The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s. Brian Aldiss
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of a starry void in which men and monsters swam or battled, and then swiftly erased it. Such ideas did not conform with the quiet behaviour of his companions; if they never spoke about outside, did they think about it?
Uneasily, Harley moved about the room; the parquet floor echoed the indecision of his footsteps. He had walked into the billiard room. Now he prodded the balls across the green cloth with one finger, preyed on by conflicting intentions. The red spheres touched and rolled apart. That was how the two halves of his mind worked. Irreconcilables: he should stay here and conform; he should … not stay here (remembering no time when he was not here, Harley could frame the second idea no more clearly than that). Another point of pain was that ‘here’ and ‘not here’ seemed to be not two halves of a homogeneous whole, but two dissonances.
The ivory slid wearily into a pocket. He decided. He would not sleep in his room tonight.
They came from the various parts of the house to share a bedtime drink. By tacit consent the cards had been postponed until some other time; there was, after all, so much other time.
They talked about the slight nothings that comprised their day, the model of one of the rooms that Calvin was building and May furnishing, the faulty light in the upper corridor which came on too slowly. They were subdued. It was time once more to sleep, and in that sleep who knew what dreams might come? But they would sleep. Harley knew – wondering if the others also knew – that with the darkness which descended as they climbed into bed would come an undeniable command to sleep.
He stood tensely just inside his bedroom door, intensely aware of the unorthodoxy of his behaviour. His head hammered painfully and he pressed a cold hand against his temple. He heard the others go one by one to their separate rooms. Pief called good-night to him; Harley replied. Silence fell.
Now!
As he stepped nervously into the passage, the light came on. Yes, it was slow – reluctant. His heart pumped. He was committed. He did not know what he was going to do or what was going to happen, but he was committed. The compulsion to sleep had been avoided. Now he had to hide, and wait.
It is not easy to hide when a light signal follows wherever you go. But by entering a recess which led to an unused room, opening the door slightly and crouching in the doorway, Harley found that the faulty landing light dimmed off and left him in the dark.
He was neither happy nor comfortable. His brain seethed in a conflict he hardly understood. He was alarmed to think he had broken the rules, and frightened of the creaking darkness about him. But the suspense did not last for long.
The corridor light came back on. Jagger was leaving his bedroom, taking no precaution to be silent. The door swung loudly shut behind him. Harley caught a glimpse of his face before he turned and made for the stairs; he looked noncommittal, but serene – like a man going off duty. He went downstairs in bouncy, jaunty fashion.
Jagger should have been in bed asleep. A law of nature had been defied.
Unhesitatingly, Harley followed. He had been prepared for something and something had happened, but his flesh crawled with fright. The light-headed notion came to him that he might disintegrate with fear. All the same, he kept doggedly on down the stairs, feet noiseless on the heavy carpet.
Jagger had rounded a corner. He was whistling quietly as he went. Harley heard him unlock a door. That would be the store – no other doors were locked. The whistling faded.
The store was open. No sound came from within. Cautiously, Harley peered inside. The far wall had swung open about a central pivot, revealing a passage beyond. For minutes Harley could not move, staring fixedly at this breach.
Finally, and with a sense of suffocation, he entered the store. Jagger had gone through – there. Harley also went through. Somewhere he did not know, somewhere whose existence he had not guessed … Somewhere that wasn’t the house … The passage was short and had two doors, one at the end rather like a cage door (Harley did not recognise an elevator when he saw one), one in the side, narrow and with a window.
This window was transparent. Harley looked through it and then fell back, choking. Dizziness swept in and shook him by the throat.
Stars shone outside.
With an effort, he mastered himself and made his way back upstairs, lurching against the banisters. They had all been living under a ghastly misapprehension …
He barged into Calvin’s room and the light lit. A faint, sweet smell was in the air, and Calvin lay on his broad back, fast asleep.
‘Calvin! Wake up!’ Harley shouted.
The sleeper never moved. Harley was suddenly aware of his own loneliness and the eerie feel of the great house about him. Bending over the bed, he shook Calvin violently by the shoulders and slapped his face.
Calvin groaned and opened one eye.
‘Wake up, man,’ Harley said. ‘Something terrible’s going on here.’
The other propped himself on one elbow, communicated fear rousing him thoroughly.
‘Jagger’s left the house,’ Harley told him. ‘There’s a way outside. We’re – we’ve got to find out what we are.’ His voice rose to an hysterical pitch. He was shaking Calvin again. ‘We must find out what’s wrong here. Either we are victims of some ghastly experiment – or we’re all monsters!’
And as he spoke, before his staring eyes, beneath his clutching hands, Calvin began to wrinkle up and fold and blur, his eyes running together and his great torso contracting. Something else – something lively and alive – was forming in his place.
Harley only stopped yelling when, having plunged downstairs, the sight of the stars through the small window steadied him. He had to get out, wherever ‘out’ was.
He pulled the small door open and stood in fresh night air.
Harley’s eye was not accustomed to judging distances. It took him some while to realise the nature of his surroundings, to realise that mountains stood distantly against the starlit sky, and that he himself stood on a platform twelve feet above the ground. Some distance away, lights gleamed, throwing bright rectangles onto an expanse of tarmac.
There was a steel ladder at the edge of the platform. Biting his lip, Harley approached it and climbed clumsily down. He was shaking violently with cold and fear. When his feet touched solid ground, he began to run. Once he looked back; the house perched on its platform like a frog hunched on top of a rattrap.
He stopped abruptly then, in almost dark. Abhorrence jerked up inside him like retching. The high, crackling stars and the pale serration of the mountains began to spin, and he clenched his fists to hold on to consciousness. That house, whatever it was, was the embodiment of all the coldness in his mind. Harley said to himself: ‘Whatever has been done to me, I’ve been cheated. Someone has robbed me of something so thoroughly I don’t even know what it is. It’s been a cheat, a cheat …’ And he choked on the idea of those years that had been pilfered from him. No thought: thought scorched the synapses and ran like acid through the brain. Action only! His leg muscles jerked into movement again.
Buildings loomed about him. He simply ran for the nearest light and burst into the nearest door. Then he pulled up sharp, panting and blinking the harsh illumination out of his pupils.
The walls of the room were covered with graphs and charts. In the centre of the room was a wide desk with vision-screen and loudspeaker on it. It was a businesslike room with overloaded ashtrays and a state of ordered untidiness. A thin man sat alertly at the desk; he had a thin mouth.
Four other men stood in the room; all were armed, none seemed surprised to see him. The man at the desk wore a neat suit; the others were in uniform.
Harley leaned on the doorjamb and sobbed. He could find no words to say.
‘It has taken you four years to get out of there,’ the thin man said. He had a thin voice.
‘Come and look at this,’ he said, indicating the screen before