It was long minutes before Lechasseur was capable of opening his eyes, and of beholding above his head a sky of blurry stars. Each glowed with a bluish cast whose unfamiliarity chilled him to the bone. His temporal perceptions, overloaded perhaps, were silent. He tried to raise his head, but the muscles of his neck seemed enervated, and he fell back painfully. It felt as if his body lay upon a bed of nails or needles, which bore him up sturdily through his leather coat but mercilessly pricked at his head and hands. The air was thick and moist, and uncomfortably warm. Mustering all the strength he could, Lechasseur lifted his head once more, and saw that, as he later put it, ‘Nothing around me made the slightest sense.’
He lay beside Percival on what appeared to be a grassy plain, beneath a sky whose uniform tint was that of late evening, and whose smeared stars were shepherded by a far brighter, whiter point of light. No moon was visible, and no sun either. A cliff, so gigantic that he could not tell whether it were near or distant, rose smooth and darkly purple, obscuring a large portion of the sky. The ‘grass’ around him was bright yellow in colour, and it was not grass. Each stalk was a stiff, flattened thorn, long and sharp as a knife. Lechasseur’s head swam, and against his will it fell back onto blades which stabbed his scalp like poignards.
‘Percival,’ a voice, or what sounded as if it might have been a voice, said from behind him. Lechasseur stared into the sky as sounds like heavy footfalls made their approach. Incredibly, his peculiar companion had succeeded in clambering to his feet. The youth stood hunched, as if his frame bore a great weight, but his demeanour was assured.
‘I saw you,’ he said, addressing the approaching presence. ‘You live behind Erik’s face. I... I suppose I must have followed you here.’ His voice held puzzlement, but also pride. Lechasseur wondered what it would take to diminish his self-confidence.
A group of figures clustered around Percival, bizarre, foreshortened from Lechasseur’s perspective. They were taller than men, strangely proportioned and grotesque. Their movements were lithe and graceful, unimpeded by what he was at last coming to realise, with a paralysing horror, must be a heavier gravity than that of the Earth. The nearest figure turned a curious, flinty gaze upon him, and Lechasseur recognised the features that he had earlier seen haunting my own.
Desperate for any information about his present plight, he scanned the figure’s details. The skin was smooth and pine-green, perfectly hairless even on the face and scalp. The physiognomy was broadly human, save for the eyes, of which there were several. These formed a ring about the head, spaced apart from one another by perhaps the width of three fingers, with a second half-ring, similarly spaced, running across the cranium like a crest. Positioned beneath the central eye, the nose was snout-like, the jaws wide and equipped, not with teeth, but with a pair of metallic ridges. The ears were the most animal feature, resembling those of a cow or a deer.
The figure’s arms and legs were significantly more robust than those of Homo sapiens. The left hand was human in every respect, save for the fingernails which were again of a metallic cast. The right manipulatory organ was not a hand, but a cluster of fine tentacles resembling a sea anemone. The creature’s broad shoulders and muscular waist seemed categorically to mark him out as a male of the species, and yet the round breasts and cleft pudendum implied the very opposite. The feet were large and flat, with toes so elongated as to mimic fingers. To Lechasseur’s surprise, the thorny blades bent underneath the creature’s soles as harmlessly as if they had been real grass.
Strangest of all, despite every characteristic marking this figure out as inhuman, many of which were elusive to define and yet profoundly unsettling, Lechasseur found himself convinced beyond rational doubt that he was looking at a man. To his uncomprehending gaze, the creature was not merely male; not merely human in broad outline; not merely, as he obviously was, an intelligent being: but actually a man, an individual of the race of mankind. If this was what men had become, Lechasseur wondered appalled, how far into the future had Percival brought him? Ten thousand years? A million? Further still?
Darkness encroached upon Lechasseur’s exhausted vision as the man reached out and, in a grave gesture of welcome that was wholly human, placed a hand on Percival’s shoulder. Calmly, the boy nodded and declared, ‘I think I understand now.’ The other figures, fading now, closed in around Percival, touching him, murmuring, as against his will Lechasseur’s mind recapitulated its earlier retreat into oblivion.
Men And Supermen
At The Retreat
The afternoon succeeding the arrival at my house of Violet and Emily was spent in frantic planning and debate, although the latter term implies a kind of balanced exchange of ideas with one’s equals which Violet’s precocity could never have allowed. I had had ample opportunity to observe during my acquaintance with Percival how that gifted young man, while by no means always in the right on any given matter, was nevertheless usually able to muster arguments cogent enough to demolish any reasoning offered by myself, however conclusive the latter might seem to me.
In just this way, all my and Emily’s opinions were as chaff before the gale of Violet’s resolve, which was to return to the Retreat post-haste with us both in tow. ‘Percival can look after himself,’ she insisted, ‘and it sounds like your Honoré’s used to doing the same, Emily. There’s nothing we can do for them here and now, anyway.’ We had agreed that, provided Percival and Lechasseur did not become separated in whichever era it was that they had reached, they would be able to return to the present whenever they chose. I considered this reassurance to be both contentious and conditional, but Violet had little patience with my reservations.
