John Lymington – The Grey Ones 1960

Chapter I

THE day was thundery, cloudy and still. You could hear small sounds from a long way off. As he walked up to-. wards the headland, he heard the little train chuffing six miles away. The noise stood out against a background of silence, and he hesitated and turned on the grassy slope to look back across the fields to the little white plume in the distance.
It was queer to be attracted like that on one’s way to commit suicide.
He watched the train running in the bosom of the green land, and felt a sense of extravagant regret, then drove his hands into his pockets and went on his way again. That small act alone showed it was drama and not determination which hauled him to the peak of the cliff.
The drop there was three hundred feet on to rocks, and had a history of deaths before this. There had been rain in the night, and the turf near the edge was slightly slippery. It was there that he slipped.
He was not such a fool as to mistake that sudden terror at the awful sight of the inevitable drop opening under him, not to realise the danger of the drama which gripped him.
He caught tufts of grass with his claws as he fell, and scrabbled madly to drag himself up and away from Death that pulled at him from below.
When he reached safety, the moment of truth was on him and he lay there and sobbed until all passion was exhausted. After a while he sat up, and for the first time in his life thanked God.
He got to his feet and started back towards the village at the foot of the hill, purged of his death wish.
After all, Maggy would come back. You cannot share a life with a man for ten years and just walk out like that. Of course she would come back. If he had not been in the grip of a hysterical despair, he would have realised that. It was a question of patience and suffering until she came back.
As he walked his head became clearer. He began to feel surprised at remembering the intention which had taken him up to the headland. It became unreal, like the miasma of a dream. But it was terrifying that he could have let a hysterical nightmare carry him so far away from life as that. The sweat came on his face, and the world seemed suddenly larger with the greatness of his relief.
Madness. Of course it had been madness. Unbelievable madness.
He could not understand how despair had got such a grip; as if it had been some maggot inside him, growing out until it was so big it gripped his mortal soul.
These last days had been times of growing nightmare, of seeing Maggy as some stranger, malignant almost. His feelings had grown against his normal will, as if some devil outside whispered and painted foul pictures for him to see ...
He stopped and pressed his hands to his head. It felt cool and solid again, as if the last days had been wiped out of his life. And that devil had driven her away. He knew that now. It had been his madness, his malice, his unreasoned jealousy lashing at her like some ghastly flamethrower.
He looked down upon the village, the little cluster of roofs nestling in amongst the trees round the church tower. The grey stone and the red tile were beginning to brighten, and a shaft of gold from a break in the cloud struck down so the gold windcock on the church tower beamed a sudden brilliant diamond.
He went on down again, following the path through the farm lands. As he came into the big yard, the silence struck him. When he had come up he had skulked round the back of the barns, for the men had been at work and the hay baler had been whining over the smell of paraffin from the thunderous tractor.
Now they had gone. He stopped suddenly, as if warned by the silence. A shimmer of heat rose from the tractor radiator. There was still the smell of hot oil mixing with the musky hay. Bales were poised half-way up the chute. The whole scene gave him the odd impression that everybody had got tired of their work and had gone home, leaving everything as it was.
He walked on through the silence to the pond, where the six ducks always were, either floating on the mirror or sitting in solemn committee on the green bank. But they were gone now, flown away as if they too had got scared of the silence.
He went through the yard gate into the footpath past the cottages. The silence seemed to grow the nearer he came to the village.
Suddenly he noticed the Barnes’s dog wasn’t there. Rufus was lying on the wall outside the cottage all the time when he was not eating, and there was a fat cat that usually sat by him. Neither of the animals was there.
Again he stopped, frightened by a growing sense of dread. He stood there listening, but there was nothing to hear in the still, hot afternoon. No sound of traffic on the road, no dog’s bark, no radio even, no birds.
He shook his head, the odd feeling that he had gone deaf striking him, but he could still hear the faint movements of the air, occasionally touching a leaf enough to make it seem like a clatter in the great stillness.
At the inn he could see into the garden and the open back doors. There was Sam’s car standing in the cobbled yard, the bucket still by it, the leather hanging over the lip. The front of the car still gleamed with diamond drops where Sam had not leathered it off.
He hurried past the inn to the village street, winding off in either direction with its cosy little cottages and the two shops smiling gnome-like in the afternoon light.
But there was no one there. Pagson’s van was outside the shop, and the vicar’s car, and Mrs. Vander’s bubble job all stood parked around, but there was no one to be seen at all.
A sudden panic seized him, and once again the finger of madness prodded his brain.
Perhaps he had died on the cliff after all. Perhaps this was the hell to come; the old familiar place, but with no one in it save himself. No one but himself for eternity, staring bewildered at the grey afternoon.
The momentary spasm passed, but he felt weak from it as he touched his face and felt it wet.
“For God’s sake, what’s happening?” he said.
The silence was like a solid thing.
“What’s happening?” he shouted. “What’s happening?”

His voice echoed from either side, repeating as if the little houses were laughing at him in his madness.
He walked into the middle of the street, and shouted again.
“I say, I say!”
He could shout no louder. The houses, the church and the trees answered him, sending his voice away to the sky until the last whisper had gone in the great hush.
His heart began to beat like the thudding of an engine.
“For god’s sake!” he said again.
Suddenly he was determined not to panic. He had the idea that if he did, he would be lost.
He strode along the road to the little grocer’s shop, where the van stood. He threw open the door and the warning bell clanged once more in the emptiness, then was silent.
He turned in desperation and went out in to the street again.
The policeman. Wills. The policeman would be there whatever happened.
He hurried across to the cottage where the legend, County Constabulary, graced the door. The door was open. He went into the room which was Wills’s office. It was as empty as the shop had been. A ledger was open on the desk and a fountain pen, uncapped, lay in the ‘V of the pages.
“At 3.40 James Burton, Ask Villas, reported bicycle . . .”
Bicycle what?
He looked round. Wills had got up and gone in the middle of the report, just as the farmers had gone in the middle of baling.
He went out into the street again. The main door of the inn yawned under heavy straw eaves. He crossed and went into the stone bar. The glasses were all ranged on the counter, lined up for washing after the morning customers.
“Sam! Sam!” he shouted, knowing there would be no answer.
He went behind the bar and took a strong whisky. As he felt its soft fire in him he knew he was not dead; he knew it was no dream.
Somehow every soul in the village had gone. Man, woman, and child------
No, not child. Idiotically he remembered The Outing; the the Annual Outing for all the children, even those in arms with their mothers. He remembered the coaches going that morning, hearing the shrill squeaks of the happy, expectant departees . . .
How many people, then, had walked out now? A hundred? Two? He had no idea how many lived here, though he had been here three years.
But they had gone.
He went to the doorway suddenly, an idea striking him. He looked out at the cottages, and as far as he could see, every door stood open.
Just as if the people had rushed out, leaving the doors wide, as if they had been pursued.
The heat of panic came over him again and he felt his knees go weak. He blasphemed again, but there was more of the urgency of prayer in it than the bitterness of a curse.
He turned back into the inn, for he knew that place, and went through the rooms on the ground floor. Everything left where it had been thrown down, a newspaper half-open, making a ragged tent on the floor, a pot of tea with a half-empty cup by it, the tea still very warm in the pot.
They had gone, right in the middle of things, during the hour that he had talked with Death up on the headland.
But what panic had taken them away like this? He had heard nothing, no warning, no alarm, no explosion, nothing, .yet in the stillness he had clearly heard the little train from six miles away. Surely he would have heard a commotion in the village? The sound of panic, of shouting, of calling to others, the chaos of alarm, the running feet, the barking dogs —he must have heard it.
But he had heard nothing, nothing at all after the little train had chuffed away into silence.
Then what, for Heaven’s sake, had happened?
He went out into the street, walking quickly, up and down, zigzagging, peering into cottages, into barns and sheds, and seeing only the stillness of a photograph. The growing eeriness made his skin cold.
He almost ran to his own cottage; for there would be nothing strange in its emptiness; there should be no one there.
He pushed the door open, remembering it had been the one village door that had been closed, and went in.
The grandfather clock was ticking against the lounge wall. The sound melted his heart. He could have kissed this one mechanical friend still moving in the silence. But as the moments passed he began to hate it, as if its sonorous clack was cheating him of some faint sound that might be made in the empty village. He strained to hear outside until he could stand it no more, and he opened the clock door and stopped the pendulum. Then he felt relieved, and the silence came down again like the cloak of night on his senses.
When he moved it was stealthily, on tiptoe, lest someone should hear him, someone that he could not see. And with the sudden realisation of what he was doing, came the suspicion, the odd, insidious feeling that someone was watching, that in all that stillness, he was not alone.
The feeling damned his throat with fear, but he fought against it.
“If I can fight it—get used to it, I might do something,” he whispered, staring round the so familiar shadows of the old place.
Suddenly he darted to the kitchen door and flung it open, as if in some mad attempt to catch someone there. Only the stillness was caught suspended in the moment that he stopped.
Then he saw the phone standing by the dresser.
“Why didn’t I think of that?” he said. The sound of his voice in the emptiness was a comfort. He lifted the phone and the bell tingled, but no answering voice came.
Of course, Tillie at the Post Office would have gone, too. There was no one left to answer, no one to put a call through. He hesitated, listening to the mush on the line, as if there was a faint hope that someone would answer the flashing light on Tillie’s board.
He put the phone down and looked quickly round him again, just as if he were being watched. Nothing moved in the stillness while he stood, listening.
He wondered why the animals had gone, and the birds. When there is an exodus, do they follow the people?
Again he tried to picture that strange flight. It must have involved a hundred people at least, and animals beside them, and the birds in squadrons overhead . . . No, it could not have happened without him hearing on such an afternoon when sound was travelling like that of the train.
He sat on the table, held his head and tried to think without getting scared again.
A history; something that he had heard, about this place over a century ago. Much, much more than that. The French invasion. There had been isolated bodies of invaders, but the general atmosphere had been panic. It was in the book in the church. Something about an exodus, then. A general desertion to hide somewhere. What had it been?
It might be a key. The book was in the church.
He got up and went out of the cottage, turning up the lane to the church. Often he stopped and looked round, imagining that he heard some sound, but there was nothing. He began to fear the quiet like coming night, and his pace quickened, grew noisier, so that the tacking of his steps began to chatter back from the silent walls of the cottages.
In the churchyard the gravestones lurched, pointing at the lonely man as he went by and in at the great doorway. He turned to the bench behind the pews where the vicar kept the historical books about the church and the village. He knew the book he wanted, but it was not there.
The discovery, after a succession of shocks, made him suddenly depressed. He did not even turn over the books a second time but accepted the fact that the one he wanted had gone.
The church did not seem so bad; it was always quiet and remote in there. He leaned back against the back of a pew and stared at the stained glass windows, dull coloured against a grey sky. His mind beat with the theories of nightmares, none of them practical or possible.
“They’ve gone,” he said, starting to walk down the aisle. “What’s happened? Surely you know! Surely------“
He remembered why he had not gone with them; why he had been alone on the headland when the miracle happened, and he turned his back on the altar.
He went to the doors and looked out over the village, as if in his absence life might have returned. There was only the brooding silence of mystery. He went down to the village street again, expecting with a desperate hope to see someone appear from a cottage, but no one came.
He stopped outside the inn, thinking more clearly.
Should he take the car and go somewhere? Where? What for? What would he say? Would anyone believe his story and come at a call? What would they do if they did come? Would they stand and stare around and feel as scared as he did?
Another thought struck him.
Why was there no traffic through the village? Saturday afternoon and not one van or car or cycle had gone through. Nothing.
That was as startling as the exodus, now he came to think of it. He sat down on the mounting stone outside the inn, and for the first time the odd sense of fear began to be drawn away.
There was a reason. Of course, there was a reason for it all. A sudden scare of war, atomics? But how had they heard? He would have heard the sounds of the alarm from up on the headland. He would have heard men shouting to each other, heard the cars starting up, people running.
What, then? Some Pied Piper coming through the village and all tumbling out to follow.
The picture of it made him feel better. Almost as if he could begin to laugh again.
But as he felt his sense of humour coming back, the silence of the empty street touched him with a cold hand, and he looked up and down the road again.
Suddenly he thought: If only a dead leaf would rustle, some breath stir in the eaves, some insect rattle in the hedge.
Chickens! Where in hell were the chickens? Had they gone too? Every other cottage kept chickens round the back. Where were they?
He stood up again suddenly and went into the inn and stood there listening intently.
Listening for flies, for wasps. But there was nothing. No fly on the ceiling, no wasp sucking at the dirty beer glasses; no insect at all in that place.
“They wouldn’t have gone,” he said. “Everything must be dead!”
The appalling thought caught him suddenly, and in desperation he looked at the floor, where flies might have dropped with the passing of the great Scythe, but there were no tiny corpses.
Of course not. If they had been there, the people would be too; lying about in their houses, propped up, still holding their papers, teacups in laps, or tossed anyhow on the floor where they had fallen.
The picture fascinated with a kind of pleasurable horror, and for a moment he felt guilty.
Dead people, lying around, sitting, and the weeds growing up all round and over them . . . What was he thinking of? The Sleeping Beauty, of course. That mighty palace become like a great waxworks show behind the veils of cobwebs . . .
What to do? He went once more to the empty street, as if it might help him to think.
He realised he was in no hurry to do anything. At the back of his startled mind there was still the shame of that time on the headland. He felt almost glad there was no one here; as if he was escaping punishment due.
Once more he stared up and down, seeing no life.
What made him look suddenly towards the Manor roof he did not know. At the time it seemed his eyes just flicked there, and saw the little diamond-paned windows in the stone frames of the gables, winking above the green clouds of the trees.
Perhaps it was the winking that caught his eye, but then the idea came to him that he had seen something move there. He stared, but saw nothing but the motionless panorama.
The Manor had been empty for a long time, and only a week ago taken over by a man nobody in the village had ever seen. A man called Gorgi Venus, and after seven days everybody had still been guessing who he was. They had seen his vans go up there, unload unseen in the Manor grounds, and go away, doors flapping.
Of course it had been a mystery. Perhaps subconsciously, curiosity about the man had made him look there.
Yet still he had the feeling that something had moved.
Slowly he walked towards the private lane that led to the Manor off the street, keeping his eyes on the grey gables over the trees. Then the leaves cut off the sight of the house and he stopped, not sure there had been anything moving after all.
Yet the idea persisted. He went along the lane until he could see the top of the proud grey stone place. Then he stopped again. It was as dead as any other part of the village.
He looked back. Dead. It was like being dead. Again the idea came back that he had died up on the headland. Perhaps dying was just the disappearance of all other people and things and one was left alone just with the scenes remembered.
But no. What of all the other places he knew?
Then what? Had his brain cheated and refused to recognise anything living any more? Was he truly mad at last? Were there really all those people around him, watching him in his madness? Could that be it?
The sweat broke on his face. He touched his nose, his lips, to make sure he could feel them. Yes, he was there. But the others?
He reached out into the empty air, made a sudden dart to one side, hitting out, so that if anyone were there they would be hit.
But he touched nothing.
“I couldn’t be mad like that. I couldn’t just see some things and not others. It wouldn’t make sense. No, I’m here and the whole place is empty, dead, but for me. They’ve all gone, and nobody else comes . . .”
He remained still in the silence, panic coming and going in his head; the panic of isolation.
He turned back along the lane, and began to half run back towards the village, as if there might be some life there which he had overlooked, but as he came into the street his own footfalls alone sounded eerie in the stillness.
He went back in at the open door of the pub and stopped by the line of barrels.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Anybody there? Service, blast you! Service, I say!”
The echoes of his voice whispered away into the silence. He went to the whisky bottle again.
“I can’t stand this for long,” he said, the tears welling in his eyes. “Something’s got to happen. Something’s got to!”
He sat down on the end of the black wood stillion and started to cry like a child, wiping his nose on his forearm.
“Oh, God, what’s happened? Is it me? Have I gone mad? Am I dead?”
He stopped crying and felt ashamed. Then as he gave a final sniff he stopped very still, head cocked.
There was a sound—a sound of someone walking slowly out in the garden.
He just sat there for several seconds, counting the slow steps, not daring to believe his ears in case his brain was tricking him in the awful solitude. Then he jumped up and turned towards the open back door.
He saw Sally in the garden, the landlord’s blonde daughter who helped in the bar and, it was said, helped herself outside it. She came in at the door, an enigmatic smile on her peach cheeks as if secretly amused.
“Sally!”
She stopped, her china-blue eyes momentarily hard in surprise, then she saw him and smiled. She was pretty, but had more the figure of a boy than a girl. Her mouth, big and loose, open in welcome, made her seem the prettiest being he had ever seen.
“Jim,” she said, in her warm half-amused voice, “what you doing here?” She came up to him, hands clasped under her breasts, thumbs making a steeple, then tapping together in sudden restlessness.
“Doing?” he said, his voice croaking like a frog’s. “My God, I was looking for somebody. Do you know there isn’t a soul in the village? Not a living soul till you came. I thought I was going mad------“
“It was a meeting,” she said, her slow smile becoming intimate. “Everybody went. They’re not back yet.” She was looking at his mouth with her china-blue eyes sparkling bright.
“I’ve never been so glad to see anybody!” he gasped, taking her by the shoulders. “I’ve never been so glad. I thought I was gone!” He did not wonder in that moment; relief was too great. He clasped her tightly to him and let his head fall on her shoulder. “I can’t describe it. . .”
She ran her hands slowly up and down his back and smiled at the window looking on to the empty street.
“You been frightened,” she said in her soft, dreamy voice. “I never thought of you being frightened. I never did. You were always so proper and stiff.”
He held her tightly, as if scared to let her go, and lifted his head to look into her eyes.
“I’ve never been so scared in my life,” he said huskily. “It was—everybody gone. No one at all. Nothing------“
He turned his head to look through the open doorway into the street. She bent her head forward and rubbed her big, soft lips across his ear. He turned his head back to her. She was smiling and watching his mouth.
“Nothin’ to be frightened of,” she murmured. “Nothin’ at’ all. Give me a kiss, then. Go on. Give me a kiss. You was always wantin’ to. I can tell by the way you look . . .” She darted her head forward and fastened her wet lips on his. He felt her body moving sensuously against him, slowly, deliberately. When the kiss ended she was smiling again. “Not frightened now, Jim.”
He stared at her quiet, amused smile, surprised. Had not shock already numbed his brain he might have felt more at her actions, but holding her to him and feeling the electric touch of her body, he wanted more.
He kissed her, and felt her hand run down his thigh, slowly. She drew her head back, ending the kiss, and smiled again.
“I said I’d have you one day,” she said, in a soft burr of a voice. “You were frightened of your wife, I know. You wanted to go to bed with me, but you were frightened of her. Now she don’t matter, Jim. You don’t want to be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid,” he said, bemused. “I just can’t think, I____”
“There’s nothin’ to think about, Jim:” She gave a little gurgle of a laugh deep in her throat. “You understand.” She reached up and pulled her blouse off one shoulder. “Kiss me there. Go on.” She reached out, caught his head between her hands and pulled it down to her white shoulder. “Harder. Go on. Bite me.” She whispered into his ear, suggesting, encouraging.
Then suddenly she pushed him away and stood back against the wall, breathing fast, her dress right off her shoulder, her bosom rising and falling deeply, yet the smile still on her face.
He stood facing her, the strange tumult in his head beyond understanding for a second or more, then he noticed a change in the atmosphere; a rustling, a coming to life. He jerked his head to one side as a shadow passed the window; a woman walking by on the road. The thousand sounds of the afternoon were coming back; the humming of life returned.
“You’re scared, Jim,” she said. “Too scared. So it wasn’t you were stiff and proper, then. It was just you was scared.”
He turned back to her angrily. The coming back of life into the world surged in him like a great tide, almost choking him. He saw nothing but her big loose mouth, smiling, and in his mind hammered the single fact that he was back from death.
The man came to the doorway unheard. He stood there for a few seconds glowering, his hands hanging to his sides, half clenched, like an ape’s. Sally sensed that he was there, and turned her head so quickly her hair flew, and at the same instant she pushed Jim away.
“Hallo, Sam,” Sally said, her voice soft as ever.
The man came in a couple of paces and stopped again, head forward, staring sullenly at Jim Manston. Manston stared back, his heart beating wildly. He knew Sam, big fumbling tractor driver off the Ley Farm, but he had never seen him like this.
From the corner of his eye he saw Sally, smiling still, pulling the blouse back on to her shoulder, acting very slowly, watching.
“You------“ Sam uttered the word in his throat and came
another step forward.
Jim Manston knew what was coming, and his soul quaked. Scared, she had said. Scared of everything. Even scared of life, then scared of losing it, up there on the headland. Scared of being alone, scared of returning, scared of the girl, scared of Sam Bickley and his big fists and boots.
But suddenly he saw the girl smiling as she watched, eyes narrowed, and her taunt stung him over again. The surge of life returning in him made a sudden desire to keep it.
Almost too late, as Sam Bickley came in a rush, Manston caught hold of a small bar stool, and swung it round in a clout to the driver’s face. Sam stopped in a kind of reel. The stool flew away, jerked out of Manston’s hand by the shock, and he went for Sam with all he could remember from school, the shock of the smash into the belly, the hurt of smashing into his face, the sheer fury of blows rained on another man to try and stop his attack.
Sam was no weakling. He took the first attack with grunts and loss of breath, but he hit back. There was only the scraping of feet on the stone floor, the panting of tortured breath, the awful sound of the blows. But as the fight moved the chairs were tumbled over, and Manston tripped on one. Sam hit him with two terrific blows and he went backwards on the counter, sweeping glasses off to the far side.
“Kill him!” the girl said suddenly, and beyond the shoulder of the oncoming man, Manston saw her face alight with savagery and lust. “Kill him!”
The real truth of the words struck a cold sword through his soul. Sam was towering over him as he lay helpless on the counter, and in one gigantic reaction he drew back his legs till his knees touched his chin and shot them out again with all the strength of panic. His shoes took Sam under the chest. The driver let out a half yell and went back, crashing into a heavy table that groaned back over the stones. Fear worked Manston like the strings of a puppet. He understood one thing only; that he must finish Sam or be finished. He had never before been in the full savagery of a fight, but now fear for his life and the sharp pains of hurt already suffered spurred him.
He slithered off the counter, gasping for breath, and saw Sam doubled up by the table. He went to the paralysed man and hit his head first one way, then the other, until Sam was dangling like a loose-jointed doll, only held up by his clawing grip on the heavy table. Then at last he let go and went down, slumping on the floor. Manston just stood there breathing so that his ribs cracked with the strain. He watched the groaning sack of a man for some time, almost sobbing with the pain of breathing, then he turned round and fell into the one chair that still stood upright in the wrecked room. He closed his eyes for a moment to try and forget the pain of living, then he opened them and saw the girl standing close to him, her eyes bright with savagery.
“I never thought you could,” she said, urgently. “I never thought you could.”
He turned, alarmed again as Sam scrabbled on the floor. One eye shut and bulging, mouth open for blood and gasps to escape, he clawed his way to a half-standing position, then swayed and shuffled from the room, almost falling but for his shifting grip on the counter edge. His shoulder rolled along the wall to the door, and then he staggered out into the street, tripped and went headlong. Sally ran to the door, closed it and shot the great bolt.
Manston got unsteadily from the chair and looked out. Two men had come casually to see the man lying face down on the road. A woman joined them. Manston knew them, but he had never known them like this. They laughed at the man on the ground, then one man kicked Sam, and the other tried to turn him over with his boot. Three other passers-by gathered round. Manston slowly froze with horror as he realised that these people were actually attacking the fallen man in some way. He went to go forward to the window, with some automatic, ineffectual idea of stopping the torture, but Sally caught his arm and turned him to face her with a surprisingly strong grip.
