Dagger of the Mind

CHAPTER SIX

Wachting the town’s diurnal return to life did something to restore Redpath’s faith in the ubiquity of the commonplace, but it was a bitter-sweet experience. A barrier had dropped solidly into place between him and all the other citizens of the Four Towns. He felt like a stranger, someone with an artificial reason for being there, like a visiting reporter trying to get the feel of the place for a television feature. During the hours he spent walking in the town centre or sipping coffee in steamy glass-fronted caverns, he looked at the faces of perhaps a thousand people and he knew that not one of those people had ever slain a fellow human being, or had any trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality, or had allowed himself to believe that a shabby old house could develop a malevolent personality of its own. He was totally alone, cut off.

When he felt he was ready to face the police he glanced at his watch, saw that the time was exactly nine o’clock and wondered briefly if his subconscious had chosen to wait for the beginning of what might be normal business hours for the CID. It was, he thought, the sort of lame-brained thing a subconscious like his might do. He set down a half-finished mug of weak coffee, went out into Calbridge’s shopping and commercial area, and walked the best part of a mile to the police station. It was a compact two-storey building of blue-red brick, with a gateway at one side leading into an enclosed yard used for parking official vehicles.

He was going up the entrance steps when a grey saloon car which had been turning into the yard stopped so abruptly in the gateway that its suspension creaked. The driver’s window slid down to reveal a fair-skinned, strongly-built man whose face looked familiar to Redpath. Pardey, he thought. Frank Pardey. How did I know that?

“You,” Pardey said coldly, aiming his forefinger like a pistol.

“Over here!”

Surprised to find that he was still capable of indignation, Redpath paused long enough to show that he was unused to peremptory commands, then walked slowly to the car. “Yes?”

“John Redpath, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” I remember now—we met at a party somewhere. Probably Vicki Simpson’s place.

“What are you doing here, Redpath? What do you want?”

Perplexed by the other man’s hostility, Redpath decided to jolt him in the hardest possible way. “You know Leila Mostyn?”

“What of it?”

“I…I stabbed her to death yesterday.”

Pardey studied Redpath with blue eyes which showed neither shock nor surprise, only a considered and calm dislike. “Do yourself a favour, Redpath,” he snapped. “Bugger off.”

“What?”

“You heard me—bug off.”

“You don’t believe me?” Redpath said, angered by Pardey’s refusal to react in an appropriate manner. “All right, I’ll talk to somebody at the desk.” He turned to walk back to the police station entrance.

“Just a minute,” Pardey said impatiently. “Is this some kind of a sick joke?”

“Joke?” Redpath gave a shaky laugh. “That’s a good one. Joke!”

Pardey’s eyes narrowed in speculation. “This thing about

Leila—when did it happen?”

“Yesterday lunchtime, in her flat. About one.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“It’s not the sort of thing I’d be hazy about.”

“Well, I talked to Leila yesterday around six o’clock and there was nothing the matter with her,” Pardey said in a matter-of-fact voice, his eyes intent on Redpath’s. “What do you say to that?”

Redpath’s mouth went dry and he felt a painful, chilly prickling on his forehead and cheeks. “But I…”

“I’ll tell you what you did yesterday lunchtime—you went round to Leila’s flat when she wasn’t there and you cut up one of her cushions with a kitchen knife. The only person you hurt was yourself.”

Redpath gave the detective a numb smile before turning away to grasp the metal bars of the nearby gate. He stood that way for a moment, bracing himself against the convulsions in his stomach, then brought up the coffee he had drunk a few minutes earlier. The silt-coloured fluid spattered noisily on the concrete.

“Get into the car,” he heard Pardey saying in the distance. There was a sensation of being manhandled, the smell of orange peel and cigarette ash from the car’s interior, rotating street images as the vehicle was backed up a short distance and was driven away from the police station. A bus momentarily filled the view ahead—a meaningless assembly of saffron-coloured sheet metal and posters—and slid away to one side as Pardey overtook it.

“I’m lost,” Redpath mumbled. “Everything…melts.”

Pardey glanced sideways at him. “What is it, Redpath? Drugs?”

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

Redpath brought all his attention to bear on the task of arranging words in a logical sequence. “I work at the Jeavons Institute. They’ve been trying some stuff out on me—doing tests. I think something has gone wrong. Look, I’ve got to see Leila for myself.”

“She works at the Jeavons too, doesn’t she?”

“I believe so, but then what I believe isn’t necessarily…”

“Would she be there by this time? It’s almost half nine.”

“She should be there,” Redpath said, trying to rid himself of a vision of a slim, tapering back hideously disfigured by stab wounds. “I’d like to see her.”

Pardey nodded ungraciously. “Just remember—no funny stuff. If Leila wasn’t a friend of mine you’d be facing charges right now. In fact, if you don’t get some pretty solid backing for what you’ve just told me…” He glanced at Redpath again, compressed his lips and returned to the business of driving with the air of a man whose natural instincts were being sorely thwarted.

Recognising the advisability of remaining silent, Redpath closed his eyes and rode with the motions of the car, swallowing repeatedly in an attempt to cleanse the sour taste of bile from his mouth and throat.

For months after the death of his father Redpath had been tormented by dreams in which his father was still alive. He had always awakened from them saddened and disturbed, with his grief renewed, but while the illusions still held good for him he had known moments of utter happiness in which he had looked on his living father with joy, appreciation and contentment, understanding that to do otherwise where a loved one was concerned was to squander life itself.

The same kind of emotion gripped him now as he watched Leila Mostyn across the small conference table in Nevison’s office. She was miraculously and beautifully alive, unharmed, untouched, dressed exactly as he would have pictured her in a white lab coat, filmy blouse and tweed skirt. He no longer quite trusted the evidence of his senses, but it seemed to him as he told his story that she was genuinely troubled on his behalf, that without realising what was happening she had come close to entering that special, binding, exclusive relationship for which he yearned and for which he would be prepared to face the events of the previous twenty-four hours all over again.

In his account of those events Redpath, as requested by Nevison, paid as much attention to the imaginary as to the real, filling in every scrap of detail he could remember of hallucination, dream and nightmare. He spoke for almost an hour, during which time both Pardey and Nevison took occasional notes to supplement the tape recording which was being made. At the passages which concerned her, particularly the death scene, Leila’s colouring deepened and she stared fixedly at her hands, looking both thoughtful and embarrassed. Redpath took the opportunity to apologise to her during a lull in which Nevison was changing tapes.

“Dreams ought to be private,” he said. “I’ll bet this sort of thing isn’t in your contract.”

She gave him a wan smile. “I didn’t realise what you were going through.”

“Didn’t realise it myself.” He tried to return the smile. “And do you know the worst of it? It’s just struck me this minute—somebody has half-inched my bicycle!”

“How can you joke about it?”

“It’s no joke,” he assured her with mock-seriousness, the privilege of being able to talk to Leila again producing a sudden lift in his spirits. “There was a brand-new pump on that machine. It’s probably been given a new paint job by this time and shipped over to the Continent. I hear there’s a big racket in …”

“Tape number two,” Nevison cut in. “Just carry on from where you left off, John.”

Redpath nodded and continued his narrative, pausing only to clarify points raised by Nevison, and going on to an account of his mild epileptic seizure and the early-morning departure from the house in Raby Street. In retrospect, in the book-lined, wax-scented comfort of Nevison’s office, he was tempted to omit details of how he had tried to investigate the cellar and had allowed himself to be panicked into headlong flight by nothing more than an unexplained noise. The presence of the tape recorder reminded him that he had set out to provide an exhaustive description of an abnormal state of mind. He gave a fair report of the incident, glancing sheepishly from one face to the other as he did so, and concluded with his abortive visit to the Calbridge police station and the meeting with Pardey. When he had finished speaking the quietness in the room was so intense that the tape machine suddenly seemed defective, whirring and scraping as it tried to record nothing. Nevison switched it off, causing some internal component to reverberate like a tuning fork.

“I’ll kick off by saying I think I owe John an apology,” Frank Pardey said, looking up from his notes. “I’d no idea of the sort of thing that goes on here, and I didn’t know there had been any experimenting with drugs. I’m here mainly as a friend of Leila’s, of course, but it seems to me that if you’re going to use drugs that gives a man hallucinations you should keep a close eye on him till the stuff wears off.”

Nevison shook his head. “The compounds we use aren’t hallucinogens.”

“They just make you see things that aren’t there,” Redpath said sarcastically, surprised and angered to find that Nevison was still disclaiming responsibility for what had happened to him.

“That’s what telepathy is,” Nevison replied. “Seeing things that aren’t in front of your eyes.”

“And that’s another thing—telepathy!” Pardey shifted in his chair and gave the others a perplexed smile. “I thought I knew everything that went on around this town—but telepathy experiments ! And at the Jeavons, of all places!”

“The idea is fairly widely accepted.”

“Not around South Haverside it isn’t,” Pardey said emphatically. “Some people in these parts still have their doubts about the telephone.”

Redpath stared at Pardey with a dull sense of wonderment, half-convinced that the detective had said something significant. Now that he thought of it, the Jeavons Institute—traditional, conventional, hidebound, less a seat of learning than a repository for technical knowledge required by local industry—seemed an unusual place to find time and money being spent on para-psychological research. Because of his own close association with the project he had never stopped to consider…

“The thing that really intrigues me,” Nevison said firmly, dismissing what he obviously regarded as side issues, “is the management capability of the various levels of John’s consciousness, the ability to take selected elements of perception and fit them into a unified pattern with extra-sensory or subjective elements.” He leaned forward to peer into Redpath’s face.

“John, do you fully understand that I wasn’t at Leila’s flat yesterday? She borrowed my car to pop home for ten minutes.”

“I know that now.”

“When Leila drove the car away from the house, couldn’t you see her at the wheel?”

“No—the sun was shining on the side windows. It dazzled me.”

“Otherwise everything looked normal?”

“Well, everything seemed to be rippling a bit. I remember I started thinking about detached retinas.”