‘There’s more important things at stake,’ she said. ‘I know I didn’t let slip to those soldiers about the Retreat, and you say you didn’t either. But we don’t know who else they might contact. You’re not the only person we’ve stayed in touch with out in the normal world, you know, Erik.’ (This came as news to me.) ‘We know you’re loyal, but you’re only Homo sapiens. Most of you couldn’t hold up for half-an-hour under real torture, even for the sake of your own families. That’s a scientific fact, I’m afraid. I can’t see you sticking it out any longer than that for us.’ Her mouth made a moue.
Violet’s principal concern was with the defence of the Retreat against the possible advent of the military hunters. ‘We haven’t got anywhere else to go,’ she admitted. ‘Sometimes, when some of us are on our own, out in your world, they vanish. We never find out where they go to. But at the Retreat we’ve always been safe. We thought, if you people ever did threaten us there, we could go and join one of the other colonies overseas, but they’ve got their own problems now. We didn’t think you were capable of such a co-ordinated campaign – more fools us.’
By peering out from behind my upstairs curtains, I had confirmed our observer’s identity as that of St John Spears’ rather thuggish chauffeur. He sat in a parked car, less ostentatious than the Rolls-Royce which he had been driving earlier in the day, and wore incongruous earmuffs which doubtless hid a pair of the protective earpieces. We could not rely on Violet’s talent to conceal us from him, and so, when Violet had with impatient magnanimity allowed me the time to pack some clothes and to advise my wife by telephone to stay with her cousins for the moment, we made our egress by the route which Violet and Emily had used previously. Had any of my neighbours happened to be watching their gardens on that fine June afternoon, they would have espied a respectable novelist being assisted by two young women in an undignified scramble over their own back fences.
Violet had vetoed my suggestion that we obtain the use of a car from one of these same neighbours: she said that she had a contact in the immediate vicinity from whom she might borrow a motor without the need for convoluted explanations. The vehicle turned out to be a handsome brand-new Morris Oxford, into which Emily and I unquestioningly climbed. So unused had I become to dealing with the supernormals and their dismissive
approach to conventional morality, that we were passing through Richmond before it occurred to me that Violet had simply appropriated the first vehicle she found in the nearby streets.
There was something mesmerising about the young girl’s presence which discouraged such doubts and questions: a personal magnetism which had little to do with her more esoteric capabilities, and more in common with that faculty of charisma which marks out certain individuals of our own species as natural mob-rulers. Violet was not a leader among the supernormals: insofar as that concept had any meaning for them, the honour went to Percival. Violet merely partook of this, as of so many other faculties, in a deeper degree than almost any normal human being.
I have already implied that the location which I described in The Peculiar as that of the Retreat was an invented one: indeed, in positioning Percival’s communitarian settlement on a tropical island, I was indulging myself in a wilful fancy. That there were compelling reasons for obfuscation had been evident to me even then, hence the publication of that account as a novel, rather than as the memoir it was in reality. As the astute reader will have guessed, the colony was in fact not far from London on the global scale, and it will simplify the telling of my current tale considerably if, rather than maintaining the cumbersome pretence, I merely reveal that the supernormals’ sanctuary was prosaically situated on an isolated farm in North Wales. Our plan was to overnight somewhere near Shrewsbury, and to reach the farmstead at some time around luncheon the next day.
As our journey progressed, both Emily and Violet became increasingly pensive and silent, a fact which I ignorantly attributed to concern for their friends, perhaps compounded in Emily’s case by a bewilderment at the bizarre situation in which she had found herself so unexpectedly embroiled. In fact it later transpired that Violet, even while she was driving us north-westward with a rapidity and skill that many a motorist would have envied, was communing mentally with the community at the Retreat, preparing it for our arrival. As for Emily, fantastical occurrences and situations were her and Lechasseur’s stock-in-trade, as I would shortly discover. Her sombreness arose, she would tell me, from brooding on the crisis which faced the supernormals.
As an unusually gifted individual herself, she was perhaps better able to empathise with these miraculous specimens of a new humanity than I, in whom admiration had always been tempered with a certain alienation. There was also the question of her amnesia.
‘I understand how they must feel, at least a bit,’ she confided in me at one point in the afternoon’s journey, when the pair of us had prevailed upon an unwilling Violet to make a necessary break for comfort’s sake. ‘I know what it’s like to find yourself in a world that has no place for you, where you won’t belong however hard you try to fit in. You try to build yourself a sanctuary, and it’s torn down again each time. As for these soldiers... well, I’ve never experienced that kind of persecution, I’m glad to say. Hunting someone down, trying to wipe out a whole race, just because you’re scared of what they can do... what kind of mentality do you think it takes, Erik, to give yourself over to that kind of blood-lust?’
I shook my head. The same problem had been exercising me since I spoke with Percival. ‘It’s man’s brute nature breaking through, I suppose,’ I said. ‘These men believe that Homo peculiar threatens their lives, and the life of their whole species. An elderly and feeble lion will fight with all its fading strength against a vigorous youngster who tries to take over the pride. It’s a return to the basic imperative of evolution: to kill or be killed. In this case, though, it’s hopeless. These children are mankind’s future, and there’s no sense in resisting the fact.’
