Mandrake

by Susan Cooper

  He stopped. His head was still bent. Queston thought he was crying. Then he looked up fiercely.

  ‘Life hadn’t altered, we weren’t any different as people. It all got too big for them, that’s what happened. It’s the thing they let loose that broke us up. They talked all that about contentment, and having your own roots being the only way to end war, but all they did was make places matter more than people. Make them more powerful than people. Let this—this thing break out. I tell you, that’s what’s happened. None of the old standards hold any more, something’s broken out.’

  Queston sat still. He felt cold. The words were like an accusation; they turned his mind irresistibly in to look at itself, and it was like a dreadful blinding realization of guilt. He shouted silently to himself: it’s not my fault, I didn’t know—

  The little teacher pulled himself up in his chair, as if he were drawing the whole of his body into a small upright space. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t generally talk very much. We never had many friends. Somehow we didn’t need them. These last weeks—well, I… I miss my wife.’

  Queston said helplessly: ‘Surely you’ll be able to join her.’

  ‘O no.’ He shook his head. It was a very final gesture. ‘Personal relationships have no place in this kind of world. You are well off without them, Mr Queston. You are a very lucky man. I think perhaps you have found the only way to survive in this—in whatever it is.’

  The candle flickered down. It was little more now than a melted stub. Out of his guilt, Queston felt an enormous resentment against a force that could so shatter this harmless, hapless little man. He tried to find some comfort, and it was as clumsy as a man holding a baby for the first time. He said: ‘I tell you what. We could go to Wales. I’ll take you. There’s the car, and enough fuel—you can still find garages with stacks of paraffin, and this car runs as well on that as on petrol. I’ll take you. I’ve nowhere else to go. We could find your wife. We’ll go tomorrow. It’s worth a try.’

  He wondered always, afterwards, whether he had really meant it, or whether Lindsey had sensed no real involvement in the offer. But he could have sworn there were new tears in the bleak-bright eyes when the man put out his hand and gripped his for a moment, and said ‘Yes, that would be wonderful. Thank you. That would be wonderful. Yes, we’ll go.’

  He could have sworn Lindsey had trusted him, then.

  They had blocked the draughts under the doors as best they could, and drunk some whisky to pledge the journey to Wales, and gone to sleep rolled in blankets on the floor.

  But suddenly, Queston had woken in the night, with nothing in his mind but the conviction that he had just heard a shattering noise.

  He listened; there was nothing. The air was blowing cold on his face, and his back was stiff. He groaned, and sat up; then he saw that Lindsey was gone. The blanket lay in a neat folded heap on the floor: and the attaché case on top of it.

  The window was a faint grey square. His mouth tasted foul and ancient; he felt terrible. He saw that the paper they had plugged underneath one door of the office was lying loose, and he went out on to the platform. Mist hung low over the railway line in the beginning light, and over the long stretch of concrete, but it was not difficult to see Lindsey. He lay at the far end of the platform, with one arm and the remains of his head dangling from the edge.

  Queston jammed his finger-nails into his palms and went close. Lindsey hadn’t learned that from a biology textbook. He had come out into the dawn, put the barrel of the heavy revolver into his mouth, and fired.

  Something tinkled at Queston’s feet. He picked it up; it was a round rimless lens from a pair of spectacles. He let it fall, and it bounced musically, and did not break.

  It was as if the anger built a protective coating around his brain. All day it lasted. He broke into the garage of the nearest house for a spade, carried Lindsey’s blanket-wrapped body to the car, drove to the churchyard, and buried him. Somehow he had seemed the kind who would want to end up under a yew-tree. Neat and tidy and grass-hummocked, with a headstone: ‘Beloved husband of—’

  He buried the attaché case with him. It had been full of letters twenty years old, from the Welsh wife.

  Afterwards, it was the thought of going into the churchyard that astonished him most. They should have more pull, those places, than anywhere else. Inevitable; the emotional bond was there ready-made. Bodies under the earth, a bait to hold those above it. Churchyards were dangerous places, especially those outside the line of a town.

  Yet he had felt nothing, with his seventh sense, from beginning to end. He knew he had been made safe by his cold fury against the earth, the Ministry, perhaps himself: against all the forces that had pulled Lindsey’s finger on the trigger. When that had gone, ebbed away, and he was driving alone again along an empty road, he began to shake until his teeth rattled in his head.

  It was the fifth week, and still he had no idea what was going on in the towns and villages. The car radio had not worked since its one mysterious bulletin in Slough. The car itself was effective still, while he could find fuel. He drove to and fro within the dead lands of the empty suburbs, aimless, without any coherent thought except the daily business of finding food. More and more of the shops he passed had been methodically cleared; or lay jagged-windowed, rifled by the gangs of youths who roamed a little way out from the edges of every town. He no longer planned beyond the end of a day. Sometimes he thought Lindsey had found the best solution. Sometimes he thought he was looking for something that he could not recognize and would never find. Sometimes he thought he was going mad.

  Then it was what he dimly reckoned to be the seventh week, and as he wrenched the car automatically round from the prickling warning of a place barrier in his path, he saw the three men, and the girl.

