A Better Mantrap

THE COTTAGE OF ETERNITY

When a young man devotes a lot of time to a scheme – a scheme which culminates in his slipping a vital question to a young woman – he usually feels pleased when she says yes. With Barney Seacombe, however, things were different. On hearing the affirmative answer he had at first refused to believe his ears, then had come the numb conviction that his life was in ruins.

The question was one he had rehearsed many times, and he uttered it with a brash and breezy confidence. “Have you,” he said, “a vacancy for a nuclear physicist?”

The young lady, a clerk in the employment exchange in the rural community of Daisyford (population: 8,324), glanced through the card index on her desk and said, “Yes.”

“That’s a good one.” Barney chuckled to show his appreciation of the witticism, then returned to the serious business of the day. “Now, where do I sign on and how soon can I have some money?”

The young lady gave him a look of cool reproach. “There’s no question of your drawing benefit while there is suitable employment on offer.”

“Wait a minute,” Barney protested. “I’ve got my old mother to look after – I can’t go away off to Aldermaston or Windscale or somewhere like that.” The part about his mother was a lie – she was being quite well looked after by her current boy friend – but he had thrown it in to win sympathy.

“The vacancy is in Gibley End,” the young lady said, keeping her sympathy to herself.

Barney shook his head in disbelief. “But that’s only three miles from here.”

“I know.”

There aren’t any nuclear establishments there.”

The young lady’s eyes flickered like those of a bad poker player. “Are you refusing to consider this offer of employment?”

“Give me the address,” Barney said, acknowledging defeat. He left the employment exchange and stood for a moment in the sunshine of a glittering spring morning.

The main street of Daisyford was a scene from a tourist poster, painted in exuberant acrylics, but Barney was not in an appreciative mood. When entering university he had chosen to concentrate on nuclear physics for no other reason than that it was a field which offered zero employment opportunities in his home area. The plan was that, having prolonged his education for as long as was humanly possible, he would return to Daisyford and settle down to a state-financed life of fishing the numerous local streams and sipping real ale in the equally numerous local hostel-ries.

It had seemed a good plan, virtually foolproof, and the last thing Barney had expected was for it to go awry on the first day, especially on account of someone who styled himself:

Arthur Haggle, Squientist,

Gibley Castle,

Gibley End,

Herts.

He thought hard about the name and address which had been supplied to him and, as he rode his motorcycle through the lanes which tenuously connected Daisyford to Gibley End, his natural optimism began to return. Gibley Castle was too old and dilapidated to have been taken over by a research organization looking for low-cost accommodation, so the whole business was either a mistake or a hoax which had been perpetrated on the humourless clerks of the employment bureau.

Squientist, indeed, he thought scornfully as his engine pulsed its note into vistas of quiet fields. What a give-away! If the idiots in the dole office had any brains they would have realized immediately that there’s no such word.

By the time the compact grey mass of the castle came into view, hulking up incongruously from pastures and ploughed fields, Barney was rehearsing a jocular account of the expedition for his friends in the Daisyford Arms. He was slightly taken aback, therefore, to find on drawing near the old building that a gleaming letterbox had been fitted into the gnarled timbers of the main entrance, and that above the letterbox was a brass plate engraved with the words: a. haggle, squientist.

Frowning a little, Barney took stock of the building’s exterior and noted the renovated stonework and freshly painted window frames. Gibley Castle was a comparatively modest affair, more like a manor house with delusions of grandeur than a proper castle, but it appeared that someone with money had taken up residence in it. Perhaps, Barney speculated, he had been too quick to assume that no research company would have bought the place. Perhaps there really was a prospective employer lurking inside. Perhaps – Barney’s spirits quailed at the thought – he was on the verge of obtaining work and would have to spend the forthcoming summer at a desk instead of lingering on the banks of murmurous streams. Numb with apprehension, he thumbed the new electric bellpush and waited to see what fate held in store for him.

After a minute’s delay the door was opened by a thin, middle-aged man whose rusty black suit, walrus moustache and white-gleaming cranium made him look like a character from a Mack Sennett comedy. His gaze hunted suspiciously over Barney’s face, and Barney – with a swift, sure instinct – knew that here was a man with whom he could never form a working relationship of any kind. He made an immediate decision, assuming he was looking at Haggle, to flunk the job interview in as spectacular a manner as possible.

“You must be Seacombe, the one they phoned me about,” the man said in a fussy voice. “I must say you don’t look like a nuclear physicist.”

“Cyclotrons weigh thousands of tons,” Barney explained. “That makes it difficult for me to wheel one up to people’s front doors and ask them if they have any atoms they want smashed.”

Disappointingly, Haggle appeared not to notice the sarcasm. “You’d better come down to my laboratory – we can talk better down there. Quickly, man!”

He closed the heavy wooden door and took Barney through an antechamber, a hall, and into a small elevator. The elevator was smooth in operation, but seemed to go an inordinate distance into the earth. When it stopped Haggle led the way into a tunnel-like corridor. The passageway was warm and dry, and was illuminated by modern electric light fittings, but Barney began to feel cool fingers of unease caressing his spine. It was quite obvious that he had descended into the castle dungeons in the company of a complete stranger whose motives and intentions were shrouded in mystery. Barney tried to draw comfort from the fact that Haggle resembled a silent movie comedian, then recalled that as a child he had been terrified of silent movie comedians because, one and all, they looked like frightening maniacs.

“Mr Haggle,” he said brightly, ‘what exactly is a squientist?”