“In other words, you had a slight feeling you were watching an image projected on…”

“Excuse me, Doctor Nevison,” Pardey interjected, “I’m the odd man here and I want to get out of your way as quickly as possible—but I need to ask John a couple of questions first.”

An expression of annoyance flickered on Nevison’s greyish face, but he made an ushering gesture in Redpath’s direction. “I’m sure John won’t mind.”

“Thanks.” Pardey consulted his notebook before glancing at Redpath. “This woman with the room full of goods and provisions—have you any idea what her second name is?”

“No.” Redpath was suddenly aware of being back in the normal world, where different types of people had different types of preoccupation. “I only know her as Miss Connie.”

“How about the man Albert?”

“Just Albert.”

“I see. Have you any idea how these people support themselves?”

“None at all—I was only there for a matter of hours and the subject didn’t come up. I think Albert may have been in the steelworks at one time.” For the second time in a couple of minutes Redpath sensed that Pardey, with his uncompromising practicality, had managed to touch on something worth thinking about. Yesterday had been Tuesday, an ordinary working day, but nobody in the house in Raby Street had gone to work. What did they do for a living?

“It all sounds a bit…” Pardey scraped his pen along the spiral wire binding of his notebook, producing a noise like a miniature rattle, and his blue eyes were pensive. “Is there a telephone I could use? I want to call the station.”

“Along the landing, second door on the right,” Nevison told him. He waited until the detective had left the room, then gave Redpath a smile which was unexpectedly sympathetic. Redpath raised his eyebrows and turned his gaze towards the window, refusing to be won over too quickly.

“John, I don’t want you to think you’re on your own in this thing,” Nevison said. “You’ve had a very unpleasant time of it, and as head of the department I feel responsible. None of us foresaw the exact manner in which Compound 183 would affect your perceptions, and…”

“But you said the drug had nothing to do with it,” Redpath blurted. “You as good as said I was going gaga on my own.“Nevison smiled again. “What I said was that the compound didn’t cause you to have any hallucinations. I still insist that you are picking up telepathic emanations in visual form—they could be coming from anywhere—and that you haven’t yet learned to interpret them properly.”

“There’s no interpreting to do—when you see something you see it.”

“It’s not as simple as that, John, believe me. If you take a photograph of a television set and hand it to an aboriginal tribesman who has never seen a television or even a photograph before, he’ll have absolutely no idea what you’ve given him. All he will be able to see is a flat sheet with some coloured stains on it. Similarly, a wiring diagram for that same set could be meaningless to you, but for an electronics engineer it would be crammed with crystal-clear information. Do you see what I mean?”

“I see what you mean, but you don’t mean what I mean.”

“Let’s move on a bit,” Nevison said patiently. “In that dream you had about being in the United States—what was the name of the town?”

“Gilpinston.”

“And the state?”

“I think it was Illinois.” Redpath spoke reluctantly, aware that Nevison was setting up some kind of a trap.

“Right. To the best of your knowledge, have you ever heard of a place called Gilpinston, Illinois?”

“Never, but I don’t see what…”

“I’m taking a bit of a gamble here,” Nevison said, standing up and going to one of his bookshelves, “but it’s all in a good cause.” He took a large, weighty atlas from the shelf, opened it at the gazetteer section and placed the book in Redpath’s lap. “Go ahead, John, look up Gilpinston.”

Redpath did as instructed, running a finger down the narrow columns of small type. He stopped, feeling a tremor of unease, when he reached an entry in which the words “Gilpinston, Ill. U.S.A.” were followed by a page number and a set of map references.

“What does this mean?” he said, frowning up at Nevison. “How did you know it would be there?”

Nevison returned to his desk and sat down before replying. “I didn’t. I never heard of Gilpinston until you mentioned it this morning.”

Leila left her chair and stood beside Redpath, resting her hand on his shoulder while she checked the gazetteer entry herself. “Are you putting this forward as proof that telepathy was involved?”

“It isn’t as simple as that,” Nevison said ruefully. “It could be telepathy or unconscious retention of a place name. What I was trying to demonstrate to John is that the relationship between his mind and his brain is more complex than he previously thought. I’ll give you another example from the same dream sequence…John, have you ever been to the States?”

“Never.” Redpath answered automatically, much more concerned with the fact that Leila had remained at his side. He could smell the light blossomy perfume she favoured.

“I thought not—and yet when you were describing trying to turn the light on in that basement you said the switch was upside down. You said you had to push the toggle up to turn the light on.”

Redpath shrugged. “What of it?”

“Switches are like that in the States. Pushing them up turns them on.”

“That can’t be right. I mean, it’s a natural movement to turn something on by bringing your hand down. I mean…“Redpath’s voice tailed off uncertainly as he began to realise that right from the beginning he and Nevison had been arguing on two entirely different levels.

“That could be unconscious retention, as well,” Leila said. “Anybody who has seen as many American films as John could have absorbed that fact without realising he was doing it.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Nevison replied equably. “All I want is for John to appreciate that mental scenarios which are presented to him—no matter whether they are internally or externally inspired—cannot be treated like Disney cartoons. It may be that the greatest problem in telepathic communication will be incompatability between sender and receiver. We may have to anticipate a plethora of interpretation difficulties.”

Leila exhaled sharply, with what sounded to Redpath like impatience. “Shouldn’t you be more concerned with the clinical effects of your experimental drugs? I know this isn’t my department, but John has practically lost a day out of his life, and it seems to me that almost anything could have happened to him yesterday.”

“I’m arranging for him to have a full check-up this afternoon before we go back on to the routine test procedures.”

Redpath gave a theatrical cough. “Just letting you two know I’m still here,” he said. “Don’t I get consulted about what happens next?”

“Of course, but I assumed you’d wish to press ahead with the test schedule while conditions are exceptional,” Nevison said. “How do you feel at this moment?”

“All right, I suppose.” Redpath took stock of mind and body, and discovered that he felt relaxed and confident, sustained by the knowledge that Leila was alive and that the nightmare had ended. “Actually, I feel pretty good right now. It’s as if that turn I had during the night did something to…” He broke off at the sound of the door being opened.

“Sorry I took so long,” Frank Pardey said, entering the room with the majorette’s knee-lifting gait which looked so out of place for a man of his size and build. He dropped into the chair he had vacated and checked something in his notebook before addressing himself to Redpath.

“It turns out that our friend Tennent has some form,” he said. “I’d like to talk to him.”

“What has he done?”

“It looks like gambling swindles mostly—he seems to have ripped off bookmakers in four different spots up and down the country.”

“Can’t they afford it?” Redpath said, thinking of Tennent’s jovial friendliness which was perhaps the only thing he would care to remember about the previous day. He disliked the idea of his being instrumental in the chubby gambler’s arrest.

“I daresay most of them can afford it, but there’s something else,” Pardey said in a businesslike voice. “He’s wanted for questioning in connection with the disappearance of one Reginald Adams Selvidge—otherwise known as Prince Reginald—who used to run some kind of a mind-reading act in the south coast summer theatres. Vanished about eight years ago.”

“Mind-reading act?” Redpath glanced at the others in surprise. “That’s odd.”

Pardey nodded. “That’s what I thought. I don’t suppose you ran into him yesterday?”

“Why should I?”

“No reason. I was only joking.”

Some joke, Redpath thought, divining what had been in the detective’s mind. Isee the joke, and I see the implications. That place in Raby Street is like a rest home for freaks—and 1 was welcomed into it with open arms…

Pardey closed his notebook, put it away in his pocket and stood up. “Okay, John, let’s go and pick up your bicycle.”

Redpath blinked at him. “Where is it?”

“Well, I’m hoping it’s where you told us it was—at 131 Raby Street.”

“I don’t want to go back there so soon,” Redpath said quickly.

“Why not?”

“It would be embarrassing for me. Those people thought I was moving in with them yesterday …”

“It’s a peculiar thing about that address,” Nevison put in unexpectedly, “but it seems almost familiar to me.”

“You want to get your bicycle back, don’t you?” Pardey said, watching Redpath’s face with amused interest.

“I can send somebody to collect it.”

“I wonder,” Nevison mused, “was the place ever owned by a doctor or a dentist?”

On his final word a faint but unmistakable smell of cloves stole into Redpath’s nostrils, and he knew on the instant that as a small child he had been to the house in Raby Street—perhaps only once—for dental treatment. The synaesthetic aroma of the clove oil used in mouthwashes was what had swamped his senses as he had entered the hallway with Betty York.

I was there before, damn it all!

The revelation, coming like a clear shaft of sunlight, produced an immediate if not entirely rational change in Redpath’s feelings about the tall, narrow house. It seemed to him that much of the sense of uncanniness which had oppressed him there could be put down to the unconscious turmoil caused by submerged memories trying to break through to the surface. As a child he had been terrified of dentists, and he was positive that such fear alone—suppressed, bottled up—had been sufficient to cloud his emotional reactions to the house. Many other things remained to be explained, but…

“I could enquire about the bicycle myself,” Pardey said, “but if you’re not there to claim it and take it away things’ll start getting complicated.”

“I suppose it would be better if I went with you and got it over with.” Redpath stood up and, finding himself close to Leila, impulsively took her hand. “Leila, this can’t have been much fun for you…listening to all my ramblings…I’m sorry it happened.”

She gave him a warm, direct look. “Don’t worry about that side of it. I’m glad you’re all right.”

“Not as glad as I am that you’re all right.” He turned his eyes upwards like an El Greco saint, causing her to smile, and the sight of the smile he had brought into being gave him an artist’s sense of fulfilment.

“I want you back here at two o’clock sharp for a full set of psychometric tests,” Nevison said, taking the cassette out of his tape machine. “That should give you time to go home if you want, and perhaps freshen up a little.”

“Hint taken,” Redpath replied, rasping the stubble on his chin. He left the office with Pardey amid inconsequential cross-talk and good-byes, filled with a rare conviction that life was all he could ask it to be, that it was good to pass through a dark tunnel now and again in order to appreciate properly the quality of the sunlight at the other end. The mood of euphoria was so pronounced that for a moment he had to consider the possibility that it was yet another psychotropic prelude, the deceiving sweet treachery of the falling sickness, but on analysis he decided the feeling was genuine and justified. He was an ordinary man, with no more than an ordinary man’s share of failings and problems, and that was something to be celebrated. Half-way down the stair he paused and studied the bright green-and-cream checkerboard of the hall floor spread out beneath him, and it held reassuringly steady in his vision.