“Your face,” she said. “I better do it for you. Come here.”
She pulled. He looked back over his shoulder. They were laughing and jeering outside, and a few more were joining in.
“What’s going on?” he said, turning to her.
“Leave them,” she said. “He’ll be all right.”
He went with her to the doorway to the passage and looked back once more. Outside he could see the little crowd moving away, still laughing. They were dragging Sam somewhere.
He stopped and grabbed her by the shoulders, turning her to face him.
“What’s happening?” he gasped. “What’s the matter with those people? They------“
“You bin hurt,” Sally said, taking command again. “Come upstairs.”
He went with her up the stairs.
“I’ve been hurt,” he repeated. “Inside and outside. I can’t understand any more. I can’t recognise anything. Everybody’s changing. I don’t know them. They weren’t ever like this.”
“Don’t fuss,” she said, as they came to the landing. “It’s your face. You been knocked silly, Jim.”
The world of pain and despair closed in on him again. He sat on her bed while she filled the old-fashioned washbowl and started to bathe his face.
“You’re tough,” she said. “It hasn’t hurt you much. You’ll be good in a minute. Wait there.”
She went out and came back with a stiff drink. He sat there for some time drinking, staring at the low window and the flowers in the grey garden, trying to sort out his thoughts. Her fingers taking the glass from his hand, jerked him back to reality. He turned his head and saw her standing there smiling, still, but naked.
“You won me, Jim,” she said huskily. “You forget you been hurt. Come on. Come on, Jim.”
He swallowed, scared still, then suddenly grabbed her to him and almost cried on her white shoulder.
He was too far gone. His world had gone. He must have died on the headland. This was something new and strange and savage that in his sheltered, frightened life he had never touched before.
Something was wrong, terribly wrong, as if the world had jerked out of a groove and dropped into another, playing at a faster speed with harsher notes.
“Does it hurt when I kiss you?” she murmured.
“Make it hurt,” he said, in sudden desperation. “I must feel pain—something to make me know its real.”
And then he knew that this was evil, as that fight had been evil. From smashing the helpless man’s head to and fro a strange fire of delight had come into him, and now, holding her naked body to him he felt the same consuming glow of evil; evil that he could not resist, that he might grow to prefer to any good.
At first he did not notice the noise below, but it grew, a tramping, laughing and shouting, and then above it Seth’s voice calling to his daughter.
“Sally! Hey, Sally!”
They became still, listening.
“He wants me,” she said, in a hiss, and went on kissing.
Heavy steps sounded on the landing, then the door rattled.
“Sally! Come out, you bitch. I know you’re in there. Come out of it, I say!” The door rattled again as if it would burst in. “Come out, or I break the bloody door down!”
“You do and I’ll break your head with the water jug!” she shouted back.
“You got someone in there, you have!” Seth said, speaking heavily against the panels. “We’ll soon see!” He made sounds of drawing back to the stairhead. “Hey, lads. Come on up here! There’s a man in Sally’s bedroom! Got to get him out, lads!”
There were shouts and yells from below, then sounds of confused shuffling.
“Get out the window,” Sally said urgently. “Go on, quick!”
She pushed him. He hesitated there, his heart beating fast, halting in the grip of nightmare.
“If they find you, there’ll be trouble, I tell you!” she hissed. “Get out of it. They’re coming!”
He scrambled through the little window on to the shed roof below, and slithered and slid down the slope to the gutter. He managed to get some kind of a balance before he jumped down into a compost heap below. He fell and rolled over and over on the flower beds, then recovered and scrambled up. From the window upstairs he heard Sally shouting defiance.
“I’ll bust you, I warn you! If you break that door------“
It must have broken then for Seth’s voice sounded, growling plain from the open window.
“I knew, you little bitch. Nothing on. Must a gone from the winder! Come on!”
There were other shouts and Sally screaming in a rage. Manston ran round the corner of the house.
“Out the window. Come on!”
The shout of pursuit sounded fainter as Manston rounded the corner, but it was coming all the same, and suddenly he remembered again the appalling sight of the jeering little crowd in the street, torturing Sam Bickley. Sweat broke out on him like an ice skin, and his knees went so weak he could have fallen. He heard boots scraping on the roof round the corner of the inn. Then his brain cleared and he saw one certain way of escape. He ran to the front of the inn, dropped into a walk and went in at the bar door. There was a commotion on the stairs, but no one in the bar at all.
He banged on the counter and shouted.
“Anybody in? Seth! Service!” He picked up the brass bell that always stood on a shelf by the counter and rang it furiously so that its shrill call even broke through the hubbub outside.
One or two curious faces peered in at the door.
“Manston,” said one, and called, “Hey, Seth. Seth!”
The remnants of a disappointed hunt came into the bar, and Seth, red-faced and furious, came amongst them.
“Oh, you!” he said.
“Well, why not?” Manston said. “I usually do come in for a drink, don’t I?”
He spoke loudly, but his courage was a shrivelled walnut thing inside him. He had never seen such an ugly crowd, never felt such a heat for blood in a company before. He tried not to think what would have happened had he gone on, leading the chase behind him. Sweat and sickness was on him again. Seth was talking furiously to the men near him.
“If I catch the bastard, you know what’ll happen . . .”
Manston finished his drink and went out unnoticed. Outside he drank in the cooling evening air like a man desperate for breath. He was in the grip of some awful dream that he could not wake from. Furtive and afraid he went along the road to his own cottage. Once inside he closed the door and boiled ii. Then he remained in the semi-darkness, once again racked for breath.
The men at that inn were going to find out who had been with Sally. He knew that. As soon as she came down amongst them, defiant, deliberately taunting, they would find out.
Because, he realised as a cold hand touched his heart, she would tell them.
And he was scared of what they would do. He had never seen men in such a mood, never known the smell of blood lust as he had sniffed it in that bar. A lynch mob, with no reason but the desire for sensual pleasure in killing.
Yet they had all been ordinary people; people he had known for three years. Sally, an ordinary, saucy girl, a fairly
obedient daughter, now, suddenly------And the others: Seth
with a blood of rage and bestiality suffusing his face, wanting any excuse to let it go. And the others, snarling, threatening------He closed his eyes to try and shut out the sight from his mind.
He heard a movement behind him as he leant against the door, and he turned with the lightning movement of desperate fear.
It was a woman standing there. A woman he had seen before somewhere, with short straw hair, big shoulders and breasts, but wearing a shirt and slacks, like a man, and, inexplicably in the half shadow, dark shaded spectacles.
“What are you doing here?” he gasped.
“I came to find you,” she said, in a soft, urgent voice.
“Me? Why?”
“Because you’re the only soul left in this Godforsaken village.”
CHAPTER   II
HE went to a chair and dropped into it, letting his head fall into his hands. She stood by, watching through the featureless glasses.
“It’s a bit too much for the mind to grasp, isn’t it,” she said, without asking a question.
“Why do you say that? Can you explain what’s happened?”
“Yes. I know what’s happened,” she said.
He distrusted; there were too many strange things, and this might be just another.
“Who are you?” he said roughly.
“Just call me Gloria,” she said. “You’ve seen me before.”
“I’ve seen you in the village—yes.”
“I’ve been living at the Manor with Venus. I was his assistant, but I think that job’s over.”
“Do you know, when I came to this village there was no living thing in it,” he said, desperate for belief. “Not an insect—nothing! Nothing at all!”
“What did you feel?”
He stared into the black lenses.
“Feel? I------“ He shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I felt I was going mad.”
“Where were you at the time?” Her questioning was direct, and rather cold, as if determined to dissect him.
“When the village emptied. I was------“ he stopped.
She waited, and when he did not go on, said:
“Far away?”
He unfroze.
“No. About a mile.”
She looked down at her feet and he saw her brows frowning.
“Only a mile. But that isn’t possible.”
“It was possible. Why do you say it like that?”
“But what were you doing?”
He got up suddenly.
“I was going to kill myself,” he said bitterly, “but at the last minute I slipped and automatically saved myself. That’s the sort of coward I am.”
“At the last minute,” she said. “What did you do? Tell me exactly.”
“I scrambled for life.”
“Did you pray or call to God?” She was very still, and the big lenses seemed to grow larger. “Do you remember?”
“Maybe I did,” he turned away. “Cowards always go back to childhood things when danger threatens, I suppose. It’s automatic. Maybe I did, yes.”
“You felt nothing—nothing unusual?”
“My dear woman, the whole thing was unusual. I’ve never tried to kill myself before and I believe I never will again. All I know is from that moment my world ended and I stepped into a lunatic place I can’t understand. At one time I thought I was dead and that this was some fantastic delusion—a sort of hell in my own mind. I can’t explain, but I couldn’t explain an empty world, either. Where did they go? Where?”
She took a cigarette packet from her slacks and lit one before she answered. She seemed to be using the actions to cover up some thoughts.
“I’ll tell you where they went,” she said. “They streamed out of this village and went into the caves in the Downs behind here, as their ancestors went, thousands of years ago.”
“What?” He could not even picture the strange exodus. “But I heard nothing!”
“They made no sound. They crept out. They were scared of being seen or heard.” She was watching him intently from behind the black lenses. “They had suddenly been thrown back to the dark ages.”
“But that would be—like a miracle.”
“It was a miracle. A dreadful—terrifying miracle.”
“But there were no insects—no birds—nothing!”
“We did not think of that,” she said. “But when the human beings left as they did, by instinct, I suppose panic spread amongst the animals. They hid. They went away, as if forewarned of disaster by the complete evacuation—they went.
Even the insects. That is the only way I can explain it—unless the penetration somehow affected all animal life.”
“The penetration,” he said, seizing on a straw. “What do you mean by that?”
She looked to the window. From out in the street there was a sort of singsong chanting of a crowd. There was a menace in the depth of it, and once again the fear of lynch mobs and fury gripped him. He went to the window and looked out. She made no move to look.
“What’s happening?” she said, smoking slowly. “Can’t make out,” he said, peering. “They’re a crowd. Seem to be moving this way ...” His voice died in agony. “You were frightened they would follow when you came in here,” she said. “What happened before that?”
“I was in the girl’s bedroom—at the pub,” he said desperately. “They tried to find me. They were like a lot of animals. I’ve never seen anything like it . . .” He was still peering with desperate, wide eyes. “They’ve stopped. I can’t make out. . .”
“They are animals—now,” she said, and stubbed out the cigarette. “What are they doing?”
“They seemed to be waiting. Now------“ He felt sickness on
him. “Oh, my God. She’s come out. She’s told them. They’re coming on here. She’s with them. She’s told them who it was! Listen!”
He held up a finger. In the distance the chant went on, ragged but with a certain wild beat, and now and again he could hear his own name in the wild song. He turned from the window.
“They’re coming for me,” he said breathlessly. “You’d better get out of here. You don’t know what they’re like! You haven’t seen them.”
“Don’t be a fool,” she said, almost coolly. “We’ll go together. You don’t understand what’s happening. Show me the back way. Quickly now.”
The chanting was  growing louder, faster than he had thought they ‘could move towards him. “This way,” he said.
He led her to the kitchen and out of the back door. As they came into the garden the volume of the savage chanting seemed suddenly to gain the fury of a storm. He stopped, and for a moment could not breathe for the horror that gripped him. She too, stood still, shocked for a moment. The sound of the raggedly tramping feet grew louder in the dusk, and then another quicker sound; the rattle of boots running ahead, leading the other marchers into a headlong rush for the cottage.
“Run! “he gasped. “Run!”
“No, not that way!” she snapped, catching his arm. “The church. It’s the only place!”
She started to run through the garden and he followed. The running feet and yelling seemed to surround the cottage now, and as the fugitives went into the lane behind the garden, dark figures started clambering over the garden fence to take the house from the back.
Then one of the rearward invaders bawled:
“There they go!  Hey!  Round here!  Round here!”
The yelling horde gathered, running round the cottage on both sides and joining in the garden, like the advanced waters of a tide round a sand castle on a beach.
The girl turned off the lane towards the churchyard with Manston close behind, but the straggling van of the pursuit was only yards behind him. The shouting had died save for a long way back; all breath was used for the earnestness of pursuit, and the rattle of boots on the hard ground and the gusting of breath alone sounded in the desperate lane.
She reached the churchyard gate and stumbled. He almost crashed into her, but swung aside at the last moment, just inside the gate.
The leading man of the pursuers reached out and grabbed her by the shoulder. She let out a sudden little scream and Manston turned and with his foot overturned a marble vase on a coffin-shaped memorial. He bent down, snatched it up and smashed at the man with it. It hit him on the shoulder and the fellow went spinning to one side and fell in the way of two others, still grasping a great strip of torn blouse in his hand.
“Get her! Get him!” The yells came from ‘behind, as the lane’s shadows became thick with the pursuers.
“Come on, for God’s sake!” she panted. “Inside!”
She went on to the church doors, the deafening cries of the followers like the baying of human hounds behind. He ran, almost twining feet with the nearest man trying to barge him to one side away from the door. But Manston spurted and jumped in over the threshold, and the sudden silence of the church wrapped him round.
The hunted pair backed into the nave, listening to the quietening roar of shouting outside.
“I was right,” she panted. “They’re afraid of it. Thank God!”
She sat down suddenly in a pew as if collapsing at the knees. She gripped the edge of the seat with her hands and started to cry in a frightened whimpering sort of way.
He stood in the inner doorway listening to the angry muttering of the receding crowd.
“They’re going away,” he said incredulously, and leaned back heavily against the font to try and stop the pain of his breathing. After a while it eased and he turned to look at her sitting on the pew bench, eyes closed, calming down.
He started unfastening his shirt front.
“You’d better have my shirt,” he said.
She started to laugh, still with her eyes shut.
“As if it matters,” she said.
She sat there, staring ahead down the long aisle, the tattered remnants of her blouse hanging ineffective.
“They’ll murder us,” she said. “The girl saw me. She was shouting for me. Didn’t you hear?”
“I don’t know what I heard. In nightmares you can’t be sure.” He tossed his shirt on the bench beside her, but she just sat there, staring.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” she said tone-lessly. “Never anything like that.”
“They’ve never been like that,” he said. “God knows what’s happened, but it’s absolute disaster. Those were ordinary men. Men I know. Men who come to mend the sink and change the wheel on the car. Men who sit and plough the fields and make fun of each other at night. Fathers with children. Girls we flirted with—running, screaming, yelling for hurt and torture and blood . . .” Tears ran unrestrained down his cheeks, and now stopped his throat.
She got up, brave again, and put her hands into the pockets of her slacks. Man-like she walked slowly down the aisle until she stood looking at the cross over the altar.
“They’re still frightened of God, you see. That fear still remains at the back of their stripped minds. The primitive fear of God. That’s instinct as much as teaching. I was lucky to guess it.”
She turned and leaned her elbows on the brass altar rail, still with her hands in pockets.
“We’re safe here for the time being,” she said. “Perhaps later we can get out. I must get back to Venus. That’s the only hope we’ve got.”
“This can’t be happening,” he said hoarsely. “This is my home. These are the people I know! These things can’t have gone all of a sudden.”
“You tried to get rid of them, only hours ago,” she reminded him.
“I wish I’d done it,” he whispered. “I wish to heaven I’d done it!”
“You didn’t mean to, or you would have done,” she said. “You’re no more of a coward than anyone else. You didn’t have to stop and hit him with that vase. He had me, you know. I should have been down in another second. I don’t know what would have happened, but I think I owe you something . . .” She cocked her head. “That was brave, you know. You could have gone on.”
“You lost your glasses,” he said, idiotically, and moved to look out of the doorway into the darkness. It seemed quiet outside. “What can this man Venus do?”
“He unleashed all this,” she said. “Maybe he can control it. It’s the only hope we’ve got—if he agrees to do it.”  He stared out towards the village roofs.
“Soon the outing will be back—with the children and everybody. What on earth will they------“
“They won’t come back,” she interrupted. “That’s why this day was chosen. No children, you see. Most of the old people gone, too, and the young mothers. This was the one day in the year when there are only men and women about. Hardly anyone else. It had to be this day.”
“But they’ll come back!” he protested.
“No. No one will come back. No one will come into this village again—and no one will get out of it. You’d better believe me, Jim Manston. I came to you because you’re the only soul left untouched by this appalling experiment.”
“An experiment! For Heaven’s sake!”
She came back along the aisle, eyes on the long carpet.
“Do you believe in God?” she said casually.
He let his head fall into his hands.
“I don’t know,” he said.
She went on to the pew by the door and halted for a moment, looking out at the gathering darkness. There was a murmuring of a crowd from somewhere. She shivered slightly, then stripped off the remnants of the blouse and put on his shirt.
“They’re still out there somewhere,” she said.
He lifted his head, sat back almost restfully in the pew and brought out cigarettes. She came and took one.
“What are we going to do, then?” he said.
“Get to Venus,” she answered. “But we ought to wait till some of these characters go to bed. I don’t fancy coming so close to them again.”
She turned quickly as something in the doorway caught her eye. In the darkness outside she saw the moving shadow of a man, the white of an eye. The evening light was grey now, and the prisoners were no more than shadows beneath the vast arches of the roof.
“Still there,” she said, almost in a whisper. “I think they’re waiting.”
“Why not?” he said suddenly. “It would be good sport. After a blood hunt like that they won’t cool off that quick. But they may get tired ... Do you think this man Venus can do anything?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s one thing to let something loose; quite another to put it back in the sack. I don’t know how he did it, anyway. I’ve only the lay idea of what he was after, and I didn’t think of this at all. I wouldn’t have gone on . . .”
“But what has he done? Why can’t anybody get here? More important, why can’t anybody get away?”
“Where are they then?” The shout was thin and clear from down the lane to the village.
“In there.” The answer came from somewhere nearer. The two in the church stood quite still, listening intently.
“Why don’t we get ‘em, then” the first voice came again.
“Not in there,” someone said. “Wait. They got to come out in time.”
Manston shuddered.
“What have we done?” he said hopelessly. “Nothing. Nothing at all!”
“We don’t have to,” she said ironically. “Mice don’t do anything that upsets cats.”
There was a pause while they listened again. Outside a girl spoke shrilly and some men laughed.
“What did he do—this man?” Manston said.
“He has been working on high frequency penetration for years,” she said. “It’s being used now instead of X-rays. A kind of radio exploration of matter. Don’t ask me how he does it. I was his secretary. I took more notes that I couldn’t understand than any secretary in the world ...”
“What do you mean—he’s seeing into these people? But how------“
Again they stopped to listen.
“No, worse than that,” she said. “He was so excited with his secret that he spilled some of it to me a few hours ago. You see, he realised that if he could penetrate the flesh he could do the same with the mind. There are already subliminal tricks, like flashing messages on a screen too fast for the eye to see, but long enough for the brain to register. Well, he thought he could do that with his radio penetration. He thought he could make slaves out of them to do exactly what he liked with. He thought he would conquer the village, then the island, then spread out------“
“But why? What could he achieve by it?”
“Immense power,” she said. “I thought at first that was his idea. A lunatic dream of power. But it’s more than that. There’s something far more behind it, but I can’t imagine what it is------“
“But these people,” he almost shouted, “they’re not doing what he says, surely!”
“No,” she said. “You still don’t understand what’s happened. Something’s happened to them. They’ve no moral sense now. They’re no better than animals. I can only think of one thing that could explain it. This mad—this callous experiment must have done something to their souls. I can’t think of anything else that it could be.”
“I don’t believe that kind of thing,” he said. “But something’s happened.”
“When this first happened they ran away and hid,” she said. “Like Eve and the fig-leaf, I suppose. Venus didn’t understand. We saw them actually going. I can’t describe the appalling atmosphere. Creeping along, furtive, guilty, horrible! Venus went into a panic. He didn’t know what he’d done. He couldn’t understand. It was when I saw him then that I felt contempt.
“He rushed about yelling, ‘My god! they’re running away!’ He was almost in a frenzy. I think he must have been terrified that he had actually touched the switch and done this thing.
“I suppose murderers feel like that. All the hate builds up a sort of horrible courage, and then, when it’s done, and nothing can undo it, that all drains away and they are left with nothing but panic and their own death. It must be a dreadful thing. I was sorry for Venus for a little while, but then he realised that all he had to do was switch on his machine again and wish those people back to their village. That’s all he had to do. That’s what he did do, but he also said, ‘Don’t be frightened. There’s nothing to be frightened of.’ You’ve seen the result of it outside.”
“It’s a kind of mass hypnotism,” he said.
“No, it’s much more than that. It’s creating a lot of animals that must do what they are told when they are told, but they do not know they are being told. It’s shot straight into their brains; and it comes out as if it were their own thought. Do you see what I mean?”
“But it could reduce anyone to being a slave!” he said.
“That’s the idea.”
“Do you mean the whole village was swamped by this radio wave?”
“Yes. That’s why it was wonderful that you alone avoided it.”
“I suppose it must have been the moment I was fighting for life,” he said. “Every particle of me must have been in that fight. I don’t know ...”
The sound of laughter rose again outside and a shout, calling for something, and there were other sounds. She went to the doorway and stayed there a little while, watching and listening. He sat in the darkness, smoking, trying to think.
“They’re bringing up drink from the pub,” she said, turning back. “It’s going to be a party.”
“I wish you hadn’t come with me,” he said.
“Scared?” she said softly.
“Go on talking,” he said. “We’ve got to talk. It’s worse when you stop and listen to them, and wonder what they’ll do.”
“I know.”
“Suppose any one of them decides to risk not being frightened of the church any more?’ he said.
“From what I’ve seen, and the way this has happened, I don’t suppose it. They’ve gone back to the primitive.”
“Yes,” he said. “You’ve been right this far.”
There was another listening pause, then she said quickly, as if scared of the quiet:
“Why did you try to kill yourself?”
“It was a personal matter.”
“It always is. But you got very close to doing it.”
“There was an easy way—that is, easy until you actually find yourself facing the fact. I meant to do it, you know. I was determined. I felt the world was empty, that nothing would ever put it right again. I felt I’d squandered everything. It was a hell of a depression . . . But as I look at it now I wonder whether I wasn’t trying to make the world sorry for what I was going to do ...”
He changed the subject abruptly.
“There are three doors from this place. One in the bell tower, one through the vestry and the one we came in. There are three sides we could get out on.”
“What’s outside?”
“A few trees near, and the old gravestones everywhere. No order, it seems. Not in rows, just anywhere. Natural traps on a dark night—for us as well as anybody else.”
“We shall have to try, sooner or later.”
“Let’s hope they get drunk.”
“It’ll make them worse.”
“But not so accurate.”
She listened for a while.
“There will be a moon about eleven.”
He became quite still, then breathed hard.
“Well, then we shall have to try it before.”
“And then------“
She stopped, and he heard her breath draw in.
“What’s the matter?”
“Someone’s—there!” she whispered.
He jumped up, heart tripping from the sudden shock. He saw a shadow by the door, but though for a moment it seemed to move towards them, it retreated and vanished into the shadows by the door.
Manston got out of the pew and went to the door, breathing hard.
“Must have gone out again,” he said. “Funny we didn’t hear him. But it shows somebody’s not afraid.”
She said nothing, but stood in the dark with her hand over her eyes.
He went to the doorway, a faint high block of light in the growing darkness of the church. He listened to the sounds of the waiters, and saw the blinking lights of the cottages shining patchily between the black trees.
“Is there anyone?” she said, almost in a whisper.
