25

 

 

Heather’s hands closed on Murray’s arm so tightly the grip hurt, and she began to breathe in great sobbing gasps, as if fighting the need to vomit. Wadeward put a finger in his mouth and gnawed at the knuckles, and from all sides men hurried up, alerted by their frightened withdrawal, to stare down and stand petrified at the disgusting sight. Even Cromarty, with his years of medical experience, had to force himself to feel for a pulse before throwing the blanket over Delgado’s face and turning away. He muttered something Murray barely caught; it sounded like, ‘Beyond hope, thank God!’

Then the ambulances were swinging up the drive, disgorging their crews of tired and irritable men, and there was a welcome distraction for Cromarty and Wadeward to seize. Murray, though, had no such good fortune. He could only sway back and forth on the spot where he stood, the weight of Heather clinging to his arm an insupportable burden that somehow did not drag him down, and feel his mind swimming with crazy visions.

He’d been compelled to accept at face value the most fantastic nonsense he’d ever heard, and the impact of it had numbed him so that it was an eternity before he next perceived an outside event.

Then, it was Cromarty and Wadeward crossing his field of vision with stretcher-bearers following, directing that the loathsome ruin of Delgado should be lifted and carried away. He stirred and turned lackluster eyes on the doctor.

‘Mr Douglas, you’re shivering—and no wonder!’ Wadeward, noticing him again. ‘Man, you’re practically naked! Someone get him a coat to put on!’

Don’t shout, it hurts my ears. But the words wouldn’t emerge.

‘Doctor, are the ambulances full up?’

‘Damned fools only sent us two!’ Cromarty pushing spread fingers through his hair, comb-fashion. ‘But never mind, I’ll take care of Mr Douglas. I have a spare bed, and I want to put a proper dressing on those burned feet, anyway. No disrespect to you, young woman. A very tidy job of bandaging. Wouldn’t disown it myself.’ He was talking feverishly for the sake of talking. ‘But how about you? You’re in rags even if you aren’t hurt yourself, and—oh, you’d best come too. My car’s there by the gate.’

Firm hands relieved Murray of the problem of balancing upright, provided relief for aching muscles and agonized feet, guided his arms laxly into the sleeves of a warm police overcoat. He saw that the firefighters were slacking their efforts now; the inferno would probably last till dawn or later, but it had been contained and would not engulf the rest of the building.

Hope they carried plenty of insurance. Hate to see Sam Blizzard bankrupted over this. …

Stumbling, leaning on Cromarty and a policeman summoned by Wadeward, Murray suffered himself to be put in the back seat of the doctor’s car and propped up with a blanket rolled into a sort of sausage. Heather slipped in beside him and took his hand.

Darkness, speared by the car’s headlights, brought calm after the hellish glare of the fire they had left. Heather sensed the fact, and gave the hand she held a comforting caress.

Murray found a memory that spewed up at random and seemed important. He said, ‘Uh—Dr Cromarty, you may have another visitor in the morning. My agent, Roger Grady. I said on the phone to him last night I was going to try and get away if I could and make for your place.’

Last night? This same interval between day and day? God, how short can eternity be?

‘Wish I had my pipe,’ the doctor muttered. ‘Dragged me out in such a panic I didn’t bring anything except the car keys and my surgical bag. … Sorry, Mr Douglas?’ He half-turned his head, swinging the car around a curve. ‘My mind was wandering.’ Then, hearing what had been said in memory: ‘Try to get away? Man, you sound as if you were in a concentration camp!’

‘It was like that,’ Heather said clearly. ‘Didn’t you follow what Murray was saying?’

‘I—uh—I can hardly credit it,’ Cromarty admitted. ‘No disrespect, Mr Douglas, but you’re overwrought and—’ He interrupted himself. ‘No, by the lord Harry! I do believe it, every word, now I’ve seen that impossible dissolution. It’s like the story by Poe, isn’t it?’

‘Monsieur Valdemar,’ Heather said. Murray felt a shudder run through her and heard her teeth chatter briefly. She added. ‘He was hypnotized, wasn’t he? Doctor, there’s no risk, is there, that all the others will—?’

‘You heard Delgado himself say they’d wake up naturally and recover in a few weeks or months,’ Murray reminded her, and put his arm around her shaking shoulders.