“What are you going to do about Tennent?” he said to Pardey as the car began nosing its way into central Calbridge. “Do you have to arrest him on the spot?”

“You can relax on that score.” Pardey gave him a quizzical glance. “I suppose you’re another one who doesn’t want to get involved in anything?”

“I admit it—I don’t want to get involved.”

“Well, you’re already involved in this one to a small extent, but I’m going to slide you back out of it if I can—that’s why I wanted you to come with me to collect your bicycle. As far as anybody in the house is concerned, I’ll just be a friend who gave you a lift across town. With any luck I’ll be able to get a good look at our man Tennent without any fuss.”

“Then what?”

“Then I go back to the station and look at his mug shots and make sure it’s the same man. Tennent is a fairly common name, you know. If I don’t manage to see him now, I’ll want you to call at the station later and look at some photographs. Okay?”

“That’s all right,” Redpath said, feeling relieved. “I don’t mind doing that much.”

“Any assistance short of actual help,” Pardey murmured.

“Think nothing of it—just make sure they spell my name right on the medal.” Redpath lapsed into silence, unable to decide whether he could warm to Pardey or not. The detective, in his capacity as Leila’s personal friend, had already saved him from what would have been a lengthy and difficult encounter with the police. It would be both ungrateful and unwise, he decided, to continue swapping the sort of banter which might develop into acrimony. He remained quiet until the redbrick canyon of the Woodstock Road had enfolded the car, then gave Pardey the final directions which brought them into Raby Street itself.

“Funny name to give a street,” Pardey commented. “It doesn’t make you think of Raby Castle or anything like that. Sounds too much like a disease.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Redpath picked out the house numbered 131 in the foreshortening perspectives of the terrace on his left and watched it until the car had halted at the gateless gateway. The place looked even bleaker than he had expected, distinguished from the ordinary shabbiness of its neighbours by a dark and yawning quality about the windows which made it seem that light which entered the building was unable to get away again. Furry green caterpillars of moss clung between the old bricks, devouring the mortar with burrowing tendrils. Red-path, his gaze hunting across the dreary fçcade, experienced a sense of foreboding which somehow was unconnected with anything that had gone before.

“Let’s get it over with,” Pardey said, getting out of the car. Redpath joined him and they approached the outer door, the letterbox of which was held partly open by a crumpled advertising broadsheet. Pardey grasped the black-painted cast-iron knocker and beat vigorously on the door, sending thunderous percussions through the house’s interior.

“Open up, madam,” he said to Redpath, grinning. “I’m from Homes And Gardens and we want to feature you in our Christmas issue.”

Redpath nodded and drew his lips into a smile. The house had sounded hollow. He crossed to the bay window, the curtains of which were almost fully drawn, put his face close to the glass and looked into the room where on the previous night he had sat for hours with the four members of his new “family”. The room was completely empty of furniture, stripped to the bare floor boards. He began to feel cold.

“Get off your backside, madam,” Pardey gritted, knocking more loudly than before, so loudly that a window frame vibrated. He locked eyes with Redpath, seemed to read something in his expression, then abruptly crouched and peered through the letterbox. Redpath moved towards him. “Something funny seems to have…”

Pardey straightened up, his face savage. “Shut it, Redpath— just don’t say anything! “

He took what appeared to be a piece of a white plastic ruler from his pocket, glanced around the deserted street, and slid the pliant strip into the door frame near the lock. Swearing impatiently, he made several forceful movements with his wrist and the brown-painted door swung open. The inner half-glazed door had been left ajar, revealing the naked hall floor and stair timbers of an uninhabited house. A breeze fluttered through an accumulation of junk mail and circulars on the tiled floor of the porch.

Redpath placed the back of a hand on his forehead and fought to control the twitching of his lips. “This is where I was last night. I swear to God, that is the…”

“Look at the dust, man!” Pardey stepped into the porch and kicked a heavy envelope onwards into the hall. It slithered a short distance along the boards, making tracks in a thick and otherwise undisturbed layer of dust.

“Nobody has been in here for weeks,” Pardey stated flatly.

Redpath looked about him with uncomprehending eyes and pointed at the leaded glass of the inner door. “There’s the fleur-de-lis I talked about.”

“Every house in the street probably has one of those bastards. Wait here.”

Pardey strode to the staircase and went up it, stamping his feet to create maximum noise, and disappeared into the upper part of the house. His progress from room to room was punctuated by the slamming of doors. Redpath listened to him for a moment, still with his knuckles pressed to his forehead, then without any conscious volition walked towards the kitchen. He pushed open the door and surveyed the long bare room, noting the stained porcelain sink on the left, in the position he had expected. He turned to his right and looked behind the kitchen door. There was another door there, in the corner, and it was painted an incongruous fire-engine red. He raised the farmhouse-type latch and pushed the door open. A maw of blackness widened beyond. Moving like a man trapped in a dream, he advanced to the first of the stone steps and tested the second one with his foot.

“That’s all I need—for you to break your neck in here,“Pardey said from close behind him. “Where’s the light switch?”

There was a click as the detective operated a switch which Redpath had not seen because it was oddly located at the top of the door frame. A yellowish light came on in the cellar, illuminating a clean concrete floor. Pardey brushed past Red-path, clattered his way down the steps and examined the cellar. Redpath followed him almost to the foot of the steps and looked around the smoothly cemented walls.

So clean, he thought bemusedly. Just like the one I dreamed about, the one in the American house. All it needs is a few pigeons that have been sandpapered to death.

“Best part of the house, this,” Pardey commented. “It looks like somebody was building a fall-out shelter.” He turned and walked back up the steps, driving Redpath before him, turned off the light and closed the cellar door. Without speaking any further he shepherded Redpath through the brown dimness of the hall and out into the sunlit street, then pulled the outer door shut, sealing the house like a tomb. The bright, diamond-hard reality of street and sky imploded on Redpath from all directions, a stunning concentric shockwave which seemed to crush his skull.

“What are you doing?” he whimpered, lunging past Pardey to throw his weight against the door. “They can’t do this to me! That’s the house, I tell you—they’re all in there!”

Pardey spun him around with practised roughness. “I’m going to do you one last favour, Monsignor—I’m going to let you walk away from here and get lost, and I’m going to pretend I never saw you. Also, I’m advising you to go to bed and sleep off whatever it is that’s scrambling your brains.”

“It’s a trick,” Redpath said distantly, scarcely moving his lips. “I tell you I was here last night.”

“Son, you’re not even here now.” Pardey flicked his fingers against Redpath’s chest in contempt, walked to his car and looked back for a Parthian shot. “And you can tell Lady Leila that the next time she wants help she’s to ring the Samaritans.”

He got into the car and drove away, vanishing from sight at the nearest corner in only a few seconds, leaving Redpath alone and stranded at the centre of an alien universe.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Calbridge’s Leicester Road was at the heart of a selfconsciously respectable district where trees, mature hedges and well-tended lawns were a dominant feature, and in which it was quite rare to see a pedestrian who was not exercising a dog. Redpath, even though he was freshly combed and shaved, felt conspicuous as he patrolled the section near the house where Leila lived. He was determined to meet her as she arrived home from work, and—in view of what had happened on his previous visit to the flat—had decided to be as transparent and ingenuous about it as possible. There was to be no lurking in shrubbery, no sudden emergence from shadows, nothing which might elicit a fear response.

With the approach of evening there had been a marked increase in the homeward flow of cars, their occupants scrutinising him in mechanised relays, but he maintained his vigil in the open until Leila’s cherry-coloured mini, winking and slowing, separated itself from the other traffic. She saw him and began to raise one hand as the car disappeared between the brick piers of the house’s front entrance. Redpath walked to the gateway, but remained outside the property line while Leila got out of the car. She closed the door, straightened up and shook out her hair in one fluid movement which struck Redpath as being peculiarly aristocratic, and which intensified his yearning to be with her.

Lady Leila, he thought. Pardey was right, though he didn’t know it. Lady Leila! If you’ll marry me I’ll even learn to play tennis and order Tanqueray’s-and-tonic…

“John Redpath!” Leila’s face showed both exasperation and concern as she came towards him. “Where have you been all day?”

He smiled. “They seek him here, they seek him there.”

“Why didn’t you show up after lunch? Henry was ever so worried about you.”

“I can imagine,” Redpath said dryly.

“He telephoned Frank Pardey.” Leila’s gaze was direct, easily penetrating his manufactured nonchalance.

“So you’ve heard all about the empty house.” He looked down and repeatedly kicked a small weed which was growing in a crack in the pavement, reducing it to a wet green strand which refused to be uprooted. “I’m supposed to have lost an entire day. Careless of me, wasn’t it?”

“It’s terrible for you, I know, but at least Henry is now convinced that Compound 183 is too dangerous to go on with in its present form.”

“Henry is way behind the times,” Redpath said, shaking his head as he obsessively pursued the sliver of vegetation with his foot. “It’s no longer a question of drags or hallucinations or side-effects. You see, I know that all those things I said happened yesterday actually did happen. There’s no doubt or question about it—I know they happened.”

Leila placed a sandalled foot over the remains of the weed, causing him to meet her gaze. “You have to face up to the evidence, John. For your own good.”

“Evidence? You mean these new trousers and shirt I didn’t have yesterday morning?”

“You could have bought them.”

“I only had about three pounds in my pocket and I’ve still got most of that.”

“That’s not what I mean by evidence,” Leila said, sadly but firmly. “You might simply have taken the clothes, or you might have got them some time previously.”

“So my whole past goes down the drain, does it? Maybe I haven’t actually got a past. Maybe I’m something they grew in a vat and programmed with fake memories.”

