The Green Drift

by John Lymington

  She bit her lip.

  You make it sound awful ! ’ she said, almost shouting.

  Ellen came in, nervous, wiping her dry hands on her thighs again.

  ‘Will you be here to lunch?’

  Hayles stared, trying to adjust his mind to immortality.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, at last. ‘Yes, thank yon indeed.’

  Barbara giggled suddenly and then covered her mouth with a hand. Ellen looked at her questioningly.

  ’I don’t know,’ Barbara said, recovering herself. ‘I hope I can go soon.’ She frowned into her drink. ‘I think.’

  Ellen stood doubtfully, then went back into the kitchen. Barbara looked up at Hayles.

  ‘I’m not so keen to go back, anyway.’ She stared at a window. ‘My husband went off with a woman.’

  Hayles tried to bring himself back to the everyday. Barbara’s problem was one he dealt with in Woman’s Sphere each week; the staff sorted out letters for him to choose from, and he answered in the ‘My Hand to You’ column.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, going back to the table for a lemon slice.

  ‘I didn’t think he’d really go,’ she said. ‘We sort of had rows about it and that, and I thought it was all out in the open. But it wasn’t. It was still going on behind my back. I shouldn’t have trusted him, should I?’

  ‘You must trust!’ he said. ‘How else can human beings get on together?’

  ‘Yes, but if you’re trusting a cheat, that’s silly, isn’t it?’

  How on earth could she talk such trivialities at a time like this? he thought angrily. Except that to her, that wretched little husband was probably more important than all the horrible events of the day.

  ‘Why did he cheat?’ she said, watching his feet with a dull expression.

  ‘Perhaps because he knew you hadn’t got faith in him,’ he said, with a slightly better smile. ‘Perhaps you’d done something he wanted to get back on you for, and what he chose to do ran away with him. Nine times out of ten that’s what happens. “I’m left at home, I’m still attractive. I could do what I liked. I don’t have to be tied here. I’ll show him—!” But she doesn’t show him. She shows herself how attractive she is, and when the other man gets

  around to thinking she’s easy, he gets around. But she won’t see his point ‘of view. She’s too vain. She doesn’t think he just wants a few bed sessions; she thinks he wants her forever. And then suddenly she thinks she’s in love and this is what she’s been waiting for. She does this because secretly she’s had a fear it might happen, so she kids herself it has happened. She goes dramatic. She wants to die, to go away alone and all the rest of it. That means a row with the husband and letting it all come out. She’s got nothing left but to run to the other man, who’s burning up because his short-term joy looks like becoming a full-time load. And so the break-up starts, and all the pretence goes out of it, and the romance and the drama. And you have three sordid, unhappy people trying to beat a way back to happiness through the sticks, only to find that, as the man said, you should have started from another place. And don’t ask me why they do. All I know is that ninety-five out of every hundred tear-stained letters that come into our office read exactly the same thing! ’

  Barbara sat back on the stairs, looking at him, hurt, surprised. He did not even notice what he had said, just felt a relief at having said it. With a faint shock he realised he had been wanting to say it or write it for years. Sincerity had come back on him like a punch ball just when he had taken his guard for granted.

  Me turned back and looked at her. She was very still.

  But that’s the man’s point of view,’ she said, stonily.

  ‘It’s the same from any point of view,’ he said. ‘Man or a woman gets the idea she’s been neglected over some- t ung, and from then on it’s self-pity and I’ll-get-even Come to my office. Read them all. If they started, “Please be sorry for me,” I wouldn’t squirm so much.’

  He looked into his drink.

  I never thought you’d be like this,’ she said, wondering. ‘I always thought of you as prissy.’

  Don t worry. I gel shoals of letters saying that, too.

  How can a homo like you advise on marriage problems?” That comes at least once a week.’

  ‘How awful!’ she said, disturbed.

