The Puffin Book of Horror Stories

Robert Westall The Vacancy

It was in a side-street, in the window of a little brown-brick office. Neatly written, on fresh clean card:

Martin pulled up, surveyed it suspiciously. Why specify a lad? Illegal, under the Sex-discrimination Act. England was a land of equal opportunity; to be unemployed. Martin laughed, without mirth. The employment-police would be on to that straight away, and he didn't want to get involved with the employment-police. But perhaps the employment-police wouldn't bother coming down here. It was such a dingy lost little street. In all his travels he'd never come across a street so lost.

He parked his bike against the dull brown wall. An early 1980s racing-bike, his pride and joy. Salvaged from the conveyor-belt to the metal-eater in the nick of time, rusty and wheelless. He'd haunted the metal-eater for months after that, watching for spare parts. The security cameras round the metal-eater watched him; or seemed to watch him. They moved constantly, but you could never tell if they were on automatic.

Anyway, he'd rebuilt the bike; resprayed it. Spent three months' unemployment benefit on oil and aerosols. Now it shone, and got him round from district to district. The district gate-police didn't like him wheeling it through, but it wasn't illegal. The government hadn't bothered making bikes illegal, just stopped production altogether, including spare parts. Cycling had imperceptibly died out.

You had to be careful, travelling from district to district. In some, the unemployed threw stones and worse. In others, it was said, they strung up strangers from lamp-posts, as government spies. Though that was probably a rumour spread by the gate-police. He'd never suffered more than the odd, half-hearted stone, even in the beginning. Now, they all knew his bike, gathered round to get the news.

But he'd travelled far that morning, further than ever before, because of the row with his father.

'Your constant moaning makes me sick,' the old man had said, putting on his worker's cap with the numbered brass badge. 'I keep you — you get free sport, free contraceptives, free drugs and a twenty-channel telly. You lie in bed till tea-time. At your age…'

'You had a job,' shouted Martin. 'In 1981, at the age of sixteen, you were given a job, which you still have.'

'Some job. Two hours a day. Four times in two hours a bloody bell rings and I check a load of dials and write the numbers in a book that nobody needs and nobody reads. Call that a job for a trained electrician?'

'You have a reason to get up in the morning — mates at work.'

'Mates? I see the fore-shift when I clock on, and the back-shift when I clock off. My nearest mate is ten minutes' walk away. Where you going?'

'Out. On my bike.'

'You think you're so bloody clever wi' that bike. And your bloody wanderings. Why can't you stay where you were born, like everybody else?'

"Cos I'm not like everybody else. And they're not going to make me.'

'You want to button your lip, talking like that. Or they'll hear you.'

'Or you'll tell them.' Then Martin saw the look on his father's face and was sorry. The old man would never do a thing like that. Not like some fathers…

He was still staring at the card offering the vacancy when a blond kid came out and spat on the pavement with a lot of feeling.

'Been havin' a go?' asked Martin mildly.

'It's a con,' said the kid. 'They set you an intelligence test that would sink the Prime Minister.' He was no slouch or lout, either. Still held himself upright; switched-on blue eyes. Another lost sixth-former. 'Waste of time!'

'I don't know…' said Martin. In school, he'd been rather sharp on intelligence tests.

'Suit yourself,' said the blond kid, and walked away.

Martin still hesitated. Then it started to rain, spattering his thin jeans. That settled it. The grey afternoon looked so pointless that even failing an intelligence test sounded a big thrill. Sometimes they gave you coffee…

He walked in; the woman sitting knitting looked up, bored, plump and ginger. Pale blue eyes swam behind her spectacles like timid tropical fish.

'What's the vacancy?'

'Oh…just a general vacancy. Want to apply?'

He shrugged. 'Why not?' She passed him a ballpoint and a many-paged green intelligence test.

'Ready?' She clicked a stopwatch into action, and put it on the desk in front of her, as if she'd done it a million times before. 'Forty minutes.' He sighed with satisfaction as his ballpoint sliced into the test. It was like biting a ham sandwich, like coming home.

An hour later, she was pushing back agitated wisps of ginger hair and speaking into the office intercom, her voice a squeak of excitement, a near-mad glint in her blue tropical-fish eyes.

'Mr Boston — I've just tested a young man — a very high score — a very high score indeed. Highest score in months.'

'Contain yourself, Miss Feather. What is the score?' It was a deliberately dull voice that not only killed her excitement dead as a falling pigeon, but made her pull down her plaid skirt, already well below her knees.

'Four hundred and ninety-eight, Mr Boston.' 'Might be worth giving him a PA 52. Yes, try him with a PA 52. We've nothing better to do this afternoon.'

PA 52 was twice as thick as the other one. As Martin took it, a little warm shiver trickled down his spine. Gratitude? To them? For what? Not rejecting him outright, like the blond kid? He smashed down the gratitude with a heavy metal fist; they'd only fail him further on. They were just playing with him. They had no job; there were no jobs. Still, he might as well get something out of his moment of triumph. 'Could I have a cup of coffee? Before I start?' 'Oh, I think we could manage a cup of coffee. You start, and I'll put it by your elbow when it's ready.' She clucked around him like she was an old mother hen, and he the only egg she'd ever laid. Smoothly, with a sense of ascending power, he began to cut through PA 52.

