That was it. Shopland must be got an Award or a Fellowship or a Grant – Sir Leonard knew about these things – that would enable him to spend a year, or preferably a couple of years, at one of the great American universities. Minnesota, say. To Sir Leonard in his sleepless condition this seemed an admirable idea.
It might have been expected that sleep should at last rapidly succeed upon this happy inspiration. But it didn’t, and Sir Leonard had presently to admit that the strange uneasiness assailing him was not connected with James Shopland at all. It was not connected with anything that his thoughts could put a name to. He found this state of affairs alarming. His alarm increased when, just as a clock somewhere in the house struck two, he discovered himself to be lying in a cold sweat. It was something horridly unusual. The physical tenement of Sir Leonard – well nourished, punctually evacuated, moderately exercised, and periodically inspected and repaired by high-ranking physicians and surgeons – was scarcely familiar with even passing distresses. Was he then, at last, going to fall ill? Somehow he didn’t think that anything of the sort was absolutely imminent. Did his uneasiness belong to some psychic sphere? He remembered a disagreeable poem of Donne’s, in which the poet promises that his ghost will appear to his new-bedded mistress and evoke just such a sweat as Sir Leonard now lay in. But Sir Leonard had again somehow an assurance that he wasn’t – this time wasn’t even remotely – in the presence of the supernatural. Great Musters, it was true, had a ghost. But that ghost, if operative at the moment, was certainly operative only in some remote corner of the mansion. What Sir Leonard was obscurely aware of – and it was an obscurity to the impenetrableness of which he felt no possibility of doing justice – was disorder or subversion entirely unconnected with the psychic sphere; was rather of some slip or shudder at the very roots of the purely physical. It occurred to him that there had perhaps been an earthquake, and he almost got up to see whether his toilet things were in disarray or Agatha’s admirable old mezzotints shaken askew on the walls. But he knew perfectly well that nothing violent had occurred; that if anything had occurred it was of a nature not distinguishable, let alone definable or measurable, through any of the unassisted channels of sense. And hard upon this intuition (as of course it turned out to be) Sir Leonard did at last fall asleep.
He could not afterwards have told whether his sleep had been dreamless, or by what gradations he awoke. There was already a grey light on the ceiling when he first became fully conscious of sharp voices and hurried movement in the house. It was mysterious. It was even – he slumberously realised – disturbing. But he contrived to be annoyed rather than curious. And then he must have dozed off again.
When he next woke up, it was to a dull banging sound which he resented at once. At eight o’clock in the morning a well-trained servant doesn’t wait to be shouted at; she knocks, pauses a moment, and then enters. But the half-witted Grace was not of course to be relied upon in these matters. Sir Leonard sat up in bed. “Come in,” he called firmly.
The banging continued. Nothing else happened. Sir Leonard looked at his watch. It was after nine, so the wretched girl must have forgotten about him. And the banging was certainly not a series of knocks on the door. Its quality was entirely different; it came from quite far away; and it went monotonously on and on.
Sir Leonard got out of bed – it was unpleasant, he discovered, to have to do this unfortified by the routine of tea and a sliver of bread and butter – and drew back his curtains. His room overlooked the park – and commanded, as it happened, that one of its boundaries upon which he had first encountered young Shopland. The clear morning sunlight made it possible to see just what was going on, so that it was only for a moment that he was able to suppose it nothing out of the ordinary. The wall of the park, it was true, had for years been in poor condition; and it might be reasonable to conclude that Agatha had resolved upon repairs. But not, no, decidedly not, upon this scale. For just beyond the park, on the road where Shopland had cursed his broken-down car, were ranged half a dozen olive-green lorries. That they were military lorries was plain from the fact that men in battle-dress were scurrying all over the place. For a second Sir Leonard imagined that the park of Great Musters must have been chosen – most impertinently – by the local military authorities for some foolish manoeuvres. Then he saw that it was upon nothing of this sort that the soldiers were engaged. They were putting up a fence. With incredible speed, they were putting up a high, barbed-wire fence round what looked like the entire perimeter of the park. The banging came from a powerful machine which was punching holes deep into the earth. Into each hole was going a concrete post. Each concrete post had an outward-sloping limb of a kind which Sir Leonard recognised as familiar. What was going up, in fact, was precisely the formidable sort of barrier which shut off from the world the atomic research establishment sprawling on the nearby down.
