The Prayer Machine

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  Ann Marie said, ‘She goes, she stops. Why?’

  ‘Press the starter again … Go on.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Well nothing’s happening.’

  Ann Marie glanced at the dump again. ‘There’s a horrible smell from over there.’

  ‘That would hardly affect the self-starter.’ Neil shorted the battery across. It gave off a vivid spark. ‘Plenty of juice. Odd. It turned the engine a few seconds ago …’

  She said suddenly, ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Somebody spoke.’

  Neil stood stock still, and listened. Nothing. But from the direction of the dump came a bluish mist. He said, ‘No one spoke.’

  ‘Am I imagining things?’ She glanced at the dump. ‘Let’s take a look.’

  ‘Why?’

  She said flatly, ‘I think we’re meant to.’

  ‘That mist might mean peat bog. We’d better be careful. Your dump. It’s only a lot of old plastics. Just rubble. You really want to look — at a lot of old garbage?’

  She didn’t answer, but climbed out of the jeep and crossed the road. Neil slammed the engine-housing shut and followed.

  An instant later a spit of lightning struck the jeep. It didn’t do much damage but it wasn’t hard to imagine what would have happened to them if they hadn’t got out. Neil waited for the clap of thunder to die away. ‘Luck — or judgement?’

  Ann Marie said, ‘I don’t know. My heart is pounding and I don’t know why. I only know that this is something Dr Braknell would not understand.’ As she spoke she was kicking the loose items of PVC. Some of them were inexplicable objects that were unfamiliar, though there were some heaped-up cooking utensils and bowls that were prosaic enough. She knew she was looking for something, but didn’t know what. It went with the sound she had heard from the jeep.

  She glanced across at Neil, who was now some ten metres away. He’d picked up one or two things and shoved them in his pocket.

  Still no rain. But the tension in the air was almost unbearable. Neil shouted, ‘What are you looking for?’

  She was just wondering how to reply when another dagger of lightning scorched down and struck a tree, not a hundred yards away. The tree was split clean down the middle like chopped celery; but that wasn’t what Ann Marie was looking at in sheer horror.

  She found it difficult to call loud enough and the words lisped out as she did so. ‘Neil! Come here quickly!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Please, Neil! Come and look at this. For the love of God, what is it? What is happening?’

  The writhing Thing at her feet was not difficult to recognize though the effect on the mind was appalling. Ann Marie fought the urge to retch. ‘For God’s sake don’t pick it up! No!’

  Neil took no notice, but reached down and tried to calm the terrible animal that squealed, just audibly, from what remained of its living tissue.

  The creature was — or had been — a perfectly ordinary rabbit.

  And — starting at the head — it was gradually turning into plastic. Most of the body, as far as the hind legs, had already become nothing less than polyvinylchloride — PVC — capable only of flexing very slightly. The hind-quarters were untouched and the soft hairs on the rump and tail responded with pathetic gratitude to Neil’s stroking.

  The eyes, though! They were fixed in their sockets in an unblinking stare; and it was probable that they could still see. Whether they could or not, the expression of abject terror at this frightful malignance made even Neil want to pray.

  In a low whisper, Ann Marie said, ‘Like a terrible sort of cancer.’

  ‘Yes. Somehow living tissue has learned to combine with the polymers. And the dreadful thing is that the rabbit … knows.’

  They stared at each other.

  Neil said, ‘I’m going to get it back to the labs.’

  ‘Please! Don’t! Neil. I beg of you! You can’t save it! Look … Don’t you see? Already the front paws are becoming stiffer. Leave it!’

  ‘No!’ Neil grabbed the writhing thing by the hind legs and ran for the road.

  She was still rigid and couldn’t move. ‘You don’t understand! It might be contagious!’

  ‘They wouldn’t have led us here just to kill us.’

  The thought thawed her and she ran after him.

  He took her in his free hand. ‘The jeep will start now. You know it will … And we’re about to get drenched.’

