Nothing But the Night

by John Blackburn

  ‘It’s physically possible, gentlemen, granted a hell of a lot of knowledge, intense research and an insane desire to succeed. Through the work of a number of scientists in­cluding those I mentioned, Forbes and Lashley, Ramon Cajal and Laura Tyrell we know a great deal about the nature of memory. By experiments with animals, Lashley discovered that the centres were not localized in a few areas as was once thought, but spread over a wide expanse of the cortex. He also demonstrated that a rat which had been taught certain skills would lose them if the outer layer of its cortex were removed or atrophied.’

  ‘I still do not believe you. Surely it is one thing to destroy cerebral tissue and quite another to transfer it.’ Cameron shook his head angrily. Behind him the wind rattled the windows though the room itself was muggy with pipe and cigarette smoke.

  ‘A group of old, frightened people with such a horror of dying that they would attempt to achieve immortality by physically transplanting part of their personalities on to the minds of children. Oh, I know that a lot of progress has been made in cell grafting these days, but it can’t be possible. It would go against the whole plan of the creation.’ He turned to his enemy, Knight, for support. ‘You’re a doctor, man. Tell me that Sir Marcus is wrong and it couldn’t be done.’

  ‘I am a country G.P., Captain Cameron, nothing more.’ Knight added another stub to his already overflowing ash­tray. ‘But I remember wondering why Laura Tyrell, or Laura Rose as we know her, should bury herself out here to look after a handful of children. She was a very eminent neurologist indeed and her thesis The Physique of Personality is still a standard text-book. I can also see where Eric Yeats might fit in. He was one of the fastest surgeons of his day, and speed is essential in all forms of brain surgery because the cells atrophy much faster than any other part of the body. Though I haven’t heard the recordings of Mary Valley’s night terrors, I am prepared to agree that Sir Marcus may have a case.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor. Also remember the mutilations.’ Marcus gave a slight bow. There was no doubt left in his own mind though the factors of emotion took some under­standing. A group of rich and talented people who had been banded together by a common horror of the grave. Had Helen Van Traylen read the same fairy story that had troubled his own childhood? he wondered. The old man toiling up the mountain and the stale, toothless mouth opening to breathe his personality into the body of a child.

  But however the idea occurred to her, the woman had grasped it. Was there a chance that the Last Enemy might be conquered? That a portion of the personality, the soul, if one liked the term, could be physically transferred into a strong, new body? If so, there would be no death, no cessation of existence or fear of hell fire, but just a passing from one room into another, as Fawnlee had said. The difficulties must have been enormous and, though the very thought of what Helen Van Traylen had done filled him with nausea, Marcus had to admire her tenacity. First would have come the cautious approaches to discover people with a similar horror of death that overrode all considerations of doubt and morality. The welding of them into a devoted brotherhood and the struggle to keep hope alive during the long years of technical research. Finally the establishment of the orphanage, two bodies, one old and one young, stretched out on the tables and Eric Yeats gowned and ready to perform the first operation.

  ‘Quite so.’ Knight had left his chair and was pacing across the room. ‘Every one of those people was mutilated after death in one way or another: gravity, a motor vehicle, gunshot, high explosive. They had to be to conceal what had been done to them.’ Knight had all the pomposity of the young and he strutted as he spoke.

  ‘As Sir Marcus has pointed out the memory cells are not localized in one sector of the brain but distributed over a considerable area. To remove an appreciable portion of them would not only kill the patient but leave a tell-tale scar that would be immediately recognized for what it was.

  ‘The transplantations might be almost unnoticeable however.’ He paused, hand on hip, before Cameron and Grant, like a lecturer eying two inattentive students. ‘If I were performing such an operation I would drill narrow trephine holes in the skull and insert tubes to freeze and kill a portion of the cortex with liquid nitrogen. I would then be ready to remove cell tissue in the form of ribo­nucleic acid from the brain of the donor and introduce it into my patient. The scars would be tiny and soon hidden by a child’s hair, but providing the tissues united, the alien memory would be lodged like a parasite, invisible beneath the flesh and bone.’

