Mandrake

by Susan Cooper

  Milward let out a great embarrassed laugh. ‘That’s right.’ He was not looking at her, but Queston could see the pleasure in his face.

  His wife jabbed a finger at his large chest. ‘Well, don’t get big-headed about it, mate. I could do with a good square meal, all the same.’

  ‘We’ll make out,’ he said. He was still grinning. ‘Give us time.’

  Then the light round them changed, and the sun came up, a muted orange blaze on the horizon under the heavy grey sky, and a long red edge of cloud.

  ‘Why are you out so early?’ Queston said.

  ‘Early morning’s safest for open land like this. No one about—police, I mean. They tour about a lot, you want to watch it. Not so many lately, though. We’ll be off soon—we’re lying up in a place at Chelmsford for the time being.’

  ‘Chelmsford?’ Queston stared. ‘But that’s not in the dead lands—there must be people there. And it’s a fairsized town. And then there’s the other business… how can you be there?’

  ‘Things have been happening. Don’t know what, exactly.’ Milward pulled his coat round him. ‘We kept miles clear of the towns for a long time, but after a bit we began finding a lot of them empty. Chelmsford is. No one there at all, that we’ve seen. Mind you, we never go right in, just find a place on the edge—there’s been pretty nasty goings on in some of them. The buildings all beaten up, or burned, and stinking like merry hell. And bodies… But the other—when a place gets like that, it begins to go. That feeling that means you can’t get near, it gets less. Funny thing. Like as if the old ghosts aren’t bothering with their haunting, because there’s no one left to haunt. Except us, and we don’t seem to bring it on. Dunno what to make of it, but there it is.’

  Queston said slowly: ‘So when the people are gone, the barriers come down.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Milward took a deep breath, after the stumbling uneasy effort of finding words, and became cheerful again. ‘You ought to join up with us, you know. Be glad to have you. Things are easier with a goodish number. You find a place for the night, patch it up enough to keep the weather out, then have the floorboards out of the one next door for fires. All in a jiffy. Then we’re asleep soon after dark—no light, see. It could be worse. Why not come with us?’

  Oakley sounded the horn from the car.

  ‘I wish we could,’ Queston said, and he meant it. ‘But we’d bring the Ministry on your tail. They’ll be after us, if they’re not now. I’d better go. If we ever lose them, we’ll come back and join you.’

  ‘You do that. Welcome any time.’

  ‘Take some spuds with you,’ the woman said, and although he protested she was away, in her flapping coat, tossing handfuls of loose potatoes into a sack. Milward walked with him to the gate, and nodded casually at the car.

  ‘Morning.’

  Oakley blinked at him. ‘Hi.’ He relaxed almost imperceptibly, and Queston saw his hand come empty out of his jacket pocket. Beth was upright and wide-eyed behind him, gazing anxiously out. The woman, coming up behind them, glanced shrewdly from her to Queston and back again: opened the car door and pushed the sack at Beth.

  ‘Here y’are, duck. Have some spuds. Got more than we need.’

  ‘O,’ Beth said blankly. ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’ She gave the woman a sudden brilliant smile, and Queston, watching, yearned for her.

  He turned abruptly to Milward. ‘Thanks a lot. I wish we could pay you for them.’

  ‘Ah no—what can you do with money now? Anyway you paid me too much last time.’ He grinned.

  ‘They were good shirts. I’ve got one on now.’

  ‘Have you? ’ The big man beamed with delight again. He moved round the front of the car with him, and the broad grin was still on his face, but he said softly, his eyes grave: ‘D’you reckon we’ve got long left?’

  Queston said quietly: ‘Fifty-fifty chance.’ For an instant they looked at each other. Then he got into the car, and wound down the window. ‘See you again. Soon, maybe.’

  ‘Go through Chelmsford. With the windows shut. Then branch left at the other end, New London Road—you’ll find some petrol.’

  ‘Thanks. Good luck.’

  ‘Good luck, mate.’

  Oakley raised his hand, and drove them away. The sun rose into the cloud, and the sky was dull grey again, and the light was cold.

