Mandrake (14 page)

Once, on the empty road, one of the big black pantechnicons roared past him. In Hounslow, he saw several others waiting beside shops while men loaded boxes into them, as he had seen before. But no other cars passed. Nothing hindered him, though he saw ‘Road Closed’ notices barring several side-streets leading to unseen villages near the main road, and instinctively he drove more quickly past.

Until he came to Brentford, he thought that he would reach London without difficulty, though wariness waited behind his eyes as he drove. And suddenly, then, he knew why. In the burned child, something watchfully expects the fire. There seemed no change in the road or the silent suburban houses on either side, but in a swift moment it was there. Without warning, it hit him again: the screaming blank wall of terror that tore through him like an electric shock, thrust his foot hard down on the brake and brought the car skidding into stillness.

He was on the edge of the town centre. The road was clear. Nothing moved; he saw nothing. But it barred his way as totally as a blockade: the great paralysing soundless shout that said: You do not belong here, you aren’t wanted, go away.

He turned the car back, his hands shaking on the wheel. Nothing in the world, at that moment, could have induced him to go on.

As he turned, he thought he heard another sound above the Lagonda’s engine. He stopped, and as he looked back over his shoulder he saw a low black car like his own coming fast towards him out of Brentford, and slewing to a noisy halt several yards away. The driver jumped out and Queston saw the black Ministry uniform. He swung back quickly to the wheel and put the car into gear again, pausing only when he heard the man’s urgent shout. No running footsteps; only the shout. He put his head out of the window, and looked back. It was something to see a human being, after all.

The man had stopped, his arms hanging loose, two or three paces from his own car. Queston found himself thinking without the slightest surprise that he must be on the other side of the barrier of the place. He heard an echo in his mind from long ago: You need a permit to get out…

More than a permit, now.

The man called: ‘Where are you going?’

Queston looked at him, at the invisible wall, and felt safe and impudent. ‘Nowhere in particular. How about you?’

The man had taken a paper from his pocket, and was peering at the Lagonda. ‘Is that your car?’

‘Of course.’

‘You are David Queston?’

Quickly, quickly, Queston’s instincts urged him. But he called back: ‘So what?’

‘Are you Queston?’

‘I’ve told you.’

‘I must ask you to come with me.’

‘Where to?’

‘London.’

‘Can’t be done,’ Queston shouted cheerfully. ‘I’ve tried.’ The man seemed to be straining towards him, leaning against a wind; but no wind blew. ‘Mr Queston, you must come, I warn you—’

Looking back with his head out of the window, in the cold air of the deserted street, Queston began to laugh. Both of them shouting about impossibility; he couldn’t go back over the line, the man couldn’t come and get him. How bloody silly. Suddenly it was all uproariously funny. He spluttered and choked with laughter, and heard the man call angrily: ‘This is your last chance. You must come—the Minister—’ He was laughing too hard, almost, to hear the small sound on the other side of the car. But the warning instinct drew his head back sharply just in time to see an arm, in the same black uniform, groping down through the half-open window opposite towards the handle of the door. He thought irrelevantly, I didn’t know I’d locked it-and then he was swinging the Lagonda forward, weaving wildly across the road to jerk the man off the running-board. He heard a cry, and then the dark shape at the window was gone. The image of the other car flashed across his driving-mirror again as he pulled back on the wheel, and he caught a glimpse of a black figure stiffly holding out its arm. Almost as he saw the wisp of smoke he heard a ringing impact behind him, somewhere outside the car. So they were armed, now.

Then he was half a mile down the road, blessing the Lagonda’s size and speed, and out of sight.

He drove fast, aimlessly, along the blank road. They were armed, and they wanted him badly enough to shoot, even if it was only at the tyres. Brunner must have lost no time with the manuscript. Was it that important? What did they think he could do? They had the number of the car. That hardly mattered; he was conspicuous enough anyway, in this empty new world. How much petrol left? Still half full. They weren’t following. Why not? That second man got through the barrier. It had held the first of them in, why not both? Perhaps they weren’t all tied. Special types, a kind of immunization. Valuable people. Is that the only reason they want me? How widespread are these Ministry police? There had been a radio aerial on the roof of the car.

