Mandrake (12 page)

The sensation was fainter this time, but there could be no doubt. There was no mistaking the silent shout of ill will, the invisible wall of hostility that to touch meant an awful paralysis of fear. This house was emanating the same thing, whatever it was, that he had encountered at Stonehenge.

Queston did not wait to investigate. He backed quickly away and into the car, and drove on.

He turned a corner, and saw another car. It stood beside the next pair of gates; a big sky-blue Jaguar, with a man and woman busy at the open boot. They were stowing suitcases and boxes inside, and more were strapped to the roof. Queston slid to a halt beside them. He was growing more thirsty for human companionship, ordinary human dull conversation with no sinister overtones, than he had thought he could ever be.

They did not even glance at him. As he drew up, the man turned back towards the house. The woman straightened quickly. ‘George! Where are you going? Do hurry up!’

‘Haven’t turned the gas off.’ The man disappeared into the front door.

‘As if it mattered! ’ The woman looked briefly at Queston now, but she spoke to herself. She was about thirty, and beautiful; her eyes dark, wide-set, and a curve to her mouth that told him suddenly and brutally how long he had been alone. But the eyes were shadowed, and the mouth slack in distress.

Leaning across to his nearside window, Queston said bluntly: ‘Where is everybody?’

The woman turned to look full at him, and he saw with a shock of disappointment and alarm that the mask was here too, over the beauty; the glazed, dazed detachment, and the listening for something unheard.

‘We’re going home, we must go home,’ the words bubbled out of her as if he had touched a spring. ‘We must get back to London… I don’t know what made us want to come away, we don’t belong here. We had the house built… we’re going home now. Think of London, think of the theatres, and the shops, and the river—’ She looked anxiously back towards the house, and her flurry was ridiculous and not ridiculous at all. ‘O what is George doing, I wish he’d hurry. We must get home…’

Queston drove on. He had no idea where he was going. He existed only in this moment like a man alone in a country overrun by war, or pestilence; all normality gone. He knew dimly that he was entering the edge of a cataclysm in which everyone but he was caught up; all around him, something which had for years been steadily, relentlessly growing had suddenly broken loose.

And he knew what it was, but still he dared not acknowledge to himself that he knew.

He followed the main road. After ten minutes the blue Jaguar streaked past him in a gasp of speed, and vanished round a bend. He saw no other car, until he came to the river, and the junction where a narrow curving bridge drew the way to London out of the main road, over the Thames. Beyond the bridge, the road was blocked high with a dreadful pile of metal, the mingled ruin of several cars.

He put his foot hard on the brake and saw, as he stopped, wide-sweeping skid marks swinging up to the crash and away over the bridge. The man in the Jaguar had seen the perilous wreck only just in time.

No ambulances, no police, no crowds. No warning of any kind; only the wrecked cars, lying silent and entangled in the road. He left the Lagonda and went nervously towards them, and saw that the remains of a lorry lay there too, buckled in among the monstrous heap. There were no bodies.

He saw a round-edged bite taken out of the lorry’s crumpled door, where acetylene cutters had been at work; and beside it, still visible, the insignia
m.o.p.
What could the Ministry be using lorries for?

Blood lay spattered everywhere in darkening patches, some still scarlet and wet. Looking at it, Queston turned from a twitch of memory, and was suddenly an indignant citizen. For all anyone seemed to care, the wreckage could lie there to gather worse disaster, trapping any car that came fast and unsuspecting round the bend. Not even a warning; damn it, there should at least be a warning. He forgot that apart from the Jaguar, he had at no time seen any other car on the road.

He picked up a tyre-lever lying beside one of the misshapen cars, and peered round doubtfully. Something red. A warning flag had to be red. He realized unhappily that only one thing was possible, and he took out his handkerchief and soaked it in a puddle of blood. Then he tied it to the lever, walked back round the corner and forced the free end into a rubber stud in the centre of the road. It leaned there dismally, the handkerchief hanging limp; the astonishing bright red would be brown before long, but at least it was a warning. He felt an absurd smugness at the thought as he walked back to the car. It was his last gesture in support of a world that had died.