‘But I also heard him say he’d been born in some impossible year that hasn’t happened yet.’ She turned blank eyes on him, seeking his reassurance through the dimness. ‘I think he was mad, wasn’t he?’

‘If he wasn’t telling the truth,’ Murray pointed out grimly, ‘there’s no rational explanation for all the things that happened, up to and including his dissolution.’

‘Christ, that was so horrible!’ The last word peaked to a moan of terror, and the teeth chattering resumed.

‘Should have treated you for shock too, young woman,’ Cromarty said. ‘Try and control it till we get to my place. Not much further now.’ He jutted his jaw forward as though clamping on the stem of the forgotten pipe.

‘But tell me, Mr Douglas, since you seem to have made sense of the whole rigmarole—who was he?’

Murray sighed imperceptibly. Tomorrow it would all seem like a nightmare, with nothing to give it substance bar the memory of those who had endured it, and the few heat-twisted scraps of machinery salvaged from the ruins of Fieldfare House, as meaningless to contemporary science as the bioelectronic gimmickry Lester had been so scathing about.

Better so, perhaps …

He said in a rusty voice, ‘As near as I can make out, some time in the future—the twenty-fifth century—they have advanced science that includes time-travel and the means of altering people’s personalities using a field broadcast by a special triplem antenna like the one I found every night on my mattress. To satisfy the illegal cravings of some perverts, Valentine was organizing a supply of primitive people’s experiences in recorded form, which could be played back to the purchasers and give them barbaric thrills—oh, compare it to cock-fighting in this country today. Banned, but some people enjoy it so much they don’t care.

‘His customers must be—going to be—oh, the hell with it. A pretty horrible bunch, anyhow, considering the sort of vicarious thrills Valentine had to provide. Who’d want to enter the mind of a relapsing alcoholic, for God’s sake? And I think the task was only at the halfway stage, if that. It would have fitted the pattern if, a bit later on, Gerry had gone looking for his bottle of heroin after some dirty trick Delgado played on him, and found it had been taken away. Addiction to drugs, liquor, pornography, sexual kinks—and it was still only the start!’

He had to pause and swallow hard, before resuming his exposition with his eyes fixed unseeing on the dark roadside.

‘But it’s difficult enough merely to translate something from one language to another and be sure you’re understood. It must have proved much worse trying to present the experiences of people far in the past to the—well—the modern mind. So Delgado hit on the idea of taping the experiences of actors; as he said, they live half their lives in other people’s minds anyway. And this worked, and made fortunes for Valentine and his gang.

‘To make the most of their fairly limited opportunities, they deliberately encouraged unstable people to rub one another up the wrong way and heighten the emotions recorded. If I hadn’t interfered, they’d have got me down as a hopeless alcoholic—’

‘And me as a fullblown les,’ Heather said. ‘It’s so frightening, Murray! They said “the urge was on her tapes” and if you hadn’t worried me so much I cut the wire every night it would have worked, and I’d have been seduced by Ida and then someone who hasn’t even been born yet would—would—’

‘This is carrying voyeurism a step too far,’ Cromarty said with an attempt at light relief. It was a ghastly failure. ‘But it might not have worked, young woman!’

‘It would have,’ she said obstinately. ‘There’s a bit of it in all of us—you should know that, as a doctor. I used to get crushes on older girls when I was at school, so it’s probably still in me, just below the surface, waiting for—’

Hysteria on the way, Murray diagnosed, and wondered if he was going to have to slap her face to quiet her. But at that moment the car slowed, and there ahead was the gate of Cromarty’s home. A curtain moved at an upper window. Lights came on. The housekeeper Murray had met before appeared to let them in.

She exclaimed in horror over Heather’s condition and led her away with promises of a hot bath and a comfortable bed, while Cromarty brought Murray his own thick woollen dressing gown and slippers that were much too big. In the surgery, he tended in silence to the burns on his feet. It was not until new bandages were in place that he glanced up from under his greying brows and put the key question.

‘Mr Douglas, do you really believe what the man Delgado said?’

‘Ask me tomorrow,’ Murray said wearily.

‘Yes, of course.’ Distressed, Cromarty jumped up. ‘I’m sorry, I should let you go straight to bed. Not much of a bed, I’m afraid. Mrs Garbett has probably given the young lady the one I meant to offer you when I suggested your coming here, but we’ll see what we can do … Mrs. Garbett!”