Murder, Mystery, and Magic

by John Burke

  “Give them time to get well away from the place.”

  The men were tense and impatient. One false move now and the whole thing might be spoilt. Somewhere a knee-joint creaked, and someone sniggered.

  “Now—go get ’em!”

  It was almost too easy. The swoop, the rounding-up, the swift retreat from the vicinity of the house. The march away into the lights of the station, and the quick check-up.

  None of the tenants would answer questions. They still looked dazed and, surrounded by interrogators, decidedly unhappy. It would take time before they remembered that they were individual human beings again.

  “Anybody left inside?” General Sammons was as eager as a terrier, snapping about him, thrusting his head aggressively to right and left.

  “According to our check-up, there must be five or six.”

  “Probably maintenance staff, or somebody sick,” ventured Windsor.

  The general swung on Mark. “Well? What do we do now? Safe to go in?”

  Mark shook his head undecidedly. “I can’t get much out of the minds of these people. It’s all a blur—a tangle of emotions and elementary sensations rather than coherent thoughts. But I’ve got a…a feeling there’s still a lot of…well, call it psychic energy, stored up in there. Feebler than before, perhaps, with only a handful of people there—”

  “Fair enough.” General Sammons rapped out orders.

  A squad of men with small blast guns moved towards the silent building.

  Mark felt fear rising up in his mind as it had risen when he stepped inside those doors. He wanted to call out and stop the men. But his orders would have no effect—they would not stop for him.

  A savage burst of firing splintered through the doors, and the men went on in.

  There were more shots from inside. Once there was a scream.

  “Second squad ready?” said the general grimly.

  “Sir”—Mark knew he must speak—“you must wait until morning.”

  “Damnit, young man—”

  “You must wait until morning.”

  There was such authority in his voice that the general quailed. He went red, and stared at Mark as though he were about to frame a derisive, devastating question. Then he said: “I suppose you know what you’re talking about?”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Mark.

  In the morning they approached the house and trained electronic survey binoculars on the windows. The rooms inside sprang up vividly before their eyes. They saw the men who had gone in, sprawling in their various attitudes, one crushed by a closing door, one strangled by one of the remaining tenants who had kept up the choking pressure even after bullets had been pumped into him, another caught ludicrously and unheroically in the mechanism of a washing machine which had ripped his arms and drained his blood efficiently away….

  “My God,” whispered the general. Then he stiffened, and swung on Mark. “I don’t care what ideas you’ve got. I’m going to shell that place. It’s still alive.”

  “Yes,” said Mark. “It’s got a life of its own now. I’d hoped I was wrong. I’d kept on hoping.”

  “It’s got to be destroyed. And after it, the other one.”

  “Yes.”

  They backed away, trying to banish from their minds the nauseating picture of those crumpled bodies. It would always be a nightmare from now on—the metal arms and surfaces, the clutching machines, striking and holding and crushing….

  “Bring up the guns,” said General Sammons.

  The man from the Housing Authority opened his mouth, then looked at their set faces, and closed it again.

  * * * *

  Christopher Cardew stood with his wife on the edge of the clearing. In the distance the sound of the train hissing along its monorail was faint and oddly soothing—fainter than the song of birds in the trees or the rustle of the wind in the branches.

  He said: “Well, there it is.”

  “We must take it,” she said.

  “No labonr-saving devices,” he said. “A generator for electricity, but not much else. Old fashioned electricity,” he added, warningly.

  “We’ll take it,” she said.

  He kissed her, and they walked towards the sturdy, drab little cottage.

  He said: “You’re quite sure?”

  “I was wondering….”

  “Yes?”

  “You don’t suppose,” she said, “that we might get hold of some really old stuff—some oil lamps, for example? I’d feel more comfortable.”

  A HABIT OF HATING

  Now that I look back and assess it honestly, I’ve got to admit that I’ve always felt most intensely alive and somehow more loving when I was hating. Everything’s so drab when you’re just making polite conversation at a party or listening sympathetically to a friend’s problems. Much more fun to be writing blistering letters to British Gas or phoning some cowering little girl on the local council. I’ve been almost sorry when the stupid little bureaucrats crumble and apologise.

  And way back, if one had only had the chance, the guts, all the adult weight and know-how.

  School, and all the slights they heaped on you. Dismal daily routine, dismal men who held sway. A schoolmaster plastered with dandruff who once contemptuously kicked my rather shabby satchel out of the way as he strode through the cloakroom. I’d love to go back with my adult powers and ram his face down one of the lavatory pans until he drowned or, even better, choked on his own shit. Yes, I’d still love to do that. And Tubby Blackshaw—a slimy fat bully, always trying to grope your testicles. I dreamed of being bigger and stronger, and twisting his until they came off in my hand.

  You think things like that, but of course you don’t really mean them, do you?

  I did, though. Still do. Still hate the bastards in the past, and find plenty more as time goes by.

  Last year a scrawny blonde in the office complained to the Divisional Coordinator that I kept looking at her in a funny sort of way. He laughed when formally questioning me about it. Of course she was a neurotic little drip, and he never for a moment thought that I’d done any such thing.

  “I mean, she’s hardly worth a second look, eh?”

