Caltraps of Time (26 page)

‘Are you coming out for lunch, Vic?’ he called to his mate across the table, fixing him unconsciously with a characteristically searching gaze under his thick brows. ‘I’m getting sick of the canteen stuff.’

‘Better pep yourself up again, then, Royo, there’s a nasty grief outside,’ said Ken Mattock, coming in breathing deeply and erratically through pinched nostrils.

‘Oh, the corner place will do us. That’s not far, we’ll survive it, eh, Vic?’

‘I’ll take a quick booster first if you don’t mind. I’m a bit low this morning,’ said Vic, helping himself from his pharmapouch. ‘Right — that’ll fix me. I’m ready now.’

That night, a rather disturbed May eventually persuaded to bed, Miriel broached the subject of school precautions again. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I don’t care for the way they hand out their peps and tranqs — much too rough and ready. I delivered May after lunch in the red city-car: she was quite upset coming in. I had a word with the head. I’m going to keep her carefully drugged up and the school will have her for lunch in future. That means she won’t be so easily exposed.’

‘You coddle her too much,’ said Roydon.

‘No, Roy, I can’t have her education going to pieces because of all these ups and downs. It may be all right for some parents, but not for us. We have her future to think of.’

Roydon gave way. He sighed for the Golden Ages of his parents’ memory, when the world’s atmosphere had nothing worse than true weather and a little fallout for men to contend with. A feature item on the chaos in Africa and India, scarcely mitigated by pharmacological aid, underlined his thoughts. The Indians and Africans were trying to ride out griefs by hectic dance-sessions on the lines of the old Mediterranean tarantella remedy, and angers and fears by great choral chants, but these folk remedies were naturally very chancy. Only the most advanced nations had been able to meet the new emotional influences in the air with air-conditioning and with drugs subtle enough to act quick enough or slow enough and without seriously affecting judgement or the body’s reactions. His own
World-Day
programme came through and he watched it dutifully and critically. It was followed by a
Men of Science
interview with a microdiathesiologist.

‘You see,’ explained the pundit, ‘the mood-climate differs not only from country to country, but from place to place, from street to roof, from valley to slope, and often in quite spectacular ways. Take the corner of a high building or the top of a cliff. This sort of site is subject to great turbulence. While the general mood-weather round it may be gloomy one day or one hour and optimistic the next, the mood at the acron, as we call it, is often switching minute by minute from despair to ecstasy and back again. Hence the semi-mystical nature-loving joy one moment and the suicide leap the next.’

‘But such violent changes are not met with in other places, are they?’

‘Not commonly. Indeed the micro-sentiment at many spots is more stable than that of the general mood-weather at man-height. The surface of marshes is nearly always depressed and fearful. Those of a park or a well-kept garden are warm, friendly, serene. And of course there is a third class of micro-diathesis which varies on a twenty-four-hour cycle. A wood or a lake at noon is usually gay and serene, at midnight amorous in moonlight but hostile and intensely fearful in darkness. The nature of the cycle in this case depends on the illumination.’

Roydon, yawning ostentatiously, switched the set off at this point. Details of this sort were rather beyond him, his yawn implied. But his heartbeat was accelerating. Programmes like this one he found disquieting. The world was dangerous enough without these local effects. He preferred not to know. The shelter of Miriel’s arms and hair blotted out the world and its perils.

~ * ~

Three years later it happened. Roydon, now in the studio team of
World-Day,
and normally working from 3 to 11 p.m., was rung at the studio one March afternoon at five.

‘I thought I told you not to ring me at night — it’s far too hectic here!’

‘Roy, Roy, it’s Phil! He — he -’

‘He had an accident!’ shouted Roydon. He recalled that Phil was usually brought home by some rather older children from infant school. Sobbing, Miriel told him that Phil and his friends had run into an unexpected pocket of terror in a dip in the road coming home. They had scattered, Phil darting insanely across the road, it seemed, and straight under a car. It was all over in a moment.

