The grey fields were abruptly blocked by a more solid anonymity, the streets of Lower Brichester, suffocating individuality, erasing it through lifetimes. Whenever he'd walked through these streets with Jack on the short route to the pub each glance of Jack's had reminded him that he was part of this anonymity, this inertia. But no longer, he told himself. Signs of life were sparse; a postman cycled creaking by; beyond a window an announcer laughed; a cat curled among milk-bottles. The door was rolled down on a pinball arcade, and a girl in a cheap fur coat was leaping about in the doorway of a boutique to keep herself warm until the keys arrived. Rice felt eyes finger the girl, then revert to him; they had watched him since the beginning of the journey, although the figure seemed to face always forward. Rice glanced at the other; he was gazing in the direction of his stride, and the scar wrinkled with a faint sneer. Soon now, Rice thought, and a block of ice grew in his stomach while the glazing of the pavement cracked beneath his feet.
They passed a square foundation enshrining a rusty pram; here a bomb had blown a house asunder. The next street, Rice realized, and dug his nails into the rubber of the torch in his pocket. The blitz had almost bypassed Brichester; here and there one passed from curtained windows to a gaping building, eventually rebuilt if in the town, neglected in Lower Brichester. Was this the key? Had someone been driven underground by blitz conditions, or had something been released by bombing? In either case, what form of camouflage would they have to adopt to live? Rice thought he knew, but he didn't want to think it through; he wanted to put an end to it. And round a corner the abandoned house focused into view.
A car purred somewhere; the pavement was faintly numbered for hopscotch. Rice gazed about covertly; there must be nobody in sight. And at his side the figure did the same. Terrified, Rice yet had to repress a nervous giggle. "There's the house," he said. "I suppose you'll want to go in."
"If you've got something to show me." The scar wrinkled again.
Bricks were heaped in what had been the garden; ice glistened in their pores. Rice could see nothing through the windows, which were shuttered with tin. A grey corrugated sheet had been peeled back from the doorway; it scraped painfully at Rice's ankle as he entered.
The light was dim; he gripped his torch. Above him a shattered skylight illuminated a staircase full of holes through which moist dust fell. To his right a door, one panel gouged out, still hung from a hinge. He hurried into the room, kicking a stray brick.
The fireplace gaped, half curtained by a hanging strip of wallpaper. Otherwise the room was bare, deserted probably for years. Of course the people of the neighbourhood didn't have to know exactly what was here to be afraid. In the hall tin rasped. Rice ran into the kitchen, ahead on the left. Fog had penetrated through a broken window; it filled his mouth as he panted. Opposite the cloven sink he saw a door. He wrenched it open, and in the other room the brick clattered. Rice's hands were gloved in frozen iron; his nails were shards of ice thrust into his fingertips, melting into his blood. One hand clutched towards the back door. He tottered forward and heard the children scream, thought once of Harriet, saw the figures on the cliff. I'm not a hero! he mouthed. How in God's name did I get here? And the answer came: because he'd never really believed what he'd suspected. But the torch was shining, and he swung it down the steps beyond the door.
They led into a cellar; bricks were scattered on the floor, bent knives and forks, soiled plates leading the torch-beam to tattered blankets huddled against the walls, others hinted in the shadows. And in one corner lay a man, surrounded by tins and a strip of the corrugated metal. The body glistened. Trembling, his mouth gaping at the stench which thickened the air, Rice descended, and the torch's circle shrank. The man in the corner was dressed in red. Rice moved nearer. With a shock he realized that the man was naked, shining with red paint which also marked the tins and strip of metal. Suddenly he wrenched away and retched.
For a moment he was engulfed by nausea; then he heard footsteps in the kitchen. His fingers burned like wax and blushed at their clumsiness, but he caught up a brick. "You've found what you expected, have you?" the voice called. Rice reached the steps, and a figure loomed above him, blotting out the light. With studied calm it felt round in the kitchen and produced a strip of corrugated tin. "I'm only sorry that you couldn't have had another talk with Harriet," it said. "You see, I take my wife everywhere." Rice had no time to think; focusing his horror, fear and disgust with his lifetime of inaction, he threw the brick.
