The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk

by David Ambrose

  It was a big leap to make from a hanging position. He looked down. The ground was rocky and hard and a long way off, and there was nothing to break his fall. He started to swing, gently at first, then building speed.

  He didn’t know where he found that extra final kick: in the air, or so it seemed. Wherever it came from, it took him those vital last few inches. Even so, his left hand failed to get a grip, though his right held on. When he was steady, he started to calculate his next jump, and wondered whether this whole thing was going to work at all. The distance to the trees was definitely more than it had looked from where he’d been observing earlier. This simply couldn’t be done. He moved a few-yards to his left and peered again into the shadows. The chances were better there, but he went on looking.

  Pretty soon he found something that was still difficult but worth a try. It was a downward jump, clearing the fence and landing right in the heart of one of the trees. The big danger was that the branch he would have to catch might not be strong enough to take his weight and would break with a dangerously loud snap. He couldn’t know until he tried.

  The branch started to give way as he’d feared. But the moment before it broke he let go and fell to the ground. The tree-had slowed his fall, and he landed on all fours with no more than a rustle in the leaves above him, as though a gust of wind had passed through or a bird taken flight.

  He stayed in a crouch and looked around. Then he checked his watch. He was waiting for two things. One was to find out if he’d been spotted or not. Any device set to detect a man, or any other object, flying through the air and clear over the fence would have got him, that was for sure. Which would mean that any moment now there would be guards and probably dogs out looking for him, and he’d rather be near the fence if that happened.

  The second thing he was waiting for was to see the patrol car pass next time, because after that he’d have a minimum of seventeen minutes, and just over thirty at the most, before they came around this way again.

  As the seconds went by and became minutes, Charlie knew that his guess had been right. This place was as secure as anyone could make it without drawing unwelcome attention to themselves, which meant there were holes in their system. He’d just got through one; now he had to find another.

  He heard the patrol car approaching, then saw its headlights, which were dipped. Other lights about the place were coming on as dusk gathered. He imagined that most people must have gone home, though some could be working late. Perhaps some of them lived on the premises.

  When the patrol car’s taillights had disappeared around the next corner, Charlie made his move. He headed for the garage door from which Fry’s van had emerged. When he got to it he could hear the whine of an electric motor. It was coming closer. A hydraulic thump was followed by a lighter, faster whine, and the doors that had opened for Fry swung up again into the ceiling.

  Charlie flattened himself against the wall on one side. A fork—lift trundled out pulling a small cart. It had a cargo of something he didn’t recognize at first. Then a shaft of light as the doors closed caught something. Charlie recognized one of his own paintings. Then he saw that they were all his recent paintings: Fry’s vanload.

  Keeping low, he ran along the edge of the ramp, following the forklift, finally hopping on the back. The man driving felt only a slight bump behind him, as though a wheel of the trailer he was pulling had passed over a stone.

  Chapter 28

  HE MADE HIMSELF so small that nobody would have noticed, at a casual glance, that he was there. The cart bumped and swung along like a children’s ride at an amusement park. They were heading, Charlie calculated, for the residential part of the estate.

  When the movement suddenly stopped and he heard the motor die, he moved fast, and was in the cover of nearby bushes before the driver came around to start unloading. He watched as the pictures were carried inside, three or four at a time, about a dozen of them.

  Somewhere above, a light went on. He looked up. It was an apartment block that looked, he thought, as though a lot of expensive television sets had been stacked together at slightly odd angles. The windows had curved edges and looked out onto the world like screens, yet the whole effect was softened by carefully cultivated ivy and other climbing plants. What could easily have been forbidding and strange became merely suburban.

  The thing he noticed in this particular window where the light had just gone on, the thing that kept him watching, was the sight of one of his paintings being held up to be examined. He could see only one hand, and no sign of the person it belonged to.

  He could either go in and ring the bell or break the door down, or he could do the sensible thing. Some days, he found, and this was one of them, his climbing skills came in more useful than others.

  There wasn’t much in the way of finger- or toe-holds, and any attempt to use the climbing plants would be rash, but he managed, going carefully, to get there. Each apartment had its own small balcony; in this case it was just around the corner from the window Charlie had observed. He pulled himself up and flipped over the rail. Now he could see into the room fully.

  It was a comfortable, conventional living room. It obviously belonged to someone interested in books and art generally, and particularly the art of Charlie Monk.

  Kathy Ryan was going through his pictures, pausing to look at each of them for a few moments. When she’d gone through them once, she started again, spending longer over some this time, less over others. Charlie had the feeling she’d already done this repeatedly.

  The glass door from the balcony into the apartment was open slightly, but Charlie checked his impulse to walk in unannounced. Instead he took a step closer so that she would see him if she turned. Then he spoke her name quietly.

  “Kathy…?”

  She didn’t jump. She just stopped what she was doing and looked at him. There was no fear in her face.

