Chronopolis

by J. G. Ballard

  Tired by his walk, Mason sat down on a low ornamental wall, screened from the surrounding houses by the rhododendron bushes. For a few minutes he played with the dust at his feet, stirring the hard white grains with a branch. Although formless and passive, the dust shared something of the same evocative qualities of the fossil mollusk, radiating a curious compacted light.

  In front of him, the road curved and dipped, the incline carrying it away onto the fields below. The chalk shoulder, covered by a mantle of green turf, rose into the clear sky. A metal shack had been erected on the slope, and a small group of figures moved about the entrance of a mine shaft, adjusting a wooden hoist. Wishing that he had brought his wife’s car, Mason watched the diminutive figures disappear one by one into the shaft.

  The image of this elusive pantomime remained with him all day in the library, overlaying his memories of the dark waves rolling across the midnight streets.

  What sustained Mason in the face of this encroaching nightmare was his conviction that others would soon also become aware of the sea.

  When he went to bed that night he found Miriam sitting fully dressed in the armchair by the window, her face composed into an expression of calm determination.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “The sea. Don’t worry, simply ignore me and go to sleep. I don’t mind sitting here with the light out.”

  “Miriam . . .” Wearily, Mason took one of her slender hands and tried to draw her from the chair. “Darling, what on earth will this achieve?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  Mason sat down on the foot of the bed. For some reason, not wholly concerned with the wish to protect her, he wanted to keep his wife from the sea. “Miriam, don’t you understand? I might not actually see it, in the literal sense. It might be . . .” he extemporized, “. . .a hallucination, or a dream.”

  Miriam shook her head, hands clasped on the arms of the chair. “I don’t think it is. Anyway, I want to find out.”

  Mason lay back slowly on the bed. “I wonder whether you’re approaching this the right way—”

  Miriam sat forward. “Richard, you’re taking it all so calmly, you accept this vision as if it were a strange headache. That’s what frightens me. If you were really terrified by this sea I wouldn’t worry, but...”

  Half an hour later, after he had given up his attempt to dissuade Miriam from her vigil, he fell asleep in the darkened room, Miriam’s slim face watching him from the shadows.

  Waves murmured, outside the windows the distant swish of racing foam drew him from his sleep, the deep muffled thunder of rollers and the sounds of deep water drummed at his ears. Mason climbed out of bed, and dressed quickly as the hiss of receding water sounded up the street. In the corner, under the glimmering light reflected from the distant foam, Miriam lay asleep in the armchair, a bar of moonlight across her throat.

  His bare feet soundless on the pavement, Mason ran toward the waves, stumbled across the wet glistening tideline as one of the breakers struck with a deep guttural roar. On his knees, Mason felt the cold brilliant water, seething with animalcula, spurt across his chest and shoulders, slacken and then withdraw, sucked like an immense gleaming floor into the mouth of the next breaker. His wet suit clinging to him like a drowned animal, Mason stared out across the dark sea. In the fleeting moonlight the white houses advancing into the water loomed like the palazzos of a spectral Venice, mausoleums on the causeways of some huge island necropolis. Only the church spire was still visible. The water rode in to its high tide, a further twenty yards down the street, the spray carried almost to the Masons’ house.

  Mason waited for an interval between two waves and then waded through the shallows to the avenue which wound toward the distant headland. By now the water had crossed the roadway, swilling over the dark lawns and slapping at the doorsteps.

  Half a mile from the headland he heard the great surge and sigh of the deeper water. Out of breath, he leaned against a fence as the cold foam cut across his legs, pulling him with its undertow. Suddenly, illuminated by the racing clouds, he saw the tall pale figure of a woman standing above the sea on a stone parapet at the cliff’s edge, her black robe lifting behind her in the wind, her long hair white in the moonlight. Far below her feet, the luminous waves leapt and vaulted like acrobats.

