The Two Timers

I

To Breton — trapped in his nexus of boredom, like a seahorse still alive inside a plastic key tab — the sound of the telephone was almost beautiful. He got to his feet and walked across the living room towards the hall.

“Who would that be, darling?” Kate Breton frowned slightly as she spoke, annoyed at the interruption.

Breton ran a mental eye over the quiver full of sarcasms which immediately offered itself, and finally — in deference to their guests — selected one of the least lethal.

“I don’t quite recognize the ring,” he said evenly, noting the sudden faint compression of Kate’s chalk-pink lips. She would remember that one, for discussion, probably at 3:00 a.m. when he was trying to sleep.

“Good old John — still sharp as a razor.” Gordon Palfrey spoke quickly, in his stand-back-and-let-me-be-tactful voice, and Miriam Palfrey smiled her bland Aztec smile beneath eyes like nail heads. The Palfreys were two of his wife’s latest acquisitions and their presence in Breton’s home usually caused a fretful, burning pain in his stomach. Smiling numbly, he closed the living room door behind him and picked up the phone.

“Hello,” he said. “John Breton speaking.”

“We’re calling ourselves John now, are we? It used to be Jack.” The male voice on the wire had a tense, controlled quality about it, as though the speaker was suppressing a strong emotion — fear, perhaps, or triumph.

“Who is this?” Breton tried unsuccessfully to identify the voice, uneasily aware that the phone line was a portal through which anybody anywhere could project himself right into his house. When he opened the channel to alien ideas he was placing himself at a disadvantage unless the caller announced his name, and the idea seemed completely unfair. “Who is this speaking?”

“So you really don’t know. That’s interesting.”

Something about the words gave Breton a vague thrill of alarm. “Look,” he said tersely. “Either state your business or hang up.”

“Don’t get angry, John — I’ll be happy to do both those things. I called simply to make sure you and Kate were at home before I came over there. And now I’ll hang up.”

“Hold on for just one moment,” Breton snapped, aware that he was letting the unknown caller get too far under his skin. “You haven’t said what you think you’re going to get.”

“My wife, of course,” the voice replied pleasantly. “You’ve been living with my wife for almost exactly nine years — and I’m coming to take her back.”

The phone clicked and began to purr blandly in Breton’s ear. He tapped the rest button several times before realizing he was acting out a visual cliché implanted in his mind by old movies — once a caller has broken the connection, jiggling the rest never brings him back. Swearing under his breath, Breton put the phone down and stood beside it undecidedly for several seconds.

The whole thing must be a devious hoax, but who was behind it?

He knew only one confirmed practical joker — Carl Tougher, the geologist in Breton’s engineering consultancy. But when he had last seen Tougher, in the office that afternoon, the geologist had been grimly trying to sort out a snarl-up in a survey the company had undertaken for the siting of a cement works over by Silverstream. Breton had never seen him look more worried, and less like playing games, especially one so full of uneasy subtleties. This conversation had been meaningless — which was not too surprising considering the mentality of phone cranks — but there had been uncomfortable undertones in it as well. For instance, the strangely amused reference to the fact that he no longer called himself Jack. Breton had begun using the formal version of his name for image reasons at the time his business began to develop, but that had been years ago and — he felt a surge of indignation — it was nobody’s concern but his own. All the same, some stubborn corner of his mind had never approved of the name change, and it was almost as if the unknown caller had been able to see right through him and pinpoint the tiny shadow that was his tumor of guilt.

Breton paused at the living room door, realizing he was reacting just the way the phone crank would have wanted — turning the thing over and over in his mind instead of dismissing it. He glanced around the orange-lit paneling of the hall, suddenly wishing he had moved to a bigger and newer place last year as Kate had wanted. He had outgrown this old house, and should have discarded it without sentiment long ago. You have been living with my wife for almost exactly nine years. Breton frowned as he remembered the words — the caller had not been implying he had an earlier marriage to Kate, or anything like that, because she and Breton were married eleven years. But that figure of nine years seemed to mean something, to have multi-layered connections of anxiety, as though some part of his subconscious had drunk in its significance and was waiting apprehensively for the next move.