  They were chasing her; lumbering, shouting towards him out of the town. The first he saw of her was the bright red coat, flapping like a cloak as she ran. There was terror in the running; she flung herself forward, stumbling with speed, and even from inside the car he could hear the fearful animal gasps for breath.

  The men were whooping with a kind of ugly delight; he saw that they were young, not much more than boys, with the same vacuous vicious faces as all the gangs of the dead lands. Something flashed in the hand of the first: a razor, or a knife. Without stopping to reason, Queston reached behind him for his shot-gun and jumped out of the car as the girl drew level with the bonnet. He shouted to her: ‘Get in! ’ and without even glancing at him she wrenched at the doorhandle and crumpled into the front seat. Queston stood with the gun levelled from his hip at the three young men, and they slowed to a halt ten yards away.

  ‘Stay where you are!’ he called. Lindsey had said the same. What else did you say with a gun in your hand?

  The three stood irresolute. The leader with the glint in his hand was ginger-haired, with a pale, pock-marked face; he yelled: ‘You mind your own business, mister. She’s ours. Leave ’er go.’

  He moved forward. Queston promptly fired at the ground before his feet; shot sprayed up and caught the hand of one of the other two, and he leapt, squealing with pain and alarm. While they still paused Queston dived back into the car, skidded round to complete his turn, and drove fast away up the road. Everything seemed to happen to him on boundaries, beside those invisible lines of force. Border incidents. He grinned. Suddenly he was exhilarated, jolted out of his joyless daze; he felt better than he had for weeks. He glanced at the girl.

  She sat beside him with the collar of the red coat drawn up round her face. He saw tangled brown hair and damp, flushed skin; he noticed, irrelevantly, that her eyelashes were very long. She was still breathing noisily.

  He stopped the car a mile or so along the road, pulling into the verge beside flat, open fields, and reached behind him for the rucksack on the back seat. He poured some whisky into his one cup, and pushed it at the girl. ‘Here. Drink this. Steady you up.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She was almost inaudible.

  �
��Smoke?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  He lit her cigarette; it shook slightly as she held it. Those eyelashes were really absurd. She wasn’t pretty. Her nose was red, and her skin shiny; the face almost sullen. She looked very young; about twenty, he thought.

  She finished the whisky, and took a deep breath. ‘O. Thank you. Thank you very much.’ She glanced quickly across at Queston, and away again. He sat smoking calmly, waiting for her to say something. Nothing came. The girl sat in silence, drawing cigarette smoke deep into her lungs and blowing it slowly at the car roof; appreciative, self-conscious, in a kind of defiance. His curiosity grew, but he determined to ask no questions. A patient Sir Lancelot. If she wants to be mysterious, let her. Well, but give her time, she’s had a shock. She’s very young. He began to feel paternal, and middle-aged, and depressed.

  He threw his cigarette-end out of the window, and started the car. A thin, cold November rain had begun outside, and he switched the windscreen-wipers on. They flicked slowly to and fro with a gentle, hypnotic hiss. The girl gave him the same nervous half-glance as before.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘I haven’t the slightest idea.’ Queston gazed vaguely out at the road ahead. ‘Somewhere with a roof. Preferably somewhere warm. We might risk a fire. I shouldn’t think the lads will stay out in this. Got any suggestions?’

  He looked round; she was staring at him blankly. She said:

  ‘But aren’t you—I mean, I thought—the car—’

  Suddenly he understood. ‘O, damn and blast the car. I beg your pardon. It is not official, I am not from the Ministry. I’m not from anywhere. I’m just a poor tramp who happens to drive a big black car.’

  She looked like a child faced with the Christmas tree. ‘I thought you were from the Ministry police. You know—out of the frying-pan into the fire. O gosh. O, I’m sorry.’ She smiled at him delightedly. It was a child’s grin, not provocative, but under its impact Queston felt himself warmed and cherished and important. He smiled back, amused at his own reaction; but at the same time he knew that he was going to want very badly to see the grin again.

  The girl began to talk, with the same urgent relief in which he and Lindsey had tumbled words out at one another. In an instant she seemed to have come to life. Only the red coat showed him that this was the same terrified waif he had rescued half an hour before.

  The fire glowed red, orange, white; it gave no smoke. Queston had stopped to investigate the coal-bunkers of half a dozen houses until he had found the sack of egg-shaped, machine-pressed black objects he was looking for, and carried it out to the car; he was determined not to send up a beacon that might give them away. So they lit the fire carefully in the small house that they chose, and it gave them heat fanned white by the draughts over the empty floor, and an acrid-aching smell. But no smoke.

  ‘All these thousands of hollow houses,’ the girl said. She leaned forward to steady the can of water resting on the fire. ‘Think of the packed furniture stores there must be in all the towns. I mean, the people that went back to their roots—there can’t be nearly enough houses for them in the places they’ve gone. They take all their belongings from the homes they’ve left, and where do they put them?’

