The Third Policeman

by O'Brien, Flann;

  The Sergeant was feeling himself sensually for his keys.

  ‘It is very close,’ he said politely.

  ‘Is this the entrance to the next world?’ I murmured. My voice was lower than I thought it would be owing to my exertions and trepidation.

  ‘But it is seasonable weather and we can’t complain,’ he added loudly, paying no attention to my question. My voice, perhaps, had not been strong enough to travel to his ear.

  He found a key which he rasped in the keyhole and threw the door open. He entered the dark inside but sent his hand out again to twitch me in after him by the coat sleeve.

  Strike a match there!

  Almost at the same time the Sergeant had found a box with knobs and wires in it in the wall and did whatever was necessary to make it give out a startling leaping light from where it was. But during the second I was standing in the dark I had ample time to get the surprise of my life. It was the floor. My feet were astonished when they trod on it. It was made of platefuls of tiny studs like the floor of a steam-engine or like the railed galleries that run around a great printing press. It rang with a ghostly hollow noise beneath the hobnails of the Sergeant, who had now clattered to the other end of the little room to fuss with his chain of keys and to throw open another door that was hidden in the wall.

  ‘Of course a nice shower of rain would clear the air,’ he called.

  I went carefully over to see what he was doing in the little closet he had entered. Here he had operated successfully another unsteady light-box. He stood with his back to me examining panels in the wall. There were two of them, tiny things like matchboxes, and the figure sixteen could be seen in one panel and ten in the other. He sighed and came out of the closet and looked at me sadly.

  ‘They say that walking takes it down,’ he said, ‘but it is my own experience that walking puts it up, walking makes it solid and leaves plenty of room for more.’

  I thought at this stage that a simple and dignified appeal might have some prospect of succeeding.

  ‘Will you please tell me,’ I said, ‘since I will be a dead man tomorrow – where are we and what are we doing?’

  ‘Weighing ourselves,’ he replied.

  ‘Weighing ourselves?’

  ‘Step into the box there,’ he said, ‘till we see what your registration is by plain record.’

  I stepped warily on to more iron plates in the closet and saw the figures change to nine and six.

  ‘Nine stone six pounds,’ said the Sergeant, ‘and a most invidious weight. I would give ten years of my life to get the beef down.’

  He had his back to me again opening still another closet in another wall and passing trained fingers over another light-box. The unsteady light came and I saw him standing in the closet, looking at his large watch and winding it absently. The light was leaping beside his jaw and throwing unearthly leaps of shadow on his gross countenance.

  ‘Will you step over here,’ he called to me at last, ‘and come in with me unless you desire to be left behind in your own company.’

  When I had walked over and stood silently beside him in the steel closet, he shut the door on us with a precise click and leaned against the wall thoughtfully. I was about to ask for several explanations when a cry of horror came bounding from my throat. With no noise or warning at all, the floor was giving way beneath us.

  ‘It is no wonder that you are yawning,’ the Sergeant said conversationally, ‘it is very close, the ventilation is far from satisfactory.’

  ‘I was only screaming,’ I blurted. ‘What is happening to this box we are in? Where – ’

  My voice trailed away to a dry cluck of fright. The floor was falling so fast beneath us that it seemed once or twice to fall faster than I could fall myself so that it was sure that my feet had left it and that I had taken up a position for brief intervals half-way between the floor and the ceiling. In panic I raised my right foot and smote it down with all my weight and my strength. It struck the floor but only with a puny tinkling noise. I swore and groaned and closed my eyes and wished for a happy death. I felt my stomach bounding sickeningly about inside me as if it were a wet football filled with water.

  Lord save us!

  ‘It does a man no harm,’ the Sergeant remarked pleasantly, ‘to move around a bit and see things. It is a great thing for widening out the mind. A wide mind is a grand thing, it nearly always leads to farseeing inventions. Look at Sir Walter Raleigh that invented the pedal bicycle and Sir George Stephenson with his steam-engine and Napoleon Bonaparte and George Sand and Walter Scott – great men all.’