“Please, John.” Leila placed a restraining hand on his arm. “Would it help you to know that Henry and I went up to Raby Street this afternoon and looked at the house for ourselves? We didn’t simply accept Frank Pardey’s word.”

“Did you? And what did you find?”

“The place was deserted and dusty. Nobody has lived there for ages.”

“That’s a great help to me,” Redpath said bitterly. “Thanks a lot.”

Leila changed the subject by looking about her in mock surprise. “Why are we standing out here?”

“I thought it might be better. After what happened, I didn’t want to …”

“Don’t be silly,” Leila put in. “Are you coming up for coffee?”

“Yes, please.” Redpath, feeling gratified, walked with her to the outside stairwell and ascended to the first landing. Leila opened the door with a key from her purse. The sight of the familiar sitting-room where only yesterday, as far as the evidence of memory was concerned, he had committed the ultimate obscenity touched Redpath with coolness, like the downdraft from an invisible wing. He went straight through into the kitchen and began filling the electric kettle.

“Is instant all right?” he called to Leila, who had stopped to examine her mail.

“You don’t waste time making yourself at home, do you?”

“Everything’s instant these days.” Redpath plugged in the kettle and switched it on, set out two striped mugs and joined Leila in the living-room. The mere fact of her presence, her living presence, brought an upsurge of the joy he had experienced earlier, but with it came the realization that his ideas about recent “events” were very much like classical double-think. The only way he could cope with the memories was to classify them as what they proclaimed themselves to be—recollections of real people and real incidents—and yet only that morning he had been able to “remember” murdering Leila. To justify his mental processes it was necessary to become metaphysical and ascribe a vital quality of nightmare to some passages of memory, thus differentiating between them and the less remarkable sequences.

What’s the underlying logic in that? Eh? Am I claiming that my mind has set up a nightmare factory which is happy to think up horror scenes, but refuses to waste its time making up ordinary events and ordinary people? Is that a union rule? And what’s so ordinary about characters like Albert and…?

“I’ve just had a thought,” he said. “When Henry rang your tame sleuth today, did they talk for long?”

“Quite a while—Frank can’t decide whether he’s been most abused by you, me or everybody.”

“Did they discuss the fact that Wilbur Tennent, well-known figment of my imagination, is a real person with a real police record?”

“I think the conversation was too fraught for that kind of thing,” Leila said. “But Tennent is a fairly common name—and you know what Henry would say.”

Redpath nodded. “Unconscious data capture and retention. What if I went down to the cop shop and looked at all of Pardey’s photos, and was able to pick out…? It doesn’t make any difference, does it?”

“Unconscious capture and retention,” Leila supplied, “and if you want to know something else that doesn’t help—your horse came in first this afternoon.”

“What horse?”

“Parsnip Bridge. Henry was intrigued by the name when he was running your tapes through, and he checked that there really was such a horse running today. It won at seven-to-one.”

“Wilbur knew that would happen,” Redpath said in a low voice, aware of icy heavings in the darkest pools of his mind. “Wilbur can see into the future. He opens the door before you knock.”

“Don’t elaborate the fantasy, John.”

“What fantasy? I know damn all about horse racing, and I couldn’t pick a winner to save my life. I didn’t even know there was a horse called…”

“Unconscious capture and retention.”

“That’s a daft name for a horse,” Redpath growled, shaking his head in despair.

“Poor John,” Leila said, her lips quirking as she saw the expression on his face. “You’re being put through the wringer and there’s nothing I can do to help.”

“You’re helping me just by standing there,” he assured her. “God, Leila, when I thought you were dead I wanted to…” Taken unawares by the stinging tears, he turned to go back to the kitchen, but she closed with him, looking into his face with a compassion which rendered her utterly beautiful.

“It’s all right, John.” Her eyes seemed luminous. “It helps to cry.”

“Sounds like a good title for a song,” he said, trying to take refuge in his jokey brand of cynicism, but his throat closed up so painfully on the last word that he had to wince. He looked down at her, chastened, dismayed by the possibility of his beginning to sob like a child.

“Come on.” She took his hand and led him into the bedroom. He stood beside the bed, enjoying and being oddly comforted by the submissive role, while Leila closed the door and adjusted the Venetian blinds, reducing the light in the room to the mellowness of candle flames. Standing at the opposite side of the bed, she pointed at his jacket and began to unbutton her cardigan. They undressed in silent unison, garment for garment, reaching nudity at the same time. And when they lay down together the outside world faded from Redpath’s consciousness like a dying star.

I could write yesterday off, you know. Pretend it never happened. What’s so awful about losing a single day out of a lifetime? Ray Milland lost a whole week-end and it didn’t do him any harm. Went from strength to strength, he did.

Redpath lay naked on the bed, watching Leila go about the room. His arms were folded behind his head, four pillows were arranged to give luxurious support to his back, and the relaxed state of his body was reflected in the meandering of his thoughts. He felt sane and secure, at times coming to terms with the idea that his mind was a master illusionist whose powers he had never suspected, at others speculating on the type of work he should try to obtain, or wondering how long Leila was going to let him stay with her on this visit. She had showered and now, clad only in underwear, was tidying the bedroom—an activity which made it easy for Redpath to imagine they were newly married and that life was always going to be as he saw it at that moment, an eternal springtime honeymoon, and endless stroll among the candled chestnuts of May.

That’s all I want. More and more of the same. It’s not too much to ask.

“This jacket looks as though it’s been slept in,” Leila said, lifting his brown zipper-up. “Isn’t it about time you got it cleaned and pressed?”

He dismissed the idea with an airy flick of one foot. “It costs a fortune to have suede cleaned. They should have warned me about that in the shop when I bought it.”

“Filling the pockets up with junk doesn’t help it, either.”

“Junk? Junk!” Looking at the garment’s bulging pockets, Redpath was reminded that he had let most of yet another day go by without taking his standard dose of anti-convulsant. “Would you look in the right-hand pocket and see if there’s a bottle of capsules in there?”

Leila put her hand in the pocket and brought it out filled with a medicine bottle, nail clippers, the lock and chain of Redpath’s missing bicycle, a pencil stub, a plastic dispenser for dental floss, and a triangular piece of paper which looked as though it had been torn from a newspaper.

“Right, apologise for that remark about junk,” Redpath said complacently. He was squirming into an upright position, preparatory to taking his Epanutin, when he saw that Leila was staring fixedly at the scrap of newsprint. Her expression was one of thoughtfulness, and of something else which caused a lurching sensation inside his chest.

“John?” Leila’s voice was small and uncertain. “Where did you get this?”

“What is it?” He stood up and took the paper from her hand. As he had surmised, it was a piece torn from the corners of a newspaper, but the typography had an odd, slightly spidery appearance which he was unable to connect with any local publication. He looked at the dateline and saw that it read: GILPINSTON BUGLE, TUESDAY, AUGUST 26, 1980.

There was a moment of stillness during which Redpath could hear the ocean-booming of his own heart.

“I’ve already told you where I got this,” he said, backing to the bed and sitting down, unable to take his eyes away from the single line of type. “Gilpinston, Illinois—I was there yesterday. I tried to snatch a newspaper and this piece must have come off in my hand.”

“John, please don’t…”

“How do you explain it, Leila? How do you explain this away?”

She sat down beside him and placed both hands on his forearm, holding tightly as though to give him anchorage. “John, please don’t get it backwards. Didn’t Henry predict that Gilpinston would turn out to be a real place? Didn’t he say you must have seen the name somewhere and subconsciously noted it? That’s why…”

“But look at the date, for Christ’s sake!” Redpath held the scrap of paper close to her face. “That’s yesterday’s date! Don’t you understand?”

“American papers are brought to England. Air travellers…”

Redpath cut in on her, half-shouting in his triumph. “From a small town in Illinois to a place like Calbridge! On the same day!”

Leila released his arm. “There’s something wrong here.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you all along.” Redpath jumped to his feet and began pacing the room, driven by the force of the half-formed ideas which were spuming through his mind. “You know what this means, don’t you? It’s all so simple once you accept one or two new ideas. It means that Albert, tricky Albert, can move himself around just by thinking about it. Instantaneously, anywhere he wants. He did it out in the open the first time I saw him, and I didn’t twig on. Nobody twigs on, because he goes around in an old boiler suit, and if he suddenly appears half-way along a street you automatically assume he got there by walking and you were too busy with your own thoughts to notice.

“And I’ll tell you something else—he can take people with him! That’s how I got to Gilpinston and back yesterday afternoon. Albert did it. I don’t think he likes me. He wanted to scare hell out of me, and it worked. My God, it worked.”

Redpath could hear his own words pouring out faster and faster, the sentences becoming shorter and more choppy as the time available for consideration of each new thought grew less. He had a feeling of no longer being in control, of instinct racing ahead of reason, but there was nothing he could do about it. His movements became jerky and frenetic.

“I tell you, Leila, Henry Nevison is wasting his time at the

Jeavons. He should be up in Raby Street if he wants to study parapsychology. That house! I said it was a rest home for freaks, but I didn’t realise how close I was to…They’ve all got something. Something different. Albert can teleport people. Take Wilbur Tennent—he’s a clairvoyant. Precognition. Miss Connie is a bit like Albert, but she does it with objects. Psychokinesis, they call it. PK. Apportation.

“Then there’s Betty York. I don’t know what she…yes, I do! She’s the physical component of the whole set-up. She’s what Henry would call the soma. She looks after the others, and makes sure they get fed and so forth. And she does other jobs, too. I didn’t just bump into her in the park yesterday—she came out to get me. On purpose! I’m as big a freak as any of them. I’m a telepath—and the house was short of one telepath. Maybe he died. I’ll bet that Prince Reginald character lived there, the one Wilbur is wanted for questioning about, and I’ll bet you he died, and I’ll bet you I was his replacement…

“The capsules, Leila! Hand me the capsules!” The sight of Leila’s face, pale and worried, gave Redpath a powerful jolt as he took the brown bottle from her outstretched hand, and all at once the nervous overload seemed to drain from his body. Smiling weakly, he sat down beside her on the edge of the bed and opened the bottle with trembling fingers. He felt cold and ill.