Rice was shaking by the time he had finished. He picked up the torch from the bottom step and as if compelled turned its beam on the two corpses. Yes, they were of the same stature—they would have been identical, except that the face of the first was an abstract crimson oval. Rice shuddered away from his fascination. He must see Harriet—it didn't matter what excuse he gave, illness or anything, so long as he saw her. He shone the beam towards the steps to light his way, and the torch was wrested from his hand.
He didn't think; he threw himself up the steps and into the kitchen. The lock and bolts on the back door had been rusted shut for years. Footsteps padded up the steps. He fell into the other room. Outside an ambulance howled its way to hospital. Almost tripping on the brick, he reached the hall. The ambulance's blue light flashed in the doorway and passed, and a figure with a grey sock covering its face blocked the doorway.
Rice backed away. No, he thought in despair, he couldn't fail now; the fall from the cliff had ended the menace. But already he knew. He backed into something soft, and a hand closed over his mouth. The figure plodded towards him; the grey wool sucked in and out. The figure was his height, his build. He heard himself saying: "I can always help to look after the children." And as the figure grasped a brick he knew what face waited beneath the wool.
WARP by Ralph Norton
I did not murder Paul Ledderman. I'm not quite sure what I did to him, but it was not murder. Self-defence maybe, but not murder.
If I had to prove it, I should produce a leather gauntlet turned inside out; a newspaper cutting now rather yellowed but still readable enough to be startling; and a spiral sea-shell called Turritella communis (not that I know one end of a clam from the other, but I had it looked over by Peterson, the marine biologist, and he's paid to know). But I shall not have to prove it. Ledderman's body was not found and never will be, which is perhaps as well for the sanity of the doctors who would have been required to certify death.
I went down to Ledderman's place last autumn at his request. It was an astonishing request. I had not seen him for five years; no-one had except perhaps the postman and an occasional delivery-man bringing up supplies from the whistle-stop at Spring Bottom, twenty miles off down the valley. He lived in a self-designed servo-house at Spring Top, a lonely spot with a view in four directions. I don't know how much that house cost him: half-a-crown for the plot, maybe, and half a million pounds for the stuff on top. It was more than real-estate, it was a one-man community with plate-glass trimmings; a rib-cage of steel and concrete, all space and light; a machine for living in—and for working in. Enough power to feed a factory was piped up from a hydro-head a quarter of a mile away; outbuildings housed a mass of electronics; and the house itself ran Ledderman's daily life like a mother. It conditioned his air, cooked his food (mostly canned, and stocked up about once a quarter), washed his clothes, made his bed, extracted dust from its polished insides twice a day by suction and electrostatics, ran his bath and disposed of garbage. It fell short of a wife in only two respects (one being the habit of giving advice). Ledderman had decided to dispense with both.
He had disappeared to this monastery with modern conveniences in 1964. The house was about as far ahead of its time in those days as Ledderman was (to say nothing of his lab equipment) and he had some difficulty at first in keeping out the technical press on the one hand and the women's journals on the other. But persistent silence and electric fences eventually discouraged even the female journalists, and by 1966 or so only the occasional playboy in a 'copter, po
inting out the Ledderman place to the latest playgirl, disturbed his solitary confinement.
He dropped his friends one by one, though a few continued to see him occasionally until as late as the spring of 1966, myself included. After that some of us got Christmas cards (if you care to call a few words scribbled on the back of a file-slip a Christmas card) and I continued to get a letter or two. But they said little and I sometimes wondered whether, among other things, Paul hadn't designed himself an automatic letter-writer with a built-in gadget for losing friends and failing to influence people. I was sore, but there it was. I had other things on my mind at the time (of which two have now reached an age of alleged discretion and the other does most of the things which Ledderman had fixed for himself by electronics and some which I, personally, think he made a mistake in omitting).
