by Basil Copper
"Let me pass, woman," I told the housekeeper.
She stood foursquare against the door.
"It is better this way, sir," she said with a white face.
I was in a passion of rage by this time.
"Woman, you shall let me pass!" I shrieked. There was a rack of Oriental curios inside the hall. Almost without realising it I found a Malay kris in my hand; I passed it not once but several times through her body, my hand seemingly without volition of its own. Horrified, I saw Mrs. Carfax hang there as though crucified, before sliding to the floor in bloody death. I opened the door and fled into the wild night.
I could hear the scraping of the barouche's wheels on the cobbles ahead of me. I followed, cutting through small alleys and courts; I knew this portion of the city intimately and by this method could be sure of keeping abreast of them. I still carried the knife, I know not why. Presently, I was in a deserted part of the metropolis, which was unknown to me; I could still hear the cab's progress but was obliged to keep it in sight, for fear of losing my way.
Presently it stopped in front of a fine Georgian building, with a large porch, lit by a brass lantern from above. Spiros, for I could now see clearly that it was he, paid off the cab and he and Jane entered the house. I waited until the barouche had disappeared. The street was quite empty and deserted. With a mad cry I rushed across to the house, from which light now shone brightly, and seized the iron knocker.
As I crashed it against the door, the same terrible thunder I had heard so many times, rushed upon me, seeming to mingle with the frenzied tattoo of which I was myself the author. I reeled in agony, clinging to the knocker. The knocking rose to a horrendous crescendo which seemed to penetrate and split my brain. A moment longer and the door was flung aside. I saw first the horrified face of a manservant, with Spiros and Jane behind him.
I screamed and sprang forward with the knife.
"Wife-stealer!" I shouted and lunged at Spiros' throat. He was too quick and strong for me. He and the manservant attempted to pinion me. A terrible, silent struggle now began.
Jane was at my side, white and distraught.
"Edward," she pleaded. "Dr. Spiros is only trying to help you as am I."
"Fools!" I shrieked. "I am fully awake for the first time. It is he, THE KNOCKER, who is responsible!"
For I had looked beyond my struggling adversaries. It was indeed a dreadful sight. A tall, emaciated stranger with parchment face, stubbled beard and the white hair of an old man. Pale yellow eyes proclaimed the madman. Then I reeled, my senses tottering, as the two men bore me down. Another servant produced a strait-jacket.
As I went backwards a fearful mosaic formed before my eyes. I saw the knife in the madman's hand, still smeared with blood, and the sign in wrought iron over the porch; SPIROS ASYLUM FOR THE INSANE.
The truth was born in upon me as my senses collapsed. For the back of the hall was a brilliantly illuminated mirror and this pitiful madman reflected in the glass, with writhing features and foaming jaws was beyond all mortal help. THE KNOCKER AT THE PORTICO WAS MYSELF!
The manuscript had a note attached to it in another hand. It said that the patient 642 had spent three and thirty years in the asylum and had died there at the age of seventy-eight. I put back the papers in the box and sat in thought. My name is also Edward Rayner. I am the third son. The writer of the narrative was my great-grandfather. I also heard the knocking for the first time tonight.
The Flabby Men
I
I did not like the look of the island from the very first. I had come from the capital along an undulating, scree-strewn beach road on the mainland, that circled around great outcrops of splintered firs and pine, and the Switzer was beginning to run out of fuel when I sighted the ferry in the gathering dusk. The lava-like rubble of the shore stretched drearily to an oily, slime-washed sea and against the dark yellow of this sullen background foul, scummy pustules burst and reformed.
The piles of the ferry landing were red with rust, I noticed, as the machine purred onto the metalized surface of the pier, and a heap of old-fashioned petrol containers lay huddled together on the shingle like the husks of some giant fruit or the whorled shells of monstrous land-crabs.
