The Year's Best Horror Stories 11

THE NEW RAYS by M. John Harrison

Horror and science fiction are by no means mutually exclusive, and when a story does cross genre lines, the results are often memorably frightening—as witness “The New Rays.” Of course, “The New Rays” is not typical science fiction—but then, M. John Harrison’s fantasy/horror stories can scarcely be termed traditional, either. A question often asked of editors is, “Why did you choose this particular story?” In this case because, after reading “The New Rays” before going to bed, it gave me recurrent nightmares of the most disquieting unpleasantness. Harrison accepted this as a compliment: “I’m glad (if you see what I mean) that ‘The New Rays’ gave you nightmares; it was built out of a couple of mine, and if you can spread it around a little…”

When not spreading nightmares about, M. John Harrison amuses himself by running where it’s level and by rock-climbing where it’s not. Born in 1945 near Catesby Hall, Harrison was educated at Rugby and lived for several years in London. Between 1968-75 he served as literary editor of the New Wave science fiction magazine, New Worlds. Harrison sold his first story in 1966 and until recently was primarily considered a science fiction writer, through such well-regarded novels as The Committed Men and The Centauri Device and the collection, The Machine in Shaft Ten. His most recent novel is In Viriconium, the third novel of a sequence that includes The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings. Harrison lives with his wife Di in a cottage in the Holme Valley, on the edge of the Peak District National Park. A new collection of his short fiction would be most welcome.

When I first arrived here it was after a hideous journey. We were ten hours on the train, which stopped and started constantly at provincial stations and empty sidings. It was packed with young conscripted soldiers shouting and singing or else staring desperately out of the windows as if they wished they had the courage to jump. We got one cup of coffee at a halt in the Midlands. In the confusion of getting back into our seats I took out the little gilt traveling clock which W.B. had given me the first time I was ill, and somehow lost it. A young boy pushing his way down the carriage helped us look for it. For a moment he seemed to forget where he was; then he looked round suddenly and lurched off. I was inconsolable. Two nights in succession I had dreamed the name of a street, Agar Grove.

We arrived late in the afternoon, just in time to watch the city dissolve into black rain, water and darkness. During the night I woke up and had to go down the corridor to the lavatory. The hotel was cold and squalid at that hour. There was a gas leak. When I looked out of a window some men were digging up the street. It was still raining.

The next morning I had my preliminary visit to Dr. Alexandre in Camden Town. I was reluctant to leave the hotel, and delayed by pretending I had lost my money along with the clock. “Perhaps the young soldier stole it. Anyway we can’t afford the taxi fare.” Then I went to the wrong address and banged on the door until W.B. lost his temper and we had one of our typical quarrels in the road. I told him that the journey had confused me: but really I was frightened that Dr. Alexandre would prove unsympathetic. In the end he drove off in the taxi, shouting, “I wash my hands of you. It was you who wanted to come here.” I went immediately to the right house and stood on the doorstep, not wanting to go in. After I rang the bell I could hear scampering and laughter inside, followed by a faint drumming sound as if a machine had been switched on and off.

Dr. Alexandre had a beautiful crippled girl who answered the door and acted as interpreter. Through her he told me that he could effect a complete cure. I didn’t believe that for a moment. Everything seemed suddenly useless and shabby—although the clinic itself, with its odd maroon decor and chromium lamps, seemed nice.

To get rid of this depression I had a cup of coffee at the corner, then went to a picture gallery for the rest of the morning. In one or two small rooms at the back they had an exhibition of new artists. I was particularly struck by a picture of a woman of my own age. The background was a buff-colored wall with two trees in front if it; completely flat trees which looked as if they had been pasted on to the wall. Behind this, from a ledge or balcony, two more flat trees emerged. They were all lifeless and stunted. In front of them a youngish woman was sitting listlessly, her sullen unfocused stare the same color as the wall, her throat swollen with goiter. Everything was flat except her throat, which had a massive, sculptural quality.

When I got back to the hotel W.B. had gone, leaving a note which said, “I know you are frightened but you have to have some thought for other people. Write to me when you have settled in.”

