Screaming Science Fiction (5 page)

The man on the beach grinned mirthlessly, white lips drawing back from his teeth and freezing there. A year ago he would have expected to read such in a book of horror fiction. But not now. Not when it was written in his own hand.

The breeze changed direction, blew on him, and the sand began to drift against his side. It blew in his eyes, glazed now and lifeless. The shadows lengthened as the sun started to dip down behind the dunes. His body grew cold.

Three hairy sacks with pincer feet, big as footballs and heavy with his blood, crawled slowly away from him along the beach….

If you motor up the Ml past Lanchester from London and come off before Bankhead heading west across the country, within a very few miles you enter an area of gently rolling green hills, winding country roads and Olde Worlde villages with quaint wooden-beamed street-corner pubs and noonday cats atop leaning ivied walls. The roads there are narrow, climbing gently up and ribboning back down the green hills, rolling between fields, meandering casually through woods and over brick- and wooden-bridged streams; the whole background forms a pattern of peace and tranquility rarely disturbed over the centuries.

By night, though, the place takes on a different aspect. An almost miasmal aura of timelessness, of antiquity, hangs over the brooding woods and dark hamlets. The moon silvers winding hedgerows and ancient thatched roofs, and when the pubs close and the last lights blink out in farm and cottage windows, then it is as if Night had thrown her blackest cloak over the land, when even the most powerful headlight’s beam penetrates the resultant darkness only with difficulty. Enough to allow you to drive on the narrower roads, if you drive slowly and carefully.

Strangers motoring through this region—even in daylight hours—are known occasionally to lose their way, to drive the same labyrinthine lanes for hours on end in meaningless circles. The contours of the countryside often seem to defy even the most accurate sense of direction, and the roads and tracks never quite seem to tally with printed maps of the area. There are rumors almost as old as the area itself that persons have been known to pass into oblivion here—like gray smoke from cottage chimneystacks disappearing into air—never to come out again.

Not that George Benson was a stranger. True, he had not been home to England for many years—since running off as a youth, later to marry and settle in Germany—but as a boy he had known this place well and must have cycled for thousands of miles along dusty summer roads, lanes and tracks, even bridle-paths through the heart of this very region.

And that was why he was so perturbed now: not because of a pack of lies and fairy stories and old wives’ tales heard as a boy, but because this was his home territory, where he’d been born and reared. Indeed, he felt more than perturbed, stupid almost. A fellow drives all the way north through Germany from Dortmund, catches the car ferry from Bremerhaven into Harwich, rolls on up-country having made the transition from right- to left-of-the-road driving with only a very small effort…. and then hopelessly loses himself within only a fistful of miles from home!

Anger at his own supposed stupidity turned to bitter memories of his wife, then to an even greater anger. And a hurt….

It didn’t hurt half so much now, though, not now that it was all over. But the anger was still there. And the memories of the milk of marriage gone sour. Greta had just upped and left home one day. George, employing the services of a detective agency, had traced his wife to Hamburg, where he’d found her in the bed of a nightclub crooner, an old boyfriend who finally had made it good.

“Damn all Krauts!” George cursed now as he checked the speed of his car to read out the legend on a village signpost. His headlights picked the letters out starkly in the surrounding darkness. “Middle Hamborough?—Never bloody heard of it!” Again he cursed as, making a quick decision, he spun the steering wheel to turn his big car about on the narrow road. He would have to start back-tracking, something he hated doing because it seemed so inefficient, so wasteful. “And blast and damn all Kraut cars!” he added as his front wheels bounced jarringly on to and back off the high stone roadside curb.

“Greta!” he quietly growled to himself as he drove back down the road away from the outskirts of Middle Hamborough. “What a
bitch
!” For of course she had blamed him for their troubles, saying that she couldn’t stand his meanness.
Him
, George Benson, mean! She simply hadn’t appreciated money. She’d thought that Deutschmarks grew on trees, that pfennigs gathered like dew on the grass in the night. George, on the other hand, had inherited many of the pecuniary instincts of his father, a Yorkshireman of the Old School—and of Scottish stock to boot—who really understood the value of “brass.” His old man had used to say: “Thee tak’ care o’ the pennies, Georgie, an’ the pounds’ll tak’ care o’ theysels!”

