WYNNE N. WHITEFORD
‘I’ve had the stuff analysed,’ said Conway as they sat down in the living room of his flat. His eyes had a haunted look.
Smith’s mouth twitched nervously to one side. ‘Was it blood?’ Conway lit a cigarette before he answered, belatedly holding the packet out.
‘It was blood,’ he said. ‘Green blood.’ - For a time neither of them spoke. Smith swallowed noisily. Conway looked fixedly at the top of his lowered head until he raised his eyes, then leaned toward him.
‘The only creature I’ve heard of with green blood is a thing called the matta-matta - a sort of turtle that lives in the mud on one of the tributaries of the Orinoco. The haemoglobin in its blood is replaced by a compound that has an atom of copper in place of the normal iron.’
‘This didn’t come out of any turtle,’ broke in Smith emphatically. ‘I was on the spot almost as soon as it happened. The wind swung the door - it’s got glass panels in it, see? I hear the crash of glass, and when I go out here’s the woman standing holding her arm with a handkerchief. The handkerchief’s starting to stain green. I wanted to help her, but she bolted for her room and slammed her door and locked it. I picked up that bit of glass with the smear of blood on it - and that’s about all.’
‘Have you told anyone else about this?’
‘No. Do I want people to think I’m crackers?’
Conway leaned back. ‘What’s she look like, this woman?’
Smith shrugged his shoulders. ‘Nothing very out of the ordinary. Tall. Holds herself very straight. Dark hair that hangs down over her shoulders. Always wears dark glasses, thick pancake make-up, like a woman wears when she’s old and trying to look young.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘Although she’s young enough, judging from her movements. Leastwise, I think so. Hard to say.’
‘What d’you know about her?’
‘Almost nothing. She has the back downstairs flat next to mine. I’ve been there a couple of months, and she moved in a few weeks before me. She goes out every morning - not always at the same time. Stays out most of the day. Doesn’t go out much at night. Never makes any noise when she’s in her flat - no radio, nothing. You’d think the place was empty, when she’s there.’
Conway stood up and began to pace backwards and forwards across the room. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Have you a room in your flat where I could stay for a few days?’
‘Hardly. They’re pretty small flats - not like this.’
Conway halted. ‘Would you like to stay here for a day or two, while I stayed at your place? You could tell your landlady I’m your cousin, or something.’
Smith looked around the room thoughtfully. ‘I wouldn’t mind staying here for a change. But why? You wouldn’t get to see much of her.’
‘Maybe not. But I’ve got nothing to lose. I can work anywhere I have room to put a typewriter.’
‘But I still don’t see what you aim to do.’
‘Neither do I - yet.’
* * * *
Mrs Stein, Smith’s landlady, was a small, wiry woman with grey hair pulled tightly back. She accepted the fact that Smith had to ‘leave town for a few days’, and her main concern seemed to be that Conway would make no noise during this stay.
‘All the tenants are quiet, here,’ she said in a rasping voice that reminded Conway of a parrot’s.
‘Who has the flat alongside this one?’ he asked.
‘A Miss Wilson. You’ll find she won’t disturb you. She’s been less trouble than any tenant I’ve ever had.’
Conway settled in. The room, with its tiny attached kitchenette, was small, but comfortable enough. He was working on a series of commissioned technical articles, and while he was concentrating on his work almost any room was as good as any other. He moved the table across near the single window which commanded a view of the path leading from the front gate down the side of the house to give access to the rear flat.
About nine o’clock on the morning after he had moved in, he heard the first sounds of movement from Miss Wilson’s room. He put down the files of papers he had been settling in order, and sat listening.
Footsteps, moving intermittently in the next room. High-heeled shoes. Somehow, they did not seem the normal sounds of a person just getting up - from the first, the steps were quick and definite, as if the woman had got into high gear immediately on awakening. He heard the outer door of the flat opening, and he had the bizarre notion that Miss Wilson must have slept fully dressed, even to her shoes - less than a minute had elapsed between the first sound and the last.
