Land Under England

by Joseph O'Neill

  The convulsive waves seized me again. They wrung my body. At the same time an upheaval of emotion was shaking my mind. The creature that had tried to seize me was my father.

  Gradually my mind eased to normal grief. My father was dead. He had left us a long time ago. Now he would never come back to us. It was not he that loathed me and had tried to strangle my life.

  There was nothing left now in this world below—nothing that remained for me to do but to go back to the upper earth, if they would let me, and if I could get back. My mother was waiting for me there and the normal life of men. I could now promise that, if they would let me go free, I would not come back to this darkness. Why should I come back? There was nothing to come back for. They had been right all the time. Now I could go home. That would be the best thing—if I could. If I stayed, I should have to kill my father’s body. I could not go on living and seeing it in the possession of that creature.

  No! I must go, as soon as they would let me, or I should be forced to deprive that body of life.

  A man came towards me with a vessel and put it to my mouth. I pushed it away. He put it to my lips again. This time I did not struggle. It didn’t seem to matter whether I drank its contents or not. Arms lifted me up from behind and a hand tilted my head back slightly. The liquid was trickling into my mouth, and I gulped it down with an effort.

  At once a feeling of quietness began to creep over me. The man put the vessel to my mouth again. This time I took a deep drink. Then I was laid back on my couch.

  I woke to the rhythmic beat of oars. I did not open my eyes, but lay there, letting the rhythm of the oars run through me. I was at peace—the complete peace of complete loss. My life as I had known it had come to an end. The motive-force that had given the chief meaning to my life since I could first remember—all that was gone. I could now go back to the ordinary life of men, that I had never fully lived.

  The world that I had lived in was shattered, buried under the debris of its own wreckage. The new world I was to live in would be a poor, ordinary thing to put in its place, even if I could get back to it. The chances were that I could not.

  If I did, I should see the green grass again, and feel the sunlight and the rain, and marry and settle down and have children—children who would not have any dreams, such as I and my father had until he died.

  My mind shifted back to him. Had he died before he came down—died, in part, during the war? Was the man who came back to us in 1919—the man without joy or laughter or life, apart from his obsession—was he the man that my mother had married, the father I had loved so intensely? Do men die while alive even on the upper earth, and give way to wandering spirits that seize their bodies? Was the man who had been robbed of his personal life here below—was he my father, or only an intruder who had already ousted my father from his body during the dreadful struggle when thousands were hurled from their bodies at every moment?

  The face of the man who had come back to us had never been the face of the man I had known—the subtle, charming face, full of delicate suggestions and laughter and intimacies. I thought of that other rigid face of the soldier that had returned—stern, hungry, simple, with an austere, pitiless simplicity. Could that have been the face of the father who had made the house ring in the old days with his joyous, fantastic mirth—that isolated man with no joy and no laughter? Surely not. Either my father’s personality had died in part in his body, or else his soul had been driven out in some great stress or shock and a stranger had taken its place—a stranger that had taken over his obsession with his body but little else of him. Could such things be?

  At the mere thought of him my body quivered with hatred. He had infected me with his, and I returned loathing for loathing. As I thought of him now, I felt a tide of rage and hatred pouring over me. If I stayed here below, I must seek him out and tear from him the body which he had polluted, even if I had to destroy that body to reach him.

  For a while, as I lay there, my mind was trembling, quivering with hatred. I would get him yet, tear him asunder, give my father’s body decent burial—Christian rest—not leave it as a slave to this thing that had seized and polluted it.

  I sat up. I would go to him now.

  Then I remembered. I was on the ship. He was away up to the northward—planning, scheming his invasion of the upper earth, a sediment of memory of the Great War still in his mind, working it like a poisonous yeast. He wanted to go back and kill and kill, and seize and confiscate.

  I lay back on the couch. He had been foiled. In the shock of my emotion at the sudden knowledge of the loss of my father he had had his only chance to seize me. As I lay under that shock, he had flung himself upon me and failed. I would go away from him. It was his nature to hate and to seize. I was becoming like him.

  The thought sprang at me that perhaps he had partly got me. He had infected me—this hatred that shook me even now. No! I must get away. To avenge my father’s death would be useless. The thought could have come only from him to torment me. How could it be done? Only by murdering my father’s body. Perhaps some shred of his personality still remained. If there were even the tiniest deposit left in the bottom of the vessel, once so filled with his personality, I could not smash the vessel.

  No! I must go! I must go at once—away from the sight of that hateful face.

  The movement of the oars had stopped. The vessel must be running into harbour. Where had they brought me? Back to the city, probably, to the Master of Knowledge. The door was sliding back. A man was beckoning. I must have been a long time asleep or unconscious on the ship, if we were now back in the city.

  I got up and followed the man. My body seemed to have lost all strength. My legs were hardly able to hold it up, and it sagged forward, as if the trunk could not support the head and shoulders. My knees were knocking together with weakness. It was as if I had just begun to recover from a long fever.