  “Come in, Charlie,” she said. “I was told you’d probably get here sooner or later.”

  He reached out and pushed open the door, then took a step inside the room, and waited for her to speak. She looked at him with a strange kind of sadness that touched and troubled him. Something, he knew now for sure, was badly wrong with her life.

  “Kathy,” he said softly, “just tell me what’s going on, please.”

  She looked down as though she found it difficult to answer his question. She was playing with something in her hand, something small and black, though he didn’t pay much attention to it for the moment.

  He waited awhile for her answer, then said, “Kathy, tell me.”

  She looked at him.

  “I’m not Kathy,” she said. Her voice was flat, drained of emotion. “There is no Kathy Ryan. My name is Susan—Dr. Susan Flemyng.”

  He could feel the puzzlement gather on his face like a hot flush. He opened his mouth to protest at this nonsense. But she—Kathy, or Susan as she now chose to call herself—lifted the small black object in her hand slightly, and suddenly he remembered the thing he had seen Marijuana Shirt pointing in his direction before that truck had come between them, and after which Charlie had lost consciousness for several seconds.

  This time nothing came between him and the small black object that she aimed straight at him. Charlie’s world came to an end.

  A strip of light opened horizontally across the center of his vision. He tried to focus, but everything was strangely blurred, as though he had suddenly become nearsighted. He could see movements and what looked like reflecting surfaces, but he could make out no detail.

  “That was quite a game you played there, Charlie,” someone said. It was a man’s voice, a voice he didn’t know. And somehow it didn’t seem to be addressing him quite as directly as the words implied.

  “He must be feeling wiped out,” another voice said, also male, also unknown.

  “He’ll be okay in a couple of minutes,” said the first voice.

  They were talking about him, Charlie realized, not to him. He tried to ask
where he was and what was happening, but found he couldn’t speak. All he heard was a strange sound coming from his mouth, as though he was half drugged.

  Then an extraordinary thing happened. The strip of light he’d been staring at shot upward suddenly and disappeared from view. There was a brief passage of blackness, then the whole of his field of vision opened up. He realized that something had been lifted off his head. It was a kind of helmet. He could see it now in the hands of one of the men who had spoken. It had a dull metalic color and several strange-looking leads coming out of it. The man holding it wore a white lab coat. So did the other man with him. Charlie had never seen either of them before.

  “He’s awake,” one of them said. “Look, he’s watching us— be careful.”

  “It’s okay, he can’t move.”

  The one who’d just spoken reached out a hand toward Charlie’s neck. Charlie made a superhuman effort to pull himself together and say something. But the sound that escaped his lips was no more coherent than before, just louder and with an edge of frustration to it.

  “Jesus Christ, he tried to bite me!”

  The man who’d reached out to Charlie snatched his hand back in alarm.

  “I told you to be careful. He can take your fingers off with those teeth.”

  Charlie heard all this with a strange sense of detachment. He was beyond shock or even surprise now. This was simply absurd. Someone had to tell him what was going on, and soon. Or maybe he just needed to wake up.

  “Listen, we’ll pull the seal and let him get the damn thing off himself. If he’s pissed off, we’ll be out of here.”

  This was said by the man whom Charlie had not—allegedly—tried to bite.

  “Okay, fine,” the other man said, sounding nervous and relieved in equal parts.

  Both men then reached cautiously around the back of Charlie’s neck, jumping slightly as he twisted in whatever kind of harness it was that held him. Once again he tried to speak; once again without success. This time he managed only a curious, rough-edged rasping noise.

  What had happened to his voice?

  There was a hissing sound, like a ball being punctured. It didn’t come from him but from something he was wearing. He felt a curious kind of pressure change all over his body. Not uncomfortable, just strange. He looked down.

  His whole body was encased in some kind of silvery suit, like a spaceman. Cables of differing thickness were attached to various parts of it, snaking away across the floor.

  He heard a muffled clang and looked in its direction, and saw the two white-coated men pulling a door closed after them. It was a cage door made of vertical bars. They were on the outside, and Charlie was inside.

  In a cage!

  He struggled to get to his feet, but something still encumbered him. It was the space suit. But as he moved and tried to free himself, it fell away, just sliding down his torso first of all, then falling with a surprisingly heavy thud to the bare concrete floor. He continued to look down.

  But it wasn’t the space suit that held his attention now. It was his own body. He was naked, and yet not naked. Every inch of him—broad chest, long powerful-looking arms, muscular legs, and feet—was covered in thick, black, coarse-textured hair.

  His head spun. He thought for a moment that he might pass out. But of course he didn’t. Because this wasn’t possible. This was some kind of aberration, some brief hallucination.

  A hand rose toward his face. His own hand. Without consciously willing it to move, he brought it up and held it before him, examining it, turning it over in wonderment.

  It wasn’t his hand at all. Not Charlie’s hand. Not Charlie Monk’s.

  It was an ape’s hand.