The wind was rising, bringing with it drifts of cold, pungently tainted spume from farther out, and the harshly striated mass of the island, black, brown, and sickly yellow, gashed the sea about two miles offshore. My ring brought no one from the dusty glass and steel office so badly needing paint and upkeep. I waited and then tried the electric klaxon on the Switzer; it stirred the echoes and sent a few broken-winged birds scuttering clumsily among the rocks. I tried once more and then gave up; batteries were too precious to waste in this fashion.
Rort should have met me at the landing. I had a vision-tube check on that just before I started, and they knew I was arriving about six. Now it was after seven and the crowd on the island should be alerted. Test conditions were said to be ideal for the next two weeks and I was eager to get ahead with the first. There was little sound in the cove, though farther out white was beginning to show among the folds of yellow; nothing but the slap of foul water, wind strumming over splintered wood, and, for a few brief seconds, a startled buzz as a weather helicopter flapped its way hesitantly southwards.
I had not expected the ferry to be working; that would have been too much, but Rort had said they had got a power launch going which would take me and my traps out. The Switzer would have to take its chance on the jetty with a tarpaulin over it; the swarms of voracious vermin that had been infesting the shore for the past few months might have a go at it, but I doubted whether they would make much impression on its tracks, the only nonmetal component likely to prove edible. Even so I had stripped the machine down to essentials; it looked as though I might have some trouble in getting fuel for the trip back.
The darkness was growing, blurring the outline of rocks and the distant island; the jetty shuddered under the impact of the undertow, and there was a sharp scrabbling and muffled squeaks from the rusting debris at the side of the pier, which I didn't like. Whole parties of people had been devoured by a debased form of giant rat which haunted the seashore, and it was said that the plague of land-crabs had increased of late.
I went to the end of the jetty and winked my flash seawards a few times and then unloaded my cases of equipment and personal gear. While I was clipping the rubberized tarpaulin over the Switzer I heard the shrill whine of a jet, and a short while after I made out the dim shape of a turbo-launch creaming out from the direction of the island. That would be Rort.
The soughing of the wind had increased and water was slapping stealthily along the filthy foreshore, stirring uneasily among the crumbling rubbish that littered the marge. It was a sad inheritance, I thought, this debilitated world; an aftermath of violence that would have to be painfully reknitted by the industry of a few patient men and women, self-dedicated and working with poor, worn-out tools.
There was a crunch from the shadows and I stabbed the flash beam into the dusk, outlined the slavering, grey, depraved jawline, red-rimmed, white filmed eyes, and slit-nostrilled mask of a large creature like the caricature of a hare, which went hopping off with a clatter among the oil cans. I went over to the Switzer and something else scurried away. There were the marks of sharp teeth on the half-tracks, where the creatures had been tearing the covering. I sprayed the area round the vehicle with a powerful poison I had brought from the stores, which I felt would discourage all but the hardiest and hungriest.
When I had finished, the noise of the jet filled the cove and then eased off as someone throttled down; I went to the edge of the jetty and saw a familiar, grey-hulled Ministry launch bearing the hieroglyphics of the Central Committee. Rort came out of the wheelhouse.
"Sorry to keep you waiting. I came earlier but had to go back over. They get worried if I'm away long. This is the only transport to and from the island you know, and Future knows what things are in the water."
Ror
t was a tall, thin man with a tangled stubble of beard; he had been a research worker in one of the innumerable project teams set up by the Central Committee, and had been seconded for special duties. He had always been the worrying kind, but now I seemed to detect an even greater nervousness in his manner, as he helped me get the equipment stowed aboard; I set this down to the location of the island and the forsaken atmosphere of this part of the coast.
He told me something of the situation as we put off. There was an oily swell running now, with what would have been whitecaps in years gone by, before poisons clogged the earth, and I sat on a bench in the charthouse with him while he steered. Rort was definitely uneasy but when I questioned him, he shrugged it off as an indefinable something. One concrete occurrence had rattled him though, which was partly a cause of his unease. Unloading the group's equipment a few weeks before, he had slipped on the slime-covered landing and a case of radio energy cells - their only supply - had gone to the bottom.
