The Green Drift Read online

  ‘A damn peculiar atmosphere there is here,’ he grunted. ‘With the heat it’s getting difficult to handle.’

  ‘I’m jotting down a line of stories or ideas that run this way,’ Richard said.

  ‘Good. That way we might get somewhere. This thing began with you before last night. Sure of that. … Any bad nights lately?’

  ‘I sometimes wake at three a.m. and watch the black mass of my creditors marching silently by the foot of my bed,’ Richard said. ‘Otherwise, little.’

  ‘Dreams?’

  ‘Lots. Only bits and pieces get remembered. That’s the trouble. I’m a believer in the time belt theory, that past and future are all happening now and you can change belts like changing gears, and that in sleep, you actually do.’

  ‘So you reckon if you could remember all your dreams you’d know what was going to happen?’ Griswold’s eyes brightened and grew very narrow.

  ‘Yes. But people can’t remember. The Future seems to have a kind of safety catch that stops you going on remembering. Only sometimes you do get the feeling you have been here before.’ Richard turned and reached to an untidy bookshelf. ‘I did some recordings on that line once. Wrote down what I could remember when I woke up. You know the type of thing. Dunne.’

  He pulled out a stiff cover diary.

  ‘Funny that” he went on and pointed to the newspaper. ‘I’m beginning to get the feeling that there was a dream—’

  Griswold watched him, then drew into a corner beside the window as if intending to shrink away. He said nothing. He knew when to be silent.

  ‘—because I remember a thing that isn’t there,’ Richard went on. ‘It was a kind of hiatus in the world, as if everything had stopped. It was dark and yet you could see. and the sky was a great arch and the still air was ringing with tension that was getting worse and worse. I felt I had to close my ears with my hands, yet there was no sound. It was the silent screaming of tension twisting until the earth was about to break. I was looking out of that window and the air was raining with the green flies, lit like little fireballs. The rain stopped and everywhere in the darkness there were pools of the green light where the things had gathered in the hillocks and dips of the field, the hollows and cups in the garden. It was not that which tore me. but the queer silent screaming of a sky in agony—’

  He broke off suddenly and drew a sharp breath as he pointed again to the paper.

  ‘But that isn’t what it says there.’

  ‘No” Griswold said, coming out before the window again. ‘No, that’s another angle. Just let me play you back.’

  He switched tapes, talking as he did it.

  I’m going to cut into it, to the point which interests me. Meanwhile, your description given the paper from the village phone is like your description a minute ago. You describe millions of the little green lit balls coming down, floating rather than dropping. The sky is a shimmering curtain of the green rain. When they come down, some flick out, others roll and gather in little pools, as you just said, little bowls of green fire in the dark… . The commentary is terrific. It holds whoever hears it. I had a different reason for being held. It is gripping, terrifying, until suddenly there is a change. I.ike this—”

  He started the record tape. Richard’s voice began alter a long pause of mush.

  ‘It’s happening to me now, but I know that outside it won’t happen till tomorrow. There are some coming now, but it’s not it. These things have not landed in any appreciable numbers yet. But tomorrow, the exact time of day is twenty-four hours ahead of me now. They are still standing off several thousand miles out. It is very important to gel verification now. There is too little time left. I can still see them in the darkness, but there are very few. After nightfall tomorrow the whole sky will be full of them. Confirm this. You cannot ring me back”

  Griswold switched off one tape and on to the recording tape again.

  ‘I don’t remember it,” Richard said. ‘How did I know, anyway?’

  ‘That’s what I’m here to find out,’ Griswold said. ‘Nobody else we can find here saw anything. An unusual number of fireflies were noticed when it got dark, but after that, nobody noticed anything or nobody remembers if they did. If anyone did notice at the time they didn’t do anything. But you did. In this record you speak like someone hypnotised, or rather trying to fight against some kind of hypnotism. Were all the others at this time hypnotised?’

  ‘I don’t actually know what happened,’ Richard said. ‘But did these people actually check what 1 said?’

  ‘Yes. But the most important thing to me is that you jumped a belt last night. You were in that phone box describing what is going to happen tonight. You were seeing it happen. The details given show that to be so.

  Also when you made the reverse charge call, the phone people kept asking you for your number, but you couldn’t see it because the light was out. But the telephone light was not out at that time last night. It did not go out, in fact, till all circuits went at around midnight. It was seen to be on at the time you telephoned from that box by Porch himself. And while you were telephoning, Porch will tell you there was nobody in the box at all.

  ‘There we are. You vanished from the pub and turned up again later, locked in. During that time you rang from the telephone box, but Porch, watching, the box, saw it empty all the time with the light on.’

  ‘If I was ringing on another time belt, how did the paper get such a call?’ Richard demanded.

  ‘The interesting possibility is that actual mechanical translation of voices reverses your mental jump. After all, you were in the future, and so far we can’t tell what effect that has on the surrounding you temporarily leave. It seems that you can communicate with those you left behind”

  ‘As a ghost does?’

  Griswold grinned. ‘Well, if you like.’

  ‘It is an interchange of frequencies, conversations with ghosts.’