Sir Leonard felt angry. He was angry with the military personnel who had woken him up so disagreeably. And he was even more angry with old Agatha Callaway. For what had happened was clear. It wasn’t, after all, time of war. No government department could simply have commandeered Great Musters. So Agatha must have let it – presumably as some sort of annexe for her proliferating scientific neighbours. That must be it. And the absurd old woman had presumably forgotten what she had done, so that nobody had been told, until now the very moment had come to quit.
Yes, that must be it. But even as Sir Leonard arrived at this conclusion – a hypothesis eminently rational in itself – misgivings assailed him. If here were indeed the explanation, would not the business of erecting that fence be in the hands not of the military but of a civilian contractor? Sir Leonard took another long look at the operation going so briskly forward. At the operation, it struck him, going so very briskly forward … and a simple, if mysterious, truth was borne in upon him. What was happening carried evidently and in the highest degree, the mark of belonging uncompromisingly to the emergency order. The soldiers, in fact, were in the hell of a hurry.
It was at this moment that Sir Leonard’s attention was distracted by a further untoward circumstance – this time immediately in his vicinity. The neglected main drive of Great Musters turned, just beneath his window, into a yet more neglected gravel sweep which rounded the east wing of the house and expired among its derelict offices. On this sweep another lorry had just appeared. It was a lorry evidently much heavier than those on the fringe of the park – and was of the sort indeed which has to be supported on a quite improbable number of wheels. Sir Leonard was looking directly down upon it now. It was an open lorry, and what it carried seemed to Sir Leonard, upon a first glance, to be some half-dozen cattle troughs. But the lorry was crawling, as if beneath an immense burden. Sir Leonard looked again. They were not cattle troughs, but boxes – open boxes, with lids stacked beside them. And yet they were not boxes either. Or rather they were a particular sort of box. What Sir Leonard was looking down on was a supply of coffins. And they were, for that matter, a particular sort of coffin. The massiveness of the lorry, and the laboured character of its progress, were alike explained by the circumstance that the coffins were very large. And the largeness of the coffins was attributable to the fact that each was lined with what appeared to be several inches of lead.
The lorry crawled round the corner of the house and vanished. From across the park the dull thump of the fence-building contrivance continued to sound. Sir Leonard was no longer able very clearly to distinguish this phenomenon from another purely internal to himself. His heart in fact was behaving badly. Even more disturbing was the fact that discomfort had seized upon his bowels. He turned away from the window and grabbed his dressing-gown. One of the archaic hardships of Great Musters consisted in the necessity of walking down a corridor whenever one was prompted either to ablution or to the simplest call of nature. Sir Leonard therefore threw open his bedroom door and hurried out. In doing so he almost stumbled over what, for a single moment, he took to be a vacuum cleaner propelled by Jones or G
race. It certainly ran on small wheels – as such an unassuming household contrivance, he supposed, commonly does. But it was plainly not a vacuum cleaner; rather it was a scientific instrument as evidently complex as it was unfamiliar. And it wasn’t, of course, being shoved along by Jones or Grace. It was being shoved along by a robot – so Sir Leonard for a moment thought – or by what a literary person of a younger generation might have taken to be a “space man” fully accoutred for some interplanetary jaunt. This apparition glanced incuriously at Sir Leonard – glanced at him from within a bubble of perspex or glass – and then passed on down the corridor. His sinister contraption was emitting a faint hum. And Sir Leonard was aware at the same time of a faint smell. It was like that faintest of smells that one is sometimes conscious of at the moment one’s dentist takes his X-ray photograph.
