Collected Short Fiction, page 185
‘There’s a way of making it visible.’ Jim held up the aluminium paint sprayer. ‘Why do you think I’ve been lugging this around? Remember when you told Manny and me that whatever touched Bellita was invisible? That’s when I got this idea. As for the de-materializing bit, there’s only one way to stop that—if we ever get our hands on it. Kill it. Quick. Before it has a chance to pull out.’
‘Kill it? But we don’t know what it is—it may not be possible to kill it.’
Jim’s face set hard, his eyes were cold. ‘We’ve come to the crunch, Don—it’s kill or be killed. In effect, it has killed the Crew already. It’s sucked the life out of them—they’re as good as dead. It’s trying to do the same to us. We’re fighting for our lives—we can’t afford to be squeamish.’
‘Yes, you’re right, of course . . . While I remember it, Manny wants to know whether Bellita could remember anything about the Casa Armetti after she came round.’
Jim looked across at Bellita. She was still with the group but not of it—not quite. They were laughing and joking and she was smiling faintly but there was a withdrawn look in her eyes.
‘If she did, it was too painful to dwell on,’ he said. ‘I mentioned it a couple of times. Each time, she held her head and complained that it hurt. Said it was like raw nerve-ends aching in her brain.’
Don felt the contagion of Jim’s cold anger. He said abruptly: ‘This has gone far enough. Let’s break this party up and get them out of here.’
He turned. Jim caught his arm and whispered in his ear: ‘First, we’ll get that croupier. He may be only a ghost—or he may be that thing in another shape.’
Don nodded. They started purposefully back to the table.
There was a sudden outcry from the players.
‘Where did he go?’
‘Hey, did you see that? He just melted away.’
The croupier had vanished before their eyes.
Don and Jim exchanged significant glances. Words were unnecessary. Anyway, words were dangerous: even whispered ones could be overheard.
The sudden break up of the game left the party aimless. That helped.
‘Everyone get into line at the elevator,’ Don told them. ‘Manny wants you all down on the ground floor in a hurry. So come along now.’
They began to file out with hardly a murmur. Jim took charge at the elevator and began sending them down, four at a time.
Don waited till last, with Greta. She told him: ‘Bellita’s suffering from amnesia—at least, so far as the Casa’s concerned.’
‘Jim told me.’ He was uneasily aware of the traces of strain in her face. However, she seemed to have lost little of her old inconsequential manner.
‘Did you see how that croupier skipped? He was scared that my next bet would break the bank.’
‘I expect he remembered how close we came to doing that to him the last time.’ He was humouring her.
Her frown came too easily. ‘The last time?’
‘Don’t you remember him—the croupier at San Remo? When we made a killing with our new system?’
The frown stayed, and Don became afraid of what could be the reason for it. He produced his notebook. ‘Look, I wrote it up—the fifteenth. We had a great day. See for yourself.’
She read it silently, then gave the book back silently. ‘It’s happened to me too, Don—just like Bellita. So that was the San Remo Casino? Gone from my memory but somehow projected back there?’
‘That seems to be the way it happens, Greta,’ he said, unhappily.
‘But I don’t feel any pain. Bellita did.’
‘Maybe that’s because no one interfered with the illusion. Jim smashed Bellita’s—violently. There must have been repercussions which affected her.’
He thumbed through the more recent pages of his book. He began to find passages he never remembered writing—or experiencing. Greta doing her Pavlova act. He and Greta ski-ing blissfully in moonlit solitude in the Aosta Valley. He couldn’t even picture those incidents. Probably those settings were pictured elsewhere now, mushroom replicas reachable through some new door in this house of illusions.
The lift came up empty for the last time. They entered it, arms wrapped around each other, symbolically clinging to their memories of each other . . . while they could. But if the mental vivisection continued at this rate . . .
A great sadness began to envelop Don. It was the encroaching fringe of that same shadow which had extinguished the glow and laughter of the Crew and left them not even knowing why they took their pleasures sadly.