  The man brought me to the bathroom. I got my clothes off and dropped into the bath. It was warm, and thick with salt, and my nerves began to lie quietly. Restfulness was again coming over me, and a sort of peace. The strong, briny smell of the water came to me, like a whiff of the upper world to which I belonged, warm and thick and stirring. I rolled round in it and felt it soak through me, and, as it soaked into my pores, strength came back to me, and resolution, and the will to live. I would begin a new life, if I got to the earth—a real one this time, not the life of a dream, so mad that it came true from its own intensity.

  The new life would never have that intensity which drove the old one on the rocks. It would be a calm, happy life, with men and women and children in it—not like shadows, as they had been before, but in the middle of my life, if ever I could get back to it—my mother, too.

  Suddenly I was burning to get away, to get back to the upper world, the sun, the sea, the laughter of men. I got out of the bath and dressed hurriedly.

  When I slid the door back, a man was waiting outside to bring me to the guardroom. Here they gave me a meal. I didn’t want to eat. Then I remembered that, in order to succeed, I must eat. My physical strength must not fail my will. When I tasted the food, I found that I was hungry, and ate a good meal. Then I was brought out of the ship, along the quay, and through the enclosures to the Master of Knowledge.

  I felt that it was the last time that I would see him. Soon I must either be dead or mad or gone from this land. I should surely never see him after this time—not I, the person who was now coming to him.

  He sat, in the same place under the globes, as if his body never moved. I could hardly believe that it ever did move, so motionless, so eternal did it seem, as it sat there, poised, staring into space and eternity.

  A message was coming to me from his mind.

  “You no longer misunderstand. You know there is no such person as the man that was your father. You will never come back here, if we let you go.”

  It was not a question. It was an affirmation. Still, I wanted to make things so clear that there could be
no misunderstanding.

  “No,” I answered aloud, “I will never come back again. There would be nothing to come back for.”

  I stopped. I found myself trembling. I was in the presence of my father’s murderer—one of those who had shaped the creature that had entered into possession of my father’s body—yet it was not anger that was shaking me. All that was gone. I felt myself in the presence merely of a machine. Could it be possible that it would let me escape? That other would have violated me, murdered me, rather than let me escape. Could it be possible that this being would let me go free?

  He was sitting impassively reading my thoughts. Now his message was coming. He was ordering me to go, to leave their land and not to return.

  I was free! Free! In spite of my father’s hatred and determination to hold me until he had wrung my powers from me, they were setting me free!

  I could hardly believe it. I must get away at once, before they had time for reflection, before my father had time to come to the Master of Knowledge and imbue him with his plans.

  Then I realised that, as I thought those thoughts, the being in front of me was reading them. I was revealing all my plans, hopes, my father’s plans, my thoughts of them, to the mind that was watching me. At any moment now, with his knowledge of my thoughts, he might recall his order.

  I turned and ran out of the enclosure. At every moment I expected to be seized and brought back.

  A man was coming after me. I began to run down the path towards the harbour. I knew it well by now, that path.

  I dashed towards the passage on the quay. Would the ship be still there?

  She was there, a little farther down. I dashed towards her. There was a gangway from the quay to her second deck. I rushed up the gangway. At the top a man pushed me back. I looked round me wildly. Two men were coming along the quays. Were they coming to seize me?

  I stood staring towards them. As they came near, I saw that one of them was a commander. He was sending me a message. What was it? What was it? I was to go into the ship. I stopped, held by a new fear.

  “Where?” I shouted aloud. “Where are you bringing me?”

  “To the northern pass, to send you off our land,” came back the message.

  I went up the gangway. I wanted to get out of sight into the recesses of the ship.

  The Master of Knowledge had ignored my thoughts and the revelations that they had brought to him. Possibly he had despised them. That he had powers that could enable him to force me to yield up my knowledge, or even to resynthesise my mind, I could hardly doubt. The forces that I had felt in his eyes were of quite a different range from those that I had already resisted successfully. If he were to become obsessed, like the other man, with the dreams of hatred and reconquest, that the latter had brought with him from the upper earth, or if, under the influence of the memories and ambitions brought by the other man from above, he should decide to seize my body and brain with all its modern knowledge, I did not doubt that he could do so. I had been saved, so far, by the fact that he was too far removed from human ambitions, or from the memory of human knowledge and the grasp of modern scientific powers, to desire to take from me any of my equipment of material science.

  Probably he had no conception of it, even such a dim conception as remained like a residue of memory in the mind of the man who had come from the earth. If he had any conception of it, it was clear that he did not, at present, value it sufficiently to think it worth while using me to obtain possession of it. But this state of mind might not last. If the conception of my powers dawned on him, what would be more natural than that he should decide to seize my brain, with the scientific wealth of ages stored in it? And, if he did so, what would the future hold in store for me?

  They had brought me to the guardroom and left me sitting on a couch there. I sat watching the door, waiting with every nerve of my body for the movement of the oars that would send the ship away from the man that sat, under the globes of light, in the enclosure so near me.

