‘You’ll scare Jack,’ Mary chided him, embarrassing me and making me wish I had deboated more nimbly.
‘Naw,’ Jerry said. ‘What I hear, Mr Harland is used to playing with the big boys. He won’t scare. Although, come to think of it, I ain’t so sure that these ain’t the real big boys he come to play with here.’
He looked thoughtful, rubbing that incredible jaw.
‘Might be sort of scary, at that,’ he said.
Jerry Muldoon looked like he wouldn’t be scared of a grizzly bear, and his point was well taken...
* * * *
III
The Red Walls was a solid mahogany structure built to withstand hurricanes, which it had. My room was adequate and had an air-conditioning unit in the window. The bathroom was down the hall, but that was no inconvenience, for I was the only guest. I hadn’t been asked to register. I took a cold shower, changed my clothing and went down to the bar to wait. Mary had to get in touch with Dr Elston in person, not trusting the telephone, and I had nothing to do but wait. The barroom was impressive, a huge chamber that would have made a passable cathedral, with arches and beams across the ceiling. The walls, disappointingly, weren’t red. They were white. And they were slatted like Venetian blinds, so that they could be opened to take advantage of the sea breeze. They were open when I came down, laying bars of sunlight across the floor in a grid. I took a wicker stool at the bar and the barman was pleased to have a customer - the shrimpers and fishermen who made up the steady clientele were plying their trade at that hour. I ordered a tall rum punch and the barman waited across the counter, fidgeting, obviously feeling obligated to entertain me with tales of the notorious Red Walls. I didn’t feel much like talking. I was thinking about Elston and speculating on what he would, I hoped, tell me. But the bartender looked so hopeful that I figured it was only common decency to give him an opening.
‘Sort of quiet here today,’ I said.
He beamed.
‘The place’ll get livelier, later on,’ he assured me. ‘When the boats come in. Not as lively as it used to be, mind you. I could tell you a tale or two...’
‘Which you no doubt will. . .’
‘...about this place that’d curl your toes. Yessir. This here place was known far and wide. Why, I remember...’
He talked. It was quite interesting, really, and I listened and made proper responses and drank a second rum. He was still talking when Elston came in...
* * * *
‘...So, like I say, there was thirteen shrimpers standing at the bar here. This is going back ten, fifteen years. They was standing here, elbows on the bar, drinking away and minding their business, when what should happen but this jigaboo walks in. He’s got him a gun. In he walks, bold as brass, says, “This is a stick-up!” Now, these thirteen shrimpers are all facing the bar, they don’t pay him no mind. He waves the gun about. He’s waving it, he says, “I say, this is a stick-up!” Well, sir, these thirteen shrimpers looks at one another and shakes their heads. Then they all turn around, nice and easy, all at the same time. There’s thirteen of em, mind. And twelve of them got guns!’ He chuckled. ‘So there this jigaboo stands, he’s got one gun and twelve shrimpers are all pointing guns at him. What’s he do? Why, he puts his gun away and he says, “I guess I done robbed the wrong bar!” And he ups and buys a drink for the house. Yessir! Things was plenty lively in them days...’
The barman was chuckling merrily and preparing to launch into another story, but I shoved my glass out for a refill in order to distract him.
Elston was standing just inside the door.
I knew right away that it was Elston from Mary Carlyle’s description of the man...timid. He had stepped to the side of the entrance, into the shadows, and his eyes shifted furtively around the big room. I raised my hand, casually, and he nodded with a quick, jerky movement. He looked out the door, then came across the room with a crablike, sidewinder gait.
‘Harland?’ he whispered.
‘Yeah. Shall we go up to my room?’
He hesitated; then: ‘Better stay here, just as if we had met socially, at the bar ... as one does.’
He didn’t strike me as the type to meet socially at a bar, but I nodded. The bartender, looking grieved that I had found another conversationalist, slid my drink across the counter. He looked at Elston, but Elston didn’t notice and didn’t order a drink. His eyes still flitted about.
‘Let’s go down to the end of the bar,’ I suggested.
I took another seat there. Elston stood. The bartender, glowering, began washing glasses.
‘What’s it all about?’ I asked.
’You won’t mention my name?’
’If you don’t want me to.’
‘You swear you won’t bring me into it?’
‘Boy Scout’s oath and all that.’
’This isn’t funny, Harland, not at all funny.’
’Sorry.’
He nodded. He said, ‘I’m not so sure this is a good idea. I let Mary talk me into this. But...’ He took a deep breath, as if about to submerge under water, then very quickly he said, ‘I want you to expose what is being done here before it goes any further. It must contravene the ban on germ warfare or something, some treaty or agreement... I know nothing of such matters, but I’m sure that public outrage...’
’I’m no scientist, so if this is technical. . .’
’Technical? Well, of course it’s technical...my work, I mean. But...gruesome, that’s what it is. Gruesome. It was bad enough with the animals, but now that they have determined to use human volunteers—’ He shuddered and rolled his eyes. His whisper was a rasping thing in that great, vaulted chamber. It was eerie.
