Not that George Benson was a stranger. True, he had not been home to England for many years—since running off as a youth, later to marry and settle in Germany—but as a boy he had known this place like the back of his hand and must have cycled for thousands of miles along dusty summer roads, lanes, and tracks, even bridle paths through the heart of this very region.
And that was why he was so perturbed now, not because of a pack of lies and fairy stories and old wives' tales heard as a boy, but because this was his home territory, where he'd been born and reared. Indeed, he felt more than perturbed, stupid almost. A fellow drives all the way north through Germany from Dortmund, catches the car ferry from Bremerhaven into Harwich, rolls on upcountry, having made the transition from right-to left-of-the-road driving with only a very small effort . . . and then hopelessly loses himself within only a fistful of miles from home!
Anger at his own supposed stupidity turned to bitter memories of his wife and then to an even greater anger. And a hurt . . .
It didn't hurt half so much now, though, not now it was all over. But the anger was still there. And the memories of the milk of marriage gone sour. Greta had just up and left home one day. George, employing the services of a detective agency, had traced his wife to Hamburg, where he'd found her in the bed of a nightclub crooner, an old boyfriend who finally had made it good.
"Damn all Krauts!" George cursed now as he checked the speed of his car to read out the legend on a village name board. His headlights picked the letters out starkly in the surrounding darkness. "Middle Hamborough?—Never bloody heard of it!" Again he cursed as, making a quick decision, he spun the steering wheel to turn his big car about on the narrow road. He would have to start backtracking, something he hated doing because it seemed so inefficient, so wasteful. "And blast and damn all Kraut cars!" he added as his front wheels bounced jarringly onto and back off the high stone roadside curb.
"Greta!" he quietly growled to himself as he drove back down the road away from the outskirts of Middle Hamborough. "What a bitch!" For of course she had blamed him for their troubles, saying that she couldn't stand his meanness. Him, George Benson, mean! She simply hadn't appreciated money. She'd thought that Deutsche marks grew on trees, that pfennigs gathered like dew on the grass in the night. George, on the other hand, had inherited much of the pecuniary instincts of his father, a Yorkshireman of the Old School—and of Scottish stock to boot—who really understood the value of "brass." His old man had used to say: "Thee tak care o' the pennies, Georgie, an' the pounds'll tak care o' theysels!"
George's already pinched face tightened skull-like as his thoughts again returned to Greta. She had wanted children. Children! Damned lucky thing he had known better than to accept that! For God's sake, who could afford children? Then she'd complained about the food—like she'd been complaining for years—said she was getting thin because the money he gave her was never enough. But George liked his women willowy and fragile; that way there was never much fight in them. Well, he'd certainly misjudged Greta, there had been plenty of fight left in her. And their very last fight had been about food, too. He had wanted her to buy food in bulk at the supermarkets for cheapness; in turn she'd demanded a deep freezer so that the food she bought wouldn't go bad; finally George had gone off the deep end when she told him how much the freezer she had in mind would cost!
She left him that same day; moreover, she ate the last of the wurstchen before she went! George grinned mirthlessly as he gripped the steering wheel tighter, wishing it were Greta's scrawny neck. By God! She'd be sorry when she was fat!
Still, George had had the last laugh. Their home had been paid for fifty-fifty, but it had been in George's name. He had sold it. Likewise the furniture and the few clothes she left behind. The car had been half hers, too—but again in George's name, for Greta couldn't drive. It was all his now, his money, his car, everything. As he'd done so often in the last twenty-four hours, he took one hand from the wheel to reassuringly pat the fat wallet where its outline bulged out the upper right front of his jacket.
It was the thought of money that sent George's mind casting back an hour or so to a chance encounter at Harvey's All-Night-Grill, just off the Ml. This drunk had been there—oh, a real joker and melancholy with it, too—but he had been sooo well-heeled! George remembered the man's queer offer: "Just show me the way home, that's all—and all I've got you can have!" And he had carried a bankbook showing a credit of over two thousand pounds . . .
