The Empty House

by Michael Gilbert

  “What happened then?”

  “It seemed such a funny idea it made me giggle, and I woke up. Where do we go from here?”

  “Straight down towards the wood. There must be some way through it. You can see the path going up on the other side.”

  There was no difficulty about it. The wood was unfenced, and was not particularly thick. They pushed their way through and climbed the knoll beyond. Standing on it, they could see across the valley, from the line of the Cryde-Huntercombe road to the levels of Exmoor running away, fold behind green and purple fold, into the distance.

  “That’s where you think he went, isn’t it?” said Anna.

  “It’s possible,” said Peter, considerably startled.

  “First having pushed his car over the cliff. Could he have done that?”

  “I think so. He’d drive it off the path, leaving it pointing downhill. It’s a fairly steep slope. The turf was wet, but it wasn’t soggy. In fact, it was probably rather slippery. One good push and I think the car would have gone over, all right. Particularly if he’d broken the fence first. After that, he’d just have to walk down the way we came. It was already getting dark. There was the whole night ahead of him.”

  “How are you going to prove it? Always supposing you’re right.”

  “The only way of proving it would be by finding Dr. Wolfe.”

  “There’d be no argument then,” agreed Anna.

  “Don’t, please, say anything about this to anyone else.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Not even to Kevin.”

  “All right. Not even to Kevin. Though I share most secrets with him.”

  They walked down the hill toward the road. In a curious way Peter felt that the last few minutes had broken down all restraints between them. It seemed perfectly natural that they should find a sheltered dip in the hillside and sit down in it. He had no wish – or no immediate wish – to do anything but talk.

  “Is Kevin your twin?”

  “He was born five minutes after me. In a lovely, decrepit old mansion house in the north of Donegal, under the Derryveagh Mountains. It’s a peaceful corner of northern Ireland even now, so I’m told, though we haven’t been back in the last five years. Don’t you think it’s a mistake to go back to somewhere where you’ve been very happy?”

  “Yes,” said Peter. “Yes, I do.”

  “My mother died when we were born. Perhaps the local midwife wasn’t very clever. I don’t know. It must have upset Father badly, but he never let it worry us. We had a succession of women who were called housekeepers. I think Father slept with most of them. It didn’t worry us at the time and it doesn’t worry me now. It wasn’t an eighteenth-century sort of household. Father taught us the important things, like how to ride properly and handle a gun or a fly rod. We went to school later and hated it. I ran away three times.”

  Peter willed her to go on talking. She was lying back, propping herself on her elbows. The shirt she was wearing was made of some thin material which looked like cheesecloth. It was biscuit coloured, with a thin blue stripe.

  “Father never seemed to worry about anything. Certainly he never worried about money. There was enough, that was all that mattered. I gather it came from a family brewery which his father and his uncle had set up. Money was made for spending, not keeping. What would have happened in the end, I don’t know. He was killed out hunting, and lawyers took over and looked grim and talked about insolvency and the workhouse, but it didn’t happen, because that very year they found enormous deposits of bauxite on our property. That’s really all there is to tell. Kevin and I are a hopeless pair. We’ve not been trained to do anything useful, so we wander round enjoying ourselves. Now tell me about you.”

  “It won’t be nearly as interesting as yours.”

  “I hope it was happy, because I don’t really enjoy gloomy stories.”

  “Then I’ll tell you about the happy part. It was when I was ten and my older brother was twelve. We had a bungalow on the Thames at Laleham. That’s a little place about fifteen miles outside London. We were both at boarding school, but we spent all our holidays there, winter and summer. In some ways the winter was best, when the river was high and there weren’t too many people about. We became real water rats. We had a punt and a dinghy and a canoe, and we took them out in all weathers. There wasn’t any trick of watermanship we didn’t know and improve on. Once, for a bet, I took a canoe across the river standing up in it and using a punt pole, and if you think that’s easy, you ought to try it. Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered if I had fallen in, I was only wearing bathing trunks.”

  Anna laughed and said, “I can just see you, Peter, looking like a long, skinny spider.”

  “I was rather skinny. Another thing we used to do was take the punt upstream, dive out of it, and let it drift down empty, with us swimming behind it and almost underneath it. People would see it was adrift and get very worried and come out to catch it, and we used to pop out of the water like seals and grin at them, which made them furious. And sometimes we’d come home blue with cold, and Mother would make us have a hot bath and cook great plates of porridge for us. It was a lovely time. Later we went back to live in London, and things weren’t such fun any more. Jonathan, my brother, was sent by his firm to New Zealand and got married and decided to stay out there.”

  He wasn’t going to tell her about the other things.

  Anna said, “Something happened which made you very unhappy.”

  “Yes. “

  “Then don’t talk about it. Only think about nice things. Jumping in and out of the water like a little frog, and eating porridge.”

  She was half lying, propped up on her elbows. Her left hand was quite close to Peter’s right hand. As he moved it cautiously forward, Anna shivered suddenly, jumped to her feet, and said, “Let’s go back to the car. All that talk about porridge. It’s made me feel hungry again.”