  The cloudburst had turned the ground beneath them into orange mud. Back at the jeep hail was hammering the metalwork deafeningly. Ann Marie’s hair was already soaked, sticking to her brow. She shouted over another thunderclap. ‘You’d better drive. I’ll hold the rabbit.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes. I’d rather hold this thing than wreck the jeep.’

  ‘Give the creature what comfort you can. It needs it. It needs loving.’ Neil hit the starter and the engine fired immediately. ‘I thought so. Let’s get back to Norton.’

  ‘Promise one thing, then!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You leave that rabbit with the experts and you come back to Exeter with me.’

  ‘I can’t hear you!’

  ‘I said, leave this terrible monster to the experts.’

  ‘Experts! In God’s name who is an expert in a thing like that?’

  ‘The biology wing. At Norton. It may be something they desperately need to know about. Perhaps they have met such a thing before … But you and I, we must try to forget it. There is work to do tonight. You cannot be allowed to go into a TNA trance with only that on your mind — or you won’t have a mind left!’

  ‘But it’s part of it, Ann Marie! You didn’t choose the moor by chance! They led you there. They are telling us something. Are we to ignore it?’

  ‘There are other things … better things. Your mind must be clear and in repose — not panicked, like this poor animal.’

  ‘Can’t this beat-up old can go any faster?’

  ‘You’re …’ Ann Marie caught a glimpse through the rain of what lay ahead. ‘Watch that bridge!’

  Neil saw it in a split second. It was hump-backed and narrow, with cobble walls hemming you in.

  He stood on the brakes and the jeep slewed round out of control, nearly throwing them both out. The jeep scraped the left-side wall, then took off where the narrow road fell away beneath them on the reverse side of the bridge. Neil took his foot off the brake pedal and prayed. The jeep flattened its springs as it hit the road obliquely, catching the other wall at the rear. With screaming tyres it went into a sidelong skid. Neil inched the front wheels straight and timed to the millisecond a sudden stab at the brakes. He regained control and pulled up.

  For a few moments there was no sound but the hammering rain. Then Ann Marie said quietly, ‘We mustn’t be panic-stricken rabbits ourselves, Neil.’

  ‘I nearly killed you.’

  ‘It is over.’

  ‘Is that thing dead yet?’

  ‘The hind legs … they have stopped kicking. Yet it breathes. I can feel it.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we be merciful and kill it outright?’

  ‘They have got to see it alive. Let’s drive on.’

  When he did, he said, ‘There must be other specimens up there.’

  ‘I do not think so.’

  He glanced across at her. ‘How can you know that?’

  ‘Neil, they were showing it to us.’

  *

  She said cheerfully, ‘Smell that. Isn’t it beautiful? Warm rain on hot pavements. Like Paris. Always I remember Paris for the rain.’

  ‘Stop trying to cheer me up.’

  ‘Is it a crime to cheer people up?’

  ‘I can only think of the results of those tests.’

  She said hesitantly, ‘I … shouldn’t place too much emphasis on those tests, if I were you.’

  ‘Well, the police search, then.’

  ‘If you mean the search at the plastic dump, I wouldn’t bank
much on that either.’

  ‘You know something, don’t you?’

  She smiled. ‘I know nothing. Take me into a pub. I want badly to see one of those places.’

  ‘I’ll take you anywhere if you’d only stop staring at the cathedral.’

  ‘I didn’t know that I was.’

  Neil chose the Ship, oak beams and olde England — full of rugger buggers and fluorescent lighting and Musak. He said apologetically, ‘It’s phoney but it’s fun.’

  She said, ‘Funny place. An old pub trying to look old by having new woodwork. That is what the Americans call bending over backwards.’

  ‘What will you drink?’

  ‘Orange.’

  ‘Just on its own?’

  ‘I am a novice. On my first visit to the great British institution of the pub. And you: one drink only.’

  ‘Doctor’s orders?’

  ‘Just so.’

  Neil ordered his pint and her orange and they found a table. She said, ‘I wonder if they have to find new woodworms to eat into all the timber, to make it crumble a little? Making lots of realistic little holes, like cheese … I think the pub is funny; all the noisy men standing at one end and all the women sitting at the other. In the Provence they mix up together.’