Haggle replied without looking back. “I presume you’ve heard of a squarson?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“What’s the education system coming to? If you look squarson up in the dictionary you’ll find it means a squire who also happens to be a parson. I’m a squire who happens to be a scientist.”

“I see.” Barney was still turning the explanation over in his mind when they reached the end of the passage and were faced with a massive steel door set flush with the surrounding stonework. Haggle straightened his tie, smoothed a fringe of hair down over his neck, rubbed the toe of each shoe against the back of his other leg, then took a remote control box from his pocket and pressed a button on it to operate the door. Barney’s apprehension increased as the door swung open a short way with a muted electrical hum, giving him his first glimpse of a large, dimly-lit room of cavernous aspect. He followed Haggle through the narrow opening, glancing about him with some disquiet as the door quickly whispered shut at his heels, imprisoning him in an ambience of vaulted ceilings, floor slabs which were big enough to cover graves, and thick pillars behind which armies of shadows lay in ambush.

Remembering the way in which Haggle had preened himself before entering, Barney looked around him – half-expecting to see an occupant, possibly a woman – but the chamber was empty except for a scattering of benches, equipment cabinets and a large divan bed. For no reason he could explain, the sight of the bed in such an unlikely setting brought Barney’s skin up in goose-pimples, strengthening his resolve to get out of Gibley Castle in a hurry and never come back.

“This is my laboratory,” Haggle announced, ‘and it’s where you’ll be doing most of your work.”

You want to bet? Barney thought. He said, “What kind of work are you engaged in?”

“Research into the fundamental nature of particles. I have only recently hypothesized an entirely new class of particle.”

“Really?” Barney felt a faint stirring of professional interest. “What properties do your particles have?”

“Size.”

“Size?” Barney considered the word, trying to place it in context with other scientific whimsicalities such as strangeness, colour and charm. “For a minute I thought you meant big particles.”

“I do.” Haggle’s eyes glittered briefly. “My particles can be a metre and more in diameter, with corresponding volume.”

“I see,” Barney replied, meaning exactly what he said. It had finally become clear to him that Haggle not only looked crazy – the little man was a genuine lunatic. And, with the cunning of the true madman, he had successfully inveigled Barney into his underground lair…

“I can handle all the practical work, looking after the particle detectors and so on, but I need an assistant to deal with the theoretical side,” Haggle said, giving Barney a penetrating stare. “How are you on theory?”

“Very sound,” Barney said, realizing the time had come to start disqualifying himself in no uncertain manner. “Of course, I’ve thrown out all that garbage about wave mechanics and distribution probabilities and so forth.”

“You have?” Haggle looked suitably perturbed.

“It’s totally unnecessary. Needless complication.” Noting that Haggle was reacting in a satisfactory manner, Barney warmed to his subject. “What these modern eggheads don’t seem to realize is that Neils Bohr’s model of the atom was absolutely correct. Particles really are like little snooker balls – all different colours, all bumping into each other – and I can explain any interaction on that basis. It’s quite simple, really.”

Haggle took a step backwards, the stricken look on his face making it obvious that he felt he was the one who was incarcerated with a lunatic. “Are you feeling all right, Mr Seacombe?”

“I feel fine.” Barney put on a broad smile. “I hardly ever get the headaches now.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Haggle said, moving towards the door. “Thanks for coming to see me, Mr Seacombe. You realize, of course, there are other applicants…’ He broke off as a telephone began to ring somewhere in the shadowy reaches of the room. “Will you excuse me?”

Barney, now feeling he was in control of the situation, made a generous gesture of acquiescence. He watched Haggle disappear into a cell-like room adjacent to the main chamber and a few seconds later there came faint and fragmentary sounds of a telephone conversation. Humming a popular tune, his mind full of green visions of the afternoon’s fishing, Barney sauntered around the nearby benches examining the various items of equipment without much curiosity. He was pleased at having managed to think his way out of a tricky situation and he resolved that he would never again allow anybody or anything to spring surprises on him.

At that moment – as though to demonstrate the vanity of such thoughts – Fate confronted Barney Seacombe with the two biggest surprises of his life.

Within the space of five seconds he saw a ghost and fell deeply, irrevocably in love.

The ghost was in the form of a slender young woman with an oval face, large eyes, long hair and a style of dress which – to Barney’s startled and inexperienced eye – might have dated from the Restoration. She was partially transparent, glowed with a delicate violet radiance, and was beckoning for Barney to join her in the shadowy area behind one of the largest pillars.

His first and natural impulse was to take flight, perhaps emitting a scream or two for good measure, but that was counter-balanced by an emotion of an entirely different nature. Barney, although a presentable young man, had never had much success with the girls of his own generation, most of whom regarded him as being too dreamy. Undeterred, he had continued to cherish the belief that one day he would meet a genuine soul-mate, a girl predestined to be his and his alone, and when that happened both he and she, without a word being spoken, would experience a pang of recognition, ecstasy and fulfilment. Now, gazing silently at the girl, he knew that his faith had been vindicated.

In his daydreams the event had been scheduled to take place in a crowded room – the onlookers largely made up of insensitive females who had previously rejected him – but the meeting itself was all that mattered, and Barney was not going to be put off by a few peripheral drawbacks. Here, in the converted dungeons of Gibley Castle, he had found the light of his life, and it mattered little to him that some kind of slip-up in the celestial book-keeping had resulted in his being born a few centuries too late for true love to run its normal course.

Smiling a tremulous smile of hope and joy, he went towards the beckoning figure. He was rewarded with an answering smile, but it faded almost at once and was replaced by a look of haunting anxiety.