  ‘If such things be,’ Griswold said. ‘Anyhow, the important thing to me is this. You have proved some little part of it by this evidence in the phone box. It was dark, and you couldn’t see the number. Equally, you couldn’t have read any other number. So why did you ring the News, the paper you don’t take and don’t subscribe to?’

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘Because this phone call will be made tonight, and the only newspaper in your head will be the News. Sometime today, Hayles will give you that number, and when you ring it will be the only newspaper number in your head”

  ‘You accept all this very easily” Richard said.

  I have to. It’s my job to accept every possibility, give it a trial, and discard it after I’ve proved myself right, not before. Time can shift for certain people. They are on the right wavelength. Such people see ghosts where others can’t, or feel pulses that are lost to the general hordes. I had hoped till today I was one of the hoi polloi, but an hour in this house is beginning to change my mind.’

  ‘You feel something in the air here?’

  ‘I feel damned uneasy, which is strange for me. But then, I think I know what is going to happen. That could make anyone sweat.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what you know about this?’

  ‘If I do that it might persuade your memory. I believe you know far more than we do, and I want to dig it out, not put in what we know and get back a weed in an hour or two. I want you to bring it out. You know it. You know all about it. You’ve known it, I believe, a long time.’

  ‘Are you ploughing back amongst the dreams?’

  ‘It might help. Where did you write down the old dreams? There could be something, though not direct.’ ‘There’s a book I used.’ Richard got up and began searching bookshelves, as one looking through loose sand for a beetle. Griswold smoked his cigar and watched the slow changing crowd in the lane and the fields.

  Then he stopped smoking and stared hard.

  ‘Great God! ’ he said very quietly.

  Richard looked round from the search.

  �
�What’s the matter?’

  ‘They’re dissolving,’ he said gruffly. ‘The flesh is going. I can see into the backs of their empty skulls—’ He swung round suddenly and stared at Richard. ‘But you’re all right. Everything is there, the flesh, the colour, the eyeballs—’

  ‘I had that,’ Richard said quickly. ‘Mrs Baynes had it, too.’

  Griswold stared at him with a strange intensity, then looked aside as if considering some new and brilliant possibility. Richard watched him curiously, then went back to the search as Griswold resumed the slow smoking

  of liis cigar.

  ‘It was something of a shock,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise that things had gone so far.’

  ‘So far?’ Richard said sharply.

  ‘Yes.’ Or is wold looked back at him, the same strange light in his eyes.

  ‘Something horrible?’ Jennifer said, very quietly.

  ‘Very, very horrible,’ Hayles said, frankly. ‘You couldn’t know. You have been here all the time. But this morning, coming towards this house, I felt such a sick horror that I almost turned back.’

  ‘But why?’ Jennifer said. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s something in the air of the place. There’s nothing you can see. The sort of half-fear that comes into you when you go into an old torture chamber; as if the atmosphere of hopelessness and inevitable suffering is still alive there.’

  ‘You feel this is bad?’ Barbara said. ‘Evil sort of thing?’

  ‘Only because I can’t understand it,’ he said. ‘It might be good, for all I know, but it frightens me all the same.’

  ‘I can’t see anything wrong out there,’ Jennifer said. ‘I can’t see anything wrong at all, except those stupid people staring.’

  ‘They run from anyone who comes from this house,’ Haylc3 said, stonily. ‘As if one has turned into a leper.’

  ‘I’m not going back till they’ve gone!’ Barbara said suddenly. ‘I can’t! I couldn’t face them!’

  ‘Don’t worry, they’ve got to go, if I have to fetch the police force here by the ear!’ Jennifer said.

  ‘It is here,’ Hayles said. He turned his head as he sat in the chair beside the stairs. Porch was still sitting on the steps, watching butterflies, occasionally wiping round his neck with the handkerchief. There was a curious air of surrender about him, as if he were ready to bow to anything that might happen.

  ‘Porch said something like that,’ Jennifer said slowly. ‘About the place feeling strange. But he seems to have settled to it.’

  ‘That is what I’m trying to tell you, Mrs Chance,’ Hayles said, his voice little above a whisper, his earnestness straining on his face. ‘One begins to accept it.’ His eyes were big, so staring that Jennifer looked away. Barbara watched him. feeling some of the horror he radiated.

  All the practised, tense sincerity of a thousand broadcasts guided his manner now. Without thought of what the result would be, he had to share the feelings of dread he had, feelings that made his very soul quake.

  ‘I am a very sensitive man,’ he said. ‘I do get the most strange feelings about people—places, and there is always a reason.’

  ‘But you know the reason,’ Jennifer said irritably. ‘These pods, or whatever they are. It says in the paper.’

  ‘They are spiders,’ Hayles said, his voice hissing.

  ‘Well, we know spiders, don’t we?’ she protested. ‘What’s it about them that is so shaking?’

  ‘Millions and millions and millions during the night,’ he said, watching her for a trace of his own fear to reflect in her eyes.

  Instead he saw an incomprehensible anger.

  ‘All sorts of things happen” Jennifer said. ‘They always did. The world changes. Sometimes it does it gradually and sometimes all of a sudden, like the flood and things—’

  ‘But this—this is an invasion! ’ Hayles cried out.