“Nobody moving near this door,” he said. “They’re all keeping their distance. Funny------“
“Why funny?” she said, challenging his meaning.
“Well—someone should have been moving away somehow,” he said. “And there’s that iron mat sunk in the floor in the porch. You can’t miss that—and it rattles. I know. It always rattles because it’s warped, and once you tread anywhere on it another bit tips up and then falls back again when you’ve gone by. It didn’t rattle, yet I thought I saw somebody go out there.”
He felt her arm catch his and press it against her breast.
“I don’t like it in here,” she said. “If s the atmosphere. It makes you think things you don’t believe.”
“That’s only part of the ancient fear that’s keeping them out there,” he said. “Same thing. Early lessons never really go out of you. They always leave a trace.”
“I don’t mean that,” she said, and abruptly let go her hold and turned away.
“What do you mean, then?” he asked, suddenly scared by her tone of voice.
“I don’t know,” she said despairingly. “I’m out of my depth. This thing has changed those people, but I don’t really know how. I can’t imagine the whole action that it took. All I understood is it was like some kind of electronic knife going into the brain and dissecting one part from another, and replacing the other part with something------No, I can’t describe
it. It wouldn’t be right, anyhow. Venus thought he knew, but he didn’t. He knew his machines all right. He knew what they could do, but he didn’t know about people. That’s the thing. He didn’t understand them. They didn’t act the way he expected. They ran wild, you see. There was only a part of their minds left; the animal part that made them run and hide, then come back and hunt for blood . . . But what happened to the other parts of these minds? Where are they now?”
“I don’t know. My brain isn’t big enough to imagine this mass mind murder. It just makes me sick—and frightened. I’ve always hated violence, but now it seems there’s nothing else left in the world—this world, anyhow. The one in here and out there. They’re not even animals. They’re monsters. We’ve got to think of them like that now. Stop remembering how they used to plough and sew and drink and laugh. Just think of them as monsters you’ve never seen before. That’s the only way.”
Silence fell in the church. There seemed to be a lull in the noise from outside.
“Are they going?” she whispered urgently.
“No,” he said. “They’re whispering.”

Chapter III
“IT’S dark,” he said.
There was a silence in the great place. She seemed to be considering the ultimatum.
“We’ve got to make a break,” he said. “If we go suddenly, we stand a chance.”
“All right.” Her voice was breathy, almost a whisper.
“Hang on to me,” he said. “I know the way through the tower.”
He touched her shadowy form in the darkness and she took hold of his arm. They started to move through the dark. Here and there a piece of brasswork loomed in the blackness as they went by. Far off, there still came the odd sounds of voices floating up from the village. Suddenly some soft, furry thing brushed her cheek. She started back, losing her hold on his arm.
“Heavens!” she hissed.
He turned, startled. “What’s the matter?”
“Something—touched my face. An animal------“
He reached out towards her and felt the thing come against the back of his hand.
“A bell rope,” he said, voice faint with relief. “Come on.”
He took her arm and pulled her through the darkness to the tower door. He knew the place well. He had often gone to the top of the tower to look out over the green country, and think and hope and fear. He knew the door, and the way it locked. When he had it opened they stood there silent, listening.
The odd angled tombstones loomed in the darkness like rotten teeth grinning in a tunnel mouth. The sounds of voices seemed suddenly to have stopped, as if the watchers were waiting.
“Can’t see anything on this side,” he breathed.
“They know we’re coming,” she said.
He felt her shivering slightly against him.
“Now or never,” he said. “Got to run. Ready?”
“Got to be,” she whispered.
“Now! “he said.
He started to run out, turning right to get on to the soft grass that killed footfalls. With her close behind like some pale wraith, he turned and twisted through the stone forest, heading towards the distant churchyard wall. The strange silence still persisted.
Then suddenly there was a shout. It was a single sound and remained alone, it seemed, for seconds, and then others came and the sounds of the rush starting seemed to grow out of the darkness all around them.
“Here’s the wall!” he gasped.
He clambered over it and waited a moment to help her. The sounds of pursuit were growing fast, and appeared to be coming from the direction of the village, round the church.
“For God’s sake run!” he said, as they started again. “They’re coming up on us.”
They ran stumbling over the ratted lane of the farm, and the fingers of the little trees beside it began to snatch at them as they went. Behind them the roaring was growing. There were lights, too, throwing crazy beams, jerking around and into the black sky.
“There’s a hole here somewhere,” he panted, and turned in among the snatching trees, slowing down to find the escape way. She came beside him.
The thunder of the chase was louder, more insistent, and there was keen excitement in the tone of the shouting. The torch beams thickened, plaiting together, then breaking out again into fans, jerking and dancing.
“It’s here—no, wait!” He fumbled amongst the brambles trying to find the rotten wooden bar of the old fence.
“Hurry! Please!”
“Here,” he gasped. “This is it!”
He grabbed her, pressed her head down and forced her towards the gap. As she went through, it seemed that someone shouted in his ear. The bright beam of a torch suddenly struck on him and showed her staggering away from under the grey wooden bar into the wild grown grounds of the Manor.
A wild roar of shouting rose up. With his heart sick with horror, he ducked under the bar and ran after her, tripping and stumbling on the uneven ground. The chase seemed to hesitate at the break in the fence and they gained almost fifty yards before the leaders came straggling across the orchard in pursuit. The jerking beams of the lights threw great grotesque shadows of the little trees across the ground, confusing sight.
“I know—the well!” she panted. “Here!”
She turned, dodging in amongst the trees to the knee-high grass of the old garden. While the shouting and noise came closer she stopped and began to clamber down into a hole in the ground. Careless of where the bottom might be, he let his feet break through the screen of grass overhanging the edge of the well and dropped down beside her. There was a thud as his feet touched boards long covered with muck. Breathing like animals, they ducked down below the wandering grass.
The noises of the chasers passed by, as they brushed the long grass, thumped the ground with angry feet, shouted to each other, threatened, called, imagined, their torches darting wild into the darkness of the awful night.
Then the sounds lost their unison, began to scatter, break up, and the note of query came into it. She huddled against him in the damp smelling darkness of .the well and he put an arm round her and hugged her to him. Both their faces were upturned to the night sky and the fringes of the old grass. The grass shadows grew plainer, for the sky was starting to pale with the rising moon above the headland.
The voices were confused now. There seemed to be no more running, only wandering, beating vegetation, and somewhere someone beat on a door with a stick and called out. No answer came in the waiting seconds that followed.
“What about Venus?” he whispered painfully. “Why doesn’t he do something. Surely he can hear them?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “He may be scared again. You didn’t see him before!”
He lifted his head and parted the long overhanging grass. He could see the black silhouette of the house and the dancing criss-cross of beams of the torches flashing on to circles of brick and sudden, startled windows that glared back the light in dazzling splinters.
“They’re round the house,” he whispered. “Beating round it.” He fell back into cover again. “Well, we’re a step better off. They knew we were in the church. They don’t know where we are now.”
She shuddered but did not answer.
There were disgruntled cries, and then the sounds of the beating and searching began to die away. Stragglers were starting off back towards the village, the sport given up, patience of hatred dying angrily perhaps into a search for a more immediate satisfaction. The noises grew more and more distant.
All of a sudden he felt the sweat cold on his body and he took his arm from round her and just sat there breathing slowly, deeply, as if there were some new-found sensation in the freedom of it.
“I can’t believe they’ve gone,” she said, tonelessly. “It may be a trick!”
He put his head up again.
“No, you can see the lights. Right down towards the village now . . .”
They stayed in the darkness. The grass rustled above them.
“They would have killed us,” she said. “I still can’t believe it, but I know it’s true. It’s horrible. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s so—vicious—so blind and terrible ...”
“Let’s get to the house,” he said abruptly. “That man has got to do something. He can’t let loose these monsters like this. He’s got the machines. He’ll have to do something.”
He clambered up out of the old well and stood for a while listening to make sure. Then he gave her a hand up, but when she was beside him she threw his hand off, almost angrily.
“Let’s go then,” she said, and started to walk towards the shadow of the house.
As they came alongside the building there came a burst of cheering or jeering from the village, then distant shouting and the firing of a shotgun.
“They’ve found something to do,” he said gruffly. “I’m not going to wonder what it is ... Do you know one thing? There are no lights on in this place.”
She said nothing, but looked puzzled. She went up the shallow dipped steps and in at the front door. She felt the wall and snapped a switch. The big square hall of ancient panelling and stone came to life, but it was empty.
“He couldn’t have gone,” she said, almost to herself.
“Why not?”
“He wouldn’t dare leave here—not after doing what he did,” she said bitterly. “He wouldn’t leave his machines------“
She turned, crossed the hall and went down a corridor to the left. He followed, curious, and with a strange overwhelming feeling of fear that he stood in the place from which the damned miracle had happened. The thought made him hesitate, momentarily, then follow on quickly in case he lost her.
She went in at a great door ending the passage and turned on more lights. He came in behind her and stared round. It could have been the main control room of a television station, switches and dials and screens and tall steel cabinets with yawning doors and hundreds of valves specking their insides like a disease.
She stopped, then slowly turned back to him.
“This is it?” he said, staring round. “The Devil Machine?”
She stared at him, blonde hair untidy like a boy’s, her fine features streaked with dirt and tears, but her brilliant green eyes bright and capable again.
“Yes,” she said, between her teeth. “But where is he? How could he have gone? There isn’t a light in the house!”
“Perhaps he scared and ran away,” ‘he suggested.
“He closed the roads himself. I told you, the place is surrounded.
“But you said that he gave the orders,” he argued.
“From here,” she said. “Don’t you understand? From here I”
She tapped the steel top of the long control console.
“He can’t go out on his own and tell them what to do,” she went on. “He’d get the same treatment as we did. Everything that has to be done now must be done from here. That’s what he told me and I’m sure he wasn’t lying.”
“Hell!” he snapped. “But surely he wouldn’t risk going away now, when he’s let that lot loose outside?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to say,” she said, almost with contempt. “He wouldn’t dare leave this house until he’s had time to see what the reactions are likely to be. He’s turned a village into a mob. He’s snatched every moral sense or thought out of them and left only the animal base. I don’t know whether he expected that, but I do know he was dead scared when he saw it------“
“How did he see it?” he interrupted suddenly.
She flicked a hand towards the television screens.
“The cameras are in the roof,” she said. “They watch the whole village from three angles, and each entrance and exit by road. Those two scan the country north and south of the village and the others east and west. So, you see, nobody can leave or come in without being seen. Practically everything they do in the open can be seen.”
“But it’s fantastic that he should have gone to these lengths to watch these people!” he protested.
“In any experiment, it is essential to watch,” she said. “That’s what he said to me.” She went to the door and stood there listening. “He isn’t here. I’m sure. And the screens are
off------“ She went to the console, frowned there a moment,
then snapped three or four switches in rapid succession. “Why? How could he dare?”
Life came to three screens, then four, then all eight. She looked at them, then fixed on the one which scanned the village street. She watched for a moment, trying to make out what it was, then turned away in sudden horror.
“They found somebody else to catch,” he said hoarsely, and looked away from the horror screen to the others.
In one there was a car lopsided across the road and six men leaning round, smoking and talking. On the other road, they had the builder’s truck, and there were seven men, arguing, it seemed, for one man suddenly hit another in the face and knocked him down. The others gathered round and blocked the camera view.
“The pictures are light as day, but it’s still dark out there,” he said.
“Infra-red,” she said. “But why isn’t he watching?”
She went out of the room. Suddenly alarmed at being alone there he turned and followed her. She went back to the hall and up the broad stairs just beyond it. At the top she stopped.
“His rooms are up here,” she said.
He looked uneasily around the big landing.
“He isn’t here,” he said.
“He might be sleeping,” she said.
“What—after doing something like that?” he said increduously.
“He hasn’t slept for weeks,” she said. “Or if he has, I haven’t seen it. He could have collapsed.”
“Better look in his room, then,” he said.
Still she hesitated.
“What’s the matter?”
“He never let me come up here.”
“You’re scared of him,” he said quickly.
“Yes. He’s a strange man. But if you’d heard him this afternoon, screaming. He was screaming when he saw what had happened. I never saw a man behave like it before. He screamed like an animal screams, just going on and on and on senselessly------“
“It must have been a pretty awful moment, after all the work he must have put into it. But look. We’ve got to find him. We’d better shout or something.”
“No.” She shuddered. “Just look in the rooms.”
It was he who hesitated then.
“You think something’s happened to him, don’t you?” he accused.
“I don’t know. I just------Oh, get on and look! Open the
doors, for heaven’s sake! We’ve got to find him.”
She put her hands over her ears as if to shut out the memory of the senseless screaming. He went forward to the first door, then the second, then the third, moving quicker and quicker as he did so until every door on the floor hung wide open.
“Every room’s empty!” he said. “There’s no furniture— nothing. Nothing at all! Where does he sleep, then? Where does he live? There’s nothing here.”
“There must be!” she cried, eyes widening. “He must have a room.”
“There aren’t any other rooms,” he said. “There’s only a huge loft above. I know. I’ve been here before.”
“But that’s impossible, he------“ She stopped.
“Has he got a room below?”
“There’s only mine. There’s nothing else.” She was bewildered. “Just the kitchen. I don’t understand ... He came up here------“ “Perhaps he used the loft,” he said. “I’ll go and see.” He went up to the top. There was a light which served the whole of the great place, stretching away into shadows on either side of him, like some ancient wooden vessel. There was old rubbish there; stuff that had been there for years, that nobody had ever troubled to clear out, but there was no furniture that anyone could use.
He went back downstairs.
“But he must have had somewhere to sleep!” he protested.
“He always insisted he wanted nothing done for himself,” she said. “He is personally very—very shy. I only worked with him at certain times, taking notes. It takes so long to get them down in type . . .”
Her voice failed. She was staring into nothing, trying to think. He watched her, foxed by her attitude. It was as if she could hardly remember how she had lived this last week.
“Did you eat together?” he asked.
“No.” she shook her head as if that might clear her brain. “No, he did everything for himself.”
He took her arm and shook it. She turned her head and looked at him in surprise.
“For goodness sake!” he shouted. “We want him! We’ve got to find him! Think! Where would he be?”
“I don’t know, I tell you! He worked downstairs in the room I showed you, but he’s gone.”
“But you said yourself he wouldn’t go out amongst that lot,” he said angrily. “We’ve got to find him.”
He turned and went down the stairs again. She hesitated, her hand over her eyes for a moment of tension, then she relaxed and followed.
He knew the ground floor, and there were only two rooms that had been furnished; the old gun room which was the secretary’s office, and her bedroom. The kitchen was sparsely equipped, and it was there he stopped after searching the whole floor.
“Did you cook for him?” he said.
“No. He did everything himself.”
“Even washing up?”
“Yes. He never left anything dirty.”
He brought a battered cigarette packet from his trousers.
“There’s something crazy here,” he said. “There’s a man you’ve been working for for months. But he doesn’t sleep, and for all you know, he doesn’t eat either!”
She turned away from him for a moment, rigid, listening.
“There must be some of those men still outside,” she said, very quietly. “I can hear shouting.”
He became quiet for several seconds. “It’s a long way off,” he said. “There are cellars here. Did he ever go down there?”
“You can look,” she said, and stayed where she was as he went out. Clearly she was greatly troubled by the disappearance of Venus, but she was not going to share all her fears and doubts with the stranger.
He realised that as he went down the shallow wooden stairs to the chill basement. He could not find the lights and struck matches to see by. There was junk, and old wood piled around, as if once they had stored firewood but the winter had never come.
She would not share her fear. Or was it something to do with Venus?
“There isn’t a trace of a man having lived here at all,” he murmured as the match went out. “Not a razor, no clothes, nothing at all. Not even proof that he ate or slept.”
Then the frightful thought struck him. Could she be mad? Had she had illusions and created Venus from nothing? Was she the scientist who had done this thing?
An unbearable sense of loneliness came over him. He realised that in those last dreadful hours, her companionship had been something great to him. He knew, suddenly, that without her he would have failed that final second time, given in, thrown himself to the mobs. It was only that she had been there to rouse the man in him, to bring the spark of hope that comes from a warm human touch.
No, she could not be the instigator. He did not want to believe it, so his head shut fast against it for the time being.
But then another doubt crept in, smiling at his firmness.
She only had known that he had not been affected by the mental sweep. The others had found it by sense, as animals do, when they find one of their lot is different, and kill it; but she had known. She had come straight to find him.
He listened in the musty dark. He heard nothing of her, but there were faint shouts from men in the park outside. Then he remembered the queer, silent scene of terror on the television screen; once again heard the insane roar of the mob in pursuit, and his body sweated ice.
He struck a match to get out of the place.
She was standing just as she had been when he had gone down.
“Well?” she said.
“Nothing but old firewood and muck,” he said. “What are we going to do?”
She relaxed at last and dropped into a wooden chair.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t think what’s happened to him!”
“Hasn’t he left this house before tonight? Haven’t there been times when you couldn’t find him?”
“Perhaps—once or twice. But he came back.”
“Came back from where?”
“I don’t know. From the garden or somewhere, I suppose.”
“You mean that one minute he wasn’t in his machine room, and the next minute he was?”
“When I looked again, yes.” She looked uneasily towards the big garden door as a ragged shouting sounded from the distance.
“There’s no sign that a man ever lived here these last few days,” he snapped. “No sign whatever.”
She was silent in surprise, then gave a short laugh.
“But I was here with him, I should know.”
“There’s no sign that a man ever lived here. Not anything! Not a sign of any male person here at all!”
“Who did I talk to?” she cried. “Who gave me the notes? Who worked that awful machine?”
He became afraid he had gone too far and turned away.
“Yes, of course.”
She got up and came close behind him.
“I can’t understand this, any more than you. I don’t know how he slept or ate! I don’t know if he shaved or not------“
“Had he a beard?” He turned back to her.
“No—he had a very—clear—complexion.” Her voice slowed down as she said it.
“Yet he didn’t shave,” he said with a touch of irony. “What did he do? Burn it off?”
“I don’t know. He must have had a razor somewhere.”
“There’s no razor here of any kind whatever. One would only be missing if he deliberately went away and shoved it into his pocket. But he wouldn’t dare go away now. You said that yourself!”
She put a hand to her forehead.
“He must be here somewhere. He must be,” she said desperately. “You see, when he brought them out of hiding he gave certain orders, but one was not to come here. Nowhere else was mentioned, so as far as he was concerned, this was the only safe place.”
“Unless he used the machine again and altered his instructions,” he said.
“No! He wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t. This power was his life, his whole ambition, the dream. He wouldn’t throw it away just when it had started to work. No man could. It’s impossible!”
“You mean he wouldn’t risk the machine—or leave it.” He stopped and listened to the distant noises of a crowd. Then he sat down in a wooden chair, put his arms on the table and let his head fall into them. For several seconds he let himself relax into a luxury of warm fatigue. The desperate need to find out what must be done faded. If he could only enjoy this rest for ever.
She went to the window and stared out into the darkness, then turned as he began to talk, head still in his arms, his voice husky with utter weariness.
“Sleep. God, if I could get some sleep. Haven’t known it for weeks. Got scared to try. Lying there in the dark and thinking and hating and trying to find a way out. I should have done it long ago. A coward. I’ve always been a coward. Leave it. See if it gets right. See if she tires of him . . . But she’s gone now. Gone. And I can sleep again . . .”
She went quietly to him and looked down.
“Sleep, then,” she said softly “Sleep.”
But he had gone, exhausted, drugged with sheer weariness. She felt suddenly alone in the silence of the house. She went into the hall again, then into the far room where the machines stood humming faintly. The silent screens flickered with movement here and there, but the commotion in the village street had mercifully ended.
Then on the northbound camera she saw the road block, and the men standing about while two coaches were turning in a lay-by. She saw the long vehicles swing away down the road, taking the children, the mothers and the old people away from the stricken village. She felt relieved to see them go, but wondered how long they would stay away for. The women, for certain, would try to get back tomorrow, to find what had happened to their men and their homes.
The odd, quiet humming of the room made her shiver suddenly. She began to walk round, as if Venus might be hiding somewhere in the avenues between the great metal boxes. But, as the man had said, there was no trace of any male human having been there. It was very strange.
Venus himself was strange. These geniuses always were. His ugly body, and queer actions now became odder still as she thought of him.
No place to live up there. No trace of having lived anywhere in the house. Had he eaten? Had he ever used the dishes she thought he had washed up?
The growing fantasy frightened her, and she turned back to common sense. Of course he must have eaten. Of course he must have slept somewhere. Of course. Of course ...
She put a hand to her bosom to feel the beating of her heart, steady but quick and fierce. She was still frightened; the smell of doom was in the electric air; the inevitable approach of some machine-like fate she could not understand.
The women and the children, the old and the sensible; she had seen them turned away. In all the besieged village now there was only the one man and herself.
Suddenly she turned the lights off, as if frightened to be seen. The screens flickered with their green light reflecting on the room wall, painting everything in an eerie glow. She felt she would suffocate if she stayed there, and ran between the steel monsters, and the stifling heat they generated, to the great french windows.
There she stopped. In the dark tree shadows below the brightening sky she could see people, grey indeterminate shapes. In her scared imagination she thought they were all standing there, still, featureless faces turned towards the house, watching and waiting.
She began to back away, but came up against the warm side of a steel cabinet. As she halted, the panic cleared. All of a sudden her eyes saw clearly; there was nothing there. It must have been a trick of the little tree shadows.
She let her breath go, and started suddenly as she caught sight of someone standing beside her.
“You!” she gasped. “I didn’t hear you come!”
He did not reply but went forward another pace to the windows.
“No,” she said desperately. “It’s the shadows. I thought I saw------“
“Look! “he said. “There!”
He was pointing away from the place where she thought she had seen the watchers, and now she, too, saw them again. Silent, grey, formless shadows, apparently waiting.
“What are they doing?” she whispered.
“Waiting,” he answered, staring through the glass.
“Why don’t they make any noise? The others did!”
“I don’t know,” he said. He went to the windows and unfastened them. Then he pushed a leaf open and went silently through on to the terrace.
If they were surrounding the house, he had to know where and how. He was too scared to let them surround him in silence protected by the darkness.
He stood on the terrace staring into the ink black of the shadows below the moonglow. The only sounds were distant ones from the village. In the overgrown garden there was silence. His eyes strained to see more clearly, but suddenly seemed to cheat and make writhing shadows of the blackness.
She came to the opening behind him.
“Can you see?” she whispered.
“No,” he said. “No. You must have been right. It’s a trick of the moon. I could have sworn they were people standing there, watching, but it couldn’t have been.”
“It could be anything,” she said suddenly. “You don’t ;know what he’s let loose. Nobody knows. He may have changed Nature. You can’t tell. Where are the animals? They never came back again. Not even the dogs!”
“Why the dogs?”
“Dogs are the only animals that ever sought the company of man, but even they haven’t come back now,” she said. “Where are they? Why don’t they come back?”
“They may just be scared,” he said. “But where’s he? You don’t think—they got him, do you?”
“Oh, don’t!” Her voice was so low he hardly heard her.
CHAPTER   IV
HE went to the console and stared at the screens glowing greenly in the dark room. Behind them he could see the myriad patterns of the tiny, glowing valves in the tall cabinets, hanging in space like the embers of stars. She came into the reflection of the screen glow.
“Don’t touch anything,” she said.
“Hell—no,” he said, and felt a surge of fear at the thought of what a fumbling hand might do.
“What’s that?” she said, pointing to the street screen. “What are they doing?”
“Burning something,” he said. “It’s a real bonfire crowd.”