  Mason ran along the pavement, momentarily losing sight of her as the road curved and the houses intervened. The water slackened, and he caught a last glimpse of the woman’s ice-white profile through the opalescent spray. Turning, the tide began to ebb and fade, and with a last bubbling spasm the great sea shrank away between the emerging houses, draining the night of its light and motion.

  As the last bubbles flickered and dissolved on the damp pavement, Mason searched the headland, but the strange luminous figure had gone. His damp clothes dried themselves as he walked back through the empty streets, a last tang of brine carried away off the hedges on the midnight air.

  * * *

  The next morning he told Miriam: “It was a dream, after all. I think the sea has gone now. Anyway, I saw nothing last night.”

  “Thank heavens, Richard. Are you sure?”

  “I’m fairly certain.” Mason smiled encouragingly. “Thanks for keeping watch over me.”

  “I’ll sit up tonight as well.” She held up her hand to silence his protests. “I insist. I feel all right after last night, and I want to drive this thing away, once and for all.” She frowned intently over the coffee cups. “It’s strange, but once or twice I think I heard the sea too. It sounded very old and blind, like something waking again after millions of years.”

  On his way to the library, Mason made a detour toward the chalk outcropping, and parked the car where he had seen the moonlit figure of the white-haired woman watching the sea. The sunlight fell on the pale turf, illuminating the mouth of the mine shaft, around which the same desultory activity was taking place.

  For the next fifteen minutes Mason drove slowly in and out of the tree-lined avenues, peering over the hedges at the kitchen windows. Almost certainly she would live in one of the nearby houses, probably still be wearing her black robe beneath a housecoat.

  Later, at the library, he recognized a car he had seen on the headland. The driver, an elderly tweed-suited man of academic manner, was examining the display cases of local geological finds.

  “Who was that?” he asked Fellowes, the keeper of antiquities, as the car drove off. “I’ve seen him on the chalk cliffs.”

  “Professor Goodhart, one of the party of paleontologists. Apparently they’ve uncovered an interesting bone bed.” Fellowes gestured at the collection of femurs and jawbone fragments. “With luck we may get a few pieces from them.”

  Mason stared at the bones, aware of a sudden closing parallax within his mind.

  Each night, as the sea emerged from the dark streets and the wave rolled further toward the Masons’ home, he would wake beside his sleeping wife and go out into the surging air and wade through the deep water toward the headland. There he would see the white-haired woman on the cliff’s edge, her high face raised above the roaring spray, a pale glimmering nimbus which rode like the moon among the fleeing clouds. But always he failed to reach her before the tide turned, and would kneel exhausted on the wet pavements as the last bubbles foamed and the drowned streets rose from the sinking waves.

  Once a police patrol car found him in its headlights slumped against a gate post in an open drive, and on another night he forgot to close the front door after himself when he returned. All through breakfast Miriam watched him with her old wariness, noticing the telltale shadows which encircled his eyes like monocles.

  “Richard, I think you should stop going to the library. You look worn out. It isn’t that sea dream again?”

  Mason shook his head, forcing a tired smile from his face. “No, that’s finished with. Perhaps I’ve been overworking.”

  Miriam held his hands. �
�Did you fall over yesterday?” She examined Mason’s palm. “Darling, they’re still raw! You must have grazed them only a few minutes ago. Can’t you remember even?” Abstracted, Mason invented some tale to satisfy her, then carried his coffee into the study and stared at the morning haze which lay across the rooftops, a soft lake of opacity that followed the same contours as the midnight sea. The mist dissolved in the sunlight, and for a moment the diminishing reality of the normal world reasserted itself, filling him with a poignant nostalgia.

  Without thinking, he reached out to the fossil conch on the bookshelf, but involuntarily his hand withdrew before touching it.

  Miriam stood beside him. “Hateful thing,” she commented. “Tell me, Richard, what do you think caused your dream?”

