The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

THE LIONS IN THE DESERT by David Langford

“How shall one catch the lions in the desert?” said young Keith Ramsey in his riddling voice, as he poured hot water into the unavoidable instant coffee.

After a week of nights on the job with him, I knew enough to smile guardedly. Serious proposals of expeditions, nets, traps, or bait were not required. Despite his round pink face and general air of being about sixteen, Keith was a mathematics D.Phil. (or nearly so) and had already decided to educate me in some of the running jokes of mathematicians. It could be interesting, in an obsessive way. The answers to the riddle were many and manifold.

“I thought of a topological method,” he said. “See, a lion is topologically equivalent to a doughnut…”

“What?”

“Well, approximately. A solid with a hole through it—the digestive tract, you know. Now if we translate the desert into four-dimensioned space, it becomes possible to knot the lion by a continuous topological deformation, which would leave it helpless to escape!”

I have no higher mathematics, but dire puns were allowed, “parallel lions” and the like. “Er, geometrically the desert is approximately a plane,” I suggested. “With the lions on it. Simply hijack the plane, and…”

He groaned dutifully, and we both drank the awful coffee supplied by the Trant to its loyal security force. Keith had converted his to the usual syrup with four spoonfuls of sugar. After all my care in dosing the sugar bowl, I was pleased that he took the correct measure.

“Deformation,” he said again, with what might have been a shiver. “You know, Bob, I wish they hadn’t shown us that picture. For me it’s night-watchman stuff or the dole, but every time I put on this wretched imitation policeman rig, I can feel things crawling all over my grave.”

“I never feel things like that—I’m too sensible. The original Man Who Could Not Shudder. But I sort of know what you mean. It reminded me of that bit in Jekyll and Hyde, if you ever read it…?”

He looked into the half-drunk coffee and sniffed; then snapped his skinny fingers. “Oh, ugh, yes. The awful Mr Hyde walking right over the kid in the street. Crunch, crunch, flat against the cobbles. Thank you very much for reminding me. Yes, I suppose it was like that.”

“They say down at the Welsh Pony that the turnover of guards here is pretty high for a cushy job like this. I have the impression they last about six weeks, on average. Funny, really.”

“Hilarious, mate. Look, what do you think happened to that bloke last year?”

“Maybe he opened one of the forbidden books,” I offered. “A hell of a thing when even a trusty pair like us gets told to keep clear of Area C.”

A gray man in a gray suit had hired me on behalf of the Trant Trustees. Amazingly little was said about career prospects, union representation or even—the part I was naturally curious about—the precise nature of what the two night guards actually guarded. Books were said to enter into it.

Instead: “I should warn you, Mr Ames, that certain people are intensely interested in the Trant Bequest. Last year, just outside the… that is, outside Area C, one of your predecessors was found like this. His colleague was not found at all.” He showed me a photograph without apparently caring to glance at it himself. The spread-eagled remains did not slot handily into anyone’s definition of how a corpse should look. Someone had, as Keith would have put it, tried bloody hard to translate him into two-dimensioned space.

“How shall one catch the lions in the desert?” he repeated, now badly slurred. The sugar treatment had taken longer than I had expected. “The method of the Sieve of Eratosthenes is to make an exhaustive list of all the objects in the desert and to cross off all the ones which on examination prove… prove not to be… To cross off…” Abandoning thought experiment number umpty-tum, he slumped to the table, head on arms, dribbling slightly over the sleeve of his nice navy-blue uniform. I thought of hauling him across to his bunk, but didn’t want to jog him back into wakefulness. With any luck he’d reach the morning with nothing worse than a touch of cramp. I rather liked young Keith: some day, maybe, he’d make a fine maths tutor with his games and jokes. If he could rouse interest in a dull pragmatist like me…

Certain people are intensely interested in the Jasper Trant Bequest. I am one of them. I slotted my special disk into the sensor-control PC and moved quietly out of the room.

Area A of the big house on Walton Street is mostly an impressive front hall, crusted with marble, chilled by a patterned quarry-tile floor too good (the Trustee said) to cover up with carpeting. Maggie, the black, shiny and very nearly spherical receptionist, reigns here from nine to five, Monday to Saturday—grumbling about the feeble electric fan-heater, nodding to the daily Trustee delegation, repelling any and all doomed enquiries for a reader’s card. I had yet to research the turnover time of Maggie’s job. The “guardroom” and a small, unreconstructed Victorian lavatory complete Area A.

