Terrors

by Richard A. Lupoff

  I stayed only one night in London, not sampling that city’s fabled theatres or museums, but simply resting up, trying to rid myself of the jet-lag inherent in a body still running on California time even though it had been relocated some eight or nine time zones. I boarded a wheezing, groaning train that carried me from fabled Victoria Station through Exham and the very peculiar-looking town of Goatswood and thence to its terminus at Brichester.

  My luggage consisted of a single valise. In this I had placed my warmest clothing, a tweed suit and Irish hat that I had purchased years before in an English shop in San Francisco and reserved for trips from California to areas of less salubrious climate. I carried an umbrella and, slung from my shoulder, a canvas case containing a notebook computer.

  In Brichester I spent my second night in England. The inn where I lodged was old and run-down. It contained a pub on its ground floor, and I looked forward to an evening of good-fellowship, a tankard of beer (perhaps more than one!) and a platter of good English beef before bed.

  Alas, I was disappointed on every count. The beef was tough, stringy and overdone. The beer was watery and flat. But most disheartening of all, the local residents, for all that they appeared just the colorful and eccentric folk that I had hoped to encounter, proved a taciturn and unforthcoming lot. They responded to my opening conversational ploys with monosyllabic grunts, and rejected my further attempts at camaraderie by pointedly turning their backs and engaging in low, muttered dialogs, casting unfriendly glances from time to time at the obviously unwelcome interloper in their midst—myself.

  After chewing futilely at the beef until my jaws ached, and giving up on the poor beer that the innkeeper served, I finally retired early, not so much from fatigue, for my body was beginning to recover from its jet-lag, but simply because I could find no comfort in the surroundings of this disappointing pub and its hostile clientele.

  In the morning I was awakened by a pale wash of sunlight that seemed barely able to penetrate the gray and louring sky that I soon learned was typical of most days in the Severn Valley. I found myself wondering why the residents of these towns remained there—why, in fact, their ancestors had ever settled in this gloomy and unpleasant region.

  At first I thought it fortunate that I had brought my cellular telephone with me—my room at the inn, of course, had no such modern convenience—but of course I got nowhere with the local telephone system when I tried to place a call. Eventually I located a pay station, however, and spent most of the day conducting business. I spoke several times with Alexander Myshkin, and let me not rehearse the agonies of placing a call from a decrepit pay station in the Severn Valley town of Brichester to Myshkin Associates in Silicon Valley, California. I finally reached my employer, after being cut off several times by malign operators somewhere in the British telephone system, and at least once by Myshkin’s own secretary, who apologized effusively once the connection was re-established, only to cut me off again.

  Myshkin brought me up to date on further tests which were being run continuously on the Zeta/Zed System in our California laboratory. The system, of course, performed flawlessly, leaving me no less baffled than beforehand by the reported problems at the Fuchs Institute installation.

  I succeeded in reaching the Institute as well, for all that I was distressed at how difficult it was to do so. Silicon Valley was some 6,000 miles from the Severn Valley. That was at least some mitigation for the difficulties in communication. But my call from Brichester to Old Severnford, a matter of a mere few miles, was interrupted several times by unexplained disconnections. Even when I was in communication with my opposite number at the Fuchs Institute, one Karolina Parker—I found myself wondering if we might be related through my mother’s side of the family—conversation was not easy. There was a curious buzzing and an occasional unpleasant scraping sound on the wire. I asked Karolina if she was not disturbed by these noises, but she denied hearing them. She suggested that they were all at my end of the hook-up—or perhaps in my mind. The latter implication did not sit well with me, but I made no point of it at the time.

  Eventually I took a late and unpleasant dinner in Brichester, in a restaurant some distance from my inn. There was not a single other customer in the establishment, and yet it took the waiter a long time to approach me. His manner was surly, and I got the feeling that the management would have been happier to forego my trade than to have it. The surroundings were stuffy and utterly devoid of decoration or distraction. As had been the case with my dinner the previous evening, the food was bland in flavor, unpleasant in texture, and served at a uniform degree of lukewarmness, whether the dish was a supposedly chilled madrilène or an allegedly freshly broiled mutton chop.