Suddenly, he had an impulse to forget about the whole thing. Probably Smith had made a mistake, and he had gone along with it. Then he remembered the green, copper-based blood, and he sat rigidly with his eyes on the window, waiting for the woman to pass.
* * * *
His first sight of her was tantalising. It told him practically nothing - just the back view of a woman walking away from him down the path. Dark shoulder-length hair, a tan leather-fabric coat that hung straight and loose-fitting, tan shoes with medium heels. Her hands were in her pockets. She was fairly tall, and she walked with a somewhat longer stride than most women of her size - but had he seen her in the street there would have been nothing about her that demanded a second glance.
As she turned to close the front gate after her, he saw that the upper part of her face was masked by large, dark sunglasses, although the day was not bright.
Slipping on his raincoat, he went quickly out. As he reached the front gate he saw her crossing the street a hundred yards away. She unlocked the door of a blue Renault parked at the kerb and slid behind the wheel. As he walked closer along the pavement she drove off, and he noticed that the car had left-hand drive. Probably bought in France.
His own car was parked in the other direction - too far off for him to have reached it in time to follow her. He bought some cigarettes at the corner shop and returned to his room, taking out his notebook and jotting down the licence number of the Renault.
* * * *
He tried to get on with his work, but his mind kept returning to that broken fragment of glass with its edge smeared with emerald-green blood. How could a human being have blood with copper in it instead of iron? He knew that such blood existed in the South American matta-matta, but that was a vastly different life-form from a human. Copper-based blood suggested an entirely different body chemistry.
The woman could hardly be an isolated case. She must have had parents, grandparents, a succession of green-blooded ancestors reaching back to - when? Had evolution produced two parallel strains of people, one with haemoglobin in the blood, one with - well, would you call it cupro-globin? If so, why had he never heard of the second strain?
No, it seemed impossible that such a parallel race of people could have remained undetected in the midst of humanity all through the centuries. The only alternative was a sudden evolutionary change. Yet in some ways that was equally unthinkable.
He tried to tell himself that the whole thing had been a mistake.
* * * *
About four o’clock he heard the click of the front gate, and looked up to see her coming down the path in the slanting afternoon sunshine. The light was in her face, so he was able to watch her secure in the knowledge that she could not see him. She carried a folded newspaper.
He heard her let herself into her flat. He heard footsteps to and fro across her room, a sound that might have been the opening of a refrigerator. Then silence. He listened for a long time, but the adjoining room might have been empty for all the sound he heard.
Next morning a knock sounded on his door, and he opened it to find Mrs Stein dressed to go out.
‘Mr Conway,’ she said. ‘I have some trouble.’
‘Anything I can do to help?’
‘Please. My sister is ill up in Nottingham; I have to go up there. The laundry will be delivered during the day, and you will be the only person at home. I wonder -’
‘Certainly, Mrs Stein. Just let me know what you need ...’
* * * *
So he was to have the house to himself. Mrs Stein left about nine o’clock, and at half-past Miss Wilson began moving about in her room. At nine thirty-five she walked out across the street to her car and drove off.
The laundry was delivered about one o’clock. Conway paid for it and handed over the parcel Mrs Stein had left with him. Then he went back and stood looking at the locked door of Miss Wilson’s room.
He went out into the small shed in the back garden and rummaged through some junk until he found a short length of stiff wire. He bent the end of it at a right angle by hammering it across a rusty boot-last, then went back into the house.
His heart pounding, he set to work on Miss Wilson’s lock. Fortunately it was an old-fashioned mortice lock, of the same general type as one that he had seen a locksmith open in a similar way within a matter of seconds.
It took him a tense, sweating half-hour before the lock suddenly yielded. He listened to the empty stillness of the house, feeling like an actor in a third-rate film. Then, covering the knob of the door with his handkerchief, he turned it and gently eased the door open.
There was a very faint, sharp click as the door swung in. He hesitated, then stepped into the room. He was getting jumpy.