The other screens showed little activity, but the idling gangs of the guards, and others wandering, apparently aimlessly, in the fields.
“They seem to be obeying what directions they were given,” he said, wonderingly.
“He gave the directions to a few—like officers,” she said. “They’re telling the others, I suppose.”
“But why isolate the whole place?” he said. “What happens next? Other people are bound to wonder what’s going on, send police in to find out.”
“But the policeman has been ordered to send his reports as usual,” she said very quietly. “So nobody will be suspicious —for a while.”
“But after that while is up?”
She shrugged and turned away from the screens.
“I don’t know.”
“But why is he doing it? Why?” He almost shouted in his frustration. “What can he get out of it? This must be something more than sheer lust for power. Look! it’s only a village full of men and a few women. Where’s the triumph in turning them back into animals? What can he achieve by it?”
“There was some crazy idea that he could spread the range and gradually control a whole area, more and more people------
That was his idea. But you didn’t see him when he saw what he had done. He went screaming—just screaming. It had gone wrong, you see. Something he hadn’t thought of happened. I believe he thought he would make slaves, but he made animals instead. Do you understand? It’s no use looking at them now and thinking that’s what he was after. It wasn’t.”
“Yes.” The weariness was on him again. “Yes, I see. It’s no use trying to get at his secret by looking at Ms.”
She sat down heavily in the padded chair which mastered the console. For a while she stared at the organ-like controls of the hated machine. He leant back against the amplifier cabinet.
“I----“
Some thought struck him, but it stopped almost immediately and, standing away from the cabinet, he looked down the avenue of the little red stars towards the windows.
She jumped up.
“What’s the matter?” She whispered as if scared she might be overheard.
“There’s somebody—at the window.” She could hardly hear his voice, and she saw the shadow of his hand rise towards her, ordering silence.
At first she heard nothing but the faint, steady humming of the machines, but then, soft and stealthy, there came a dragging sound across the window panes and a faint squeak.
“What the hell------?” he breathed.
The soft sound came again, and there was a barely distinguishable rustling.
She came up close behind him.
“That’s not anybody,” she whispered. “It’s not human!”
“What is it, then?” he said, and then, desperate for normality, he said, “A breeze, perhaps. Touching the ivy. Blowing it against the glass.”
“There was no wind,” she said. “Not all evening. Not a breath. There’s none now, or we should hear it.”
True, he thought, and listened again. Beyond the steady humming there was a rubbing against the panes, and the faint squeaks were multiplying.
“It’s something trying to get in,” she said.
The sounds were increasing, but still soft and stealthy.
“Can it be the animals coming back?” he said.
“Animals make noises like people,” she said. “You can hear them scratch or breathe. They don’t squeak like that.”
They stood very still, listening. He felt her shiver suddenly as she stood close to him.
“It’s no good standing here,” he said hoarsely. “I must see I”
She held his arm as he stepped forward.
“You don’t know what it is!” she said. “Don’t go!”
“But it isn’t anybody,” he said angrily. “You said that yourself! Then what else can it be?”
“I don’t know, but------“
There was a crack, then the tinkle of falling glass by the windows.
“It’s in—whatever it is,” he said breathlessly.
He pushed her into the shelter of the side of an amplifier, and went to go and see what the invasion meant, but she held on to his’ arm.
“No!” she hissed. “Don’t. You don’t understand------“
There was a rattling on the floor by the window, a rustling and the dragging of the glass pieces on the bare boards.
He pushed her away from him and turned towards the window. The first three steps were quick, then he slowed, then halted.
The rising moon was shedding a faint light beyond the banks of the electric machines, and from the angle he stood at he could see its fringe of light illuminating the upper panes of the windows.
And silhouetted against the light sky he saw a thousand writhing, twisting tendons, like worms, striving against the glass. A hundred starfish seemed caught in the monstrous network.
He stared, fascinated with horror, then something close to his feet rustled and slithered like a snake. By the myriad tiny glow of the valves he saw something writhing across the floor, fanning out as it came, slowly, steadily into the room.
“It’s the ivy,” he shouted suddenly. “Good God! It’s alive I”
He backed until he struck one of the cabinets and almost fell. Then he turned and ran back to her as she crouched beside the giant amplifier.
“The ivy,” he gasped. “It’s alive! Crawling in at the windows!”
He took her arm and dragged her to the door. By the screenlight green he saw the main electric switches and snapped them down.
The lights came on. They stood there, fixed to the floor in horror, while the green-black sea came slowly across the boards, crawling towards the first of the cabinets, like a thousand gnarled fire-blackened hands creeping forward under the camouflage of the oily green leaves.
“Oh! No!” She almost screamed at the horror of it.
He dragged her through the doorway, then slammed it shut. For a moment the white panels glowed sanely in the silence of the house. Only after a few seconds did they hear again the faint, whispering rustle of the weird invader.
“What’s he done?” he gasped. “What clever part of the trick is this?”
“I don’t know,” she almost sobbed. “I’ve never seen anything so—horrible. It’s alive. Breaking in—crawling------“
“That grass,” he said, his voice grating. “When we were hiding in the well. It was whispering. It was moving over our heads. I remember now. I was too scared of the men to notice, but it was! It was whispering—moving right there over our heads!”
“It must be something the machine did,” she said.
“It isn’t likely to be any sort of coincidence. Why the hell don’t you talk sense or scream? One or the other, for Heaven’s sake!”
She did not hear him.
“Where’s he gone?” she said, her voice trembling. “He’d know!”
“There’s precious small point in knowing!” he shouted. “What we want is to know what to do! Shut up and think!”
He smacked her across the face. She shook her head, then started to cry. But only for a few seconds. She stopped herself with magnificent control, straightened and looked at him, her face glowing where he had struck it.
“We’ve got to see what’s happening,” she said. “Then we might know what to do.”
“Okay. Who’s going in there to see?” he said. “The tubes are all in there, working. Do you want to go in there and look at ‘em? Would you be able to with that stuff crawling along the floor?”
“We’ve got to see,” she repeated, speaking with her teeth closed.
“There’s a fanlight. You can see through from up the stairs.”
She pointed to the ornamental light over the door. He turned and went to the curving stairs and began to go up, going slower as he realised that as he turned he must look through and see into the room.
“I’m even scared to look,” he murmured.
He stopped and turned. Through the fanlight he could see the green screens. He kept his eyes rigidly on them. In the air there was a growing sound of the rustling and creaking of the vine.
She looked up at him queryingly.
“Surely it couldn’t be happening anywhere else,” he said, staring. “People would be frightened. You’d see them running------“
“What’s happening?” she snapped, as he stopped.
“Just realised something,” he said. “It’s not moving; not what we mean by moving. It’s growing—growing at colossal speed. That’s what it is. It’ll fill that room soon. Must be crawling all over the gardens outside.”
“Growing!” she echoed. “At that rate?”
“Yes.” He became bitter. “Something’s gone wrong with it, you see. Just as it has with those people. Nature has been taught a sharp lesson. Your friend has been a little bit too clever for it. There may be other things going wild, too.” ‘ He came down the stairs again and stopped by her.
“There’s only us two left,” she said, shivering. “I can’t bear it! There’s no one. but us. We’ll never get out of it now!”
He turned and stared at the great studded wood of the main door. For a moment he did nothing, but felt a fading in his stomach sucking away his strength. Then he forced himself forward.
For a moment after he had opened the door he could hear nothing but the distant, bitter savagery of the jeering crowd in the village. Then, like a sound wave creeping forward through the darkness he heard it; a restless kind of seething, a rustling from a thousand crawling tendons of the vegetation.
He looked back at her. She was standing by the newel post of the stairs, hands clasped over the top, head bent, as if she were biting the back of her hand to stop screaming.
“It’s spreading,” he said hoarsely. “You can hear it.”
He switched off the light and looked out. The moon was gathering brightness, and it seemed there was a mist in the sky behind the trees, so that the vegetation looked as it might have done a million years ago, part of the swamp fringe of a primaeval forest.
She gave a little gasp of breath, then let go the post and turned.
“Shut the door. For pity’s sake, shut the door!”
“What’s the good of that? It’s in the house now. It’s in that room. It’ll be coming out soon. Have you ever seen concrete split and cracked up by a single solitary weed that pushed up through it? Well, it’s going to be like that, only you won’t have to wait so long.”
“We can’t stay here!” she shouted.
“Where else can we go?” he countered angrily. “We came here to get away from those swine out there. You said it was the only safe place—from them. Seems to be a matter of being torn apart by them or strangled by vegetation. It’s a choice that could only happen in Hell. Of course, that’s it.”
She came to him.
“Don’t start thinking like that again. Please don’t! It’s real. It’s happening.”
He pawed sweat off his face.
“Yes, I know,” he said. “Sorry, I promise I won’t go mad.”
She shuddered and closed her eyes.
“If only he would come back,” she said.
“He won’t come back,” he said bitterly. “He was never here. There was never a man in this house with you. Never at all.”
“But I was with him every day! I saw him—spoke to him------“
“What kind of machines are those in there?” he cut in. “Don’t they play hell with brains? Couldn’t they create a milder form of hypnosis? Couldn’t they? Couldn’t they make you believe you were seeing and hearing somebody who wasn’t there at all?”
“Impossible!” she cried desperately. “He was here, I tell you! Every day!”
“There isn’t a trace of anyone but you being here—nothing at all. Not a trace of a living person but you. And now he’s vanished, you say. Leaving nothing behind him. How could any real man do that? No real person can go and leave no trace at all.”
“I tell you------“
“You can’t tell me anything. All you know about Venus is what the machines put into your head. He isn’t here, never was. He’s a hallucination shoved into your head by an electronic monster. There is no other explanation!”
She covered her face with her hands.
“No, no,” she moaned.
“All right, then, if it wasn’t, why did you come to me, and say 7 was the only soul left? Didn’t you think there was Venus, too? Why didn’t you stick with him then? Sickness over what he had done? For Heaven’s sake, no. It was that at the back of your mind you knew he wasn’t there! . . . When you saw me in those screens behaving like an ordinary frightened man you realised that I was one who hadn’t been touched. Only one. Because you’d seen all the others. You’d seen them creep away into darkness and I was the only one left. The only one. The hypnosis could not defeat your own desperate loneliness when you saw me running like a scared rat in the village street.”
“It can’t be,” she whispered. “No, no! I was here with him all this week.”
“What kind of man was he?” he shouted, a brutal note in his voice. “Describe him. Tell me about him. Tell me about his habits. If he was human, he had habits. Did he lisp, or snort, or pick his nose? Did he smoke, or cough, or limp, or scratch his hands? Did he pull his ears, hesitate when he spoke? Stutter, or grunt? Did he do any of these things like a human being? No! Because he never was a human being. He was never alive. There’s your answer, and you know it!”
She shook her head. It seemed that she was crying silently. He wanted to hit her until she admitted that he was right, and turned away, dragging himself, to stop the savagery. The rising fury of fear in him was scaring; it seemed to link him with the lost men of the village.
He went a few steps up the stairs until he could see down through the fanlight to the flickering screens. There was only inactivity and confusion. There was some kind of fight going on in the village street; perhaps the remnants of the previous uproar. His heart beat in his throat as he turned his eyes downward to try and see the invader, and felt a coward’s relief that the darkness was too great.
He went down the stairs to her. She had calmed. He could see the tear streaks on her face glistening in the moonlight.
“You couldn’t be right,” she said, tonelessly. “But there is something. Something that was strange.”
He caught her by the shoulders, fierce again.
“Can you be sure you weren’t hynotised?”
“You can’t hypnotise without the subject’s consent.”
“You’re talking of ordinary hypnotism,” he said, with a sneer. “This is different. This could be a system of planting a living image in you from a machine. You know yourself it can be done in films and television. What makes you think it couldn’t be done to you?”
”But he was here—I spoke to him------” She broke off, helpless.
”Spoke to him?” he jeered. ”From the Dark Ages people have spoken with visions. Read the Bible—if you ever get the chance again. Visions, hypnotic images. Isn’t it possible that this happened to you?”
”No!”
”You’re scared to admit it because Venus is the only straw you’ve got to cling to—the only thing that could help us now. And if he never existed, then you’ve got no hope left. That’s what’s the matter!”
She pushed him in the chest.
”Don’t touch me! I hate you! I hate men! Go away! Leave me alone!”
He let her go.
”All right,” he said, sharply. ”Just as you like. It makes no difference to me. I can’t be scared any more. I don’t care if anybody hears me scream. I’ve had enough!”
”No! Don’t go!” She let out a little shriek and put out a hand as if to catch him. ”Don’t leave me. I couldn’t bear it.”
He stopped at the open door. Through the garden he could see weird, spreading shadows, like shuffling pools of blackness. Climbing stuff was whispering on the bricks around the edges of the doorway.
”There won’t be much time to bear anything,” he said, the fire suddenly draining out of him. ”It’s everywhere now. The garden’s coming alive.”
Into the silence of horror within the house gradually seeped the restless, seething hush of the whispering vegetation.
”What’s happened to it all?” she said, driving her hands through her hair. ”What’s happened?”
”I don’t know,” he said. ”I couldn’t even guess. But it’s those bloody machines in there. Venus was never here. It was those machines. They made you see Venus. They ruined the souls of a village. They’re doing this to that stuff out there!” ”The machines.” Her voice was quiet with terror. ”Yes. You must be right. The machines. But they can’t work alone. Somebody, somewhere must be doing it. Even if there was never a Venus; that I was affected by the machines—even if all that could be true, there must be someone—somewhere— thinking and commanding. You can’t do it any other way!” ”Why can’t a machine think?” he cried. ”What’s a man but a machine, anyhow?”
”You might have thought that once, but you can’t believe it after the things you’ve seen tonight,” she said bitterly. ”You’ve seen the difference between men with souls and men without. You couldn’t make any mistake about that difference now!”
”All right, then! There is someone, somewhere!” He raised his voice in a great shout, his head upturned to the stairwell. ”Where are you? For God’s sake have mercy! Show yourself ! Show yourself, whoever you are!”
His voice flew away in small laughing echoes to the very top of the house, scattering like whispering rats in the beams and died, leaving only the hushing quiet of the living night.
They looked at each other, as if sharing the desperate hope that from somewhere the answer would come.
He did not even speak when the echoes had died away, but
turned, sat on the stairs and put his head between his hands.
”Got to think,” he said. ”Got to talk about it. That’s the
way. Find out what the enemy’s doing. That was what they said in the war. Watch and then interpret. If we knew what the idea of this is, we might find something we can do. Might. Just might.”
He looked up.
”Where are all the notes you made?” he asked.
She started suddenly, as if she had been thinking at a great distance.
”The notes?” she repeated. ”Oh! In the office along the passage.”
He got up and went ahead of her along the panelled corridor to the old gun room. On the way he stopped, raised a hand and listened.
The rustling sound seemed to be nearer, but it was a sudden burst of shouting from the village that had made him stop. He shrugged and went on.
The door of the room was still open as they had left it. There was a typewriter on the desk, trays, a drawer open with paper, a filing cabinet.
”Where are the notes?” he said.
She passed him in silence and pulled the upper drawer of a filing cabinet open. She gave him two or three files, as if she were too tried to speak.
He put the files on the desk and opened one, then another.
”Is this your work?” he said.
She nodded without looking.
”Yes. That’s all I took down.”
”But there’s nothing here,” he said, between his teeth. ”They’re blank sheets!”
”What!”
”Well, look at ’em!” He threw them across the desk, and some spilled to the floor. ”Every sheet’s blank.”
”But------” She stopped quite still, then looked desperate.
”My notebook. Where’s that?”
She opened a drawer and took out the shorthand book. As she flipped the pages she saw that, too, was plain and unused.
He watched her drop the book: Saw her standing there, her eyes darting, like a guilty person seeking a way out.
”Nothing. Nothing at all!” he shouted.
”But—I took the notes! I------”
”You thought you did,” he cut in. ”In fact you did nothing. You thought you took notes. You thought you saw Venus. You didn’t see either, because neither of them ever existed!”
She was very pale, and looked as if she would cry like a child.
”I’m so frightened,” she whispered. ”I can’t even think.” Then, refusing to believe the evidence, she began to open
drawers almost in a frenzy. Each was empty.
”There must be something!” she moaned. ”There must be!”
She ran out, along the corridor and into the bedroom she had used. He came to the door and watched. She opened drawers, her case, everything, scrambling through clothes and belongings, desperate to find some trace of Venus, of the work she had done for him.
There was nothing at all. She sat on the bed, the overturned case beside her, staring at nothing. Then she rolled over and lay on her face, quite still, save for deep, shivering breaths.
He felt a sudden flood of compassion for her. With self-confidence gone, it seemed she had been stripped of everything.
”Try to understand, you’re still whole,” he said huskily. ”You’re not like those poor devils out there. You’re still you, whatever happened in these last days.”
She made no reply, no movement to show that she had heard. Her shocked mind was cut off from his then. He began to be alarmed at her stillness.
”Look, try and understand------” he said.
No response.
He bent by the bed and touched her shoulder. He felt a shiver run through her at his contact. Then suddenly she turned as she lay there, reached up and pulled him down on her. She hugged him, started to kiss him. This was none of the smooth experience of the girl at the inn, but something new, clumsy and desperate. Even in the moment of conflict in his emotions he felt the heat of embarrassment. She was trying to prove something, establish herself in a side of life she had tried to treat with contempt. But stripped of the last traces of civilised security, there was only womanhood left.
CHAPTER   V
”You won’t leave me?” she said.
”No,” he said.
Her fingers sought his in the darkness.
”You’re kind,” she said.
Lying there on the bed they could hear the restless seething of the plants around the house, and far off, singing from the village.
”When I was a child, there was a beast of a man,” she said, and her fingers gripped his with sudden fury. ”It shrivelled me inside. I’ve always thought of men like him since. Even looking at their faces I used to think of the filthy beasts inside. It was a kind of madness, I think. The more I kept away, the worse it got. You can’t understand how it can worm into you, poison your life, and the way you think—everything. . . . It’s different now.” She turned to him urgently. ”Make love to me. Make me know . . . again ... I don’t care any more. It’s only you and me and—and nothing else . . .”
He pressed her to him and she responded fiercely.
”We’ve got to think, Gloria,” he whispered. ”We’ve got to think.”
She did not seem to hear but covered his face with kisses, willing him to her.
Suddenly there was a shout from the garden, a wild incredulous sound. She let him go. He rolled off the bed and stood up close to the window.
Outside the world was electric with the moonlight. He could see bushes and some papery looking flowers sprawling and writhing on the ground close to the house.
Some distance off a man stood, a shotgun in his hand. He was looking towards the house, but suddenly he gave another yell and fired blindly at the ground, like shooting snakes.
He fired one barrel, then dropped the gun and ran, shouting still, back towards the village. She got up and came beside Manston, white as a statue in the room.
”Who was it?”
”A man from the village—one of the guards,” he said.
”Why did he come here? The orders were to stay where they were sent------” She broke off.
”How can you be sure what orders there were?” he said, fierce again.
She turned her head. ”I know—I’m sure,” she said. ”Don’t hurt me again. I do know. I do—please!”
He was thoughtful. ”You’re sure. And they were patrolling as you said. Yes. It must have been right. Then what happened that he disobeyed?”
She shivered, went back to the bed and put on the shirt. There were other clothes for her now, but she stroked the shirt as if it were indeed part of her lover.
He turned back from watching the runaway.
”You know what it means,” he said. ”Within half a minute the whole village will be up here gawping. They may even find we’re in here.”
”They may not come,” said she, without looking round.
”They’re bound to,” he said, anger starting again. ”Listen! The way he’s shouting they can hear him already!” Once more he looked out. ”He’ll bring them. That’s what he’s gone for. I wonder if it’s any good trying to get away now?”
”Oh, no!” she said, the cold note of terror coming back into her voice. ”Not again. I couldn’t bear that again!”
”It might be the only way,” he said, turning back to her.
”It wouldn’t work,” she said desperately. ”The guards are still there. We’d never get out even if we—missed the villagers.”
He went closer to her.
”How are you so certain about those orders, when the rest was—a dream?”
”I heard him,” she said, staring down. ”It was no hallucination. He was there and I heard him screaming. Nothing could have hynotised me into hearing that. Nothing.”
He remembered the vision screens, and the idling men on the roads and walking the fields they had sowed. She must be right about that; but how be right there, and wrong in the vast hallucination of Venus and the work she had done for him?
”He was here,” she said quietly. ”I know that now. Perhaps I was wrong thinking he was always here, but he was here today, and I believe he will come back.”
She seemed calm then, and for a moment he thought she might be right.
”You seem sure about that, in spite of everything?” he said.
She nodded.
”Yes. I’m sure. There are some things you know, and in spite of everything, I know that.” She caught his arm and gripped it tightly. ”In spite of everything.” He felt her trembling slightly, and saw she was biting her lip.
”Don’t worry,” he said. ”All that’s over. What we’re up against now is the physical part of the problem—how to get out of here—sometime.”
He looked to the window. There was a ragged shouting from somewhere beyond the great garden. It was being picked up, in places almost as cheering, and growing louder.
”It’s coming closer, that noise,” he said. ”He’s got the message across.”
”They won’t come in here,” she said urgently. ”You’ll see I’m right. They won’t. He told them not to.”
”We shall soon see now,” he said.
”He told them not to,” she repeated.
He went close to the window and looked out towards the trees beyond the lawn.
”Are you sure?” he said. ”Look! Over there. Aren’t they people? Look!” He grabbed her arm and pointed her in the direction he meant. ”People, creeping towards the house. Under the hedge there! Do you see?”
For a moment she thought she saw them, but the light tricked her and she was not sure.
”Can you see?” he urged, almost pushing her against the window.
”Oh! Yes, lean.”
”They’re coming towards the house,” he said. ”They’ve passed the end of the garden where you said he told them to stop.”
She said nothing, but watched intently. The light was difficult under the hedge, which was perhaps why the marauders took its cover. The shadows gave the impression that one moment the people were there, and the next, that they were nothing but shade pools.
”They’re coming, aren’t they?” he said, close to her ear.
He watched her, staring motionless, and then saw a tiny shake of the head.
”I can’t see them any more,” she said.
He looked out again, searching the patched darkness below the hedge.
”They must be hiding,” he said.
But the shouting from the villagers was becoming a roar out in the silver night. Near the gates, a long way off, they saw the van of the noisy invaders pouring in, torches flashing here and there.
He stared at them without understanding.
”Well, they’re not hiding,” he said.
”See if they dare come!” she said, ignoring the shadows she had seen by the hedge. ”See!”
The mob spread out inside the gate, and instead of coming towards the house, fanned out and started moving cautiously round the edges of the great lawn. There were odd shouts and calls, but no one stepped up to the lawn. No one tried to approach the house.
Minutes passed while the mob shouted and called out. Somebody screamed, and then the shouting became subdued, as the invaders seemed to settle to watch at a safe distance.
”Strange,” he said.
”They won’t come,” she answered. ”I know they won’t dare come. I told you I know he was here. I heard him tell them. I heard him.”
He stayed watching, then turned away from the window.
”You must be right,” he said. ”Unless they’re so scared of the vegetation.”
The villagers were creeping round the edges of the lawn, obviously going round the house to see the phenomenon from different angles, but none came nearer than a hundred yards to the house.
He sat on the bed and tried to think. It seemed to be a proof that someone had been there with her; something more real than a hallucination born of a machine. If that were the case, then, there was the chance the person would come back.
Surely no one, whatever kind of man he was, would run away after such an experiment as this?

What had been his purpose, then? To create an army of slaves.