  ‘They mix up together here all right, but that comes later on. What did you do in Cannes?’

  ‘I was like a sort of beachboy.’

  ‘Only not quite.’

  ‘Funny job, it was. Sitting at the end of the pier, all alone, fill the stupid Englishmen came along and wanted to learn to water-ski.’

  ‘And did the stupid Englishmen manage to “get up”?’

  ‘Sometime. But only after I showed them.’

  ‘I’ll bet that was a sight and a half.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You in a bikini, browned in the sunshine and poised on water skis. No wonder they “got up”.’

  ‘This is a disgraceful double-entendre.’

  ‘So is a nun on water-skis disgraceful. What stopped you?’

  ‘Boredom. It wasn’t getting me anywhere.’

  ‘It all depends where you wanted to get.’

  ‘Not where the stupid Englishmen wanted to get me.’

  ‘What you objected to was their conceit.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Male vigour being bandied about. They always remind me of uncooked joints of beef. I get a sort of vision of them, surrounded by vegetables and roast potatoes.’

  ‘Now I see your problem: you are a repressed cannibal.’ She scolded: ‘But you are conceited, too. You use your wit like the beefcake use their bodies. It is subtler … and it is dangerous because I quite like it … But —’

  ‘— Ann Marie. What’s worrying you?’

  ‘You see more cunim?’

  ‘In your eyes.’

  ‘Yes … Because I know you want me to … I mean, you expect me to …’

  ‘Am I as conceited as all that?’

  ‘No. That’s what makes it worse.’

  ‘Well after all, Ann Marie, you were a nun up to this morning.’

  ‘You mean, I wore a habit. And do you know what made up my mind — I mean, to leave the Order? It was that I did not feel at all like a nun when you arrived. I felt very guilty, hiding inside my robes.’

  ‘And now you’d feel very guilty if you didn’t act as though you had them on. You can’t win.’

  ‘Give me a chance. I’m still a novice, drinking orange juice.’

  Neil said, ‘I can teach and also learn, with a novice. You would be most unlike a novice, in a very short time. And no vows, either.’

  ‘I would like it with you. But —’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘I am not ready.’

  ‘Then I don’t see the point of leaving the convent. Merely feeling guilty back-to-front doesn’t solve anything.’

  ‘Now you are angry.’

  ‘Purely chemical. It’ll pass.’

  ‘You think you want me. Don’t you? Let us always be honest. I am not afraid of — what is it you would say? — the egg on my face.’

  ‘Not like poor Jane Schuber.’

  ‘I am angry if you have made love to Jane Schuber.’

  ‘Me? She’d blush so much she’d set fire to her filing cabinet. Anyway, she has a wonderful policeman who thinks mental patients are expendable.’

  ‘I cannot imagine it.’

  ‘But you can imagine me loving you? You know what? — I have a hunch you’re acting out of some sort of sense of duty. But I can’t make out what this duty is.’

  ‘Sometimes love and duty obey the same rules.’

  ‘That’s just confusing the issue.’

  ‘You must not be so strict.’

  ‘You must not be so beautiful. You must not have your eyes set so wide apart and so high on the brow. You must not have lips that are so sensitive and want to kiss me so much even if you won’t let them. You must not have such amazing hair that catches in the sunlight and flows in the wind when you are in a jeep. And you must not have such truthful eyes — especially that.’

  ‘I shall wear sunglasses.’

  ‘Like on the pier?’

  ‘No. To hide from you. I did not hide from them because they are stupid Englishmen. They go to the Cote d’Azur and do not even visit the mountains. They arrive in aeroplanes which serve a horrible breakfast with tiny mustard tubes and a very old egg in the middle of the plate. Then they buy their suntan lotion and get a standard issue from the hotel: one rug, one umbrella, and a patch on the beach two metres long by one metre wide, where they cook. When they have finished cooking themselves they go back to Nice Airport and have another aeroplane breakfast. Afterward they show their Polaroid camera pictures including one of me on my water-skis.’