Once upon a time, it was said, Jasper Trant saw something nasty in the woodshed. The people who strayed into the Bequest between nine and five had often gathered as much from odd sources—a footnote in Aleister Crowley, a sidelong reference in (of all places) H.P. Lovecraft. They came hoping for secret words of power, the poor fossils. Modern spells are written in bright new esoteric languages like C++ and 80486 extended assembler. This was the glamour I’d cast over the real-time monitoring system that logged all movement in Area B.

“It’s like something out of fucking Alien,” Keith Ramsey had said the day before. “All those narrow twisty corridors… it’s designed to make you expect something’s going to jump out at you from round the next corner, or chase you through the bits where you can’t run because you’ve got to go sideways.”

Naturally I’d been thinking about it, too, and had replied: “My guess is, it was designed that way to make it hard to bring in heavy cutting equipment. Or a trolly big enough to truck out the library. Assuming there really is a library.”

“Mmm… or maybe it was just fun to design. Everyone likes mazes, and why not old Trant? He was a maths don, wasn’t he? You know there’s a general algorithm for solving any maze. No, not just “follow the left-hand wall,” that only works without unconnected internal loops. To find the center as well as getting out again, what you do is…”

I was fascinated, but Area B isn’t quite that complex. It fills almost all the building, winding up, down and around to pass every one of the (barred) windows, and completely enclosing the central volume in its web of stone and iron. You might get lost for a while, but there are no actual dead ends, or only one.

“You wouldn’t get planning permission for that nowadays,” Keith had said gloomily. “Bloody indoor folly.”

I moved along the eighteen-inch passageways now. The dull yellow lamps, too feeble and too widely spaced, bred a writhing mass of shadows. (When the gas-brackets were in use, it must have been far worse.) Our desultory patrols were set to cover the whole labyrinth, with one exception: the short spur where the sensors clustered thickest. Daily at 10 AM the gray-headed Trustee and his two hulking minders went down this forbidden path to—consult? check? dust? pay homage to? “Feed the Bequest,” came Keith’s remembered voice, now artificially hollow. “His expensive leather briefcase, Bob, simply has to be packed with slabs of raw meat. Flesh which is… no longer of any human shape!”

Remembering the photograph of a certain ex-guard, it was possible to feel apprehension. I thought also of my reconnaissance down at the Welsh Pony pub off Gloucester Green, where it was almost a standing joke that people didn’t wear a Trant guard’s navy uniform for long. They did not all suffer freak accidents: that would be absurd. By and large, they merely tended to leave after that average six weeks. You could speculate, if you chose, that something had frightened them. The heavy, regulation torch was a comfort in my hand.

Somewhere the real-time watchdog system dreamed its dreams, fed a soothingly “normal” pattern of patrol movements by my rogue software, registering nothing at all in the dense minefield of IR and ultrasonic pickups that guarded the way to Area C.

Left, right, left, and there in torchlight was the door: big, grim, banded with iron, deep-set in its massive frame, with a lock the size of a VCR unit. I was half inclined to turn back at that point, because it was joke. Modern burglars flip open those jumbo Victorian lever-and-ward efforts almost without breaking step. As part of my personal quest, I’d entered other restricted libraries (including sections of the BM and Bodleian known to very few) and had never seen such a lumbering apology for a lock. But after all, and hearteningly, there was the maze and the electronic network… something here was surely worth guarding.

“How shall one catch the lions in the desert?” I quoted to myself as I felt for the lock-spring, remembering one of Keith’s sillier answers: the hunter builds a cage, locks himself securely in, and performs an inversion transformation so that he is considered to be outside while all the lions are inside, along with the desert, the Earth, the universe… Perhaps Jasper Trant had liked mathematical jokes. He was here at just about the right time to have known Lewis Carroll, another of Keith’s heroes whom I must look up some day.

I was here because of a rumor that Trant’s preoccupations, Trant’s bequest, had a personal connection with—well—myself.