That last was hearsay, though, passed on to George by Harvey himself, the stubble-jawed, greasy-aproned owner of the place. Now that earlier accidental meeting and conversation suddenly jumped up crystal clear in George's mind. It had started when George mentioned to Harvey that he was heading for Bellington; that was when the other fellow had started to take an interest in him and had made his weird offer about being shown the way home.
God damn! George sat bolt upright behind the steering wheel. Come to think of it, he had heard of Middle Hamborough before. Surely that was the name of the place the drunk had been looking for—for fifteen years!
George hadn't paid much attention to the man at the time, had barely listened to his gabbled, drunken pleading. He'd passed the man off quite simply as some nut who'd heard those fanciful old rumors about people getting lost in the surrounding countryside, a drunk who was making a big play of his own personal little fantasy. The fellow would be all right when he sobered up . . .
Now that George thought about it, though—well, why should anyone make up a story like that? And come to think of it, the man hadn't seemed all that drunk. More tired and, well, lost, really . . .
Just then, cresting a low hill, as his headlights flashed across the next shallow valley, George saw the house with the big garden and the long drive winding up to it. The place stood to the right of the road, atop the next hill, and the gravel drive rose up from an ornamental stone arch and iron gate at the roadside. Dipping down the road and climbing the low hill, George read the wrought-iron legend on the gate: High House. And now he remembered more of the—drunk's?—story.
The man had called himself Kent, and fifteen years ago, on his tenth wedding anniversary, he'd left home one morning to drive to London, there to make certain business arrangements with city-dwelling colleagues. He had taken a fairly large sum of money with him when he drove from High House, the home he himself had designed and built, which had worked out just as well for him. Turning right off the Middle Hamborough road through Meadington and onto the London road at Bankhead, Kent had driven to the city. And in London—
Kent was a partner in a building concern . . . or at least he had been. For in London he discovered that his firm had never existed, that his colleagues, Milton and Jones, while they themselves were real enough, swore they had never heard of him. "Milton, Jones & Kent" did not exist; the firm was known simply as "Milton & Jones." Not only did they not know him, they tried to have him jailed for attempted fraud!
That was only the start of it, for the real horror came when he tried to get back home—only to discover that there just wasn't any way home! George remembered now Kent's apparently drunken phrase: "A strange dislocation of space and time, a crossing of probability tracks, a passage between parallel dimensions—and a subsequent mapping-back of space-time elastic . . ." Only a drunk would say something like that A drunk or a nut.
Except Harvey had insisted that Kent was sober. He was just tired, Harvey said, confused, half mad trying to solve a fifteen-year-old problem that wasn't . . . There had never been a Middle Hamborough, Harvey insisted. The place wasn't shown on any map; you couldn't find it in the telephone directory; no trains, buses, or roads went there. Middle Hamborough wasn't!
But Middle Hamborough was, George had seen it, or—
Could it be that greasy old Harvey had somehow been fooling that clown all these years, milking his money drop by drop, cashing in on some mental block or other? Or had they both simply been pulling George's leg? If so, well, it certainly seeme
d a queer sort of joke . . .
George glanced at his watch. Just on 11:00 P.M.
Damn it he'd planned to be in Bellington by now, at home with the old folks, and he would have been if he'd come off the Ml at the right place. Of course, when he'd left England there had been no motorway as such, just another road stretching away north and south. That was where he'd gone wrong, obviously; he'd come off the Ml too soon. He should have gone on to the next exit. Well, all right, he'd kill two birds with one stone. He'd go back to Harvey's all-nighter, check out the weird one's story again, then see if he couldn't perhaps latch on to some of the joker's change to cover his time. Then he'd try to pick up a map of the area before heading home. He couldn't go wrong with a map, now could he?
Having decided his course, and considering the winding roads and pitch-darkness, George put his foot down and sped back to Harvey's place. Parking his car, he walked through the open door into the unhealthy atmosphere and lighting of the so-called cafeteria (where the lights were kept low, George suspected to make the young cockroaches on the walls less conspicuous). He went straight to the service counter and carefully rested his elbows upon it, avoiding the splashes of sticky coffee and spilled grease. Of the equally greasy proprietor he casually inquired regarding Mr. Kent's whereabouts.