He looked up.
”Are they coming?”
She shook her head.
”They won’t come.”
”I’ve suddenly seen this from another angle,” he said. ”It’s fantastic, but it’s got more sense than the way we’ve been seeing it.”
She took her eyes from the garden at last.
”What is it?”
”There’s some form of life in control of this evil situation, but it isn’t a man,” he said. ”You were specially treated. You weren’t wiped out, like these others. You were merely gently hypnotised probably by mechanical means, because, you see, Venus had to have somebody to establish ordinary human contact with the outside world. Someone had to rent the house, to organise the machines, to have the removal men bring them here—all that sort of thing. It had to look normal. It had to seem as though ordinary people were coming here. Otherwise all kinds of suspicion would have been roused. Maybe the machines would never have been assembled at all. You did all that.”
”I don’t remember,” she said in an odd little voice.
”You aren’t meant to,” he said. ”But do you see what I mean? There’s something here that is nothing but the energy from some kind of brain. It even needs machines to translate it to some kind of impulse that can affect the human being. And as it has no bodies, it needs control of bodies, otherwise it can do nothing.”
”You mean it—it’s still here now?” she said.
”Yes. But it no longer has to persuade you to see some dream figure like Venus,” he said. ”It isn’t necessary any more because the first stage is complete. It has two hundred bodies right out there now. At any time, it can order what it wants. It can get an army of men to build more machines and never ask a question, never do anything but obey.”
She looked desperately round the moon shadows in the room.
”It could—hear now.”
”Yes.”
”But why does it leave us alone, now that we know?”
”Perhaps we’re too small to bother about,” he said. ”Or maybe Venus would sooner leave that lot at a safe distance from the machines than bring them in to catch us. It probably knows what is most likely to happen to us, anyway.”
She did not hear him. She had her hands to her mouth and was staring in horror at the empty wall.
”It means—I worked those machines this afternoon,” she whispered.
”Not morally,” he said.
She shook her head to dispel the horror.
”Where is this thing coming from?” she asked.
He shrugged.
”I don’t know,” he admitted. ”From the air, from space, even out of the ground. It doesn’t have to have anywhere solid to be.”
He got up and stared out of the window for a while. There was movement, but it seemed to be a slow retreat back towards the gate which stopped as he watched.
The crowd had become so quiet that the seething hurry of the vegetation outside seemed to be louder. One or two had run away, yelling, but others, feeling that the vegetation in its slowness could not catch them, stayed precariously near the fringe of the lawn.
She sat down on the bed.
”If you’re right, it means Venus can do nothing without actual people,” she said huskily.
”That’s how I see it,” he said. ”I could be wrong. I don’t know.”
She sat very still.
”He isn’t here now,” she said quietly. ”I know. Of course I know. I’m me, aren’t I? I wasn’t when he was here!”
He drew a deep breath.
”Yeh,” he grunted. ”I think you’re right.”
”But he will come back,” she said. ”I know.”
”Yes. I think we must expect it. But how are we going to know when he does?”
”I shall know,” she said.
”There’s a chance before he does come back,” he said suddenly. ”Those people out there won’t come nearer now.
But if they do—too bad. The thing is we’ve got to try and find out which is the key machine in there.”
”That room?” she gasped. ”You can’t go back in there!”
”We’ve got to,” he said. ”That’s the brain.”
”The weed! The ivy!”
”It is only ivy,” he said, between his teeth. ”There’s nothing it can do to us ... I’ve been thinking. There’s the crowd outside. Venus is bound to come back. What chance of living do we stand between the two of them? You know as well as I do. What chance is there? Only one, as I can see it. To try and find out something about the machines. If we could get an idea what they do—how they could be destroyed —then we might get ourselves out of here.”
”They could be smashed,” she said quickly.
”That wouldn’t do,” he said. ”For instance, they’re probably duplicated and we don’t know which is the duplicate set. We don’t know if they’re working anyhow. Suppose we smashed one, but the one behind us was actually doing the thinking—you bet the gang outside would come in then.”
She caught her breath.
”I see. I hadn’t realised . . .”
”What do you know about the machines?” he said fiercely.

”Nothing. I remember nothing.”
”But you turned on the screens when we first went in there,” he said, frowning. ”So you must remember something!”
She touched her forehead.
”Yes. But I don’t remember how I knew those switches.”
”Think of it like this,” he said, intently. ”Only you ever worked that machine.
”If you could remember, you might take command of the whole thing,” he went on. ”It would at least mean danger would be over.”
He turned to the door.
”We’ve got to get in there,” he said. ”We can’t have much time.”
She got up quickly and followed close behind. When they came to the stairs he turned aside, mounted to a height where he was above the fanlight of the machine room door and looked down through. The vision screens glowed greenly, and beyond the moonlit shape of the french windows snowed silver. There he could see a writhing mass of the ivy crawling in from out on the terrace, but that was all he could see of it.
”We mustn’t smash anything to start with,” he said, coming down the stairs again. ”We might need those screens working.” He joined her by the door. ”Just let’s get things straight before we go in. A bit of panic might prevent us thinking plain sense. There are only two things that have happened, though it seems like a lot. The people have been mind poisoned, and the plants have started growing out of hand. There’s nothing else. I think the plants’ action is a by-product of the radio waves the machines have put out—an accident.”
”There was the hypnotism,” she said, in an odd tone.
”But that’s over,” he said. ”It’s usefulness ended once the mind beam went out this afternoon.”
She shuddered, then became suddenly stiff as he put his hand on the door latch.
”Ready?” he said.
She took a long breath.
”You’re not frightened of it?” he said. ”It’s ivy. Just ivy.”
”I’ve loved flowers all my life,” she said breathlessly. Flowers and trees. It was my hobby. I love them—but I never saw anything like this before.”
”It’s just speeded up,” he said, between set teeth, ”Try and remember that. Like on a film. You’ve seen flowers moving on time-lapse film. Just like that.”
”It’s all right,” she said suddenly. ”You can trust me. I won’t—break down.”
He opened the door. The rustling of the ivy was not as loud as he had expected. The glowing screens and the moonlight behind them was all that he could see for the first second; then he made out the crawling sea in the avenue between the amplifiers. It was whispering from all over the room. He saw two side windows where ivy was crawling, alive, up the panes, like clutching, skeleton hands and could hear the faint tinkling where it was brushing the metal cabinets. But the invader had not reached the main part of the amplifiers, and the controller was still two yards clear of it.
He looked back at her. She had stopped in the doorway, back of her hand to her mouth.
”Don’t look at it,” he said urgently. ”Just come here. Come here!”
Horror had too great a hold. He grabbed her arm and pulled her to his side with a jerk.
”Just look at this thing,” he said. ”Just look at this!”
She turned her head towards the door.
”It’s too horrible!”
He turned her forcibly and jammed her down into the control seat.

•	”Just look at this,” he ordered. ”Don’t bother about anything else. Just look at this thing. These clocks. The switches. Look.”
He realised then she had her eyes shut, but now she opened them and stared fixedly at the vast control panel.
”You remembered the vision screens,” he said. ”Which were the switches?”
She frowned, then shook her head, but in a moment she put out her hand to them. He remembered that they were the ones she had touched before.
”What else do you remember?” he said. ”This afternoon. When Venus was here. Did he say anything to you? Where was he? What did he do? Did he give you any notes to take down?”
He asked the questions quietly, quickly, and kept repeating them over and over again in the hope one would fire a spark in her brain. She just sat there, staring at the control panels, too scared to look up.
She did not hear his voice, only the rustling of the advancing creeper.
”There isn’t much time,” he said, and repeated the questions again.
”I don’t remember,” she said. ”I don’t remember!”
”Try!” he almost shouted. ”Shut your eyes and try!”
She shut her eyes. He put his hand on her shoulder and felt her shivering. He shook her so that she almost fell forward out of the chair and she looked up in sudden alarm.
”Stop being scared and try to think!” he shouted. ”There isn’t much time!”
”I can’t!” she whispered. ”I don’t know what I did. I don’t know!”
He let her go and stared down the avenue of the machines, trying to imagine how they linked up, what they did. But he could not. He had nothing whatever to go on. They were like cabinets he had seen in television stations, and that was all he knew. The control desk had dials marked in symbols he did not understand, and switches that were not marked at all, but numbered in groups that could be anything.
To touch any of it, knowing nothing, might be to bring destruction complete.
He went forward down the avenue, heart beating fast. The writhing creeper on the floor seemed to be reaching towards him.
He went forward down the avenue, heart beating cabinets, and recognised it.
”It is adapted from television stuff,” he said, turning. ”Vision tapes. But what does it do? How? Who adapted it? You?”
At last she looked up, the light from the vision screens shining in her eyes like bright tears.
”I don’t know,” she said.
The fury of frustration rose in him. For a senseless moment he thought of beating her until she told, but quite suddenly the hopelessness of the situation shut off anger like a blind.
He turned away from her and stared out into the moonlit garden, his glance caught by a man’s movement. He became still, watching.
There were a number of villagers gathered watching the writhing vegetation that seemed to be spreading out towards them. The men were silent and still. One man had stolen on to the lawn, creeping, as if to have a closer look at the horror plant.
As he came near, he tripped on one of the unseen branches of the stuff and fell headlong amongst it. There was a wild scream. Manston saw the man struggling, but it seemed that the tentacles of a hundred limbed octopus had got him in their grip. He struggled in a frenzy, yelling for help. The watchers turned suddenly and ran away, scattering in full flight towards the gate.
Manston stood, with the invading sea of the stuff at his feet, and watched the man struggling until he stopped suddenly, strangled by the creeper.
”What was it?” she gasped. ”What was that?”
He turned back to her and walked quickly to the control panel.
”It was a man,” he said.
”What happened to him?”
”The stuff choked him to death,” he said.
She said nothing at all, but her eyes, watching him were wide and fixed.
”It must be alive,” she breathed after a long time.
”Yes,” he said, with a slight nod. ”Yes, it must be.”
There was a crack from somewhere, a heavy ominous sound. He looked round the dark room but could see nothing that could have caused it.
”It sounded like a shot—muffled,” he said. ”But it was in here.”
She turned suddenly and ran out of the room. He followed and found her standing, breathing hard, in the middle of the hall.
”I can’t stay in there,” she said desperately. ”I can’t! I can’t. It’s like watching somebody being slowly killed. Slowly and slowly------”
”What do you mean? The man was outside!”
”I don’t mean that. Somehow it’s that creeper. I don’t know, it’s like something good suddenly turning into an awful disease and running over everything. Stay with me! Don’t go away. I don’t care what happens if you just stay. Promise! Promise!”
He took her in his arms and her head fell to his shoulder. She cried very quietly.
”I promise,” he said, and felt the full idiocy of the words. What could be promised in this house, with death inside it and out?
She hugged him fiercely as if she would never let him go again.
Another crack sounded. He started, but she heard nothing, felt nothing, only the need for him.
As he stood there holding her he began to realise the full effect of the hypnosis on her brain. Though it was over now, the shock of finding she had lived for days at the command of someone, or something else, had been too great. Faced by a mob, pursued by a rabble, she had shown courage, but now she could only think of the frightening weakness of those past days.
”It doesn’t mean anything, what ended today,” he said. ”It could have happened to anybody.”
”Why to me?” she said.
”You were free—of men,” he said. ”Perhaps there was no one you’d be likely to tell.”
”I was alone, yes,” she said. Her voice was small, but now the tenseness had gone out of it, and there was a slight note of wonder. ”My mother died not very long ago. I have a few friends, but they married and went. I was alone, yes, when mother died. I concentrated more and more on my flowers. It sounds mad.” She looked into his face suddenly. ”Perhaps you don’t know what it’s like to be really alone. You take an interest in anything that gives some sense of company, of sharing ... I can’t explain it. Bet said to me, ’You’ll be an old maid, but instead of a cat and a budgie you’ll have your flowers.”
She looked despairingly at him to see if he understood.
”That was—unkind,” he said.
”She was like the others—trying to make me snap out of it,” she said, excitement rising. ”They all did it. They could see what I was really. I used to pretend about men. Pretend I hated them. Pretend they were contemptible. I had to. You can’t understand. I was frightened and frightened and frightened. The pretend got so big 1 wasn’t me any more. Once I got to wishing I could have a child, adopt one, anything to have something I was frightened to take like anybody else------” She closed her eyes and shook her head
slightly. She looked at him again, a strange brightness in her eyes. ”If I never live after tonight, you will have saved me.”
He was touched. His throat dammed up and he pressed her tightly to him and hid his face beside her cheek.
”I understand,” he said at last. ”I don’t know why this happened tonight. Perhaps something good comes along when everything has gone bad. I understand. I’ve been lonely too. It nearly killed me, up on that cliff. I know what it’s like.”
There was a crushing sound, like wood twisting, from somewhere in the house. It seemed she was determined he should not hear it.
”Kiss me!” she said. ”Kiss me.”
There was a moment before he obeyed. The crushing stopped and there was only the increasing whisper of the plants. As he kissed her he thought how mad it was, stand-
ing there as if love mattered when there was only death left. And then, as if defiant of Fate, he kissed her with increasing passion.
”We’re going to get out of this!” he said at last. ”We’re going to find a way.” He held her tightly by the shoulders and glared as if challenging her to laugh at him.
She nodded. ”All right,” she said. ”We’ll try.”
He let her go, turned and then took her arm. He drew her to the main door, fringed now with the blindly feeling creepers of the vine.
”There are still people waiting down there,” she said.
”Yes. But it might be possible to draw them away,” he said. ”If we can think of something to do that, we might stand a good chance tonight—or tomorrow.”
”They’re looking for us,” she said quietly. ”They must know we’re here now. There’s nowhere else that we could be. You saw them searching the houses on the television.”
There was a dull cracking sound, and then a lump of plaster split and fell away from the wall. It crashed to the floor and exploded into dust.
She looked up at him.
”What did that? It looked like a shot!”
”No. It’s the house cracking,” he said, his voice suddenly robbed of tone. ”Of course! The little roots that have been sucking to the mortar all these years are going in now, like the weed that breaks up the concrete. It just gets in a little crack and swells, and the cement has to give. That’s what’s happening. And this place is covered in creeper, right up to the roof. The creeper . . . The plants—your hobby------”
”What’s the matter?” She squeezed his arm against her side suddenly. ”Why look at me like that?”
”How did you get in touch with Venus?” he said suddenly. ”What were you doing?”
”He came one day. I was in the greenhouse. It was Mother’s greenhouse . . .” She looked away, staring at the panelling on the wall as if seeing right through it. ”I was cutting some flowers for my room, and he came in.”
”Did he knock or call out or anything?”
She shook her head. ”No,” she said slowly. ”No. I turned around and he was there. Then he asked if I would take an important secretarial job------”
”Did he?” He watched intently.
”No,” she said, frowning into nothing. ”No, I don’t think he did. I can’t really remember. But I took the job, of course, and obviously came here------” She came back from the distance of memory and looked quickly at him. ”Then I thought I was working for him as a secretary, and taking notes, and typing them------”
”Steady!” he said gruffly. ”We know that’s what you thought you were doing. In fact you were getting those machines ready. You ordered them, ordered the moving men to bring them in, and then connected them all up in a special way.”
”How could I?”
”You were told exactly what to do,” he said. ”You were the body Venus wanted. He could order but he couldn’t do anything.”
”But where did he come from?” she said. ”Where?”
”From the ground,” he said. ”From the earth!”
”I don’t understand,” she said.
”I’m only guessing,” he said urgently. ”But supposing it isn’t an accident those plants out there have come alive like that. Suppose it is the reason for the whole thing. Suppose it is a sudden turnabout, a rebellion. There were plants on earth millions of years before there were animals. Perhaps the animals came from the plants, the common cell developing. There are cases still of plants that devour insects and animals, of parasites like ivy and creepers . . . Supposing that suddenly man’s ascendancy was stopped by a simple cutting ray in his brain and the plants became the masters. Who said plants don’t think? How do we know what they can do? Shut them in a dark room with a single slit of sunlight and they’ll strive to get towards it. Is that thought, or instinct? Just how much does man think, anyhow. Does he think? Or does he shuffle together the bricks of a million men’s experience before him? Isn’t it just a mathematical exercise—not thought at all? Can a man think? If he can, why does he never think anything that is new? Why can he only think with the inborn assistance of experiences which his forefathers gathered over a million years? Is thought so wonderful when you look at it like that? Is it such a remarkable thing that we must imagine nothing else on earth can do it? We don’t know how plants communicate with each other, but we know that they do. That is how they survive. We say they can’t think because they don’t think like us. The fabulous conceit of mankind is based on his inability to understand any other form of life but his own . . . Suppose just for a moment, that it’s happened. That man’s complete lack of understanding, his bumptious belief in myths that will save him have made him the perfect stooge for brains that can think in slightly different ways? Suppose that is what’s happened?”
She stood there, slowly shaking her head.
”It’s not possible,” she said in a low voice.
”Nothing that happened today was possible yesterday,” he said roughly. ”Since the day of electronics nobody can say anything is impossible any more. It’s the nearest thing to the spark of life we’re likely to get. The plants have done this. They could have chosen you for the part, because, with your love of flowers your sympathies were with them at the start. It could be a rebellion.”
”But what purpose—what reason?” she said.
”What’s the reason behind any of man’s efforts? Survival in the best circumstances. That’s all.”
A series of soft cracks sounded from the wall near the ceiling. He looked round, but there was only the reflected moonlight to see by and the glow did not reach up above the doorway level. The only sounds were the whispering of the plants and the steady humming of the machines. He glanced round at the open door of the machine room. The screens glowed; silent pictures flickered on their faces eerily.
”I could be right,” he said. ”You could have been hypnotised by one of your own flowers, and the picture could have grown into Venus in your mind. It could have been put there, and the orders given through that image.”
She said nothing for a long time.
”If that is the truth,” she said, ”what can we do?”
”If it’s the truth,” he said, ”I can’t imagine why it never happened before. Why did it happen now, with you? What started it. Why, in your little greenhouse?”
”The Pixie!” she cried suddenly. ”It must be that, because it’s the only one that’s strange. I found it only a week or two ago growing in a corner of the garden. It was unusual, strange in colour, and very small. I’d never seen anything like it before. I looked up my books, and couldn’t classify it. I went to the libraries, to Kew and to the Museums. Everyone was interested. Kew wanted it, even, but nobody knew what it was. It was like several species at first sight, then totally different on seeing the detail. Several experts had guesses, but everyone gave up. There is just nothing that is exactly like it. It was the man at the Natural History Museum who said it could have been a seed dropped from space as a form of cosmic dust, and somehow taken root. There was even the possibility of some space vehicle off the earth dropping refuse in some way or the other. He was the only one who said that. The others just didn’t know, couldn’t explain, but wanted it to see if they could make it breed again.”
”Could it?”
”No. Not if it is the only plant on Earth. No.”
”But it lives like any other plant?”
”Yes. That is—it hasn’t died. And I suppose it must be
basically the same as our plants, otherwise this------” She shuddered and stopped talking altogether.
”I think we’re getting somewhere,” he said. ”Where is the plant now?”
”Outside. I brought it with me. I don’t know why. It’s only a little thing in a pot, but it’s so pretty, and rare, and, of
course, I------” Again she cut off, frightened to mention things that hurt her.
”Show me where it is,” he said.
She led him back through the kitchen and down steps to the rear part of the old house. As they went, there were a series of creaks from the fabric of the building, as if the whole place was settling slowly.
They came into a small greenhouse building, lean-to, against the back of the woodstore. The moon shone through the dirty glass, and over the panes the sprawling creepers waved and reached out blindly. As she saw them she gasped and drew back suddenly.
He stopped and took her by the arms reassuringly.
”Just show me where it is,” he said. ”I’ll get it.”
She covered her eyes and turned round to go out of the door again.
”It’s there—in the corner. There’s only one little pot.”
”Okay. You go out.” She withdrew into the shadows and he turned back into the greenhouse. He stopped quite still, realising the possibility of what the plant had done already, and how powerless he might be in tempting its force. The sweat broke out on him, and his face turned to ice. Once again his coward self bade him turn and run out, but a stronger spark made him go on.
He crossed the brick floor and came to the slatted shelf in the far corner. He saw a small pot there, overturned with earth spilled out of it on to the slats. He forced himself to put his finger into the pot and feel the mould, then he felt stupidly relieved, turned and rejoined her outside.
”There’s no plant there,” he said, his voice rough from strain. ”Just earth.” He looked at her. ”Why did you bring it? Do you know?”
She shook her head. ”I suppose I had to.”
”Well, it’s gone now,” he said. ”Did it crawl by itself, or did somebody take it?”
”There was nobody here,” she said. ”Nobody—but me.”
”You didn’t take it?”
”Until now, I didn’t even remember it was there. I suppose I had to bring it. That could have been an order, too.”
”The colours were very wonderful?”
”Yes. Quite unlike anything you ever saw. I watched them for hours. They would change, slowly, with a kind of rhythm, like soft lights slowly fading and brightening into another colour. I never saw anything like it. Nor did the people I showed it to. One thought it could be like the animal-eating orchids of the Amazon, but he had to admit the resemblance didn’t go far enough.” She held her head a moment. ”I mustn’t think too much about it. I can almost see it again, slowly changing, all those colours, until you were looking through them into a great depth, almost another world, a jungle------”
”Stop!” he cried, suddenly, and grabbing her shoulders he shook her violently. ”Look at me! At me!”
The hair fell over one eye in the shaking and for a moment she did not seem to see him. Then she did, and she clung to him in a sudden panic.
”All right,” he said, stroking her hair. ”All right. I know now.”
She calmed down.
”That was it,” she whispered. ”It must have been.”
There was a sudden crack and one of the greenhouse panes crashed to the brick floor and shattered. Looking round he saw the creeping tentacles drop down through the gap in the roof, feeling for a hold.
He turned her and they went away into the hall again. For a moment he stared out. The crowd had drawn back from the edge of the lawn, but they seemed to be gathered at the gates.
He glanced aside at the vision screen in the big room. The same soundless activity flickered there. There were more noises of distant cracks, but they seemed to be growing less frequent.
”I loved them so much,” she said in a little voice.
”Venus knew that,” he said. ”He seems to have known a devil of a lot for a pot plant! He knew how those machines could be put together to give these effects. I wonder if anybody else knows that? . . . Doesn’t matter now, but Venus is something more than a disembodied brain. He’s a superior intelligence, and if he did seed himself here from another planet he knew all about ours.”
A sudden shouting broke out from the gate, and a general commotion seemed to be taking place there. It was too far off to see the details under the moonlight, but the sounds indicated a furious argument, with physical violence.
”What started that, I wonder?” Manston said. ”Did you see anything happen before?”
”No. They just seemed to start rowing.”
He looked round him again.
”That plant must have gone somewhere,” he said. ”It was either stolen, or it went away by itself.”
”Did you say the pot was overturned?”
”Yes. That seems like stealing, doesn’t it? Could that be the reason why—he isn’t here any more?”
”I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it. I just know I had the plant, but I don’t remember bringing it here, or ordering machines or anything. It’s no good keeping on at me!”
”Why not?” he challenged. ”You did remember the plant in the end. You didn’t remember until I kept on asking.”
”Well, I don’t know what could have happened to it. I don’t know!”
”When did he scream?” he asked, brutally. ”When was it? Before or after he’d given further orders?”
”I can’t be sure.” She shuddered. ”It was so horrible it drove everything out of my mind for the time being. I—Oh! heaven! Look!”
He stared down to where she pointed, then stepped back as she ran to one side and tried to hide behind him.