Greta had always been the life of the party. But this was a strange hell where parties lost their life. He knew that he and Greta were already beginning to lose one another.
The Set were sitting in rows on the carpet of the sweeping staircase. Mannheim had their reports, of which Don’s was the most startling and revealing. He had assessed them and, standing by the fountain, delivered his conclusions.
He said it appeared that they were captives of some unimaginable alien being, which was playing a cat and mouse game with them for its own peculiar amusement. It must be a creature of at least four dimensions, for it could manipulate things in their limited three-dimensional world without being observable. It was able to pentrate so-called solid matter by moving along another dimension.
‘It doesn’t actually materialize or de-materialize,’ he said. ‘It merely extrudes from or withdraws to this other dimension, at will. So we’re at a great disadvantage. How can we hope to combat it? Again, its technological know-how is quite literally out of this world—or rather, our world. It employs forces we can’t understand and handles power on a staggering scale.’
Greta called out: ‘If it’s so intelligent, why doesn’t it behave like an intelligent being? It hasn’t even tried to communicate with us—it treats us as though we were wood-lice.’
‘One can be both intelligent and knowledgeable and yet still be emotionally retarded,’ Mannheim answered.
‘Lord knows we have our own strain of compulsive killers. Obviously this creature is emotionally primitive. It may even be, in its way, a bit scared of us, simply because it doesn’t understand the way we behave . . . You look incredulous, Jim.’
‘I think it knows what it’s doing, all right, Manny. It’s just damn perverted, that’s all.’
‘If it knew what it was doing,’ said Mannheim, ‘it would have made me, the leader, its first target. The first rule of tribal warfare is to disable the enemy chief. It’s ignorant—or scared. It hasn’t touched me. So it’s left me free to plan a campaign—Ah! I thought that might rouse you—Jim, the gun!’
Mannheim was grappling with the unseen. His hands were like claws gripping nothing. His face began to flush with the effort.
Jim rocketed off the second stair, his spray-gun levelled. Don was only a pace behind him.
A controlled cloud of glistening particles enveloped Mannheim’s hands, making gauntlets of them and revealing something like a silvery eel writhing between them. Don clamped his gloved grip on the thing.
Jim raised the angle of the spray. Most of it passed beyond to join the fountain’s own spray, but the rest stuck and rendered visible a kind of agitated metal creeper seemingly hanging from the high ceiling.
The Set started to its feet.
‘Come on, confound you—grab!’ Mannheim roared.
They came in a rush. Don gasped a warning about gloves.
Driscoll, the tall, got a grip way up, heaved down. Greta joined on, then others. They were trying to drag the creature completely out of its hidden world. It was like a vertical tug of war.
Then a knife flashed—Jim’s pocket-knife. He sawed at the thing. A black split appeared on its surface, in sharp contrast to the silver, and began to gape wider slowly.
There came a sound like a banshee howling far out in the night. It was the voice of the thing. There was no hint of music in it this time—only the dissonance of snapping nerve-wires and pain-wave-impulses flowing chaotically.
It cut off, as all sound and light and consciousness were cut off. Mannheim’s Set were swallowed up in freezing darkness.
To Mannheim it seemed as though he were back in that silent temple at Buddhgaya built on the spot where Buddha had received enlightenment under the Bo-tree.
To Driscoll it was as though he stood on that far-spreading deserted South Pacific shore watching the dawn.
Don was alone a mile deep in the Grand Canyon beside the waters of the Colorado River.
Greta was watching the Northern Lights from Goose Bay.
Bellita stood at the foot of a 2000-year-old redwood in the forest of giant trees in the Cowell Redwoods Estate Park.
Each member of the Set had at some time been aware of standing on what seemed to be holy ground, where the sense of their own identity slipped from them and they were at one with something greater than themselves.
