Froomb! Page 7

  “Saucy sod,” said Packard. “Just for that, I refuse. But I wish I could, Park. I wish that earnestly. I’ve got froomb about it, and it’s a long slope we’re on this time. The speed’s getting too high to think.”

  “Unsick, Dave,” said Park, quietly. “Don’t let it get you. It’s everybody’s pigeon, not just yours.”

  “Yay, said Packard.

  “So long.”

  When Park had gone the silence brought a strange loneliness to Packard.

  He went out. Packard stood a while, then went across to his big Victorian trunk. He lifted the lid. The small penny editions, over a hundred years old, were piled inside in a gaudy heap. On their covers the devil burst up in sulpher-smoke, wolfish guard-dogs bayed at the lightning striking the turrets of Dracula’s castle, blood spurted in streams from Sweeney Todd’s victims, and Maria Marten was dragged by the hair across the floor of the Red Barn. But he let the lid fall. A puff of dust burst out slowly and faded in the washed air of the office.

  “I smell death,” said Packard, and wiped his face with his hand. “It’s froomb. This is it. That’s why everything’s ganging up. Froomb, David Packard, you crackpot! Now you really know what it feels like.”

  He looked toward the door leading to Ann’s room, then went loping like an ape into the laboratory. He left the

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  door open behind him and went down the shining steel corridor to the green tubes and rolling tapes around the empty chair. He halted there, sweat breaking out on his face.

  “John Brunt,” he whispered. “Are you dead, too? Are you dead? Is it going to be the last straw? Has froomb come to you as well, you poor devil?”

  His eyes switched from the empty chair to the control panel. There was a master switch marked recovery. It was locked. He had not trusted anyone, and the lock was good.

  Suddenly he dipped his big hands into his sagging trouser pockets, searching for his keys. He pulled out a small wallet and flipped it open. His small golden keys gleamed in the shaded green lights.

  “David!”

  He heard her quick, hard heels clacking down the floor behind him. He stiffened, then stuffed the keys back into his pocket. The sweat turned cold on his face. He turned and began to walk toward her.

  “Not now,” he said. “I’m going to have a shower. It’s hot.”

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  ■Two

  1

  The village was as he remembered it, hardly anything changed, but it was very clean. The road was black with white edges, the cottages of bright gray stone and brilliant red creeper, the windows laughed in the sun reflecting off regimented flowers in the gardens. The church still stood under the trees, with its squat tower, but in the graveyard the tombstones lurched like sinking ships in weeds and strawlike grass. Poppies leered among the decay, and John saw the gates were tied together with a rusty chain. In the little square, the cottages crouched around as before, brass shining, windows chuckling. They had a prophylactic look, as if sprayed by some instant polish. The telephone booth in the corner, for long a faded pink, had faded away altogether. He remembered the booth, for inside it, with the bulb taken out one night, he had beed seduced for the first time. He had been twelve and she fourteen, and he always felt a warm gratitude to Helen Murphy.

  And there, beyond the square, set back behind grass and a gravel drive-in, The Ostlers peered out from behind the arms of towering elms. All the warmth of the past came back to him, the days of endless summer, of unbroken happiness and warmth; the illusion of childhood’s memory.

  “That was my father’s place,” he said, as they walked toward it.

  “You must be old,” George said, and slapped a tablet into his mouth.

  “More than that,” John said, “I’m dead.”

  George made a face and swallowed.

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  “Why do you keep on about this being dead?” he said. “Not everybody likes it, not all the time like that.”

  John shrugged and looked at the place where the telephone booth had been. “Look,” said Helen’s ghost, “it’s easy. I’ll show you.” Surely it wasn’t all those years ago? Wasn’t she somewhere in the village now, pulling family sheets out of a washing-machine? Or was she dead, too?

  A coldness fell on his body, almost a clamminess, like a damp shroud touching him. The fact that he was dead and still alive was one thing; he could not bear to think of others, like warm little Helen, dead, too.

  “Does everybody go through here?” John asked suddenly.

  George looked at him a few long seconds, then shook his head.

  “Very few,” he said.

  Helen’s ghost prodded his conscience, as if he had had anything to do with her death.

  “But there are other places like this, then?” he said urgently.

  “So I hear,” said George. “But I shouldn’t worry. You’re lucky to get in.” He went toward the inn door.

  John hesitated. He felt the sun on his face, smelled the wandering scent of the flowers, heard the birds circling over the church tower. He was alive and feeling, his senses were all there as they had been that day' with Helen.

  But the electric giant had fallen and rotted, and the weeds had warred over years and choked the countryside, and the cottages had been restored and sprayed over with eternal brightness, and the telephone booth had gone, so there was not even any sign on the black square where the roots had been.

  He ought to feel the heat and uncertainty of madness warring in his brain with these sensory perceptions, but he did not. Instead there was a sadness, as if something had been lost forever.

  He shaded his eyes and looked up at the sky.

  But why feel like this? Why think that Packard would fail? Why think that now, when he hadn’t before the final button had been pushed? Was he tired? Could one really be tired in Heaven’s anteroom?

  Or what was this place?