  ‘A reshuffle,’ Queston said; cross-legged, as he had learned to sit in the last two months. ‘People go back to a place—but others leave it, to go back to somewhere else. The dead lands aren’t so very big, with their dead houses like this one. And there were new blocks waiting in the really big towns, where you could have got overcrowding. The Ministry’s been preparing for this for a very long time.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She sat with one arm propped on the blanket spread over the bare boards, gazing into the fire. The light glinted on her hair; it had dried to a curious golden-shot bronze, curling over her forehead and ears, and she looked, Queston thought, like a long-legged and rather chubby Puck. He sat facing her, his back against the fireplace; his right leg and side were slowly roasting, but he enjoyed the view. They had no light but the fire; the house stood alone by a level-crossing on a small railway line, the home of a departed crossing-keeper, and the gas which was its only power supply had been cut off.

  The girl was quiet now. She had emerged from the red coat dressed all in black: a heavy woollen sweater and pleated skirt that gave the same young-old impression that had struck him at first. She was something outside his experience, and there was a wariness in his interest.

  Her name was Beth Summers, she had told him: twenty-three years old, an actress. Not a very successful actress: ‘but I was going to be, if this hadn’t happened.’ She had spent two years at one of the London drama schools, and the four years since in the no-man’s-land of beginners’ theatre: three seasons of repertory, a handful of one-line television parts, a provincial tour of a West End play in the last winter before the Ministry tightened its hold. She had talked about the stage, as they sat eating in front of the fire, with a mixture of sage disillusion and childish delight.

  She said, as if it were her own phrase: ‘I’ve never had any roots.’ As a child she had been tossed between divorced parents; when the last Ministry edict had come into force she had applied to live in London, since she could think of nowhere else, but had failed. Unlike Queston, she had tried to find somewhere to settle; but her friends had grown curiously cool, and one Ministry office after another refused her admittance to any town.

  By the time the real change began, she was wandering from one hostile community to the next; she seemed to be one of those on whom the invisible barriers of place had no effect. She said little about this, either; only that the gang from whom Queston had rescued her were typical of many inside. Like animals, they could sense an outsider, and hunted him—or her—as fair game for anything they pleased to do.

  She lay rolled in blankets, her head pillowed on her coat, while Queston banked up the fire. She said: ‘The most terrifying thing isn’t the people themselves. It’s something that’s got hold of them. They’re—possessed. That blank, listening look. Even the Ministry men have it. That was the thing that scared me stiff always.’ She looked at him, in a sudden, fierce appeal. ‘I don’t understand, I want to know what it means. Do you know? I can’t go to sleep, I haven’t for a long time. Tell me what it means.’

  Queston squatted on his haunches, and gazed sombrely up at the stars prickling the bare black windows, and for the first time his mind was clear and cold and open, admitting the things that he knew and had deliberately shrouded, all this time, in ambiguity. If he had told Lindsey… When he spoke, he was speaking not to her only but to himself, and to Lindsey, and Thorp-Gudgeon, and the farmer on the underground platform; the man on the Plain, the woman in the pub. Even to the dog. All the people he had never properly spoken to at all.

  ‘You have to forget a lot of things,’ he said slowly. ‘Unknow them. All the things that bound our little horizon. You have to look at the stars out there, and think that when the light left them the earth was still practically molten, and human life was millions of years away. Man is an episode, on that scale. And his intelligence is tiny. We’ve never known quite how tiny—we haven’t the capacity to know. We know less about the human mind than about anything. We potter about with something like the electro-encephalograph, and we think we’re enormously advanced, but it’s about as clumsy as trying to hear a Beethoven quartet on a metronome. We don’t understand the nature of life, or intelligence, any more than we can grasp infinity. We don’t understand the connexion between our mind and our nervous system, but because they obviously are connected we can’t imagine any intelligence that isn’t linked to an organism.’

  ‘Religions do. They have gods, I mean.’

  ‘Gropings in the dark,’ Queston said. He glanced at her. ‘If that doesn’t offend you.’

  She said: ‘No one ever gave me any good reason for believing in a god.’

  ‘Religion… even the Christians have to think of the Holy Ghost in terms of an intelligence like
their own. O, vast, infinite, omniscient, but not different in kind. Some of the ancient religions were groping in the right direction, I suppose. Some of the primitive peoples I came across, once…’

  He felt the words come as they had come when his book took shape; fumbling, flickering at snatches of what he chased. ‘You see, if you try to put yourself outside the idea of man, it can all change. Blake came nearer to it than anyone, and they said he was mad… Suppose you say: Life is energy. And suppose you equate the two things that no one can account for—life and intelligence. On that basis, the hydrogen atom that’s being fused inside the sun, turned into energy, is alive—and intelligent. The universe is full of suns and novae and solidified matter, and they are all of them energy, and so it’s a kind of community of intelligences. Only man’s scale of values doesn’t include this. He can’t appreciate an intelligence that consists of performing to certain immutable laws, and of being indestructible. Transforming itself by natural processes into another form if its own is attacked. He can’t see the laws of the universe as a kind of cosmic intelligence.’

  The girl lay on her back, her face tightened with listening. ‘But it isn’t. I mean, there’s nothing intelligent about a set of rules. A machine can obey rules. Intelligence is choosing what you do—free will.’