“Please do not leave,” she said. “Please stay here. Please do not leave me here with… him.”

Barney was not sure if he had really heard her voice or if the words had merely echoed in his mind, but the plea for help was unmistakable. “Do you mean Mr Haggle?” he whispered.

“Yes, yes. I implore you to save me from him.”

“But you’re a ghost, aren’t you?” Barney glanced down at the girl’s figure to confirm his diagnosis and made the discovery that her semitransparent state of being made it possible for him to see a variety of distracting curves beneath the insubstantial dress. “What can… ? What can …?” He made a valiant effort to gather his thoughts. “What harm can he do you?”

“He is keeping me a prisoner in this terrible place,” she said, her ethereal features registering distress.

“But… I thought a ghost could just flit through walls.”

“If I could do that,” the girl said, and it almost seemed to Barney that a note of impatience was creeping into her voice, “I would hardly be standing here now, would I?”

“You should nip out through the door next time he opens it. You could pass through him, couldn’t you?”

“And mingle my body with his! How can you suggest such a thing?”

“Sorry. I guess I wasn’t thinking. You see, this is the first time I have ever…’

“There is no time to talk,” the girl cut in. “Will you please help me?”

“Gladly. What do you want me to…?” Barney stopped speaking as a faint as happened in ting from the telephone signalled that Haggle had just hung up, and in the same instant the girl disappeared. He turned away from the empty space she had occupied and, more than a little overwhelmed by what had happened, prepared himself to face the mysterious Mr Haggle, squientist and abuser of pretty ghosts.

“Sorry about the interruption,” Haggle said, walking towards the door.

“It’s all right.” Barney gave a hearty laugh to conceal his nervousness. “I really had you going a minute ago, didn’t I? All that nutty stuff about particles looking like snooker balls! Sometimes I let my sense of humour run away with me.”

Haggle’s heavy moustache twitched several times. “You mean, that was a joke?”

“Of course!” Barney spoke quickly, anxious to gain the initiative. “Look, Mr Haggle, I’ve been weighing up your new concept of large-volume particles and I think it’s absolutely brilliant. In fact, I’m so impressed by it that I’m prepared to come and work for you without payment – the privilege of helping in your great work would be all the recompense I would need. What do you say?”

Haggle looked furtively gratified. “You wouldn’t expect any salary at all?”

“Not a penny.”

“And you’ll bring your own lunch?”

Stingy swine, Barney thought. “I’ll bring some for you, as well. My mother is a great cook.”

“Well, in that case,” Haggle said, in the manner of one who was yielding to a generous impulse, “I’m prepared to take you on for a trial period. You can start work immediately.”

“Wonderful!” Barney found it quite easy to sound enthusiastic despite his aversion to work, especially of the unpaid variety. His intention was to remain on the premises only until he had rescued the translucent damsel, and with any luck that task might be completed in a matter of minutes. And as a first step he would have to speak to the girl again and find out exactly why she was unable to pass through the stones of the castle walls like any other spirit. He looked around the shadowed recesses of the room, hoping to catch another glimpse of her, but all the corners and niches remained impenetrably dark.

“…particles, which I have named maryons, can easily penetrate solid screens up to a tenth of a metre in thickness,” Haggle was saying, “but the evidence seems to show that they can be trapped in a container whose walls are more than half-a-metre in thickness.”

“Really?” Barney tried to bring his thoughts to bear on the other man’s preposterous notions about particle physics.

“Yes. And according to my understanding of wave mechanics, that establishes them as objects whose associated wave functions decrease to 0.7 of their full amplitude at about 0.1 metres from their boundary. Do you agree?”

“Absolutely,” Barney said, still covertly scanning his surroundings.

“Their wavelength must be of that order of magnitude – so what sort of rest mass would they have?”

“Huh?” Barney floundered for a moment and then, realizing he would have to play along with Haggle until there was an opportunity to be alone, took a calculator from his pocket and fingered its buttons. “It looks like the rest mass would be less than an electron’s by a factor of around 10¹⁶. That’s pretty small.”

“So it wouldn’t take much energy to accelerate a maryon to Earth escape velocity?” Barney did more calculations, all the while wondering at what point Haggle would begin to appreciate the absurdity of his own theories. “Only 10^-38 joules.”

A gleam appeared in Haggle’s slightly protuberant eyes. “Would the pressure of the solar wind be enough?”

“More than enough.”

“Hah!” Haggle began to pace the stone floor, his hands fluttering like white moths. “This confirms all my ideas.”

“Does it?” Barney’s wariness of the little man returned as a strange thought began to take shape at the back of his own consciousness. Haggle’s large-volume particles were the product of an eccentric mind, but it was possible to suspend disbelief for a moment and predict that if they did exist they would be very rare on Earth because the solar wind would sweep them away into space. The only places where they might be found would be inside buildings with very thick walls – for example, in the dungeon of an old castle. It looked as though Haggle had come to the same conclusion and had designed his underground laboratory as a sort of bottle for capturing maryons.

Was it possible, Barney wondered with a growing sense of excitement, that Haggle’s arrangement for trapping non-existent particles was also responsible for imprisoning the ghost? If so, all he had to do to set her free was to get Haggle out of the way and open the door. It was all quite simple and straightforward, and yet alarm bells had begun to clamour in Barney’s subconscious, warning him that he had not taken his idea to its logical conclusion, that there were implications he had overlooked. The girl – whose name he had yet to discover – had given him the impression that Haggle was deliberately preventing her escape. And it was odd, very odd indeed, that the postulated physical characteristics of Haggle’s strange particle should be exactly the same as…

“What’s the matter with you, man?” Haggle moved closer to Barney, one of his eyes narrowing critically while the other grew correspondingly larger. “You look like you’ve seen a…”

“I haven’t,” Barney cut in. “I haven’t seen anything.”

