Walking Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  Foxe had been led from the breakfast-room by another of the white-jacketed servants, elderly and plump, with the solid walk of the traditional butler but with a haggard, greyish face and ceaselessly flickering side-glances. This man had shown him into a much smaller room, windowless, with a curious sweet reek in the air. After a few minutes another door had opened and two men had come in, the first moon-faced, yellow-grey, enormously fat, a little shorter than Foxe, wearing a crumpled linen suit; the second another palace servant, but with the rubber muscled face of a professional boxer. All in one sentence the second man had said, “His Excellency Doctor Timothy Trotter President of the Southward Islands tell him your name, mister.”

  “I’m Doctor David Foxe, your excellency.”

  At a nudge from the servant Doctor Timothy had moved forward, extending his right hand for Foxe to shake. His fingers seemed to have no bones in them. He began to mumble in a gasping bass that made the loose folds of flesh round his chin, like the pouches of a male orang, quiver in sympathy with the incomprehensible syllables.

  “I’m very honoured to be staying here,” said Foxe when he paused.

  The servant had nodded, touched Doctor Timothy on the elbow and led him away. The first servant, who had been waiting by the door, had then shown Foxe to this other room and left him here.

  Although he was standing at the window, watching the work of the harbour, Foxe didn’t notice the Consul’s arrival because he was distracted by a belch of black-and-yellow smoke up the cliff face. It was so large and sudden that it looked like a signal—of the election of an anti-pope, perhaps—but then the ancient steam-engine emerged into daylight and with its extraordinary waddle chuntered into the sheds. Only when the smoke cleared did Foxe notice that the helicopter had returned to the landing-strip and its rotors were still moving.

  A fat little man wearing a pale blue suit and carrying a black brief-case climbed down. A soldier, not Captain Angiah, followed and pointed directions. The man in the blue suit began to walk along the quay, unescorted. Soon he was visibly European. There was something about his walk—a rapid but short-striding bustle, a sense of hurry without actually moving at all fast, a likelihood that he was about to trip over something and fall flat on his face—that extinguished the last flicker of Foxe’s hopes; and when at length Mr Palamine was shown into the room this impression became still stronger. He picked his way between the chairs, smiling with the affable smug in comprehension of a cuckold in a French farce.

  “Well, well,” he said. “Doctor Foxe, I believe. We’re in a bit of a mess, aren’t we?”

  “You make it sound as though I was in hospital and I’d been sick in my bed,” said Foxe.

  “Do I? Palamine’s the name. Oh, you’re not in any serious trouble. Time will come when you look back on all this and laugh, I daresay. Now, let’s sit down while I take a few details, name, next of kin, passport … I imagine they’ve nobbled your passport, though.”

  “That’s right. But I made them give me a receipt, with the number.”

  “Good man. Shall we sit here?”

  They settled side by side onto, or rather into, a too luxurious sofa and Mr Palamine took notes of Foxe’s history and predicament, pausing almost between every question to gaze round the room or out of the window. His hand trembled as he wrote and he kept licking his lips.

  “That’s all,” said Foxe at last. “Now the point is this. It’s very simple. The Prime Minister asked the Company I work for to lend me to him to do a job. I was going to refuse, but then this happened. His line is that now I’ve got to stay here anyway, so I might as well do the job. Is that right? Can he insist on my staying?”

  “Oh, I should think so, Doctor Foxe. Indeed I should think so. First time I’ve been to the President’s Palace, but in my opinion you’re very well off as you are. Last case I had like this was a sommelier from one of the hotels on Hog’s Cay—a Gibraltarian, as a matter of fact. Silly fellow.”

  He paused, smiling softly, as if in pleasurable contemplation at the idiocy of British subjects who get into trouble in foreign parts.

  “What happened to him?” prompted Foxe.

  “Gone to one of the dance-houses the night it was raided.”

  “That sounds fairly harmless.”

  “A dance-house is different from a dance-hall, my dear chap. Curious practices, not to say, er, disgusting. My bloke was only there out of curiosity, he said, but they flung him in the hoosegow with the rest. Took me three weeks to get him out.”