  ‘All right, Doctor. I will accept that it is physically possible.’ Cameron’s pipe rapped the wall behind him. ‘But I still can’t credit it. If you are correct, Sir Marcus, at least ten of those poor little devils must have been infected already. How many so-called deaths have there been to date? Mrs Van Traylen herself, then the old colonel and the woman novelist and two others, finally half a dozen in the launch and there may be more we don’t know about. Now, I suppose fresh children and guardians are being recruited and the whole foul process continues.’ The pipe broke against the wall, but he hardly noticed it.

  ‘It is quite unthinkable, Levin. Who would wish to produce such monsters? Children infected and poisoned by the memories of the dead. Creatures with two separate personalities which we cannot recognize. What would one do with such beings? Imprison them? Lock them up in mental homes? Use them as guinea pigs?’ He raised the shattered stem of the pipe and pointed it at Marcus.

  ‘No, you must be wrong and, in any case, how does the Harb woman fit in with your theory?’

  ‘I have no idea, Chief Constable.’ Marcus had been leaning against the operating table, but he was suddenly on his feet and staring towards the window and the helicopter parked in the square. He had been concentrating on the technical side of the problem but the mention of Anna Harb made him remember something else.

  ‘Kirk told you that he believed Anna Harb was hiding in the orphanage grounds and the bonfire might bring her out for another attack. He said he intended to go to Inver House himself. If the old boy somehow stumbles on the truth . . .’ Marcus pulled the door open and then turned and looked back at them.

  ‘Captain Cameron, Inspector Grant, whether you be­lieve my theory or not, for God’s sake let’s do something about it.’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  ‘Your name is Helen Van Traylen.’ That was the truth at last. The child’s head had nodded gaily, she had clapped her hands and giggled at the answer. Then the boy had come running towards her with the wire rope over his shoulder and Kirk saw how he was going to die.

  But though his death would be agonizing it was un­important because he was old and tired and very few people would mourn him. He was quite ready to go home and the only thing that mattered was the sense of utter failure and defeat. There is no fool like an old fool, he thought, standing quite alone facing the flames. They had untied his ankles, but the wire was attached to his wrists and it stretched away from him through the centre of the fire, already reddening in the embers.

  When you first saw them you should have recognized them for what they were, he told himself. You should have seen that they were not normal children. You should have recognized the strangeness of them; the aura of evil that came from the twin personalities lodged within a single brain. Because he had been blind, Helen Van Traylen’s monstrous scheme would continue unchecked to poison the race.

  If only he had been a better actor, he might have succeeded. The children, he couldn’t think of them by another name, had moved off to the other side of the fire, dancing and singing and letting off fireworks and the adults had walked towards him.

  They had stood in line before him; Fawnlee and Yeats, Laura Rose and Mrs Alison and the rest of them, and all their faces were full of compassion while one of the women had wept for him.

  But they had no guilt at all, not a shred of it. Like the children who had not yet been treated they were com­pletely under the spell of their terrible charges and a compulsive terror of dying had driven them
into slavery.

  ‘You are quite correct, General Kirk. Helen and the others are monsters now.’ Fawnlee had answered him. ‘Their cruelty is that of an unbalanced child who tears the wings from a fly. But they are monsters who are not going to die and once the cells are truly united we believe they will become as normal human beings. In any case Helen is our leader and we can never disobey her.’

  Fawnlee was lying. Kirk could see self-deception clear in his face as he described what had been done over the years and the way Helen Van Traylen had bound them together. The sadness and anxiety he had noticed before which had made him think that they realized some dark force was working against them was clear now. These people knew that they had produced a race of degenerates. It saddened them, but had not deterred them. Their terror of the grave, the longing to go on, the shadow of the grey figure of Death waiting at the door was so great that they would accept any escape from it. To them, the Wandering Jew was not a figure of pity but of deep envy.