“You weren’t listening to a word I was saying.”

“It’s just that I’m rather tired,” Barney said. “Haven’t slept much lately. Worrying about not getting a job.”

Haggle scowled his dissatisfaction. “I have to go upstairs for a while. Can I trust you to familiarize yourself with the equipment and not fall asleep as soon as I leave?”

“Of course,” Barney said eagerly, pleased at the prospect of being alone with his ghost-girl. He hurried to one of the benches and stared fixedly and conscientiously at the instruments on it until Haggle left. As soon as the door had swung shut behind the little man Barney turned and walked towards the dark area where he had last seen the ghost. She appeared to him almost immediately and he felt an upsurge of tenderness and concern as he saw that she was more distraught than ever.

“You mustn’t worry,” he soothed. “I’ll get you out of here in no time. You’ll see.”

She shook her head. “I can scarcely believe it. After being bricked up in a cell for almost three hundred years I have begun to feel that I shall never escape.”

“Bricked up in a cell!” Barney was horrified. “Who did that to you?”

“My uncle – Lord Cyril.”

“But what made him do such a terrible thing?”

The girl lowered her gaze. “I fancied myself in love with a stableboy. My uncle said that if I could not find it within myself to behave like a lady it was incumbent on him to remove me from all worldly temptation by locking me in the castle dungeon.”

Barney felt a twinge of jealousy towards the long-dead stablehand and was at once consumed by intense curiosity about how far the affair had progressed. Unable to think of a diplomatic way of obtaining the information, he asked the girl’s name and was told that it was Mary Grey. Further questioning revealed that Mary had died of pneumonia soon after her incarceration and that her uncle, who probably had not intended things to go that far, had hidden his misdeed by having her cell bricked up. Mary’s ghost had been imprisoned there for almost three centuries – until Haggle had knocked the wall down in the course of constructing his laboratory.

“In a surfeit of joy I made myself visible to him, wishing to express my gratitude,” Mary said. “You can imagine how quickly my gratitude turned to fear and loathing when I discovered the kind of creature Mr Haggle is. Not only has he continued to keep me prisoner here, but he has made me the object of his base and carnal lusts.”

“I’ll kill him,” Barney gritted, quivering with rage. “I’ll go up there now and tear him from limb to…” He paused in mid-vow as certain practical difficulties in what he had just heard presented themselves to his mind. “Um …if it’s not too delicate a question… what exactly did he do to you?”

The violet radiance of Mary’s face deepened to magenta. “He asked me to disrobe for his vile pleasure.”

Barney gave a relieved sigh. “At least he isn’t able to…”

“Not yet,” Mary said in a tragic voice.

“Not yet?” Barney frowned at her in bafflement. “I’m sorry, but I don’t see…”

“He is not a well man. His heart is not strong, and that is why he spends most of his time in this room. Some day, perhaps quite soon, he will die, then he and I will be locked in here for ever – and I will not be able to escape him.”

Barney gave a low whistle, words failing him as one part of his mind took in the full extent of Haggle’s nastiness, while another was swamped with speculations about the sexual proclivities of disembodied spirits. Mary had certainly retained all the externals of a nubile female, but Barney found it difficult to envisage, for example, the production of spectral hormones. A possibly vital clue lay in the fact that Mary, who had been a ghost for rather a long time, still thought like a woman and apparently was confident that Haggle’s ghost would act like a predatory male. It was a subject to which Barney had never devoted any thought and he found it intriguing.

“Mr Seacombe!” Mary silently stamped her foot. “Are you going to help me, or are you content to stand there dreaming?”

“I’ll help you, of course,” Barney said fervently. “I’ll get you out of here in no time – all I have to do is open the door.”

“How will you do that ?”

“Nothing to it! I’ll just grab the handle and…” Barney’s voice faltered as he noticed that the inner face of the door was a smooth sheet of metal, devoid of any manual controls.

Mary toyed with one of her tresses. “Mr Haggle always opens it with a magic box.”

“There’s nothing magic about it,” Barney explained. “It’s a remote control device operating on radio or ultrasonic frequencies. Very common. Very simple.”

“Have you got one?”

“Ah… no.”

“Can you make one?”

“No, not in here.”

“In that case,” Mary said, ‘it cannot be as common or as simple as you appear to think.”

“You don’t understand,” Barney replied, suddenly aware that seventeenth century girls could be as irritatingly illogical as their space age counterparts. He took out his nail-file, went to the door and – trying to look as though he knew what he was doing – inserted the sliver of metal into the hairline crack at the door’s edge and wiggled it up and down. The door swung open immediately.

Barney’s delight at this unexpected development was tempered, however, by the discovery that Haggle was framed in the narrow aperture, holding his remote controller in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other. He advanced quickly into the laboratory and the door swung shut behind him.

“I’ve brought you a drink,” Haggle said, looking almost affable. “Something to pick you up a bit.”

Barney checked discreetly to confirm that Mary had vanished, then accepted the mug. “This is most kind.”

“Think nothing of it. Living alone has made my manners a bit rusty, but I do want you to be comfortable.”