For God’s sake, what kind of a world was this?

He shot through Slough: no vans now, the place was dead again. Swinging out to the motorway beyond the town, he found the same thing as before: all by-pass roads seemed safe, disinterested, uninfluenced. ‘Keep to the open roads…’

A no-man’s-land of time and space began then, while he roamed the empty roads and towns round London for days which ran into one another until he lost count. A kind of suspended animation, cold and comfortless. He occupied himself only with survival, and did not think; and survival seemed gradually more pointless every day.

In the dead lands, the places where no men had grown roots, he learned to find the suburban houses shut spiritlessly away in their half-acre gardens, stripped of all possessions and identity; they were uneasy places, but at least they gave shelter for the night, in an autumn that was turning early to winter and making his tent a poor substitute for a roof. In the end he packed the tent into the boot of the car, and did not use it at all. The Lagonda became his real refuge, the defiance that was in movement; he blessed his choice of a turbine-powered car when he found that although there was no petrol, he could always help himself to paraffin from the garages of the dead lands. Cans and big hundred-gallon drums were always stacked high there, even though there was never anybody to be seen in the echoing, empty sheds. He wondered for a long time why the fuel had not been taken away; in the end, although he saw hardly any movement on the roads, he supposed it to be left for any roving Ministry car.

The pattern of his days became a macabre game: running the car into the drive of a deserted house; walking round to its front door over gravel crackling boldly in the silence—a long silence now, and more oppressive than he had ever known it, with only the birds chattering, and even those quieter every day. He never saw more than an occasional bird, or animal; the freedom of loneliness seemed to frighten them, and they kept out of sight.

The front doors were never locked. He could find no reason for that. Once or twice still he saw the black Ministry pantechnicons at work, with intent men carrying furniture out into the road, and he took care to go another way. But in each house, when only emptiness remained, the doors were left on the latch. Available, ownerless.

He would curl up on bare wooden floors in his sleeping-bag, with blankets heaped over him; the nights were cold now, and although he longed to light fires in the empty grates he was nervous of drawing attention with the smoke. Once inside a house, he took it on trust, not flinching at the hollow beat of his footsteps over naked floors—but there was no point in waving a banner which the Ministry police could see from a mile away. He remembered the pistol shot, and he knew that whatever else might capture him, it should not be Mandrake’s men.

He ate from his stock of tins, setting up the primus in the kitchen of each empty house. In the gardens sometimes he found apples still on the trees, hanging obstinate among branches whose leaves were dropping fast now. But generally there were only unkempt hedges, trees where masses of fruit rotted underfoot, and flower-beds thick with the green of weeds.

Once, near Watford, he came on a lorry parked outside one of the houses, and a gang of youths round the gate hurling stones at the windows. They seemed to have no purpose but destruction. The lorry was old, small, open-backed; the first vehicle without the Ministry insignia that he had seen for weeks. As he slowed to pass it the boys turned, a row of startled white faces; then the nearest shouted, grinning, and flung a stone at the car. The others scrambled to join in, and Queston hastily accelerated past. Later, when he stopped to investigate, he found a deep dent in the rear offside wing, near the long scar the bullet had made. For the footloose young it was a good world; they must be having trouble with them in the towns. But what was this gang doing half a mile outside?

He stopped, that night, at Chesham railway station. Though so little seemed to travel the roads, there were still trains on the lines every day. Always goods trains, always very long; endless snaking rows of covered trucks pulled by two engines, travelling fast from nowhere to nowhere. He noticed often a certain kind of boxed-in black truck that bore the Ministry initials on its side.

But they never stopped anywhere in the dead lands. Every railway station that he passed was shut and silent, and he discovered that they were places immune from every kind of pull. Even in the green belts between the suburbs, where the voice of the land was loud and the leafless spiny arms of hedges groped out over the straggling grass to the roads—even there, he found that once inside a station yard, he was suddenly out of the tension and sense of doom. After a little while, he understood. Stations were outside the old boundaries of the villages; and they were hardly places where anyone would have put down roots. Places with no emotional pull at all, at least since the days of steam.