George’s already pinched face tightened skull-like as his thoughts again returned to Greta. She had wanted children. Children! Damned lucky thing he had known better than to accept that! For God’s sake, who could afford children?

Then she’d complained about the food—like she’d been complaining for years—saying that she was getting thin because the money he gave her was never enough. But George liked his women willowy and fragile; that way there was never much fight in them.

Well, he’d certainly misjudged Greta, there had been plenty of fight left in her. And their very last fight had been about food, too. He had wanted her to buy food in bulk at the supermarkets for cheapness; in turn she’d demanded a deep freezer so that the food she bought wouldn’t go bad; finally George had gone off the deep end when she told him how much the freezer she had in mind would cost!

She left him that same day; moreover, she ate the last of the wurstchen before she went! George grinned mirthlessly as he gripped the steering wheel tighter, wishing it were Greta’s scrawny neck. By God—she’d be sorry when she was fat!

Still, George had had the last laugh. Their home had been paid for fifty-fifty, but it had been in George’s name. He had sold it; likewise the furniture and the few clothes she’d left behind. The car had been half hers, too—but again in George’s name, for Greta couldn’t drive. It was all his now: his money, his car, everything. As he’d done so often in the last twenty-four hours, he took one hand from the wheel to pat reassuringly the fat wallet where its outline bulged out the upper right front pocket of his jacket.

It was the thought of money that sent George’s mind casting back an hour or so to a chance encounter at Harvey’s All-Night-Grill, just off the Ml. This drunk had been there—oh, a real joker, and melancholy with it, too—but he had been so well-heeled! George remembered the man’s queer offer: “Just show me the way home, that’s all—and all I’ve got you can have!” And he had carried a checkbook showing a credit of over two thousand pounds….

That last was hearsay, though, passed on to George by Harvey himself, the stubble-jawed, greasy-aproned owner of the place. Now that earlier accidental meeting and conversation suddenly jumped up crystal clear in George’s mind.

It had started when George mentioned to Harvey that he was heading for Bellington; that was when the other fellow had started to take an interest in him and had made his weird offer about being shown the way home.

God damn! George sat bolt upright behind the steering wheel. Come to think of it, he had heard of Middle Hamborough before. Surely that was the name of the place the drunk had been looking for—for fifteen years!

George hadn’t paid much attention to the man at the time, had barely listened to his gabbled, drunken pleading. He’d passed the fellow off quite simply as some nut who’d heard those fanciful old rumors about people getting lost in the surrounding countryside, a drunk who was making a big play of his own personal little fantasy. He would be all right when he sobered up.

Now that George thought about it, though—well, why should anyone make up a story like that? And, come to think of it, the man hadn’t seemed all that drunk. More tired and, well, lost, really….

Just then, cresting a low hill, as his headlights flashed across the next shallow valley, George saw the house with the big garden and the long drive winding up to it. The place stood to the right of the road, atop the next hill, and the gravel drive rose up from an ornamental stone arch and iron gate at the roadside. Dipping down the road and climbing the low hill, George read the wrought-iron legend on the gate: high house. And now he remembered more of the—drunk’s?—story.

The man had called himself Kent, and fifteen years ago, on his tenth wedding anniversary, he’d left home one morning to drive to London, there to make certain business arrangements with city-dwelling colleagues. He had taken a fairly large sum of money with him when he drove from High House, the home he himself had designed and built, and this had worked out just as well for him. Turning right off the Middle Hamborough road through Meadington and on to the London road at Bankhead, Kent had driven to the city. And in London—

Kent was a partner in a building concern with head offices in the city…or at least he had been. For in London he discovered that the firm had never existed, that his colleagues, Milton and Jones, while they themselves were real enough, swore they had never heard of him. “Milton, Jones & Kent” did not exist; the firm was known simply as “Milton & Jones.” Not only did they not know him, they tried to have him jailed for attempted fraud!