Each now seemed to be standing in those same tracks in that same mood, hearing a voice that spoke from waves and rocks and leaves and walls and icefields. The moments of high mysticism are few and cannot be long sustained. But the message which comes in those brief moments arrives in a great flash, which illumines whole landscapes of understanding.
The voice used few words but each spoke volumes. It didn’t relate: it made a statement. The hearers’ comprehension was equally absolute.
It was not of mankind, for mankind were creatures of another world. It was a parent. It was also a philosopher, an artist, a scientist—in short, a brain and spirit seeking knowledge about all things and all kinds of life in all known dimensions. It used an instrument for its work, which observed but neither harmed nor disturbed.
If it were not misused.
But it had been misused—by a child at play, in the absence of the parent.
The child was innocent. There was no evil in its world. It did not know evil. It was ignorant of many things.
It observed these groups of humans whose practical aims was happiness. It took specimens from their memory tracks of the happiest times of their lives, examined them and tried to live those experiences vicariously. And then it bungled its attempts to replace those memories intact. But they had been torn too roughly.
To try to undo the harm, it transferred these people from their world to an artificial one where, in time, they could relive their happiest experiences as often as they chose, and make their dreams come true, and enjoy a round of continual pleasure—of their strange Earthly kind.
The child tried to share some of their happiness and laugh with them. But they ceased to be happy and attacked and hurt it.
Its own damage was repairable. The damage it had caused to these people’s minds was not. The parent loved and understood. It believed these people would also love and understand . . . during these moments, if only then. For such moments of direct contact and communication were rare and for some may never come again.
It was too late to save the Crew. Their personalities had dissolved almost completely and merged into the force-field of the space warp. The space warp itself must now be dissolved in order to free the Set. Unfortunately, the lost memories would be lost forever with it. But much remained . . .
The Set were singing Santa Lucia. They were more than a little drunk. Maybe that was why their senses tended to swim and concentration was blurred.
However, they soon began to pull themselves together when the fun-promising town of Algiers hove into sight across the blue and glittering sea.
Jim, at the controls, said: ‘Well, there it is.’
Mannheim, beside him, echoed: ‘There it is.’ And sighed. He looked up at Don, just behind him in the pilot’s cabin. ‘It didn’t come off, Don. I’m afraid we shall never see the Crew again. May their souls rest in peace.’
‘Amen,’ said Don, quietly, then went back to join Greta, the centre of the merriment, the life of the party.
1978
The Man Who Wasn’t There
William F. Temple, author of the classic Four-Sided Triangle, offers a short story about hypnotism and an experiments unforeseen developments . . .
TREVOR looked as though he had died in his sleep many hours ago. He was as stiffly wooden as the Jacobean chair supporting him. His eyes were closed, his mouth open—in the o which so often shapes the last gasp.
Dale, who probably feared ridicule more than death, thought: Shaw will never get me looking like that.
This was Shaw’s apartment. Everything in it except the telephone could conceivably have been touched by James the First. Shaw was very rich; therefore leisured. He had no wife and no problems except the perennial one: how to amuse oneself.
Amateur hypnotism was the current answer.
“He’s now in deep trance,” Shaw whispered. Then, annoyed by the lapse which proclaimed his inexperience, for Trevor couldn’t be awakened except by command, he added loudly: “And ready to accept post-hypnotic suggestion.”
Dale observed: “I’d always thought deep trance was a condition of complete relaxation. Trev looks more like a case of rigor mortis.”
Shaw, who thought the same, said, still loudly: “It affects different persons in different ways.”
And hoped it did.
He went on. “We had some fun with the last guy I did this to—Bill Benson. Know him?”
“The broker?”
“No, no—the pro golfer. I told him that when he woke up he’d be a chimpanzee Everyone fed him peanuts. Laugh! And, boy, did he scratch for those fleas!”
Dale produced a smile as a tribute to the rich who could be cruel, vulgar, stupid—and useful. As a compensating tribute to good taste, he suggested: “Let’s try something more subtle with Trev . . . Make him think I’m not here, not in the room.”