  Abandoning the sorry repast after a half-hearted attempt to consume it, I paid my bill and, leaving the restaurant with a silent vow never to return, hefted my single valise and began the trek to Old Severnford. With difficulty I was able to hire a car and a driver who insisted on being paid in advance for his services. I was not pleased with the arrangement, but, feeling that I had no choice, I consented.

  The car was of uncertain ancestry and vintage; its suspension was badly sprung and I suspected that its heater was connected directly to its exhaust pipe—the chill of the day was dispelled, all right, but was replaced in the car by a choking unpleasantness far worse.

  The afternoon had turned a dark gray, and it was impossible to tell just when the sun dropped beneath the rolling, sinister hills beyond the Severn River to the west, save for the moment when my driver switched on the car’s headlamps. They cast a feeble, amber patch of light on the narrow and ill-repaired roadway ahead of us.

  The driver stayed muffled deep in his sweaters and overcoat, a visored cap with furry earflaps covering most of his face. He wore a pair of mirrored eyeglasses—a peculiarly modern touch in this archaic valley—and between his upturned collar and the visor and earflaps of his headgear, all that I could see of his face was the mirrored lenses and a huge, walrus mustache, grayed with age and yellowed with I knew not what.

  We reached the Severn River without incident, save for a few bicycling schoolchildren—these, among the very few children I ever saw in the Severn region—who halted their bikes and pointed as we passed them in the roadway. I thought at first that they were waving a friendly greeting, and waved back at them, pleased at this sign, however slight, of cheer and goodwill.

  Once more I was mistaken. Quickly I realized that their gestures were not friendly waves, but some sort of mystical sign, whether intended to ward off evil or to bring harm upon me. One boy, who seemed almost unnaturally large and muscular for his age, but whose face appeared unformed and vaguely animal-like, hurled a large rock after my car. The rock struck the rear of the car, and for a moment I thought the driver was going to stop and berate the children, but instead he pressed down on the accelerator and sped us away from there, muttering something beneath his breath that I was unable to make out.

  The driver brought the car to a halt in a decrepit dockside district of Severnford. Full night had fallen by now, and the quays and piers before us seemed utterly deserted. I asked the driver if he would wait for a ferry to carry us to Old Severnford, and if he would then drive me to the Klaus Fuchs Memorial Institute.

  He turned around then, gazing at me over the rear of his seat. I had switched on the car’s tiny domelight, and it reflected off his mirrored glasses. “Last ferry’s run, mister,” he husked. “And me’uns don’t fancy spending no night by these docks. You get out. Get out now, and you’re on your own.”

  I started to protest, but the driver leaped from the car with surprising agility for so bulky and aged an individual. He yanked open the door beside which I sat, caught my lapels in two thickly-gloved hands, and lifted me bodily from the car, depositing me in no dignified condition on the cracked and weedy sidewalk. He hurled my valise after me, jumped back into his vehicle and sped away, leaving me angered, puzzled, and utterly uncertain as to how to resolve my predicament.
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  I recovered my valise and tested my notebook computer to reassure myself that it was undamaged. I then pondered my next move. If the Severn ferry had indeed ceased its runs for the night, I could not possibly reach Old Severnford before morning. I did not know my way around the town of Severnford itself, and with a shudder of apprehension I set out to explore.

  At first I walked beside the river. A moon had risen, apparently full, yet so cloaked by heavy clouds as to appear only a vague, pale disk in the sky, while furnishing the most minimal of watery illumination to the earth. But as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I realized that there was another source of illumination, faint and inauspicious.

