Star of Ill-Omen

by Dennis Wheatley

  For some days Kem wrestled silently with his problem. Escobar had behaved generously to him about the past and now treated him as a friend; so was it fair again to attempt to seduce his wife? On the other hand he had made it perfectly clear that he no longer felt even affection for Carmen, and his treatment of her implied that had he still been on Earth he would by now have thrown her out of his house, even if his own pride had made him stop short of bringing a charge against her that would have resulted in her being imprisoned. Now there was no possibility of anyone learning of her infidelity and laughing at him about it behind his back, it seemed probable that he would not really care much what she did. But as long as the three of them were confined together in the Saucer it would be impossible for her to carry on an affaire without him knowing of it; and he might strongly resent being placed in such a position. Moreover, if he did cut up rough, that would put an end to the unity which Kem considered it so important for them to preserve in view of their uncertain future. Yet, did that really matter so very much, after all? It did not if their journey was going to last for years, as by the time they reached their destination Escobar would have become accustomed to the new situation and condoned it. He would have to unless he were prepared to be sent to Coventry, perhaps for the rest of his life. And if it was their wretched fate to have to endure their present lot for a stretch of years, Kem felt that that was all the more reason why, if Carmen was willing, he and she should not continue indefinitely to deny themselves all the joy they could take of one another.

  While Kem turned these thoughts over again and again in his mind he became more and more highly conscious of Carmen’s allure. Her pale face and big lustrous eyes perpetually haunted him between waking and sleeping. The grace of her lithe body as she moved about made him ache to hold it. One day he was seized with an overwhelming desire to place his hand on her shapely instep; on another he could barely restrain himself from running his fingers through her dark hair, as she turned her head suddenly and it floated up in a gentle wave from the nape of her neck. The sight of her red mouth was a constantly tormenting temptation.

  At last, when they had been on their way for just over a fortnight, he could bear it no longer. The Old Adam in him triumphed over all scruples and counsels of prudence. When their next sleep time came round, and they settled down in the covered gaps between the tanks, he waited for a while to give Escobar time to drop off. Then, emerging from under his blanket, he gently raised the sheet that formed Carmen’s tent and slid inside.

  12

  World Far from Ours

  As he laid his hand on Carmen’s shoulder, she woke with a start.

  ‘Hush!’ he whispered. ‘It’s only me, Kem. Don’t make a noise.’

  ‘What do you want?’ she murmured drowsily.

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘What about?’

  He noted the swift, nervous tension that had entered her voice now she was fully awake; so, as he eased himself down beside her in the narrow space, he replied as laconically as he could, ‘Oh, about ourselves.’

  ‘No, Kem!’ She caught her breath, then added quite firmly, ‘There is nothing to be said between us that cannot be said in front of Estévan.’

  ‘There is! Carmen, I love you.’

  ‘I know you do; but I don’t want you to tell me so. Please go away.’

  ‘Not till you’ve told me why you don’t want me to tell you that I love you. It’s not so long ago since you used to beg me to tell you so over and over again. Don’t you care for me any more?’

  ‘Yes. I still love you, Kem. Just as much as ever. But everything is different now.’

  At her admission he tried to put his arm round her shoulders but she pushed it away and murmured unhappily: ‘No! Please, Kem! Don’t make it harder for me.’

  ‘You’re being hard on me, too,’ he protested. ‘Damnably and unnecessarily hard, if you still love me. And even if our circumstances have changed, we haven’t. We are still the same people.’

  ‘I know. But things are different. I can’t let you make love to me any more.’

  ‘Why? On account of Estévan?’

  ‘Not altogether; although I don’t want to hurt him more than I have already.’

  ‘You needn’t worry about that. He doesn’t care a rap for you. I don’t think he ever did—or anyhow not since he found you disappointing to sleep with. It’s quite on the cards that he made you marry him in the first place only on account of your family connections and wealth. No doubt he wanted a wife who would do him credit. Anyhow, it is pretty clear that for a long time past he has regarded you only as a valuable possession. Lots of people must have envied him his lovely, rich, aristocratic wife; and he must have got a big kick out of their believing you to be his loving and faithful spouse. When he found that you had kicked over the traces with me, that threatened the pretty picture he had built up; so naturally he was furious about it. But it was only his pride that was hurt, and there is no one here to make spiteful innuendoes about his having lost you. So why should you be so absurdly considerate for him?’

  ‘If it were only that, I might feel differently,’ she sighed. ‘But it is really something fundamental. As you are an heretic I can hardly expect you to understand. But after what happened on the boat, I couldn’t go to Confession. Not with the knowledge that you were coming out to stay at the estancia and that it might happen again. So, you see, I am still in a state of mortal sin.’

  Although Kem did not regard himself as an heretic, he let that pass; but as he had no reason to believe that Catholic women usually had better morals than Protestant ones, he said:

  ‘Whatever religion a woman follows it is a sin for her to break the Sixth Commandment; but I’ve known quite a number of Catholic ones who did, and they didn’t seem to think there was anything very terrible about having done so. Most of them got it off their chests by going to Confession afterwards, and I can’t see why you shouldn’t have done that, too.’