  “Three weeks?”

  “Oh, don’t pin any hopes on that. Special case. That’s to say I worked a wangle. I got a line on the Minister of Tourism. In fact I took his sister and brother-in-law out to dinner at my chappie’s hotel, and fixed to have them served with warm champagne and shook-up claret, and told them what a pity it was that the fellow who knew how to do the job right was in jail, and what damage that was doing to the tourist trade. He was out next day.”

  Mr Palamine nodded, smugger than ever at his own astuteness.

  “But …” began Foxe.

  “Wait a moment, my dear chap. I haven’t got to the point yet. What I wanted to tell you was that this chap had a pretty rough time of it till I got him out. Eight in his cell, one with DTs and one with dysentery, and that was on Hog’s Cay. Prisons on Main Island are—well, one doesn’t care to criticise, but I’d be surprised if they were better than the ones on Hog’s Cay. So I’d say you were pretty well off here.”

  “Look, so far I’ve been told that I’ve got to be under arrest because that’s the law. But they let your wine waiter out, law or no law. So why …”

  Mr Palamine stopped smiling and sucked his lips in, shaking his head slowly from side to side.

  “That is not the kind of point I would advise you to take, Doctor Foxe,” he said. “In your position, the more valid an argument is, the less tactful it becomes.”

  “What you’re telling me is that I’ve bloody well got to go along with them or they’ll put me in a real jail and keep me there as long as they like. Aren’t you going to do anything?”

  “Of course I am. I shall cable London immediately. I shall point out that you are accepting this job under protest … you are accepting it, aren’t you? I strongly advise that.”

  “I suppose so. Listen. What about Ladyblossom?”

  “Who?”

  “The woman whose body I found, for God’s sake! Now listen, can you check that they’re doing something about clearing that up? They sound quite capable of dragging their feet over it just to keep me here as long as they want. In fact, can you check that the old biddy’s dead at all? I’m beginning to think that the whole thing might be a charade, just to get me here and keep me here, because they’d worked out I wasn’t going to come unless I had to.”

  Afterwards Foxe tried to work out how long this notion might have been floating around, a vague unformulated unease below the surface of rational thought, before his tongue so suddenly brought it to his mind’s attention. Now, having said it, he paused to think it out. Was there anything to support it? Captain Angiah had arrived remarkably pat. The skin diver in Fall Bay might after all have heard Foxe say he wasn’t going to Main Island at any price. He could have radioed … Ladyblossom’s arm had still been warm … on the other hand Charley’s glimpsed face had shown real fear and horror … Perhaps she was dead, killed just to fix Foxe. Were they capable of that? Were there any moral limits to caprice? None, Dreiser would say … and why the hell was Quentin loose?

  “Oh, come,” said Mr Palamine patiently. “They could hardly hold you if the lady wasn’t dead, could they?”

  “There might be a so-called failure of communication, mightn’t there?”

  “All right, all right. I’ll do my best to check. But …”

  “And check what she died of, if she did. I mean, suppose it was only a heart-attack, after all … Have you h
eard of snake-apple poison?”

  “Can’t say I have,” said Mr Palamine, rising and gazing at the view. “Look, Doctor Foxe, I’m going to do what I can for you, though honestly I think your company’s got a lot more leverage than I have. I’ll be in touch with them, of course. I’ll cable London, and I’ll make it clear that you’re taking the job under protest, so we’ve got that position reserved. I’ll find out what I can about the murder. But when all’s said and done I don’t think you’ve got a lot to worry about. I mean, it isn’t as though you were one of those beggars there.”

  He gestured towards the harbour and Foxe stood up to see what he was talking about. At the far end of the quay the gates of the castle had been thrown open and for a moment—rather as one sometimes sees a face or an animal in just one place among the repeated pattern of roses on a wall paper—the castle became a face, a stone mask of tragedy propped against the black cliff. The crenellations were its crown; two wide slits, cut later then the other fortifications to take more modern weapons, were its eyes; it had no nose, but the black arch of the gateway was its wailing mouth, out of which a drab tongue began to protrude. Foxe shut his eyes and shook his head, letting the blood which his sudden rising had drained from his tired brain come back. The mask was gone. A gang of men, guarded by soldiers, was being marched out of the castle gate. Foxe realised all at once how the dock got its labour force.