"Eh? Kent? He'll be in his room. I let him lodge here, y'know. He doesn't like to be too far from this area . . ."
"You let him lodge here?" George asked, raising his eyebrows questioningly.
"Well, y'know, he pays a bit."
George nodded, silently repeating the other's words: Yeah, I'll bet he pays a bit!
"G'night there!" Harvey waved a stained dishcloth at a departing truck driver and his mate. "See y'next time." He turned back to George with a scowl. "Anyway, what's it to you, about Kent? After making y'self a quick quid or two?"
"How do you mean?" George returned, assuming a hurt look. "It's just that I think I might be able to help the poor bloke out, that's all."
"Oh?" Harvey looked suspicious. "How's that, ten?"
"Well, half an hour ago I was on the road to Middle Hamborough, and I passed a place set back off the road called High House. I just thought—"
" 'Ere," Harvey cut in, a surprisingly fast hand shooting out to catch George's jacket front and pull him close so that their faces almost met across the service counter. "You tryin' t' be clever, chief?"
"Well, I'll be—" George spluttered, genuinely astonished. "What the hell d'you think you're—"
" 'Cos if you are—you an' me'll fall out, we will!"
George carefully disengaged himself. "Well," he said, "I think that answers one of my questions, at least."
"Eh? What d'you mean?" Harvey asked, still looking surly. George backed off a step.
"Looks to me like you're as mad as him, attacking me like that. I mean, I might have expected you to laugh, seeing as how I fell for your funny little joke—but I'd hardly think that you'd get all physical."
"What the 'ell are you on about?" Harvey questioned, a very convincing frown creasing his forehead. "What joke?"
"Why, about Middle Hamborough, about it not being on any map and about no roads going there and Kent looking for the place for fifteen years. I'm on about a place that's not twenty minutes' fast drive from here, signposted clear as the City of London!"
Suddenly Harvey's unwashed features paled visibly. "You mean you've actually seen this place?" he whispered. "And you drove past . . . High House?"
"Damn right!" George answered abruptly, feeling as though things were all unreal, a very vivid but meaningless daydream.
Harvey lifted a flap in the counter and waddled through to George's side. He was a very big man, George suddenly noticed, and the color had come back to his face with a vengeance. There was a red, angry tinge in the man's sallow features now; moreover, the cafeteria was quite empty of other souls, all bar the two of them.
"Now look here—" George blurted, as Harvey began to maneuver him into a corner.
"I shouldn't 'ave mentioned 'is money, should I?" The fat man cut him off, his piggy eyes fastening upon those of his patently intended victim, making his question more a statement than a question proper.
"See," he continued, "I'd had a couple of pints earlier, or I wouldn't 'ave let it drop about 'is predicament. 'E's been right good to me, Mr. Kent 'as—'elped me set this place up proper, 'e did—and I don't cotton to the idea of some flyboy trying to—"
Again his arm shot out, and he grabbed Benson's throat this time, trapping him in the dim corner. "So you've been down the road to Middle Hamborough, 'ave you?—And you've seen High House, eh? Well, let me tell you, I've been looking for that place close on six years, me an' poor ol' Kent an' not so much as a peep!
"Now I knows 'e's a bit of a nut, but I like 'im and we gets on fine. 'E stays 'ere, cheap like, an' we do a bit of motorin' in 'is old car—lookin' for those places you say you've seen, y'know? But we never finds 'em, an' we never will, 'cos they're not there, see? Kent being a decent little gent I 'umors 'im and things is OK. But I'm no crook, if you see what I mean, though I'm not sure I can say the same for everybody!" He peered pointedly at George, releasing the pressure on his windpipe enough for him to croak:
"I tell you I have seen High House; or, at least, I saw a place of that name and answering that description I heard from Kent. And I have been on the road to—"
"What's that about High House?" The question was a hoarse, quavering whisper—hesitant, and yet filled with excited expectancy. Hearing that whisper, Harvey immediately released his grip on Benson's neck and turned to move over quickly to the thin, gray-haired, middle-aged man who had appeared out of a back room behind the service counter.