Into the moonlight across the floor a sudden river of moving black diamonds was sweeping towards the door. It was ”so large they could hear the metallic clicking of insects’ legs. There must have been thousands of the things, sweeping on relentlessly to the open door. They seemed to spill over the step and some fell on their backs and could not get up. The others swept on over them.
”Cockroaches, beetles, lord knows what!” he said. ”They must be pouring out of every hiding hole in the place.”
As the straggling remnants of the insect army poured out over the steps, there was a sharp, terrified squealing and a few great rats ran quickly, clumsily out into the night. But as they came amongst the writhing plants beside the steps their squeals became violent, then quietened, growing less one by one until there was no sound left from them.
”Mass evacuation,” he said. ”Why? Must mean the plants are getting in at the holes and places where those things hide. Even an insect must be scared of what’s going on now.”
He looked out down the steps. From the beds on either side the plants were writhing, reaching out, closing the way ahead to the lawn. Around the door, too, the tendrils were feeling and working like blind guards of the opening.
She took his hand, and then suddenly let it go.
”What’s that?” she said. ”It’s wet!”
He looked at his hand. It was stained around the fingers, and gleamed a little like fine oil.
”I only put my hand in that pot,” he said. ”What was in it?”
”Mould. Dry mould.”
”But it felt wet. I remember now. Funny I didn’t feel it when I came away. Wet . . .” He stared at his hand in the moonlight. ”It’s like blood,” he added suddenly.
”You cut yourself,” she said. ”Something in the mould. A piece of glass.”
”I should have felt it,” he said, and wiped his hand on a screwed handkerchief. ”No, there’s no cut. It came out of that pot. What on earth was in it?”
”Just mould,” she said, and shivered. ”Are there any more of those things?”
One or two straggling insects were running across the moonlit patch towards the door.
She leant against the panelled door.
”It’s just one thing after another,” she said huskily. ”Like a nightmare. If you weren’t here I should go screaming mad.”
”I am here,” he said.
There was another commotion by the gates, a good deal of shouting and excited voices. And amongst the uproar there suddenly came a short phrase, shrill and clear.
”Manston—in there!”
She started forward from the wall as the shouting swelled after the single voice. He just stood looking out into the moonlight.
”Well, they know where we are,” he said. ”They were bound to find out sooner or later.”
”They won’t come to the house,” she said, catching his arm. ”I know they won’t.”
He did not answer. She was reassuring herself, not him.
Some started to shout at the house, but their cries were indistinct.
”It was blood in the pot,” he said. ”Perhaps your little plant was an eater, after all.”
CHAPTER   VI
THE shouting died into waiting. Manston looked suddenly tired and careless. He left the doorway and went to the stairs, leaning on the newel post. She stayed by the doorway, watching him.
”You’re not going to give in?” she said, her voice firm.
He looked over his shoulder.
”You’re getting to know me,” he said ironically.
”I can tell by the way you walk, and your shoulders go,” she said, crossing the hall.
”I haven’t got the guts,” he said. ”For a bit I can be defiant, but all of a sudden I think, ’What’s the use?’ Then it all goes slack. Well—what is the use? We’re trapped here. We have been for hours. Just getting a little warm up now and again by pretending we’ll get out somehow. But we can’t get out. There’s the creeper coming in, and the crowd waiting. We’re here alone. Even the rats have gone. I’m not frightened any more. Don’t think that. I’ve seen and felt too much these last hours to be scared any more. I’m just empty. I just can’t kid myself any more.”
He leant on the newel post with both hands and stared in at the silent, flickering screens in the dark room. She stood a few paces behind him, watching his back, trying to think of something she could say that would change him again.
Suddenly he stiffened, his eyes on the screens.
”What’s the matter?” she said, startled.
For a moment he did not answer.
”My wife!” he whispered. ”Maggy! Look! The top screen on the right. Coming along the hedge there. It’s Maggy!”
She grew suddenly hard.
”How can you tell—at that distance?”
”I know the way she walks. I couldn’t mistake her, after ten years. It’s Maggy. She’s come back!”
Her heart became a shrivelled walnut of a thing, icy and dead.
He watched intently as the silent figure on the screen came alongside the hedge. On the other side of it a lounging group of men at a road block obviously did not see or hear her. She came past them. Obviously, she knew they were there, for she kept looking at the hedge beside her and twice, while he watched, she stopped.
In the foreground there showed the rear wall of the last cottage in the village, an empty place that was being modernised. Maggy came to the garden, went through the gate, crossed the builder’s planks over the flower bed and darted in at the doorless opening.
He let out a gasp of relief.
”She’s safe in there, anyway,” he said, turning his head excitedly. ”They didn’t see her, but it was close!” He swung on the newel post and dropped to a sitting position on the stairs. ”Why has she come back?”
”Why did she go?” the girl said bitterly.
He looked up in surprise.
”Go?” he said. ”She went with the man Hayter.” He put his head in his hands.
”She left you,” she said.
”Yes. She left me.”
”For another man.”
”I just told you!” Anger flared in him again.
”Then why do you care that she’s come back?”
He stared for a moment. ”It’s a part of your life that goes when someone walks out like that. Ten years of life. It’s a long time. It’s too much to lose just like that.”
”She was willing to take it from you.”
”I don’t think it was as—callous as that.” He turned his head and looked between the banisters to the screen. The scene was unalarmed. No one had seen Maggy go into the empty house.
She came close and leant her shoulder against the stairwall.
”Why don’t you tell me about it?” she said, almost coaxing.
He said nothing but stared at the floor again.
”Surely it means a lot to you. Didn’t you nearly kill yourself?”
He looked away to the moonlit doorway, and nodded very slightly.
”I’m a bad jealous type,” he said. ”I can drive myself mad with it. I must have been nearly mad.”
”Who was the other man?” She spoke softly, but there was a tense, nervous edge to her voice that she tried to hide from him.
”He was a friend—at first,” he said. ”I admire him now, with the kind of fascination that hatred gives. I suppose because she found so much to admire in him, and she was so much a part of me ... It was queer, how we’d always shared everything, Maggy and I, and when this was actually going on, she still appeared to share everything with me—but she was sharing with him, too. That didn’t seem possible to me then—it doesn’t now. How didn’t I suspect? How did she keep the two sides of her emotions so completely separate in those early days? I used to lie awake at night, and try to persuade myself that I was wrong, then in the darkness I would remember a way she had looked at him, and detect a gleam in her eyes that brought a sudden foul shock to my whole being.
”When I began to suspect through those looks, I began to suspect it in a hundred ways, small ways: minutes that she was late coming back; times that the phone went and she said it was nobody—a wrong number, the grocer;- times she put a letter aside and said it was just an old school friend, and started chattering about something else to draw my mind from it. I would watch her dressing to go out, and made myself see little extra touches she gave—for somebody else. Touches that had been forgotten in later years and now renewed. Little things. Little tortures day by day, hour by hour, and multiplying through the sweaty darkness of the night. Every morning starting with exhaustion, hot eyed, with a brain thumping round on a record that’s jumped the groove, repeating an idiot yap ...
”At first she laughed at me. Said I’d lost my sense of humour, that there was nothing there at all. Then it changed a little, and she began to say it wasn’t like me to make such a fuss about what was only a little flirtation. Then there came a little threat, that by my jealousy I might force her into doing something she didn’t want to do.
”All the time, Hayter stayed in the background, coming to the house less and less. I was savagely rude to him when he did, and she began to be furious with me for creating such an atmosphere . . .”
He was talking steadily, almost dreamily, without emotion, recording simple, multiplying facts.
”I was watching something slipping away from me, something I desperately wanted to keep, slipping away and feeling there was nothing I could do to stop it. I tried. God knows I tried. I tried to make love to her, but began to sense a resistance, almost a contempt. She said it was because of my jealousy, she couldn’t really believe that I loved her. You see, she could turn everything so that it fitted her case. The more I tried to bring about a reconciliation, the more she made it seem that the thing was my fault, that I had driven her away by heat and bitterness and imagining and distrust. I know, in a way, that helped. It was some part my fault, but it could have stopped then. I tried to believe it had, but the feeling was still there, and the sleepless nights became unbearable. I could feel myself on the edge of breaking down, but things had gone so far I dared not tell her; she would have thought it a ruse to hold her still. We had got even to that stage.”
He sounded very gentle then, faraway, speaking of something long ended.
”It’s hard to know whether it was love or self-pity that made me feel there could be no life without her. But I believed that. I believed it until yesterday morning, when 1 watched her dressing again. She looked at me through the mirror—I suppose that was easier than looking me in the face. She said, ’I’m leaving you, Jim. I’m sorry.’
”I pleaded. I did everything, and all she would say was,
” ’I’ve got to go to him’.
”It was as if all my strength, my powers of reason and talking and thinking and fighting were suddenly petrified by this one unanswerable statement. ’I’ve got to go to him’. I think that whenever I can see the great idiocy of the human race and its complete lack of reason I shall place that sentence at the summit. Yet any woman will understand it; no man ever will.
”And she went. Took a case. Even when I watched from the top of the stairs, I had the feeling I should go down and carry the case for her. I stayed up there, watching my life walk out, and she did not even glance back.”
He laughed very quietly.
“Why should she? Maggy was always very practical . . . Well, she went, and the panic of loneliness set in, I suppose, or just plain self-pity. Yes, I suppose really it was that, or I should have had the courage to go through with it. It’s easy to condemn it, but after weeks of nervous strain and worry and senseless exhaustion, you just don’t have the sense left to sort it out and fight it. You don’t even try.” He shook his head. ”And that’s all there was to it.”
”She’s a bitch,” Gloria said.
”But she wasn’t for nearly ten years,” he said, looking up at last.
Her heart stopped a moment, then went on quickly, steadily.
”She’s come back,” she said. ”Would you go back to her now?”
He said nothing for a while. She watched, still and intense.
”No,” he said. ”I wouldn’t go through that again—not for the rest of those ten years. She could throw it all up, just like that. She could make up her mind in hours to throw away years. All right. She’s practical. She always knew what she must do. I know what I must do.”
She stayed leaning against the wall, watching him. Her body seemed relaxed but her eyes were brilliant with fear.
”Would you—stay with me?” she said. Her voice was so low it hardly sounded above the whispering of the plants.
He looked at her.
”Yes. I’d stay with you,” he said. ”You see, I know that we’ve shared something tonight I couldn’t have shared with anybody else. Not Maggy. She could never have come this far with me, even if nothing else had happened. It’s no use thinking bad things are all bad. Bad times have one quality nothing else has; the quality to show the truth suddenly, unquestionably. The moment of truth. It seems strange you should have to wait for death before you know what life is all about.”
She sat down on the stairs beside him. He put his arm round her. She let her face fall to his shoulder. He put his hand up and touched her wet cheek.
”Don’t cry,” he said gently.
”I’m not crying because I’m sad,” she said.
A crack sounded in the house, but it was faint amongst the murmuring of the whispering plants and the steady humming of the machines. She began to kiss him, half in love and half in fear that he was wondering why Maggy had come back.
”What’s the matter?” he said suddenly, as she drew back with a start.
”Nothing, I------”
He looked round him but could not see what had startled her.
”Something made you jump,” he said. ”What did you see?”
”I didn’t see anything,” she said breathlessly.
”Then what happened?”
She hugged him to her. ”I suddenly wished they would find her in that house!” She was clearly horrified and watched his face in the soft light.
He squeezed her shoulder with his hand.
”Don’t be silly,” he said quietly.
He did not even look round at the screens. She eased and the chill went out of her. Outside the odd shouts from the crowd seemed far away, isolated. They still had the power to jerk the nerves, but remotely now.
He was not wondering why Maggy had come back; he was trying not to wonder what must happen to them all.
As she lay relaxed she glanced again, past the jut of his jaw, to the screens and the single picture where she had seen Maggy.
The men at the road block were looking about them. One had gone to the hedge and seemed to be sticking a pole through it. One or two of the others were obviously saying something, or calling. There was the air of activity in the actions of the men there.
She tried not to let her muscles tense as she watched; not to let him feel her sudden alarm through his touch on her body. The men seemed to be breaking up, walking a few paces off in different directions, starting to search for something.
The soundlessness of the picture made it more horrible; gave every tiny movement more meaning, as at first the search moved aimlessly, then gradually began to cohere, gather up and point its nose down the road towards the empty cottage. It hesitated, and then turned back for consultation against the truck that blocked the road.
”You’re trembling,” he said. ”There is something wrong.”
He almost pushed her away and looked round. He saw the screens, but the guards were still talking round the truck and he could see nothing that meant immediate danger; nothing that could change the pattern of what he felt now was an aimless waiting, a stretching out of life for its own sake, suffering and ecstasy together.
”Those people,” he said, staring at the screens, ”have had just the one order to isolate the village. Will they go on doing that till another order comes?”
”I don’t know,” she said. ”Could it be like that?” Suppose no other order ever came. They’d stay there till they died. No one would ever get in and everybody would starve.” She giggled. ”It’s insane. The whole thing is insane. They could even kill themselves!”
”What’s new there?” he grunted. ”If only you could remember how you did it------”
”I wasn’t ever conscious of doing it,” she said. ”I’m not now. You say I must have done. I believe you. But it doesn’t help. I tried. I honestly tried. If I remembered anything at all it would have come back while I sat there. But it didn’t. Nothing did. Only that one time when I turned the screens on, and I don’t know why I did that, or how. If I sat there for a month I might not do anything, and even if I did I wouldn’t know what I’d done, and we wouldn’t know what the effect might be. ... Jim—it’s no use hoping for anything like that.”
He stared at the screens.
”Suppose Venus has gone,” he said. ”Suppose he never comes back. Anything could happen to this village.”
The guards at the road block were looking down towards the cottage again. She felt him tauten.
”They look—as if they’ve got wind of something,” he said, very quietly.
”Perhaps there’s—noise in the village,” she said quickly.
He watched intently. The men were speaking and looking down the road towards the cottage. Now one pointed towards it and then slowly, warily, three men of the road guard moved away from the others and began to come down the road towards the cottage.
She wished she could stop him looking, but she could feel his body tense, mesmerised by the slow advance of the men.
”They may just be going by,” she said desperately. ”Changing over.”
Despite the fact there was no sound to hear he put his hand on hers to keep her quiet. She felt it trembling.
The men stopped, turned and seemed to shout something back to the others by the truck. They were still uncertain.
A man by the front of the truck made a gesture for them to go down the road. The three men exchanged looks, then continued down towards the cottage.
He got up from the stairs, and stood there glaring at the screen, his fists clenched. She came up beside him feeling almost that she must draw him back, but in her heart she knew that nothing now could save him.
The men came to the cottage, and once more looked back to the road block. The leader there nodded and waved his hand towards them.
The three men began to break apart, faces upturned towards the windows of the cottage, watchful, sly, suspicious.
”They know she’s there,” he said. ”They know!”
She said nothing. Despair had hold of her, because, through the view of the greenish, silent screen, he was being drawn away from her.
Long minutes seemed to pass while they watched the silent cottage, and far off, the idling members of the block team. Then a man came out of the doorless opening at the back of the cottage. He made a megaphone of his hands and shouted something. The leader at the truck mimed his orders—to keep her in the cottage for the time being. The man at the cottage nodded, then went in again.
He turned suddenly and looked at her.
”Got to go—now,” he said, in a queer, strained voice.
”No!” she whispered. ”No! You said you’d stay with me!”
”She’s in danger there,” he said. ”They might kill her.”
”But they’ll kill you, too!” She came closer. ”They’ve been waiting to kill you all the evening. You can’t go now!”
”I can’t stand here and know—what’s happened to her,” he said. ”I can’t. You understand that!”
”You said you’d stay. You said you didn’t love her any more. You said you’d stay with me!”
”I’ll stay with you,” he said. ”But I can’t leave her—not like that.”
”You said you’d never go back!”
”I lived with her for ten years. I can’t forget that in a few minutes—or a few hours. I don’t know why she came back and I don’t care. She’s come back, she’s there, and she’s one like us now—different from all the rest, and you know what happens to different ones.”
She changed her attack swiftly.
”It’s suicide,” she said. ”You know you haven’t a chance of getting out of here.”
Then suddenly the inspiration came. He took her shoulders, but she shook his hands off and retreated a pace.
”There’s a gun, out there, on the grass,” he said. ”Remember? That man dropped it when he saw the weeds moving!”
”A gun?” She sounded dazed. ”But he fired a shot. It could only have one cartridge left!”
”It’s a gun,” he said, between his teeth. ”And who knows how many bullets are in a gun? Even a gun without bullets is a talking point. The gun . . .”
He passed her and half ran along the corridor to her room. He stopped by the window there, looking out. Beyond the crawling mass of the creeper the gun lay, reflecting the moonlight in a thin sliver of light.
She came to the doorway, her face set hard, her eyes bright but narrow.
”There it is,” he said.
”There it is,” she said, almost with contempt. ”Thirty yards off. How do you propose to get it?”
He looked at the plants shimmering like a monstrous sea in the moonlight.
”It’s only about three yards wide,” he said. ”Perhaps a bit more.”
”You can’t jump it,” she said decisively. ”There’s a set of steps leading up at the back. You can’t jump from there.”
”I’ve got to get out,” he said, staring at the slim gun on the distant grass. The shape of it was growing indistinct, as if sinking into a soft bed as the grass blades grew waveringly around it. ”The greenhouse?” He turned to her. ”Weren’t there some old tools there?”
Her lips curled contemptuously.
”You’re not going to try and cut a way through, are you? She might not last that long.”
He frowned, hurt, and went to her by the door.
”Try and understand. I’ve got to go. You know that. Don’t go against me, now.”
”But I must go with you,” she said tonelessly. ”You don’t seem to understand that. I’ve got to go with you.”
”We meant to try and get out before.”
”You never thought of that gun before. It was her made
you think------” She stopped herself, and looked away. In a
moment she had control of herself once more. ”There’s nothing in the greenhouse but old tins. There aren’t any tools.”
”What tins?”
”Creosote and stuff.”
There was a sudden burst of shouting from the front gates. He looked back through the window. At the back the lawn was fringed by a hedge which joined a small wood on the left side. A few odd people were standing about near the hedge, apparently watching the house. To the left the shadows of the wood seemed for the moment to be clear, then he made out shapes of people waiting silently amongst the little trees.
”It’s relentless,” she said. ”They’ve never let go since they chased you out of the village hours ago.”
”Primitive concentration,” he said. ”What do you expect from savages?”
”I only hope they’re as scared of that gun as they are of God,” she said bitterly.
He looked quickly at her.
”You’re going to try, then?” he said, voice trembling with emotion.
”I can’t stop you,” she said, without meeting his eyes. ”And I can’t stay here alone. I must go with you.”
He looked to the window again.
”If we could reach the gun, I’m sure we’d stand a chance,” he said huskily.
”I think you can reach the gun,” she said, stonily.
He turned to her widly. ”What do you mean? How?”
”Creosote,” she said. ”It’s a fairly good weed killer. It might make a path out there.”
He was momentarily rooted.
”Good lord! I never thought of that,” he said. ”Is there enough down there?”
”Better go and see,” she said.
They left the room and went down to the basement and its sunken greenhouse. Several more of the roof panes had broken and the tendrils of creeper were exploring in all directions, climbing down the glazing bars to the slatted shelves and spilling over again. The moon, filtering through the network invasion, was strong and bright.
”Under the shelf over there—where the pot was,” she said.
He nodded and went in, ducking the hanging, wandering creepers as he went. He came to the shelf where the pot was overturned, and remembered the blood stuff on his hand. He saw the spilt mould was darkened with a wettish-looking stain and there were small prints there of rodent feet.
”Ate a mouse,” he murmured and shuddered to remember that the evil flower was still somewhere in the house. He bent and dragged out some sticky-feeling cans from under the shelf. There were half a dozen. He brought them, two at a time, to the basement where she waited. She had opened the back door and the moon showed the four stone steps leading to the garden level. He could see the weird sea of the plants, moving like praying hands in the air.
”A bucket,” he said. ”That’s what we want.”
”There’s one up in the kitchen—under the sink,” she said.
While he was gone she stood there, staring out at the distant sky, her eyes bright with tears, her lower lip wet where she had been biting it.
”Bitch. Bitch!” she whispered. ”Why did she come back?”
When he came down she went away to one side, leaving him to empty the cans into the pail. He was so intent on the task, so desperate with hope he was a man she had not seen before. She began to hate the change in him.
”The cracking’s started again,” he said. ”Maybe a good place to be out of, after all.”
He lifted a full bucket and- went towards the steps.
”You’ve got to be sure it’s soaked,” she said.
He nodded, held the bucket by the bottom and the handle and mounted two steps. He took his aim hastily and the black stinking stream sloshed out clumsily over the praying creeper, bursting into heavy splashes, then dripping from the writhing arms to the weed underneath. He ran back and refilled the pail. Once more he hurled out the killing mass, praying as he did it. A third time he went, but the remains of the creosote only half-filled the pail. He threw that, then stood watching the saturated creepers, shining like slime nerves in the moonlight.
”You just wait a little while,” she said.
”It’s not moving so much,” he said, staring.
”It won’t die—go still,” she said, sounding short of breath. ”But when it’s quieter—we’ll have to go and risk it. It may not kill it, but we’ll just have to risk it. But wait a minute or two.”
”God make it work,” he said aloud.
For a while there was nothing but the ceaseless rustling of the creeper and the occasional crunching sound from the walls of the house.
”If we get through,” he said, ”you take the gun. You understand that? . . . Then if they get me, you look after yourself. You’ve got to agree to that.”
”There’s only one shell in the gun,” she reminded him.
”You must use it—the best way,” he said.
For a moment she knew he was going to take her in his arms, perhaps for the last time, but his face changed and at the last moment he looked away from her.
She stood there, bitterness complete. For a moment, the will to go on drained out of her and she was empty of every emotion, tired of feeling the urge of life. And then like a returning tide a fierce heat built up inside her. He looked round and saw her face, and in that moment, was shocked.
”Try to understand,” he pleaded.
”I understand,” she said. ”It’s quietening. This is the last chance. We’d better tie sacking over our feet. That stuff can burn.”
There was plenty of sacking left from years before. Tying it on did not take long.
”You go first,” he said. ”They won’t think of the gun, I hope.” He pointed. ”We’ve got to head for the wood. You see?”
”I think there are men waiting there,” she said, after a second of looking.
”We shall have a gun by then,” he said. ”We’ve just got to hang every hope on that.”
They began to mount the steps, the girl in front. In the broad ragged path where the creosote had fallen, the creeper seemed to be dying, perhaps choked by the acid, sticky mess pouring off it like a poisonous treacle. On either side the waving of the feeling tentacles seemed to be more agitated.
”For heaven’s sake, keep to the middle,” he said in her ear. ”Make sure you don’t trip. Take it slowly!”
She nodded and went up the steps. The journey was long, fantastic. The rags on their feet caught in the dying limbs of the creeper, as if in the death throes the thing was trying to grab them back. As they went, there were sudden, isolated cries from the edges of the lawn. Manston heard his name called, then repeated from somewhere else, then taken up. From the right, other figures came running to join the ones already there.
”When you get through it, just get the gun,” he said fiercely. ”That’s the only thing that matters.”
She went on and came to the edge of the weed. She ran clumsily, the stained sacking flying loose from her feet. She tripped, fell and rolled over in the grass. He came up as she scrambled to her feet and then, with a little gasp, practically flung herself on the twelve-bore gun.
To the right the runners from the front gates were swelling the crowd and the roar of their shouts was growing, echoing in the sky.