“I’m all right,” he said, putting a capsule into his mouth and swallowing it. “Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“You reckon this crazy spell will soon pass.”

She gave him an unconvincing smile. “It already has.”

“Leila,” he said, slowly and gently, “I believe every word of what I’ve just said. I don’t understand all of it, but I believe it. In one of the nightmares I dreamt the house was a living thing and the cellar was its stomach…That’s ridiculous, of course, but the analogy is there just the same. The house and those people in it are like a composite being—and they want me to join the family. I think now that they made me believe I had murdered you, just so that I’d be driven to go into hiding with them, though I don’t know how they did it. Maybe there’s a member of the family I haven’t met yet, but the point is that it was all part of a plan. Don’t you see that?”

“I don’t want you to get upset,” Leila said unhappily.

“I’m not upset. I feel a lot better now I’ve got some idea of what’s been going on. It all makes sense of a kind when you think about it. A group like that, each member with one special talent, can really look after itself—and that’s why the house was empty when I got there this morning with Pardey. Wilbur would have known we were coming, you see. He gave the warning and Albert moved out all the people and Miss Connie moved out all the furniture and other stuff. And it wouldn’t have been hard for somebody like her to blanket the place with dust and make it look as though nobody had been there for ages.”

Leila made to stand up, but Redpath caught her wrist and continued to speak in an abstracted monotone. “I’ll bet you they’re all in the States at this very minute, living in that other house, the one with the same layout as the place in Raby Street—but what’s it all in aid of? What brought them all together in the first place, and what do they want with me? What makes them run?”

Have they ever sandpapered anybody to death?

“John, you’ve got to unwind and think things over calmly,“Leila said. “Why don’t you lie down again and perhaps have a doze? You must be tired out.”

Redpath considered the proposition. “I daresay it would be safe for me to go to sleep. If they’re thousands of miles away they probably won’t feed me any bad dreams.”

“The rest would be good for you.” Leila stood up, rearranged the pillows and gently pushed him down on to them. He eyed her appreciatively and, as she was leaning over to cover him with a sheet, lightly pinched the tiny roll of fat which had appeared just below her navel. She pushed his hand away, went to a wardrobe and selected a lime green dress which enhanced the colour of her hair. It was only when she had put on white sandals and was looking around for her purse that it dawned on Redpath that she had been preparing to go out. He found the idea strangely annoying.

“What are you doing, Leila?” He raised himself on one elbow. “You’re not going out, are you?”

“Just to get some butter and one or two other things—I wasn’t expecting a lodger.”

He glanced at his watch. “But it’s nearly eight o’clock.”

“The shops in Botanic Avenue will still be open.”

“I don’t want you to rush around getting food for me.”

“It’s no trouble. I can be back in…”

“I don’t want you to go out, Leila.” Redpath, now sitting upright, realised he had spoken too sharply and tried to make amends. “It’s selfish of me, I know, but…”

“It’s all right, darling,” she said quickly, “I can manage without going shopping—as long as you don’t mind margarine on your toast.”

Redpath nodded, mollified. “I don’t mind margarine.”

“It’s supposed to be better for your health, anyway,” Leila said in a subdued voice. She sat down at her dressing table and began to work on her cuticles with an orange stick.

Unable to suppress a feeling that something had gone wrong, Redpath stared at her in silence as he went over the events of 1 the previous ten minutes, like a hunter backtracking to pick up 1 a lost trail. The atmosphere had been harmonious up to the I moment when he had half-deduced and half-guessed the underlying facts about the house in Raby Street and its effect on his life, but since then…

“Leila,” he said gravely, “it has just occurred to me—you’ve really taken all this in your stride, haven’t you?”

She lowered her head, concentrating her attention on her fingernails. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean all that stuff I told you about those people up in Raby Street. It was pretty astonishing. In fact, it was very astonishing— but you don’t seem astonished.”

“I…Perhaps I haven’t fully taken it in.”

He weighed up her reply for several seconds. “You don’t believe any of it do you? You think I’m mad. You were trying to humour me.”

Leila’s shoulders slumped momentarily, then she turned to look at him with haunted eyes. “John, you’ve got one piece torn off a newspaper, and that’s all there is. One piece of a newspaper!”

“An American newspaper.”

“There might be half-a-dozen Gilpinstons in this country, and even if it is an American newspaper—what of it? Have you considered that it might be a weekly newspaper, printed days in advance?”

Redpath had not thought of that possibility, but he dismissed it as being irrelevant. “All that matters is that I was able to produce physical evidence for something that people said had only happened in my imagination. Can’t you see what that meant to me?”

“I saw what it did to you.”

“Fair comment.” Some quirk in Redpath’s mental make-up made him feel oddly uplifted by the challenge implicit in Leila’s remark. “You’re a rational person, and—not having experienced all that I experienced yesterday at first hand—you require more evidence. There’s nothing wrong with that, nothing at all.” He spoke pleasantly, slipping into a near-imitation of Henry Nevison’s best professorial manner. “Now, what other evidence can I produce to strengthen my case? Intriguing little problem, isn’t it?”

Instead of being amused, Leila eyed him with something which could have been desperation. “John, do you realise what you’re saying? Do you remember what you told us in the office this morning, the part about finding two flayed bodies in the bath in that house? Are you going to try proving that really happened, as well?”

Redpath’s confidence wavered. “Was that not in the nightmare? It’s getting hard to keep track of what was real and what was…” He looked about him with narrowed eyes, fighting against the swarming sensation inside his head, and his gaze fixed itself on Leila’s bedside telephone. A strange idea was born in his mind, an idea which struck him as all the more bizarre in the context because it was entirely practical. He picked up the phone, dialled for the operator and asked to be put through to the international directory enquiry service.

Leila set her orange stick aside. “What are you doing?”

“It’s all right,” he said in sudden manic glee. “I’ll pay for the call. Give me a pen or something—quickly!” He took the eyebrow pencil she handed him and gestured for silence as the connection was made. In little more than a minute he had written the telephone number of the Gilpinston Bugle across the skin of his right knee.

“There we are,” he said triumphantly, indicating the dark sprawl of numerals. “You wanted proof, and proof is what you’re going to get.”

Leila came towards him. “I asked what you were doing.”

“Just listen to this—Illinois is five or six hours behind us, so it should be mid-afternoon there.” He dialled the international code for the United States, followed by the number of the Bugle, and the call was answered almost immediately. “My name is John Redpath and I’m calling from England,” he said in a businesslike voice. “Tell me, please—is the Bugle a daily newspaper?”

“Yes, sir. We publish six days a week.” The voice of the switchboard girl was clear in the bedroom. “Can I help you?”

“There was no need to make an international call to prove that,” Leila whispered furiously. “There are newspaper directories in the…”

Redpath held one finger to his lips and spoke into the phone. “I have an interesting story for your paper—could you put me through to a reporter, please?” He grinned at Leila during the brief wait, filled with a heady confidence in his own ability.

“Reporters’ room, Dave Knight speaking,” a male voice said with some diffidence. “Did you say you were calling from England, Mr Redpath?”

“Yes, indeed. I’m connected with the Jeavons Institute, Calbridge, which is a research offshoot of the University College of South Haverside. My department is researching some aspects of E.S.P., and something interesting has just cropped up which—believe it or not—has a direct link with Gilpinston, Illinois.”

“Did you say E.S.P.?” The voice was alert now.

Redpath winked at Leila. “That’s what I said.”

“Is there someone from Gilpinston working on this research?”

“It’s more interesting than that, Dave, as I think you’ll agree. The reason I’m calling you is that one of our subjects swears he has projected his consciousness into a house in Gilpinston. Visited it yesterday without actually going there in the flesh, if you know what I mean.”

“Are we talking about something like an astral body?”

“Something like that, although we wouldn’t use that particular term. The point is that our subject has given us a precise description of the house and the street it’s in. We have no way of knowing how much of this is just his imagination, but if the details did happen to check out you would have a very nice little offbeat story on your hands. What do you think?”

There was a pause. “It would be a nice story if I could be sure it wasn’t some kind of a hoax, Mr Redpath. I’m not implying anything, but…”

“No, no! You’re right to be sceptical—I’m sceptical myself. I’ll give you my number here in England so that you can call me back, and I’ll also give you Professor Nevison’s number at the institute. You could speak to him there tomorrow and confirm everything before you go into print. Of course, if you’d prefer that I went to some other paper…”

“No, I don’t want you to do that, Mr Redpath—I’m very glad you rang us first. Now, did you say you had an exact address in Gilpinston?”

“The street is 13th Avenue S.E. and the house number is 2224. Does that sound feasible?” Receiving an affirmative, Redpath went on to describe the house, mentioning that the owner’s name could be Rodgers, and giving every significant detail he could recall—pale blue front door, diagonal line of metal numerals, fire hydrant immediately outside, Gruber’s Delicatessen at the corner, a bar known as Pete’s Palace next door… He concluded by stating Leila’s telephone number and saying he would wait for a return call.

“Okay, it won’t take me long to drive out to 13th Avenue and check this out,” Knight said. “Is there anything else?”

“Well…” Redpath hesitated, sensing that he was going too far, introducing an unaccountable element of danger, but Leila’s earlier remark had implanted a nagging doubt about the blurring of the line between reality and nightmare. “I don’t want to give you the subject’s name at this stage, but there was something about the bathroom in the house, something frightening that he didn’t want to talk about. I don’t even know why I’m mentioning this—you’ll hardly be going right into the house, will, you?”

“It all depends,” Knight said, the dubious note returning to his voice. “You have to play this sort of thing by ear.”

“I’ll look forward to hearing from you.” Redpath set the phone down and got up to face Leila, who was standing with her hands on her hips in what was almost a caricature of outrage. His feeling of manic elation had ebbed, but in its place was a comforting sense of having taken a positive action, no matter how slight, against the forces of chaos and unreason. It had been his first opportunity to strike back.

“You’d no right to do that, John Redpath,” Leila said, her eyes brilliant with anger. “What’s Henry going to say if the newspapers do pick this up? Do you realise the position he could be in?”