  We laughed, man to man; though he never guessed how much I loathed him, pretentious little brown-noser who’d squelched his way up the promotional ladder.

  Of course in this instance he was right. Until then I’d hardly noticed skinny Miss Goffin. Now, although I was careful not to stare too directly, I couldn’t help glancing at her in a way that sent her scuttling off down corridors towards offices she hadn’t really meant to go to. Having been duly reprimanded, she wouldn’t dare risk another complaint. I wondered, in an abstract way, if I could frighten her into throwing herself off the roof, but our labs and offices were a sprawl of single-storey buildings, and even if she could be willed into climbing up on a roof and jumping, she’d probably only thump down on to the grass verges and bruise her bony shoulders.

  She was a scrawny little nonentity, but the effect she was having on me proved to be quite stimulating. I was healthily indignant that she should have laid that complaint against me, and found myself ready to spread that hatred over others. Kids who stamped their chewing gum on to pavements: I dreamed of making them scrape it up with their teeth and then swallow it. Women, kids and prams always blocking the pavement while they gossiped below a large clock jutting out from a department store: let it drop on their heads, chiming jubilantly as their screeching voices rasped into silence.

  And then there were the things I’d like to inflict on some of my wife’s repulsive friends. Just the thought of it....

  No more than the thought of it, for a while.

  To be fair, it wasn’t just the office moron or Amanda’s friends who were bringing things to the boil. Always simmering away below the surface had been the memory of Deborah’s treachery.

  Not that I had always hated Deborah. For a long time I neither hated nor loved. I went to bed with honey-haired Deborah in her flat a quarter
of a mile from my own bedsitter, stayed the night if it suited me or walked home immediately afterwards if it suited me, along those featureless streets and comfortably into my own bed. That was the way we both wanted it: no commitments, no intensity. Or so I believed. Until she confessed that she was pregnant, and I knew she must have been cheating on me.

  Because I’m sterile. Always have been.

  That was one of the things that Deborah said suited her just fine, just as it suited me. No risks, no responsibilities. Yet suddenly she was all aglow at the prospect of having a baby.

  “I can’t expect you to understand, Tony. I really am sorry. Truly I am.”

  Truly she wasn’t. No way was she sorry. She was bathed in a sickly, self-satisfied radiance. It was a radiance I couldn’t share; but I did find some new incitements of my own. Only now, when I knew she had been a shabby cheat all along and I could begin steadily hating her, did those grey streets take on a different light. Instead of drowsing along them, I was wide awake. My mind tingled, I was ready for something. It would show itself soon. Had to be soon. The drizzle glittered a dancing silver, the wet pavements gave off a rich, musky smell. The tatty Cherry Tree pub on the corner looked as if it had been newly repainted, and the sound from inside was livelier than it used to be. I swaggered past and thought of Deborah and out loud called her a bitch, and laughed and hated her and laughed all the more. Discarding her and detesting her gave a new shimmering edge to everything else.

  Amanda was different.

  Different to start with, anyway. I did believe I loved Amanda. We were married and we were happy. Well, content, anyway. We had nothing to quarrel about. I went off each morning to the laboratory, while Amanda went to sit behind the reception desk at a management consultancy, always looking smart and sounding confident in her command of the up-to-the-minute jargon of the trade.

  At weekends she devoted herself to our small garden and the greenhouse. We had the neatest possible flowerbeds, and no herb or pot plant could be featured in a colour supplement without it appearing promptly inside or outside the household. Evenings together were tranquil. We played Scrabble a lot, and backgammon. I handed over tips about plant propagation or growth inhibitors which our lab researchers had been testing, and could see her mind wander until she simply had to scurry out to the greenhouse and adjust the heating and do her umpteenth survey of the month. We watched a lot of gardening programmes on the television.

  Occasionally we went to bed early, and made love quietly, and slept tranquilly afterwards. Once, after reading a paperback she had been given by one of her firm’s clients, she asked me to beat her, which I tried to do lightly and methodically, until something took possession of me and I began to raise weals on her back and she howled and asked me for Christ’s sake to stop. But I couldn’t. Things between us had been so complacent, so ordinary. Now it was different. She had asked for it, and she was getting it.

  Until she struck back. Not physically, but somehow flailing out at me with her mind. My arm was wrenched agonisingly to one side. My fingers went lifeless and I dropped the cane. Sweat broke out on my forehead.

  Amanda’s voice was a harsh voice I had never heard before. “You were enjoying that. You liked hurting me.”

  “You were the one who wanted it.” I had difficulty in steadying my breathing. “You asked me to do it.”

  “‘But you enjoyed it so much. Too much.”

  She looked at me with a mixture of fear and calculation for a few evenings after that. And something was pulsating inside me, some urgent appetite that had to be satisfied.

  It was fed, for starters, by my growing irritation at those silly catchphrases which old school friends consider the height of wit and secret communion.

  “Remember the famous occasion when….”

  ‘Famous’ meaning that nobody outside their own pathetic little clique had ever heard of it or would ever find it in the least amusing.

