Summerhouse Land

by Roderick Gordon

  As he joins Curtis, Morgan is intrigued. ‘See what?’

  Curtis takes a buff colored file from the safe and from this extracts some black and white photographs. ‘Your batman’s tattoo isn’t a one-off.’

  On the top of the safe is a lamp, which Curtis turns on. In the cone of light it casts Morgan studies the A4-sized photograph Curtis has handed him, turning it one way then the other. ‘Good grief,’ he swallows, as he appreciates what he’s looking at.

  It extends over a man’s shoulder blade, and from the yardstick photographed next to it Morgan can tell that it’s almost a foot in height, so it’s not insignificant in size. The tattoo depicts a scantily clad woman with long slim legs, a wispy dress twirling around her like a patch of mist. She has dark, striking eyes in a very beautiful face, but what jars is the pair of coal-black insectoid legs reaching up over each shoulder with menacing looking pincers at each end. And below the woman is written Roach War Unit.

  ‘What does it mean?’ Morgan whispers.

  ‘Darned if I know,’ Curtis replies. ‘The injured man was a rating from a Navy frigate that was torpedoed in the North Sea. He was in a bad way, with eighty percent burns to his body and his lungs barely working due to smoke inhalation. He wasn’t expected to live for more than a fortnight, but I treated him, and he left here on tip-top form.’

  ‘You never filed a report on this,’ Morgan says, semi-accusingly, holding up the photograph. ‘I mean, what on earth did the man make of his new tattoo?’

  ‘Actually, he was rather taken with it,’ Curtis replies, not meeting Morgan’s eyes. ‘To tell the truth, he didn’t give two hoots about it; in one brief instant, his intolerable pain had been completely eliminated, and he knew full well that he’d been snatched from the jaws of death. He was just grateful to be alive and have his health back again. Full health.’

  ‘But where is this stuff coming from? What’s your device actually doing here? Is it healing and restoring, or is something else going on?’ Morgan asks.

  ‘Replication … rather than renewal,’ Curtis says distantly.

  ‘I’m not with you. Replication from where?’

  ‘You might well ask. Other than the fact that the amount of energy my process can unleash is staggering, I don’t have the answers. Which is why I have such severe reservations about a full-scale roll out of these devices,’ Curtis says. ‘And there’s more.’

  ‘More?’

  ‘All these appeared too.’ Curtis flips through several other photographs of tattoos, although these are less remarkable, with women’s names next to roses and crosses, and even one of a sea serpent coiling around an anchor. Then there’s another photograph of a man’s upper arm on which there are a series of black lines of differing widths arranged in a precise rectangle.

  ‘It’s very well defined, but there’s no inscription with it,’ Morgan observes. ‘I wonder what it means.’

  ‘Curious, isn’t it?’ Curtis replies, bemused, because he and Morgan have no way of knowing that it’s a computer barcode, and that in their world these won’t come into common usage until many decades into the future.

  Morgan watches as Curtis delves inside the safe again. He takes out a small envelope, then lifts the flap on it.

  ‘Put out your hand.’

  Morgan does as he’s told, and Curtis tips the contents of the envelope into it.

  ‘This was embedded under the skin in the abdomen of German airman I treated. His Dornier had been shot to pieces by Ack-ack over London.’

  ‘A German?’ Morgan asks.

  ‘For the preliminary trials with the Cube we used seriously wounded POWs as guinea pigs. They brought this chap to us after his plane crash-landed in the docks,’ Curtis says. ‘He was borderline when he arrived, and we caught him just in the nick of time.’

  Morgan moves his hand under the lamp so he can see the tiny fragments more clearly. ‘It’s broken.’

  ‘I’m afraid I did that trying to open it, whatever it is. When I dug it out from the German’s abdomen, it was roughly the size of a quarter of a train ticket, and not much thicker.’

  With a fingernail Morgan nudges the silicon chip to where it was originally seated in the middle of the almost microscopic circuit board. ‘You can see what could be connections, but it’s all so impossibly small … is this some form of electrical device?’