  Carmen sighed again. ‘I wish I had been capable of fooling myself into believing I could have received absolution like that; but I was not. The priest’s words count for nothing unless one feels repentance and has honestly made up one’s mind to resist the same sort of temptation in future. And now it is too late. I shall never receive absolution at all.’

  ‘I’m sorry you feel so badly about it. When we became lovers on the boat, you showed no scruples about deceiving your husband.’

  ‘That has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘But your attitude was so different then. I took you for a woman of the world.’

  ‘I meant you to. I had been acting the part since soon after I married. I thought of myself as one, too. I had just come from having a gay time in Paris, and most of the women I knew there had their lovers. I wanted to take one myself. Sometimes at night I felt the urge to let myself go simply terribly, and I might have if I hadn’t been so heavily chaperoned by Aunt Julia. By the time I met you I was on my way back to another six months with Estévan at the estancia, and I was obsessed with the thought that I was letting the best years of my life slip by without knowing what real passion could be.’

  ‘Well, when you did find out, with me, you enjoyed it, didn’t you?’

  ‘Of course I did; but although I didn’t let you know it, I was haunted all the time by the thought that I was committing a sin.’

  ‘Darling, I cannot for the life of me understand why you should make such a bogey of that. Other women don’t believe in these days that because they follow the dictates of their hearts they will be damned for all eternity.’

  ‘Perhaps. I wish I were like them, then. But all my family are deeply religious, and it’s something I feel right inside me.’

  In the half-light that penetrated through the sheets Kem could see her strained face quite clearly. Leaning over her, he took both her hands in his and, in spite of her movement to pull them away, held them tightly, as he said: ‘Listen, Carmen. If you had received absolution I could underst
and your not wanting to fall into a state of sin again. As you haven’t, what difference can it make if we go on living together?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, Kem. I can’t. Please don’t ask me to.’

  ‘How can you expect me to do otherwise? We may be cooped up in this damned thing together for years.’

  ‘I know. But all the same, I can’t do it. Now that I feel repentance, to give way again would be an even greater sin.’

  ‘You mean you won’t!’ he muttered angrily. ‘Because you’re just being thoroughly selfish. You’d rather see me driven half insane with longing for you than face being worried for an hour or two afterwards by a guilty conscience.’

  ‘No. It’s not that. I’m not really being selfish. At least, I don’t think I am. I want you just as much as you want me.’

  ‘Then for goodness’ sake make an effort to put all these ideas about hell-fire out of your mind, and let me make love to you.’

  ‘No, Kem. I really mean what I said.’

  She had on the long fur coat that she wore both waking and sleeping, on account of the slight chill in the atmosphere, but it had fallen open when she had struggled to release her hands from his grasp.

  ‘Please, Carmen, please! I can’t go on like this! I need you terribly! I didn’t mean what I said just now about your being selfish. Seeing that you feel as you do, it would really be unselfish of you if you took pity on me. It is I who am the selfish one, to press you. But I can’t help it.’

  Suddenly, exerting all her strength, she thrust him from her and sat up. Then she said firmly: ‘Now it’s your turn to listen, Kem. I know just how you are feeling, because I feel the same myself; but I’m not going to let myself weaken. You may not agree with me, but I believe that our having been carried off like this is God’s choice of a way to chastise us for our sin. Perhaps that sounds far-fetched, but if I hadn’t come up early to bed, intending to commit adultery with you in my bedroom, we might not be here now. In any case, what we are suffering on this journey will be counted against the punishment that we wantonly invited. But that is not enough. As God is merciful we still have it in our power to gain His forgiveness, and He alone can protect us from the unknown horrors that we may have to face in the future. If I were in a state of grace I feel sure that the Holy Virgin and the Saints would intercede with Him successfully for us. As I am not, all I can do is to show my repentance by denying my body its desires, and to pray for help with faith that my prayers will not remain unanswered. Estévan often swears by the Saints from habit; but he is really an agnostic, and you do not take your religion so seriously as I do mine. You must let me be; so that with a clean heart I can continue to implore mercy for us all.’

  In the face of such a declaration Kem felt that it would be almost sacrilegious to press her further. The wave of passion that had shaken him so terribly had passed, and he looked at her now with new eyes, as though she were a woman dedicated and holy.

  ‘I understand,’ he said slowly. ‘And I won’t make a nuisance of myself again. I shall pray that your prayers may be answered.’ Then he left her as quietly as he had come.

  There followed many days of deadly monotony, unbroken by any major incident. Only one occurred during the third week out. The last beans in the tank were used up, and when the next issue was due another full tank sprang open. This led to some excited speculation by the captives. Obviously the length of the journey must be governed by the supply of beans on board. They counted the tanks and in various ways endeavoured to assess how many beans each would contain, then worked out the number of days the beans would last, allowing ten per person for themselves and thirty per head for the giants, every twenty-four hours. Unfortunately, however, there were too many imponderables in the problem for them to arrive at a solution which stood a chance of being anywhere near the mark. In the first place, the giants must have consumed a considerable number on their way to Earth, and there was no means of discovering how many to deduct from the total on that account. Then the total itself might be hopelessly wrong; as one of the tanks consisted of the lavatory and another held the water-pipe, so others might contain other items such as spare parts, or be empty and filled with beans only on occasions when the Saucer was about to start on a journey to another world yet more distant from its place of origin than Earth. The only thing of which their calculations made them feel reasonably certain was that its present voyage was unlikely to last more than nine months.