  ‘I’m used to it.’ He stopped by the banister, leant on the newel post and passed the side of the glass across his forehead. ‘Do you really want him back, or do you feel you’ve been cheated and let down? Which is honest? Have you ever stopped to think?’

  She looked into the glass and shook her head. He felt pity for her well in him suddenly. She was lost. She didn’t know where she was or anything else. She just thought she did until things got on top of her, then she tried to blame something she was used to for going wrong.

  He realised he was the same. He was in this house, had dared himself to come, as she had dared to risk her marriage, and now he couldn’t get out of it because he was frightened of being known as a coward so widely. He and she were both scared of the same thing: other people. Every week, without break, he wrote in one column or another, ‘You must not take notice of what other people say—’ Every week, for years. And other people’s notice and love of it was the basis of his successful life.

  ‘Why do you tell people what you don’t do yourself?’ she said.

  ‘You can help people and stay a stinker, as one generous critic said of me,’ Hayles said. He looked round to the open doorway. Porch still sat there, but sideways now, with his neck against the loggia post, watching butterflies.

  In the kitchen Jennifer mixed a dressing while Ellen washed a lettuce. The lettuces needed washing. It had been dry and a good summer for insects.

  As she washed she put the leaves in a collapsible metal cage. Suddenly she stopped.

  ‘I’m not going to swing this out in the garden,’ she said.

  ‘You can go behind the garage,’ Jennifer said. ‘Nobody will see.’ She wondered how on earth she had come to accept this incredible situation. To be frightened of going out of one’s own house! Yet she accepted it now as i£ her rights in the place had lapsed overnight. She felt angry for herself.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it! Give it to me when it’s ready.’ ‘There’s some of those spiders in it,’ Ellen said, looking np. ‘They’ve got everywhere. Why are they all dead?’ She shrugged and went on breaking the lettuce up. When it was all done and in the shaking cage she took a leaf and ate it, munching as she wiped her hands on her thighs and looked around for a glass cloth. She pulled the blind slats apart wider and looked through. ‘What am I going to do for dinner? They don’t seem to go. I can’t think what they’ve got to look at. I wanted to get some dinner ready for my man and Billy! ’

  ‘They’ll be gone soon,’ Jennifer said. But she had the feeling that nothing ever was going to be the same again. She tried to make herself angry about other things, like Barbara Baynes being in Richard’s cupboard, naked, but she couldn’t. It was just another thing, and there were so many things that day. As if the place was haunted.

  Was it? She started. Richard had come across haunted houses before. It had been that which had started his stories. Ghosts and funny things that happened which nobody could explain—

  But how did a house become haunted overnight? But then how did a house become haunted at all? Usually because someone had died there, suddenly, violently, savagely.

  ‘Ellen, have you done everywhere this morning?’ she asked quickly.

  Ellen looked back slowly.

  ‘Well no, I didn’t do the spare room and Master John’s room. I did those yesterday.’

  ‘I’ll go up the back stairs.’ Jennifer left the mixing bowl and went out along the passage to the back door. From that she went up a narrow flight of white wooden stairs to the first-floor landing.

  The door of Johnnie’s room was partly open. She halted before it, as if frightened at what she might see when she pushed it wide.
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br />   She forced herself to put a hand on the door and push. She stood there and gradually, like a cooling breeze, the familiarity of all the things in the room soothed her with relief. There were all the photos of the football teams, and the pictures of aircraft and locomotives. There was the funny-horrible disjointable skeleton a foot high, dangling from the ceiling, slowly turning in the stillness. There were his desk, mercifully shut to hide the chaos inside, his wicker chair, the cricket bats and the pads in the corner, the old walkie-talkie on the chest of drawers. It was all the same as usual. She stepped back with a smile of relief.

  She went without looking behind the door because she knew it would be there.

  FIVE

  ‘Read it out,’ Griswold said. ‘Date first.’