I can describe Dr. Alexandre quite easily. I have the feeling that he can help people but also the feeling that he is an unscrupulous imposter. He is the kind of man who wears a dark suit. His eyes are blue and demanding, quite unintelligent in the wrong light. He is frightened that soon he will be repatriated or interned. He has a soothing voice but one which, you sense, could easily say; “I cannot have you here disturbing the other patients if you do not give me your full cooperation. We are in this together. You must cooperate with me fully and then we will make good progress together against your disease.” When the lame girl translates for him she unconsciously mimics his fussy gestures.

The new rays are intermittent and difficult to focus. When they come they are sometimes the stealthy gold or russet color of a large, reassuring animal; sometimes a wash of rose like a water-color sunset. (I warm to these particular rays and, despite the knowledge of the pain to follow, allow them to comfort me. I feel no time pass, I feel no physical sensation at all; I am laved, washed quite clean, and experience nothing.) But most of the time they are a blue-black color which fills the bare treatment shed with shadows and imparts to the teeth and spectacles of Dr. Alexandre and his assistant a kind of jetty gloss. They come with a desultory buzzing which you feel in the bones of your jaw; or a drumming noise which rises and falls, the sound of heels drumming briefly on an iron pipe, sometimes near, sometimes unbearably far away. It is the sound of loss, and the giving up of all dignity. Dr. Alexandre and his assistant put on their goggles and nod at one another.

It appears now that they are not even sure where the new rays are from. The discovery was accidental, and took place many years ago in some laboratory where it was ignored. Since he does not yet fully understand the nature of the rays, it’s entirely possible that Dr. Alexandre will kill me sooner than my disease. Standing there in my dressing gown, feeling sore and violated by the laxatives which are an important part of the treatment, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at this idea; but when I tried to explain, the lame girl thought I was making a complaint and refused to translate. I was embarrassed.

At the hotel I sat in the bathroom trying to write a letter. Two cockroaches crawled from under the carpet and crawled back again. “Dear W.B., When I try to imagine you at home in our lovely house all I can remember is one yellow chair and the smell of Vinolia Soap.”

On treatment mornings I get up early and walk through the rainy streets by the river, or travel aimlessly here and there on the Underground, so I have some part of the day to remember unspoiled. We aren’t supposed to eat and drink for five hours before a treatment, but all my good intentions go by the board in warm damp cafes at Baker Street or Mornington Crescent. At that time of the morning no one speaks to you. All you have for company is the image of yourself in the steamy mirrors behind the counter, a woman younger than middle-aged, in a good coat, drinking another cup of coffee to stop herself fainting on the train.

Off a corridor at the back of the clinic there are two or three pleasant little waiting rooms. They are very modem and aseptic, with contract furniture, aluminum window frames, and a bed over which is stretched a white plastic sheet: but the walls are a cheerful yellow and you can switch on a little radio. You undress here. After a few minutes Dr. Alexandre’s assistant comes in and gives you a kind of bluish milk to drink, explaining that it will clear out your insides and at the same time coat them with a paste which will attract the rays. He goes out of the room and you begin to feel dizzy and nauseous almost immediately. Soon you have to choose between the sink or the little lavatory with its yellow paper on a roll. You can’t lock the door in case you faint. By the time he comes back with the wheelchair you are too tired to stand. He will put your clothes away and help you comb your hair and then wheel you out to the treatment shed.

The shed has a sour concrete floor sloping to a drain in the middle. It is cold and, unlike the waiting rooms, retains the smell of vomit, rubber, and Jeyes fluid. It occupies a muddy open space thirty yards behind the main building. This is for reasons of safety, claims Dr. Alexandre. I suspect he is afraid of accidentally curing passersby, but you cannot risk a joke like this with the crippled girl. “The doctor is so sorry for the present inconvenience to patients,” she translates earnestly. “He hopes they will not complain.” And she gives me a savage stare. In fact I quite like the shabby bit of garden which is the last thing you see before you go into the shed. A few lupins, gone desperately to seed, add something human to the clutter of duckboards thrown down hastily to prevent the wheelchairs and builders’ barrows from bogging down in the mud. There is often a fire burning here, as if a gardener or workman were about, but you never see him.