  That cheered them a little, but only temporarily; for, owing to the monotony of their routine, it seemed to them that instead of eighteen days they had already been imprisoned in the Saucer for as many weeks; so to have to endure a further eight months under such conditions sounded like a life sentence.

  While they were discussing it Kem remarked: ‘I remember reading somewhere an article on sending a rocket to the Moon. It said that at a certain point where the gravitational attractions of the Earth and the Moon balance each other the rocket would have to turn round; so that as it came down it would descend base first, and by turning on its jets again be able to check the speed of its fall. When the Saucer turns upside down we shall know we have reached that point, and that may tell us something.’

  Escobar shook his head. ‘You are right about the theory of the thing; but even if it happened it would not tell us the proportion of our journey that we had covered, because we do not know the gravitational pull of the planet to which we are going as compared with that of Earth. However, the fact is that when the Saucer does turn over we shall not even know it. For all practical purposes we passed out of the field of gravity of Earth within a few minutes of taking off, and the only gravitational pull we have been subject to since is that of the giant magnet on which we are sitting. To whatever angle the Saucer may tilt, and even if it turns upside down, we shall continue to feel as though that remains beneath us. The Saucers have frequently been reported as flying sideways, on their edge, and while in an atmosphere that is the way in which they would meet with a minimum resistance. It is quite possible that we are flying sideways to our trajectory now.’

  Having become reluctantly resigned to the probability that they would have to remain for many weeks in their prison, they gradually adopted a routine of regular occupations.

  Carmen made herself a little oratory by sticking a small crucifix to one of the tanks with seccotine, then decorating the deck below it with a mat of crimson silk, cut from one of her dresses, on which she laid out all her jewels. On her knees before the crucifix she spent many hours in prayer, and for a quarter of an hour before each issue of rations was due read prayers aloud, in which Kem joined her, but Escobar curtly refused to participate in what he considered to be futile mummery.

  Kem occupied himself for quite a while by converting the Spanish shawl into a coat. Carmen offered to do it for him, but he refrained from accepting, because it was one of the few ways in which he could kill time, although he gladly availed himself of her help in the matter of directions.

  Escobar amused himself by making scientific calculations, doing his sums in minute figures in the margins of Carmen’s French novel, as they wished to save her notepaper; but to make the book last as long as possible he allowed himself only one page a day for this purpose. He also spent a lot of time peering down the chute of the lavatory in the hope that he might see some heavenly body that he would recognise, and so be able to make a guess at the direction in which they were going. That would have been easy for him had it been perpetual night outside, but as it was always full daylight his chances of seeing anything were extremely slender. They would have been non-existent had not the Saucer been moving away from the Sun, but that it was doing so he soon detected through the very fact of seeing a star at all. It was so faint that at first he could not be sure that he had really seen it, but his impression was confirmed a few days later by seeing another. That they were visible in daylight, even against the deep blue colour that space assumed up in the stratosphere, proved that they must be very large and lu
minous bodies, but without a telescope it was impossible to identify them; so his observations got him no further.

  Every day now they exercised themselves regularly as well as they could, played question-and-answer games for a set period, and took turns in selecting a subject for discussion. But, even so, the hours between ration issues seemed to drag interminably. And when ration-time came there were only the mentally unsatisfying few mouthfuls of water and five beans apiece to chew. They had soon come to loathe the very sight of the beans and their minds became obsessed with a craving for good food. They talked for hours of the delicious dishes they had eaten in the past, until it was decided that to do so was an additional torture; so for the future food should be taboo as a subject of conversation.

  Under the strain one or other of them occasionally gave way to fits of anger, brought on by some trifling cause that normally would not have seemed of the least importance, or for a few hours sank into a state of sullen apathy; but, ‘while there is life there is hope’ being one of the truer sayings, in the main, the certainty that their journey must end some time, somewhere, kept them buoyed up with a nervous expectancy.

  It was on the forty-ninth day after they had left Earth that Escobar, who had just lifted the lid of the lavatory tank, looked down its pipe and gave a sudden shout:

  ‘Nom de Dios! Quick! Come here!’

  Kem and Carmen hastened to his side and leaned over the edge of the tank. The foot-wide round of daylight at the bottom of the pipe was no longer empty. Near its centre shone a brightly-coloured circle, which appeared to them to be about the size of a tennis ball. Their first impression was of its likeness to some fabulous jewel, for it might have been fashioned from a big, many-hued stone. Its predominant tint was rose-ochre, but in parts it was robin’s-egg blue, and both were set off by a nearly complete, much smaller, circle of dazzling white, a segment of which was severed by the rim of the larger.