  ‘Are – are we in eternity yet?’ I chattered.

  ‘We are not there yet but nevertheless we are nearly there,’ he answered. ‘Listen with all your ears for a little click.’

  What can I say to tell of my personal position? I was locked in an iron box with a sixteen-stone policeman, falling appallingly for ever, listening to talk about Walter Scott and listening for a click also.

  Click!

  It came at last, sharp and terrible. Almost at once the falling changed, either stopping altogether or becoming a much slower falling.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Sergeant brightly, ‘we are there now.’

  I noticed nothing whatever except that the thing we were in gave a jolt and the floor seemed to resist my feet suddenly in a way that might well have been eternal. The Sergeant fingered the arrangement of knob-like instruments on the door, which he opened after a time and stepped out.

  ‘That was the lift,’ he remarked.

  It is peculiar that when one expects some horrible incalculable and devastating thing which does not materialize, one is more disappointed than relieved. I had expected for one thing a blaze of eye-destroying light. No other expectation was clear enough in my brain to be mentioned. Instead of this radiance, I saw a long passage lit fitfully at intervals by the crude home-made noise-machines, with more darkness to be seen than light. The walls of the passage seemed to be made with bolted sheets of pig-iron in which were set rows of small doors which looked to me like ovens or furnace-doors or safe-deposits such as banks have. The ceiling, where I could see it, was a mass of wires and what appeared to be particularly thick wires or possibly pipes. All the time there was an entirely new noise to be heard, not unmusical, sometimes like water gurgling underground and sometimes like subdued conversation in a foreign tongue.

  The Sergeant was already looming ahead on his way up the passage, treading heavily on the plates. He swung his keys jauntily and hummed a song. I followed near him, trying to count the little doors. There were four rows of six in every lineal two yards of wall, or a total of many thousands. Here and there I saw a dial or an intricate nest of clocks and knobs resembling a control board with masses of coarse wires converging from all quarters of it. I did not understand the significance of anything but I thought the scene was so real that much of my fear was groundless. I trod firmly beside the Sergeant, who was still real enough for anybody.

  We came to a crossroads in the passage where the light was brighter. A cleaner brighter passage with shiny steel walls ran away to each side, disappearing from view only where the distance brought its walls, floor and roof to the one gloomy point. I thought I could hear a sound like hissing steam and another noise like great cogwheels grinding one way, stopping and grinding back again. The Sergeant paused to take a reading from a clock in the wall, then turned sharply to the left and called for me to follow.

  I shall not recount the passages we walked or talk of the one with the round doors like portholes or the other place where the Sergeant got a box of matches for himself by putting his hand somewhere into the wall. It is enough to say that we arrived, after walking at least a mile of plate, into a well-lit airy hall which was completely circular and filled with indescribable articles very like machinery but not quite as intricate as the more difficult machines. Large expensive-looking cabinets of these articles were placed tastefully about the floor while the circular wall was one mass of these inventi
ons with little dials and meters placed plentifully here and there. Hundreds of miles of coarse wire were visible running everywhere except about the floor and there were thousands of doors like the strong-hinged doors of ovens and arrangements of knobs and keys that reminded me of American cash registers.

  The Sergeant was reading out figures from one of the many clocks and turning a small wheel with great care. Suddenly the silence was split by the sound of loud frenzied hammering from the far end of the hall where the apparatus seemed thickest and most complex. The blood ran away at once from my startled face. I looked at the Sergeant but he still attended patiently to his clock and wheel, reciting numbers under his breath and taking no notice. The hammering stopped.

  I sat down to think and gather my scattered wits on a smooth article like an iron bar. It was pleasantly warm and comforting. Before any thought had time to come to me there was another burst of hammering, then silence, then a low but violent noise like passionately-muttered oaths, then silence again and finally the sound of heavy footsteps approaching from behind the tall cabinets of machinery.