That meant the sending of test data over the transmitter to base was strictly limited, to conserve energy; and fuel for the launch was short. The relief helicopter was not due for a month; in another week or two there might be difficulties in communications. I asked Rort about the island; he cleared his throat with a rasping noise, a sign of dislike with him, but I was surprised when I heard there was actually some sort of settlement, on the lines of the old-style village, in a cove on the seaward side, somewhere over the other shoulder of the flinty hill which was beginning to climb up the dark sky as we approached the shore.
Rort said there were about sixty people; fifty men and a few breeders, and they had a miserable existence growing vegetables on imported unsoured soil and fishing far out; cleansing and sterilizing conditions were fantastic, of course, but I gathered they had worked out a satisfactory and safe system. Their rations were supplemented by the Central Committee at various times of the year, and I remembered seeing somewhere that the experiment was one likely to be encouraged in various places.
At all events they had welcomed the group and had been pathetically eager to provide labour and materials from their own scanty stores; they felt that the survey, even though organised only to carry out research on conditions, would improve their lot immediately, though there was something in their reasoning when looked at as a long-term policy. Research groups set up by the Central Committee were constantly on the move as the cloud moved round, and though we still got the same reaction, there were hopes in higher circles that the effects might wear off in our lifetime.
But most of this would not, of itself, have been enough to cause this uneasiness. It sprang from something other than the sombre environment into which every pulse of the boat's progress was bearing us. When I put this thought into the form of a direct statement Rort did not immediately reply. Then his tall body uncoiled itself from over the wheel.
"I don't know," he said. "But there's something deadly in the wind. You can laugh, but you haven't been here these weeks like the rest of us. Later, you'll know what I mean."
I was still chewing over this infuriatingly vague answer when we began the run into the jetty. The shingle was harsh, black clinker, something like volcanic ash, and the vessel grated unpleasantly against it as Rort let the water slowly take us in. He steadied the boat, holding a corroded handrail that jutted out from the concrete slipway, and after we had unloaded we pulled the craft farther up the shore.
Back from the beach the wind suddenly plucked at one, as though it were buffeting down from the black bulk of the hill which rose into the misty dusk above us; we slipped and floundered on the yellow clay pathway that wound through black, slippery rocks, covered with sickly smelling encrustations, and once a shimmering, black and yellow creature like a toad flopped away soggily down the hillside, leaving a trail of crimson slime behind it.
I was winded long before we had reached the lower shoulder of the hill; the air seemed calmer here and looking down I could see the faint smudge of the launch beside the jetty and farther out, the tired, grey wrinkle of the sea, changing to the ghostly green glow it always assumed after dark. To my relief Rort suddenly turned aside from the pathway, and went through two sloping wet shoulders of stone that breasted across the face to the right.
Hesitantly I followed; it was an oppressive place, wet underfoot, the encrusted walls exuding moisture and overhead the sweep of rock toppling forward until it met in a dizzy arch. We were using our flashes now but presently the walls fell away, and we walked across an undulating upland slashed with the gentian, scarlet and black of the parasitical fungi that sometimes grew to two or three feet across. Along a gully and up another slope and then Rort halted. He pointed through a gap between groups of stunted trees. I was looking at K4 Research Station.
II
K4 had been constructed some two years before, at a time when the drive for economy and the need for a chain of observation stations had been at the height of conflict; the result was an amalgam of extravagances and sterilities. The Central Committee had felt that the scientific needs of establishments overrode those of expediency and comfort so that at K4 primitive concrete constructions like the old-fashioned blockhouses had been left without proper proofing and finish, while the expensive and elaborate equipment housed within began to deteriorate for want of protection and proper maintenance.