He drove on, across the bridge, out to the long straight road through the Royal lands of Windsor; silent land cut off by a dark wall of firs looming over either side of the road. He drove fast, feeling threatened, enclosed. The trees still walled the road, stalking him; if it weren’t for the fence and the asphalt, he thought, I might be driving through any age, out of time.

In Windsor the sense of warning was there again; a mute hostility that would let him through the place, but would spring if he dared to stop. With quick staccato flicks at the wheel he spun the Lagonda round corners at fifty, and heard the engine sing hollow in the empty streets; in from the bleak park, past closed and sightless shops, past the door of a house hanging helplessly in the wind; past the little theatre on the hill, entrance dark, picture-frames bare, with a tattered poster flapping from its board. But the town was not unpeopled. He saw sentries at the castle gates and the heads of others lining the walls. They flowed past him, remote, medieval; again he had the sense of being caught in unreality, with time rushing him back into minds and longings that were centuries dead.

Then he was down the hill and over the Thames again, into Eton, with the hostility of the place pursuing him like a persistent noise. Only when he was out of the town, passing the mounded trees of the playing-fields, did the shouting and the tension die; and suddenly he found that he was driving now in peace, detached again, through a new indifferent place that cared nothing about his troubles and was not forcing him away. He passed a hoarding: ‘Slough Welcomes Careful Drivers.’

From the central island that faced him, with traffic-lights flashing pointlessly red-gold-green, up and down in their frozen automatic sequence, three roads led away. All three were broad, walled with shops, all chrome and glass and silence. He turned off the engine and sat there in the centre of the empty town. Nothing moved. The emptiness of this place was unlike any he had encountered yet; a more absolute desertion. Andover, Amesbury and the rest had been deserted, but not dead; through the animosity of the places themselves he had sensed the mistrust of individuals, the unseen families behind curtained windows and closed doors. But here, there was no hostility of any kind; and no life.

Warily he let the Lagonda slide along the length of the main street, past shops whose windows still shouted with the bright custom-catching labels of an affluent town: ‘Grand Autumn Sale’… ‘Deep Freeze Your Fruit at Summer Prices’… ‘This Week’s Bargain, Sugar 5c. a Pound.’ With no crowds to see them, the phrases were pathetic, shrill. He toured the back streets, past dreary, dream-repeated rows of neat, dull houses from which no smoke rose; at intervals, defiantly, he pressed his horn, flinching each time at the loud virulent bray. But no one came out to look, and no curtain moved.

He drove past the silent railway station, a low concrete mausoleum; and on through a vast trading estate where old railway lines criss-crossed the roads, rusting into the asphalt, to click briefly under the tyres as he passed. There was nothing. He saw only bleak black warehouses and the cluttered yards of factories, a dead mechanical world stretching unbroken on either side. Chimneys and water-towers, lifts and derricks, loomed over his head like great empty husks, symbols of the end of things.

Things? Or people?

He drove back to the central crossroads, and irritably past the dutiful traffic-lights, idiot robots flashing directions at cars that were not there. It was a dead town, dead and spiritless, and he was uneasy because he did not understand. When all other places were taking on a monstrous life of their own, why was there none here?

He pulled in to the kerb outside a shop-window full of cameras and soap. He looked down the grey empty street, and tried not to think. Without really expecting it to work, he turned the radio knob on the dashboard; he had used it perhaps twice in the few years since he had bought the car.

At once his head was full of the high ringing note of a continuous call-sign, eerie and unbodied. Then, as suddenly, it stopped. There was the prickling silence of the live air, and a voice said unemotionally: ‘This is the
b.b.c.
Home Service. Here is the one o’clock news. The Prime Minister, Sir Michael—’

An appalling crackle broke in, drowning the words. ‘Blast!’ Queston said furiously, surprised by the violence of his disappointment. He thwacked impotently at the dashboard, but the noise did not clear for several minutes. It was a curiously deliberate sound, rising and falling in regular waves.