The room was surprisingly bare for a woman’s room. A bed over one side, a dressing-table across the corner, one chair, a wardrobe, and three large trunks - black aluminium trunks of American pattern. A couple of newspapers lay folded on the small table under the window. Idly he glanced at the upper one, wondering what looked unfamiliar about it. Suddenly he picked it up.
It was the New York Times - with today’s date. He took out his pocket diary and checked the date; he scanned the headlines, looking at column after column. There was no mistake, no misprint in the date. It was today’s paper!
The second paper had a slightly different whiteness, the suggestion of a pinkish tint against the whiteness of the New York paper. The name on it seemed to blur before his eyes for a moment. The Sydney Morning Herald - again with today’s date.
He wondered if he was going mad. A paper from America, a paper from Australia - both of them today’s. The New York paper might just possibly have got here by jet - although it was not the lightweight airmail edition of the Times, but the ordinary version sold on the streets. But the Sydney paper - no! Twelve thousand miles the same morning! Even allowing for the fact that Sydney’s time was - what was it? - ten hours ahead of London’s time, there was no conceivable way it could have got here before Miss Wilson had left the flat at nine-thirty-five.
He was still standing thunderstruck when a shadow flitted past the window. He heard the sound of high heels on the steps outside, the grating of a key in the lock of the outer door.
In a sudden panic, he looked about the room for a possible place of concealment. The back door closed, and he heard her steps come to the door of the room.
Almost by reflex action, alone, he dived for the only hiding-place - the angled dressing-table. Crouching behind it, he found his eyes just level with the narrow gap beneath the bottom edge of the tilting mirror.
The door opened, and Miss Wilson stepped quickly into the room. She poised tensely, breathing rapidly as though she had been running. With a swift movement of her hand she took off the dark glasses, and as she looked about her he noticed that her eyes were large and strangely light-coloured.
Almost at a run, she crossed the room to the high old-fashioned wardrobe, flinging open the veneered doors.
Within was another door, apparently of grey metal, with a line of circular dials down one side of it. She made a rapid adjustment of the dials, pressing a button. The metal door parted down the centre and slid open, revealing a smooth metal cabinet inside. She stepped within it, turned, and pulled the outer doors of the wardrobe shut.
Conway waited, breathing very carefully. His thighs ached from the cramped position in which he was squatting, but he dared not move.
From the direction of the cabinet he heard a deep, almost inaudible hum that crept gradually up the scale, ending in a faint thump.
* * * *
For several minutes he waited, but there was no further sound. He had the sudden fear that the girl might be unable to get out of the cabinet within the wardrobe - that she might be suffocating.
Suppose he tiptoed out of the room, then came in under some pretext. If he explained he had heard some slight sound in the wardrobe.
Cautiously, he eased his body out from behind the dressing table, his eyes on the wardrobe. He moved stealthily across to the door, then, on a sudden inspiration, knocked on it loudly, pulling it open and standing within the doorway as if he had just stepped in.
‘Miss Wilson! Are you there?’
No reply. He strode across to the wardrobe and opened the doors. The metal doors within presented a surface so smooth that he was unable to see the dividing line down the centre. He looked at the dials. They were of some dark green material - with white figures engraved around their rims - or not figures, when he looked at them more closely, but signs somewhat like shorthand symbols.
He pressed the button, and the doors slid open. He looked into the cabinet.
It was empty.
There was no apparent exit to it. The floor and ceiling of it were of a fine gauze-like metallic mesh with a peculiar shimmer to it. The walls seemed like the inside of a hollow casting made in one piece, and ground to mirror smoothness.
She must have gone somewhere. He reached in to tap the walls of the cabinet, then stepped in to feel the back of it. He noticed a single green button set on one side wall. Was this the control to the secret exit? Experimentally he pressed it.
Instantly the sliding metal doors shut him into darkness. He began to shout in sudden alarm, then froze as the deep, humming sound climbed swiftly up the scale. Suddenly he had the sensation of being disintegrated in a soundless explosion. He was falling, falling down a vast darkness - then an impact seemed to strike his body all over from every direction at the same instant...