  George stopped at the door and looked back at him, almost sorrowfully, as if sympathizing for a lunatic. John felt an uprush of anger, braced himself and walked quickly

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  after the arrogant guide. Not that George’s manner itself was strange; it was just like an older boy at school.

  School. How long ago was that?

  He shut his mind to the question. It was best not to try and think in terms of dates and times. Times, indeed, had changed. The whole meaning of Time had changed. It was like learning that two and two make four, then going on to calculus and finding two means two or four or any old thing convenient to the problem. Surely that was it, wasn’t it? Hide it as they might, it came to nothing in the end. Nought to the power of nothing. A sort of argument. . . Look, there was no four o’clock in the afternoon, at Granchester or anywhere else now. The gears in the clocks had gone, the hands slipped round regardless. You couldn’t tie anything to the click of a second hand. You couldn’t tie your brain to a sixty minute ring any more. You had to make it work in space, by itself, regardless.

  He went into the well-remembered shade of the spacious hall, with the oak and the brass and the leather and the thick rugs, all there still. With a sudden bound of his heart he had an expectation of seeing his father come forward, in his knee breeches, his stockings, his frilly silk shirts, his anachronistic smile—

  George went right ahead down the passage beyond the hall which led to the kitchens. Between John and the vanishing George appeared a woman and he stopped.

  She was a strongly built woman, perhaps thirty, broad shouldered, with a bosom like a barrier, surprisingly narrow waist and yet big swelling hips. She wore a tight dress of black material, like the Puritan style of the first girl, Margaret.

  She pointed to the door of the old smoke room.

  “In there,” she said.

  Her face was ugly and attractive, all at once. Her black hair was drawn back tight into a bun behind. She wore no make-up that he could see, but her fine original color needed very little.

  He we
nt into the smoking room. It was the same as he had known, with high oak pews and hunting prints. She came in and closed the door behind her.

  “John Brunt,” she said, making a statement.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “The story you told. Is it true?”

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  “Yes.” He was surprised and watched her coming closer to him with a certain apprehension.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  He hesitated, resenting her command, but he caught a

  momentary glimpse of his shorelines dragging in the black water between him and life. The chill emptied his stomach, and he was afraid. He sat down in one of the pews. She leaned on the table in front of him, both hands on it, her face poked forward.

  “Why be so honest?” she said. Her voice was unpleasantly vibrant, like a cat’s purr.

  “Let me get the angle,” John said. “I’ve seen Peter. What’s this new—”

  She slashed him across the face with one hand. The sting paralyzed one side and he felt his grin fixed to the other. He sat back in the pew.

  “You answer me,” she said, in the same quiet voice.

  He would not give in entirely, but like a child, evaded, so that he still seemed to get his way.

  “I was just asking your name,” he said, and wiped his stinging face with his hand.

  “Petra,” she said. She remained leaning, staring at him.

  “My father had a ship that name,” he said, surprised. “In the war, he had a command in the Navy. He used to smuggle God’s amount of stuff in here—I’m sorry. He used to run the ship right up the creek, over here—”

  He stopped, pointing through the wall toward the kitchens. Her penetrating stare made him uneasy, insufficient.

  “Everything you said is true?” she asked, clearly ignoring what he had said and going back to her first question, as if she alone mattered.

  “To Peter? Yes.”

  “What did you feel when you died?” she said. “Elated? Sad? Frightened? Lost? Relieved? At Peace?”

  He stared. The questions did not fit her. He did not feel his answer should be from his brain, but from his body. She roused him physically, so that he did not want to think.

  “Put it in your words,” she said.

  “It was like pushing off from a familiar shore and being frightened of the size of the ocean,” he said impatiently. “I don’t know any other way to put it.” His interest quickened. “Who are you?”

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  She continued to stare at him, watching every detail of his face and assessing his build; as if costing a prize bull, he thought. Then he remembered that Margaret had stared, too. So indeed had Peter, but perhaps he did not notice a man’s stare so much as he did a woman’s.

  “You felt lost,” she said.

  “A feeling of emptiness, heading into the unknown,” he said. “I thought this would all be so different. Something fantastic. Something I hadn’t been able to imagine. I didn’t think it would be familiar—”

  “You remember this house?”

  “Yes. I was bom here.”

  “There was a ghost,” she said, the very faint lines of a frown appearing between her bright green eyes. “Tell me about that.”

  “Edna,” he said, and laughed suddenly. “Yes! When we were children they told us she was an old aunt playing tricks at night, but the story was a gentleman came here one night, his horse sweating, his eyes bloodshot. He ran upstairs and found his wife with another man. The man got out of the window, stole the traveler’s horse and rode into a pond at Down End, drowning himself. The woman was slaughtered all over the bedroom right above here. She’s the one who stayed.”

  She leaned off the table. He felt the pressure on him decrease and relaxed in the pew.

  “It’s something like that,” she said.

  “I saw her several times,” he said. “Once on the main stairs, then once in the broad daylight out in the pump yard. I went out to speak to her and she went into a corner of the yard by the stables and vanished. I looked all over the place, but I never found her. I told my father and he said it must be Edna. He’d often seen her.”