  When they got back to the hotel, they found Kevin, very pleased with himself. He had managed to hire an old Army-surplus Jeep with a winching attachment which he was demonstrating to Dave Brewer.

  “You just hammer one of these pickets into the ground, fasten yourself to it, and wind yourself out backward.”

  “You get yourself bogged down to rights,” said Mr. Brewer, “and you won’t get out with no winches. Only one thing’ll pull you clear. That’s a team of cart horses.”

  “We’ll see,” said Kevin. “We’ll see.”

  It was at ten o’clock that night that the telephone call came.

  “For me?” said Peter. He had not yet told even his head office where they could find him, although he should certainly have done so.

  “It’s you he asked for,” said Mr. Brewer. “Mr. Mansipple. Didn’t give his name.”

  The telephone was in a dark, triangular recess under the stairs. By bending his head and stooping forward from the waist, Peter was able to get at the instrument, but by no contortion could he have managed to shut the door behind him.

  “Mr. Manciple?” said a voice which he thought he recognised.

  “Yes,” said Peter.

  “It is Dr. Bishwas, from the Research Station. I have something I wish to tell you. It is of great importance that we should meet.”

  “I’d be only too glad. Do you want me to come to your quarters?”

  “That would not be a good arrangement. No, I shall come out and have a word with you.”

  “It’s kind of you to take the trouble. Where do you suggest, and when?”

  “Now, as soon as possible.” The note of urgency in Dr. Bishwas’ voice was unmistakable. “If you will take your car and drive out on the road, as you did this morning. But do not turn down the side road which leads to our front entrance. Go beyond it, and take the next turning. It runs along the outside of our boundary fence. Follow it to the end of the fence, and I will be waiting for you at the corner and will guide you from there.”

  “That seems clear enough,” said Peter slowly. “
Shall I start now?”

  There was a pause. Peter got the impression that Dr. Bishwas might be consulting someone; perhaps his own conscience?

  “No. I shall not be able to get away immediately. Could you be there at eleven o’clock, please?”

  “Very well,” said Peter. “Is that all?”

  “That is all, for the moment.”

  Peter extracted himself from the recess and stood for a moment in the hall thinking. He would have to mention the matter to Mr. Brewer. Otherwise he could well find himself locked out when he got back. He found the landlord shepherding the last of the drinkers out of the public bar.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll let you have a key. I’ll leave the light on in the downstairs passage. Turn it out when you come back.” He seemed uninterested in the reason for this midnight excursion.

  Peter went up to his room. There was time before he need start. He got out a pad of paper, sat down in the chair beside his bed, and tried to compose his thoughts. Superficially, he had made little progress and had almost nothing to report. Nevertheless certain nebulous ideas were already forming in his mind: shadowy possibilities, the children not of logic, but of instinct. It seemed essential to get them down on paper. A Latin tag, learned and forgotten in his schooldays, came into his mind: “Litem scripta manet.” That was true. Words spoken floated away on the breath that uttered them, but the written word endured, for better or worse.

  Half an hour later the first part of the report had been written, placed unsealed in an envelope, and addressed to Arthur Troyte. He put it away in his briefcase. He could finish it in the morning. There were still a few minutes left.

  He took out another piece of paper and wrote on it: “I am going out, at his invitation, to meet Dr. Bishwas of the Biological Warfare Research Station, at the southwest corner of the perimeter fence. I have no idea what he wishes to tell me.” This note he also sealed up in an envelope and propped it against the looking glass on the shelf above the fireplace, where it would be obvious to the first observer. Then he went out, locked the door of his bedroom, pocketed the key, and went quietly downstairs.

  There were voices in the lounge. He could distinguish the pedantic tones of Professor Petros and he heard Kevin say something in reply. As he slipped out of the door at the back, he thought he heard Anna laugh.

  He found the turning which Dr. Bishwas had indicated. It was a roughly macadamised track running between high banks, and there were signs that its most recent users had been a herd of cows. After a few hundred yards it opened out and he could see, on his left, the boundary lights of the Research Station. When he reached the corner of the fence, he saw Dr. Bishwas standing beside the track.

  The Doctor came across as he stopped, and said, “Might I suggest that you turn out your headlights? There is sufficient light for you to see. We have only a short way to go. Thank you. If you drive straight along the track, you will find a building. It is, I fancy, a barn for the cattle, but in this weather they stay out all night. We shall not be disturbed.” The Doctor gave a disconcerting giggle, and Peter realised that he was in a state of extreme nervousness.

  They drove on in silence until a darker patch in the darkness around them indicated the position of the barn. Peter switched off the engine and they both climbed out. The Doctor went ahead and pulled open the door of the barn. He had produced a flashlight, which he shone into the interior of the building.

  “Come in, Mr. Manciple,” he said, “and dispose yourself. What I have to tell you may take some little time.”

  7

  The barn was warm with the stored heat of a summer day. Peter sat on an upturned crate inside the door. Dr. Bishwas perched himself on the edge of the half-floor above him and sat there enthroned and grave, like a teacher preparing to discourse to his disciple.

  “I assumed,” he said, “from the length of time you were together this morning, that Colonel Hollingum told you very little.”