'Sit down,' said Mr Boston, steepling long nicotined fingers. He consulted PA 52 slyly, slantingly. 'Erm… Martin, isn't it?'

'Mmmm,' said Martin. He thought that Boston, with his near-religious air of relaxed guilt and pinstripe brown suit (shiny at cuff and elbow, and no doubt backside, if backside had been visible) was more like a careers officer than any employer. Employers were much better dressed, ran frantic fingers through their hair, and expected to answer the phone any minute. Still, he'd only met two employers in his life; they'd turned him down before he left school.

'I see you're interested in working with people?'

'Oh, yes, very,' said Martin, outwardly eager, inwardly mocking. You were taught in first-year always to say you were terribly keen on people. Jobs with machinery no longer existed; only computers talked to computers now.

'I see leadership potential here.' Boston peered into PA 52 like it was a crystal ball. 'A lot of leadership. Do you find it easy to persuade others… your friends… to do what you want?'

'Oh yes.' Martin thought of the copies of his underground newspaper, rolled up and pushed down the hollow tubes of his bike, ready for distribution to the various districts. Getting the newspaper team together had taken a lot of persuasion. Persuading pretty little girls to be the news-gatherers, which meant sleeping with grubby elderly civil servants for the sake of their pillowtalk. Getting the printers, with their old hand-operated cyclostyling machine, set up in a makeshift hut in the middle of Rubbishtip 379, after the spy-cameras, sprayed daily with salt water, had rusted solid and stood helpless as stuffed birds. 'Yes, I find it easy to persuade others to do what I want.'

'Good,' said Mr Boston. He leaned forward to his intercom. 'Miss Feather — bring our friend Martin here another cup of coffee — the continental blend this time, I think.' Somewhere in the small terraced building a large electrical machine began to hum, slightly but not unpleasantly vibrating the old walls. Some percolator, Martin thought, with a slight smile. He was already starting to feel proprietorial, patronizing about this old dump.

Boston re-steepled his fingers, and slantingly consulted PA 52 again. 'And bags of initiative… you're a good long way from home, here. Five whole districts. Have you walked? You must be fit.'

'I've got an old bicycle…'

'A bike? Bless my soul.' So great was Boston's surprise that he took off his spectacles, folded their arms neatly across each other, and popped them into the breast-pocket of his suit. He surveyed Martin with naked eyes, candid, weary and brown-edged as an old dog's. 'I haven't seen a bike in years, though I did my share of riding as a boy. Where did you find this bike?'

'At the metal-eater. Had to build it up from bits.'

Mr Boston's excitement was now so great that he had to put his spectacles on again. 'Yes, yes, your mechanical aptitude and manual dexterity show up here on PA 52. And your patience. But…' and his voice fell like the Telly preacher's when he came to the Sins of the Flesh, 'it wasn't awfully honest, was it, taking that bike away from the metal-eater? It already belonged to the State…'

Martin's heart sank. This was the point where the job interview fell apart. Even before he got his second cup of coffee. It had been going so well… but he knew better than to try to paper over the cracks. He hardened his heart and got up.

'Stuff the State,' he said, watching Boston's eyes for the expression of shock that would be the last pay-off of this whole lousy business.

But Boston didn't looked shocked. He took off his spectacles and waved them; a look of boyish glee suffused his face.

'Stuff the State… exactly. Well, not exactly…' he corrected himself with an effort. 'We all depend upon the State, but we know it isn't omniscient. To the mender of washing-machines, the State supplies split-pins at a reasonable price, within a reasonable time. But suppose our supply of split-pins has run out already; because we imprudently neglected to reorder in time? We still want our split-pins now — even if we have to pay twice the legal price. That is my… our… little business. Greasing the wheels of State, as I always tell my wife (who is a director of our little firm).' He polished his spectacles enthusiastically with a little stained brown cloth, taken from his spectacle-case for the purpose.

'And if we get caught?' asked Martin; but his mood soared.

'A heavy fine… the firm will pay. Or a short prison sentence; that soon passes. We're commercial criminals, not political. We do not wish to overthrow the State, only oil its wheels, oil its wheels. The State understands this.'

They eyed each other. Martin still thought Boston didn't talk like a businessman. But the chances this firm offered… His own bedsitter, perhaps a firm's van… better still, a chance to smuggle on his own behalf. Not just paper for the newspaper… perhaps high-grade steel tubing for guns. He looked at Boston doubtfully; jobs just didn't grow on trees like this. Boston licked his lips, almost pleading, like an old spaniel.

'Sounds a good doss,' said Martin doubtfully.

'Then you accept the vacancy? You're a most suitable candidate.'

Miss Feather came in with the second cup of coffee.