  He felt strange. He did not know why he should be talking about Edna, nor why the woman should have mentioned it. It had the effect of taking him right back to his boyhood, to the times when they had sat in wait for the poor, wandering spirit, when they had set traps on the stairs, and booby falls above the door of her bedroom. They had never caught her. He was glad she was still here. She seemed like an old friend now.

  “Things used to be thrown in the night,” he said. “But

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  you couldn’t be quite sure about that, because some guests play tricks.”

  The woman in black said nothing, but seemed to be thinking.

  “You say the man’s name is Packard,” she said. “But what is he?” ,

  He’s Minister of Science and Research,” John said.

  “Science!” Her face hardened with some kind of shock.

  “Yes. Why? What’s the matter?”

  She made no reply. She puzzled him. He could not see why she should ask him questions after Peter had been so penetrating. He could not help wondering what she was in this place.

  “What did you think would happen to you?” she asked.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You must have been told something before you—killed yourself.” Her lips curled a little. She made him angry.

  “I didn’t think what I’d ever been told would be of any use!” he said.

  “What had you been told to expect—Communism?”

  He stared in astonishment. At first the question seemed absurd: then he realized he was thinking of the the term politically, which had long been divorced from .its meaning.

  “Of a sort, I suppose, yes,” he said slowly.

  She sat back, her eyes fast on his. Her thick lips curled again and she began to laugh softly, almost to herself. His anger roused again. He felt a shameful, childish desire to hit her and make her stop laughing.

  “Why expect it here?” she said, her cat’s eyes narrowing.

  “Heaven’s about the only place it could work,” he said. He watched her and his desire changed from wanting to hit her to an almost uncontrollable urge to reach out and touch her breasts. He shut his eyes to try and stop the feeling.

  She reached out, snatched his hand and put it to her bosom, pressing it there with a sticky strength. He felt her shake with quiet laughter.

  “Why be afraid—in Heaven?” she mocked, and let him go. She sat back again. “What do you want to know?”

  “What’s happened outside this place? The weeds. . . Don’t they use electricity any more? Why did they ever have it in Heaven, anyway? I always thought the angels’ faces shone so you could see your way—” He stopped his flood of

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  questions as he might have pulled back a runaway horse, and gritted his teeth.

  She took no notice whatever, but went to a table where there was a dish of sweets. She took one and ate it. It seemed that she was trying to make him out. Or catch him out, perhaps.

  She made up her mind, and opened the door.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  He followed her. They went up the stairs and into several of the black wooden bedrooms, with their fourposters, and hanging draperies, the heavy wooden chests and tables, the brass ornaments, pans, candlesticks, the prints of the mail coach; men in top hats shooting with very long guns and gun-dogs forever struck in mid-prance; men in sleeping cars leaping out of large beds with the skirts of their nightshirts on fire. . . Room by room revived his childhood in this rich place. Rich with food and smells, comfort and warmth, rich with brass, black wood, and fine linen. All the time he felt her close beside him, knew that she was watching, feared that she was laughing silently again. Yet when he looked, she smiled only, and her eyes, yellow with the sun from the windows, were direct and brilliant. Sev
eral times he felt her breast touching his arm and his muscles tautened as if to draw away.

  Sometimes boy servants passed by, dull looking, like overfed babies. One or two maids in old-time dress passed by, carrying folded linen. He saw their eyes flick from him to the woman, as if questioning.

  As they went Petra kept asking questions in her soft, purring kind of voice, almost as if she knew the answers and smiled at his efforts to evade.

  He was surprised to find he was trying to evade them. He was scared of her, scared of the questions, as if the very familiarity of this place made strangeness absolute and terrifying. He began to feel uncertain of himself, driven into bewilderment by the continuing inquisition.

  As they came down the main upstairs corridor, with its curved, sloping floor he thought he saw his father cross the end of the passage.

  He gave a short exclamation. Petra watched him intently. The vision went, as if it had been dust motes whirling in the slanting sunbeam from a window at the end of the passage.

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  “I thought—it was my father,” he said, a little breathless with the shock.

  “Your father died long ago,” she said.

  “It was a trick of the light,” he said. “There’s no one there. I’ve been thinking of him since I came in here.”

  They went into the Long Bedroom, where the windows looked out toward the church and the river beyond, with its drooping willows. To one of those he must have clung all those years ago, when the boat he had built capsized on its first sail. He had screwed on lumps of lead to balance it and sank it for good and all. Perhaps it was somewhere down among the wavering weeds, short-lived, unhappy off-balance boat.

  He turned from the window, taken off his guard by the memory. He was surprised to see her so close, her yellow eyes so steady, bright with reflected sun and meaning. Her thick lips smiled again.

  “You kissed Margaret,” she said.

  Margaret had told her everything, he realized. So they must still have telephones, though the old booth in the square had gone.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She stood very close, watching him, smiling. Again he had the unbearable urge to touch her and feel the rich impudence of her breasts under his hand. He could see she knew what he felt and his heart began to bump. She put her hand flat on his belly and watched him as a thrill ran through him and made him still. Slowly she moved her hand down until she felt him. She began to laugh and her eyes were bright.