“For God’s sake!” Breton spoke aloud and smacked his forehead in self-disgust. “I’m nearly as crazy as he is.”

He opened the door and went into the living room. In his absence Kate had dimmed the lights and moved a coffee table over beside Miriam Palfrey. A block of plain white paper and a pen were ready on the table, and Miriam’s stubby, grub-like fingers were already making vague little floating movements over them. Breton groaned silently — so they were going to have a session after all. The Palfreys were newly back from a three-month tour of Europe and all evening bad been so full of the trip that he had begun to think there would be no demonstration. The hope had given him the strength to listen politely to their tourist talk.

“Who was on the phone, darling?”

“I don’t know.” Breton did not want to talk about the call.

“Wrong number?”

“Yes.”

Kate’s eyes searched his face. “But you were there so long. And I thought I heard you shouting.”

“Well,” Breton said impatiently, “let’s say it was the right number, but the wrong people.”

Gordon Palfrey snorted delightedly and the light of interest in Kate’s eyes dwindled away into disappointed coldness, as if Breton had switched off two minute television sets. That was another one for the nightly post mortem in the small hours, when all normal people were asleep and even the curtains of their rooms were breathing steadily in the night breezes. Why, he wondered guiltily, do I hurt Kate in the presence of her friends? But then, why does she hurt me all the time — showing her damned determined disinterest in the business, year in and year out, but giving me a public third degree about a stupid telephone call? He sat down heavily, let his right hand instinctively guide itself to his whiskey glass, and glanced around the room, practicing his benign smile on the Palfreys.

Gordon Palfrey was toying with the square of black velvet, figured with silver stars, which was always draped over his wife’s face during the sessions — but he still wanted to go on talking about Europe. He launched into a long account, undeterred by the theatrical flinches Breton gave each time he heard a statement like “The French have an excellent color sense.” His theme was that the decor of European cottages was invariably in better taste than the work of the best American decorators. Sinking back into the amber prison of boredom, Breton writhed in his armchair, wondering how he would survive the evening, knowing he should have been in the office helping Carl Tougher to straighten out the cement plant survey. With the effortless and imperceptible change of gear that is the mark of the born bore, Palfrey slid onto the subject of an old crofter they had met in Scotland who hand-wove tartans in spite of being totally blind, but Miriam had begun to get into her pre-trance restlessness.

“What are you talking about, Gordon?” Miriam Palfrey leaned far back in her chair and her right hand, poised over the block of paper, began to dip and sway like a kite in high wind.

“I was telling Kate and John about old Hamish.”

“Oh, yes — we enjoyed old Hamish.” Miriam’s voice had become a faint monotone which sounded to Breton like an incredibly banal imitation of something from a Bela Lugosi film. Seeing the rapt attention on Kate’s face he decided to launch a full-scale attack in defense of common sense.

“So you enjoyed old Hamish,” he said in an unnaturally loud and cheerful voice. “What a picture that conjures up! I can see old Harnish slumped in a corner of his croft — an empty, dried-up husk, his purpose in life fulfilled — he has been enjoyed by the Palfreys.”

But Kate waved him to silence and Gordon Palfrey, who had been unfolding the velvet square, draped it over Miriam’s upturned face. Immediately, her plumply white hand took up the pen and began to fly across the paper, producing line after line of neat script. Gordon knelt beside the coffee table to steady the writing pad and Kate removed each top sheet as it was filled, handling them with a reverence that Breton found more annoying than any other aspect of the whole business. If his wife wanted to take an interest in so-called automatic writing, why could she not have been more rational about it? He would almost have been prepared to help her investigate the phenomenon himself had she not insisted on putting every sample in the general category of a Message From the Other Side.

