He remembered her as he stood among the crazily placed chairs and looked toward the teacher’s desk, like an altar, with the blackboard, now brown and peeling, behind it.
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Miss Hardwicke, big, tall, stem and hard, with breasts so big they had strained the dresses she had worn. He remembered the sniggling boy beside him, goading him on when already she had warned him twice.
“If you stuck a pin in them,” the next boy hissed with the pressure of daring humor, “they’d go off pop!”
John had gone off pop with laughter. Twice she had called to him to stop, but it had been impossible to control himself, and to make it worse, he had not dared look at her for fear of seeing her bosom shining at him. He had been kept behind and beaten. It had been a sexual experience, felt but not understood. After that she had featured in his erotic daydreams. Miss Hardwicke, his first exciting woman.
He remembered her then, stem, frightening, inviting and forbidding. Like Petra.
The realization was startling. Like Petra, of course. The similarity, the sexual attraction, the strange fury of the beatings. . . . Was he going through a second stage on the same experiences? Was that all part of the test? Was that why he feared the woman in black? Was it the old original fear of Miss Hardwicke?
He turned away from the schoolroom and went through the door at the back of it to the library. It was a smallish room lined with bookshelves to a height of six feet, with faded classification tabs still stuck on the edges of the shelves. There were cobwebs and dust everywhere, flaked paint on the floor. The solitary window was half blanked by a roller blind. He took the cord to jerk it and send the blind up on its spring. The wooden slat bottom of the blind merely ripped off and fell on him in a little cloud of dust.
There was an old duster lying on a table. He picked it up and shook it. Dust and chalk flew out of it. Perhaps chalk that Miss Hardwicke had used.
He went along the shelves as he had long before and searched for the history books. The bindings were spotted with green rot, and the gold lettering had gone black. He found a book he had never seen before.
"A Popular History of the World, Volume IV, 1800-2000.”
He pulled it out, wiped it and blew a plume of dust off the top of the leaves. He flipped the pages to find the era when he had died.
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He found chapter twenty-seven, 1970-80.
The chapter was headed:
DEATH OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
A strange coldness came into the warm, musty room. He started to read, and then heard a movement in the schoolroom. He looked up quickly, then moved behind the half open door. Through the crack he could see Petra, staring round the old schoolroom, and his heart began to thump at the sight of her, all his early fears of Miss Hardwicke exaggerating his fear of the woman in black. He stopped breathing. He could see shadows of other women thrown across the dusty floor by the sun through the doorway. In the silence he could hear the house breathing, creaking, hushing, and the sudden startling drone of a bee shooting away from a window sill.
Petra looked back at the doorway.
Margaret came into the schoolroom, still wearing the same plain little Puritan dress. Another woman followed, similarly dressed with very short, golden hair. Last came a red-headed girl dressed like Helen, and therefore probably a waitress. She came a little diffidently.
“I saw him come in here,” she said. “I know I did. She pointed to the blonde. “Ask Jo.”
“There’s another room over there,” Margaret said.
As he peered through the crack he saw her point directly at him. The other women began looking round. The waitress opened a cupboard by the blackboard, Jo opened one on the other side. Petra began to walk toward the library door.
John slammed the door shut. He heard sudden sharp cries from the other side as he shot the little bolt in the dry wood of the frame. He ran to the window and unfastened the catch. It nearly broke his finger with its jerking stiffness. He grabbed the lifting hooks and heaved. It did not move. He heard a banging on the door, and then Petra’s voice.
“Go round the outside!”
He fought with the sash. It would not give. He went back, picked up a chair and shoved it through the window. Big lumps of glass jangled to the floor and shattered. The chair went right through, carrying glass and broken wood
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with it into the high sea of weeds. He clambered through the rough opening, feeling the sharp edges of the broken frame digging at his flesh. As he dropped down among the weeds he saw the woman Jo appear round the corner of the building. She began to run.
He ran |too, cutting through the weeds that dragged at his feet like hands. His fear of the women was acute now, boiling in his head with the realization that if they caught him there would be unending pain. Pain that would go on and on, and from which there was now no relief.
They could not kill him. He must go on and suffer, on and on, with no end to it that could possibly come about now.
As he ran on he heard them behind him, odd sounds, the tearing of their legs through the weeds, the pounding of a foot on a hard, bare patch, the sudden alarmed shriek of a bird taking off from the weeds, clicking like a clockwork toy.
It had been the church school. There was nothing ahead of him but the sea of weeds flowing round the tottering gravestones and the yawning darkness of the church door. Heat and fear beat in his head. It was a nightmare, his feet dragged back by the weeds, the sounds of the pursuers beating steadily on his nerves, the heat of the sun growing all round, stifling his mouth, weighing on Kim, pressing him down into the weeds so that they would come up on him and all the pains and terrors of Hell would beat on him.
The church door yawned. In his extremity . it seemed to be receding. The sounds behind grew louder, the rhythmic swishing of their strong legs through the weeds, the soft pounding of feet; the sounds of pursuit, not of people.
He forced himself to run harder. The church, Sanctuary. The oldest of the Christian gifts. Once within the church he must be untouchable.
He ran, straining to break the tearing grip of the weeds on his legs, his
chest bursting with the effort. He reached the porch. The door opening swelled up at him, as if he no longer ran, but sanctuary came to him.
He burst into the great, cool place of soft light and dust and the smell of warm, rotting wood and decay. He halted himself with his hand on the carved head of a pew, then turned to face them.
As he saw them coming toward him through the doorway,
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he wondered whether the oldest of the Christian customs meant anything any more.
■ :-2
As Packard made his way between the people on the pavement he . saw George and the Rolls waiting. He sighed and slapped the pocket where his DF set lay like a cigarette case- It sent out position transmissions every half hour, during a time of special activity, and gave no peace. “A broadcast, sir,” said George.
“What time?” Packard said, looking at his watch. “Ten. ITA studio, but it’s going out on all channels.” They got into the car. Packard took the telephone. His office was waiting for him.
“A special message from the PM, sir. There has been some trouble about Flightend.”
“Oh Jesus,” said Packard. “You want me to give a reassuring message to the poor bellyachers? How long?” “Three minutes. Leading the news, all channels.” “Interview?”
“Yes ”
“Who?”
“Jack Bart.”
“That’s the bloody feller looks like a boxer with a hornet up his stern. I don’t know him. He doesn’t sound a reassurance stooge to me. Barks like a boxer, too.” “You’ll handle him.”
At the studios a reception committee was waiting. They, producers and other responsible program operators, did not like rush jobs, specially on Saturday. Often the officials were tight and said things that were good for news and bad for image. The tapes always started with a judder at the thought of landing up in a libel court.
But by that time eleven thousand people had died of Flightend poisoning. The incident was becoming news.
Jack Bart peered aggressively through thick spectacles and chewed a cigarette as he smoked it. He had a sheaf of papers in his hand and hung back until the producer and his assistants had welcomed the unexpected guest.
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