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly!’ Jennifer shouted, and then felt ashamed. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘You’ve got to look facts in the face,’ Hayles said, savouring pleasure at finding his fears disturbing her at last.

  ‘I’ve got a headache. Forgive me.’ Jennifer got up and went out into the kitchen.

  Hayles got up politely, but his eyes followed Jennifer as if watching a victim being lost.

  ‘Why do you want to frighten her?’ Barbara said, frowning.

  ‘I don’t. I want her to come to grips with reality.’

  ‘But she’s here, isn’t she? She’s not running away or anything.’

  ‘She ought to. That’s the point! ’

  ‘Lord! you sound fierce. What’s the matter?’

  Hayles glared at her, then smiled slowly and turned away.

  ‘It’s this heat, and the atmosphere,’ he said huskily. ‘It’s getting me down.’ He crossed to a tray of drinks Jennifer had put out. The ice was starting to float in the bowl, a rot begun during the night with the power cut. He poured a gin and tonic and left the ice to melt more.

  ‘One for me,’ Barbara said, cocking her head as she watched his back.

  He started, the glass half-way to his lips, then turned and put it down. -

  ‘I’m sorry! ’ he said, confused. ‘I didn’t think. Yes, of course!’ His hand shook slightly as he poured and the opener slid off the tonic top twice.

  ‘You want to ease up,’ Barbara said. ‘You’re all tense. It might not come to anything at all. It’s only the people that scare me. After all, we’ve got spiders already. We’ve always had them. I think they’re lucky.’

  He gave her the drink. She gulped it. The air was sweet and getting hotter. He began to think of excuses for getting out of the place.

  ‘We shall have to get out of here,’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s insane to stay.’

  ‘But nothing’s happening,’ she said. ‘The paper said tonight.’

  ‘You believe the paper, do you?’ His white teeth showed in a quick smile. ‘I suppose that’s what those people out there believe, too. That’s why they won’t run till tonight. Will we do the same? Suppose the prophecy’s wrong? Suppose they come earlier?’

  ‘You want to frighten me, don’t you?’ Her big brown eyes were pulled, trying to think why he wanted to do that.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘When people who don’t know each other get all friendly very quickly it’s because they’re frightened,” she said.

  ‘That needn’t be the only reason,’ he said snappily. ‘There is such a thing as sincerity, goodwill—’ He realised he had bodged his grammar by adding- on, a thing he was normally very careful not to do. It sounded so stupid on the film. He had refused live broadcasts because he could not see his own performances, and he liked to know that everything was effectively right.

  ‘I remember you on the television once,’ Barbara said, cocking her head.

  ‘Once’ spiked him right in the vertebrae. The heat was pressing on his skin and his temper was fretting. The way she said it made it sound as if he had only been on once, instead of a hundred and eleven times.

  ‘Did you?’ he said.

  ‘It was one of those discussion programmes, where they have a question, and the people round the table answer,’ she said. ‘I remember it now. It was a question about a sinking ship, and you had to decide whether to fight somebody for a boat or stay behind and hope. You said you’d stay behind and pray.’

  ‘Well?’ he challenged. ‘That would be the answer, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘It made it sound as if you didn’t think you’d be able to win a fight” she said, with a faint smile.

  His mind pulled up and was shocked into some fantastic collision. For a moment he just stared.

  ‘It made you think that?’ he said, aghast.

  ‘Well, the people in the bar said that.’

  ‘Good God! ’ Hayles was truly horrified. He had never thought of that angle, and could see it now, but that it could have existed at all was like the sudden appearance of some unbeara
ble monster from the deep. The sheer horror of having to share life with such a thing as that had always appalled him. To find that he had given birth

  to a mental monster was worse.

  ‘No! ’ he said, as if to kill it.

  She went to the door. Porch looked round and up at her. His face was red brown and shiny.

  ‘Do you want me to see you back?’ he said, without emotion.

  ‘No. Not till—they’ve gone.’

  ‘They’re only people,’ Porch said.

  She remembered her sight of them with their flesh peeling off: and the grinning skulls and the deep, empty sockets that looking in was like a picture of space that made you dizzy—

  She went back across the hall and sat on the stairs, holding her glass with both hands.

  ‘Do you think they’re going to die—those people?’ she said, in a half-whisper.

  Hayles looked startled.

  ‘When? Now? Why should they?’ The suggestion made his heart beat fast, pumped by a new fear. He had the jumps.

  ‘If anything happened out there,’ she said. ‘It could, couldn’t it? Before they were ready?’

  ‘Why worry about them?’ he asked, too surprised for caution. ‘If anything happened it would come to us first! ’

  She clutched the glass to her breast.

  ‘They can’t be sure,’ she said.

  Her voice had a curious practicality, a deliberate coldness that acted like an icy draught on his heated fears.

  ‘No,’ he said, surprised. ‘No. No one can be sure.’ He felt he had something to cover up. ‘One can never be sure of anything. There are times when we must pray and depend on prayer. When there is nothing that we ourselves can do.’