Click and click again. The door swung ponderously inward, and the first torchlit glimpse swept away half my uncertainties. Area C, where the movement sensors did not extend, was indeed a library—a forty-foot-square room with wooden bookcases scattered along its iron walls. Ceiling and floor were likewise made of, or lined with, dull iron. A vault.

All this profusion was a disappointment. I had flicked through libraries before. The literature of the occult is stupendously boring and repetitive… it may contain many small secrets, but I had very much hoped that dead Jasper Trant knew one big secret.

Must smells: old books, old iron, and a thin reek of what might have been oil. Keeping close to the wall, I moved cautiously clockwise to the first bookcase. An average turnover time of six weeks. Easing out a random volume with a cracked calf spine, I shone the torch on its title page to find what blasting, forbidden knowledge…

The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy by William Paley, D.D.: The Twelfth Edition, corrected by The Author. Vol I. MDCCXCIX. Crammed with edifying stuff about Christianity.

Jesus Christ.

The next one was called The Abominations of Modern Society. These included swearing, “leprous newspapers” and “the dissipations of the ballroom,” and the author didn’t approve of them at all. Then another volume I of Paley… sermons… more sermons… numbing ranks of sermons… a third copy of the identical Paley tract.

I scanned shelf after shelf, finding more and more of the same dull book-dealers’ leavings. Junk. All junk. The Bequest library was a fake. Not even a volume of dear old Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

On the other hand, where does the wise man hide a pebble? On the beach. Where does the wise man hide a leaf…?

Perhaps. In the center of the far wall, opposite the door, my flicking circle of torchlight found a cleared space and a long metal desk or table. One the steel surface, an old-fashioned blotting pad; on the pad, a book like a ledger that lay invitingly open. Cautiously, cautiously, now. There was something almost too tempting about…

What I felt was minute but inexplicable. I might have put it down to nerves, but I never suffer from nerves. A sinking feeling? I backed rapidly away, and my bootheel snagged on something, a slight step in the floor. The floor had been smooth and even. Now the torch beam showed bad news: a large rectangle of iron had sunk noiselessly, with the metal table and myself on it, just less than half an inch into the floor. I thought hydraulics, whipped around instantly and blurred toward the door faster than anyone I have ever met could have managed. Too late.

It was all very ingenious. Victorian technology, for God’s sake. The 3-D maze construction of Area B must have concealed any amount of dead space for tanks, conduits, and machinery. Now, tall vertical panels within the deep door frame had hinged open on either side to show iron under the old wood, and oiled steel bars moved silkily out and across, barring the way. By the time I reached the door, the closing space was too narrow: I could have thrust myself a little way in, only to have neat cylinders punched out of me. The heavy rods from the left finished gliding into their revealed sockets at the right. And that was that.

The space between the bars was about four unaccommodating inches. I thought hard. I still knew one big thing, but was it needed? “Well, I was just curious,” I imagined myself saying with a slight whine to Gray Suit in the morning. “It’s a fair cop. I don’t suppose, ha ha, there’s any chance you could keep me on? No? Oh well, that’s the luck of the game,” and bye-bye to the Jasper Trant Bequest.

Everyone gets curious after a while. Practically anybody would grow overcome with curiosity in an average time of, say, six weeks. Thus the staff turnover. Thus…

No. I don’t pretend to be an expert on human psychology, but surely sooner or later the Trant would end up hiring someone too loyal or too dull to take a peep, and they’d duly hold down the job for years on end.

For the sake of form I tested the bars—immovable—and went back to learn what I might from the disastrous ledger. It was all blank sheets except for where it had lain open. That page carried a few lines of faded blue-black ink, in the sort of clerkly hand you might expect from Bob Cratchit.

Jasper Trant said in his Last Will and Testament that once as a magistrate of the Oxford courts he saw a shape no man could believe, a thing that crawled from a cell window where no man might pass and left nought behind. All through his life he puzzled over this and sought a proof. Here is his bequest.

Here was what bequest? Was this slender snatch of gossip the root of all those rumors about Trant’s secret lore of shape-shifters and changelings? Something was missing. Or perhaps I had not thought it through. The path seemed clear: wait till morning, own up like a man, and walk out of the building forever. No problem.