The doors whipped open. He turned, shaken, and stepped out.
His feet pounded on bare wooden boards. Sunshine slanted through a Venetian blind across a window in a wall that should not have been there - a green wall with a table against it and a disused fireplace of what appeared to be black marble.
He had stepped out into a different room.
* * * *
It was a longer, wider, hotter room than the one he had been in. Outside came a muted roar of traffic, a squealing of tyres as if cars were accelerating away from traffic-signals. He crossed to the window, peering through the slats of the blind.
The sun - it looked like the morning sun - struck fiercely through tall trees outside. He should have been looking at ground-floor level into the back garden of the house in Highgate - but he was not. He was high above ground-level - perhaps on the third storey of the building. Below was a wide street, tree-lined along each side, with an area of park beyond. A car sped along the street - a big American convertible with left-hand drive, and with white licence-plates with blue letters and figures.
Where was he?
A minute ago he had been in a flat in London. He looked wildly across the room. It was unfurnished except for one chair and a bed without bed-clothing. A coat lay across the bed as if it had been flung there hastily - the long, tan leather-fabric coat that Miss Wilson had been wearing.
Conway went to the window and looked down at the street again. Cars were parked along both sides of it, all of them on what appeared to him to be on their wrong side.
A girl in a cotton dress walked away from the house across the broad sidewalk, and as she turned to glance up the street before crossing he recognised her as Miss Wilson. She ran diagonally across the street and climbed into a Chevrolet parked on the far side. He saw the quick forward movement of her body as she released the handbrake, the pale triangle of her face beneath the dark glasses as she looked over her shoulder before pulling away from the kerb. She let another car pass, then swung the Chevrolet out and away.
Conway felt the wall of the room to convince himself he was not in the middle of a nightmare. He walked slowly across the room and tried the door. It was locked.
He walked through an inner doorway into a large kitchen, past a bathroom, into a completely bare room beyond. The apartment took up the entire floor of an old-fashioned three-storeyed house, apparently built C-shaped around a stairwell. The door from the bare room at the back to the stairway was also locked.
He went back through the kitchen. The place didn’t look as if it had been lived in, except for the fact that a glass stood rim-down on the draining board, as though someone had filled it from the tap and drunk from it hastily.
* * * *
He returned to the front room. A large, old-style wardrobe, painted chalk-white, had been used to contain the metal cabinet, which as far as he could see was an exact duplicate of the one in Miss Wilson’s flat in London. There were shelves down one side - the wardrobe was wider than the cabinet within it by some eighteen inches - and on one of the shelves were a number of folded maps.
He took them out, leafing through them. Oil-company maps, mostly, and small directories. Uppermost was a map of Washington, D.C., then a road-map of the New England States with inset plans of Boston, New Haven, Providence and other cities within the area. Next was a street map of New York City, then a Morgan’s Street Directory of Melbourne, Australia, an A.Z. Directory of London, an Esso map of San Francisco.
Far back in the dark corner of the shelf was a bunch of keys. Nine keys of different patterns on a plain ring, some Yale type, some for mortice locks, and two of a peculiar, delicate workmanship, of a green metal that he did not recognise.
Replacing the maps, he took the keys across to the door. The third he tried opened the lock.
He was about to open the door when he remembered the sharp click that had punctuated the opening of the door in the London flat. Had it been the tripping of some alarm system that had brought Miss Wilson back? He looked carefully around the door, and found what he was looking for - a tiny cylinder fitted above the lintel with a hair-thin wire projecting down so that the top of the door would brush it in opening.
Noticing that it was mounted on a swivel, he turned it horizontally so that the door would clear it; then he opened the door and looked out.
* * * *
No sounds came to him up the stairwell. He tiptoed cautiously down, stopping for a heart-pounding minute when a step creaked under his weight.