“Could be amusing,” Shaw conceded. “Okay, then. Now listen carefully, Trevor.” He enjoyed this bit. It made him sound like a mastermind. By comparison, detailing his order to a waiter was plain ordinary: anyone could do that. “Our friend Dale has been called away. He’s gone. You will wake up when I have counted to three. Exactly ten minutes after that, you will fall asleep again. During those ten minutes you will talk to me but not to Dale, because he is not here. Do you understand? Answer now.”
Shaw’s tones were authoritative and his frown was meant to be, but it betrayed some doubt.
The doubt was allayed. Trevor’s lips moved, though not much.
“I understand.” A toneless echo.
“Good.” Shaw re-directed the frown at his gold wristwatch. “I shall now count to three. On the word ‘three’ you will wake up. One . . . Two . . . Three.”
Trevor opened his eyes, gave a huge yawn which relaxed him, then looked around slowly identifying his surroundings.
“Pardon me. Guess I just dozed off. What were you saying, Shaw?”
“I said I’d hate to work for Cadman’s.”
“You’d hate to work for anybody,” said Trevor. “Where’s Dale?”
“That’s the point. The Cadman lab phoned and wanted him in a hurry.”
“Don’t they ever let him off the hook, poor guy? Isn’t he entitled to any private life? Why doesn’t he get another job?”
Dale, looking on, smiled wrily. He had asked himself those questions often enough. He was a research physicist at Cadman’s and they drove him hard. This was the first time in months he’d been a member of a threesome which wasn’t discussing electronics.
Aloud, he said: “I’m open to offers, Trevor.”
Trevor was a self-made, independent manufacturer of garbage disposal units. He ignored the suggestion and Dale with it. It seemed he hadn’t heard it.
Shaw, mastermind, smiled a faint but complacent smile.
Dale tried again. “Can I get you another whiskey, Trevor?”
Trevor looked bewildered but not by Dale’s query. He was staring at the paneled oak door.
“I’m not over there, I’m right here, Trevor,” said Dale and slipped an aside to Shaw: “Gosh, you’ve reformed him!”
Trevor was rising uncertainly to his feet, looking a bit white.
Shaw reflected the uncertainty. He was still a little scared about the unknown fringes of this hypnotism game. It was like electricity: you used it, not knowing what it was, and if you weren’t careful things could go wrong.
He asked jerkily “Anything the matter, Trevor?”
“That man over there. Do you know him?”
“What man: Where: I don’t see anyone.”
Trevor couldn’t take his eyes off the man who wasn’t there.
He pointed to a spot just inside the door. “There, for Pete’s sake. He’s looking at us.”
Shaw glanced at Dale and shrugged.
He said: “Take it easy, Trev. Sit down and I’ll fix you another drink.”
Trevor put a hand to his mouth. “I’m sure he walked clean through that door,” he whispered through his fingers. “Is it a ghost? Is this room haunted, Shaw?”
“Good heavens, no, man.”
All the same, Shaw wondered briefly about that carved oak chest. The legend sold with it was that a priest once hid in it and suffocated there.
Dale said. “There’s something odd here, Shaw. Trev can’t see me. That worked, all right. But you’ve given him the illusion that he’s seeing someone else. Ask him what the fellow looks like.”
Shaw was glad to take direction now.
“What does this man look like, Trevor?”
But Trevor was absorbedly listening to the subject of the inquiry.
“I get you,” he said presently. And then: “Yes, it makes sense.”
“What—” began Shaw, but Trevor shushed him. “Let me heard this,” he said.
Shaw shrugged again and reached for the decanter. He refilled Dale’s crystal tumbler, then his own. He raised his glass. Pink light from a winter sun fallen low in the west ran and shone a moment in its handcut channels.
“To our unknown guest.”
“May he remember to knock next time,” Dale responded.
They sipped their drinks, waiting for the end of the strange communion.