  ‘January twentieth,’ Richard read from the dream book:

  ‘Alone in London suburb. Midsummer afternoon. Vast yellow sky, ringing with tension. News of a great invasion force poised in space. X must get back to Mary and the children. I try to catch a train, but people get in my way in the station and I lose it. It gets dark. I get a car, but when I accelerate the engine keeps idling. It is dark, and I am still alone. I come near the village. Great falling cascades of green fire start coming down in the sky, mighty chandeliers of fire many miles up so that reflection glows in the stratosphere like the aurora. We send up rockets with H-heads. They burst like suns in the blackness, spreading blinding day from horizon to horizon. The green chandeliers come on down through, slowly, as if nothing will stop them. There is no sound of any explosions, just the weird ringing sensation of the vastness of the black sky… .’

  ‘January twentieth,’ Griswold said, and went to his case where the spools turned slowly. He brought out some papers and consulted one. He shook his head and let the papers fall to the table. ‘No. The date’s wrong. But it’s part of it, isn’t it? Green chandeliers of light coming slowly down the sky. Some kind of attack. You put it into ordinary everyday schoolboy terms as everybody else would. This isn’t attack. There’s no noise. They just come sailing down, serene, undismayed by the high firing of the missiles.

  ‘It’s just a dream. I’ve had many such. Most people have. The continuous reminders of air attack by spacial stuff is bound to get into the head.’

  ‘But not like this. This slow floating down of the green masses isn’t an imagined action of war. There is no violence but in the frightened filing of missiles from the ground. The slow falling masses ignore them. The atmosphere is of tension, still the ringing in the skies, but not of violent war. And this mass of greenish things, well—’ Griswold shrugged. ‘What else is there? Is it possible there is a story somewhere—or the idea for one? Anything of that sort?’

  ‘I wish you’d tell me what you’re getting at,’ Richard said. ‘A story or an idea. But there are always jottings in the diaries for that—’

  ‘February 8th—9th,’ Griswold interrupted.

  Richard stared in surprise.

  ‘Oh, you’ve got a date, have you?’ He began to look through the diary. Then he stopped quite still.

  ‘Yes?’ Griswold said eagerly, and loosened his collar more.

  ’I didn’t connect this,’ Richard said. ’Because it doesn’t, and yet—An idea for a story during the night of the 8th- 9th of February, and written on the ninth. It must have been a Saturday. It was sent off the same day and published a fortnight later. Only a thousand words long.’ ‘What was it called? What about?’

  ‘It was called—’ Richard watched Griswold, ‘—“The Night Spiders”.’

  ‘Jesus! ’ Griswold hissed. ‘What was it about?’

  ‘Not like this.’ Richard pointed to the ceiling, then wondered why lie had done it. ‘A man had an observatory in the grounds of his house. The telescope developed a fault in one of the lenses, so that on its edge it magnified at such a frequency that it split time. He found he could see things happening in his grounds which were actually happening on another time belt, perhaps a thousand years before, or after.’

  ‘What things were happening?’

  ‘He saw a group of great spiders out there, resting on a space trip. These things were actually travelling through

  space by jumping time belts, and the distorted lenses happened to catch them during an instant of time between belts.’

  ‘Just a minute—why spiders?’

  Richard stared and then shrugged.

  ‘God knows,’ he said. ‘I don’t know any reason. I can’t think of any now.

  Go on.’ Griswold looked out of the window. The crowd was thinning.

  ‘The man realised what they were doing and wanted to catch them and do it himself. The possibility of travelling in that way got him so that he thought of nothing else. Then he succeeded. No one ever saw him again. All they found were a couple of dead spiders on the ledge beneath the telescope slot.’

  ‘He vanished.’ Griswold turned round, grinning.

  ‘I reckoned that’s what would happen if, he did jump belts.’

  ‘It does. You ought to know.’ Griswold sat down suddenly, leant on the table and stared at Richard across the sea of litter. ‘You’re in with them, you know that?’