”Just keep heading for the woods!” he panted, as she ran on, the gun now securely held.
They were running diagonally across the grass to reach the trees and the shouting pursuers were sprinting along the edge to cut them off.
”Somebody in the trees!” she gasped.
Among the twisted shapes of the black tree boles he could see the grey shadows of men waiting there.
”Try and scare ’em with the gun!” he panted. ”It’s the only thing. I didn’t know there were so many!”
The shouting was repeating his name like wood crackling in a fire. The pursuers were running madly to make the cutoff, obviously not seeing the men already waiting in the wood.
On the left of them, only a few stragglers were appearing round the corner of the garden, and they did not yet seem to know what was happening.
”We can’t do it!” she cried.
”Keep on!” he shouted desperately. ”Just keep on, and hold the gun out when you get near enough for those ahead to see you!”
But he knew too, that the situation was hopeless. One gun, with at most two shots—as any of them would know—could not hold back a lusting crowd like this. The sound of the shouting and its savage tone was enough to drive all courage out of any man. As he ran he felt his knees growing weak, almost as if he would fall headlong to the grass.
Then she shouted something.
He could see past her to the wood. The shadows of the men in the woods seemed to be stealing away, leaving a way for the fugitives amongst the wavering trees. But as he watched, he saw they were stealing away towards the yelling crowd on the right.
He stumbled in surprise and almost fell, but fought the air to keep his balance and ran on again. She was running fast. She had lost one sack altogether.
The men in the wood had cleared the path ahead of them and as they entered the trees, they saw nothing more of them. But the shouting of the crowd became suddenly different; it gained a note of alarm, almost of panic.
She looked back at him.
”Keep on!” he gasped.
They were running in amongst the little trees, exhaustion making them swerve and almost collide with the twisting trunks. But the shouting was growing confused, farther away.
She began to slow down instinctively.
”What’s happened?” she said.
”God knows. They seem to have stopped. The other men went towards them.”
”They were the ones waiting by the hedge all night,” she called back. ”I know. It made them sort of grey, difficult to see.”
”Take the path left,” he said. ”And hold on.”
They stopped in amidst the shelter of small bushes and trees. She leant against one, breathing desperately. He sat on the ground and began to unfasten the sacking. Both stopped panting as long as they could to listen, but the pursuit, inexplicably, seemed to have stopped.
He got up, and they went on again, the gun tucked under her arm, her left hand supporting the heavy barrels. They walked quickly, twisting and turning on paths that he knew would lead them to the edge of the village and the cottage.
She walked behind him, eyes fixed on his back, as the moonlight dappled it with leaf patterns running downwards. The strange, cold feel of the steel in her hand made a thrill run through her. The pursuit faded from her mind; what danger they headed for was forgotten. There were only her lover and herself alone in the world of the little trees and the silent moon. She could stay forever with him. She had the power in her hands. If she let him go on, he would go back to Maggy. He would go back because he would have to, because he felt he must.
But if she stopped him now, he would never go back. He would be hers forever. Nothing again could ever take him from her.
The panic of the flight, the strain of the waiting, terrifying hours, none of these mattered any more; nothing was remembered but him and the exaltation of possession.
He stopped suddenly and turned to face her. Something in her expression arrested him, stopped him saying what he had been about to say.
”Are you all right?” he asked, anxiously.
She realised that she was covering him with the gun. She lowered it and let out her breath.
”Yes,” she said.
They stood listening for a few seconds. There was shouting and a confusion of noise, but it was distant.
”Something turned them off,” he said. ”It was the men in the wood.” She just stared at him intently. ”I said, it was the men in the wood!”
She started.
”Yes. I think it must have been,” she said.
”Very soon,” he said, watching her, ”we’re coming out behind the cottage. It’s only about a quarter of a mile. I must see if she’s still there, but I don’t want you to risk being seen. I’ll go ahead when we get near.”
Her eyes narrowed, and her grip on the gun shifted slightly.
”Yes,” she said.
”There were three men,” he said. ”But none had a gun. So we should have the advantage—if they’re still there.”
”I see,” she said quietly.
He watched her unnatural stillness.
”She’s the only one like us that’s left,” he said.
She did not reply. He turned, uneasily, and went on again, but slower now, as if conscious of the gun behind him. Twice it seemed as if he would stop, but he went on.
”She’s the only one like us that’s left,” she kept repeating to herself. ”Just the three of us. Nobody else. Just three.”
He came to a split path in the wood and stopped. Through the pattern of the leaves ahead the white wall of the cottage could be seen. He waited a moment, watching it, then turned slowly to the girl behind him.
”That’s the place,” he said.
”I’m coming with you,” she said.
”Don’t you understand what I meant just now?” he said. ”If the two of us------”
”I understand,” she said. ”I’m coming with you.”
She was very firm, very beautiful. He had not realised how lovely she was until he saw her then. Her hair wild, the shirt and slacks, all made a part of a picture from which beauty shone in startling contrast. And there was something in her still dignity that caught his throat.
He swallowed and nodded. ”All right,” he said.
He led the way closer to the garden of the old cottage, and stopped, peering through the shimmering leaves of a little beech tree. The scene was brilliant under the moon. Clouds of the oppressive day had cleared and the sky was a silver bowl.
A man came out of the cottage so suddenly it startled him, and he touched her arm in unnecessary warning. The man stopped a moment and lit a cigarette, then stared up towards the road block. He went suddenly, as if scared somebody was behind him, out of the littered garden and out of sight on the road.
The house was silent. Somewhere a crowd was shouting still, as if some all-night revel was going on.
”If no one else came, that would leave two,” he said.
”Why is it so quiet?” she whispered. ”What are they doing?”
He shook his head and listened again. From up the road there came a raised voice, then a shout of harsh laughter. The tone of it made her shiver suddenly.
”I don’t know,” he answered. ”I hope—she hasn’t been taken away.”
He began to go forward towards the cottage, heart pounding so loudly he thought it must be heard by anyone inside the place. They kept in the shade of the timber and brick piles to the last two yards from the door. Then he stopped abruptly and put out an arm to keep her back.
”What is it?” she whispered.
”Listen!” he warned. ”What’s that?”
Both stared at the doorless opening, yawning blackly in the white wall. There was a sound inside, and for several seconds the listeners could not recognise it. Suddenly she wanted to giggle from sheer nerves.
”Snoring,” she whispered. ”It’s somebody snoring!”
The sounds adjusted themselves in his mind, and his tenseness relaxed.
”They must be taking the guard in turn,” he said, heart beating in his throat. ”They didn’t go for her. They were just trying to decide where to sleep.”
He watched the doorway.
”She must still be there,” he said.
”She might have gone,” she answered.
”I must find out,” he said, tonelessly.
She leant for a moment against the brick stack and brushed hair aside with her left hand. The momentary despair passed, and she straightened.
”What are you going to do?” she asked.
”Go in there,” he said, and she saw his teeth show. ”Keep the gun on them—when you see them.”
”Suppose they shout?”
He hesitated. ”I’d better have a look first,” he said at last. ”Keep me covered—in case.”
When he crept on his toes his legs felt weak, and the thudding of his heart almost stopped his hearing. He came to the wall, and remained there, straining for the courage to peer into the dark room. Slowly he put his head to the edge of the opening. She watched from the brick pile, the gun shining as it pointed to the doorway.
He saw vague shadows inside, but peering hard, managed to make out what they were.
A man stretched out on his back on the floor, head pillowed on his rolled-up jacket. Mason, a tractor driver from Blaze’s —as he had been. Another man was lying on his side, head crooked in his arm, his back towards the door.
Both appeared to be sleeping deeply. Manston watched them for a minute or more, wondering what to do.
At the far end there was a window, silhouetted against the sky and the rake of yellow wooden stairs going up. It was then he saw the movement there.
For a moment he could not make out what it was, then he saw it was a leg withdrawing up the stairs; a woman’s leg retreating backwards as if she felt she had stepped down too far.
He let out a little gasp, then turned and went back behind the brick pile.
”There are two men asleep, and she’s there—I saw her on the stairs. I think she was trying to come down and get out, but couldn’t.”
Her face was taut.
”What are you going to do?”
”Have to lay those men out.” He bent and picked up two feet of square yellow timber. ”I don’t know any other way.”
”You’ll have to make sure, because the other one will wake when you hit his pal,” she said.
”Yes.” He tried to stop his arm trembling. ”I’ll try and make sure.”
He made a sign to her to follow and crept back to the wall beside the door. The gun was steady in her hands as she joined him.
”Just cover me,” he said breathlessly. ”If one wakes up, let him see you’ve got the gun. We dare not have any noise. They’ll hear from up the road.”
Fears that the blow might not be hard enough, that it might kill, jostled in him, making his heart beat faster. He watched the man with his back turned, for he seemed the easier one to strike first.
He went in. The boards creaked slightly and he stopped. The snoring was broken suddenly and the man on his back opened his mouth and sighed. Manston raised the wood and struck.
The blow sickened him. The man seemed to start awake, and then go slack. He rolled over onto his back and his hand, flailing like a useless thing, tumbled on to the other man’s face.
The second man grunted and half turned, then blinked his eyes open.
Gloria came into the doorway with the gun held at her waist. The man on the floor saw her from the corner of his eye and sat up clumsily. Manston hit out as if he held a bat and cracked the man on the back of the head. Mason groaned loudly and swore in his throat and half turned in a dazed way. Desperate, Manston hit him again, and still he seemed to try and get up. He even got onto all fours and started to yell in a panting, broken-voiced way. Manston hit him again and again until he went down.
Manston dropped the wood and stood there weak, sick and-trembling. She came into the room.
”I wonder if they heard?” she said.
Both stood listening. From up the road there was a voice, argumentative, but it died away. There came no sound of footfalls on the road.
He turned and looked towards the slant of the stairs in the far corner. She watched him, standing rigid in desperation. The place was silent save for the queer, heavy breathing of the two men.
”Please God—she isn’t here,” she prayed, biting her lips together. ”Please!”
He went to the bottom of the stairs.
”Maggy!” he whispered.

CHAPTER   VII
HE went slowly, stealthily up the wooden stairs, rising into the deeper shadows of the upper floor. No answer came to his whispered calls. Below, Gloria left the doorway and came to the foot of the stairs listening, her heart stumbling in case the answer should come.
There was nothing but silence on the upper floor.
One of the men on the floor moved suddenly and grunted, but that was all. She looked round suddenly, so startled she did not ever remember to cover the man with her gun. Outside the roaring of a crowd in the village street was loud and sustained. The tone of it made her skin grow cold, and she listened intently, trying to make something of it.
She heard him creeping on the bare boards above, and then his shadow appeared at the top of the stairs.
”Nobody here,” he whispered. ”I can’t make it out. I saw someone just now.”
”The crowd,” she said urgently. ”They’re coming nearer. Listen!”
There was a pause. ”We ought to get away from here,” she said breathlessly. ”The wood’s the only safe place!”
”I can’t go and leave her,” he answered, his voice scarcely audible. ”She was up here. I know. I saw a woman’s leg. I couldn’t be mistaken.”
She went up the stairs quickly.
”Every second’s precious,” she urged. ”Listen to them!” She shivered. ”They’re on a hunt again. You can tell by the noise they make. It’s just like when you were at the cottage------”
”I can’t leave her,” he said, angrily.
”You can’t tempt fate any more,” she said bitterly. ”Only God knows how we managed to get here. Let’s get back into the wood. It’s the only place—They’re bound to come here and find those men down there. Don’t be a fool, Jim! Listen to them! Just listen!”
In the pause the shouting and calling of the mob sounded dangerously near, echoing off the little buildings in the street.
”We can’t go back to the wood,” he said.
”It’s the only place!”
”Don’t you realise why that crowd turned back on the fringe of it?” he said savagely. ”They turned back because the damned trees were beginning to come alive! That’s why! What other reason do you think there was?”
”I didn’t see------” she whispered, aghast.
”It was just a few moving limbs and wisps,” he said. ”I only just saw it on the fringe. I was running so I could hardly see at all—but they were starting to move. This plant war is spreading right out, Gloria. It’s going to choke the lot of us before it’s done because there’s no damn way you can stop it.”
”Well------” She looked round in desperation, as if some
escape might lie in the shadows. ”If we can’t go to the woods —where can we go?”
He did not reply for a moment. The shouting grew louder.
”She was here,” he said. ”I know she was here. There must be a hiding place up here . . .”
He began feeling along the wall, then remembered that he had a lighter in his pocket. He flipped it and the tiny flame glowed in the dark.
”There’s a door,” she said softly. ”Over in the corner.”
It was half hidden by timber planks leaning there. He went to it quietly. Downstairs one of the men groaned loudly, and there was a shifting noise on the floorboard. Manston looked round at the girl. Her eyes were bright with fear, but steady for all that.
”Better hurry,” she whispered.
He turned the handle and pulled the door open as far as it would go against the leaning boards over it. The faint glow of the lighter spread into the darkness of another room.
”Must be the next cottage,” he hissed.
She came close behind him and followed him through, then closed the door behind her. There was no bolt to hold it fast. The sounds of the crowd seemed muffled from where she stood. There were piles of builder’s material in this room, too. He picked his way amongst it, followed the tiny, wavering yellow flame.
The stairs led down through the floor. He began to go down, putting out the light as he did so. Moon patches were skewed on the boards of the floor below. As he went down he heard someone move. There was a faint gasp and then silence below.
He almost ran down the remaining stairs, and as he came into the cottage room he saw Maggy running away down the little garden towards the trees.
Her name rose in his throat, but he stopped shouting it in time.
Gloria came down behind him.
”She’s run out!” he snapped. ”Into the trees. They’ll see her!”
”We’d better follow,” she said urgently. ”It’s no use staying here. It’s a trap. The men next door—I heard one moving just now.”
For a moment he just stood there watching the trees gleaming silver in the moonlight.
”All right,” he said. ”But we’ll be seen. I’m sure of it.”
”Then run!” she said.
He did. They ran along the littered garden, and as they went there was a sudden shout from the doorway of the next cottage.
”Here! Here!” the man bellowed. ”Quick!”
The shouting in the street became scattered and confused as the warning shout reached the fringes of it.
The fugitives ran into the trees.
”Maggy!” Manston shouted. ”Maggy!”
The figure ahead, appearing and vanishing in the bends of the path, stopped running abruptly, then turned as the two came up to her.
”Jim!” she gasped, her eyes wide. ”Jim!”
”We’ve been trying to find you,” he panted, and looked back.
A scattered crowd was gathering at the fringe of the wood, shouting queries.
”They ran in there!” somebody bawled. ”In the wood!”
He looked desperately round.
”I remember a little cave somewhere,” he said. ”Under a tree. Better find it—quick!”
They moved on. He found the tree growing on a bank and a cave under it, screened by the twisted curtain of the roots. They ducked into it one after the other and crouched down. The shouts of the pursuit were echoing amongst the trees, making it impossible to tell where the hunters were.
”How did you get back?” Manston said.
”The Alverstone road,” Maggy said. ”I met a coach. They said something had gone wrong here, there was a guard on the road.”
The shouting seemed to come from every side.
”The root!” Maggy said suddenly.
”What’s the matter?” Gloria said sharply.
”I thought I saw it move,” Maggy said.
A man ran by on the path, shouting. He was but three yards away from where they were hidden. Then farther off they saw other men appearing like ghosts between the trees and vanishing again.
”Why are they like this?” Maggy whispered, eyes wide in horror. ”What’s happened to them?”
”They’ve gone mad,” Manston said.
”But why are they chasing like this?” she said, aghast at the sound of the shouting.
”They think I raped a girl in the village,” he said. ”She told them I did.”
The hunt seemed to have passed, for the shouting was growing fainter. Manston crawled out, keeping clear of the roots as he went. He stood up and moved away from the cave, looking and listening.
Gloria stared at Maggy.
”Why did you come back?” she said bitterly.
Maggy looked at her in surprise.
”What’s that to you?” she said, and then she realised the meaning of the question. ”Oh! That’s interesting.” She looked out at Manston’s still figure, then back at the girl. ”I never
thought------” She laughed a little, and her eyes grew hard
and bright. ”I’ve seen you in the village.”
”Why did you come back?” Gloria repeated. ”Did he turn you down—the man you went with?”
”Bitch!” Maggy said, viciously.
”Did he? Is that why you came back?”
”What are you doing—with Jim?” Maggy said, bitterly. ”Are you together by accident, or because you thought I’d gone?”
”We’re together,” Gloria said.
”He happens to be my husband.”
Gloria looked out at the man standing so still in the moonlight. , ”You left him,” she said, tonelessly.
”I’m here—now,” Maggy said.
”Do you mean you’ve come back—to him?”
Maggy laughed again. ”Of course.”
She started suddenly as a fresh outburst of shouting seemed to come very near. Manston came back into the cave.
”They’re running back,” he said, wiping his sweaty face on his arm. His eyes were big, watching the faintly moving arms of the root. ”They’re running away. Every damn tree in the place is moving. We’ve got to get out of here. Go back. We can’t stay here. Just let them go by, and then we’ll have to follow.”
”What do you mean—moving?” Maggy hissed. ”How?”
”Coming to life,” he snapped. ”Soon it’ll be everything, every plant, every bush, every tree, reaching out, clawing for us, trying to strangle us. It won’t be long.”
The frightened, yelling mob was running past, like briefly seen figures on a film.
”I don’t understand------!” Maggy gasped.
”You will—in a minute,” he promised, savagely. ”Just let them go------”
The last straggler ran by, shouting to the others not to leave him. When he had gone, Manston crawled out of the cave.
”Keep clear of those roots,” he ordered. ”And come on.”
Gloria went out, dragging the gun with her. Maggy came after, and as she stood up, looked round the way the men had come from.
”Oh my God!” she gasped, then clapped a hand over her mouth in horror.
The whole wood towards the Manston was alive. The trees were moving, waving sinuously, leaves shimmering in the moonlight. Some way off, a man was half hanging amidst the tangled branches of little trees. He seemed to be hanging there by his neck, his knees on the ground, his arms hanging uselessly.
”He’s dead,” Manston said, without emotion. ”Come on! Before it spreads ahead of us!”
”I’ve never seen anything------” Maggy began, almost whimpering.
”Come on!” he said, roughly.
They began to half run along the path, back towards the cottages, while all round them the trees began to move, waving slowly, as in some strange ritual dance.
”The men------” Gloria panted. ”They’ll be waiting—
”Better the devil you know,” he said briefly. ”We’d die here. There might be a spark of humanity left—in them.”
”They didn’t look like it,” the girl said.
Maggy was stumbling ahead, her hands clasped over her ears to cut out the frightful creaking sounds of the moving trees.
”Better drop the gun,” he said. ”It might antagonise them.”
They went on. At the fringe of the wood they saw an excited crowd in the back garden of the cottage, all looking towards the wood and listening to stories being yelled amidst the uproar.
”Perhaps the fear of what’s happening might help,” Manston said, but it was a thin last hope that made him say it.
They came out of the wood, he in front of the two women. Someone shouted, then another, and dozens took it up.
”Manston! Manston and the woman!”
The trio stopped. The faces of the men were angry, frightened, and then, from behind, a girl burst through and pointed.
”There he is!” she cried stridently. ”There he is! What are you waiting for?”
Sally from the inn stood there, the bright glow of triumphant cruelty in her face.
”I didn’t------” Manston began, then stopped, knowing the uselessness of it.
”Get ’em!” the girl shouted. ”Get ’em all. They’re all as guilty as each other! Get ’em all!”
The men came forward. This was something they could understand, to make them forget their shame in running from the wood. A dozen or more surged forward and surrounded the three. Two men grabbed Manston, and one hit him in the face when he was held. Others took hold of the women and hustled all three towards Sally.
The girl stood there, feet apart, hands on her hips, laughing.
”Take ’em down to the bonfire!” she shouted. ”That’s the place for ’em.”
Maggy started to struggle to tear herself away from the men holding her.
”Let me go!” she screamed. ”I know nothing! I wasn’t here! Let me go!”
”He’s yours, isn’t he?” Sally shouted. ”That’s your trouble. You’re coming with him! Bring ’em all. We’ll show ’em the fire. If they’re innocent, they don’t burn. You know that? If they’re innocent, they don’t burn!”
Somebody laughed, and others took it up and yelled out obscenities.
”They wouldn’t—dare,” Gloria said, with a gasp.
”You’ll find out, girl,” one man said. ”We bin after you all night. Keeping him hidden, you were. All part of it, I reckon.”
”All in-it together,” another said. ”And near killed Charlie. Smashed his head with a beam, the bastard did. That’s a crime, that is.”
”And raping a girl’s a crime, too!” another man shouted. ”We ought to burn the bastard altogether. Burn him on the bloody fire!”
A roar of assent made Manston feel suddenly sick.
Maggy had half fainted. The men holding her were supporting her to stop her falling to the ground.
”You’re mad!” Gloria shouted. ”You’re all mad! Can’t you understand what’s happened to you?”
”That’s nothing to what’s going to happen to you, dearie,” a man said, and laughed. ”Been waiting all night, we have, for that pretty face. Hiding the fancy boy, eh? Doesn’t pay to keep criminals, dearie. It puts you all in the same bloody boat.”
Maggy came to and stared wildly about.
”I know nothing,” she moaned. ”I was away.”
”Bring ’em to the fire!” Sally shouted. ”Come on, you bleeders.”
She began to march off. The men followed, forcing the captives in the front rank, holding them tightly in case of an attempt to escape. Somebody began to sing, and the crowd took it up, senseless, inane, cruel, making sport of an execution.
At first, Manston tried to resist, but the men dragged him on and those behind kicked his feet and his legs and pushed and hit him in the back. Gloria walked as if no one was holding her arms at all, showing no reaction to the obscene things said by the followers, but a flush high in her cheeks. Maggy went, pleading for a while, and then suddenly abandoning appeals and going on with her mouth tight shut.
The glow of the fire in the street ahead began to flicker on their faces as they came round the bend by the grocer’s shop. Maggy’s face became streaked with shining tears; tears brought by the familiarity of the street she knew so well, and the scene she could never have imagined.
”They’ve nearly let the bloody fire out!” Sally shouted. ”Get weaving, you lot! Get some more stuff. We want a good, big blaze! Get some more wood!”
Several men went off into cottages near by. The fire, burnt low, and still showing the legs of tables and chairs tossed in, spread almost across the village street. Its dying glow was hot and dry on the faces of the captives as they were halted in front of it.
”Stokers,” yelled Sally, with a hoarse laugh. ”That’s what we want—stokers! Get it going. Shove these bastards in the pub. Lock ’em in so they can see the stoking. Come on, you lot. Get weaving!”
They dragged the three into the door of the inn and fairly threw them into the bar. Sally came in with them, and two men went on the other side of the counter and started helping themselves to drinks. Somebody slammed the door shut. A good deal of shouting went on out in the street.
Maggy fell against a wall and stood there staring without understanding.
”You can’t do this,” she said. ”You can’t!”
Sally went to her and laughed.
”You called me a whore once,” she said. ”Remember? You told somebody I was a whore. Don’t you remember? I do! I remember. You’ll remember it soon, too.”
”If I said that, it was true,” Maggy said savagely. ”Nobody ever raped you. Nobody would have to------”
Sally hit her across the mouth, and then laughed when she saw it hurt.
”You don’t understand,” she said quietly. ”They’re going to chuck you on that bloody fire and burn you. I’m going to hear you scream. Do you know that? I’ve never seen anybody burn. I’m glad it’s going to be you. You hated me because you knew your husband liked me. You and your la-di-da bloody ways of looking down on me. Well, this time, I’m going to look down on you and see you shrivel up. See?”