Nothing stirred. There was only silence and gloom and the smell of cedar-wood. He went on down, keeping his weight on the sides of the steps, until he stood on the ground floor. Out through the living room, with its dark furnishing and drawn blinds and the dull gleam of brass and polished wood here and there in the half-light. Out through the front door, checking that one of the keys opened it before he pulled it shut behind him. Across the tiled verandah and down the stone steps to the sidewalk.
The air smelled fresh and clean, with a thousand mingled tree and bush scents from the park opposite. He turned right, towards an intersection where heavy streams of traffic flowed, dammed back intermittently by traffic lights that were red and green, without the intermediate yellow. Some of the cars parked along the street had green licence-plates with white figures, but most bore the white plates in blue with numbers preceded by D.C.
At the corner, he found the street he was in was indicated as Tilden Street; the long, busy road that angled across it down the hill to the left was Connecticut Avenue. Incredible though it may be, he was forced to admit to himself that he was somewhere in the United States. The D.C. on the cars jigsawed into place with something he had noticed when he had looked out from the window of the house - a high obelisk spearing into the sky three miles or so away, fully half-a-thousand feet of it, hazy with distance. The Washington Monument. And D.C. stood for District of Columbia.
It was an utter impossibility, of course. Twenty minutes ago he had been in Highgate, in London, three thousand miles away - or was it four? Yet the sun was warm on him, the asphalt hard and real beneath his feet, the people waiting at the bus-stop alive and moving. He took off his jacket and hung it across his shoulder, mopping his face with his handkerchief.
What had he stumbled on here? A technique that could instantaneously transmit a living person thousands of miles. The maps suggested a network of such lines of transmission spreading to the farthest part of the Earth. Obviously, Miss Wilson was not the only person who used them. Who was she? What was she?
He began to walk quickly back to the house. He let himself in, climbed to the top floor, locked the door of the top front room from the inside, and returned the hair-trigger alarm device to its original position. He put the keys in his pocket, opened the wardrobe, and pressed the buttons on the cabinet. The grey metal doors slid silently open.
A moment of fear held him rigid. What happened when you stepped into the cabinet and pressed the green button? Were the separate atoms of the body disintegrated, flung across space, reassembled in the cabinet in London? But no - that was unthinkable. Was there some property of space involved which he knew nothing about?
Yet he had seen it work. Without giving himself time to think, he stepped into the cabinet, pressed the green button, heard the rising hum, the thump, felt the abysmal fall, the impact of arrival.
Still sweating, he stepped out into the sudden coolness of a grey afternoon in London.
* * * *
Back in his room he poured himself a drink and sat down by the window, turning the bunch of keys over in his hand. Seven of them could have been made in America, in England, or in almost any other country. But the other two - the slender, intricate, twisted keys of gleaming green metal, with their wide ends engraved with outlandish hieroglyphs - those were the two that convinced him that everything that had happened this afternoon had not been a grotesque dream.
He thought of ringing Smith, then decided to wait. He remembered an American friend, looked up his number, and dialled it.
‘Frank, how well do you know Washington, D.C.?’
‘Pretty well. Why?’
‘Don’t they call the streets by numbers there?’
‘Numbers north-south, letters east-west. Why?’
‘So there wouldn’t be a street called Tilden Street?’
‘Yes. After they run through the alphabet they give them names in alphabetical order. Tilden’s out north along Connecticut Avenue. Runs along the top end of the park near the bureau of Standards
When he had rung off, Conway felt as if everything had become slightly unreal. He took out his notebook and began writing down everything that had happened since Smith had come to him with the piece of bloodstained glass. The analysis of the green, congealed liquid. The description of the girl. The newspaper. The cabinets. The transference of his body from the London flat to the green-walled room in Washington. The car in which the girl had driven away. At this point, as he wrote, a light knock sounded on the door.
He closed the notebook and put it in his pocket, then answered the knock. In the passage outside stood Miss Wilson. She was slightly taller than he had thought at first, her high heels bringing her a shade above his own five-feet-eleven.