“Thanks a lot.” Barney sipped the coffee and deduced from its flavour that it had been made from some rather inferior brand of powder, but at the same time he was intrigued by Haggle’s desire to be hospitable. It appeared that the little man, in spite of some serious character defects, had a better side to his nature. It just goes to show, Barney mused, nobody is all black.

“How is your coffee?” Haggle said, watching Barney with a look of intense solicitude.

“It’s very nice.” Barney made an appreciative slurping sound. “Delicious.”

Haggle looked pleased. “I’m glad to hear it – most poisons spoil the taste of a drink.”

“I’m an anti-caffeine man myself,” Barney riposted, ‘but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it…” He stopped speaking as a curious tingling sensation spread through his limbs, making it difficult for him to move, and causing him to fix Haggle with a look of abject pleading. “You are talking about caffeine, aren’t you?”

“Hardly.” Haggle took the mug from Barney’s numb fingers and put it aside. “Caffeine takes decades to kill a person, but the substance I put in your drink will do the trick in about fifteen minutes. You can consider yourself well and truly dead.”

Barney had read somewhere that the imminence of death was a powerful aid to concentration, but he found himself unable to string two thoughts together as Haggle caught his toppling body and dragged him to the door of the laboratory. It obviously took most of the little man’s strength to get both of them through the narrow opening during the brief period in which the door was ajar, and when it closed again Haggle leaned against a wall, panting and clutching his chest. As soon as his breathing steadied he bundled Barney into the elevator and thumbed the top button on the control panel.

“You’re not going to get away with this,” Barney said, aware that the near-final utterance sounded disappointingly like a line from an old B-movie.

Haggle appeared not to mind the lack of originality. “I’ll get away with it, all right. After all – what motive could the police establish?”

“Motive? I’ll tell you what motive.” Barney paused for a moment, his brow wrinkling. “Why did you do it?”

“Bringing you here was part of an experiment,” Haggle explained, smirking. “I did need some theoretical help, but I was also interested in finding out if Mary would be visible to other people. I guessed from the expression on your face that you had seen her when I was on the phone. That was why I went out and left you alone with her.”

“I take it that the lab is wired for sound,” Barney said, getting his first inkling of what had been going on.

Haggle nodded. “You take it correctly. I suspected Mary might try to be unfaithful to me – there’s a touch of the wanton in that girl – and when I heard you begin plotting with her so readily I realized you would have to be put out of the way.” Haggle’s brows drew together. “It’s a fine thing when you invite someone into your home and the first thing he does is try to steal your wife.”

“Mary isn’t your wife,” Barney protested.

“She soon will be.” A look of lascivious anticipation appeared on Haggle’s face. “I don’t think I’ll have long to wait until I’m free of this mortal shell.”

Barney felt a strong desire to take part in the little man’s discorporation, but as his paralysis was now almost complete he concentrated instead on assuaging his curiosity. “Do you reckon that male and female ghosts are able to… you know…?”

Before Haggle could reply, the elevator came to a halt and the door slid aside to admit strong sunlight from a conservatory which appeared to have been constructed on the roof of the castle. Haggle manhandled Barney out of the elevator and unceremoniously dropped his body on the rush matting of the floor. The rough treatment caused Barney no pain, a reminder that he was close to death. He gazed up through the glass roof, into the clear blue vault of the sky, and made the astonishing discovery that he was unafraid. Previously, death had always been equated in his mind with total extinction, but he had learned a lot in the past hour. He had met Mary, had fallen in love with her, and passing from this world into the next merely meant that…

There’s something you seem to have forgotten,” he said, experiencing a pang of mingled triumph and joy as the new thought was born in his mind. “You’re doing this to keep Mary and me apart, but when it’s all over I’ll be a ghost – just as she is – and then we’ll be together. What do you think of that?”

“I think you must be as moronic as you look,” Haggle said contemptuously. “Have you learned nothing in the past hour? Why do you think I went to all the trouble of bringing you up to the roof? Answer me that.”

“I…’ Barney struggled unsuccessfully against a wave of mental confusion. “Can you give me a clue?”

“What name did I give my new particle?”

“Ah… the maryon.”

“And what is the name of the young lady down in my laboratory?”

“Mary, of course, but I don’t see…’ Barney lapsed into silence, teetering on the edge of a philosophical chasm which abruptly yawned before him.

“I named the whole class of particle after her, you oaf.” Haggle’s eyes bulged with excitement as he glared down at his victim. “Human ghosts and my large-volume particles are one and the same thing! It may be that all the matter in the universe is made up of greatly condensed maryons – that concept could reconcile the religious and scientific views of creation, but it’s outside the scope of my researches. It was enough for me to prove that a ghost is a particle with the properties we discussed earlier, because it explains so much about psychic phenomena.

“Maryons can pass through thin partitions, but not thick walls – that’s why ghosts are most often found in very old buildings, although if the human body has chains or ropes around it at the time of death they can hold the ghost in place, too. A maryon has very little rest mass, but if it gets speeded up or agitated for some reason, perhaps because of anguish, its mass increases and it is less able to penetrate walls. That explains why ghosts are usually unhappy, and the increase in mass also accounts for most poltergeist phenomena. A massive high-speed ghost could easily knock over a vase.”

Haggle squatted down beside Barney, his face twitching in scientific fervour. “Now do you see why I brought you up to the roof to die? You yourself worked out that the pressure of the solar wind would be enough to sweep a ghost, or maryon, away into interstellar space. That’s why the world isn’t crowded with ghosts; that’s why vampires are so careful to avoid sunlight. And that’s why, young Seacombe, you won’t be able to try coming between Mary and me again.