  Curtis indicates a very small rectangular component on the board. ‘Yes, and that seems to be the power source or battery – when I tested the contacts there with a voltmeter, it gave me a reading. A very weak one.’

  ‘But an electrical device … on this scale? Who in the blazes is capable of that?’ Morgan suddenly looks up at Curtis in alarm. ‘Is this something Jerry has cooked up?’

  Curtis shakes his head. ‘It wasn’t in the airman before he was healed. The Cube put it there.’

  ‘If he was in bad shape, you might easily have overlooked it,’ Morgan reasons. ‘Are you sure you didn’t?’

  ‘Categorically, because the man didn’t have a stomach when they brought him in. He’d been clipped mid-body by an anti-aircraft round.’

  Morgan nods, still holding up his palm with the fragments. ‘And there’s no metal content in this? Or else there would have been an explosion?’ he asks.

  ‘You mean implosion,’ Curtis corrects him once again. ‘It’s mainly silicon, but there are traces of nickel and iron, for electrical conductivity I would presume.’

  ‘Really? But it didn’t cause a blast?’

  ‘No. If a ferrous material is enclosed by living tissue, it doesn’t trigger a reaction. It simply disappears. If you think about it, there haven’t been any problems when I’ve treated soldiers with rounds or shrapnel still inside them.’

  ‘But if this gadget was functional – and who knows what it did – it’s a whole new field of technology.’ It’s Morgan’s turn to be lost in thought. Curtis holds the envelope out, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Please,’ Curtis prompts him.

  Morgan very carefully empties back into the envelope the pieces of electronic wafer chip that won’t be equaled by anything on Earth for at least the next sixty years.

  ‘You see – that’s what worries me. We have no conception of what we’re doing here ... or of the source of this phenomenal energy we’re tapping into,’ Curtis says, stooping to return the envelope to the safe. ‘No conception at all.’

  ‘One doesn’t have to understand something,’ Morgan says, ‘in order to benefit from it.’

  Damaris couldn’t understand how she was still alive. Weighed down by the chain, she had sunk like a stone in the chill depths of the lake.

  There had been a distinct point at which she’d known her time had run out, when her lungs burned and she couldn’t hold on any longer. She had opened her mouth, letting the stagnant water gush in.

  Although she hadn’t been able to see much in the silted-up bed of the lake, there seemed to be another kind of blackness encroaching on her vision, quickly spreading in from the edges with each faltering beat of her heart.

  For a few short moments Damaris drew on everything she still had left in her to escape from the floor of the lake. She clawed at the weed in a desperate bid to pull herself through it. She could remember that so vividly; grabbing at the fronds as they broke off in her hands, her body becoming more leaden and unresponsive with every frantic movement.

  In the end it wasn’t a violent death. Those brutal men couldn’t get to her down in the bottom of the lake, not in time anyway. Instead her life ended with a quiet cessation, as if a candle had been snuffed out before bedtime, ushering in a deep and dreamless sleep.

  So when Damaris came round with her head resting on a bank and water lapping around her waist, she couldn’t begin to make sense of it. For a while she lay still, utterly exhausted and listening to the sound of her own breathing.

  There was light and, more than that, she could feel the warmth of the sun on her skin. It was so very different from the overcast and w
intry weather when she’d slipped under the surface for the last time on the dunking stool. And she couldn’t hear any voices. Where were her tormentors? Where were all the townspeople?

  It took her an age to drag herself from the water because the chain was still tight around her waist and her legs. But by agonizingly slow stages and helped by the mud pasted all over her body, she began to wriggle free from the constricting links. At the same time she was edging herself farther up the bank by gripping the reeds growing on it. Mere inches took her hours, not helped because every so often she’d black out again.

  Finally, liberated from the chain and with only her ankles still submerged, Damaris managed to flip over onto her back. The body of water she saw was smaller and nothing like the lake she’d been dunked into. It was a pond. And she had the briefest glimpse of a towering white cliff face on the far side of this pond before she fell into a semi-conscious daze. Not asleep, but not awake. She didn’t know how long she remained like this, but suddenly she was fully awake again, and so phenomenally thirsty and hungry it hurt.