  A glow seemed to come from beneath the surface of the Severn River. Seemed? No, it was there, it was all too real. I tried to make out its source, but vague shapes seemed to move, deep in the river for the most part, but darting toward the surface now and again, and then slithering away once more into the depths. And a mist arose from the sluggishly flowing water, and gave off a glow of its own, or perhaps it was that it reflected the glow of the river and the vague, luminous shapes therein. Or yet again, were there shapes within the mist as well, floating and darting like fairies in a garden in a child’s book?

  The sight should have been charming, almost pretty, but for some reason it sent a shudder down my back. With an effort I turned away and made my way up an ancient street, leading at a slight uphill slant from the river and the docks and into the heart of town.

  Perhaps I had merely strayed into the wrong part of Severnford, or perhaps there was something about the town itself that set off silent shrieks of alarm within me. I could find no establishment open, no person to ask for assistance. Instead I paced darkened streets, chilled and dampened by the night. Once I thought I heard voices, rough and furtive in tone, murmuring in a language I could neither comprehend nor identify. Twice I heard scuffling footsteps, but upon whirling clumsily with my valise and computer weighing me down, I saw nothing. Thrice I thought I heard odd twitterings, but could find no source or explanations for them.

  How many miles I trudged that night, finding my way from alley to courtyard to square, I can only guess. I can only say that the first pallid gray shafts of morning light were as welcome to me as any sight I had ever beheld. I was able, by heading steadily downward, to find my way back to the docks.

  In the morning light the mist was lifting off the Severn, the hills on its far shore looked almost welcoming, and the disquieting shapes and lights beneath the river’s surface were no longer to be seen.

  I located the quay where the Severn ferry made its stops and waited for the morning’s first run. I was rewarded soon by sight of an ancient barge, something more suitable to a motion picture about Nineteenth Century life than to a modern enterprise. Nonetheless cheered, I climbed aboard, paid my fare, and waited with a small party of taciturn passengers until the ferryman saw fit to weigh anchor and transport us across the slowly flowing water.

  I tried my cellular telephone from on board the ferry, and by some miracle of electronics managed to get through to the Fuchs Institute. I spoke with Karolina Parker, who expressed concern as to my welfare and my whereabouts. As briefly as possible, I explained my situation and she said that she would personally greet me at the pier in Old Servernford.

  She proved as good as her word. I found her a delightful young woman, perhaps a few years younger than I, but showing so marked a family resemblance as to remove all doubt as to our being related. I explained to her about my Parker ancestors, and she astonished me by planting a most uncousinly kiss on my mouth, even as we sat in her modern and comfortable automobile.

  I was still puzzling over this remarkable behavior when we arrived at the Klaus Fuchs Memorial Institute. Karolina Parker introduced me to the director of the institute, whose friendly greeting was tempered by his assertion that I was expected to resolve the troubles of the Zeta/Zed System post haste, if Myshkin Associates was to retain the Fuchs Institute as an account.

  Without stopping to arrange lodging in the town of Old Severnford itself, I set to work on the Institute’s Zeta/Zed machines. The system was taken off line, which did not please the director, and I ran a series of diagnostic programs in turn on the mainframe processor, the satellite work stations, and the peripheral units that ran under system control.

  As long as I used only sample data for testing, Zeta/Zed performed to perfection. It might be thought that I would be pleased with this result, but in fact the opposite was the case. If the system had malfunctioned, I possessed the tools (or believed that I did) to narrow down the area of malfunction until a specific site in the hardware or software remained. This could then be examined for its flaw and repaired or replaced.

  When nothing went wrong, I could correct nothing.

  “Very well,” my hostess, Karolina Parker, suggested, “let’s go back online while you observe, Mr. Lorentzen.” I was as surprised by the coldness of her address as I had been by the warmth of her greeting in the car, but I could think of no response better than a simple, “All right.”

  Zeta/Zed was placed back on line. Almost at once error messages began flashing on the main monitor screen, but the system did not shut down. I permitted it to run until a batch of data had been processed, then attempted to print out the results.

