by John Wyndham
‘M. B.?’ she inquired, vaguely.
‘Bachelor of Medicine. I practise medicine,’ I told her.
She went on looking at me curiously. Her eyes wandered over my mountainous form, uncertainly.
‘You are claiming to be a doctor?’ she said, in an odd voice.
‘Colloquially – yes,’ I agreed.
There was indignation mixed with bewilderment as she protested:
‘But this is sheer nonsense! You were brought up and developed to be a Mother. You are a Mother. Just look at you!’
‘Yes,’ I said, bitterly. ‘Just look at me!’
There was a pause.
‘It seems to me,’ I suggested at last, ‘that, hallucination or not, we shan’t get much further simply by going on accusing one another of talking nonsense. Suppose you explain to me what this place is, and who you think I am. It might jog my memory.’
She countered that. ‘Suppose,’ she said, ‘that first you tell me what you can remember. It would give me more idea of what is puzzling you.’
‘Very well,’ I agreed, and launched upon a potted history of myself as far as I could recollect it – up to the time, that is to say, when Donald’s aircraft crashed.
It was foolish of me to fall for that one. Of course, she had no intention of telling me anything. When she had listened to all I had to say, she went away, leaving me impotently furious.
I waited until the place quietened down. The music had been switched off. An attendant had looked in to inquire, with an air of polishing off the day’s duties, whether there was anything I wanted, and presently there was nothing to be heard. I let a margin of half an hour elapse, and then struggled to get up – taking it by very easy stages this time. The greatest part of the effort was to get on to my feet from a sitting position, but I managed it at the cost of heavy breathing. Presently I crossed to the door, and found it unfastened. I held it a little open, listening. There was no sound of movement in the corridor, so I pulled it wide open, and set out to discover what I could about the place. All the doors of the rooms were shut. Putting my ear close to them I could hear regular, heavy breathing behind some, but there were no other sounds in the stillness. I kept on, turning several corners, until I recognized the front door ahead of me. I tried the latch, and found that it was neither barred nor bolted. I paused again, listening for some moments, and then pulled it open and stepped outside.
The park-like garden stretched out before me, sharp-shadowed in the moonlight. Through the trees to the right was a glint of water, to the left was a house similar to the one behind me, with not a light showing in any of its windows.
I wondered what to do next. Trapped in this huge carcass, all but helpless in it, there was very little I could do, but I decided to go on and at least find out what I could while I had the chance. I went forward to the edge of the steps that I had earlier climbed from the ambulance, and started down them cautiously, holding on to the balustrade.
‘Mother,’ said a sharp, incisive voice behind me. ‘What are you doing?’
I turned and saw one of the little women, her white suit gleaming in the moonlight. She was alone. I made no reply, but took another step down. I could have wept at the outrage of the heavy, ungainly body, and the caution it imposed on me.
‘Come back. Come back at once,’ she told me.
I took no notice. She came pattering down after me and laid hold of my draperies.
‘Mother,’ she said again. ‘You must come back. You’ll catch cold out here.’
I started to take another step, and she pulled at the draperies to hold me back. I leant forward against the pull. There was a sharp tearing sound as the material gave. I swung round, and lost my balance. The last thing I saw was the rest of the flight of steps coming up to meet me …
As I opened my eyes a voice said:
‘That’s better, but it was very naughty of you, Mother Orchis. And lucky it wasn’t a lot worse. Such a silly thing to do. I’m ashamed of you – really I am.’
My head was aching, and I was exasperated to find that the whole stupid business was still going on; altogether, I was in no mood for reproachful drip. I told her to go to hell. Her small face goggled at me for a moment, and then became icily prim. She applied a piece of lint and plaster to the left side of my forehead, in silence, and then departed, stiffly.
Reluctantly, I had to admit to myself that she was perfectly right. What on earth had I been expecting to do – what on earth could I do, encumbered by this horrible mass of flesh? A great surge of loathing for it and a feeling of helpless frustration brought me to the verge of tears again. I longed for my own nice, slim body that pleased me and did what I asked of it. I remembered how Donald had once pointed to a young tree swaying in the wind, and introduced it to me as my twin sister. And only a day or two ago …
Then, suddenly, I made a discovery which brought me struggling to sit up. The blank part of my mind had filled up. I could remember everything … The effort made my head throb, so I relaxed and lay back once more, recalling it all, right up to the point where the needle was withdrawn and someone swabbed my arm …
But what had happened after that? Dreams and hallucinations I had expected … but not the sharp-focused, detailed sense of reality … not this state which was like a nightmare made solid …
What, what in heaven’s name, had they done to me …?
I must have fallen asleep again, for when I opened my eyes there was daylight outside, and a covey of little women had arrived to attend to my toilet.
They spread their sheets dexterously and rolled me this way and that with expert technique as they cleaned me up. I suffered their industry patiently, feeling the fresher for it, and glad to discover that the headache had all but gone.
When we were almost at the end of our ablutions there came a peremptory knock, and without invitation two figures, dressed in black uniforms with silver buttons, entered. They were the Amazon type, tall, broad, well set-up, and handsome. The little women dropped everything and fled with squeaks of dismay into the far corner of the room where they cowered in a huddle.