  ‘Ann Marie, I’m going to kiss you. Now.’

  ‘I tilt my face?’

  ‘And your hair falls … just so. And, young woman, this is not a deal.’

  ‘You do not understand yourself, Neil.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ — But he didn’t give her a chance to answer. Their bodies were straining against each other, and his hand strayed to her breasts, and her calves ached, and her buttocks crimped together, and she broke away abruptly, and she said, ‘Now you will hate me, because we go back to Norton with your penis in agony?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then one day you beat me for it, when I grow up.’

  ‘I’m not sure you ever will.’

  ‘You do hate me.’

  ‘No. I see what you thought your duty was. You’re the carrot. To stop me going too far into the PONEM.’

  ‘You must believe me: I wouldn’t have done this for any Tom, Charles or Harry.’

  ‘Whatever happened to Dick?’

  ‘You are angry yet you make jokes?’

  ‘I don’t know … But at least nuns stay in their own league, Ann Marie. They take a vow and they put on those awful clothes and everyone knows where he —’ Neil stopped.

  ‘You can’t help these jokes?’

  ‘You’re such a ridiculous mixture between orange juice and champagne I can’t stay angry for long enough. Let’s go for a brisk walk and smell hot, wet pavements …’

  Out there she said, ‘I think in the pub they were surprised. I thought everybody kissed in pubs.’

  ‘Good Lord, no. In pubs you are only allowed to do three things: boast about former conquests with sexy secretaries; discuss rugger, which is a game in which the team that gets most covered in mud is declared the winner; and, finally, cars. Cars with twin carburettors; cars with aluminium cylinder heads. Cars with anti-roll torsion bars and sixteen exhaust pipes; cars with overdrive and limited-slip differential and a hundred and eighty-seven sparking plugs. This is known as being masculine.’

  ‘I can see you are a rebel. You fail miserably to understand the internal combustion engine. Accordingly you make the mistake of falling in love with French girls who don’t know about engines either. So how will y
ou ever learn about the automobile?’

  ‘Ann Marie. I now have myself under control. I can therefore say great oracular things. One is about love, and it is important. Love is neither totally dissipated by going to bed — which is what you fear, did you but know it — nor is it enhanced by staying out of the bedroom. Now, I have never been a nun. But as far as I know, it doesn’t alter basic human chemistry.’

  She said, ‘I know …’ They walked on for a bit in silence, till she said, ‘It is sad. But I see cunim in your eyes, now.’

  ‘It’s because there are so many things to settle, and so little time to do it in.’

  She stopped. ‘Why do you say such things?’

  ‘Because we’re not in Paris, where I would so love to take you.’

  ‘Take me? If it’s Paris, I take you, Neil Prentice.’

  ‘Yes … You see, however hard you try, you can’t make me forget that tormented animal. Some … instinct of yours made you find it — am I right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And now we’re stuck with it. We can’t evade what it really means.’

  ‘You must.’

  He said, ‘You sound as if you’re carrying out a brief … obeying orders.’

  ‘Father Stillwell is in no mood to give me orders. Of that I assure you.’

  ‘Why did you take me up on the moor?’

  ‘I just … felt like it.’

  ‘And promptly drove to the one spot on Dartmoor that harboured the worst nightmare I’ve had since …’

  ‘Since what?’

  ‘Since after that flight.’

  ‘Your flight in the storm? The voices?’ She seemed to come suddenly to a decision. ‘The pilot. Phone him up!’

  ‘Why? Why now?’

  She said carefully, ‘Isn’t it one of the things you have to settle?’

  ‘He’ll deny it — as he did before.’

  ‘It’s worth a try.’

  ‘Before tonight’s treatment? Why are you so insistent?’

  ‘Because now I think we have to admit that things have happened which cannot be explained away by schizophrenia.’

  Neil said, ‘Doesn’t it depend on the definition? What we have to figure out is what schizophrenia really means.’

  ‘Your airline pilot may help you define it.’

  ‘Just pick up a phone and conveniently find Captain Rogers at the far end? He’s more likely to be thirty thousand feet over the Pacific.’