The letter which reached me in September, 1967, came therefore as a shock. For one thing, it was hand-written, which was unusual in itself. For another, it was very curiously worded: rambling, stilted and containing a very pressing invitation to go down and see him which was nevertheless made to sound about as attractive—and unavoidable—as a drafting notice. But the most curious thing of all was the way the letter was set out. Each line by itself made some sort of sense, though incomplete; but the sense did not follow on from line to line. I lost that letter when Ledderman was killed and I can't quote from it, but the sort of mess it was in shows up something like this:
of a fix, but also on the verge of something
see you without delay. I'm in a kind
long silence stand in the way. I must
For God's Sake, Steve, don't let our
There was no 'Dear Steve' and there was no signature or I might have worked it out sooner. It looked mad and sounded worse. I felt the back of my scalp creep a little as I read over that long collection of urgent phrases, each of which rose out of nowhere from the left-hand margin and stopped dead on the brink of a precipice on the right. They read like cries for help, coming in by VHF across half the world and getting cut off at intervals by something odd going on in the ionosphere—or at the transmitting end. I wasn't all that much relieved when I figured out that the way it read was from the bottom up. I've seen automatic translators do this kind of thing, but men don't. Not unless they're pretty sick men—or Leonardo da Vinci.
And Leonardo wrote his left hand backwards. It makes sense to read certain pages of the Notebooks with a mirror placed at the top of the page. The whole thing inverts: left becomes right and top bottom at the same time. But to write forwards while setting out the lines from the bottom up seemed to make no sense at all.
Unless Paul had written that letter with his left hand not only back to front but also from bottom to top (which seems to come naturally to the really devoted left-hander if he lets himself go, as the Old Master sometimes did). And then—? Well then—he turns the page over and miraculously causes the writing to rise through the surface and appear on the new side: left to right, of course, but still bottom to top. But why do a thing like that to an old friend; and how the hell, anyway? Especially if, like Paul, you happen to be right-handed.
It took me forty-eight hours to persuade Judy that I should go and see Paul—I thought it best not to show her the letter and she was inclined to think that Paul had a nerve after all these years, especially with Jimmy running a temperature, and so on—and another twenty hours to get down there.
It was already dark by the time I turned the car up the valley from Spring Bottom. It was also very lonely and bad going. The dirt road led nowhere except to the Ledderman place and I doubt that it carried more than a dozen trips a year by Johnson's delivery van bringing provisions off the train or the local postman. Paul himself kept a car but I heard later that it was a good eighteen months since his last rare visit to the bottom of the valley. He was rumoured, in the village, to have one or two curious qualities (a piercing look and a habit of talking to himself, for example), and the kids were sometimes kept in order by a few soft words, after sundown, about the Man at Spring Top. But Spring Bottom is the sort of place which clings to superstition and outdoor sanitation, and will probably have both till the next century or the one after that.
About a quarter of a mile from the Ledderman place I came to the ring-fence. My headlights picked out one of the "DANGER" signs that hung at intervals of twenty yards or so along its whole length. (They had more psychological value than real significance: Ledderman's voltage was well within regulations and about calculated to stun a rabbit. But the effect was good.)
The house itself was screened by the trees which Paul had imported some time back and I could not make out much in the darkness. In the old days Paul had used to greet his visitors at the gate, but this time there was no-one around—except one of his electronic minions. As I edged the car forward a part of the electric fence swung inwards leaving an entrance, though not a very inviting one. I don't like gates that open themselves by night.
I drove in and edged up the drive. I didn't feel too happy at the way that gate clanged to behind me. It was a decisive noise. I was tempted to back up the car and see if the electronic butler worked from the inside as well; but I have my pride, and I drove on.
I came round the screen of trees and pulled up. The house was much as I remembered it: a lovely thing; a delicate platform of steel and concrete, floating in the darkness, one-storied and sparkling with light. Every room along the front and also along the one side I could see was illuminated from within, as though the lights had been left on by someone who preferred not to be without them. Yet they intensified the darkness. The brilliant illumination, punctuated by the steel uprights, cast a kind of frontier along the edge of the gravel path. It made the blackness look blacker, if you know what I mean. Ahead of me, and off to one side of the house, the car-port slid back its metal doors. "Thanks, chum," I thought, without much gratitude. I drove in. The doors shut behind me, politely but firmly. I revved up the engine for a second or two and switched off. In the intense silence which followed I saw that a man was waiting for me at another exit from the carport which joined the house by a covered way.