The two gave me the familiar salute. With an odd mixture of decision and deference one of them inquired:
‘You are Orchis – Mother Orchis?’
‘That’s what they’re calling me,’ I admitted.
The girl hesitated, then, in a tone rather more pleading than ordering, she said:
‘I have orders for your arrest, Mother. You will please come with us.’
An excited, incredulous twittering broke out among the little women in the corner. The uniformed girl quelled them with a look.
‘Get the Mother dressed and make her ready,’ she commanded.
The little women came out of their corner hesitantly, directing nervous, propitiatory smiles towards the pair. The second one told them briskly, though not altogether unkindly:
‘Come along now. Jump to it.’
They jumped.
I was almost swathed in my pink draperies again when the doctor strode in. She frowned at the two in uniform.
‘What’s all this? What are you doing here?’ she demanded.
The leader of the two explained.
‘Arrest!’ exclaimed the doctor. ‘Arrest a Mother! I never heard such nonsense. What’s the charge?’
The uniformed girl said, a little sheepishly:
‘She is accused of Reactionism.’
The doctor simply stared at her.
‘A Reactionist Mother! What’ll you people think of next? Go on, get out, both of you.’
The young woman protested:
‘We have our orders, Doctor.’
‘Rubbish. There’s no authority. Have you ever heard of a Mother being arrested?’
‘No, Doctor.’
‘Well, you aren’t going to make a precedent now. Go on.’
The uniformed girl hesitated unhappily, then an idea occurred to her.
‘If you would let me have a signed refusal to surrender the M
other …?’ she suggested helpfully.
When the two had departed, quite satisfied with their piece of paper, the doctor looked at the little women gloomily.
‘You can’t help tattling, you servitors, can you? Anything you happen to hear goes through the lot of you like a fire in a cornfield, and makes trouble all round. Well, if I hear any more of this I shall know where it comes from.’ She turned to me. ‘And you, Mother Orchis, will in future please restrict yourself to yes-and-no in the hearing of these nattering little pests. I’ll see you again shortly. We want to ask you some questions,’ she added, and went out, leaving a subdued, industrious silence behind her.
She returned just as the tray which had held my gargantuan breakfast was being removed, and not alone. The four women who accompanied her, and looked as normal as herself, were followed by a number of little women lugging in chairs which they arranged beside my couch. When they had departed, the five women, all in white overalls, sat down and regarded me as if I were an exhibit. One appeared to be much the same age as the first doctor, two nearer fifty, and one sixty, or more.
‘Now, Mother Orchis,’ said the doctor, with an air of opening the proceedings, ‘it is quite clear that something highly unusual has taken place. Naturally we are interested to understand just what and, if possible, why. You don’t need to worry about those police this morning – it was quite improper of them to come here at all. This is simply an inquiry – a scientific inquiry – to establish what has happened.’
‘You can’t want to understand more than I do,’ I replied. I looked at them, at the room about me, and finally at my massive prone form. ‘I am aware that all this must be an hallucination, but what is troubling me most is that I have always supposed that any hallucination must be deficient in at least one dimension – must lack reality to some of the senses. But this does not. I have all my senses, and can use them. Nothing is insubstantial: I am trapped in flesh that is very palpably too, too solid. The only striking deficiency, so far as I can see, is reason – even symbolic reason.’
The four other women stared at me in astonishment. The doctor gave them a sort of now-perhaps-you’ll-believe-me glance, and then turned to me again.
‘We’ll start with a few questions,’ she said.
‘Before you begin,’ I put in, ‘I have something to add to what I told you last night. It has come back to me.’
‘Perhaps the knock when you fell,’ she suggested, looking at my piece of plaster. ‘What were you trying to do?’
I ignored that. ‘I think I’d better tell you the missing part – it might help – a bit, anyway.’
‘Very well,’ she agreed. ‘You told me you were – er – married, and that your – er – husband was killed soon afterwards.’ She glanced at the others; their blankness of expression was somehow studious. ‘It was the part after that that was missing,’ she added.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He was a test-pilot,’ I explained to them. ‘It happened six months after we were married – only one month before his contract was due to expire.
‘After that, an aunt took me away for some weeks. I don’t suppose I’ll ever remember that part very well – I – I wasn’t noticing anything very much …
‘But then I remember waking up one morning and suddenly seeing things differently, and telling myself that I couldn’t go on like that. I knew I must have some work, something that would keep me busy.
‘Dr Hellyer, who is in charge of the Wraychester Hospital where I was working before I married, told me he would be glad to have me with them again. So I went back, and worked very hard, so that I did not have much time to think. That would be about eight months ago, now.
‘Then one day Dr Hellyer spoke about a drug that a friend of his had succeeded in synthesizing. I don’t think he was really asking for volunteers, but I offered to try it out. From what he said it sounded as if the drug might have some quite important properties. It struck me as a chance to do something useful. Sooner or later, someone would try it, and as I didn’t have any ties and didn’t care very much what happened, anyway, I thought I might as well be the one to try it.’