After the funeral, which ironically took place on a gay, serene morning, Miriel, who had kept herself on a tight rein, seemed to go to pieces. She refused all drugs, scarcely roused on the most cheerful of days, and gave herself up to a sort of resentfulness of sorrow. Roydon’s parents, who had stayed on for some days, took May under their roof not far off; and for the rest of term were to fetch her to school and back. Roydon managed to secure leave and took Miriel west to a wild part of the country neither of them had seen before, which she could not associate with Philip. They left the two city-cars behind and hired a runabout. Gradually she began to pick up, but there was a ghostly something about her look, an air of looking through or past Roydon, which worried him. It was a fine spring and the mood-weather was optimistic, with only the occasional grief. Roydon let the griefs wash over Miriel when they were out walking, and sometimes over himself, as he felt they would help to purge the emotional load.

The first Sunday they went to church. The rather meagre congregation huddled in the cool Early English interior. The sermon was uninspiring. But there was a soothing quality about the grey-green gloom and the thin arches. The motor of the tranquillizer-cordial hummed gently in the silences. Afterwards Roydon was rather sorry they had gone, for they were strolling through the churchyard when Miriel stopped with a shudder. The funeral was too recent. Drunken gravestones, their inscriptions worn to rivers in the soft local stone, leant around them. But she had stopped at a very tall and broad headstone.

‘Look,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Roy, you could have had an ancestor here.’

‘Well, could be, certainly ends with “Back”, and it certainly has an R as second letter, and the length looks right. Can’t make out the forename, can you?’

‘No, I don’t think I can. And what a long inscription.’

‘From the few words I can make out, it was one of those paragons of all the virtues. Local bigwig, I expect. They used to make them out to be saints on their tombstones in those days; whereas they probably fathered half the brats in the parish really, and twisted their tenants. I must have a look at the parish register some time, just in case he really had the same name. Still, it’s not absolutely unique as a name.’

~ * ~

‘What is all this about the Snevley Fields?’ said the big man at the bar.

Roydon turned half round from his half-pint. Miriel was upstairs. The big man, who looked like a landowner or businessman, was talking to a squat little fellow who might be a farmer or a lawyer.

‘What do you want to know about the Snevley Fields?’

‘Something queer is going on there — what is it?’

‘Something decidedly queer is certainly going on there,’ said the squat man, who, like the big man, had a whisky in front of him. Roydon cocked his
World-Day-
educated
ear. ‘It seems that all Morris’s cattle have disappeared there. So has Midgley’s dog. Midgley was walking the Carruthers side and his dog went after rabbits. That was a week ago and no one has seen the dog since.’

‘But it’s perfectly open country, no badger holes or fox holes either.’

‘Exactly. And no cow holes! ... Midgley’s a bit scared to go in himself. As for Morris, he thinks the place is bewitched. Talks about fairies and I don’t know what. Won’t stir near there. A bit superstitious, old Morris is.’

‘Was it in daylight?’

‘We don’t know about Morris’s cattle. But Midgley’s dog went early one afternoon.’

‘Any clues?’

‘No! Only thing is, the Snevley Fields seem to have been re-hedged by someone. The old hawthorn’s given way to hazel, Morris says. He looked through binoculars. Says it goes beyond the brook too.’

‘Snevley’s is let, isn’t it?’

‘Yes — to someone from Scrutton. But they haven’t been there for weeks.’

‘You talking about them Snevley Fields?’ put in a long man in an overcoat, drinking stout on the far side.

‘Yes, and Harry says it goes on beyond the brook.’

‘Too true; and another thing,’ said the long man: ‘you know that brook runs straight down a fair way between them two hedges? Someone digged it that way long since.’ The other two nodded assent. So did three other listeners. ‘Well now it don’t. It runs all squiggly-squaggly. And them hedges — they’ve gone!’

There was a heavy silence. ‘I know another man as lost a dog thereabouts,’ called a dark man in a corner. Silence. Heads turned. “Twere Ted. His bitch were round Parker’s Knoll, a week come Friday ‘twere. She were chasing rabbits too. Ted says he had his eye on her, and she just vanished.’