“As soon as you die you’ll be on a one-way excursion out of the solar system. Have a nice trip!”

Haggle rounded off his discourse by giving vent to a maniacal giggle. Barney, all other recourse denied to him, tried to spit in the little man’s gloating face and discovered that the paralysis had now spread to his lips and tongue. He was unable even to swear. He had time for one searing stab of regret over having failed Mary, for having doomed her to an eternity closeted in an underground prison with a monster like Haggle…

Then he died.

On his way up through the stratosphere and the various radiation belts surrounding the Earth, Barney noticed quite a large number of other ghosts of many shapes and sizes, all being carried in the same direction by the inexorable pressure of the solar wind. The sun, mother of all life, was heartlessly driving away its young. Events had been proceeding at a bewildering pace, but his training in the science disciplines had not quite deserted Barney and he was quick to notice that he was travelling much slower than the rest of the ghostly multitude. They were whipping past him at accelerations he guessed would soon take them close to the speed of light, while he was progressing at a fairly moderate pace which gave him plenty of time to look around.

I’m a massive ghost, he deduced. And if Haggle is right, it’s because of the heartache I feel over…

At that moment the cratered sphere of the moon swung into his field of vision and, aided by his spectral senses, Barney saw the satellite’s conical shadow extending and tapering out into space behind it. He was approaching the moon’s orbit with increasing speed, and until that moment had no idea he was capable of some independent motion, but a kind of instinct took over, he darted sideways on a vectoring course, and before he knew it had come to rest in the calm and pressure-free volume of space which was the shadow of the moon.

With the brilliant disk of the sun screened from his view, Barney found he could see with great clarity, and the first thing he noticed was that his immediate vicinity was quite thickly populated with other ghosts. He rotated himself into the attitude they had all adopted – feet towards the moon – and examined his neighbours with some interest. There were myriads of spirits in a variety of costumes which spanned ages and cultures. Many of them were congregated in large groups, but some were flitting about in restless isolation. Very much aware that he had been extremely lucky to escape being blown away into the reaches of interstellar space, Barney paused for a moment to collect his thoughts and then approached a chubby, benign-looking man – clad in Victorian tails, a stand-up collar and top hat – who was regarding him from the fringes of a nearby group.

“Allow me to welcome you to the afterlife and to congratulate you on your quick thinking,” the portly gentleman said. “My name is Joshua Simms.”

“Quick thinking?” Barney began to feel he had lost the power of thought altogether. “I’m sorry, but I…”

Simms smiled approvingly. “Oh, yes – you were very quick. Most fledgling souls get swept away into infinity before they know what is happening to them, but you were perspicacious enough to realize that the shadow of the moon is a sanctuary, and you got into it just in time. Physicist, are you?”

“Yes. How did you guess?”

“We get two main classes of people in here, apart from those who are lucky enough to be carried in by accident,” Simms said, waving expansively at the surrounding ghost population. “Astronomers and physicists – people whose professional training enables them to appreciate the advantages of this select volume of space. We think of ourselves as a kind of élite, although in recent years there has been an unfortunate influx of spirits whose only qualification is that when they were corporate they read that fantastic rubbish scribbled by Bertie Wells and his followers.” Simms lowered his voice to a confidential level. “Naturally, nobody bothers with them.”

“Naturally.” Barney struggled to assimilate the flow of new data. “So it’s all true – a ghost is akin to a large-volume particle.”

“Of course! Though we’re not elementary particles, needless to say. We have highly complex structures.”

“But if space is full of ghosts why haven’t astronomers detected them?”

“They have, but they don’t realize it,” Simms said scornfully. The very low mass of a ghost leads to a very large shift in any radiation which strikes its surface and is scattered by it. All short wave radiation, such as light and infrared, is scattered at radio frequencies – so ghosts are a major source of cosmic radio noise.”

“This is all too much for me,” Barney said feebly as radical new ideas about the nature of reality swarmed in his mind.

Simms nodded sympathetically. “It’s obvious that you have been illused by Fate, my friend. You are very massive for a ghost, which means you are burdened with regrets. Did you, by any chance, commit suicide?”

“No, I was murdered – and the rat who did it has got my girl.”

“How distressing for you!” Simms patted Barney on the shoulder. “But take my advice, my young friend – put all thought of your mortal existence out of your head, and, above all, don’t contemplate going back to Earth to haunt your murderer. If you join one of our debating societies or discussion groups you will have the inestimable privilege of conversing with Galileo, exchanging scientific ideas with the two great Isaacs, Newton and…”

“What did you say?” Barney cut in. “What was that about going back to Earth?”

“Some misguided souls do it,” Simms said, shaking his head in disapproval. “They never achieve anything, of course. All that happens is that they eventually get swept away into infinity. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

“How could anybody possibly return to Earth?” Barney said casually, disguising his intense interest in what he had heard.

“It can only be done safely during a lunar eclipse, when the Earth’s shadow forms a corridor linking it to the moon. Some poor tormented souls cannot wait that long, however…” Simms indicated the distraught-looking individual ghosts who were restlessly keeping themselves apart from the groups, “… and they try to get back during an ordinary full moon, when the tip of the Earth’s shadow comes near us. It means crossing a stretch of open space, which is a hazardous enterprise, but I daresay some of them must manage, otherwise the full moon would not be so prominent in the history of superstition.”