Chesham station was like the rest; near a village, where hidden life lay locked behind hostile boundaries, but a lifeless refuge. He parked the car outside the porters’ room; it would be, he had found, the cosiest place in the whole bleak building. Sometimes there was a gas ring where the gas could still be tapped, from the main still serving the living unseen village not far away.

The yard was familiar, a pattern of all the station yards. Once it had been precise and neat as all its London-trotting travellers; now the asphalt was cracked and pitted, with dandelions beginning to sprout in the holes; and fir cones lay scattered from the dark trees that grew round its edge.

He got out of the car and took a chisel over to the office door. Generally he had to break a lock; he did it without compunction now.

‘Stay where you are!’

The voice was high and nervous. Queston stood startled, holding his chisel, and waited. Soon it came again.

‘What do you want?’

He looked round warily, to find where it could come from. The station was fairly new; spare red brick, with no unnecessary alcoves. He could see nowhere that anyone might hide.

‘I warn you, I’ve got a gun.’ The voice raced away, near hysteria. ‘Haven’t you taken enough, damn you? What more d’you want?’

Queston said evenly, towards the wall: ‘If you think I’m from the Ministry, you’re wrong. I’m alone. My name is Queston. I’m looking for somewhere to sleep. Nothing else. If I can’t stay here, I’ll go away.’

There was a pause, and then he spun round as footsteps came from the side of the station. The shock came from the unexpected; he had seldom seen so inoffensive a figure. The man was small and bald, with rimless spectacles; a crumpled, dirty raincoat hung from his shoulders. His eyes were fixed on Queston in an immense frightened determination that seemed incongruous, as if no emotion so large had ever tightened his face before, and he clutched an unwieldy service revolver in both hands, pointing it unsteadily ahead. Queston looked at him, and felt overwhelmingly depressed. The man looked so wretched. Without the gun, his last rag of human dignity would vanish.

‘Put that thing down,’ he said gently.

They had a long insane argument, standing in the growing dusk of the silent station yard, with bats swooping across and away from the fir-trees bordering the road, until the little man was satisfied. He seemed obsessed with a hatred for the Ministry. He suspected Queston’s car, and only the story of the bullet, and the sight of the long sinister graze, finally convinced him that Queston was not a roving spy. He put the revolver into his pocket, where it dragged his raincoat comically down, and held out his hand with apologetic ceremony. ‘You must forgive me,’ he said. ‘My world has gone mad.’

They sat together in the porters’ room, drinking soup heated on Queston’s primus stove. The little man had no food, and no possessions but an attaché case which he kept carefully near him, touching it now and again as if for reassurance. His voice was tidy and careful, as he must once have been himself.

His name was Lindsey. He was about fifty-five, with a face that had never known real misery and was the more desolate now. Its puzzled, pathetic lines seemed curiously new. He was alone, he said. He was obviously very hungry.

He would say no more, so Queston began talking about himself. Once he had started he found it surprisingly easy, his thoughts uncoiling like a long-pressed spring. When he reached the story of his food-hunting expedition in Slough, the little man sighed.

‘I wish I’d had such foresight. I didn’t imagine—everything happened so quickly, you see.’

‘How long have you been wandering about on your own?’

‘About six weeks.’

‘What d’you live on?’

‘I had some packets of dried fruit at first, and nuts. I took them from—home.’ It was a curious hesitation. ‘But they’ve gone. Since then, fruit and vegetables from people’s gardens, and the fields. I don’t like the business of just helping myself, but there isn’t any alternative. I don’t seem able to go to the towns, I don’t know… I don’t need much, you know. My wife and I are vegetarians, and that helps. Being used to that kind of diet, d’you see.’

‘Your wife?’

Lindsey looked down into his soup, and said nothing. To shake off a sudden sense of vulgar intrusion, Queston tried another tack. ‘Are you making for anywhere in particular?’