That was only the start of it, for the real horror came when he tried to get back home—only to discover that there just wasn’t any way home! George now remembered Kent’s apparently drunken phrase: “A strange dislocation of space and time, a crossing of probability tracks, a passage between parallel dimensions—and a subsequent
snapping-bac
k of space-time elastic….” Now surely only a drunk would say something like that? A drunk or a nut. Except Harvey had insisted that Kent was sober. He was just tired, Harvey said, confused, half mad trying to solve a fifteen-year-old problem that wasn’t. There had never been a Middle Hamborough, Harvey insisted. The place wasn’t shown on any map; you couldn’t find it in the telephone directory; no trains, buses, or roads went there. Middle Hamborough wasn’t!

But Middle Hamborough
was
, George had seen it, or—

Could it be that greasy old Harvey had somehow been fooling that clown all these years, milking his money drop by drop, cashing in on some mental block or other? Or had they both simply been pulling George’s leg? If so, well, it certainly seemed a queer sort of joke….

George glanced at his watch. Just 11:00 p.m. Damn it, he’d planned to be in Bellington by now, at home with the Old Folks, and he would have been if he’d come off the Ml at the right place.

Of course, when he’d left England there had been no motorway as such, just another road stretching away north and south. That was where he’d gone wrong; obviously he’d come off the Ml too soon. He should have gone on to the next exit. Well, all right, he’d kill two birds with one stone. He’d go back to Harvey’s all-nighter, check out the weird one’s story again, then see if he couldn’t perhaps latch on to some of the joker’s small change to cover his time. Then he’d try to pick up a map of the area before heading home. He couldn’t go wrong with a map—now could he?

Having decided his course, and considering the winding roads and pitch darkness, George put his foot down and sped back to Harvey’s place. Parking his car, he walked in through the open door into the unhealthy atmosphere and lighting of the so-called cafeteria (where the lights were kept low, George suspected, to make the young cockroaches on the walls less conspicuous). He went straight to the service counter and carefully rested his elbows upon it, avoiding the splashes of sticky coffee and spilled grease. Of the equally greasy proprietor he casually inquired the whereabouts of Mr. Kent.

“Eh? Kent? He’ll be in his room. I let him lodge here, y’know. He doesn’t like to be too far from this area….”

“You
let
him lodge here?” George asked, raising his eyebrows questioningly.

“Well, y’know—he pays a bit.”

George nodded, silently repeating the other’s words: Yeah, I’ll
bet
he pays a bit!

“G’night there!” Harvey waved a stained dishcloth at a departing truck driver and his mate. “See y’next time.” He turned back to George with a scowl. “Anyway, what’s it to you, about Kent? After making y’self a quick quid or two?”

“How do you mean?” George returned, assuming a hurt look. “It’s just that I think I might be able to help the poor bloke out, that’s all.”

“Oh?” Harvey looked suspicious. “How’s that, then?”

“Well, half an hour ago I was on the road to Middle Hamborough, and I passed a place set back off the road called High House. I just thought—”

“‘Ere,” Harvey cut in, a surprisingly fast hand shooting out to catch George’s jacket front and pull him close so that their faces almost met across the service counter. “You tryin’ t’ be clever, chief?”

“Well, I’ll be—” George spluttered, genuinely astonished. “What the hell do you think you’re—’

“Cos if you are—you an’ me’ll fall out, we will!”

George carefully disengaged himself. “Well,” he said, “I think that answers one of my questions, at least.”

“Eh? What d’you mean?’ Harvey asked, still looking surly. George backed off a step.

“Looks to me like you’re as mad as him, attacking me like that. I mean, I might have expected you to laugh, seeing as how I fell for your funny little joke—but I’d hardly think you’d get all physical.”

“What the merry ’ell are you on about?” Harvey questioned, a very convincing frown creasing his forehead. “What joke?”

“Why, about Middle Hamborough, about it not being on any map and about no roads going there and Kent looking for the place for fifteen years. I’m on about a place that’s not twenty minutes’ fast drive from here, signposted clear as the City of London!”