  All the same, in spite of his nausea and the fact that they would allow him to be tortured to death, Kirk had to admire their tenacity. The years of preparation and intense work, the charities built up as fronts, while some of them died and others grew too senile to care and the medical researches produced nothing but records of failure. The personality of Helen Van Traylen had been their motive force, but he wondered who had been the practiced planners. Who, for instance, had driven the Dormobile to the dynamite store and arranged to destroy the launch?

  ‘Yes, General, Mary is a child now, cruel and mentally disturbed, but she will grow into a good human being because her brain houses the soul of a saint.’ Laura Rose had pleaded for his understanding and tears had trickled down her worn cheeks.

  ‘When Helen founded our Fellowship she showed us that there was hope. At first she talked to us individually and discovered our longing to go on. She conquered our scruples and proved that there could be a physical resur­rection and that life could be bridged from one generation to another.

  ‘God himself gave her that vision, General Kirk. When Helen was trapped in that fire so long ago, he told her that she was his instrument who would bring a great gift to mankind. She passed on her faith to us and supported us in everything. If Eric or I despaired, she encouraged us. When the task appeared impossible, she prayed with us. Then, one day, we saw a sliver of tissue unite with the cortex of an animal and knew that God’s promise had been kept.

  ‘Before long it will be my turn, General.’ She reached out and touched his hand. ‘Whenever one guardian passes over into its secure, new home, another is recruited to take his or her place. Soon Eric and Michael and I will rediscover what it means to run and dance and make love and be young again. To be young, General. To throw away our old, worn-out bodies like discarded clothes and be really young.’

  At that moment Kirk destroyed himself. There was a plea and an offer in the woman’s eyes and it should have told him what he had to do. He should have confessed to a similar horror of dying and congratulated them and begged to join with them. But the things he had seen had driven out reason and anger was like the glare of the fire and the crackling heat of the blazing timbers and the steady wind blowing in over the cliffs.

  ‘You are lying to yourself, Dr Rose,’ he said. ‘You will never be young again. All you can do is to graft part of your old, diseased personality into the body of a child and produce a monster that will rot in an asylum.’ The words came gasping out through his dry lips and he looked at the group of uninfected children, abject and cowed near the edge of the cliff.

  ‘You spoke of God just now, madam, but you are fighting against his whole intention. You would put your fears, your memories, your old woman’s sickness into the soul of a little girl. Don’t you realize that that is the sin which will never be forgiven you? You may let your mutants drag me into that fire, Dr Rose, but it will be nothing to the fire that burns you one day.’

  They left him then. One by one, the old people filed away back across the field and the creatures they had made returned to him.

  ‘You have refused Laura’s offer, General.’ Mary Valley, Kirk still tried to think of her by that name, smiled up at him. ‘You will not accept the gift of life which God gave me to pass on to others.’

  ‘Mary, it was not God. Part of you is still a normal child, Mary, so try and understand. Fight the wickedness, the memories of that woman which have been grafted on to your mind. God didn’t make you do those things. Would God have made you torture your mother and Sidney Molson? Remember the way Sidney died, Mary; the wounds on his hands and feet and the cuts on his forehead. God didn’t tell you to do that.’

  ‘Didn’t he?’ For an instant there was a puzzled look on her face, but it cleared instantly. ‘My God ordered it, whatever his name may be, General.’ The child tittered, an old woman cackled and a thing grinned at him. A creature which would remain split and diseased till the end of its life.

  If life ever did end, that was. When the creatures became old would more young victims be found to act as hosts to them? Could the process be repeated over and over again till the whole race became tainted and a great army of the damned populated the earth?

  ‘What’s in a name, General Kirk? Whatever my God is called he has proved his powers.’ The slight body jumped up and down in triumph. ‘Our God has given us life and what can yours do? That driver who refused to stop smoking when I told him to had a god. “Christ, Jesus Christ”, he kept repeating when the cigarette burned his face and the coach went out of control.’ The smile vanished and a sour, bitter frown puckered the smooth features.