In the black and chaotic moment when the rays arrive, Dr. Alexandre and his assistant struggle into their loose yellowish rubber suits and round tinted goggles. Once they are covered from head to foot like this all their kindness seems to be replaced by panic. They grab you roughly: there is no turning back: up on the table you go, trembling as you help them fasten the straps. Before you can open your mouth they force into it the vile rubber wedge which stops you biting your tongue. The focusing machine has already begun to buzz and rattle faintly as it picks up the initial burst of rays. Soon the whole hut is vibrating. Dr. Alexandre stares at his watch: he wasn’t ready for this: there’s real panic behind those round blue lenses now. Hurry up, he urges you with gestures. Hurry up! You bruise your feet pushing them into the stirrups. A thick vibration like the taste of licorice creeps into your lungs and along your spine. The buzzing has invaded you. Black light splashes across the room. Here it comes, here it comes…

If you are getting your treatment free of charge, you have to agree to have it without an anesthetic. You mustn’t pass out.

Through the most abysmal vomits and discharges, when the rays seem to be laying down a thick coat of poison in every organ, you can still hear the urgent, earnest voice of the crippled girl. “Are you conscious? Can you raise your head? Are you aware that you have lost control of your bowels? We must know.” Into your field of vision, blackness spraying off his smooth goggled rubber head, bobs Dr. Alexandre’s assistant, anxious that nothing should escape the record. And into the exhausted calm after the blue-black shower has abated and all three of them have taken off their goggles, the uncertain foreign tones of Dr. Alexandre fall, and you must be awake to answer his questions.

Sometimes the rays don’t arrive at all. What bliss to be let off with a cup of tea in the reception room and told to go home again!

A fortnight after I got here it turned foggy, first a black fog, then a yellow one which filled the streets like gas; but I didn’t miss a treatment. One of the blue bodies got out and drifted about in the garden for a while before it was caught. There was such an expression of puzzlement on its face; as if it knew it had been in the garden before but could not remember when. After a while a man came out and pushed it back into the treatment shed, grumbling and flapping his arms.

The same day I fell asleep on the train on the way back to the hotel, and dreamed I was disembarking from a ship. When I went up on deck with my case and umbrella, a cold wind came off the land and blew my hair into my eyes. It was just before dawn, and the funnels of the ship were dark against a greenish sky like heavily worked oil paint. Down on the shadowy quay muffled figures waited for the passengers. Everybody except me knew where to go and what to do. I shuffled forward, trying to pretend that I knew too. The sun rose while the queue was still slowly leaving the ship. The land never seemed to get any brighter. When I woke up somebody had stolen my red gloves, which had been on the seat beside me.

W.B.’s letters, full of solicitude and domestic calm and ‘the dark woods lighted so mysteriously by the white boughs of the ash trees when I take my evening walk,’ drove me out into the fog, to the picture galleries and cafes. I couldn’t stay in the hotel on my own; they look at you so accusingly if you are ill and on your own. In a cafe nobody notices you at all. You can eat your piece of sponge cake, read your letter, and leave. “Seventy pence please.” “Fifty-two pence please.” And you go out with the simple vision of a human face turning away forever, into streets which seem to be populated with wounded soldiers—big, lost-looking boys whose surprised eyes stare past you at something which isn’t there.

“I’m feeling so much better,” I wrote untruthfully to W.B. The rays seemed to have settled in my bones like a deposit of poisonous metal, and I could hardly get out of bed the day after a treatment. “And I get on well with the other women.”

Actually we have no time for one another. Despite our diversity we are all very much alike—a desperate, frightened bunch, concentrating on the only important business we have left, which is survival. We exchange nods as we are hurried along the corridors by wheelchair, too self-involved to speak. In the common room—where without turning your head you can see a countess with ‘anaemia of the brain,’ the mistress of the discredited novelist, and three young prostitutes seeking a cure for some new venereal complaint—we sit like stones. Many of the others have been here for a year or more. If we have a social hierarchy, these old hands are the cream of it. They have their heads shaved once a month so that their hair doesn’t soak up the smell of the treatment shed. They ‘live in’ and look down on the out-patients, whom they call ‘weekend invalids.’ Through their stiff cropped stubble, which gives them as surprised a look as the wounded boys in the streets, I perceive the bony vulnerable plates of their skulls.