“Anybody ready for another drinkie?” Breton stood up and walked to the mirror-backed cocktail cabinet. Drinkie, he thought. Christ! What are they doing to me? He poured himself a generous shot of Scotch, tempered it with soda, and leaned against the cabinet, watching the tableau at the other side of the room. Miriam Palfrey’s body was limp in the chair but her hand was moving as quickly as it was possible to write without the aid of shorthand, producing thirty or more words a minute. The material she turned out was usually flowery, outdated prose on unrelated subjects, with a high proportion of words like Beauty and Love, always written with the initial capital. The Palfreys claimed it was dictated by the spirits of dead authors, whom they tentatively identified on a stylistic basis. Breton had his own ideas, and he had been more shocked than he cared to admit by Kate’s uncritical acceptance of what he regarded as a party trick straight out of a Victorian drawing room.

Sipping steadily at his drink, Breton watched Kate as she gathered up the sheets, numbered the corners and set them in a neat pile. Eleven years of marriage had not made any real physical changes in her — tall and still slim, she wore richly colored silks as though they were natural plumage, reminding Breton of a gorgeous and exotic bird; but her eyes had grown much older. Suburban neurosis, he thought, that must be it. Fragmentation of the family reflected in the individual. Give it a label and forget it. A woman is never completely a wife until all her own family are dead. Amalgamate orphanages and marriage bureaus. I’m drinking too much…

A low gasp of excitement from Kate brought his attention back to the group at the table. Miriam Palfrey’s hand had begun to trace what, at that distance, looked like an intricate circular pattern, like a drawing of a freshly opened carnation. He went closer and saw that she was writing in a tight, slowly spreading spiral, moaning faintly and shuddering as the pattern grew. An edge of the black cloth across her upturned face alternately clung and fluttered, like the breathing apparatus of a marine animal.

“What is it?” Breton asked the question reluctantly, not wishing to show too much interest, but aware that this was something new to the writing sessions. Miriam sat up uncertainly as he spoke, and Gordon Palfrey put an arm around her shoulders.

“I don’t know,” Kate said, rotating the sheet in her long-fingered hands. “This is… it’s a poem.

“Well, let’s hear it.” Breton spoke with a tolerant joviality, annoyed at letting himself be sucked in, yet impressed by the sheer manual dexterity Miriam had shown.

Kate cleared her throat and read:

“I have wished for you a thousand nights, While the green-glow hour-hand slowly veers. I could weep for the very need of you, But you wouldn’t taste my tears.”

Breton found the lines vaguely disturbing, for no reason he could name. He went back to the cocktail cabinet and, while the others examined the fragment of poetry, stood frowning down into the mirrored array of bottles and glasses. Sipping the tingling ice-warmth of his drink, he stared back at his own eyes in the crystal microcosm; then — quite suddenly — his mind plumbed the possible significance of the phase “almost exactly nine years.” That was the real kicker in the call he had received, if he guessed right; it was a psychological depth charge, perfectly aimed, fused to sink deep.

It had been nine years earlier, to the month, that a police cruiser had found Kate wandering in the darkness of 50th Avenue, with flecks of human brain tissue spattered across her face…

Breton stiffened with shock as the phone shrilled in the hall. He set his glass down with a sharp double click, left the room and picked up the phone.

“Breton here,” he snapped. “Who’s that?”

“Hello, John. What’s the matter?” This time the voice was immediately identifiable as that of Carl Tougher.

“Carl!” Breton sank onto a chair, and groped for his cigarettes. “Did you call me earlier? Within the last half hour?”

“No — I’ve been too busy.”

“You’re sure?”

“What is this, John? I told you I’ve been too busy — we’re in serious trouble over the Silverstream survey.”

“It doesn’t check out?”

“That’s right. I made a series of eight random readings in our designated area this morning, and checked with a different gravimeter after lunch. As far as I can tell at this point the initial survey we made last month is completely haywire. The new readings are roughly twenty milligals down on what they should be.”

“Twenty! But that would suggest a much lighter rock formation than we thought. It could mean something like — “

“Salt,” Tougher cut in. “Could you interest the client in a salt mine in place of a cement works?”