“Do you think I’m enjoying this?” Redpath reached for his shirt and began getting dressed. “Do you think I’m having fun?”

“Perhaps not, but…”

“Perhaps not! Leila, I’m trying to fight my way back into the human race. I’m all alone in this thing, but if that reporter calls back and says those details have checked out… Well, somebody will have to sit up and take notice, that’s all.”

“What if it works the other way?” Leila said. “What if the other place doesn’t exist?”

He gave her a wry smile. “Then I’ll know I was bombed out of my mind all day yesterday. I’ll just have to take it from there.”

“Promise?”

“Don’t even need to promise—I wouldn’t go against the facts.”

“In that case, do you want a green salad or a potato salad with your chicken?” Leila said, with a visible change of mood.

Redpath understood at once that she was anticipating a negative report from Dave Knight, and that she would prefer not to discuss the subject in the meantime. The idea of a truce, of a return to normal living—no matter how temporary—had an undeniable attraction for him, and he readily entered into the game.

“Green salad,” he said, “but I want to mix my special Italian dressing for it. This new recipe I’ve got doesn’t just stimulate the taste buds—it makes them roam up and down your tongue in armed gangs demanding more and more.”

Leila went to the door. “Why do you always exaggerate?”

“Have you ever seen a mob of taste buds in a threatening mood?” he said, following her into the kitchen. “A fearsome sight!”

He helped Leila prepare a simple evening meal, and while they were eating it discovered that one of his favourite films—a 1944 comedy-thriller called Scared Stiff, starring Jack Haley—was having a rare showing on television. Leila agreed to watch it with him, and while they sat together in the companionable dusk, laughing at the same things that people had laughed at in another time and place, building bridges, he found himself wishing that the telephone would not ring. He wanted to rest for a while. He was tired of arguing and being afraid, and of struggling to assimilate concepts which were alien to the world-view which had sustained him since infancy, and there was a magical peace-fulness in being able to lie back on a deep settee beside the woman he loved while darkness drifted down from the sky and there was no need to resist being drawn into the beguiling little universe of the cathode ray tube, where Jack Haley’s face periodically floated in space…a comet…a comic comet…a comic comet rendering him comatose…

Redpath slipped easily and cleanly into sleep.

Some miles away, on the far side of Calbridge, the blue-white street lights had begun to glow all along the redbrick canyon of the Woodstock Road, casting unnatural shadows, producing odd changes in the apparent colours of people’s clothes and cars. Buses were still plying the road—compact, mobile constellations of yellow stars—and further salients were carved into the darkness by the lights of the corner shops; honey-coloured in the case of the confectioners, tobacconists, fish-and-chippers, and the old-style public houses; cold, motionless fluorescent white in the case of those building society branches, estate agencies and utilities stores whose fronts were illuminated all night to encourage window-shoppers and deter thieves. Traffic lights added their contributions of ruby, topaz and emerald to the slim chain of radiance, and would continue to do so all through the night, patiently orchestrating the flow and counter-flow of vehicles which existed only in the proto-minds of their automatic control boxes.

It would never really get dark on the Woodstock Road, but from a comparatively early hour night held full sway in the narrow tributaries which disgorged into it. The lamps were feebler and much further apart in those lesser streets. Some of the lights had fallen into disrepair without attracting the attention of the council’s engineering and maintenance departments, others had been vandalised for pleasure or with an eye to clandestine profit. It was only necessary to walk a hundred yards from the main road, and perhaps make a couple of turns, to enter a black region where pedestrians were few. Those who did venture out at night tended to walk quickly, with their heads down, and to keep themselves to themselves.

And there was nobody at all abroad in Raby Street, nobody to pay any attention or to pass any comment, when lights suddenly began to glimmer behind the curtains of the house with the numerals 131 above its blistered brown door.

For a moment Redpath was looking down at an expanse of green-and-cream floor tiles and he feared the nightmare had begun again, but this time there was a qualitative difference in the experience. He was able to interpret the visual pattern almost immediately, and he knew with utter certainty that the radiant squares were part of a huge machine.

The display panel of a computer and the instrumentation of an aircraft were the nearest parallels he could envisage, but the engineering principles employed here were far removed from anything which had originated in human minds. It was likely that information was being presented, and yet both form and content were unintelligible to Redpath. There were signs of continuous, furtive movement beneath some of the translucent slabs, and he knew that its origins were neither mechanical nor electronic—the machine incorporated living organic components which served it in ways beyond his understanding.

The complex image held steady before him—not a memory, not an illusion, not a dream.

This is a reality. It isn’t my reality, but it’s a reality nevertheless, and I’m sharing it.

As had happened before, a brown slurry surged across the glowing checkerwork, like a tide of clotting blood, and in places the light from brighter panels shone upwards through it with the redness of port wine, revealing a thready internal structure. At the advancing edge of the mass there was a constant agitation of pseudopods which probed and tested the surface before filling out with dark fluids and being reabsorbed. But Redpath felt no fear, no revulsion.

That is part of my body, in this reality. I am a Thrice-born, in this reality, and I have travelled far in pursuit of a Once-born, an abomination who sought to break the decreed cycle of in-gestion, purification and renascence. He committed the ultimate crime against my kind, the crime of permitting his bioplasm to degenerate with age. The disease, for that is what he has become, must be eradicated because it would be almost as great a crime to allow such malignancy to exist.

I have been scry-sensing for him very carefully during these latter years of the pursuit, in this reality, and I know that he is injured, or that the process of degeneration has greatly advanced, because he has not made use of his higher powers in all that time. He must, therefore, be close to his ship. It will be sufficient to locate the ship…

As had happened before, four squares near the centre of the vari-coloured pattern grew darker and merged into one, taking on the semblance of a transparent hatch which covered a well of night. But now the blackness was far from complete. It formed the background and setting for the brilliant blue-white disc of a planet which was quickly identifiable as Earth. The planet was growing close.

It will be sufficient to locate the ship, and then…

Something bad happened to Redpath.

There was a loosening, a flicker-shifting of geometries. The image before him twitched and altered its colours and proportions, and suddenly he was at a remove from that reality, and the thoughts he had been share-thinking—cold, ascetic, dispassionate—were obliterated in a vortex of dark emotions. Fear mingled with hatred, anger and contempt, but the fear was ever dominant, engulfing him in a writhing, raging blackness which was shot through with memory fragments, partial images, shards of an unimaginably alien existence. For an instant that life was congruent with Redpath’s life.

He began to scream. NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!

Redpath was running in a twisted corridor. The corners were sharp and difficult to negotiate at speed, and his progress was further hindered by the fact that the corridor had been designed to resemble a series of connected rooms, such as would be found in an ordinary dwelling. There was a hall, a kitchen and a living-room—endlessly repeated—and in the living-room was a television set which shone in the dimness like a miniature stained glass window. Close to the television was a girl who sat huddled on a settee, rocking backwards and forwards in terror, her hands covering her face. He became aware of the faint sounds of her distress, then there came the shock of recognition, a sense of guilt and responsibility.

“Leila?” Redpath clung to the jamb of the kitchen door, less for support than to quell the remnants of a blind instinct to flee. “Don’t cry, Leila—I know it all now. I know everything.”

She continued to cower, to make herself as small as possible.

He crossed the room, turned off the television and knelt in front of her. “Don’t cry, Leila. We’ve both got things to do, and there’s very little time. Look at me, please.”

She raised her head slowly. Her face was wan and miserable, robbed of beauty, and he knew at once that the first vital step in his plan would be to calm her down and restore her confidence in him. The necessary task which lay ahead of Leila Mostyn was even more demanding than his own in some ways, and she would be unable to face it unless he armed her with knowledge and trust.

“Don’t be afraid of me,” he whispered. “I got a bad shock, but I’m all right now and we’ve got to talk. Will you listen to me for a while and try to understand what I’m saying, no matter how fantastic it might seem? Will you?”

“What is it, John?” Her lips seemed to be numb, scarcely moving as she spoke.

He took a deep breath. “I said some incredible things today, and nobody would believe me—and then I came up with concrete proof. Just remember that and trust me and hear me out. The telepathy project was more successful than any of us expected, Leila—the fact is that I’ve been in mental contact with beings from another planet. Does that sound too fantastic for words?”

“Not if you say so.”

“Good! We’re making progress. The next thing to understand is that these beings are totally unlike anything you’ve ever seen. They don’t look like us and they don’t think like us. Their bodies are soft, almost entirely liquid. They can flow like syrup, or jam that hasn’t set, but that doesn’t stop them being intelligent and having a social structure. Are you still with me?

“The contact I made didn’t last long, but it was clear—too clear—and I know that their society is based on a form of cannibalism. When an individual reaches a certain age he allows himself to be eaten or absorbed by a younger being, and somehow he seems to survive the experience and be reborn or reincarnated. Though maybe he doesn’t really survive it. Maybe it’s a matter of faith with them, like a religion, and that could be where the trouble started—I think I’d be inclined to run away when my time came round. Maybe I ought to feel some sympathy for that thing in Raby Street.”

Leila started visibly and made to turn away, but he put a hand under her chin and forced her to continue looking at him.

“He ran away, Leila. And a long time ago—twenty or thirty years ago, perhaps even during the war—he came down on Earth, probably falling at random, and I don’t think I need to spell out exactly where. A couple of houses have been chopped out of the row behind Raby Street, and I’d say that’s where his ship went in. The damage could have been put down to a bomb, or maybe a gas explosion, and nobody has ever had any reason to suspect otherwise or dig deep underneath.

“That’s how it all started, but you can’t understand what’s been going on all these years unless you know more about these aliens. They’ve got psi powers, Leila. Their bodies are pretty useless as machines, but they compensated by evolving a whole range of talents that enabled them to beat the competition— telepathy, psychokinesis, precognition, other abilities that we haven’t even got names for. Mental control of animals is one of them, and it was probably developed for feeding purposes. Tele-hypnosis, you might call it, though I doubt if…”

“John, can we have some tea?” Leila said, her throat vibrating in his fingers. “This is all so…I’d love some tea.”