When the blue bodies get loose they sometimes wander into the clinic itself, as if looking for something. One evening when the fog was at its height, Dr. Alexandre’s assistant took us downstairs to see one. They were keeping it in a small room with white lavatory-tiled walls. It was supposed to have been left on a bench, but when we arrived it had somehow fallen off and got itself into a corner among some old metal cylinders and stretcher-poles. Its face was pressed into them as if it had been trying to escape the light of the unshaded overhead bulb. Dr. Alexandre’s assistant ran his hand through his hair and laughed. What could he do, he seemed to be asking, with something so stupid? He pulled it back on to the table where it lay blindly like a mannequin made of transparent blue jelly.

“Come and touch it,” he encouraged us. “There’s nothing to be frightened of. As you can see it has no internal organs.” It was quite cold and inert. When you touched it there was a slight tautness, a resistance to your fingertip similar to the resistance you would get from a plastic bag full of water; and a dent was left which remained for two or three minutes. When one of the women began to cry and left the room, Dr. Alexandre’s assistant said, “They have no internal organs. They are not alive in any way medical science can define.”

Before he could move away I asked him, “What becomes of the poor things after we have finished with them?”

I lay in bed for three days at the hotel, very ill and depressed, wondering if it was all worth it. To W.B. I wrote, “Why this mania of mine to stay alive? I feel no better. I can’t even go for a walk or eat a piece of cake! I hate myself for hanging on.” When I caught sight of myself in the mirror I was so thin that my shoulder blades looked like two plucked chicken wings. Sleeping fitfully during the day, I dreamed that I had a goiter which drained all the virtues of the world around me. Everything around me grew two-dimensional and unrealistic, while the thing on my neck fattened up like a huge purple plum. I woke up in a sweat and found myself staring out of the window at a square of sky the colour of zinc.

Later I found that someone had telephoned me, but the hotel people hadn’t thought to wake me up. They said they had made a mistake about my name.

At night I could hardly sleep at all. I stared out of the window; listened to the boys singing under the sodium lamps in their mournful, half-broken voices. Far away a man blew inexpertly on a bugle. One boy lifted up the stump of his arm, which looked as if it was covered with black tar. I thought that if W.B. would let me change my mind and start paying for the treatments I might feel less downcast.

The mornings are dark now, and quite cold. You cannot see inside the cafes for steam; it billows over the pavement where people are buttoning themselves into their overcoats. As Winter approaches, and the women wheel their prams a little quicker along the streets by the river, a thin wind rises round Dr. Alexandre’s clinic. Some little-understood property of the new rays, it seems, is rotting the walls of the treatment shed, so that when you get down on the table now you are surrounded at once by little icy draughts smelling of decayed wood. The wallclock, a very delicate mechanism, stopped and had to be replaced. When they opened it up all its working parts were covered with damp furry mould.

Outside Dr. Alexandre’s office window a couple of low shrubs struggle with the desolation of the treatment shed garden, their grayish leaves and waxy orange berries covered with a film of dust or thin mud according to the weather. Inside, the doctor sits impatiently behind a desk piled high with papers, manila envelopes, rubber tubes. Behind him are some green metal shelves, so overloaded with the patients’ files that they curve in the middle. It was raining the afternoon I was there. A desk lamp was burning in the dim room and the crippled girl was staring out across the garden through the streaming window pane. “The doctor wishes to say something to you,” she told me, turning reluctantly to face into the room. “He asks me to say that you must not worry the other patients with questions. It will only hold up your own progress, as well as interfering with theirs. A positive attitude is very important.”

I cleared my throat. “I can see that,” I said cautiously.

The doctor wrote something on the margin of the file in front of him. Suddenly he held up his hand for silence, stared hard at me, and said with great difficulty and slowness: “Matter is cheap in the universe. It is disorganized, but yearns to be of use. Do you see? We do nothing wrong when we create these blue bodies. We violate no laws.” He put the cap carefully on his pen then leaned back in his chair and remained silent for some minutes, as if the effort of speaking English had tired him out. The crippled girl watched me triumphantly from the window.