'Will there be a chance to travel?' asked Martin.

'Almost immediately,' said Mr Boston, and Miss Feather nodded in smiling agreement. 'We will have to process you now. Would you mind waiting in here?'

The waiting-room was tiny. Just enough room for a bentwood chair, and a toffee-varnished rack containing a few worn copies of the State magazine at the very end of their life. Martin was surprised anybody had ever bothered to read them; everyone knew they were all glossy lies. There was a strange selection of posters on the walls — Fight Tooth Decay, an advert for the local museum of industrial sewing-machines, and a travel poster featuring an unknown tropical island. Martin wondered if his new job would take him anywhere near there. His head was whirling with the strange drunkenness of accepting and being accepted. Blood pounded all over his body. The vibrations of that damned machine were coming through the waiting-room walls, and going right through his head. It sounded a clapped-out machine, as if it was trying but would never make it.

Too late, the tiny size of the waiting-room warned him; the oppressive warmth. He pulled at the closed door, but it had no handle this side. He hammered on it; heavy metal.

Then there was a crack of blue darkness inside his head. When he opened his eyes again, he was standing in a room exactly the same size, but walled with stainless steel and excruciatingly cold. He shivered, but not just with cold.

There was a great round window set in the door. In the window floated the moon, only it was too big, pale blue and green, scarfed in a white that could only be clouds. Below were low white hills like ash-tips. Nearer, lying on the ashy soil, what looked like heaps of the stringy frozen chops you found in the deepfreeze of the most wretched supermarkets. From among the heaps, white skulls watched him, patiently waiting.

But much worse was the black sky, the totally black sky. In which stars glowed huge and incandescent, red, blue, yellow, orange. Some pulsed, at varying rhythms; others shone steadily.

'There!' Boston's voice came from a grille above the door, crackly with radio-static. 'There's your vacancy, Martin. Outer space. The biggest vacancy there is!' His voice was almost gentle, almost proud, almost pleading. 'Look your fill — I can only give you another minute.'

Quite unable to think of anything else to do, Martin continued to gaze at the pulsing stars. Then the door of the capsule slid aside. His body, sucked outwards by the vacuum, turning slowly in the low gravity, exploded in half-a-dozen places in rapid succession. The force of the explosions shot out great clouds of red vapour that sank swiftly to the surface of the white ash. Continuing explosions drove his disintegrating body across the mounds of his predecessors like an erratic fire-cracker. Then, indistinguishable from the rest of the heaps, except for its fresh redness, it settled to the freeze-drying, vacuum-drying of total vacancy.

'It always seems to me a pity,' said Mr Boston, 'that anything as wonderful as the Moon Teleport should have been reduced to this use. We could have conquered space, if we'd only discovered how to bring people back. Now it's no more than a garbage-disposal unit.'

'I always feel so flat afterwards,' said Miss Feather. She lifted a faded print of Constable's Haywain from the wall, revealing a row of stainless-steel buttons and a digital read-out in green.

She tapped the buttons rapidly. The number went down one.

Then resumed its inexorable climb.

Miss Feather gave a slight shudder of distaste, and replaced The Haywain.

'Pity we can't send them all that way.' She pressed her hairstyle back into place with the aid of her compact-mirror.

'Do you know how much it costs to send one to the moon?' asked Boston. 'No, — we can only send the dangerous ones. The ones that qualify for the vacancy.'

'Was he, dangerous?'

'He might have become so. Intelligence, leadership, initiative, mobility, ingenuity, curiosity — all the warning signs were there. It doesn't pay to be sentimental, Miss Feather — I believe young tiger-cubs are quite cuddleable in their first weeks of life. Nevertheless, they become tigers. We remove the tiger-cubs so that the rest, the sheep, may safely graze, as one might put it. I only fear we might not catch enough tiger-cubs in time. The young keep on coming like an inexorable flood, wanting what their fathers and grandfathers had. They could sweep us away.'

They sat looking at each other, in mildly depressed silence.

'That bicycle was a sure sign,' said Boston at last. 'Most original — first I've seen in years. Originality is always a danger. I'd better get the bike off the street, before it's noticed. Ring the metal-eater people, will you?'

Miss Feather rang; put the kettle on for another cup of coffee. Mr Boston came back empty-handed, perturbed.

'It's gone. Someone's taken it.'

'A sneak-thief?'

'Then he's a very stupid sneak-thief,' said Boston savagely. 'Stealing a unique object he'd never dare ride in public'

'You don't think one of his friends… should we ring for the police?' Her hand went to the necklace round, her throat, nervously.

'To report the theft of a bicycle that didn't belong to us in the first place? They'd think that pretty irregular. They'd want to know where our young friend Martin had got to…'

'Shall we ring the Ministry?'

'My dear Miss Feather, they'd think we were losing our nerve. You don't fancy premature retirement, do you?'

She paled. He nodded, satisfied. 'Then I think we'd better just sit it out.'

Facing each other with a growing silent unease, as the light faded in the grubby street outside, they settled down to wait.