  It began as snow, gusting down in broad flakes on the wind, leaving a thin, shabby white coat over the roads and fields. Then the patches of sudden melting crystals on the windscreen changed to wavering streams, and it was raining. The white coat melted gradually away; the cold seemed less intense. But the rain grew heavier, and all the sky was low and grey.

  Beth had been sick. She lay huddled on the back seat, wrapped in a rug. Queston had taken over again at the wheel; he drove in silence with Oakley dozing at his side. They nosed cautiously into Chelmsford, and he found Mil-ward had been right. There was a prickling uneasiness about the place, but no more than that; it allowed them through. But something far worse was the desolation; the streets littered with the wreck of some appalling nameless catastrophe, with houses in ruins, paving-stones torn up and scattered like playing-cards, torn and broken furniture tossed indiscriminately about. And the dead, lying here and there where they had fallen. Queston caught sight of what had been the face of one corpse, and afterwards drove very fast, backing and turning; from blocked streets to find a way through. When they were clear of the town the obsession for escape eased, and he slowed down, shuddering. Empty or not, the towns were places to be left alone.

  Milward had been right about the petrol too. In the London road they came to the great bleak garage of an A. A. depot; the pumps were dry, but behind the main buildings they found a stack of about fifty two-gallon cans. There was no sign that anyone had lived in the place for months.

  They splashed back to the car, laden. The rain had soaked them within seconds, and Oakley’s hair was plastered mud-coloured to his head. Queston could feel his shirt wet against his back, under his jacket, and the rain trickling down his back.

  ‘Who on earth left it there?’

  ‘Must be a Ministry store. Better be on our way.’

  ‘I wish we could find some food.’

  ‘I have an idea about that,’ Oakley said. He set the petrol cans down, and shook the water out of his eyes. ‘You fill the tanks. I’ll be back.’

  He loomed up again through the rain as Queston was easing himself wet and cursing into the car.

  ‘Blankets, candles, matches. Cigarettes, God bless them. Cans—shove them on the floor.’ He slid in beside Queston, gasping.

  ‘Kit!’ Beth said from behind them. Her voice was shrill with alarm. ‘What happened to you?’

  Queston, who had been gaping at the tins and bundles, turned sharply round, and saw that Oakley was shivering with more than the cold. His fists were tight folded, and great shudders running over him as if he were in a fit. His face was bloodless, grey-white. He said through clenched teeth:

  ‘Find a house on the edge. With a garage. Time we stopped.’ As they drove, his self-control came back, and he talked. The stores had come from one of the forgotten, ten-year-old fall-out shelters. Not many towns had built communal shelters like Gloucester, he said; in a place the size of Chelmsford, families had bought their own. ‘If they were scared enough, or rich enough. Those big houses round the depot were the right size for either.’

  He had gambled on the shelters’ emergency stocks being forgotten when the houses had been evacuated and cleared; and he had been right. In a dripping, overgrown garden he had spun the locks on the big steel doors that opened down into the earth. But he had not reckoned with the effect of going down.

  ‘It was fantastic. I don’t know how to describe it.’ He laughed, shakily. ‘And brother, when I don’t know how… I’ve never been so scared. Simple stark fear. Not of anything in particular, just an absolute paralysed terror. If I hadn’t been so damn hungry I’d never have got down. And if
you two hadn’t been here I’d never have got up again. It was like being shouted at. Like someone pushing you.’

  ‘I know,’ Queston said. ‘I’ve had some.’

  ‘Why wasn’t it there at Gloucester?’

  ‘God knows.’

  They came to a between-towns road of big detached houses set back behind trees; deserted, but apparently untouched. They chose one half-way down. Queston broke in through a back window; then he carried Beth inside while Oakley put the car in the garage. She wound her arms tightly round his neck, and he kissed her. The rain spangled and tossed her hair.

  ‘Carrying you over the threshold, not quite in ideal circumstances. How d’you feel, love?’

  ‘Better. I’m sorry to be a nuisance.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish. We’ll eat soon. Got a pain anywhere?’

  ‘No.’ He put her down on the bare floor of a room in the front of the house. As he bent over her, he said curiously: ‘Why do you call Oakley Kit?’