“I only want to be sure I’m doing the right thing,” I explained. “It’s that I don’t quite understand what happens to them when they’re finished with.”

“Do we not give you these treatments free?” Dr. Alexandre reminded me gently.

After this he made the girl translate for him again while he examined me. “The doctor says you are not making fast progress. You are not sleeping. Why is this? He thinks you should move into the clinic if you wish your treatments to have the best effect. Your disease does not wait. Please do not talk to the other women in the common room. Everything here is humane and legal.”

All I want from life is this room. If I can successfully identify myself with its red candlewick bedspread, the mustard wallpaper and the thin light coming in through the curtains, I won’t have to admit to anything else.

I decided not to move into the clinic. But I couldn’t stand the hotel any longer. When I went to the lavatory in the small hours there was always someone there to stare at my hair or clothes; if I found the courage to complain at the desk about the silverfish in the bathroom, the woman said it wasn’t very convenient for them to have me always asleep in the room during the day. Then W.B. arrived, and there was a fuss about transferring us to a double room. They weren’t going to let us have one at all until I said I would be moving out soon.

At night we lay in bed talking. Suddenly he asked me, “What are you thinking?” and I had to answer, “That I had died and one of our friends had gone to tell you.”

I thought that if I could get furnished accommodation somewhere I would feel better. In furnished accommodation you can sleep all day, come and go as you like. But in Bayswater in November it was difficult. They were all too expensive or they didn’t want single women. At first I didn’t mind. I treated it as a holiday. A tremendous lonely wind blew us up and down the streets, past the cats, milk bottles, and pots of geraniums in basement areas. I felt elated, as if we had recovered something of our youth. Then came a week of really difficult treatments; the rays were more intractable than ever; I was very tired. We started to argue about Dr. Alexandre. W.B. was all for him now. “After all it was your decision to come here.” Soon we were having a blazing row in the hotel lobby. The woman behind the desk watched exactly as if she were at the cinema, nodding slyly to the other guests when they came down to see what was happening.

“You disgust me, stewing in your self-concern!” shouted W.B. I ran out into the street for some air and fell over.

After that I walked around for a while not quite knowing where I was, until I got the idea of going into a gallery and sitting down in front of the first picture I came to.

It showed a woman standing by a yellowish shoreline covered with boulders. The sea was slack and cold. In the background, where the bay curved round into a promontory, some wooden frame houses, and a gray sky streaked with more yellow, were one or two indistinct figures—a man, another woman, perhaps a child in a white confirmation dress—with their backs turned. It had a sort of exhausted calm. I heard myself say quietly: “There is something detestable about all these attempts to preserve yourself.” Once I had understood this a complete tranquility came over me, and I realized I hadn’t felt so well for a long time. I laughed softly. I was hungry. Soon I would get up and run all the way back to the hotel, but first I would have a cup of coffee and perhaps some battenburg cake.

A man in a lovely gray suit came and stood next to me. “It has a certain atmosphere, this one, doesn’t it?” he said. He sighed. “A certain atmosphere.” He had come to tell me the gallery was closing; I saw that it was almost dark outside and suddenly remembered W.B.

When I got up to go I felt odd and a bit tired. The attendant put out his hand to help me and I was horrified to see vomit pour unexpectedly and painlessly out of my mouth all over the sleeve of his suit. I stood trembling with cold, surrounded by the sour smell of it, until they got the name of the hotel from me and put me in a taxi. “At least I didn’t do it on the picture,” I thought on the way back. “At least it was only his sleeve.” In the hotel lobby I found all my cases piled by the door. The woman behind the desk wouldn’t let me go up to my room.

“Your friend left some time ago, I’m afraid,” she said. I stared at her. “If you recall my dear, you did tell us you’d be moving into furnished accommodation when your friend left.”

In the end they agreed to let me have the room for one more week.

I was ill all the next day. I stayed in the room trying to eat soup but I couldn’t keep anything down, not even water, and if I closed my eyes and concentrated I could hear a far-away buzzing, like a noise at the end of a corridor. I wrote letters to W.B. (“Please forgive me and take me away from here”) and tore them up. When the maid came in there was a row about the state of the sheets, but they can’t get rid of me now until the end of the week. I made them change the bed. In the end I was so frightened I decided to go and see Dr. Alexandre and find out why I was this ill.