‘I’m Miss Wilson - from the next flat.’ Her voice was slightly husky. ‘I wonder if you happened to pick up a set of keys?’
‘Keys? Have you lost some?’
‘I may have dropped them. However, if you haven’t seen them -’
‘Let’s have a look in the passage,’ he suggested quickly, as she half-turned away. He switched on the light and began peering about the carpet. She stood quite still, her hands in the pockets of her coat, her eyes hidden by the dark sunglasses.
‘Don’t trouble,’ she said. ‘I could hardly have dropped them here without noticing it.’
That accent? What was it? A hint of Spanish, of Japanese? Filipino, perhaps? Yet not quite.
‘Have you been long in London?’ he asked.
‘Three months. Why?’
‘I’ve lived here two years.’ He had a fierce compulsion to keep her talking, to keep her from slipping away from him again. ‘I like London. The theatres, for instance.’
The full red lips curved in a slight smile. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t had the opportunity to see them.’
‘But that’s almost criminal, living in London and not taking in the theatres. Listen! I have a friend who can get me theatre tickets any time I want them. Would you care to take in a show tonight?’
The dark glasses could have hidden any expression. The slight curve of her lips betrayed nothing of her thoughts.
‘Thank you. Some other time, perhaps.’ She moved again towards her door.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’m certain I’ve seen you before, somewhere. Not in London.’
‘It’s quite possible.’ Her hand was on the door.
‘Could it have been in Washington?’
Half-turned, the doorknob froze with the sudden rigidity of her hand. She stood perfectly still. He felt his pulse drumming, and he started at the click of the doorknob turning back as she relaxed her grip of it.
‘It’s possible,’ she said. With a sudden movement she turned towards him. ‘Perhaps we could go to the theatre together this evening. It might be fun.’
‘Right. I’ll ring my friend right away about the tickets.’
She smiled. ‘But I don’t even know your name.’
‘Conway - Eric’
Her smile widened. ‘Wilson - Alma.’
Her even white teeth were curiously pointed.
* * * *
He had no difficulty in getting tickets.
‘I can get you two in the second row of the circle at the Comedy,’ his friend told him.
‘That’s fine.’ It was only as an afterthought that it occurred to Conway to ask the name of the play.
As he put down the phone he caught sight of his reflection in the wall-mirror.
‘I hope the hell you know what you’re doing,’ he murmured aloud.
* * * *
She watched the first act of the play with intense absorption, as though it was the first she had ever seen, holding the dark sunglasses in her hand. The lights from the stage showed her eyes, large and curiously light. But when the lights went up for the first interval Conway turned to find the glasses again hiding her eyes.
‘Do you always wear those?’ he asked.
‘Eyestrain,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand strong light - just for the present.’
She preferred not to move out for the interval. ‘When were you in Washington?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Few months ago.’
‘Thought you said you’d been in London two years.’
Careful, he thought. ‘I move about a bit. Been here most of the time. I’ve just been trying to figure where I’ve seen you. I used to stay in a street called Tilden Street. Park along one side, sloping down from the street. Do you know it?’
‘I know it.’ The dark glasses swung towards him, opaque, void, like the eyes of a vast insect. The sleek dark helmet of hair framed her face, hid her forehead, so that he could see nothing of her expression beyond the straight firmness of her mouth.
Throughout the remainder of the play she said nothing, sitting erect and immobile alongside him.
‘Would you care for a cup of coffee?’ he asked as they moved towards the exit.
‘Why not have one at home?’ She smiled. ‘It would be more pleasant in my flat than in a cafe. Mrs Stein might not approve - but need she know?’
As they emerged into the sudden coolness of the night air, Conway noticed a big man in a pale grey suit standing on the far kerb. He wore dark glasses and a white Panama hat that seemed fantastically out-of-place in the West End of London at ten-thirty in the evening. As they walked down Panton Street towards the Haymarket he glanced over his shoulder, and he noticed that the man in the panama hat was walking at the same speed down the opposite side of the street, about twenty yards behind them. He felt a sudden dryness in his throat.