  ‘Of course I don’t know that! What—’

  ‘Mentally,’ said Griswold. ‘Are you remembering anything? Anything at all?’

  ‘I remember going down to the pub last night and sitting out in the garden there, watching fireflies. Then it was tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Well, that’s a bit more, isn’t it? You didn’t mention the fireflies before. I don’t think you did.’ He readied out to reverse the tape, then changed his mind. ‘No, I’m sure you didn’t. It’s just a little bit more.’

  ‘You’ve come to dates, ‘and you seem to know what to expect me to find,’ Richard said. ‘Tell me the rest.’ Griswold grinned.

  ‘Your flesh will begin to shrivel,’ he said. ‘It will be unpleasant for you, anyway you look at it.’

  ‘It’s unpleasant for me now.’

  ‘Right. The night of February 8th-9th:

  “During that night, UHF radio telescopes tracked a cloud about fifteen thousand miles out, measuring twelve- miles by three. It moved slowly towards the north, then trailed round, as a snake turns, and came back south almost along its own track. Analysis by frequency and light content gave the very curious answer that the contents of the cloud was animal. In fact, it was a shoal of some kind. It was tracked that night for the first time, but dwindled towards dawn, shrinking into a pinpoint before vanishing. Afterwards it was decided that the oblong shoal turned directly away from us, which gave the dwindling effect as it retreated.

  ‘That night you dream about the night spiders, wake with them in your head, and write the story the following day.’

  Richard swallowed, then got up and poured himself a bottle of Bass. Griswold refused anything, but went on while Richard drank with a throat that burnt with nervous aridity.

  ‘Last week,’ Griswold said, ‘you fill up a visiting journalist with a story of tiny explosive capsules drifting down to earth from space. Twelve hours before you told him that, this shoal was tracked returning to somewhere near its original position of February. It has been there ever since, patrolling up and down and swelling in size all the time. You may have seen birds waiting to migrate. They fly aimlessly in large groups, and other groups come up and join in, then more and more, and then suddenly they take a definite direction and go out way over the sea. This patrol is like that. It is merely wheeling up and down in space and growing all the time. It is now nearly fifty miles long and four wide, and still around fifteen thousand miles out. But while you were making your phone call last night—or tonight, which you like to call it—that shoal was coming in towards us at considerable speed. It is still invisible to the naked eye, but it is now near enough to come upon us within twelve hours.’

  ‘How do you know they’re spiders?’

  ‘We didn’t. But you did, and now there is evidence around this house that that is what they are.
Only you knew it. Only you know all these things. Now you see why we must get out of your blanketed mind everything that’s being hidden there. We are in considerable difficulty. We don’t know anything about these things, whether they’re coming in, or just waiting out there watching.’

  ‘How can they live out there?’

  ‘They adapt their shells, their eggs. Insects constantly adapt. That is why we can’t win against them. We use insecticide, they adapt themselves, we have to use stronger, again they adapt, we use stronger still so that we begin to kill other things, but the insects lose a million and adapt ten million more. It is a war we are losing, and in the end, man will be overcome by the insects. That would normally take a long time, but if these outer spiders have adapted their ova to living in airless conditions, they could bring about the insect world much sooner. Have you thought how many insect balls can be contained in a cylinder fifty miles long and four in diameter, all so close together that they register on our finders?’

  ‘A mass of beings in insulated ova,’ Richard said. ‘How very interesting. Because then atomic blast would not affect them, being as it is a heat transference system of destruction. But if it were pure blast would it be any different? They would shatter, these little things, so light, so tight, so insulated— It’s that insulation that makes it horrible. Suppose you had people who didn’t have to breathe and could walk through fire, what kind of things would they be?’

  ‘We may find out,’ Griswold said.

  ‘The things went away before,’ Richard said. ‘That was in February. Why won’t they go away this time?’

  ‘You say they won’t.’ His eyes grew big yet penetrating.

  ‘Look, because I had a dream months ago it doesn’t mean—’