  If it should once get the idea of emerging from its lair! If its mind should conceive the idea that the creature at the Wall possessed!

  I have no greater fear than other men. I had already shown in my wanderings in the darkness fortitude and endurance that were at least up to the average. I had met the man that had seized my father’s life and had not given way, but I confess that I was afraid—pitifully afraid—of the being that was sitting in the enclosure so near me. I did not feel that I could meet him, if he attacked me. I had only one thought—flight to the uttermost bounds, away from his power.

  When at length the ship started, I relaxed. Only then I realised that all the time I had been sitting rigid with fear.

  During the whole of the voyage north I did not sleep, until the last section of the journey. In the beginning I could not have slept, even if I had wanted to do so. Then, as lack of sleep began to wear me down, I tried to keep awake. It was the most foolish thing I could have done, since a person is most subject to hypnotic influence under deep fatigue or deep emotion, and the lack of sleep would have been one of the most effective factors against me, if anyone had tried to dominate me in that way during the voyage. I knew all this, and yet so great was my panic that I could not let myself fall asleep, until, finally, somewhat before the end of the journey, nature had her way and forced me to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Pursuit

  I DO NOT SUPPOSE that any stretch of water on the upper earth will ever be so profoundly associated in my mind with deep emotions as that Central Sea. Certainly there is not likely to be any stretch of water that will again be the scene for me of such sharp longing and panic as I felt during the two journeys that I made in the guardship from the city, northward to the Wall.

  It is probable that, by this time, the cumulative effect of all I had gone through was beginning to undermine my nervous system and my balance in a deeper way, perhaps, than even my ordeal in the darkness. But it is also possible that the panic which I felt during that second voyage northward was the result of a deep reaction from the intense tension that I must have endured while I was struggling in my trance with the forces that were trying to overpower me.

  My reserves of nerve-power must have been drawn on deeply during that struggle, and I may not have felt their depletion until I had rested sufficiently for the tension to die down.

  It is when the tautness has finally left the nerves, and they collapse on to one another, that losses become effective, and the extent to which the reserves have been depleted begins to tell on the whole organism.

  Now I was filled with the wildest panics and suspicions. Even when the boat was moving into the harbour, I still kept looking back at the sea, in the fear that a ship might be pursuing us with a countermanding order.

  They were bringing me to the gangway. The commander himself was now coming with me. He did not communicate with me, beyond ordering me to follow him.

  I hoped desperately I should not meet the man that was in my father’s body. If I met him, I didn’t know what would happen. I wanted to be clear of all that now, if they would let me go. I would go forwards, upwards, back to the earth, if they would only let me. If I got back to the sunlight, I would always go forwards, not against the movement of days and years, but with them — with the sunlight, forward, not back into the darkness.

  I hadn’t let anybody fill my father’s place, when he had left it to go to the war and hadn’t come back. I would fill it now, if only I could get away without meeting this man who hated me.

  We were mounting the terraced steps, and a commander was coming to meet us—not my father; another.

  My hands kept clenching at the thought of him. That room in there was the room where he had hurled himself on me.

  The two commanders had gone forward a little together, probably talking silently.

  Now a man was taking my knapsack. I held on to it. His message was coming to me. They wanted to store it with food. I gave it up. It was an old knapsack of my f
ather’s which had been bought in Germany before the war. If that other man saw it, he might recognise it, begin to remember perhaps, but it was too late to think of things like that now.

  I sat on the stone bench that ran along the bottom of the great Wall. I was on the wrong side of it still—the inner side.

  In front of me, the enclosures sloped down to the terraces. Below that the Central Sea lay, running into the darkness. At the farther end of that sea, the Master of Life, who could have held me, was sitting. I could see him clearly. He was letting me go, with all my knowledge. I felt that he himself was doing it through these men here, who were only his hands.

  Should I really get free? Could it be possible?

  Now they were bringing the knapsack back to me, and with it a big bow and a quiver of arrows. They were bringing me in, through the Wall.

  It was very deep, that Wall—twenty feet at least. At any moment my father might come out of a side-door and stop me.

  I was through the Wall, on the other side, a big space lit with globes, and, beyond the lighted space, a narrow wood in front, to the left; to the right, cliff walls.

  The two commanders were standing at the door of the Wall, watching me with their fixed stare. Did they wonder what I was going up to?

  I looked back at them—waved my hand. They made no movement. They were back in the tunnel behind the door. It closed.

  I was outside—outside the Wall, outside my father’s life, outside everything. All that had given intensity to my life was behind me. I was free—free to go upwards and forwards into an empty world of bright sunlight, if I could find it. My fears had been groundless. They were gone now.

  I fixed the knapsack more firmly on my shoulders and turned my face to the wood.

  I knew now how much of my life had been lived in my father’s life. He had filled me. I had lived in him. Now he was gone, behind that Wall. His body was lost to him and to me. His spirit gone. Until now I hadn’t known how much I had possessed both, in hope and memory.