* * * *
The vague feeling of uneasiness crystallised on the way home, when he was held up at a traffic signal. He glanced in his rear-view mirror, and noticed a 2.4-litre Jaguar waiting behind him. Another car rounded the corner, coming from the intersecting street, the swing of its headlights gave Conway a glimpse of the man in the Jaguar behind him. He wore dark glasses and a white Panama hat.
Dawdling, he watched the next traffic signal ahead. He managed to time it so that it was changing to amber just as he reached it, and tramping on the accelerator he crossed in front of the opposing traffic, leaving the Jaguar stranded at the red light behind him.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked the girl.
‘I think I know a short cut. Dodges the worst of the traffic.’
Swinging off the main road, he drove through a series of narrow streets, twisting frequently until he was sure that the Jaguar could not possibly have kept track of him. He glanced at the girl as she sat quietly beside him. Her lips were curved in a faint smile that brought all his uneasiness back to him.
When he reached their street, after having to retrace his way from a couple of dead-ends, he saw a grey Jaguar parked fifty yards from the house. It appeared to be empty. He tried to convince himself that there were plenty of cars of that type about London, but the coincidence was still too strong for his liking.
When she opened the door of her flat, she did a curious thing. She walked straight across to the window looking out on the back garden, pulled the curtain aside, and stood looking out into the darkness for perhaps three seconds. Then she drew the curtain again and went into the kitchenette. He heard the sound of a tap running, then the lighting of a gas-jet.
‘Where was I when you saw me in Washington?’ she called from the kitchenette.
‘I don’t know. Walking somewhere. Think I’ve seen you driving a car.’
‘A Chevrolet?’
‘That’s right. A green one, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ She came back into the room and stood with her hands in the pockets of her coat. ‘I bought it three days ago from Cherner’s.’
It took a couple of seconds for the full chilling implication to seep through to him. She tapped one foot sharply on the floor, twice. A key turned in the lock. The door opened, and the big man in the Panama hat moved swiftly into the room, closing the door behind him and locking it without taking his eyes from Conway.
With a sudden change in her intonation, the girl said something that sounded like ‘vorak esri’, and the big man made a monosyllabic reply. The girl went suddenly to the wardrobe, opened it, opened the cabinet, stepped within. She did not close the outer doors of the wardrobe this time, and Conway watched the metal doors seal her from view. The crescendent hum, the thump - and she was gone.
‘What’s all this?’ demanded Conway.
The big man gestured towards the cabinet. ‘You follow, please.’
‘I’m damned if I do!’
The big man took something from his pocket. It was a delicate-looking instrument of shining metal, shaped rather like a small paint spray-gun. He pointed it towards Conway.
‘I must warn you to do as I say,’ he said. ‘This can be quite lethal.’
Conway shrugged, and went to the cabinet. The big man kept the weapon pointed at him as he opened the doors and stepped inside. Conway pressed the green button ...
When he emerged into the green-walled room in the Tilden Street house, late afternoon sunshine was slanting ruddily through the slats of the Venetian blind. The five-hour time-difference between England and the eastern United States meant that the sun had not yet set here.
Miss Wilson was standing near the window, an instrument gleaming in her right hand. It was the same type of weapon that the big man had carried, though slightly more compact.
‘I’m sorry your curiosity has led you this far,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m afraid you have come to what your people might describe as the point of no return.’
‘How do you mean?’ he asked, moving towards her.
‘You are not stupid, Eric. Nor are we.’ She took off the dark glasses and slipped them in her pocket. For the first time, he saw the full strangeness of her eyes, large, upward-slanting, the iris silvery and luminescent, the pupils diamond-shaped. He could not tear his gaze away from them.