It was then that I looked properly at the steel table which supported the book. It was dreadfully like a medical examination couch. Two huge minders always accompanied the Trustee on his morning visit to Area C. Suddenly I was sure that no errant security guard was allowed to say good-bye without being carefully prodded and probed. Which would not do at all.

The Trant Bequest had circulated its own damned rumors, and fed the fires by refusing any access to its worthless collection. Bait.

How shall one catch the lions in the desert? There was one answer that Keith repeated with a tiny sneer because it wasn’t pure maths but mathematical physics. I know even less physics than maths, but swiftly picked up the jeering tone… protective coloration. The theoretical physicist’s answer: Build a securely locked cage in the centre of the desert. Wave mechanics says there is always a tiny but non-zero probability that any particular wave/particle, including a lion, might be in the cage. Wait.

With the long patience of the dead, Jasper Trant had waited.

Shit, I thought, seeing another facet. After six weeks on average, if they hadn’t given way to curiosity, each successive Trant guard would be sacked on some excuse or another, to make way for the testing of the next in line. No one who wanted to infiltrate the Bequest would have to wait for long.

I sighed. Four inches between the bars. This would take time and not be at all comfortable. I could not stay around for a possible medical examination: every instinct screamed against it, and I trust my instincts. The Trant Bequest had nothing more to tell me about myself.

So. Off with that smart uniform. The dull, painful trance of change, writhing to and fro on that death-cold iron floor, in the dark. Bones working as in a dream. Muscle-masses shifting, joints dislocating, rewriting the map of myself. The ribs are one thing; the pelvic and cranial sutures are very much harder work to part and rejoin. It went on and on, until at length I was a grotesque flat parody of the Bob Ames who had entered an eternity before. Even so, it would be a long hard wriggle. By now I must look like…

Well, specifically, like the dead and flattened guard in that photograph. Could he have been—? No, it wouldn’t make sense, there was a real autopsy and everything. But I did examine the bars more closely, in fear of some hidden trap. Then I stood back and glimpsed the trap too obvious to be noticed.

Jasper Trant himself had seen something slip from an Oxford jailhouse cell. Through the bars, no doubt. Bars, no doubt, set just as far apart as those now blocking the Area C door. There was another subtlety here. If this was a snare for people like myself, set by his long-departed curiosity, why the loophole?

Almost I could hear Keith’s voice, the eager voice of the mathematician: Didn’t you read the mention of “proof” in the book? Wasn’t I telling you last night about the austere kind of maths reasoning we call an existence proof? Trant wasn’t collecting for a zoo… he was a mathematician and all his Trustees want is the existence proof. Which they’d certainly have, if after walking in there and triggering the hydraulics you got out through that impossible gap. Don’t you see?

I saw, and was profoundly grateful to Keith for the patterns of reasoning he’d shown me. It was heady stuff, this reason, a shiny and unfamiliar tool. I couldn’t stay and I couldn’t go. Knowledge is power and human ignorance is my safeguard. After the long years’ trek from that damned children’s home in search of more of my kind, whatever kind that might be, I did not propose the betrayal of confirming to these… others… that my own kind existed. Which left me caught, like the lion in the desert who (“Ever heard the psychologist’s method, Keith?”) builds around him, deduction by deduction, the bars of his own intangible cage.

Yes, I owe a great deal to young Keith. Education is a wonderful thing; he taught me how to be a lion. And at the last I remembered one thing that he’d explained to me, sentences falling over each other in his enthusiasm… the technique of reducing a difficulty to a problem that has already been solved. All else then follows. Q.E.D.

It was solved, I think, last year.

Caught in this exact dilemma, what did my anonymous cousin do then? He could escape the cage, but at the cost of leaving the Trustees their proof. I salute him for his splendid piece of misdirection. Then as now, there was a second guard, no doubt asleep back in the control room. No live man could have slipped through those bars after springing the trap, but a dead man, topologically equivalent but stamped and trampled and flattened… In the morning, outside the barred doorway of Area C, there lay an object that might just have been—that to any rational mind must have been—hauled and crushed with brutal force through one narrow space. Hauled from outside the cage. A bizarre and suspicious circumstance, but not one which quite proved anything.

So logic points the way. I’m sorry to be doing this, Keith. I’m truly grateful for all our conversations, and will try to make quite sure that you feel no pain.