‘Dr Elston ... if all you want is to prevent this research, or whatever it is, why don’t you simply resign? Refuse?’
’It’s too late for that!’ he snapped. He had spoken loudly, and he shot a startled glance down the bar, but the bartender was taking no interest in our talk. In a lower tone, he said, ‘It’s done, God help me. My assistants could carry on without me, at this point...assistants provided by them. And I’m not sure—’ with his eyes flitting about ’—that they’d let me resign. I’m afraid of them, Harland.’
’Who are they?’
’A branch of the government...nameless. The navy provides ships and guards, but I’m not concerned with them, it’s the others...the civilians...the ones who represent...ruthless men, Harland. If you had seen what I have seen...’
He seemed to be seeing those things now, looking through me. He was a shaken man, and frightened. I didn’t like him, but I felt a touch of pity; perhaps some sympathetic vibration of his fear.
’You’ll tell me?’
’Yes, yes. I will give you the details and you must reveal them to the world, without implicating me. Surely that will be enough, this fiendish thing will be stopped once it has come to light.’
I nodded. I took out my notepad and pen. Elston chewed his lip. He placed one hand flat on the counter and, not looking at me, he said, ‘It began ... it was pure research, my goal was to treat madness...not to create it.’ He glanced at me and I moved my pen, just scribbling; waiting for details. He was grimacing as he continued, ‘My research was in chemical lobotomy...not a pleasant thing in itself, but in certain cases ... it is sometimes necessary to make the incurables...obedient. I trust you will understand that?’ He looked at me doubtfully, the sort of man who must always preface an opinion by a justification. I sort of nodded. That he was taking such pains - and they were pains, they registered physically on his countenance - to excuse his involvement removed any lingering doubts I might have had, about this being a hoax, at any rate.
‘I meant only good,’ he went on, still staring at me, gauging my reaction or looking for scepticism. I kept my face blank. I had written one word: Lobotomy. A Pandora’s Box of a word, opening up dark implications just as the lobotomist opened up a skull.
‘Go on,’ I said, unwilling to express the vindication he sought as he s
earched my face.
‘My work came to their attention. This agency of the government. They saw possibilities that had never occurred to me - nor ever would have. I was not...given all the facts. I was given a government grant and brought to this place, provided with all the facilities to continue my research, assigned eager - too eager - assistants. I worked. That is what I have always done. I have few friends and little social life. I work. Naively, I still believed I was in control of my research, that I was working towards my own goals.’ His lips tightened in a bitter smile. ‘Well, gradually, I came to see what they intended.’ He paused, twitching his cheek up several times, as if chewing and tasting his words. He did not relish the flavour of those syllables. ‘If only I had renounced them then. I was still important to the project, it was still mine and without me...but I did not renounce them and there’s no sense speaking of what has not been.’
He dropped his head. With his face still twitching, it seemed he was gnawing through his breast.
‘They did not threaten me - but the threat was there; they spoke of the Russian menace - they were menacing. And then there were...volunteers...’ My pen moved on the paper. I wrote: Volunteers. There were two words on the paper that should not have been linked and an icy sensation climbed up my spine.
’Volunteers,’ he repeated. ‘Say, rather, men to whom the alternative was worse. Well, who thought it worse, not knowing...’ His head le snapped up abruptly. He had to look directly at me as he said the next words. ‘There are chemicals, Harland...chemicals that warp the fabric of the soul, that alter the structure of the mind as surely as the keenest scalpel. This treatment. . .’
He stopped.
Loudly, he said, ‘So I don’t get much time for fishing, but I understand it’s good here...I’m sure you’ll enjoy yourself, Mister...I didn’t get your name...’
I blinked in surprise; Elston was very white.
’Well, it was pleasant meeting you,’ he said, and he looked wildly about for a reason to be there. He snatched up my drink and gulped at it, then clutched it possessively, leaving me no reason for being there. Then he nodded curtly and brushed past me. Bewildered, I turned, getting an elbow on the bar and I saw the man who had just come in - the man Elston had seen a moment sooner.
He wore a dark suit and necktie in that blistering heat and he wasn’t sweating. He had steel framed spectacles and his hair was close cropped and he looked about ten pounds underweight - but it was underweight the way an athlete in training is underweight. He was heading for the bar, not looking at us. The open walls had laid a grid of sunlight across the floor and he moved through that grid as if describing an arc or a graph, not so much a man as - a statistic.
Elston crossed in front of him, nodding en passant.
The man nodded back.
Elston took two more steps, then turned jerkily back.
’Oh, hello, Larsen,’ he said, as if he’d just identified the newcomer.
’Doctor,’ said Larsen.
’I just stopped in for a drink, you know,’ Elston said.
’Uh, huh,’ said Larsen.
’Well...back to the grind,’ Elston said and he walked to the door with his shoulders squared, like a man anticipating a bullet in the back. He went out. For a moment, framed in the doorway, he looked two-dimensional, a flat shadow of himself. Then he was gone and Larsen as was standing at the bar.