  Mason shrugged. “Perhaps it was a sort of memory ...” His wife’s cool, elegant face was watching him intently. He wondered whether to tell Miriam of the waves which he still heard in his sleep, and of the white-haired woman on the cliff’s edge who seemed to beckon to him. But like all women Miriam believed that there was room for only one enigma in her husband’s life. By an inversion of logic he felt that his dependence on his wife’s private income, and the loss of self-respect, gave him the right to withhold something of himself from her.

  “Richard, what’s the matter?”

  In his mind the spray opened like an immense diaphanous fan and the enchantress of the waves turned toward him with her burning eyes.

  Waist high, the sea pounded across the lawns in a seething whirlpool. Mason pulled off his jacket and flung it away into the water, and then waded out into the street. Higher than ever before, the waves had at last reached his house, breaking over the doorstep, but Mason had forgotten his wife. His whole attention was fixed upon the headland, which was lashed by a continuous storm of spray, almost obscuring the figure standing on its crest.

  As Mason pressed on, sometimes sinking to his chin, shoals of luminous algae swarmed in the water around him, their brilliant phosphorescence stinging his legs, and his eyes smarted in the harsh saline air. He reached the lower slopes of the headland almost exhausted, and fell to his knees.

  High above, he could hear the spray singing as it cut through the coigns of the cliff’s edge, the deep base of the breakers over-layed by the high treble of the keening air, entwining itself through the long white strands of the woman’s hair like the chords of a harp.

  Carried by the music, Mason climbed the flank of the headland, a thousand reflections of the moon dancing in the breaking sea. As he reached the crest, the fluttering of the long black robe hid the woman’s face, but he could see her tall erect carriage and slender hips. Suddenly, without any apparent motion of her limbs, she moved away along the parapet.

  “Wait!”

  His shout was lost on the surging air. Mason ran forward, and the figure turned and stared back at him. Her white hair swirled around her face like a spume of silver steam and then parted to reveal an angular skull-like face with empty eyes and notched mouth. A hand, like a bundle of white sticks, clawed toward him, and the figure loomed through the whirling darkness like a gigantic bird.

  Unaware whether the scream came from his own mouth or from this specter, Mason stumbled back, before he could catch himself tripped over a wooden railing and in a cackle of chains and pulleys fell backward into the shaft, the sounds of the sea booming above him in its hurtling darkness.

  After listening intently to the policeman’s description, Professor Goodhart shook his head.

  “I'm afraid not, sergeant. We’ve been working on the bed all week, no one’s fallen down the shaft.” One of the flimsy wooden rails was swinging loosely in the crisp air. ‘‘But thank you for warning me. I suppose we must build a heavier railing, if this fellow is wandering around in his sleep.”

  “I don’t think he’ll bother to come up here,” the sergeant said. “It’s quite a climb.” As an afterthought he added, “Down at the library where he works they said you’d found a couple of skeletons in the shaft yesterday. I know it’s only two days since he disappeared, but one of them couldn’t possibly be his?” The sergeant shrugged. “If there was some natural acid, say. . .”

  “Ingenious, sergeant, but I’m sorry to disappoint you.” Professor Goodhart drove his heel into the chalky turf. “Pure calcium carbonate, about a mile thick, laid down during the Triassic Period 200 million years ago when there was a large inland sea here. The skeletons we found yesterday, a man’s and a woman’s, belong to two Cro-Magnon fisher people who lived on the shore just before it dried up. I wish I could oblige you with a corpus delicti, though it’s quite a problem to understand how these Cro-Magnon relics found their way into the bone bed. This shaft wasn’t sunk until about thirty years ago.” He smiled at the policeman. “Still, that’s my problem, not yours.”

  Returning to the police car, the sergeant shook his head. “Nothing.” As they drove off he looked out at the endless stretch of placid suburban homes.

  “Apparently there was an ancient sea here once. A million years ago. Who would believe it?” He picked a crumpled flannel jacket off the back seat. “That reminds me,” he said, sniffing at the fabric. “I know what this coat of Mason’s smells of—brine.”