  The high-speed laser printer hummed, then began spitting out sheet after sheet of paper. I tried to read the top sheet, but it seemed to contain sheer gibberish. The printout comprised an almost random pattern of numbers, letters, and symbols which I knew were not part of any font supplied by Myshkin software. I asked Karolina Parker about this, but she insisted that no one had tampered with the software and no virus could have been introduced into the system as it was swept by anti-virus software regularly.

  What could be the answer?

  I asked Karolina Parker the source of the Institute’s power supply, and was told that the Institute generated its own power, the Severn River turning a generator housed in a separate building. In this manner the Institute was independent of the vagaries of the local power system, antiquated and unreliable as it was known to be.

  Furnished with a sparse cubicle from which to conduct my affairs, I soon sat alone with the enigmatic printouts. I had been furnished with a meal of sorts from the Institute’s commissary, and I sat eating a stale sandwich, pausing to wash it down with occasional swigs of cold, stale coffee, trying to make head or tail of these pages.

  After a while I found a passage that seemed less chaotic than what had gone before. The printing was in Roman letters, not mathematical formulas, and by concentrating on the “words” (which were in fact not any words I recognized), moving my lips like a child just learning to read, and letting the sounds that were suggested pass my lips, I realized that this was the same language I had heard the previous night as I wandered the streets of Severnford.

  By quitting time I was tired, nervous, and eager to find a warm meal and a soft mattress, if such amenities even existed in this accursed Severn Valley.

  To my astonishment, Karolina Parker offered me a ride home in her automobile, and even offered me room and lodging in her house. I insisted that such hospitality, while appreciated, was excessive, but she replied that everything should be done to make my visit pleasant. We were, after all, family!

  Karolina Parker’s home was a pleasant house set in the center of a modest but beautifully tended parklike estate. The house itself was of late Tudor style, with half-timbered beams and diamond-pane windows. There was a great fireplace in the living room, and through the front windows I could see the peculiar topiary shrubs that stood outside like unfamiliar beasts grazing an alien landscape.

  My hostess explained to me that she lived alone, and showed me to a comfortable bedroom which she said would be mine during my stay in Old Severnford. She suggested that I refresh myself while she prepared dinner for us both.

  An hour later I was summoned to dine in a charming informal room. Karolina apologized for h
er impromptu mode of entertaining, but I found both her manner and the meal which she served me the high points of my until-now dismal journey. She had decked herself out in a pair of tight-fitting blue jeans and a tee shirt with a portrait of Klaus Fuchs himself blazoned on it. Over this amazing outfit she wore a frilly apron.

  She served me a delicious ratatouille accompanied by an excellent white wine (imported from northern California, I noted with some pride) and a crisp green salad. How this attractive young woman could work all day at the Institute and still entertain in such delightful fashion afterwards, was quite beyond my power of comprehension.

  After the meal we repaired to the living room and shared coffee (hot, fresh and strong!) and brandy before a roaring fire. Oddly portentous selections of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann came from the speakers of a superb sound system. Karolina and I spoke of computers, of her work at the Fuchs Institute and mine at Myshkin Associates. We tried to trace our common ancestry but ran into a blank wall somewhere around the year 1665. At no time did we speak of our personal lives. I did not know whether she had ever been married, for instance, or seriously involved with a man, nor did she query me with regard to such sensitive (and for me, painful) matters.

  The sound system must have been preprogrammed, for after a while I found myself drawn into a complex composition by Charles Ives, and then into one of the stranger sound pieces of Edgar Varese. Our conversation had turned to the history of the Severn Valley, its peculiar isolation from the rest of England, and the odd whispered hints that were sometimes heard regarding the dark countryside and its inhabitants.

  I fear that my stressful journey and my lack of sleep the previous night caught up with me, for I caught myself yawning at one point, and Karolina Parker, gracious hostess that she was, suggested that I retire.

  “I’ll stay downstairs to clean up a little,” she volunteered. “You can find your room again, of course?”