It was quite late when I arrived at the clinic. A strange woman came out of the common room wiping her mouth on a paper serviette, and walked off down the passage without speaking. There was the distant sound of a tray being dropped in the kitchens. I had the impression that things were going on here much as they did during the day, but at a reduced and much duller pace. I went to the rooms I knew, one after the other, hoping I would remember how to find Dr. Alexandre’s office. The waiting rooms were unlocked: I sat in one of them for a bit, touching the familiar plastic bedsheet with my hand and turning the hot water on and off in the little sink. Later I stood in the dark in the garden in case I could see the office from there. But a bluish light came from under the treatment shed door, so I went back in.

By now I couldn’t remember where anything was. I went downstairs and tried a door with frosted glass panels, but it was only an empty linen cupboard. While I was in there I heard someone coming. One of the blue bodies had got into the passage and was drifting toward me, pale and bemused-seeming under the downstairs lights. It kept looking back over its shoulder, blundering into doorways, and entangling its limbs in the heating pipes which ran along the walls. The crippled girl came round a corner and began to urge it along impatiently.

I stared at her in surprise. I said, “I didn’t know you were having treatment.”

“You aren’t allowed down here,” she said. “Go back upstairs before someone finds you.”

The blue body bobbed gently between us, waving its hands about in the air like a policeman directing the traffic. It touched her face; examined its own fingertips. It was the exact image of her, moulded in cool blue jelly. She pushed it away.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t seem to find the doctor. Perhaps you could help me. I feel rather ill.”

She looked at me like a stone. “Patients aren’t allowed downstairs after nine o’clock,” she said. She drove the blue body out of the linen cupboard, where it had been trying to thrust its head in among the pillow slips, and started to manhandle it through a door farther along the corridor. I followed her and stood outside watching. She had to struggle with it physically to keep it moving. Her hair fell into her eyes. Once she got it into the room, which was similar to the one in which Dr. Alexandre’s assistant had shown us our first blue body, she dragged it on to a table and lay down next to it. It stared inertly at the ceiling for a time, then slowly turned to face her. One of its legs slipped off the table. She put her arms round it and tried to get it to press itself against her, encouraging it with little clicks of her tongue.

When nothing happened she got off the table with an irritable sigh, went to the door, and looked up and down the corridor. No one was there. Then she got back to the table again. This time something seemed to happened but before I could see what it was the blue body fell off the table, pulling her down with it. She began to shout and scream with pain. I went closer and saw that they were partly joined together along their legs. The blue body had penetrated the muscles of her calves. She was flailing about, calling, “Push us together! Help!” The blue body stared at the ceiling, opening and closing its mouth.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“For God’s sake!” cried the crippled girl. “Help us join back together!”

I backed away and ran upstairs to the common room and sat down. Later that night there was a lot of coming and going, and I heard Dr. Alexandre and his assistant shouting in the passages.

When I first came here it was like a picture painted on a sodden, opened-out cardboard box. I remember the train slowing down between garden fences from which dangled bits of rag; and convolvulus spilling like white of egg out of a rusty old car abandoned in a scrapyard. Some of the soldiers said good-bye to us; most of them went silently away up the platform. All I want now is to stay in this room sleeping and reading. The maid says very politely, “Could you go downstairs for a bit, miss, we want to give the place a thorough going over.” They know they will be getting rid of me tomorrow. W.B. will come and fetch me. We are going over to France, where he has heard of a man who has had above-average success with a new chemical.

Last night, listening to the barges full of conscripts being towed up and down the river, the men singing their mournful songs, I thought: “Places are not so easy to escape from.” I will never go back to Agar Grove, but I see the blue bodies everywhere. Spawned in the violence and helplessness of the treatment shed, shadows of myself cast somehow by rays that no-one properly understands, they bob and gesticulate dumbly at the edge of vision. How many times have I said, “I would do anything at all to be cured!”

Now that I have done everything I feel as if I have been complicit in some appalling violation of myself.