  Zone of Terror

  Larsen had been waiting all day for Bayliss, the psychologist who lived in the next chalet, to pay the call he had promised on the previous evening. Characteristically, Bayliss had made no precise arrangements as regards time; a tall, moody man with an offhand manner, he had merely gestured vaguely with his hypo and mumbled something about the following day: he would look in, probably. Larsen knew damned well he would look in, the case was too interesting to miss, in an oblique way it meant as much to Bayliss as it did to himself.

  Except that it was Larsen who had to do the worrying—by three that afternoon Bayliss had still not materialized, and what was he doing except sitting in his white-walled, air-conditioned lounge, playing Bartok quartets on the stereogram. Meanwhile Larsen had nothing to do but roam around the chalet, slamming impatiently from one room to the next like a tiger with an anxiety neurosis, cook up a quick lunch (coffee and three amphetamines, from a private cache Bayliss as yet only dimly suspected—God, he needed the stimulants after those massive barbiturate shots Bayliss pumped into him after the attack) and try to settle down with Kretschmer’s An Analysis of Psychotic Time, a heavy tome full of graphs and tabular material which Bayliss had insisted he read, asserting that it filled in necessary background to the case. Larsen had spent a couple of hours on it, but so far he had got no further than the preface to the fourth edition.

  Periodically he went over to the window, peered through the plastic vanes of the blind for any signs of movement in the next chalet. Beyond, the desert lay in the sunlight like an enormous bleached bone, against which the flaring, aztec-red tail fins of Bayliss's Pontiac glittered like a flamboyant phoenix. The remaining three chalets were empty; the complex was operated by the electronics company for which he and Bayliss worked as a sort of “recreational” center for senior executives and tired think-men. The desert site had been chosen for its hypotensive virtues, its supposed equivalent to psychic zero. Two or three days of leisurely reading, of thoughtfully watching the motionless horizons, and the neuronic grids realigned, tension and anxiety thresholds rose to more useful levels, creative and decisional activity heightened.

  However, two days there, Larsen reflected, and he had very nearly gone mad. It was lucky Bayliss had been around, with his handy hypo. Though the man was certainly casual when it came to supervising his patients, left them to their own resources, in fact, looking back, he—Larsen—had been responsible for just about all the diagnosis. Bayliss had done little more than thumb his hypo, toss Kretschmer into his lap, and offer some cogitating asides.

  Perhaps he was waiting for something?

  Larsen tried to decide whether to phone Bayliss on some pretext; his number—zero, on the internal system—was almost too inviting. Then he heard a door clatter
outside, leapt to the window and saw the tall, angular frame of the psychologist crossing the concrete apron between the chalets, head bowed pensively in the sharp sunlight, hands in pockets.

  Where’s his valise, Larsen thought, almost disappointed, don’t tell me he’s putting on the barbiturate brakes. Maybe he’ll try hypnosis. Masses of posthypnotic suggestions, in the middle of shaving I’ll suddenly stand on my head.

  He let Bayliss in, fidgeting around him as they went into the lounge.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he asked. “Do you realize it’s nearly four?”

  Bayliss sat down at the miniature executive desk in the middle of the lounge and looked around critically, a ploy Larsen resented but never managed to anticipate.

  “Of course I realize it. I’m fully wired for time.” Letting this pass, he went on: “How have you felt today? No residues at all? Vision, memory, functional apparat okay?” He pointed to the straight-backed chair placed in the interviewee’s position at the desk’s left-hand corner. “Sit down and try to relax.”

  Larsen gestured irritably. “How can I relax? Just hanging around here, waiting for the next bomb to go off.” He began his analysis of the past twenty-four hours, a task he enjoyed, larding the case history with liberal doses of speculative commentary.

  “Actually, last night was easier. I think I’m entering a new zone. Everything’s beginning to stabilize, lose that edgy feel. I’m not looking over my shoulder all the time. I’ve left the inside doors open, and before I enter a room I deliberately anticipate it, try to extrapolate its depth and dimensions so that it doesn’t surprise me—before I used to open a door and just dive through like a man stepping into an empty lift shaft.”