‘You have used the cabinets to transport yourself here. You know this is a method of travel your people do not possess. I knew someone used the cabinets today - and since you knew about a car I have been using here only for the past three days -’
* * * *
Conway turned as the doors of the cabinet opened again. The man in the Panama hat had moved soft-footed beside him, the weapon in his hand flashing in a stray lance of sunlight from the blind. He no longer wore the dark glasses. Conway looked from the weapon to his eyes. They were the same as the eyes of - of the girl. It was ridiculous to think of her as Alma Wilson now.
‘I regret this, Eric,’ she said. ‘I’m returning home. I won’t be seeing you again.’
She put the weapon in a shelf in the wardrobe, and stepped into the cabinet, after making an adjustment to the dials. She said something to the man in the Panama hat, her voice rippling in a language that was half murmur and half song. Then she pressed the green button. The doors closed. Again, Conway heard the rising hum, the sharp thump.
She had gone home. Already, she must be stepping into the flat in London, more than three thousand miles away.
The big man lifted his weapon. ‘I regret this, too. Curiosity is a desirable trait, is it not so?’
‘Who are you?’
‘Let us say we are neutral observers.’
‘Listen!’ Conway tried to keep his eyes off the weapon. ‘I’m not the only man who knows about you.’
‘Ah, no. You’re thinking of Smith? The man who noticed the colour of Miss Wilson’s blood? I think we have little to fear from him. We can - handle him, if it becomes necessary.’
‘Listen, man, we’re in a civilised city. There’s no chance of you killing me. Put that thing away and let’s talk this over!’
The weapon was steady in the big man’s hand. ‘You think I might have difficulty in concealing your body? There is no difficulty there. The cabinet is a gateway to many places.’
Conway had edged towards the locked door. Near it was a wooden chair. Within arm’s length was the light switch.
He stared at the weird, light-coloured eyes - eyes that seemed well-adjusted to dim light. Suddenly his outstretched hand brushed the light-switch down. It was down already. In an instant of time that was like an eternity, he remembered that light switches in America went up for on.
The big man had involuntarily looked up at the naked light bulb two feet above him as Conway’s hand whipped back. With the light suddenly in his eyes the man in the Panama hat ducked his head, and as he lifted the weapon the chair smashed it from his hand.
Conway’s second swing of the chair sent him sprawling on the floor. In a moment, Conway was at the cabinet.
* * * *
The big man was just stirring, beginning to rise, as the doors shut him from view. In the cold smoothness of the cabinet Conway listened to the rising hum. Within seconds, now, he would be emerging into the London flat. Miss Wilson would never expect him to leap from the cabinet in her room. He would have surprise on his side, coming into the room within a few feet of her.
The humming sound lifted. There was the sense of falling. This time it kept on, as if he were falling forever. Somewhere outside of reality he heard the humming sound rising again to a climactic thump, rising again, again, in ever swifter tempo.
Panic seized him. Something had gone wrong. Would the separate atoms of his body be lost forever in the space between Washington and London?
At last, the walls of the cabinet were smooth and solid about him. The doors opened - into pitch darkness.
Of course, it was nearing midnight in London. He caught his breath at a sickly, almost overpowering smell. Had she filled the room with gas?
He moved quickly from the cabinet, groping with outflung arms for the door. Strange - he should have seen the strip of light under it. Had she sealed the room to keep in the gas?
His knees struck something that yielded slightly, and he fell across an oval chair that seemed to be mounted on springs. He felt around it, and the hair on the back of his neck seemed to be lifting itself erect. It was not a chair. It was a warped oval shape of something that felt like plastic, floating eighteen inches above the floor without tangible support.
He scrambled away from it and cannoned into a wall that seemed to be made of smooth, warm metal. He groped along it, and suddenly a door opened beside him. Pale violet light streamed past him into a room unlike any room he had ever imagined. Outside, a broad, curved platform was bathed in that unearthly violet pallor - and beyond it towered buildings out of an ultra-modern architect’s nightmare.
‘I’m returning home,’ she had said. But -
Where was home to a creature who bled green?
He tried to get back to the cabinet, of course. But he was too late. They were already in the room ...
First published 1960.