A man can change a bit in three years. He can grow to look older, more lined, more mature. Paul had changed more than that, though. There was an oddness about his look which is not easy to describe. If I had passed him in the street, I think I would have "known that I knew him" without being able to put a name to the memory. He looked ill and tired; the eyes were deeper set than I remembered and showing a little too much of the whites. But there were other changes—which I could not analyse—in the contours of the face and the set of the body. There was a kind of family likeness to the Paul Ledderman I remembered, but I would not have been prepared to stand in a witness-box and swear to the identity. And I must admit that he seemed to find me about as unfamiliar.
"Steve Kassner," he said softly. It was almost a question, half way to being a cautious guess—as though at that famous meeting in the African wilderness Livingstone had said, Mr. Stanley—I presume?" It was perhaps the first time in fifteen years that he had used my second name.
I felt a sense almost of something uncanny in that greeting, and I was shocked by the oddness of his stare. I held out my hand a little self-consciously. There was a curious pause. He looked down uncertainly at his own hands and seemed to make a conscious choice between them. After a moment's hesitation he took my arm in his left hand and drew me towards the house. Under the brilliant illumination of the covered way I noted the flash of a white bandage encircling each wrist; also that he was limping slightly. The sense of shock strengthened. Something at the back of my mind whispered, "Who is this man?" and "What has become of Paul?"
Looking back on that evening, I'd say now that Paul Ledderman was already dead at that moment, had in fact died at some uncertain time between 1964 and 1967. And I don't say this just to pretend that what followed doesn't matter.
Maybe the last time I ever really saw Paul Ledderman was in 1964, three years before that ev
ening. And yet who can say? Maybe the last time was in the small hours of September 10th, 1967, the morning which followed. It would take a smarter person than I am to work out the philosophical niceties of that problem. I still get to brooding about it at night, when there is no moon, and the blackness outside my house looks like a frontier and the great windows in their steel frames throw up a memory of the glass door opening into Paul's house off the covered way. As we came up to that door, two faces looked out from it: mine and Paul's. And Paul's face was suddenly the face I knew, thrown back into proper shape, with some of the illness and all of the strangeness wiped out of it. Two thoughts rattled through my head. The first went with an impulse to turn round and shout, "Paul!" and to clap him on the shoulder and to say something bawdy and friendly. The second thought was that if the man in the glass was Paul—the real Paul, trapped in another dimension behind that transparent barrier—the man beside me was not.
Maybe, after all, the last time I saw Paul was on the other side of a sheet of quarter-inch glass on the evening of September 9th, 1967. Who can say?
We pushed open the door, the image in the glass swept away into whatever void is inhabited by such things, and I was left alone with a stranger called Paul Ledderman.
He led me along a corridor into the spacious room, part library, part study, which, as I remembered, looked out by day across the valley to the plains country beyond Spring Bottom. He began mixing a drink but his arms seemed to be giving him trouble and he handed me the shaker.
"Steve," he said after a while, "I think I owe you an explanation."
"I guess you do—Paul." It was an effort to use his first name. I kept telling myself that this was Paul Ledderman, the man who had been perhaps my closest friend until he shut himself up in this glass cage on a mountain-top; that the sense of oddness, almost of danger, was something thrown up by the lapse of five years; that presently we should get back onto the old footing; that the image in the glass door, if it meant anything at all except a trick of the light, meant that it really was Paul Ledderman who sat opposite me, holding a tall glass in his left hand. But all the time I felt like Little Red Ridinghood. What strange eyes you have, Ledderman, what bandaged wrists, what a lopsided, left-handed look! Are you a wolf in Paul's clothing, Ledderman? What has become of Paul; or, rather, what have you done with Paul, Ledderman? What lies under the bandages and behind that crooked look, which try as I may, I cannot quite get into proper perspective—except as an image in a plate-glass door?
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