“Good idea.” He made his voice warm and encouraging, anxious to demonstrate that he was entirely rational and reasonable, and in that way give extra credence to his words. A sense of desperate urgency was pounding at the doors of his mind, but nothing could be done until Leila was fully convinced and won over. He stood back, allowing her to rise, and then followed her into the kitchen. She looked cold and tired as she filled the electric kettle. He resolved to proceed with even greater care.

“The mental control aspect is one of the things that scares me most, because it’s so insidious. There’s no way of telling how deep and how far back it goes, but we know this alien is intelligent and devious, and it’s been drawing up its plans for a long time. A dentist used to have that house in Raby Street—now, did he choose it by accident, merely because it was suitable for his needs and the district hadn’t yet declined at that time? Or was he influenced in his decision because a dentist’s surgery draws in a lot of people and the thing that was waiting under the ground wanted access to as many minds as possible?

“I was in that house when I was a kid—is that anything to do with my developing a vestige of telepathic ability? Is that why I volunteered for the screening tests at the Jeavons? And you heard Henry Nevison suggest that the house had been used by a dentist—is that what led to his interest in parapsychology in the first place?

“How many local bigwigs, who might otherwise have blocked an off-beat research project in a place like the Jeavons, were manipulated into going along with it? And what about all the people who live nearby? Is their natural curiosity damped down in some way so that they pay no attention to odd activities?”

Leila set out cups and saucers, then opened a lacquered tin and brought out a rectangular madeira cake. She looked around, strangely hesitant, took a long knife from the wall rack and began to cut the cake into thin slices, working with painstaking care.

“I don’t understand that part,” she said, in something like her normal tones. “What would be the point of all that mind-control and manipulation?”

“Life or death—it’s as simple as that. Our visitor is being hunted by another member of its own race, a killer with a spectrum of senses you and I can’t even visualize, and it had to lie low. For a human fugitive that could mean not moving or making a sound; for the monster we’re talking about it meant not using many of its natural abilities. The problem was that it couldn’t survive without those abilities, so what did it do? How did it get out of the dilemma?”

Leila paused in her meticulous slicing of the cake. “By using substitutes.”

“Exactly right,” Redpath said, encouraged. For minutes he had been listening to his own voice with growing dismay and wondering if any person who had not been directly involved could ever believe a story of such extravagance. He had set out to soothe and coax Leila into acceptance, then it had seemed to him that his calmness was defeating its own purpose, that it would have been right and appropriate for him to give way to his dread, to howl out to all the world his foreknowledge of the fact that the megadeaths were coming and there was very little time in which to do anything about it. Leila, however, was responding better than he had at first anticipated, and it appeared he was getting his message across to her.

“Exactly right,” he repeated. “That’s what the people in that house really are—substitutes, stand-ins, prosthetics. That’s the common factor I was looking for. You can see how they all work together, each one serving in his or her own way and allowing the…the puppet master to remain in hiding. The hunter has no interest in human beings and our activities, even our rare paranormal activities, apparently don’t register with it. And that other thing has been living under the house in Raby Street for years, decades, using human beings the way we use pack animals and discarding them when they become useless.”

“Without anybody noticing?”

“It tries hard to be inconspicuous—and it’s done a bloody good job over the years considering that we’re as alien to it as it is to us. The concept of the family unit must be completely foreign to it, but it tries to present the outside world with the right sort of picture. They have a sing-song in the front parlour every night, and everybody smiles and looks happy, and Miss Connie knits the way an old lady is supposed to, but she doesn’t knit anything in particular. She just knits. I had one night of that, Leila, but the others have been going through it for years, night after night after night…”

Redpath paused, momentarily distracted. “Did you ever think of hell as a shabby old room, with rexine armchairs and luncheon meat sandwiches, where you’re not allowed to scream in case you disturb the neighbours?”

Leila toyed thoughtfully with the knife. “It’s hard to credit that a group of people could be held and controlled that way against their wills.”

“But it’s true, Leila—though I’ve a feeling it isn’t an entirely straightforward or consistent effect. I think you have to get within close range of the beast in the early stages. That’s why Betty York was sent out to bring me to the house any way she could. If you ask me, Albert is the only one who might be awkward at times. I’m nearly sure he…what do they call it in that kids’ TV show?…‘jaunts’ over to the States every now and then just to buy American cigarettes. Possibly he would be the hardest one to control because of the way he can flit about. There’s that business of whipping me off to the house in Gilpin-ston with him—I’ll bet you that was a nasty little trick of his own. He wanted to…”

Redpath hesitated again, frowning. “You were right about the bodies in the bathtub, Leila. That wasn’t in the nightmare, was it? It must have really happened, but why would anybody want to peel dead bodies? There must be something I don’t…” He stopped speaking as a familiar but loathsome sensation manifested itself behind his eyes. There was a slithering coldness in his brain. Inside his head was a worm, a giant worm which had begun to coil and uncoil.

“There’s something I still don’t understand.” Leila turned to face him, still casually holding the long knife. “If you were in that house, fully under the thing’s control, how did you break free?”

Redpath pressed both hands to his temples and gave her a numb, lop-sided smile. “Can’t you guess? I thought that part was obvious.” He swayed slightly as the disturbance in his mind intensified, and when he spoke again his voice was pitched unnaturally high. “I’ve been wasting time…thought I was safe…I’m needed, you see…it needs me to give warning—just before the bomb comes…the Thrice-born is going to bomb the ship, and he’ll use a big bomb, an area weapon…there’ll be no more England, Leila…perhaps no more Europe…”

He made a shuddering intake of breath, staring at Leila as though seeing her for the first time, and fought to control the spasmodic twitching which had developed in the muscles around his mouth. “Here’s what you’ve got to do, Leila. That house in Gilpinston is the bolt-hole, and that’s why it’s so far away. Seconds before the bomb explodes…just before the big bang…the thing, the puppet master, will be taken there by Albert. After the bomb explodes there’ll be complete silence. Scry-silence, I mean. The Thrice-born will wait for a time, listening, but there’ll be complete silence, and he’ll go away again, satisfied.

“I’ll probably be dead, too—because the puppet master won’t take the risk of my somehow revealing it’s still alive, but you can prevent all that. You and I working together can prevent all that—by killing the puppet master before the bomb is dropped. The Thrice-born will know what has happened. He’ll scry-sense it and he won’t drop the bomb. At least, I don’t think he will. You’ll help me, won’t you, Leila? Say you’ll help me, for Christ’s sake!”

Redpath lurched forward and grabbed Leila by the shoulders, crooking his fingers deep into the soft flesh. She flinched and her lips moved silently as she thrust the knife into him. The pain was a shocking, sickening admixture of every other pain he had known. Retaining his grip on Leila’s shoulders, he looked down at the knife. It had gone through his shirt and penetrated some distance into the gathering of subcutaneous fat just above his belt, but the thrust had been checked at that point. Leila, still gripping the handle of the knife, was locked in a trembling rigidity.

“You didn’t mean to do that,” he said gently, almost benignly, taking the blade from her and drawing it clear of his own body. “I frightened you, and you reacted out of fear, and we’re not going to let a minor incident like that affect our plans, are we?”

“No, John.” Leila’s voice was virtually inaudible and tears glistened on her cheeks. “I’m sorry I…”

“Good girl!” Redpath set the knife down, tore a handful of kitchen tissue from the wall-mounted roller and tucked it inside his shirt, forming a loose pad in the region of the wound. Blood had been channelled along the top of his belt, creating a broad horizontal stain across his waist. He applied pressure to the pad with his left forearm and turned his attention back to Leila. The geyser of pain seemed to have had a purging scouring effect within his head, but the intangible pressures had increased immeasurably. Something had been thwarted, and now it was impatient and angry.

“Can’t talk much longer,” he said in whispered panic. “It wants to listen. Don’t take time to pack a bag, Leila—just get your passport and credit cards and all the money you have. If you leave now you can be at London Airport soon after midnight. With luck you’ll be able to get a walk-on flight to Chicago before morning. As soon as you get there find some…”

“Chicago!” Leila backed away from him, shaking her head. “I can’t.”

“Don’t argue!“Redpath’s voice was thunderous in the confined space of the kitchen, and his gaze alternated wildly between Leila’s face and the knife which was lying beside the sink. “Why are you arguing? You bitch! What are you trying to do?”

“John, I …” Leila stared at him for a moment, eyes flaring white, then turned and ran into the living-room.

Redpath—swearing dementedly, his limbs rigid with fury—picked up the knife and went after her.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Mini’s engine, powered by a new battery, turned over with all the scrabbling eagerness of a terrier going after a rat, shaking the framework of the vehicle with its energy, but the ignition sequence refused to sustain itself. Alarmed by the engine’s perversity, Leila Mostyn kept turning the key and pumping the accelerator pedal until a listless note amid the mechanical frenzy told her she had flooded the system. She paused, trying to breathe steadily, and looked back over her shoulder towards the house. The lights were on in the narrow outside stairwell, and at any second she could expect to see the tall, lurching, stoop-shouldered, bleak-eyed apparition that had once been John Red-path bounding down the concrete steps. It was a vision which threatened to undermine what was left of her self-control. She bit her lower lip, forced herself to count slowly to sixty and tried the starter again. The engine fired into healthy life.

She switched on the lights, swerved the car out through the gates into the Leicester Road and drove towards the town centre. Her intention was to go straight to the Calbridge police station, but at a distance of a hundred yards from the house—encased in a mobile metal shell which gave her the ability to outpace the devil himself—the crushing sense of fear abated slightly and old modes of thought began to reassert themselves. She knew John Redpath and, regardless of what had happened to him or had been done to him, the notion of handing him over to the authorities to be restrained and sedated and mentally dissected seemed like the ultimate act of betrayal. He was insane, frighteningly insane—so much so that in one hideous moment of panic she had almost sunk a knife into his body—but it had to be a temporary condition, caused by the treatment he had received at the institute.

Henry Nevison would know what to do, she decided. Henry could give the best advice, would have all the right polysyllables on tap. Should Compound 183 prove to have psychosomimetic properties…And so on, and so on.