"Don't get yourself all upset, Mr. Kent," Harvey protested, holding up his hands solicitously. "It's just some bloke tryin' to pull a fast one—"
"But I heard him say—" Kent's eyes were wide, staring past the fat proprietor straight at Benson where he stood, still shaken, in the corner.
George found his voice again. "I said I'd seen High House, on the road to Middle Hamborough—and I did see it." He shook himself, straightening his tie and shrugging his disarranged jacket back into position. "But I didn't come back in here to get involved with a couple of nuts. And I don't think much of your joke."
George turned away and made for the door; then, remembering his previous trouble, he turned back to face Harvey. "Do you have a map of the area by any chance? I've been in Germany for some years and seem to be out of touch. I can't seem to find my way about anymore."
For a moment Kent continued to stare very hard at the speaker; then he half turned to Harvey. "He—he got lost! And he says he's seen High House . . .! I've got to believe him; I daren't miss the chance that—"
Almost sure by now that he was the victim of some cockeyed leg-pull (and yet still experiencing niggling little subconscious doubts), George Benson shrugged. "OK. No map," he grumbled. "Well, good night, boys. Maybe I'll drop in again sometime—like next visiting day!"
"No, wait!" the thin man cried. "Do you think that you can find . . . that you can find High House again?" His voice went back to a whisper on the last half dozen words.
"Sure, I can find it again," George told him, nodding his head. "But it's well out of my way."
"I'll make it worth your trouble," Kent quickly answered, his voice rising rapidly in what sounded to George like a bad case of barely suppressed hysteria. "I'll make it very worthwhile indeed!"
George was not the man to pass up a good thing. "My car's outside," he said. "Do you want to ride with me, or will you follow in your own car?"
"I'll ride with you. My hands are shaking so badly that I—"
"I'm coming with you," Harvey suddenly grunted, taking off his greasy apron.
"No, no, my friend," Kent turned to him. "If we don't find High House, I'll be back. Until then, and just in case we do find it, this is for all you've done." His hand was shaking badly as he took out a checkbook and quickly, nervo
usly scribbled. He passed the check to Harvey, and George managed to get a good look at it. His eyes went wide when he saw the amount it was made out for. Five hundred pounds!
"Now look 'ere, Mr. Kent," Harvey blustered. "I don't like the looks of this bloke. I reckon—"
"I understand your concern," the older man told him, "but I'm sure Mr.—?" He turned to George.
"Er, Smith," George told him, unwilling to reveal his real name. This could still be some crazy joke, but if so, it would be on some bloke called "Smith," and not on George Benson!
"I'm sure that Mr. Smith is legitimate. And in any case I daren't miss the chance to get . . . to get back home." He was eager now to be on his way. "Are you ready, Mr. Smith?"
"Just as soon as you say," George told him. "The sooner the better."
They walked out into the night, to George's car, leaving fat greasy Harvey worriedly squeezing his hands in the doorway to his all-nighter. Suddenly the night air seemed inordinately cold, and as George opened the passenger door to let Kent get in, he shivered. He walked around the car, climbed into the driver's seat, and slammed the door.
As George started up the motor, Kent spoke up from where he crouched against the opposite door, a huddled shape in the dark interior of the car. "Are you sure that—that—"
"Look," George answered, the utter craziness of the whole business abruptly dawning on him, souring his voice, "if this is some sort of nutty joke . . ." He let the threat hang, then snapped, "Of course I can find it again. High House, you're talking about?"
"Yes, yes. High House. The home I built for the woman who lives there, waiting for me."
"For fifteen years?" George allowed himself to indulge in the other's fantasy.
"She would wait until time froze!" Kent leaned over to spit the words in George's ear. "And in any case, I have a theory."
Yeah! George thought to himself. Me, too! Out loud he said, "A theory?"
"Yes. I think—I hope—it's possible that time itself is frozen at the moment of the fracture. If I can get back, it may all be unchanged. I may even regain my lost years!"
The Year's Best Horror Stories 4 Page 22