Breton put a cigarette into his mouth and lit it, wondering why the world had chosen this particular evening to begin drifting out of focus. “Listen, Carl. We can make two interpretations of these discrepancies. The first is the one you’ve already mentioned — that the limestone we know to lie under that site has changed overnight into salt — and, with your support, I’m ruling that one out right now. The other is that somehow both our gravimeters are out of adjustment — right?”

“I guess so,” Tougher said wearily.

“So we rent a couple of new instruments tomorrow and go over the ground again.”

“I thought you’d say that. Do you know how many miles I covered today, John? I feel like I’ve walked clear across the state of Montana.”

“I’ll go with you next time,” Breton replied. “I need the exercise. See you in the morning, Carl.”

“Yeah, see you. Oh, John — you left out the third possible explanation.”

“Which is…?”

“That the force of gravity has lessened since yesterday.”

“Get some rest, Carl — even your jokes are getting tired.” Breton set the phone down and smiled in appreciation of the way in which the little geologist never got depressed or rattled. A telephone crank who picked on Tougher would have ricocheted off a massive shield of sane practicability — yet in this case Tougher was the only suspect Breton had had. His jokes were usually on the locker room level, but there was the time a couple of years earlier when Tougher had spent something like fifteen dollars of his own money in bringing a can of gasoline to work every day and sneaking it into the office janitor’s car. Later Tougher had explained, matter-of-factly, that he had wanted to study the janitor’s reactions when he discovered his car was apparently manufacturing gas instead of using it up. Was that particular hoax on a par with “You have been living with my wife for almost exactly nine years”? Breton was uncertain. He went back along the mustard carpeted hall, automatically touching the wall with his knuckles at every step to prevent any build-up of static in the dry air.

Kate kept her eyes averted as he entered the room, and Breton felt a slight pang of guilt over his earlier sarcasm.

“That was Carl,” he volunteered. “He’s been working late.”

She nodded disinterestedly, and his guilt instantaneously transformed itself into resentment — not even in the presence of friends would she pretend to care anything about the business. That’s the way, Kate, he thought furiously, never ease up for a second. Live well off me, but at the same time reserve the right to despise my work and everybody connected with it.

Breton stared somberly at his wife and the Palfreys, who were now going back through all the material Miriam had produced, and suddenly realized he was beginning to sway slightly. He retrieved his drink, finished it with one gulp and poured another. I keep on taking this sort of treatment — the old, familiar and repetitious anger patterns began to flow redly on the surface of his mind — but how much is a man supposed to take? I have a wife who complains night and day because I spend too much time at the office, but when I do take an evening off — this is what I get. Phony spiritualists and another king-sized dose of her damned, stinking indifference. To think I wept — yes sir, actually wept with relief — because she was safe that night they found her with Spiedel’s brains scattered through her hair. I didn’t know it then, but Spiedel was trying to do me a favor. I know it now, though. If only I could…

Breton chopped the thought off in alarm as he realized he was setting himself up for a trip.

But he was too late.

Without getting smaller, the subdued orange lights and white-mortared stone chimney of the living room began to recede into planetary, stellar, galactic distances. He tried to speak, but the transparent overlay of language was shifting across the face of reality, robbing nouns of their significance, making predication impossible. Strange geometries imposed themselves on the perspectives of the room, snapping him sickeningly from pole to alien pole. A face in the group turned towards him — a pale, meaningless free-form — man or woman, friend or enemy? Ponderously, helplessly, over the edge we go…

Breton slammed down the hood of the Buick so savagely that the big car moved like a disturbed animal, rocking on its gleaming haunches. In the darkness of its interior Kate was waiting, immobile, Madonna-like — and because she showed no anger, his own became uncontrollable.

“The battery’s dead. That settles it — we can’t go.”

“Don’t be silly, Jack.” Kate got out of the car. “The Maguires are expecting us — we can phone for a taxi.” Her party clothes were completely inadequate against the night breezes of late October, and she huddled in them with a kind of despairing dignity.