  The last thing Damaris wanted to do after her ordeal was to linger by the water, but her thirst was so great that she crawled on her hands and knees to drink from the pond. The water was crystal clear and so refreshing that she kept on drinking.

  Then she staggered unsteadily to her feet and looked around. The chain that had bound her was still on the bank. She knew she wasn’t dreaming because of this, a sort of touchstone anchoring her to the terrible reality she had just emerged from. By some miracle.

  She turned away from the cliffs, scanning her surroundings. Open countryside. She didn’t recognize anything familiar in it.

  ‘Where am I?’ Damaris asked out loud, the sound of her words strange in her ears after so many years of not speaking. She even went as far as calling out to her parents, something she would never have dreamed of doing before. There was no response.

  She looked down at herself, at her mud stained and ripped dress. ‘Someone saved me,’ she said. But if someone had rescued her from the thugs with staffs and brought her here, why was she alone now? Where were they?

  And the burns that Hopkins’ men had inflicted on her arms and the injuries to her forehead had gone without trace. She racked her brains for a logical explanation to all this but none was forthcoming. None of this made any sense. She began to stumble down the incline, searching for a track or signs of habitation. She kept going, and it was several hours before she noticed a thin twist of smoke rising into the sky. She headed straight toward it.

  Evening was setting in as she neared the line of houses. Large houses of several stories, far larger and more elaborate than anything in her town. People, not many, were gathered around a fire in front of them. And there was the most incredible voice. A woman was singing, and it was so beautiful that despite her hunger and fatigue Damaris was moved to tears.

  Tottering at each step and falling to her knees every so often because her legs were very weak, she continued toward the gathering.

  The wonderful voice was still singing. No words, but exquisitely clear notes hanging in the air, like the mellifluous tones of small bells.

  Damaris couldn’t stop herself. She began to sing, matching the melody note for note.

  The singing stopped abruptly.

  ‘Look! There’s someone’s there!’ a voice called out. It sounded surprised.

  The people began to move toward her.

  ‘It’s someone new!’ a woman said.

  They were closing in now. Perhaps twenty of them.

  A man stepped forward from the group and Damaris instinctively drew back.

  ‘There’s no need to be afraid,’ the man said gently.

  As he reached her, Damaris’s legs went again, but he caught her.

  ‘I’m Curtis. Whatever you’ve been through, you’re safe now,’ he said, picking a piece of weed from her blond hair.

  ‘Safe?’ Damaris asked, not able to stop herself from crying.

  ‘Yes, you are now,’ Curtis answered.

  Damaris put her arms around him, hugging him so tightly that he gasped.

  ‘Whoa,’ he said, laughing gently.

  ‘Just hold me,’ she said, so grateful for the warmth of another body. Grateful for the human contact that she’d rejected for so long.

  ‘They are,’ Sam mutters, the window wipers whipping rapidly back and forth as the downpour continues at the junction where they’re waiting.

  ‘These traffic lights take their time,’ Mr White says distantly, watching the rain in the overflowing gutter at the side of the road. He frowns, then looks at his son. ‘You answered my question before I even asked it. Sorry, must be getting very predictable in my old age. Do I always complain about them?’

  He doesn’t, and Sam doesn’t know what to think. He feels sick, his head a jumble of images from the present and the past, with something else mixed in he doesn’t know what to make of. It’s as if the dread he’s been feeling since his operation is growing, building into a spinning white-hot ball, which now and then throws out a thought, a memory, although some of these memories are completely new to him. And one of these just told him precisely what his father was about to say. This makes Sam so confused, his mind almost shuts down. He wishes it would.