‘How d’you mean, vanished?’ put in the big man.

‘Vanished in full view, right in the middle of the next field. Here, Fred, turn up the aero-whatsit. That crossness is seeping in again — I can feel me hackles rising.’

“Tis the whisky in you, Bill,’ called the squat man amid general laughter, but the landlord picked up an aerosol hand-sprayer and pumped the cordial-tranquillizer over the room.

‘Well, as I were saying. She vanished in full view. One moment she were there, going hell for leather in the middle of a field. Next moment — she weren’t there. Never came back no more.’

‘That’s a hell of a lot of land that is. From Snevley’s to Parker’s Knoll.’

‘And from Goff’s Brook to t’other side of Snevley, I shouldn’t wonder,’ came from a small man who had not yet spoken.

Roydon, who was used to interviewing, or failing to interview, rural types, held his peace, but after a moment or two found occasion to ask the barman the name of the long man and the squat man, and still later buttonholed the landlord and got from him their addresses (they turned out to be the village grocer and the local garage man) and the approximate location of Goff’s Brook, Snevley’s and Parker’s Knoll. He represented himself as an amateur landscape painter with some ideas about later fishing.

Next morning, with a strong instinctive drive prevalent and a cordial temperament abroad, Roydon took Miriel out on foot looking for the mystery area. The forecast was fairly optimistic and he thought it would be good for her to tramp around with him while he tried to work up what promised to be something of a news story. In two hours they were in sight of the farmhouse known as Snevley’s. Beyond it down a slight slope were the Snevley Fields, a set of meadows already powdered with buttercups. The pair paused. ‘Let’s work round this field and up to that copse. We might get a better view of that break in the hedges they were talking about.’

When they reached a field corner next to the copse, where a distinct drop in the emotional temperature could be felt, Roydon took some photographs. The chilliness was becoming palpable hostility, and his wife was unprotected by drugs. ‘You stick it out here, Miriel. I’ll walk uphill and see what can be seen from that tree.’ Roydon strode off. A brusquely suspicious mood dominated the summit. Reaching the tree at the top he turned. Miriel was not to be seen.

Roydon, shouting her name at the top of his voice, glared round an arc of countryside. Away down a narrow meadow between two hedges he thought he saw a flickering speck running, running very hard. An instant later it was swallowed up, in the line of the nearer hedge. Perhaps it was a rook in the air between. Moving cloud-shadows confused the view. After a minute of calling, Roydon ran back down the long slope and at length arrived, gasping and dizzy, his knees aching, at the spot where he had left her. There were some snapped twigs, and after staring around he thought he could see the imprint of her shoes in the earth not far off, pointing homeward. But beyond this on all sides tall wiry grasses swallowed up everything. The feeling of hostility grew, mingled with acute fear. The wind hissed among the twigs and grasses. ‘Bitch, bitch!’ Roydon found himself muttering. He forced himself to swallow a pill, but found minutes later that it must have been a slow-acting one he had chosen. Hoarse with shouting and cursing, he began to stumble back the way they had come, convinced that she had started home. As he approached Snevley’s a squall of rage and grief burst upon him. Sobbing and swearing, tears coursing down his cheeks, he ran round the yard and burst in through the open doorway. No one was at home. He rushed through the rooms without finding anyone or any trace, tried all the cupboards, and finally ran out again and on to the village. At last, in a state of maudlin warmth now that the pill had taken effect in more cordial surroundings, he stumbled into the inn. Miriel was not in their room. No one had seen her. Someone brought him to the police station, in whose tranquillized air he told his story.

‘That settles it,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’m ringing HQ. These disappearances are beyond us.’

Roydon found himself at the receiving end of the interviewing on that evening’s
World-Day.
Ken had shot up from London by jet to see him personally. By next day the CID and half the newshawks of the west of the country were in the district. No one dare enter the ‘Forbidden Zone’ and a cordon was to be thrown up by the army. During the week a helicopter and a set of tracker-dogs on the end of microphoned long lines were brought up.