  “And old Miss Murray. The old dragon! Ugh! Marjorie Johnson, who was married and had two teenage children, still twittered like a gauche teenager herself. “We believed that at night, in her own room, she paced about breathing flames. One night she’d be bound to set the school on fire with her breath.”

  Amanda shuddered with a terror not entirely feigned. She had always had a fear of being burnt alive, trapped in a car or in a room she couldn’t get out of.

  I wondered what Marjorie’s special intimate fear was, and how it could be most poetically and lethally turned against her.

  Afterwards, Amanda said: “Tony, Marjorie was a bit upset, the way you looked at her.”

  “What on earth are you on about?”

  “She says you gave her a look. Gave her the creeps.”

  “The woman does drivel on. Don’t any of you ever grow out of those old school hang-ups and bun fights in the dorm?”

  And of course there was Bunty with that repulsive dog of hers.

  “He’s such a great big softie,” she drooled as the hulking great thing slouched about our lawn.

  I saw Amanda’s face as it crapped on her wallflowers and then knocked over an urn of fuchsias. “It doesn’t matter,” she said tightly when Bunty apologised as though any apology was an absurdity when the perpetrator of the offence was so lovable. “Honestly, it doesn’t matter a bit.”

  But I felt that Amanda wouldn’t complain this time if I looked or spoke in a certain way.

  “From what I’ve heard,” I said, “rottweilers aren’t exactly reliable. Likely to turn on their owners without warning.”

  “Rubbish.” Bunty sniffed at me just as her dog might sniff before peeing on my leg. “A lot sweeter tempered than most human beings I know. Much more reliable. And loving.”

  I pictured that hefty black and brown beloved turning on her and tearing her apart. Amanda looked at me and went very pale. But we both knew we had an unspoken compact.

  A week later in the park, in front of half-a-dozen witnesses—and I’m sorry to say I wasn’t one of them—the creature sprang on his besotted owner and sank his teeth into her right arm. By the time it was hauled off, there wasn’t much of Bunty’s arm that remained user-friendly.

  Amanda avoided my eyes when we heard the news, but while I was pouring a drink she said: “The way you looked at poor Bunty, and at that dog anyone would think you’d wished it on her.”

  “You weren’t actually wishing her the best of British luck yourself,” I ventured. “I don’t think it could have been done without your collaboration.”

  She said nothing. But she knew what I was talking about. And if she was worried, so was I. When the attack happened, I had felt her full power. No matter how she coyly tried denying it to herself, she was the one with the great gift—the true potency for doing what had to be done.

  I was envious. She looked so demure and uncomplicated. But she had a gift that, once let loose, I couldn’t hope to compete with.

  All would be well if we stayed on the same side.

  One afternoon I got home to find Amanda already there, earlier than usual, unpacking an emerald dress from a box and laying it reverently on our bed.

  “I’ve been invited out.”

  “‘Some office romance?” I knew it wouldn’t be.

  “The big boss. Several important clients coming to dinner, and at the last minute he realized they were short of one lady to make up the numbers. Could I step in at short notice—and buy myself a new dress and charge it to the firm.”

  “Have a wonderful time,” I said as she left. And I meant it. I didn’t begrudge her a treat of this kind, though I hoped she wouldn’t move too far, too fast, onto a different level from the one we had comfortably established for ourselves.

  On the music centre I was replaying for the fourth time that bit of the concert pieces from Berg’s Lulu where Lulu is carved up by Jack the Ripper, when the front door opened and Amanda came in, tight-lipped. She had been gone less than an hour.

  I flicked the remote control to cut short the wonderful murdero
us discords. “Something wrong? One tycoon refused to sit down with another?”

  “The bastard.” Amanda was not crying, but her eyes were blinking furiously. “The rotten bastard.”

  I had never heard her use language like that before, or speak with such venom. Before I could make any soothing noises, or even decide whether they would be welcome, she raged on: “When I got there, it turned out that one of the men wasn’t going to show up, so please I wasn’t needed and please would I go home. Only of course the firm would pay for a taxi and I can keep the dress.”

  “The bastard.” I said it more quietly than she had done, but much more decisively.

  “How can they expect me to go back to that place? How can I be expected to work there, having to see that disgusting swine swaggering in and out every day? I don’t think I can bear to be in the same building.”

  She collapsed into her usual chair.

  “No, I don’t see how you can.” I sat opposite her, both of us in our usual positions. “He’ll have to go, won’t he?”

  “Don’t be silly, Tony. He’s the boss.”

  “And we have to remove him.”

  “You can’t be serious?”

  I was very serious; and she knew it.

  In the morning I phoned the lab to say I would be late, and accompanied my wife to her place of work. We didn’t discuss exactly what was going to happen because we didn’t know. But we did know, deep down, that something would.

  We were there watching, concentrating, when Mr. Broderick’s black Merc rolled up and he got out, leaving his chauffeur to ease it round the block to the underground car park entrance. We didn’t even know that repairs were going on in the lift shaft. So we could hardly be held responsible, even by ourselves, for the fact that, thirty seconds after the main door had been held open for him by a uniformed commissionaire, Mr. Broderick had somehow stepped into the open shaft just as the lift came down on a test run, Someone had failed to take proper safety precautions.