“Don’t be so damned reasonable, Kate. We’re an hour late already, and I’m not going to a party with my hands like this. We’re going back home.”

“That’s childish.”

“Thank you.” Breton locked up the car, carelessly smudging the pale blue paintwork with oil from his hands. “Let’s go.”

“I’m going on to the Maguires,” Kate said. “You can go home and sulk if that’s what you want.”

“Don’t be stupid. You can’t go all the way over there by yourself.”

“I can go by myself and I can get back by myself — I did it all right for years before I met you.”

“I know you’ve been around, sweetie — I’ve always been too tactful to mention it, that’s all.”

“Thank you. Well, at least you won’t have the embarrassment of being seen in public with me tonight.”

Hearing the hopelessness creep into her voice, Breton felt a flicker of malicious glee. “How are you planning to get there? Did you bring any money?”

She hesitated, then held out her hand. “Give me something for taxi fare, Jack.”

“Not a chance. I’m childish — remember? We’re going home.” He savored her helplessness for a moment, somehow extracting revenge for his own cruelty, then the whole thing fell apart in his hands. This is bad, he thought, even for me. So I arrive late at a party with my face and hands all black — a balanced person would see that as a chance to do an Al Jolson act. Let her ask me just once more and I’ll give in and we’ll go to the party.

Instead, Kate uttered one short, sharp word — filling him with wounded dismay — and walked away down the street past blazing store windows. With her silvered wrap drawn tight over the flimsy dress, and long legs slimmed even further by needle-heeled sandals, she looked like an idealized screen version of a gangster’s moll. For a moment he seemed to see the physical presence of her more clearly than ever before, as though some long-unused focusing mechanism had been operated behind his eyes. The ambient brilliance from the stores projected Kate solidly into his mind, jewel-sharp, and he saw — with the wonder of a brand new discovery — the tiny blue vein behind each of her knees. Breton was overwhelmed by a pang of sheer affection. You can’t let Kate walk through the city at night looking like that, a voice told him urgently, but the alternative was to crawl after her, to knuckle under. He hesitated, then turned in the opposite direction, numbed with self-disgust, swearing bitterly.

It was almost two hours later when the police cruiser pulled up outside the house.

Breton, who had been standing at the window, ran heavy-footed to the door and dragged it open. There were two detectives, with darkly hostile eyes, and a backdrop of blue uniformed figures.

One of the detectives flashed a badge. “Mr. John Breton?”

Breton nodded, unable to speak. I’m sorry Kate, he thought, so sorry — come back and we’ll go to the party. But at the same time an incredible thing was happening. He could feel a sense of relief growing in one deeply hidden corner of his mind. If she’s dead, she’s dead. If she’s dead, it’s all over. If she’s dead, I’m free…

“I’m Lieutenant Convery. Homicide. Do you mind answering a few questions?”

“No,” Breton said dully. “You’d better come in.” He led the way into the living room, and had to make an effort to prevent himself straightening cushions like a nervous housewife.

“You don’t seem surprised to see us, Mr. Breton,” Convery said slowly. He had a broad, sunburned face and a tiny nose which made scarcely any division between widely spaced blue eyes.

“What do you want, Lieutenant?”

“Do you own a rifle, Mr. Breton?”

“Ah… yes.” Breton was thunderstruck.

“Do you mind getting it?”

“Look,” Breton said loudly. “What’s going on?”

Convery’s eyes were bright, watchful. “One of the patrolmen will go with you while you get the rifle.”

Breton shrugged and led the way down into his basement workshop. He sensed the patrolman’s tenseness as they stepped off the wooden stair onto the concrete floor, so he halted and pointed at the tall cupboard in which he stored a jumble of large tools, fishing rods, archery equipment and his rifle. The patrolman shouldered quickly past him, opened the doors and dragged out the rifle. He had to disengage the sling, which had snagged a fishing reel.