I put my notebook away.
’Nice day,’ I said.
‘They’re always nice here.’
’Hot, though. You must be boiling in that suit.’
’Not really.’
The barman came down and Larsen ordered a beer. The barman served it without a word, the same barman who had talked nonstop to me. Larsen didn’t touch the glass.
‘Tourist, are you?’
‘That’s right. For the fishing.’
‘Um. Staying long?’
‘Just a day or two.’
‘Uh huh,’ he said.
He picked up the glass and turned to face me. His eyes were like lenses. I felt I was being filmed and filed away behind those steel-rimmed sockets. They drew me like a vacuum. He sipped his beer and I drank the last of my rum and all the while he watched me with his eyes glinting behind his spectacles.
* * * *
IV
Larsen had the one beer and left.
I felt he was taking a part of me with him, that he had dragged some intangible segment from my spirit, unravelled a thread of my soul and wound it up again inside his skull, where he would dissect it at his leisure. I was sweating heavily and it had nothing to do with the heat now. It was the sweat of anxiety and Larsen had pulled it from my pores.
The bartender nodded at the door.
‘One of them geezers from the compound, we don’t care to have their trade. Damn liberty, it is, them comin’ here. That guy you was talkin’ to ... he was really filling you ear, eh? He come from the compound?’
‘I don’t know him,’ I said.
‘That a fact? Why, the way he was gibbering away, I figured you was old friends. Some folks is like that, though...they’ll bend anyone’s ear, even a total stranger’s.’
He proceeded to manifest that fact while I considered Elston and Larsen...what Elston had managed to tell me and how Larsen had affected me. I was truly interested now...and disturbed. The big room with the open walls had been cheerful: now it was atrabilious, Larsen had left gloom in his wake. The bright grid of sunlight remained, yet now those lines did not illuminate the cathedral distances - they segmented the room in a sequence of cramped oblongs, like crypts in a graveyard.
I wondered if Elston had been frightened off for good or if he would contact me again? Perhaps through Mary Carlyle, certainly not by telephone.
Then, thinking about the telephone and realising I might have to stay on Pelican longer than I’d expected, I asked the bartender to put me through to the Mangrove Inn. He did so, grumbling about the delay as the call went through the switchboard and, taking the phone, I felt sure that my call was being monitored. But that was all right. I told the owner of the Mangrove that I’d decided to spend a day or two on Pelican and asked if my car would be all right in his parking lot. He assured me it would and assumed I would be fishing. I didn’t disabuse him - or the monitor - of that. The bartender had been listening as well, and after I hung up he spent some time telling me where to get the best value in hiring a boat. I told him I’d surely take his advice. I supposed that I should, too, to validate my cover story, but I didn’t want to go fishing and cursed Elston for throwing that at me in his panic. I was no fisherman and my inept attempts would be a dead giveaway. But then, rationalising nicely, I figured that the average fisherman spends more time drinking than fishing and it would look odd were I to follow an aberrant routine. It would look...fishy. So I had another drink, quite in line with my cover - and needed it, after being in the line of Larsen’s gaze...
* * * *
In my room I stretched out on the bed and glanced at the meagre notes I’d taken. There wasn’t much there, certainly nothing concrete, but the words were chilling. Lobotomy is a harsh word, not softened when prefaced by chemical ... no more on the page than in the wreckage of a mind. I read the words, aware that my lips were moving as I mouthed the unsavoury syllables, then I tore the page out, and the two pages beneath where an impression might have been indented, and I burned them in the ashtray and flushed the ashes down the toilet in the hallway. I was taking this seriously now, absolutely. Larsen’s ominous appearance had impressed me more than Elston’s aborted statement. There was something cold and dangerous about Larsen. Not a viciousness so much as a void of compassion, a man to whom charity would be alien. He had the eye of a serpent and I’d fluttered like a bird, mesmerised by his gaze. I felt that, had he moved towards me, I would not have been able to retreat; that he’d pinned me with his eyes like a moth on a display board whilst he studied the texture of my spirit, traced the veins of my instincts and laid bare the articulation
of my bones.
I was still sweating from the encounter.
I moved to the window and gazed out. A middle-aged man slowly and methodically pedalled past on a bicycle. He had a terrycloth sweatband around his high-domed, glabrous brow. His Adidas shoes went up and down on the pedals. His bony back was bent deeply over the dropped handlebars. The bike was a ten-speed, on an island devoid of hills where those multiple gearings were as useless as the fashion that compelled him to have them. Man had spent the long eons rising from the slime: he had learned to walk upright: now racing handlebars were pushing his face once more, unseeing, into the mud. I was feeling distinctly uncharitable towards the human race - a legacy, no doubt, of Larsen’s gaze. I mourned Darwin. The industrial revolution had put paid to evolution; now giant, pea-brained athletes may outlast the dinosaurs and wizened accountants survive to breed; millions of joggers jarring their spines will fall in love over Perrier water and produce little joggers to trot through a world where trend has superceded evolution.
Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 66