  Feeling a weakness in my spine, I went over quickly and stood beside the Sergeant. He had taken a long white instrument like a large thermometer or band conductor’s baton out of a hole in the wall and was examining the calibrations on it with a frown of great preoccupation. He paid no attention to me or to the hidden presence that was approaching invisibly. When I heard the clanging steps rounding the last cabinet, against my will I looked up wildly. It was Policeman MacCruiskeen. He was frowning heavily and bearing another large baton or thermometer which was orange-coloured. He made straight for the Sergeant and showed him this instrument, putting a red finger on a marking that was on it. They stood there silently examining each other’s instruments. The Sergeant looked somewhat relieved, I thought, when he had the matter thought out and marched away to the hidden place that MacCruiskeen had just come from. Soon we heard the sound of hammering, this time gentle and rhythmical.

  MacCruiskeen put his baton away into the wall in the hole where the Sergeant’s had been and turned to me, giving me generously the wrinkled cigarette which I had come to regard as the herald of unthinkable conversation.

  ‘Do you like it?’ he inquired.

  ‘It is neat,’ I replied.

  ‘You would not believe the convenience of it,’ he remarked cryptically.

  The Sergeant came back to us drying his red hands on a towel and looking very satisfied with himself. I looked at the two of them sharply. They received my glance and exchanged it privately between them before discarding it.

  ‘Is this eternity?’ I asked. ‘Why do you call it eternity?’

  ‘Feel my chin,’ MacCruiskeen said, smiling enigmatically.

  ‘We call it that,’ the Sergeant explained, ‘because you don’t grow old here. When you leave here you will be the same age as you were coming in and the same stature and latitude. There is an eight-day clock here with a patent balanced action but it never goes.’

  ‘How can you be sure you don’t grow old here?’

  ‘Feel my chin,’ MacCruiskeen said again.

  ‘It is simple,’ the Sergeant said. ‘The beard does not grow and if you are fed you do not get hungry and if you are hungry you don’t get hungrier. Your pipe will smoke all day and will still be full and a glass of whiskey will still be there no matter how much of it you drink and it does not matter in any case because it will not make you drunker than your own sobriety.’

  ‘Indeed,’ I muttered.

  ‘I have been here for a long time this today morning,’ MacCruiskeen said, ‘and my jaw is still as smooth as a woman’s back and the convenience of it takes my breath away, it is a great thing to downface the old razor.’

  ‘How big is all this place?’

  ‘It has no size at all,’ the Sergeant explained, ‘because there is no difference anywhere in it and we have no conception of the extent of its unchanging coequality.’

  MacCruiskeen lit a match for our cigarettes and then threw it carelessly on the plate floor where it lay looking very much important and alone.

  ‘Could you not bring your bicycle and ride through all of it and see it all and draw a chart?’ I asked.

  The Sergeant smiled at me as if I were a baby.

  ‘The bicycle is easy,’ he said.

  To my astonishment he went over to one of the bigger ovens, manipulated some knobs, pulled open the massive metal door and lifted out a brand-new bicycle. It had a three-speed gear and an oil-bath and I could see the vaseline still glistening on the bright parts. He put the front wheel down and spun the back wheel expertly in the air.

  ‘The bicycle is an easy pancake,’ he said, ‘but it is no use and does not matter. Come and I will demonstrate the res ipsa.’

  Leaving the bicycle, he led the way through the intricate cabinets and round behind other cabinets and in through a doorway. What I saw made my brain shrink painfully in my head and put a paralysing chill across my heart. It was not so much that this other hall was in every respect an exact replica of the one we had just left. It was more that my burdened eye saw that one of the cabinet doors in the wall was standing open and a brand-new bicycle was leaning against the wall, identically like the other one and leaning even at the same angle.

  ‘If you want to take another walk ahead to reach the same place here without coming back you can walk on till you reach the next doorway and you are welcome. But it will do you no good and even if we stay here behind you it is probable that you will find us there to meet you.’