“That’s right,” Barney said, a desperate resolve forming itself in his mind. He still felt a powerful yearning to be with Mary, a fact which was slightly puzzling considering that neither he nor she had any physical presence to speak of; he would never rest until he got her out of Haggle’s clutches; and, in the name of both justice and revenge, he craved the chance to punish the little man for all his evil ways. And if the achievement of those goals necessitated crossing the brink of hell itself – so be it.

It occurred to Barney, as he quietly slipped away from Simms, that he had grown up a lot since setting out on his bicycle from the Daisyford employment exchange only two hours earlier.

After waiting three days for the time of the full moon, Barney traversed some thousands of kilometres of open space and reached the shadow of Earth with comparative ease. He did not deceive himself that the crossing had been without risk, however – he had seen other ghosts, presumably less massive than himself, being swept away by the unrelenting pressure of the solar wind. Their cries of despair faded quickly as they were accelerated off into some unknown and remote part of the galaxy.

Barney tried not to think about their ultimate fate as he arrowed down the cone of dark stillness, identified the continent of Europe with his spectral vision, and homed in on southern England which was settling into a night of peaceful slumber. Picking out familiar landmarks, he flitted over Daisyford, and briefly considered dropping in to see his mother before deciding that the ensuing complications would be too much for him to cope with on top of his other problems. In any case, she was likely to be busy with her boyfriend.

He descended on the roof of Gibley Castle, passing through the glass of the conservatory with ease, and came to rest with a jolt on the ancient fabric of the building proper. Haggle had been right, he realized – a particle with the wave functions peculiar to a ghost was unable to pass through thick stonework. Barney glanced around and was relieved to see that his mortal remains had been tidied away. He went to the small shed-like structure of recent origins which capped the elevator shaft, and found he was able to penetrate the thin sheeting of its door with very little difficulty. He sped down the shaft, coming out at successive floors to explore the castle, and eventually was drawn by the bright lighting of a small apartment on the ground floor.

On entering the room Barney saw that it was furnished as a kitchen. The black-suited figure of Haggle was sitting at a table, poring over a book and sipping a cup of chocolate. During his three days of waiting behind the moon Barney had nurtured a plan to lurk around near the laboratory door until Haggle opened it, and then to slip inside without being seen, but at the sight of his enemy his self-control snapped. Haggle was seated under a shelf which was laden with heavy porcelain jars, and before he had considered the consequences Barney – driven by ungovernable fury – was whirling around the room at an ever-increasing rate, like a particle in a cyclotron, trying to dislodge the jars. As his speed built up his mass increased accordingly, as dictated by the laws of physics, and the ceramic containers began to vibrate and stir under the multiple impacts of his ghostly form.

Haggle looked up from his book, his eyes widening in alarm. He turned his gaze towards the overhead shelf, saw one of the jars toppling down on him, and threw himself clear an instant before it shattered on his chair.

Barney came to an abrupt halt, his disappointment giving way to relief as he belatedly realized the position he would have been in had Haggle met a well-deserved end. With the little man dead there would have been no physical agency for opening the laboratory door and Mary would have continued languishing in captivity. Barney, knowing he was invisible because of the brightness in the kitchen, paused beside Haggle and was concerned to see that he was clutching his chest with one hand and holding on to the table for support with the other. Perspiration beaded out on the white dome of his head. He emitted a strangulated gasp, staggered out of the kitchen and lurched along a passageway to the elevator.

Barney stayed close behind him the whole way down to the dungeon level, hovering solicitously as Haggle clawed the remote control box out of his pocket and opened the laboratory door. Steeling himself to endure the unpleasant intimacy of partially occupying the same space as Haggle’s body, he went through the narrow aperture with the little man. The heavily shielded door swung shut behind him and, his whole body suffused with tender longing, he cast about him in the hope of espying Mary and once again hearing her voice. She was not to be seen.

“There’s no point in your hiding, my proud beauty,” Haggle croaked, hobbling towards his bed. “I have a feeling I’m soon to be released from this physical shell, and when that happens… you and I… you and I…” The excitement of visualizing what he would do when he finally came to grips with Mary apparently placed too great a strain on Haggle’s system. He gave a quavering moan and collapsed unconscious on the bed. Barney gazed at him anxiously, half-expecting to see an astral body arise from the mortal clay, but rapid shallow movements of the chest told him that Haggle was still in the land of the living.

“Mary! Where are you, Mary?” Barney kept his voice low. “It’s me – Barney. I’ve come back to rescue you.”

“Oh, Barney!” There was a flicker of soft radiance in one of the darkest niches of the room, and Mary came into view and glided towards him.

At the sight of her Barney felt a pang of desire which almost frightened him with its intensity. He was impelled towards her, but stopped short of actual contact, partly because he was afraid of offending her innate modesty, partly because of the startled expression on her face.

“Mr Haggle did poison you,” she gasped. “I had hoped that part was untrue, that he was only taunting me.”

“It was true, all right,” Barney said. “The little swine gave me a lethal dose of something. I don’t care about that, though – it didn’t stop me coming back for you.”

“But you are a ghost – just as I am.”

“I know.” Barney got an impression that Mary was not as pleased to see him as she ought to have been. “What difference does that make?”

“What difference? You were not able to open that door when you were alive,” Mary said, a note of asperity creeping into her voice. “How do you propose to do it now that you are dead?”

“I… Well…” Barney gave the door a look of baffled resentment.

“If Mr Haggle dies now the three of us are going to be cooped up in here for ever. Have you thought of that?”