  He stared in silence, as though hypnotized. The hand grew larger, filling his field of vision. Unknowingly, instinctively, he brought it to his face to feel what was there.

  The hardness of the hand itself, the texture and thickness of the skin, made feeling anything at all difficult. Like wearing gloves. Except that these weren’t gloves. This was a living hand.

  And the face that it was feeling—his face—was similarly rough and covered in hair, and strangely rounded. He felt his lips. They were wide and thin, but with a leathery edge. And where he should have felt his nose, there was none: just a small mound in the middle of his face.

  Something moved on the floor by his feet. He looked down and saw the discarded silvery suit being towed by its various attachments toward a recess in the wall. When it had been pulled all the way in, the recess swiveled and disappeared, leaving only a smooth wall.

  He looked around him now, taking in a wider aspect of his surroundings. It was true: He actually was in a cage. Two sides were bars, two sides concrete walls. Beyond the bars he couldn’t see much. A passage went past one side; there was nobody in it for the moment. On the other side was a more open space with a brightly lit area visible in the distance. It looked like a high-tech lab. There were benches with microscopes and computer screens, and people working at them. Nobody was paying any attention to him at all.

  There was a movement in the corner of his vision. He swung to his right—and found himself looking into something he hadn’t noticed before. On the far wall of the corridor, opposite his cage, was a full-length mirror. He could see a reflection in it—a reflection of whoever was in the cage.

  He raised one arm, and then another. Then, just to be sure, he took a step forward and another step back.

  There could be no doubt about it. The reflection was himself.

  He was a full-grown chimpanzee.

  PART THREE

  Chapter 29

  THEY WERE IN Montana: That much she knew. As the executive jet lost altitude, the relief-map topography below them gradually transformed itself into pine- and aspen-covered slopes against a background of soaring mountains. They were aiming for a plateau where she could see a landing strip on what looked like a big private ranch. A helicopter sat on a circular pad nearby. Some way off she could see a sprawl of buildings. There was a luxurious ranch-style house surrounded by lawns, a swimming pool, and tennis courts. Behind it were a couple of barns with corrals and horses.

  Susan and her father were the only passengers. There were two pilots, both of them professional and courteous; they wore uniforms and even put on their caps as they came back from the cockpit to open the door. The senior of the two said he hoped they had enjoyed their flight and wished them a pleasant stay.

  A station wagon waited, driven by a pleasant young man in jeans and a lumberjack shirt. As they covered the half mile or so to the house he told them the ranch was twelve hundred acres and stood at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet. The whole state, he said, was around a thousand feet above sea level—no finer air in the world, he added with proprietorial pride.

  It had been Amery’s idea to come with her on the trip. West hadn’t objected when she’d told him she would like Amery to accompany her. It would help her get through the whole difficult experience as much as it would reassure Christopher.

  “Okay,” he’d said after a moment’s reflection, “I’ve no doubt you’d tell him all about it anyway, so he might as well be there in person. You see, we’re trying to make this whole experience as painless for you as possible.”

  She hadn’t replied to that, but she hoped the expression on her face had conveyed her feeling that the remark, like West himself, was beneath contempt. Did he really expect her to feel gratitude for being allowed to visit her kidnapped son?

  Christopher was waiting for them on the porch of one of the buildings she’d seen from the air. He leaned out, waving, as their car approached. Buzz ran barking at his heels. There was nobody else in sight. Christopher flew into his mother’s arms while the dog danced around them, delirious with joy. They clung to each other, the child ecstatic to see her, she fighting to hold back tears of happiness.

  “Let me look at you,” she said after a few moments, and held him at arm’s length. “You look so well. Are you having fun?”


  “Sure, sometimes. But I miss you, Mom.”

  “Me, too.”

  They hugged again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll try not to make it much longer.”

  “Why can’t I come with you? Have I done something wrong?”

  “No, darling, it’s not you. It’s some work I have to do. It’s creating problems just now, but they won’t go on for long.”

  She paused, looked him in the eyes, and knew he’d understood—at least the important things. He knew it wasn’t his fault, and their separation wasn’t her choice. It was something else, and neither of them could do anything about it. He also saw that she hadn’t changed, and that was good. The same with his grandfather.

  “What do you do most of the time?” she asked him.

  He brightened.

  “Like I told you, I’m learning to ride. I’m getting real good. You want to see me ride?”

  “Of course I do…!”

  “And there’s my tree house…and some great videos…”

  “Sounds like you’re doing fine!”

  The sound of a door on the porch made her look up. A tallish woman in jeans and a white blouse had emerged. She was around fifty, with gray hair pulled back and fixed in a bun. She had a long, bony face that might have been stern except for kindly blue eyes with laugh lines around them.

  “We do an hour or two of schoolwork every day, just so he doesn’t get too rusty.”

  The woman came down the steps toward Susan.

  “I’m Mrs. Hathaway. Christopher calls me Auntie May.”