  Here I gave a cry as my eye caught a spent match lying clearly on the floor.

  ‘What do you think of the no-shaving?’ MacCruiskeen asked boastfully. ‘Surely that is an uninterruptible experiment?’

  ‘It is inescapable and highly intractable,’ the Sergeant said.

  MacCruiskeen was examining some knobs in a central cabinet. He turned his head and called to me.

  ‘Come over here,’ he called, ‘till I show you something to tell your friends about.’

  Afterwards I saw that this was one of his rare jokes because what he showed me was something that I could tell nobody about, there are no suitable words in the world to tell my meaning. This cabinet had an opening resembling a chute and another large opening resembling a black hole about a yard below the chute. He pressed two red articles like typewriter keys and turned a large knob away from him. At once there was a rumbling noise as if thousands of full biscuit-boxes were falling down a stairs. I felt that these falling things would come out of the chute at any moment. And so they did, appearing for a few seconds in the air and then disappearing down the black hole below. But what can I say about them? In colour they were not white or black and certainly bore no intermediate colour; they were far from dark and anything but bright. But strange to say it was not their unprecedented hue that took most of my attention. They had another quality that made me watch them wildeyed, dry-throated and with no breathing. I can make no attempt to describe this quality. It took me hours of thought long afterwards to realize why these articles were astonishing. They lacked an essential property of all known objects. I cannot call it shape or configuration since shapelessness is not what I refer to at all. I can only say that these objects, not one of which resembled the other, were of no known dimensions. They were not square or rectangular or circular or simply irregularly shaped nor could it be said that their endless variety was due to dimensional dissimilarities. Simply their appearance, if even that word is not inadmissible, was not understood by the eye and was in any event indescribable. That is enough to say.

  When MacCruiskeen had unpressed the buttons the Sergeant asked me politely what else I would like to see.

  ‘What else is there?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Anything I mention will be shown to me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The ease with which the Sergeant had produced a bicycle that would cost at least eight pounds ten to buy had set in motion in my h
ead certain trains of thought. My nervousness had been largely reduced to absurdity and nothingness by what I had seen and I now found myself taking an interest in the commercial possibilities of eternity.

  ‘What I would like,’ I said slowly, ‘is to see you open a door and lift out a solid block of gold weighing half a ton.’

  The Sergeant smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘But that is impossible, it is a very unreasonable requisition,’ he said. ‘It is vexatious and unconscionable,’ he added legally.

  My heart sank down at this.

  ‘But you said anything.’

  ‘I know, man. But there is a limit and a boundary to everything within the scope of reason’s garden.’

  ‘That is disappointing,’ I muttered.

  MacCruiskeen stirred diffidently.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘if there would be no objection to me assisting the Sergeant in lifting out the block

  ‘What! Is that a difficulty?’

  ‘I am not a cart-horse,’ the Sergeant said with simple dignity.

  ‘Yet, anyhow,’ he added, reminding all of us of his great-grandfather.

  ‘Then we’ll all lift it out,’ I cried.

  And so we did. The knobs were manipulated, the door opened and the block of gold, which was encased in a well-made timber box, was lifted down with all our strength and placed on the floor.

  ‘Gold is a common article and there is not much to see when you look at it,’ the Sergeant observed. ‘Ask him for something confidential and superior to ordinary pre-eminence. Now a magnifying glass is a better thing because you can look at it and what you see when you look is a third thing altogether.’

  Another door was opened by MacCruiskeen and I was handed a magnifying glass, a very ordinary-looking instrument with a bone handle. I looked at my hand through it and saw nothing that was recognizable. Then I looked at several other things but saw nothing that I could clearly see. MacCruiskeen took it back with a smile at my puzzled eye.

  ‘It magnifies to invisibility,’ he explained. ‘It makes everything so big that there is room in the glass for only the smallest particle of it – not enough of it to make it different from any other thing that is dissimilar.’