  “They’ll be on indefinite sentences,” muttered Mr Palamine.

  “Jesus! What do you get that for?”

  “Political.”

  Foxe, Captain Angiah and Mr Palamine walked back along the quay together. Once again they had to halt and wait for the engine to pass, and this time Foxe watched it with a sense not of strangeness but of familiarity; the feeling puzzled him for a moment, because he knew it traced back to long before yesterday, and then he found that his mind had meshed unlikely images together, human and mechanical. The machine was a Dreiserism, in fact it was very like Dreiser himself, in its jerky and flailing motions, its intricacy and inefficiency, its huge effort to moderate ends … This time too, because he had approached from the opposite direction, Foxe saw the driver and fireman leap from the footplate just as the cliff began to swallow its meal of smoke and iron. Mr Palamine chattered questions which Captain Angiah answered in mutters and monosyllables, strangely more contemptuous than his earlier replies to Foxe. Together they saw the Consul into the Presidential helicopter and then stood clear while it battered its way aloft.

  “Now I must show you your animals,” said Captain Angiah, pitching his voice above the thudding of retreating rotors and at once turning on his heel.

  I won’t do it.

  Afterwards it was impossible to remember at what point Foxe realised what he was being asked, or ordered, to do. Was it at once, clued by the dryness of the Captain’s tone and the manner of his turning? Was it as they were ducking through the little wicket in the vast, iron-studded gate? Foxe would have liked to think so, but in that case why had he said nothing, merely gazing with a growing sense of uneasy dread at the scene inside the castle wall? In a way it was like Back Town all over again. The courtyard was about fifty feet deep from the gate to the cliff, but four or five times as wide between the two points where the masonry met the living rock, and the whole of this area was crammed with ramshackle hutments, far larger than the Back Town houses but with the same improvised and tumbledown air. The place stank.

  As Captain Angiah led the way through this muttering barracks towards the cliff, Foxe’s sense of dread increased. It was this that later made hindsight so difficult. At one point he was looking, weary and frightened but still with daytime eyes, at the prison camp and the castle, and next everything became wavering and monstrous through the lens of fear. Not even the normal processes of self-respect, which after a crisis tuck away the loose ends of nightmare and repattern one’s cowardice and stupidity into a memory one can live with, could change that. Fear was, and remained, the major colour of the next few minutes—like one of those obscure Rembrandt etchings so hatched with that seeing it one is more conscious of the experience of ink than of anything the picture portrays—a blackness, in the middle of which something is happening.

  In a clearing of consciousness Foxe waited swaying at the door of a hut by the cliff while Captain Angiah, just inside the door, snapped orders at a lounging soldier, who picked up a telephone and spoke. Outlined against the brilliant sky and seeming black as masonry and cliff two soldiers manned a machine-gun on the castle rampart. Laughing they traversed it across the courtyard and sighted on Foxe. A motor purred. Captain Angiah shouted angrily at the men with the gun, then took Foxe by the elbow and led him between still-sliding doors into the cliff.

  “Volcano made this one too,” he said.

  “Uh.”

  Even in his stupor Foxe was aware that the tunnel was not man-made, only man-improved. It was lit by electricity and its floor was smooth, but the walls and roof were unchanged since the raging gases of the volcano had burst out through the rock, leaving a tunnel that widened and narrowed erratically, like the intestine of a stone giant. It seemed to suck Foxe along; his legs, against all his mind’s desires, followed the Captain’s loping stride as if they’d been taken over by his autonomous nervous system. These effects he later guessed had a cause outside the rationale of nightmare, because the tunnel sloped steadily down, swinging to the right as it did so. The sharp lights passed like the hammer-pulse of fever. The air was dry and cool and almost odourless after the reek of the castle courtyard. The Captain’s crêpe-soled boots set up soft whimpering echoes, the footsteps of invisible companions. The lights were too close together to cast any real shadows, Foxe longed to fall, to crumple, to faint and be unconscious, but his legs refused even to stumble.