  ‘Well… it’s his name. Isn’t it? ’ But she was not looking at him, and for a cold moment he had a sense that she was hiding something, not saying everything that she might say. Kit… Kit… there was something about the name, or her use of it, that troubled him; and it was not only the intimacy of the shortening. He supposed ‘Kit’ must be short for Christopher. It was not a name he remembered ever hearing before. And yet, somewhere, there was an echo nagging in his head.

  He shrugged his shoulders, and went out to the car. There was too much else to think about. A fire to dry them, for a beginning.

  The wind was rising; the rain whipped their faces in vicious squalls. It was midday, but dark as a stormy twilight; in the garden the bare trees lashed and whimpered and groaned, and he had to shout to make Oakley hear.

  ‘Are there tools in the garage?’

  ‘I think so. A few.’

  ‘Bring a hammer. And an axe.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You’ll see. Damn!’ Lightning ripped the horizon, and after it a long rumbling growl. Queston tripped over the doorstep.

  ‘I dream of a very large Scotch. And a steak.’ Oakley slammed the door against the wind, and helped him up. Outside, the rain pattered and swished at the walls. Thunder grumbled again, more loudly.

  ‘Thunder’s getting nearer. I don’t like the sound of it. That noise snarls—it’s like a summer storm. Only there weren’t any in the summer, were there? Just that crazy heat. Saving them up, maybe.’

  Queston said: ‘You may be right, at that.’ White light flashed at the hall window, and he jerked again. ‘I hope this place has got a conductor.’

  ‘We don’t live here. We’ll be O.K.’ Oakley paused at the door of the room, his arms full of boxes, and half turned. ‘Maybe I’m nuts, but doesn’t it strike you as odd, the way nothing has ever happened to us? Floods, typhoid, riots—but never where we are. Quakes—but only the fringe of them touches us. And when we’re in the middle of one, none of us gets a scratch. Only bumps on the head, from another kind of source.’

  ‘By the law of averages, something should happen any moment now.’

  ‘No, I mean it. If this is coincidence it’s a helluva big one. Damn, you’re the theoretician. Hasn’t it occurred to you?’

  ‘It’s a good romantic idea. You surprise me.’

  ‘Ah, drop dead,’ Oakley said resentfully. He opened the door.

  O yes, Queston thought, it’s occurred to me all right. He had thought of it, in the times when he still believed thinking worthwhile. The rovers, the rootless, those not under the spell—perhaps, because they couldn’t be controlled mentally, they could be brought no physical harm. If it was the same force working the two things.

  Or perhaps they were simply allowed to go free. To start again. With no frontiers to extend, no homes to guard against imagined attack, they had never been the destroyers. There was no danger in them. He had imagined, sometimes, a great line of them stretching through the centuries, differing in nature but not in kind: the wandering scholars, the Romanies, the monks and adventurers and aimless, amiable men. The weak ones. The mercenaries, who would indifferently kill for their hire but never motivate the war. The travellers, wandering all countries without discriminate love, in search of something they might one day find but would never recognize. And himself, Oakley, Milward; the nameless ones adrift unharmed on the dead roads now. A pretty negative crew, but without malice; capable of learning a lesson. Yes, that’s right, Christopher, it’s odd nothing has ever happened to us, we must be the chosen people. There’s just one thing. What about Mandrake? Nothing happened to him either, unless he did get run down. Like hell he got run down; he’s still there, somewhere, waiting. Is he one of the chosen people too? In this neat little set-up, what about him?

  But he said nothing, and he followed Oakley into the room. It was cold; draughts gusted in from the windows. He bent to drop his load of tins, and as he did so he caught a glimpse of the journalist’s face which sent his mind suddenly blank.

  Oakley was standing looking down at Beth, curled unhappily in her blanket on the floor, and it was as if a mask had dropped, leaving his face naked. Startled, Queston saw there tenderness and compassion and a kind of regret, in a depth that he could not understand.

  The wind blustered and grew, shaking windows and doors; once or twice they heard a slate crash down from the roof, and sometimes a sprinkling of mortar-grey soot spattered down into the hearth, puffing smoke out from the fire. They had followed Milward’s advice, wrenching floorboards up from a back room; the heavy wood burned hot and glowing as coal.