At the thought of being able to transfer her burden of responsibility to Nevison’s shoulders, where it properly belonged, Leila reduced the car’s speed, and at once other considerations came into her mind. If she brought the police in now there would be an immediate explosion of scandal—the story the media would noise abroad would be a sensational cocktail of strange Karloffian experiments, madness, flying saucers, and blood-letting in a suburban love nest—and it would be harmful to everybody who was directly or indirectly involved. The repercussions would reach as far as her own parents down in Pangbourne.

A fresh decision made, she turned left at the next intersection and went left again so that she was driving back the way she had come on an avenue which ran parallel to Leicester Road. At the first cross-street above her starting point she made another left turn, drove slowly to the end of the street and halted almost at the corner in a position from which she could observe the entrance to her apartment house. She switched off the car’s lights but left the engine running, unwilling to risk the consequences of perhaps being noticed by John when he emerged and not being able to take flight in time. His sudden lunatic rages in the flat had been terrifying enough, but she sensed they would be as childish tantrums compared to what he would do on learning she was not at that moment speeding on her way to Gilpinston, via London Airport and Chicago.

Leila gave an involuntary shudder and drew her coat closer together at her throat as she recalled those last few minutes alone with John in the apartment…his abrupt descent into total irrationality…the brandishing of the knife as he followed her about in search of her passport…the incoherence and the wild ramblings…

Remember the address, Leila…I can beat the puppet master, but it doesn’t know that…go straight to Gilpinston…the Thrice-born is too close…hire a car if you need one…fill the bottles with petrol and stop up the necks with rags…I can break the control, but the Once-born doesn’t know…both houses have to go up at the same time…we can kill it, Leila.…midnight tomorrow night—that’s seven o’clock in Illinois…don’t worry—the bottles won’t explode in your hand…have faith, just have faith in me…light the rags and throw the bottles through the front windows…the Thrice-born will know what has happened …

And then as a final touch of unreason, ludicrous and inexplicable, there had been the business with her television set. He had tinkered with the small controls at the back of the set until he had identified the vertical hold adjuster, then had shown it to her and had made her kneel down and grip the knurled projection. He had switched the set on, turned his back to it and covered his eyes with both hands, and had ordered her to rotate the control until the television picture was far out of adjustment, rolling upwards so quickly that it was almost impossible to guess what was on the screen.

Is it rolling? His voice had been timid. I’m afraid to look.

At that moment, and only for a moment, her pity for him had almost overcome the sense of fear that was yammering through the molecular corridors of her nervous system. He had looked and sounded bemused—as childishly vulnerable as she had sometimes known him to be when faced with an unexpected challenge—and she had dared hope that the dark shadow was lifting from his mind. But within a second of the set being switched off he had dragged her to the entrance of the flat and had thrown her on to the landing. His face had been distorted, inhuman.

Run, Leila! For God’s sake…for all our sakes…RUN!

As she gazed into the night-time stillness of the suburban road, at the receding row of gateway pillars and the trees whose leaves had been turned into Yuletide plastic by the intervening street lights, Leila began to wonder if she ought to have set off to Henry Nevison’s house. She had seen John struggling into his suede jacket and had concluded that he was about to leave—but was any logical deduction valid in his case? Several minutes had gone by since her escape and it appeared that he was still in the flat. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel and had given the accelerator a tentative jab when there was a movement on the opposite side of the road.

John Redpath emerged into the light and turned in the direction of the town. He was walking slowly, like an elderly man, and had his left arm pressed to his side. In his right hand he was carrying a case-like object which she had to look at twice before recognising it as her portable television. With shoulders hunched and head lowered, apparently oblivious to his surroundings, Redpath made his way from one island of light to the next. The renewal of the pity she had felt earlier was like a physical pain to Leila. She watched Redpath’s diminishing figure until it was lost in the tunnel of perspective, then she drove across the road and parked outside the flats.

On reaching the first landing she discovered he had left the door open and the lights switched on inside her apartment. She locked the door behind her, went straight to the telephone and dialled Nevison’s number. The phone was answered immediately and she had begun to speak before realising it was a recording machine at the other end of the line. After stating her name and requesting a return call without delay, she hung up and stood by the phone for another minute, unsuccessfully trying to think of someone else to whom she might turn for help. Frank Pardey was unlikely to be in at that time, and even had he been she could not face the prospect of telling him that John was temporarily insane and had thrown her out of her own flat and stolen her television set, but that no charges were to be preferred.

Feeling tense and nervous, she slipped out of her coat and hung it up, and for the sake of the physical action tidied away the remains of the evening meal and washed the dishes. A profound sadness had settled over her by the time she finished, colouring all her thoughts and threatening to overwhelm her each time she considered the extent of the calamity which had overtaken Redpath. In only two days he had been transformed from an unremarkable, likeable i>flâneur with a certain desperate charm, whose main fault had been possessiveness, into an unpredictable stranger with a mind which appeared to have been sapped by the wildest outpourings of the super-nature cultists and flying saucer cranks.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the change was the air of utter, fanatical conviction with which he elaborated his fantasies. Leila had known a boy in Pangbourne who had drifted into a mental never-never land and who on occasion had talked for hours about the emissaries from the Kingdom of Orion who would descend from the skies some day and seek him out, but always there had been a lurking bafflement in his eyes. The reason for it was that he had retained some contact with reality and was struggling to reconcile two conflicting world-views. John, on the other hand, spoke with a dreadful certainty, was entirely convinced. She knew little about abnormal psychology, but she had a growing suspicion that delusions of such completeness and intensity were likely to have a lasting effect. Could it be that Compound 183 was not merely psychosomimetic, but had served as a trigger for permanent mental derangement?

The idea that the old John Redpath might be gone for ever brought with it the realization that she had unconsciously begun to accept him as a fixture in her life. Ruffled by the discovery that the part of her which romantic writers referred to as the heart—and which she had presumed to keep fully under control—was in fact a wilful organ, capable of hatching subversive schemes of its own, Leila made some coffee and retired to the living-room to await Nevison’s call. At midnight she thought of going to bed, but decided against it on the off-chance that what she had to say to Nevison might prompt him to come to the flat. She made herself comfortable on the settee, read the first two chapters of a paperback novel without getting into the story, and eventually relaxed into a light sleep.

The measured clamour of the phone bell shocked her into wakefulness at a few minutes past one. She sat up, feeling cold and apprehensive, ran into the hall and picked up the phone.

“Thank you, thank you for ringing, Henry,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for…”

“Pardon me.” The interruption came from an unfamiliar voice. “Am I calling the right number for Mr Redpath?”

Leila identified the accent as American and her sense of foreboding suddenly increased. “You’ve got the right number, but John isn’t at home at the moment.”

“Oh! When will he be available?”

“Not for some time,” she said, then yielded to an impulse she scarcely understood. “He was called away on an urgent matter, but he asked me to take your call. I’m Leila Mostyn and I work with John at the institute. I know why he telephoned you of course.”

“I was really hoping to speak to Mr Redpath.”

“Isn’t that Mr Knight of the Gilpinston Bugle?”

“Yes, indeed.” Apparently reassured by the foreknowledge of his name, Knight allowed a note of animation to enter his voice. “I’ve been down to 13th Avenue, Miss…Mizz…”

“Leila, please.”

“Thank you, Leila. As I was saying, I’ve been to the house_ and it’s all there! Every detail checks out as predicted—even the name of the owners. A Mr and Mrs T. E. Rodgers, I’m told, though nobody in the street has seen them around for quite some time. I thought Mr Redpath would want to know right off.”

“It was good of you to call,” Leila said numbly. She floundered for a moment, unable to make the orthodox logical connections which would prove that this, too, was spurious evidence, that no assessments of John Redpath needed to be revised.

“I’d like to get the story into tomorrow’s paper, but Mr Redpath didn’t give me a number for…umm…Professor Nevison,” Knight continued. “Do you happen to…?”

“Professor Nevison is out of town,” Leila said quickly, almost as a reflex. “I should warn you that he’s very sceptical about the whole thing. To be perfectly honest, he’ll be pretty annoyed when he learns that John spoke to you without his authorization. He takes the view that every bit of that information could have been obtained from directories or letters or from conversation.”

“I thought so, too—except for the bit about the bathroom.”

“The bathroom?” Leila was suddenly aware of the darkness which pressed inwards at all the windows. “What about the bathroom?”

“Well, it turns out they had quite a bit of excitement in that neighbourhood yesterday morning. The house has been empty for a while, but one of the local kids noticed the front door lying open and he decided to have a walk inside. Probably hoping to pick up some small change—you know how it is with kids. Anyway, he came out of there an awful lot faster than he went in, and his mother found him hiding under his bed. It took her about an hour to get him to talk about it, but the kid swore he went up to the bathroom—just to use the facilities, you understand—and he saw two corpses lying in the tub.”

“How ghastly,” Leila said in a distant voice.

“That’s not all of it. The kid said the bodies had no skin on them, and apparently he got so worked up that his mother sent for the police. When they got there the house was all closed up, but a woman who lives across the street said she’d seen a redheaded guy in a brown jacket running into it earlier on. So the cops got a locksmith to let them in and they checked the bathroom.”

“Well?”

“It was as clean as a whistle. Nothing there. The whole place was empty.”

Leila made her voice cool, unimpressed. “In other words, the whole episode amounts to precisely nothing.”

“You don’t understand,” Knight whinnied. “Mr Redpath told me there was something …”

“Mr Redpath has a vivid imagination—and I really don’t think there’s any point in continuing this conversation. Goodbye, Mr Knight.” Leila hung up the phone on the reporter’s startled protests and slumped back against the wall, breathing deeply, bracing herself as though the world was tilting away from under her feet.

She remained in that attitude for more than a minute, then straightened up and walked to her coat, which was hanging on the opposite wall. The gilded black booklet of her passport was partially visible in one of the pockets. She stared at it with sombre eyes, coming to a decision, then went into the bedroom and began to pack an overnight bag.