  When they arrive home Mr White helps Sam inside and accompanies him up to his room. Sam’s dog is over the moon to see him, tearing up the stairs ahead of them and prancing around the bedroom floor, but Sam doesn’t feel up to making a fuss of him. Mr White ushers the dog from the room. ‘Good boy, Maxie. You can play with him a bit later,’ he says unconvincingly because Sam isn’t in a good way and this is unlikely. Mr White leaves and returns a few moments afterwards with one of the large painkillers, a bomber, which Sam swallows down with a mouthful of water.

  ‘The phone,’ Sam says.

  ‘Huh?’ his father asks, as he places the glass on the bedside table.

  ‘The phone,’ Sam repeats.

  Mr White cocks his head to one side, then there’s a ringing from downstairs. ‘Funny. I didn’t hear it,’ he says. ‘Now you try and get some shut eye,’ he tells Sam, as he leaves to answer it.

  But try as he might, Sam can’t get to sleep. The house is silent and Jesse won’t be home from school for a good few hours yet, and still he can’t relax. It’s as if there is noise from all over – whispers that can’t quite be heard. And below these are dark undercurrents of foreboding, so strong that they are palpable. Something terrible is about to happen – he’s sure of it.

  And under the dressing on his forehead, Sam has the sensation that the plate on his skull is throbbing, vibrating even. He knows this can’t be true, but he finds it impossible to settle, as if there’s a mounting pressure above his brow, as if a band is being slowly tightened around his cranium. Eventually he gets up from his bed and although he’s not particularly steady on his feet, he stands there with his eyes closed for a second or two.

  As he does when he has his migraines, there’s one place he thinks of going. Exiting from his bedroom, Sam climbs the staircase to the library. There’s enough light still percolating through the cobwebbed windows that he has no need of the torch, but he’s a creature of habit and he instinctively checks for it as soon as he’s inside. The torch isn’t where he left it, lying on its side farther into the room. He wonders why.

  He crawls along his usual route, through the scattered Cunard playing cards. As he’s about to pass under the table, he notices a money spider. He watches as the tiny speck descends from the edge of the table on its invisible filament, like a mountaineer in a photograph from one of the old volumes on the shelves he thumbed through once. Sam keeps watching as the spider touches down, then scuttles into a gap between the floorboards. Unlike Jesse and many other kids his age who have no reservations about killing anything that moves, crawls or flies, all life is sacred to Sam, even that of the most insignificant insect.

  He’s always been convinced that each life which is ended before its n
atural time, each bad deed, can bring about harmful karma or juju or whatever you want to call it, and that this might envelop him like the ripples in the disturbed surface of a pond. Sam takes this to extremes, even checking where he puts his feet in the garden in case there’s anything alive there. The last thing he needs is any more bad luck; he’s only too aware that his own life hangs by a thread as finely spun and delicate as the money spider’s.

  Continuing under the table to the other side, Sam notices something else out of place. A surgical scalpel is stuck into the floor by its point.

  ‘What are you doing there?’ Sam knows he didn’t leave it like that.

  He pulls the knife out and holds it up so the light catches its razor sharp blade. He’d originally come across it in an old Gladstone bag in one of the packing crates, along with some glass phials and pairs of curious looking forceps. But while all the other medical paraphernalia held little interest for him, the scalpel is different. Sam handles it with respect as if it’s some sort of totem, only too aware that instruments identical to this had and would continue to play a significant role in his life.

  Latterly, with the onset of the crippling headaches, he would often toy with the notion that he could simply carve the pain from his head, as if he was excising the brown flesh from a bruised apple.

  ‘I wish,’ he sighed, putting the scalpel to one side. ‘I could do with it right now,’ he adds, as the pain wells up in his forehead again.

  Crawling the rest of the way under the table, he emerges on the other side only to stop abruptly.

  Now he knows why the torch and the scalpel weren’t where they should be. The cushions and chair covers he always lies on have been cut to shreds. There are feathers and pieces of material everywhere.

  Worse still, as his eyes move to his pile of favorite books, they too have been vandalized, their pages slashed and their bindings covered with jagged slits. He picks up his Kon Tiki book, touching the brutal stumps of the pages where they have been cut through, touching them very gently as if they can feel pain.