  They roasted potatoes in the embers at either side; heated stew in tins, drank the juice from tins of fruit. Even Beth ate well, and the storm shrieking outside seemed less alarming. Queston and Oakley sat half-wrapped in blankets, drying their shirts and trousers by the fire. Through the rain-blurred windows they could see trees whipped to and fro by the gale.

  Beth lay with her head on Queston’s lap, and he stroked her hair. ‘The last time I did this you were asleep. In a house, beside a fire. You looked wonderful. I didn’t dare touch you when you were awake, but just for that moment—’

  She smiled up at him. ‘I wasn’t asleep. I felt your hand on my head, so gentle. I remember breathing very softly, and keeping my eyes shut, in case you thought you’d woken me, and moved.’

  Queston felt slightly foolish. ‘You mean you were pretending? And you never told me?’

  She said lovingly: ‘O darling, don’t be silly.’

  Oakley lurched to his feet on the other side of the fire. ‘Close your eyes, honey.’ He dropped his blanket, and pulled his trousers back on.

  Queston was suddenly certain that the words had been chosen at that moment to ridicule him. It was as if they were both joined in secret mockery. A cold flicker of jealousy went through him; he said, irritable and martyred: ‘You’d both better get some sleep. I’ll keep an eye open, just in case.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Oakley said cheerfully. He looked completely disreputable, with an untidy red bristle of beard above his crumpled shirt. He lay down on the floor, pulled the blanket over him, and was asleep almost at once. Beth was already breathing long and evenly. Childishly suspicious, Queston raised her nearer eyelid with one finger to see if she were really asleep. The upturned white glared, inhuman, and he hastily took his hand away again.

  There was an hour of the rain driving down, streaking and battering louder even than the wind. Queston sat listening, in the bare room dim-lit by the fire. The hot wood was glowing a duller red now, fringed with ash, but there was still warmth enough, and he put on no more fuel; safer to avoid the chance of sparks or smoke from the chimney giving them away, even through this filthy rain.

  Out of an immense weariness, he sighed, and heard the sound as if its sadness came from somewhere else. Even if they were to survive, what would be the point of it all? On all sides men who had refused to trust other men had brought about their own destruction: what guarantee was there that
those who remained would not, in the end, do the same? He had gone his own way before, apart from them; out of what had been, he realized now, a kind of contemptuous arrogance. They had been worth nothing to him; they had been nothing more than the chessmen in an academic game that he played to fill in the weary time of living. If living had held little point for him then, what could it have for him now?

  But as he looked at Beth, he knew. She delighted in the world, even now; and in him. On their trust of one another they could build a world of their own—whatever happened, however little was left. There would be enough men and women like Milward’s group, living on their own faith that survival was worth the trying.

  He watched the firelight on her cheek, and ached for her even through the exhaustion of his body; it had been too long since they had made love. The delirium of that was the symbol of all he now had: the urgent surrender that was a gain, the total involvement in another mind and body that finally showed him himself. He thought: I would do anything to keep her from hurt. All my being depends on her, she is all of me. He thought in a kind of yearning agony of the way they had thrust and twined and afterwards lain quiet together. And he thought, in a different anguish, of the day in the caravan when he had bullied her into confession of things in the past: hell, that was a terrible day, what would be the significance now of things in the past…

  Kit. O God, Kit. That was where the echo had come from. It was in that confession, talking of a man she had loved, that she had used the name before. Suddenly Queston was sitting very still, and the warmth of the fire did not keep him from feeling deadly cold. Kit. He heard in his mind Beth’s involuntary cry of anxiety, as Oakley came to them grey and shaking out of the streaming rain.

  Despising himself as he did it, he searched fiercely back for every word that she had said, before, and found fearful new meaning in them all. ‘He wasn’t old… it was a writer. His name was Kit. He wrote plays.’ Hadn’t Oakley said something about writing plays? And then Beth, again: ‘… he turned up any hour of the day or night, it was because of his work… We weren’t living together, at the time. I used to wish we were. I loved him very much… ’ And when they had met Oakley in Gloucester, he had known Beth’s name.