  And then there was an end. A big man seemed to emerge from the tunnel wall and saluted Captain Angiah, beyond whom the monotonous glare of the tunnel changed. There was a brighter, whiter light below and real darkness above, and between them a sharp line of black which Foxe only focused into a handrail when Captain Angiah stopped, leaned on it and looked down. Foxe’s legs drifted him forward to stand beside him.

  “There are your animals,” said Captain Angiah.

  “I won’t do it,” said Foxe, speaking all at once with the clarity and firmness of plain day.

  They had come out from the tunnel onto a narrow timber gallery which ran out of sight along the rock face to left and right. The handrail was its balcony, and beyond that was a huge pit, fiercely lit. The effect was as if Foxe was standing on one of the lower tiers of a Roman circus arena. Up here was safety and relaxation—a couple of soldiers, a few feet along the gallery to Foxe’s right, were lounging against the rail, smoking, bored; down there on the pocked and scuttered sand were the victims of the show. The lights were fixed below the gallery, leaving it in deep shadow and thus adding to the sense of privacy and security. The difference between the two levels was only about twenty feet, but it seemed as sharp as the difference between night and day.

  Foxe didn’t at once grasp the size of this cavern. Later, when he was used to it, he guessed that a great plug of lava must have risen inside the rock like a piston rising up a cylinder, compressing above it the superheated gases which had first melted this bubble in the solid rock and then escaped along the fumarole which was now the entrance tunnel. Then, miles below the surface, the pressure had eased and the lava plug had sunk, again like a piston, leaving this pit. No doubt there were other tunnels, many undiscovered, riddling the now-cold rock, a meaningless maze. There was the one along which the mad engine crawled, too.

  But for the moment all Foxe saw was an over-arching darkness beneath which on the flood-lit arena was a kind of crude encampment through which men moved. Foxe’s words came back as echo, hovering in the dark.

  “I won’t do it.”

  3

  Negotiations. No doubt, Foxe slowly realised, this ha
d all been foreseen—not in exact detail of how he would behave, but as far as the need to weaken him with loss of sleep and to disorientate him with sudden changes from horror to luxury and back, from sympathy to insolence. They sat, Foxe and Captain Angiah, in a small room above the castle gateway, part office, part bedroom with filing cabinets along one wall, a table with an ancient typewriter in the middle, and beneath the window a mattress and tousled blankets. The place smelt of sour old sweat, and tobacco, and stale food, all mixed with the more excremental odours of the courtyard. Captain Angiah never lost his monotonous calm, but Foxe’s own voice slithered uncontrollably along the gamut between scream and wheedle. Occasionally this antiphone was varied by the Prime Minister’s bass coming through the radio set. Foxe didn’t know how much he listened, but Angiah sometimes seemed unable to contact him to settle a point—or pretended to be.

  Foxe had always refused to read stories, whether fact or fiction, about torture and interrogation, or to listen to victims, however brave and worthy, talking about their experiences on radio or TV. Why should he be got at with other people’s sufferings? Even so, despite this willed ignorance, he was aware that a bond tends to build up between oppressor and oppressed, and was only surprised by the speed with which this happened. He could detect no sign of response to his feeling in Captain Angiah, who maintained throughout a formality which became yet more punctilious the more obscene were the threats and pressures he had to apply. At first Foxe longed for some flicker of feeling to show in the fine, ascetic countenance—rage or impatience would have done—anything to prove that the man was more than a totally neutral tool in the hands of the monster at the other end of the radio link. Then, slowly, he began to persuade himself that the relationship wasn’t like that—not monster/tool/victim but monster/victim/victim—that Doctor Trotter had set them down in this arena as gladiators, so that he could watch the contest with Olympian amusement. If so, Captain Angiah was fighting with a far more admirable style than Foxe, stoic and professional in his degradation. Discovering this, Foxe managed to pull himself together a little. Perhaps it wasn’t true. Perhaps the Captain was enjoying his work. But even imagining that he might not be was a help.