When Sir Leonard got downstairs, he found no sign of breakfast. Indeed, what was equally depressing, he found no sign of life, and it was in an anxious search for both that he made his way to the kitchen. Neither Mrs Lumley nor her assistant was in evidence. But there was an excellent smell, and this appeared to be due to the activities of Shopland, who was busying himself at the old-fashioned range. Sir Leonard hurried over to him. “What is it?” he asked anxiously.
“Sausages and bacon. More than we’ve had for a week. And coffee. I don’t understand the bloody percolator. But I’m making it in this pan.”
“Yes, yes – but what is it? And where are the servants? Where is Lady Callaway?” Sir Leonard remembered the coffins. “They’re not … dead?”
“Probably not. That’s to say, they were alive fifteen minutes ago. I took them round some tea.” With surprising dexterity, Shopland poured out a cup of coffee, added a dash of hot milk, and thrust it at Sir Leonard. “It’s a bit of a shock for the poor old bitches, you’ll agree. And even for Grace, although I don’t suppose she understands it. Could you manage two rashers? They’re a bit fatty.”
Sir Leonard felt that he could not manage two rashers – or for that matter one either. But he gulped his coffee avidly, not even taking time to deprecate in his mind the coarse manner in which the young man had referred to the womenfolk of the household. “But I don’t understand it,” he cried. “Nobody has told me anything. What is it?”
Shopland gave a shout of laughter. It wasn’t a kind of laughter in which Sir Leonard recalled his ever indulging before. “What is it?” he said. “It’s the case of the luminous dog. That’s what it is. The Case of the Luminous Dog. An English Holocaust. By James Shopland. Or by Sir Leonard Vause, if you like. It’s your donnée quite as much as mine.”
For a moment Sir Leonard remained silent. He was both unnerved and baffled. He supposed that Shopland had lost his reason; he even feared that whatever visitation had befallen Great Musters might presently take them all that way. The young man’s whole expression and bearing had changed. Was he simply excited? Was he in the grip of fear? Or was it conceivable – the possibility glimmered in Sir Leonard’s mind – that he could be both?
“Something in the air,” Shopland was saying. “It might be better to call it something in the ether. Except that ether is a term with rather old-fashioned associations. Nineteenth-century physics. And it’s twentieth-century physics we’re conjuring up.”
“Conjuring up?” Sir Leonard found himself increasingly bewildered. He couldn’t make out whether Shopland was offering a report or engaged in imagining things.
“You must remember,” Shopland said, “that I’m in a sensitised state. Shut up day after day in this bloody morgue, turning over the semi-decomposed stuff you call the Closet Papers, dodging those embalmed old women, and managing civil replies to all that putrifying civility you’re so hot on yourself.”
Sir Leonard wanted to repeat the phrase “civil replies” in a tone of just indignation. But he found his voice fail him.
“It might, of course, have a merely depressive effect. I might just go numb and not notice things. But in fact the effect is sensitising, as I’ve said. I’m in a state of hyperesthesia. Like Shelley, or whoever it was, being able to count the leaves on the tree at the other end of the park.”
But now Sir Leonard’s voice was restored to him. It broke from him angrily. “Will you stop talking nonsense,” he said, “and tell me what happened last night?”
“I got up and made a raid on the beer.” Shopland glanced at his companion with an odd effect of good- humoured surprise. “Because of having this feeling about the ether, or whatever you like to call it … I say, would you like another cup of coffee?”
Sir Leonard declined more coffee. He wondered why the offer of it perplexed him.
“I went downstairs in the dark. It wouldn’t have done to be pounced on. Particularly by you. You’d have supposed I was stalking Grace. And nothing would have persuaded you to the contrary.” Shopland laughed his new excited laugh. “Old men forget, you know. And forget that they forget. There were times, believe me, when you wanted a pint of beer a damned sight more than a wench. So you see—” Shopland broke off as if to listen. Then he relaxed again. “I thought they were coming for us,” he said. “But not yet.”
“Coming for us?” Sir Leonard was apprehensive. The expression had an ominous ring. He had a sense of being placed in some hideous borderland between fact and fantasy. Clearly he was in the presence of some real crisis or disaster. But equally he was in the presence of Shopland’s dramatic imagination. “What do you mean by coming for us?” he repeated angrily.