  “He spent most of the time giving me a number of reasons why he could tell me nothing.”

  “He is a good man by his own lights, although his lights are not mine. He sometimes seems to me”—Peter could tell that Dr. Bishwas was smiling in the darkness—”like a master who has been left in charge of a class of children who are cleverer than he is. He wields the physical power, but knows that mentally his charges are beyond him. He is a simple soldier. In so far as he understands what is going on, he disapproves of it, or so I think. But a soldier does what he is told. That is a comfort to him. Also, perhaps, he can persuade himself that what he is doing is not aggressive. The object of the research is defensive: to prepare countermeasures against the possibility of attack by others. Between the wars, did you know, your country produced some of the most virulent poison gases in the world. The establishment which perfected them was known as the Anti-Gas Warfare Station at Winterbourne Gunner, near Salisbury. Anti-gas – you appreciate the subtlety.”

  “And they were none of them used.”

  “They were none of them used, for the same reason that the normal products of biological warfare will never be used. Because both sides possess them. Because their effects are too immediate, and therefore ultimately remediable. And because they invite the most unpleasing reprisals.”

  “That’s a comfort, anyway,” said Peter.

  “It would be a comfort, if it was the whole truth.”

  In the silence which followed, Peter could hear tiny sounds. A bird shifting its position on the rafters above him. Some small animal moving in the hay. The comfortable normal sounds of life going on. If all human and all animal life was destroyed, would sound cease too? Would an empty planet revolve in silence around the sun?

  “If you are to understand what I am going to tell you – and I will shortly make it clear to you, I hope, why it is important that you should understand it – then I shall have to assume in you some knowledge of biological structures.”

  “Until a few days ago,” said Peter, “you would have assumed wrongly. Recently I was given a short lesson on the subject. I now know that everyone has a personal genetic code which is carried by a private arrangement of biochemicals in cells called nuclei. What geneticists try to do is to decipher the pattern of information carried by the nuclei. Oh, and I remember, too, that chromosomes play a part in it. They are made up of five different substances, and the most important is called DNA, whatever that may be.”

  “Deoxyribonucleic acid. From whom are you quoting?”

  “From Dr. Wolfe’s sister.”

  “He spoke often of her. I was not aware that he discussed the technical side of his work with her.”

  “Only once. They were on holiday in Wales and it rained and he was bored.”

  “You have a visual memory?”

  “Something like that. Why?”

  “When you spoke just now, you were visualising the words which Miss Wolfe spoke to you, as though they were written down and you were reading them. Does it afford you total recall?”

  “Not total. Selective.”

  “Interesting.” Dr. Bishwas sat swinging his neatly pointed feet. Now that Peter’s eyes had become adjusted to the half-darkness, he could see Bishwas more clearly.

  “If you are to appreciate what I am going to tell you, we shall have to start a little further back. You realise that the human body is entirely composed of cells? Every last part of it, flesh, blood, skin, muscles, and nerves. It is a miraculous living entity, the cell, complete in itself. We can dissect it and destroy it, but we cannot reconstitute it. If we could do that, we should indeed be gods. We could create life.”

  Dr. Bishwas paused, and Peter could again hear the night breathing around him. In seven days created He the world and all that is therein. How long to destroy it?

  “Each cell, you must understand, is composed of two parts. The outer part, the cytoplasm, is the work force. It absorbs food, converts it into energy, and keeps the factory going. Inside the cytoplasm is the nucleus. If we call the cytoplasm
the body, we could call the nucleus the brain. It is a minute but immensely complex structure made up of threads of DNA composed of nucleotides. You can think of them as tiny beads on a thread. Until recently we have only been able to study them by biological staining. Very recently the Molecular Biology Research Unit at Cambridge succeeded in reproducing them in the form of microscopic crystals.”

  Peter had been sitting quietly, body and mind relaxed, as he did when he wanted to imprint facts on his memory. Now he said, “I suppose there are only a limited number of people at any time at work in this field.”

  “There are not more than a handful of men in any country who are capable of comprehending it. People who can comprehend the ground gained and advance from it into the unknown are fewer still. When they die, the rest of us are thrown back. We can only follow in their footsteps and hope, with patience and good fortune, to reach the point from which they were stepping off and advance a few steps more into the darkness before we, too, die.”

  An owl outside said, “Hoo,” and Peter jumped. Dr. Bishwas said, “I become dramatic, I apologise. Let us return to our cells. You must understand one further fact about them. Some cells are static. That is to say, they increase in size, but do not divide. The cells of the nerves and the muscles are of this type. Other cells, such as blood cells, are in a constant state of subdivision. But this is the important point, Mr. Manciple, and it is one to which you must give particular attention, for it is the objective of my whole discourse. You remember that each cell has in it a nucleus, and that this nucleus contains the genetic code which governs your whole development. It dictates not only external characteristics such as the shape and growth of your body and the colour of your eyes and your hair, but internal matters as well. You mental capacity, your predisposition to certain derangements such as hay fever or colour blindness. The speed with which your arteries harden in age. It may even, although this has not yet been proved, affect a predisposition to cancer. You understand what I am saying?”