“No, I haven’t,” Barney said hotly. “All I’ve been able to think about was seeing you again. I’ve crossed the depths of space to be with you, because I loved you, hoping that you loved me in return – but I realize now that I was wrong. I’m sorry if all I succeeded in doing was to anger you, and in future I’ll try to stay out of sight to spare you further annoyance.”

Barney made to turn away, but during his impassioned speech a misty expression had appeared in Mary’s eyes and she reached out to take his hand. The contact gave Barney a pleasurable thrill.

“Do you really love me?” she said softly.

“You know I do. You must know.”

“And I have similar feelings for you, though we have scarcely met,” Mary said wonderingly. “I don’t know why that should be, because I’m a spirit now and I haven’t been troubled by such desires since I quit my mortal body.”

“I can’t understand it, either.” Barney took Mary’s other hand in his, completing a circuit which intensified his feeling of delight. There’s nothing in the rules of particle physics to account for it, unless… unless…”

“Don’t question it,” Mary whispered urgently, moving close to him. “Hold me, Barney, hold me.”

“Darling!” Barney took her in his arms, and in the instant their bodies met a pang of orgasmic rapture fountained through him with an intensity he could never have imagined, obliterating his senses, filling him with the joyous realization that his whole life had merely been a prelude to this divine moment. He clung to Mary, and she to him, and time itself seemed to cease.

“My love,” Barney said eventually, surfacing through a golden haze of pleasure, “do you know what has happened to us?”

Mary laid her head on his shoulder. “Yes – our souls have united in heavenly bliss.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Barney replied. “But I think I understand everything now. You were once a woman and I was a man, and a trace of sexual difference is carried over into our present state, a difference represented by the antisymmetric wavefunctions characteristic of particles which obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. You have half integral spin in one direction, and I have it in the opposite direction, and when we paired up together we fully occupied the available energy state. That’s what gives us this feeling of bliss and…”

“Don’t try to analyse it,” Mary said. “Just tell me we will always be together like this.”

Barney smiled at her. “Of course we will. Just the two of us.”

“That’s what you think!” The voice of Haggle, loaded with gloating malice, interrupted the lovers’ communion, and when they turned towards the bed they saw his ghost-figure spring up from congruency with a lifeless body. He came towards them, face contorted, limbs quivering with pent-up emotion.

Mary shrank away, hiding in Barney’s embrace. “Mr Haggle has died! Oh, Barney – what are we going to do?”

“It looks as though you’ve already done it, you shameless wanton,” Haggle hissed. “You betrayed me with this young jackass the minute my back was turned, but I’ll have my revenge. You’ll see! The three of us are going to be in here for a long time, and I’m…”

“Correction,” Barney put in, sounding relaxed and unconcerned. “You are going to be in here for a long time – but Mary and I are leaving almost immediately.”

Haggle looked alarmed for a moment, then a sneer tilted his walrus moustache. “And how do you propose to get out?”

“Through the walls, of course.” Barney was aware of Mary looking up at him with an expression of surprise, but he continued to stare Haggle straight in the eye.

Haggle gave a derisive laugh. “You young fool! You’ve learned absolutely nothing.”

“I’ve learned how to do this.” Barney put out his right hand and thrust it into the stone wall beside him. His hand and arm slid into the ancient masonry with no trace of resistance. Mary gave a cry of wonderment.

“But that’s imposs…” Haggle darted at the wall, bounced off it and stood glaring at Barney with impotent fury.

“There’s no point in your trying it,” Barney told him. “You see, it’s hard enough for an ordinary ghost to penetrate a thick wall, and for a ghost like you – bursting with anger and hate – it’s quite impossible. You’ll be trapped in here until the building crumbles.”

“So will she,” Haggle snarled, pointing at Mary. “She was in here for three centuries without being able to escape.”

“Ah, but that was before Mary and I were bonded.” Barney gave Mary a reassuring squeeze. “The probability density distributions of our wavefunctions are now finite beyond the boundaries of this room, which means that we can tunnel through the walls and exist outside. I’m using the word ‘tunnel’ as it is employed in quantum mechanics, of course, to account for the passage of an electron through a potential barrier in a…”

“I don’t believe all this theoretical twaddle,” Haggle snapped. “You can’t leave me here alone.”

“We can,” Barney said sternly. “In fact, we have very little choice in the matter. If you consider this room as a quantized space, then the three of us can’t continue to exist inside it without violating the Pauli Exclusion Principle.”

“Balls to the Pauli Exclusion Principle.” Haggle’s voice thickened with venom. “There’s one thing you’ve forgotten – the solar wind! If you go outside this castle you’ll be blown away into the depths of space.”

“I would have dreaded that at one time,” Barney admitted, “but not any more. Now that I’m pair-bonded with Mary I can see that it’s our natural destiny to journey across the universe together, exploring all the wonders of creation hand-in-hand, meeting and welcoming cosmic travellers from other worlds. I’m not daunted by that prospect, and I don’t think Mary is.” Barney glanced down at his partner and gave her a fond smile. “Are you, sweetheart?”

“Not as long as we’re together,” Mary said. “Eternity seems as friendly and homely to me as a rose-covered cottage in which the love you and I have for each other will flourish and blossom, and will continue to do so long after the stars have grown cold and the galaxies have returned from their lonely flights and new cycles of…” Her words faded away as, still exchanging looks of mutual adoration, she and Barney faded into the stonework and were lost to view. “Pompous bores,” Haggle muttered to himself. “If that’s what pair-bonding does for you, they can keep it. I think I had a lucky escape.” He squatted on the floor, produced an insubstantial pack of playing cards and settled down to the first of many, many games of solitaire.