He came in again at the tail-end of a sentence elliptically describing the end of a trade agreement, and a national appeal for reliance on home resources. Home resources? What kind? The announcer went on, his voice deepening a semi-tone in the regulation greeting for disaster, with an account of two accidents, oddly simultaneous that morning, in the country’s two deepest coal mines. In one, a fall of rock had trapped sixty men, all now presumed dead. In the other, an underground riot of some kind seemed to have broken out; the description was vague and guarded, but here too several men had died.

The cool voice went on: ‘The Minister of Planning, Mr Mandrake, has issued a special order closing all pits which descend below a hundred feet. The Minister said at a press conference this morning that owing to the ban on coal and oil imports, this new order will make further domestic economies imperative. Special cooperatives are to be set up for the distribution of shallow-mined coal from area depots of the Coal Board. Representatives of the steel and forestry industries will be meeting the Minister this afternoon.’

There was a pause.

‘Evacuation of the Harwell and Trawsfynydd areas is now complete,’ said the voice off-handedly. ‘A spokesman for the Ministry of Planning said last night that dismantling will begin as soon as possible.’

Another pause. Queston sat motionless. Then he jerked in alarm at the words that followed: ‘That is the end of the news. This is the
b.b.c.
Home Service. We are now closing down until six o’clock. Please switch off your sets.’

Silence. Incredulous, he turned the knob to the short wave, to find a local station, but there was nothing. He found no voice or signal on any waveband, except, once, the distant sound of accordion music; and very faint on the short waveband a voice which appeared to be reciting the history of Roman London. He turned the switch off, and sat still. However sinister the implications of the strange, allusive news bulletin, that seemed after his years of remoteness to be speaking of another country, another time—however deeply that disturbed him, this silence of the air was worse. It was worse than an immediate isolation, it turned the world cold. He felt childishly resentful towards the
b.b.c.
for leaving him alone.

From that moment, he took refuge in childishness; in simple reactions, as if he were conscious only on one superficial level, and the rest of his mind asleep. He looked angrily round at the smug silent shop-fronts, impossible and deserted and dead. He was hungry. And where was he to sleep that night? He remembered a hotel he had passed near the centre of the town; a gloomy, red-brick building with two sad cigar-shaped trees in pots outside the door. Well, he would stay there. He would force back normality that far, in this strange lifeless town.

He drove back to the hotel and parked the car in its narrow forecourt. Grey concrete, neatly swept; blank white curtains looping the windows; a solid, silent, locked door. In a sudden fear of embarrassment, unable to believe that a live town could turn into a vacuum, he hammered at the door with his fist. But the place was not inhabited. No one came.

He made his way round to the back, and climbed over a fence; the wood left a lick of green lichen on his sleeve. Inside he found a small garden: a patch of grass, a rusting wrought-iron seat and some dispirited clumps of Michaelmas daisies. And a pair of french windows, leading into the hotel. He hesitated, and called: ‘Hallo! Hallo!’ The sound was startling, and suddenly absurd. Decisively he pulled off his jacket, wrapped it round his hand and punched his fist through the window. The small tinkle of falling glass was instantly exhilarating, and an end of his backward groping for reality. It was as if he punched his reason through at last into accepting the impossible new world.

Inside, the hotel was all solid, middle class, one-night-stop comfort, with grazed leather armchairs and thick drab carpets. He walked through to the reception desk. The register lay open on the counter; everything everywhere was neat and clean. The people of this town had left with ordered speed, expecting to come back.

He unlocked one of the doors, and fetched his suitcase from the car. Walking the empty corridors of the hotel, alert to the seventh sense that was growing more watchful in him every hour, he could feel nothing but a despondent fatalism in the place. The room he chose was the same; tidy and depressed, a harmless box without power or emotion. He thought of all the hotel rooms he had ever slept in, and knew why. The necessary link was not there. People passed through, without lingering to grow attached to the place. And it was the same, perhaps, with the town itself. Slough; he tried to remember it. An industrial dormitory, shallow-rooted; a twentieth-century town, too raw to be able to hold those who had lived there. Or to be able to make use of them, to control their minds.