“To decide whether we must be put down. Like Chowder. It was Chowder that gave the show away. You see, I met him in the dark. Going for that beer. When can you see a black dog in the dark? Answer: when he’s luminous. Like your wrist-watch. Chowder was like that.”
“I don’t believe a word of it!”
“Well, of course, you must remember my hyper- aesthesia. Chowder mightn’t have shone for you. So let’s say merely that I noticed something pretty queer about the dog. You’ll take that?”
“Yes, I’ll take that.” Sir Leonard was relieved that Shopland seemed prepared to talk at least intermittent sense.
“I turned on some lights after all, and led him back to his basket. I noticed what I took at first to be a couple of bones. Only they weren’t bones. They were a sort of metal capsule – and pretty effectively gnawed through. A soft metal of some sort. And on one of them I could just distinguish some initials. A.E.R.E. That’s for Atomic Energy Research Establishment. Well, I made for the telephone. It’s something that this morgue has a telephone. And I must say those chaps have acted pretty quickly.”
Sir Leonard was silent for a moment. The quick action of those chaps, at least, was a solid objective fact. He could still hear the dull thudding from across the park. “And the place is really contaminated?” he asked.
“To an unbelievable degree. It seems there was a case in Holland some time ago, when a child brought home something or other lifted from a hospital. The whole house had to be quarantined for weeks. But it was nothing to this.”
There was another short silence. Sir Leonard was conscious of emotions of irritation and dismay. He was conscious too of a lurking sense that these were inadequate responses to the situation. “I must say,” he said crossly, “that you’ve told me this along with a great deal of unnecessary clowning. You said something about our being ‘put down’. I don’t think much of the joke. But no doubt we may die. They’re obviously prepared for that. Have they admitted regarding it as a certainty?”
“They don’t say much. And they’re not, by the way, going to have a great deal of truck with us. Of course they have all that protective clothing, and so forth. But it’s risky for them, all the same. For quite some time they’ll be here only for the bare minimum of scientific and humanitarian necessities. Food will be delivered. And no doubt you’ll get The Times. In fact, today’s has come already. I meant to give it to you.” Shopland paused. “Sorry I forgot.”
Sir Leonard was only faintly aware of the large unto
wardness inherent in James Shopland’s uttering a conventional apology. His mind was taken up by the havoc that this catastrophe must for long inflict upon the whole reasonable routine of his life. On Tuesday, he had been going up to town for the night to attend his dining club; on Thursday, he had thought of running over to Oxford to lunch with the Master of Balliol and spend a quiet couple of hours in the Bodleian library. And now he belonged to a leper colony. It was a leper colony, too, presided over by the tiresome old Agatha Callaway and cooked for by the disastrously degenerate Mrs Lumley. “You mean to say,” he demanded, “that we’re going to be shut up here? That fence is to keep us in as well as other people out?”
“Certainly. Barbed wire used to be mainly for keeping people out. Now it’s mainly—isn’t it?—for keeping them in. And that’s us, all right. We can’t go away. We can’t even be taken away. Or not while alive. We’re much too dangerous. You might call it an authentic hundred-per-cent taboo. And in Berkshire. It’s pretty tremendous, that. Wouldn’t you say?”
Sir Leonard found something disagreeable in this attempt to glamorise a grotesque situation. He found Shopland’s expression – strained and somehow vividly alive – disagreeable too. “At least,” he said rather ill- naturedly, “it will give you an opportunity to get on with that interesting play.”
“No good. No good at all.” Shopland threw back his head, so that his long untidy hair rose like a cloud and fell back again. “Not a patch on this.”
“On this?” Sir Leonard was outraged but acute. “You’d ditch your monks and Russians in favour of poor Lady Callaway and myself? You’d make Great Musters your desert island, your derelict drifting liner? Just a nice touch of novelty to a well-worn theme, eh?”
The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories Page 15