Despite our earlier agreement, Violet decided without consultation that she would drive on through the night, allowing us to reach the Retreat by morning. She insisted that her constitution was more than adequate to the prolonged mental and physical exertion which this would entail. Emily and I slept fitfully and uncomfortably in the Oxford’s leather seats, and I awakened, stiff and cold, to behold those majestic Welsh mountains, lonely and grey, limned by the orange glow of the dawn sun.
An hour later, we were with Violet’s friends at the Retreat. The community occupied a collection of farm buildings, rude but robust in construction, which had been adapted in various ways towards the comfort of their new occupants. When the property had fallen (by what means I had never discovered) into Percival’s hands, it had been abandoned and derelict. Since then, however, thanks to his hard-won agricultural knowledge and the combined ingenuity of his friends, it had become a working farmstead whose resources were perfectly capable of supporting the thirty or so European specimens of Homo peculiar whose home it had become, and who now gathered round us like a troupe of apes, jabbering and gabbling in several tongues.
There was loveliness in the crowd, but there was also hideousness. A typical member of the superior species appears to our eyes malformed and misshapen, although certain fortunate individuals attain an equally striking, if otherworldly, beauty. Frequently, the bodily deviations which these individuals sport turn out to be organic augmentations which allow their bodies to function more perfectly, improving in practical if not aesthetic terms on the design which nature has imposed upon normal men. To my unsophisticated gaze, however, this mob of near-humanity which teemed about us was reminiscent of those grotesque depictions of crowds in the paintings of certain of the Flemish masters: a catalogue of ugliness and deformity which nonetheless, when viewed in full and with a dispassionate eye, achieves a heterogeneous harmony which may indeed be considered beautiful.
When Violet, who seemed insolently fresh and rested after her exhausting labours, had greeted her friends, we were taken into the communal refectory to be fed. Neither Emily nor I had eaten since lunch-time of the previous day, and we partook gratefully of what was offered before we were presented to the community as a whole.
Emily And Freia
Many inhabitants of the Retreat I had known already from Percival’s early efforts to assemble his community together: some of them, indeed, had been my house-guests at one time or another. I immediately recognised Bridget, the first member of his own species whom Percival had met; Jimmie, the mathematical and musical prodigy who had caused such a sensation in London society eight years before, and who had been Percival’s intimate in the latter’s earliest, headiest days of sexual experimentation with his own kind; and sundry others. Jelena, the Russian girl who had been able to speak forty languages fluently by the age of twelve, and had become the fourth of the original founders of the community, was like Percival away from the Retreat on some unspecified errand.
All were of course older by several years than when I had known them, and they had begun to show those strange anomalies of the ageing process which are also typical of the supernormal strain. Jimmie, for instance, who was twenty-three, was already grey and balding, though his physique was that of a rather chubby eighteen-year-old. Bridget, the oldest of the founding members, appeared still in the transitory stages of puberty; while I would discover on Jelena’s return that she, the youngest, had become by any standards a very beautiful young woman. Each greeted me cordially, but with a reserve which I had not encountered in them before. They were becoming wary of the outside world and its interventions in their lives.
Others of the community were unknown to me, and all, of course, were strangers to Emily. Some time was taken up in introducing the two of us to various members of the Retreat. From the abstracted air with which these youngsters told us their life stories, I suspected that a psychic conference was in progress, precipitated by Violet’s arrival. The tension of it filled the atmosphere around us, yet it excluded us so entirely that Emily, I believe, remained unaware of its existence.
Some of the tales the newcomers told were fascinating, however. Pedro, a gangly, stammering Spanish youth of nearly seven feet tall, shyly confessed that he was also in excess of two hundred and fifty years old: he had simply ceased age
ing at fifteen, and had spent most of his life as a novice in monasteries across Europe, moving on at intervals of a decade or so when his fellows grew wary or superstitious concerning his prolonged youthfulness. Although his protracted and cloistered existence had brought him great learning, in quickness of intellect and in imagination he was somewhat the inferior of most of the supernormals, and they made rather a pet of him.
There was a Greek boy, baptised Nikolas but usually addressed as ‘Argos’, who illustrated vividly the frequent utility of these so-called deformities of the supernormals. He possessed a cluster of additional eyes, half-a-dozen in number, which was located in the rear of his cranium. Although smaller than usual and lacking in eyelids, these orbs functioned perfectly well; and even when ‘Argos’ slept, which he did face-downward in one of the communal dormitories, they would swivel in their anterior sockets, following any movement in the room.
I was surprised to find among these friends of Percival and Violet one whom I had known by repute in the outside world. Mary O’Rourke had been a child-medium, of fragile and unhealthy appearance, who had caused a great stir when her devoutly spiritualist parents had brought her to England a few years previously. Her evidences of communication with the spirits of the dead were so outrageous, and yet so substantial, that an eminent scientist had taken it upon himself to ‘de-bunk’ them. After much study, he had finally confessed himself baffled as to what trickery the Irish girl was using, and shortly afterwards he had retired from public life.
Peculiar Lives Page 5