Back in the living room, Convery took the rifle and rubbed a fingertip in the fine coating of dust which lay over the stock. “You don’t use this much?”

“No. The last time was a couple of years ago. Before I was married.”

“Uh-huh. It’s a high velocity job, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Breton could feel the bewilderment building up inside him to an almost physical pressure. What had happened?

“Ugly things,” Convery commented casually. “They destroy animals. I don’t know why people use them.”

“It’s a good machine, that’s all,” Breton replied. “I like good machines. Oh, I forgot — it isn’t working.”

“Why not?”

“I dropped the bolt one day and I think it jammed the pin.”

“Uh-huh.” Convery removed the rifle’s bolt, examined it, smelt the breech, peered through the barrel at a table lamp, then handed the weapon back to the patrolman. “That the only rifle you own?”

“Yes. Look, Lieutenant, this has gone on long enough. Why are you here?” Breton hesitated. “Has anything happened to my wife?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Convery’s blue eyes roved Breton’s face. “Your wife is all right. She was foolish enough to walk through the park tonight, without company, and a man attacked her — but she’s all right.”

“I don’t understand. How… how can she be all right if she was attacked?”

“Well, she was very lucky, Mr. Breton. Another man, who incidentally looked like you, stepped out from behind a tree and blew the attacker’s head off with a rifle.”

“What? You don’t think… Where’s the man now?”

Convery smiled. “We don’t know that, as yet. He seems to have vanished…”

A sense of aching vastness, shifting of perspectives and parallax, unthinkable transitions in which the curvatures of space-time writhe between negative and positive, and infinity yawns at the mid-point — numinous, illusory, poignant…

“Look at that guy drink,” Gordon Palfrey was saying. “He’s really going into orbit tonight.”

The others turned to look at Breton, who — desperately needing time to reorient himself — smiled wanly and sat down in a deep armchair. He noticed a speculative look in Kate’s eyes and wondered if there was any way for a casual observer to detect that he had been blacked out. An analyst called Fusciardi had, after an unsatisfactory investigation, assured him the lapses were unnoticeable, but Breton had found it difficult to believe because the trips often occupied several hours of subjective time. Fusciardi’s explanation was that Breton had an unusual, but not unique, capacity for flashes of absolute recall occupying only split seconds of objective time. He had even suggested referring the case to a university psychological team, but at that point Breton had lost interest.

Breton relaxed further into the big old chair, enjoying the comfort of its sane solidity. That particular episode was cropping up more often lately and he found it depressing, even though Fusciardi had warned him that key scenes in his life — especially those involving emotional stress — would be most liable for reclamation. Tonight’s trip had been unusually long, and its impact increased by the fact that he had had so little warning. There had been none of the visual disturbances which Fusciardi had told him were commonly the prelude to a migraine attack in other people.

Chilled by his brush with the past, Breton tried to increase his hold on the present, but Kate and the Palfreys were still absorbed in the unusual sample of automatic writing. He listened for a moment as they went through the ritual of trying to identify the author, then allowed his mind to drift in a warm alcoholic haze. A lot seemed to have happened in an evening which had started off in an atmosphere of distilled dullness. I should have stayed in the office with Carl, he thought. The Blundell Cement Company survey had to be com pleted in less than a week, and had been going slowly even before the unlikely twenty milligal discrepancies in the gravimeter readings showed up. Perhaps they had not been corrected properly. Carl was good, but there were so many factors to be considered in gravity surveying — sun and moon positions, tidal movements, elastic deformation of the Earth’s crust, etc. Anybody could make a mistake, even Carl. And anybody could send or receive an anonymous phone call. I was crazy to imagine all those specially engineered connotations — I was caught off balance, that’s all. The call was a psychological banana skin and nothing more. Good phrase, that… and the whiskey’s good too. Even the Palfreys are all right if you look at them the right way — especially Miriam. Nice figure. Too bad that she had to let her whole life be influenced by the fact she was born with that Hollywood Inca M.G.M. Ancient Egyptian priestess face. If she looked like Elizabeth Taylor she could come around here every night… Or even Robert Taylor…

Feeling himself borne up on a malty cloud of benevolence, Breton tuned in again on the conversation across the room and heard Kate say something about Oscar Wilde.