Maggy shivered and could not answer.
”You’ve got to stop them,” Manston said, his voice so dry it hurt his throat.
She swung round and looked at him contemptuously.
”I don’t want to stop them,” she said.
”They’ll hang—for murder,” he said, desperately.
Sally laughed. ”That’s all over. Things have changed. We’re the bosses. You’re the ones that’s hiding in the holes now. You’re out of date, Jimmy. You’ve lost your way. The way you should have gone is my way—when I asked you, long time ago. Now it’s too late.” She gave one contemptuous look at Gloria, then opened the door and went out.
”They can’t!” Maggy said, staring at the window. ”They can’t.”
”They’re going to,” Gloria said. ”And if this goes on we’ll only be the first of many. Anybody else who comes into this place will go the same way. It was part of the plan to begin with. I realise it now. These people were meant to destroy their own kind. They’re the hands, the bodies------”
”They can’t throw us on a fire!” Maggy cried. ”People can’t do such things!”
”It won’t be the first time in history,” Manston said wearily. He stared out at the business of building the fire. ”It seems hardly possible it’s really happening, after all those endless hours of waiting for it. In a way it’s almost a relief.”
”Something must stop it!” Maggy shouted. ”The police---!”
”There’s the policeman out there now, carrying a table,” Manston said.
”Not that bloody old fool!” Maggy said. ”I mean the county police. The telephone. Why doesn’t somebody ring up the police?”
”There’s no one to put calls through,” Manston said angrily. ”Shut up, Maggy. Don’t make it any worse!”
”Worse! For God’s sake!” Maggy shouted derisively. ”Worse than what? Why the hell did I come back to this godforsaken spot?” She started to cry.
”Why did you come back?” Manston asked suddenly.
”She couldn’t leave you,” Gloria said, watching his wife. ”She couldn’t let you go.”
”Why did you come back?” Manston said. ”Stop looking at the window. It only makes it worse. Why did you come back?”
She looked at him, wet eyes blazing with anger and fear.
”He walked out on me! The cheap swine! After all that! All the talk and promises—he walked out. Said he couldn’t hurt anybody. Couldn’t hurt anybody? Only me!”
”But why did you come back?”
”There was nowhere else to go. It’s my home.” She was staring at the window again. ”This can’t be happening. It can’t be. Jim! You know it isn’t happening! You know it isn’t!”
”No,” he said, looking at the floor away from her. ”Perhaps it isn’t.”
”Why don’t you do something?” Maggy cried hysterically. ”You can’t let them do this!”
”I can’t do anything, Maggy. Nobody can,” he said.
”They’ll burn us like witches,” Gloria said, in an odd lone. ”I suppose that’s what we are, to them. They’re not men any more. They can’t think as they used to. Just get one idea and stick and stick and stick with it. Hours they waited for us. Like cats at a hole. I don’t believe they thought of anything but us in all that time . . . I’ve been thinking, Jim. I know now what those men in the woods were. The ones that let us through. The silent ones we kept seeing, and then thought we didn’t. They’re not men. They’re not anybody. They’re souls, Jim. Just waiting. Earthbound where they were severed from their bodies that still went on living.
The Grey Ones. That’s what they are. That’s why they let us go.”
He looked at her, his expression softening.
”There’s so much that’s unbelievable, why not that, too?” he said huskily.
”You’re mad!” Maggy snapped. ”You’re both mad! Why don’t you do something instead of just talk?”
”There’s nothing to do,” he said tiredly. ”Don’t you understand?”
Maggy made a motion as if to run to the door, then suddenly she saw the two men, standing against the bar wall, grinning, silent, feasting on agony. Realising they were still there gave Maggy a violent shock. She turned her back on them and covered her face with her hands.
He glanced up and saw Gloria looking at him. He dropped his gaze. For a moment a strange idea of making some offer of sacrifice that would save the others came to him, but there was nothing in the natures of this mob to which he could appeal. Nor would they seen anything in such an offer, for they would burn him anyway.
Burnt for witches; because they were different. That was the real reason. Reversion to the fears of centuries ago, and devising the same cures. Just as they had run away into the darkness when first their minds had been stripped.
He saw Gloria look out at the street scene.
”Don’t look there,” he said gently.
”Perhaps it would have been better to stay in the woods,” she said with a small shudder.
Maggy was sitting in a chair, her head in her hands, quite still.
”I was thinking about the machines,” Jim said. ”This high frequency sort of probe seems to have some special powers of animation. I still think it just makes the plants grow at phenomenal speed and gives the illusion of animation. These people, too. Since the beam took over, they haven’t been still. Marching, shouting, hunting, burning—any sort of senseless activity, so long as it’s activity. These men in the cottage were exhausted. They just couldn’t keep going any more.”
”Maybe it does animate everything,” Gloria said. ”I don’t know, and it seems a bit late to care.”
Maggy had started to cry again. The shouting and cursing out in the street was angry.
”They let the fire get too low,” Gloria said, without emotion in her voice; then suddenly bitter anger came into it as she added, ”We’ve got to wait!”
”They won’t do it!” Maggy said. ”They won’t do it!”
”You don’t understand—they’re mad; gone beyond any reason,” Manston said.
”It’s you that’s mad!” Maggy said. ”Talking—just as if nothing mattered!”
”What does it matter?” he said. ”What difference can I make now? What difference could I ever make? They’re going to do it. They’re fixed on it. Millions of people before us have waited for death like this. Millions will again. What difference does it make if it comes now or in ten years time? It’s going to be the same whenever it comes. You’re only frightened because of going into something you know nothing about, that’s all. I was frightened today—this afternoon. I went to do myself in. At the last moment I got scared and saved myself. But I’m not scared of it any more. I dread the fire, but that can’t last many seconds. Then it’ll be over.”
”My face!” Maggy whispered, her hands to her cheeks. ”It’ll burn my face.” Tears streamed down her cheeks and over her fingers. ”Only because she hates me. Why should she do this? Only because she hates me!”
There was a ragged cheer from the street as the fire began to recover. Gloria reached out behind her and caught his hand. She clenched it tightly at first, then relaxed, as if his touch brought some strange relief.
”He left me—standing there—on the pavement,” Maggy said, staring unbelieving at the wall by the window. ”He left me there! He thought I would understand. He thought I would understand!” Her wet eyes were wide in wonder. ”And I dragged myself through everything for that. My pride, my decency—everything. I threw it all away so that he could say, ’I don’t want you any more. I’ve used you—I don’t want you any more’. And he said I would understand . . .”
”Maggy!” Manston said, and felt almost an agony of compassion for her. ”Don’t think of it.”
”Let her,” Gloria said. ”It’s—better.”
Maggy did not see or hear them.
”He let me go to the very edge—walk out of my own home. He let me do that before he said he didn’t want me any more. If he had beaten me I should never have felt it ... I was proud this morning. Proud and defiant. I had chosen my way and I knew it was right. I had found myself, found my life. Now I’ve got nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing that’s me is left. Just bitterness and shame, tears and hate for everything that was wasted. And he said I would understand . . .” Her eyes were wide. ”And I love him! I can’t change that. I love him! Why for God’s sake, why?” She covered her eyes and sobbed.
”Don’t Maggy!” Manston said.
Gloria held his hand tightly, holding him back from going to her. And suddenly, through the touch, he understood that Maggy wanted no one but the man who had left her standing on the pavement; and incredulously he knew that she would go back to that pavement again.
He felt shame for her, and an odd kind of sympathy. He knew then that he had liked Hayter, too.
More shouting drew their eyes to the window, where the flicker of the fire was growing.
Gloria turned suddenly to Manston, eyes wide in sudden realisation.
”I did all this!” she said desperately. ”I did all this!”
”You couldn’t have done it without being told every step,” he said. ”You were just an instrument. It could have been anyone.”
”But how could I have believed there was someone there, when there was nobody there?” she said, ”He was real. I saw him, talked to him.”
”He was a hypnotic vision coming from a plant you looked at too much,” he said.
”Then why did he suddenly disappear? Why did he scream like he did?”
”He screamed because a rat ate him,” Manston said. ”It was a rat’s prints I saw in the earth by that pot. A rat ate him. That’s why he hasn’t come back.”
”It isn’t possible,” she said. ”You know it isn’t possible.”
”Look at those people outside,” he said angrily. ”I know them all. If they’re possible, anything is! The trouble is you’re trying to go back to a life that ended a week ago. It’s no good. You can’t go back. Things have changed loo much.”
She became calmer.
”I know,” she said. ”But I did it.”
Maggy suddenly heard, her intelligence focusing on the blonde girl.
”What do you mean—you did it?” she said.
”I operated the machine that did this,” Gloria said.
”You! How could you?”
”It’s too long a tlory,” Gloria said, wearily. ”And too late to do anything.”
”Do you mean you got us into this?” Maggy said, gelling up and going slowly towards the girl.
”In a way—yes,” Gloria said.
”You must be crazy!”
”I was.” She looked at Manston suddenly. ”But not now.”
A sudden burst of ragged cheering greeted the rising of the fire in the street. Maggy shuddered.
”They can’t be like that!” she cried. ”They can’t be!”
”They are,” Manston said.
”You’ve got to do something!” Maggy shouted. ”You’ve got to!”
”What can I do?” Manston answered.
”You can’t let them kill me!” she shouted. ”You can’t let them burn me!” She began sobbing as she cried. ”You can’t, Jim! You can’t! It’s murder! You can’t let them do that!”
She drew in a great gasping breath and turned to the door, eyes wide in terror. Sally came in.
”She had nothing to do with it,” Gloria said, bitterly. ”You don’t want her.”
Sally looked at her vindictively.
”I want the lot,” she said. ”This is my turn.”
”She wasn’t here,” Gloria said. ”She ran away. They brought her back, otherwise she wouldn’t be here now.”
Sally narrowed her eyes.
”Why are you standing up for her? It isn’t going to do you any good.”
There were several men in the doorway. Gloria turned to them.
”It’s fair, what I say, isn’t it? She had nothing to do with it. She was miles away. It was me and this man. You know that!”
”They’re all in together,” Sally cried viciously.
”No!” Maggy said, pleadingly. ”It’s true, I wasn’t here. I don’t know what happened! I don’t know anything about it! You can’t do this to me!”
”You can go first!” Sally said.
”No!” Maggy stood quite still. They saw her face paling, and then she collapsed, quite suddenly, falling downwards as if all her bones had gone. She rolled over and lay motionless.
”Leave her alone,” Manston said, hoarsely.
Sally looked at him, narrow-eyed, like a cat.
”Come on,” she said suddenly. ”Get ’em out of here. Leave her on the floor. Get the others out.”
The men came in, stumbling, pushing, inexplicable fury in their eyes and mouths. Manston held the girl by both arms as if to keep the men away from her.
”Okay, we’ll walk out!” he shouted.
They were pushed, shoved and dragged to the door and out into the passage. The men shouted and their cries were taken up by the mob outside, fifty of which seemed to be trying to get in at the inn door and join in dragging out the victims. There was a wild, savage cheer as they came out into the heat of the firelight, the heap of flaming debris spreading haphazard over the road. The shouting became deafening; it was mob hysteria, and nothing now was going to stop it. In the heat of that headlong, dragging struggle to the fire, Manston knew the sudden emptiness of despair, of utter impotence.
They were stopped on the rim of the fire, almost treading in the edge of the flaming sea.
Sally screamed out something which penetrated the shouting madness, and for a moment Manston found himself released, standing between a milling mass and the scorching edge of the fire. For a moment he glanced aside and saw the girl standing there, half stripped now, her face dirty and streaked, the golden hair spilled over an eye, and then suddenly the last thread of despair snapped. The atmosphere of dream that held him became complete. He no longer had feelings, no longer a body that could be hurt, only a savage reaction to the fury of these maniacs.
He bent suddenly and took out a great flaming spar from the fire. One end of it only was a burst of flame, where it had been carelessly tossed into the edge of the fire. He turned and, before anyone realised what he was doing, he struck out at the nearest faces with the great torch. Yells of alarm and anger broke out, but the men began to draw back, leaving the girl at his side. He saw the torch smash into men’s faces, bursting red embers as it struck, saw hands fly up, saw the wild flash of fearful, tortured eyes as he drove forward into the mass, smashing out with the firebrand like a madman.
”To the wall!” he shouted. ”Follow me to the wall. Keep behind!”
It seemed in those glorious moments of fiery action that there must be a chance. It was action that created the illusion, for there was no hope at the end of it. Yet he fought his way to the cottage wall opposite the inn, smashing out at a widening circle of frightened people with the flaming weapon. She came up against the plaster wall, panting. He stood in front of her, wild-eyed, breathless, deafened into almost a dazed state by the yelling. A flaming stick came sailing through the air and smashed into fireworks against the wall beside him. Another followed and the idea caught. The air became filled with the flaming missiles, smashing against the wall, breaking against their bodies.
”Try and get to the door!” he shouted, moving crab-wise along the wall. He was trying to fend off the burning sticks with his own brand, but sparks and flaming pieces were splashing over him, so that he could smell his own flesh burning under his nose. But there was no time to feel pain, no sensation but that of fury and desperation driving him on to fight any odds until there was no life left.
”It’s locked!” He heard her voice screaming from behind him.
”Just stand—there—inside!” he yelled. ”They’re falling back!”
True, they were falling back across the road, the circle of the battle was growing bigger, but only to let the mob more readily get burning sticks from the fire.
And then, in the midst of the nightmare scene there was a frightful cry; one louder, more alarming than all the rest.
It rose like a wail, a warning scream, and it somehow bore in amongst the din of the mob.
”The Manor! For Christ’s sake! The Manor!”
Drawn by the shout a few heads turned. Other cries of sheer terror broke out, and suddenly, it seemed, the whole face of the rabble was turned to stare down the lane to the Manor House, bright and clear under the moon.
It was moving. At first the pitches of the roofs wavered, like waves in a water tank, and then collapsed like paper bags and vanished inside. Pieces of debris flew into the air, and dust, like the smoke from fire, rose into the still night air. The crowd became suddenly quiet, staring at the dreadful sight.
On the air there came a growling roar from the timbers of the falling roof, and then the walls began to crumble outwards, stone upon stone, strangled with the writhing arms of the ivy, crushing down in a fearful avalanche. The whole building, collapsing with majestic slowness, seemed like a picture drawn on melting wax.
Against the doorway, Manston and the girl stood staring as spellbound as any of the others, though they had seen the beginning of the holocaust. She put her arm through his and hugged it to her breast. He felt her shivering, saying something he could not quite hear.
Even above the roaring of the fire the crashing of the great building was clear, like a far-off thunder. More and more went. The great place, erect for three hundred years, was pulled down in hours by the exploring, destroying fingers of weeds.
Then suddenly the west end went with the others. Flashes like lightning sparkled from amongst the collapsing stone, and the crushing windows, sparkling like splintering ice in the moonlight. Then fire came up, a sudden tongue, and one or two more flashes.
”The machines!” Gloria whispered.
The crowd stood silent, faces white, staring at the collapse of a monument. Burning sticks fell from hands that had forgotten them. Then, as the remains of the building seemed to become still at last, there was only the rising pillar of the fire from the machine room, and the watchers began to make sounds again.
The sounds were quite different now; they were awed, bewildered noises. They no longer spoke for a mob, but broke into small groups, twos and threes, people beginning to talk to each other again. Some started to go down the lane towards the Manor, others moved away along the street as if suddenly scared but not wanting to show it. More stood still, stunned where they were.
Manston stood staring at them, watchful still, yet sniffing the change in the very air. The tension had gone; the dreadful, screaming rage dissolved.
He found himself looking at Sally. Now a still, lone figure by the fire. She was looking at him wide-eyed, as if she had never seen him before that moment. Then she looked round as if to find someone to explain what had been happening. Her eyes grew wide, and then she turned and ran into the inn.
Manston dropped his smouldering stick.
”It’s over,” he said, wonderingly. ”The machines have stopped.”
She hugged his arm tighter and he heard her crying very softly.
”The plants broke it all to pieces,” he said. ”Brought every stone down. Everything.”
The crowd was dispersing, some in bewilderment, some with an odd kind of guilt in their actions. He began to cross the street by the blazing, lonely fire, and she went on his arm. At the door of the inn, she let him go. He went inside.
Maggy was standing by the fireplace, white, big-eyed, shivering. She just looked at him.
”What’s happened?” she said.
”It’s over,” he said, and found his voice so dry it hardly sounded. ”It’s over!” he shouted.
Maggy sat down on a bench against the wall, then sagged with a relief that drew all remaining strength out of her.
”They won’t burn me,” she whispered.
”No,” he said.
She just sat there, staring unseeing at the floor, head hanging.
In the street Gloria turned at an unfamiliar sound. A car was coming slowly down into the light of the fire, the police legend alight on its top. It stopped by the police cottage and a man got out of the back seat and went into the cottage. Two others got out and came to the fire, staring.
”They can’t do this,” one said in surprise. ”This is a public highway. You can’t light fires in a public highway. It’s an offence!”
Gloria started to laugh. The laugh grew on her and she leaned back against the wall helpless with it, a different kind of tears streaking the dirt off her face.
”What on earth’s happened to you?” the sergeant said. ”Here, have my mac.” He took his raincoat off and gave it to her.
”It’s furniture burning,” said the constable. ”Look! What the blazes has been going on?”
The inspector came striding down from the police cottage.
”Can’t find Wills,” he said, and looked at the girl. ”What’s been happening?”
”A lot,” she said.
”We had a signal that communications had stopped, and there was a guard turning traffic back,” the inspector said. ”I didn’t believe it, but it seems it was true.”
”Yes, it’s all true,” she said.
”We’ll have to get that fire out,” the inspector said. ”And you------” He looked at her. ”You need a cup of hot tea with
a rum in it. Come in here.”
He took her arm and guided her into the inn. Sally was at the end of the passage, dirty and frightened.
”Get some tea brewed, will you?” the inspector said. ”Hot. Make plenty,” he added, entering the bar.
”Yes, sir,” Sally said, and went.
”Who can tell me all about this?” the inspector said.
”I can,” Manston said.
”You’re in such a state,” the inspector said, looking from Manston to Gloria. ”What happened to you?”
”We nearly got lynched,” .Manston said.
”What here—in a village?” said the inspector, incredulously.
”I’ll tell you,” Manston said.
”It’ll be one of those things that no one who wasn’t here will believe,” Manston said. ”But you’ve got to push it.
You’ve got to let everybody know. I personally think the seed of that plant came in from somewhere else. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe it did spring up. Wherever it came from, it was a superior intelligence. It was a kind that understood how we lived, our social structure, our electronic machines, and our psychology. It knew how to get things done—practical things, though it had no body to carry it out.”
”But a flower!” said the inspector. ”I ask you!”
”You should have seen the bloody little trees waving about, and the ivy crawling,” Manston said angrily. ”It was—quite something.”
”It was horrible!” Maggy said with a shudder. ”I’ve never seen anything like it.”
”We’d better go and see it now,” the inspector said. ”Can’t let that go on—if it does what you say.”
He turned and shouted to the sergeant to turn the car round.
”Hypnotism,” he said, looking back at Gloria. ”But you know exactly what this plant looked like?”
”Yes,” she said. ”And luckily I took it to Kew, the British Museum, the Natural History Museum—I’d never seen anything like it before.”
In the end a rat ate it, and there was blood in the mould,” Manston said. ”It couldn’t have been quite like an ordinary plant, could it?”
”You will have to give a complete description,” the inspector said, turning to the girl again. ”It must be sent out all over the world. We couldn’t take a risk of this happening again. Although perhaps it’s a good thing it happened once and failed.”
”There are one or two dead people,” Manston reminded him.
”There could have been a lot more,” the inspector said practically.
The sergeant called that the car was ready. At that moment, a queer row appeared on the night air, a clattering, squawking, barking, running, scuttering mixture of a hundred noises.
”What the devil’s that?” the inspector said, startled.
They all listened to the growing, almost joyous noise.
”Dogs!” Gloria said, frowning, and then her face lightened. ”It’s the animals coming back! The animals!”
”Where the hell have they been?” said the inspector, staring out of the windows. He saw the first of the dogs come fleeing by, barking, tails a-go, scattering to their own homes.
”They’ve been waiting,” Gloria said. ”Like the Grey Ones.”
”I wonder which were the Grey Ones,” Manston said. ”The ones that waited, or the ones that nearly killed us?”
The inspector went out, and his: car began to feel its way down the lane against the tide of cats, dogs, chickens, and even cows now lumbering into sight across the fields.
The car went on to the scene of the disaster and the ivy-strewn wreckage smouldering in the moonlight. But no ivy moved any more; no plant waved; the little trees in the wood only rustled their silver leaves in the stirring of the night air. But it was a dry rustling, and the plants drooped, and the ivy withered, as if they were all dead.
”Well?” the sergeant said.
The inspector shrugged.
”Something did it,” he said. ”We might as well believe the only story that there is.”
The Manstons went back to their cottage, taking Gloria with them, to wash and get clothes. But when they got there, Maggy went to her bedroom, shut the door and did not come out again.
Manston was left downstairs to clean up in the sink. Gloria came down sooner than he had expected. She stood at the foot of the stairs, looking at him.
”I’m going back home,” she said, only a very slight tremor in her voice.
”But we------”
”I’ve been thinking it over—all of it,” she said.
”I love you,” he said urgently.
”Yes, I know,” she said gently. ”I couldn’t have made a mistake about that, could I? But I couldn’t mistake those ten years either, Jim. Ever since we found her this evening, in every little thing you did and words you said—it was those ten years still holding on. You can’t just leave it all of a sudden.”
”You heard what she said,” he pleaded. ”You heard it yourself. She loves him. She’ll go to him in the end. You know that, because you’re a woman, and you can understand why.”
”Yes, I can understand it,” she said quietly, ”but you can’t be sure she’ll go to him again. Because, you see, Jim, she can’t. More than the fact she loves him, that’s the one thing you’ve got to understand. If she goes now, it won’t be to him. It will be to nobody, because she’ll have nobody left. You must understand that.”
”But, Gloria, you don’t------!”
”I know what I mean to say,” she said. ”I only wish I could say it.”
”You can’t walk out,” he said. ”I love you.”
”I love you, too,” she said. ”I’ve never loved anyone in my life before. It’s something so wonderful inside me that I’m frightened of it.”
”Then there’s no reason------”
”There is. There is! Jim, you don’t understand after all. She came back. She was in love, too. She still is. But it turned her down. It’s left her with nothing at all. That’s why I’m frightened. I’m frightened of the ten years. I’m frightened that it’s too lovely a thing to last. I’m going, Jim.”
”I’ll find you,” he said. ”If you go, I’ll find you. But you------”
”Goodbye, Jim.”
She went to the door and stood there, looking back at him.
”Don’t go, Gloria,” he said. ”Don’t go!”
”Yes, Jim. Yes. Let me go.”
”I won’t! I------”
”Do you love me?”
”Yes, I do, I do!”
”Then let me go, Jim. Please, for God’s sake!”
He stood there seeing her silhouetted against the moonlight through the door. Then she went, and the door shut.
She did not look back, did not listen, but walked on, through the broken street, walking firmly, away from the village, past the last cottage and the oil patch on the road where the guard truck had been. She walked on up the hill, until the road was blurred with tears. Then she stopped suddenly and turned back. She wiped her eyes on the backs of her hands so that she could see the little village in the saucer of the downs.
”Jim!” Her voice trembled, and the scene faded in the mist of tears. ”Find me soon!”