The spokesman doctor interrupted to ask:
‘What was this drug?’
‘It’s called chuinjuatin,’ I told her. ‘Do you know it?’
She shook her head. One of the others put in:
‘I’ve heard the name. What is it?’
‘It’s a narcotic,’ I told her. ‘The original form is in the leaves of a tree that grows chiefly in the south of Venezuela. The tribe of Indians who live there discovered it somehow, like others did quinine and mescalin. And in much the same way they use it for orgies. Some of them sit and chew the leaves – they have to chew about six ounces of them – and gradually they go into a zombie-like, trance state. It lasts three or four days during which they are quite helpless and incapable of doing the simplest thing for themselves, so that other members of the tribe are appointed to look after them as if they were children, and to guard them.
‘It’s necessary to guard them because the Indian belief is that chuinjuatin liberates the spirit from the body, setting it free to wander anywhere in space and time, and the guardian’s most important job is to see that no other wandering spirit shall slip into the body while the true owner is away. When the subjects recover they claim to have had wonderful mystical experiences. There seem to be no physical ill effects, and no craving results from it. The mystical experiences, though, are said to be intense, and clearly remembered.
‘Dr Hellyer’s friend had tested his synthesized chuinjuatin on a number of laboratory animals and worked out the dosage, and tolerances, and that kind of thing, but what he could not tell, of course, was what validity, if any, the reports of the mystical experiences had. Presumably they were the product of the drug’s influence on the nervous system – but whether that effect produced a sensation of pleasure, ecstasy, awe, fear, horror, or any of a dozen more, it was impossible to tell without a human guinea-pig. So that was what I volunteered for.’
I stopped. I looked at their serious, puzzled faces, and at the billow of pink satin in front of me.
‘In fact,’ I added, ‘it appears to have produced a combination of the absurd, the incomprehensible, and the grotesque.’
They were earnest women, these, not to be side-tracked. They were there to disprove an anomaly – if they could.
‘I see,’ said the spokeswoman with an air of preserving reasonableness, rather than meaning anything. She glanced down at a paper on which she had made a note from time to time.
‘Now, can you give us the time and date at which this experiment took place?’
I could, and did, and after that the questions went on and on and on …
The least satisfactory part of it from my point of view was that even though my answers caused them to grow more uncertain of themselves as we went on, they did at least get them; whereas when I put a question it was usually evaded, or answered perfunctorily, as an unimportant digression.
They went on steadily, and only broke off when my next meal arrived. Then they went away, leaving me thankfully in peace – but little the wiser. I half expected them to return, but when they did not I fell into a doze from which I was awakened by the incursion of a cluster of the little women, once more. They brought a trolley with them, and in a short time were wheeling me out of the building on it – but not by the way I had arrived. This time we went down a ramp where another, or the same, pink ambulance waited at the bottom. When they had me safely loaded aboard, three of them climbed in, too, to keep me company. They were chattering as they did so, and they kept it up inconsequently, and mostly incomprehensibly, for the whole hour and a half of the journey that ensued.
The countryside differed little from that I had already seen. Once we were outside the gates there were the same tidy fields and standardized farms. The occasional built-up areas were not extensive and consisted of the same types of blocks close by, and we ran on the same, not very good, road surf
aces. There were groups of the Amazon types, and, more rarely, individuals, to be seen at work in the fields; the sparse traffic was lorries, large or small, and occasional buses, but with never a private car to be seen. My illusion, I reflected, was remarkably consistent in its details. Not a single group of Amazons, for instance, failed to raise its right hands in friendly, respectful greeting to the pink car.
Once, we crossed a cutting. Looking down from the bridge I thought at first that we were over the dried bed of a canal, but then I noticed a post leaning at a crazy angle among the grass and weeds: most of its attachments had fallen off, but there were enough left to identify it as a railway-signal.
We passed through one concentration of identical blocks which was in size, though in no other way, quite a town, and then, two or three miles farther on, ran through an ornamental gateway into a kind of park.
In one way it was not unlike the estate we had left, for everything was meticulously tended; the lawns like velvet, the flower-beds vivid with spring blossoms, but it differed essentially in that the buildings were not blocks. They were houses, quite small for the most part, and varied in style, often no larger than roomy cottages. The place had a subduing effect on my small companions; for the first time they left off chattering, and gazed about them with obvious awe.
The driver stopped once to inquire the way of an overalled Amazon who was striding along with a hod on her shoulder. She directed us, and gave me a cheerful, respectful grin through the window, and presently we drew up again in front of a neat little two-storey Regency-style house.
This time there was no trolley. The little women, assisted by the driver, fussed over helping me out, and then half-supported me into the house, in a kind of buttressing formation.
Inside, I was manoeuvred with some difficulty through a door on the left, and found myself in a beautiful room, elegantly decorated and furnished in the period-style of the house. A white-haired woman in a purple silk dress was sitting in a wing-chair beside a wood fire. Both her face and her hands told of considerable age, but she looked at me from keen, lively eyes.