“Not again,” he protested mildly. “Not Oscar Wilde again!”

Kate ignored him and Miriam smiled her sculptured smile, but Gordon Pa]frey was in the mood to talk.

“We aren’t saying that Oscar Wilde communicated these words, John. But somebody did — and the style of some of the stuff is identical to that of Wilde’s early prose — “

“His early prose,” Breton interrupted. “That’s the point. Let’s see — Wilde died about 1900, right? And this is 1981 — so in eighty-one years on the other side, or beyond the veil, or whatever you spiritualists call it, not only has he failed to develop as a writer, but has even slipped back to his undergraduate phase.”

“Yes, but — “

“And it isn’t lack of practice, because according to what I’ve read in those books you lent Kate he’s been a favorite with automatic writers since his death. Wilde must be the only author in history whose output went up after he was buried.” Breton laughed, pleased at finding himself in that pleasant transient state of drunkenness in which he always felt able to think and talk twice as fast as when sober.

“You’re assuming a one-to-one correspondence between this and any other plane of existence,” Palfrey said. “But it need not be like that.”

“It mustn’t be. From the data you have about the next plane, it seems to be peopled by writers who have no paper or pencils, and who spend their time telepathically projecting drivel down into our plane. And, somehow, Oscar Wilde has become the stakhanovite — possibly as a punishment for writing De Profundis.

Palfrey smiled patiently. “But we’re not saying that these…”

“Don’t argue with him,” Kate said. “That’s what he wants. John’s a professional atheist, and he’s starting to talk too much anyway.” She shot him a look of scorn but overdid it, making herself look like a little girl for one fleeting second. What an unlikely emotion, Breton thought, to cause rejuvenation.

“She’s right,” he said. “The whole structure of my belief crumbled when I was a kid — the first crack was the discovery that F.W. Woolworth was not a local businessman.”

Kate lit a cigarette. “He’s had ten whiskies. He always pulls that joke when he’s had ten.”

And you always pull that one about the ten drinks, Breton thought. You humorless bitch — trying to make me sound like a booze-operated robot. But he remained jovial and talkative, although aware that it was a reaction against the trauma of his trip. He managed to preserve his good spirits right through the coffee and sandwiches stage, and accompanied Kate to the door as she escorted the visitors out to their car.

It was a crisp night in late October, and winter constellations were beginning to climb up beyond the eastern horizon, a reminder that snow would soon come marching down from Canada. Feeling warm and relaxed, Breton lounged in the doorway, smoking his last cigarette of the day while Kate talked to the Palfreys in the car. Two meteorites burned briefly in the sky as he smoked — Journey’s end, he thought, welcome to Earth — and finally the car moved off, crunching and spanging in the gravel while its headlights raked through the elms along the drive. Kate waved goodbye and came back into the house, shivering slightly. Breton attempted to put an ann around her as she passed him in the doorway, but she kept walking determinedly, and he remembered his earlier waspishness. The post mortem still had to be held in the small hours, while the bedroom curtains breathed gently in sleep.

Breton shrugged to show himself how little he cared, then flicked the cigarette butt out on to the lawn, where it was extinguished by the dewy grass. He took a final breath of the leaf-scented air and turned to go inside.

“Don’t close the door, John.” The voice came from the black-tunneled shrubbery beside the drive. “I’ve come to collect my wife. Had you forgotten?”

“Who’s that?” Breton rapped the question out anxiously as the figure of a tall man came towards the light, but he had already recognized the voice. The anonymous phone caller. He felt a surge of dismayed anger.

“Don’t you know yet, John?” The stranger reached the porch, and slowly came up the steps. The overhead light suddenly made his identity very clear.

Breton — transfixed by a vast and inexplicable fear — found himself staring into his own face.