The life there was a peculiar blend of crowded discomfort and brooding loneliness; the days were given over to exhaustive examination of the content of the soil, the air, and the sea surrounding the island, while the evenings were spent in writing up notebooks, in conducting analytical experiments among the crazy cackle of Geiger counters in the tall, lighthouse-like building overlooking the rocky coast, and in limited social intercourse among our colleagues.
Of these some are worthy of more than passing mention: Dr Fritzjof, a Swede who had lost an arm as a result of nuclear experiments; Masters, the Director of the station, a tall, handsome-looking man in his late forties with hair inclining to silver; sober, careful-minded, and good-humoured, a pleasant man to work with; Professor Lockspeiser, a young, tawny-bearded Australian who had done astonishing work on the degeneration of atomized structures and the causes of sterility in contaminated females; Pollock, despite his name, a West Indian physicist; and a breeder, officially C2147, but known to us as Karla.
A tall, blonde girl with a well-made body and prominent breasts and buttocks, she was ostensibly there as laboratory assistant, but really to be near Fitzwilliams, one of the physicists, by whom she was pregnant. This made no difference to the usual emergency regulations then in force and she was still expected to carry out her obligations to other members of the staff, which she did with energy. It was my turn to enjoy her on the third or fourth evening after my arrival and a very fine experience it was, she being, as I said, a very passionate, well-built girl, most willing and inventive and with a most attractive smile and white teeth; Polish, I think. We all thought Fitzwilliams a lucky man as permanent possession of her was vested in him; he showed me the papers he had taken out on one occasion in which C2147 was specifically mentioned. I knew then it was correct as I had seen the same symbols, branded in the usual place for all breeders of her class.
If I record this in some detail it was because the monotony and aridity of the life made such occurrences assume the emotional and significant impact of a sunburst on a person blind from birth; it irradiated a glow that lasted for days and certainly Karla's presence and the amenities she afforded lent the little garrison some degree of contentment.
It was about a week after my arrival that the first of a long procession of events occurred, which were later to assume a quite disproportionate significance when they began to fall into place. It had been a day of storm and violence; shards of rain beat savagely at the transparent slits of the observation tower, almost drowning the discontented chatter of the instruments.
I had been out in the early afternoon, the weather abating, to draw off fluid from a particular form of fungi whos
e formation rather interested us, and when I turned up along the cliff, my cases full of specimens and cuttings, I was suddenly struck by the fact that since my arrival I had seen so little of the island. The clouds were still lowering and the harsh chumble of the sea on the slimy rocks did not form a background of any great charm, but a beam of sickly, dusty "sunlight" - an archaic term I use for want of a better word - suddenly pricked out a path to the sea's edge and against this metallic sheen I saw the filigree work of a pier and what looked like a cluster of huts and buildings.
I assumed this was the village Rort had spoken of and having some time in hand thought I would take a look, but an hour's stumble among foul rocks and dripping, cave-like formations along the shore made me realise that I could not hope to regain K4 before darkness. The afternoon was already deepening to early dusk when I came out on a primitive path and found myself near the spot. Though the greenish twilight and the slop of the waves among the pebbles of the foreshore gave the place a somewhat eerie aspect, I could not say I was particularly conscious of this, interested as I was to see the village.
I say village, but it was little more than the most primitive kind of settlement, framed in two gigantic spits of rock which made a sort of notch in the black sand. The wind had risen and the stench of decay was in the twilight. Dead matter and poisonous dribbles of spume whirled about the dark strand.
The green luminosity of the sea bathed the area in its pale, unearthly light though it had not yet assumed the intensity it would reveal with the coming of full darkness. I felt like a creature as unsubstantial as mist as I drifted, like a lost soul in a latter-day inferno. I was minded of a reproduction - on the vision-tube, of course - of an ancient illustration; one of the mimes on the celluloid strips I believe it was. It concerned the legend of the vampire and the scene depicted a man in a broad-brimmed hat and cloak wandering, much as I did tonight, through a landscape of mist and nightmare, to what strange adventure I never discovered, for the remainder of the strip was beyond preserving and some had been lost.