  ‘And like the driver you have refused to obey me. Get ready, my friends. Let’s have a tug of war and see if General Kirk has a god as strong as ours.’ The rest of the mutants ran off to the other side of the fire and Kirk felt the wire tighten. ‘Pull, children, Billy, Jane, Malcolm, pull hard and we will sing as he screams to his god.’ She capered at the edge of the flames and the wire started to drag him forward.

  ‘They will discover who you are, Helen Van Traylen.’ There was no escape, no appeal, no hope. His ashes would be scattered or buried and nobody would ever suspect what had happened to him. Death was a few yards away, already he could feel his skin cracking in the heat, but it was un­important. All that mattered was the knowledge that he had failed and those poor, split, but intensely evil creatures would go undetected.

  ‘They will lock you away in asylums and study you like infected guinea pigs. Men like Marcus Levin will write theses about you and journalists will have a field day. I can think of a good title for them. “The Monsters of Bala”.’ Kirk’s only consolation was that he might inflict some slight mental pain before he died.

  ‘Nobody will find us. Nobody will ever lock us up. That was promised to me as well.’ Above the roar of the flames, he heard an old voice crack with fury. The voice of a woman who had cowered in a steel box and felt her body start to shrivel. Was that the thing that had started her mania? he wondered. A vision of hell fire that sent her striving for immortality. Even as the rope dragged his own body forward, Kirk felt a slight twinge of compassion.

  ‘Go on, pull, my friends.’ Round and round she danced beside him, the long dress blowing in the wind and the fair hair streaming to reveal the tiny scars through which the poison had been inserted. ‘Pull hard and sing.’

  Kirk’s feet clawed at the earth, he tried to brace himself against tussocks of grass, but the wire moved, the earth slid by and the things beyond the fire sang. Through the crackle of blazing timber he could hear their voices, shrill and bird­like. ‘Here we come gathering nuts in May, nuts in May, nuts in May.’ Inch by inch, foot by foot, he was dragged towards his death while the figure of a blonde child capered and sang at his side. ‘Here we come gathering nuts in May on a cold and frosty morning.’

  The pain was agonizing now and the wind appeared to be much stronger, driving the flames straight towards him like rapiers to pierce his eyes. It felt as if his whole body was
melting, but he wouldn’t scream and he wouldn’t cry out. No, he must not give them that satisfaction. He closed his eyes, and all at once faces from both the past and the future were before him. His wife and his daughter, Alan smiling from under a blue midshipman’s cap as if welcom­ing him home, his parents, Tania and Marcus and the imagined face of their child he would never see. Beyond them, faceless and in shadow, but kinder, gentler, more loving and merciful than anything he had ever known, stood the Last Enemy and he pitied those who resisted him.

  ‘Help me to fight to the end. Don’t let me cry out or make a sound. They mustn’t hear me so much as whimper.’ The faces were obscured by flame and smoke and Kirk prayed to his God that he might die with dignity. He threw himself down on to the scorched earth, clutching at grass and heather, but the wire still forced him forward, while suddenly above the sounds of the fire and the wind and the singing voices there was a great hammering, pulsing roar which he knew must come from his own imagination. He realized he was about to faint and had been given the grace to go out in silence and he raised his head to take one final look at the world he was leaving. As he did so, the hammering sound lessened and he did cry out, but not in pain or despair. The wire had gone slack and it was Mary Valley . . . Helen Van Traylen who screamed because the wind had veered to the north and she herself was burning.

  A shower of sparks had caught her dress and set it alight in a dozen places. With her mouth open in a constant cracked scream she beat at them and staggered back, and out from the bonfire came a great gout of flame which wrapped her like a robe. Her companions rushed to her aid but the flame held them back as it stripped the hair from her head and the clothes from her body and, all at once, it wasn’t a child’s body any more. Kirk saw an old, stunted woman totter towards the edge of the cliff and heard an immensely old voice croak while a crone’s eyes glared at him.