Roberts was a polished businessman of the American type, the sort that likes to think of themselves as ‘go-getting’. He was dressed smartly, and the parting in his hair could have been drawn with a ruler. He was extravagantly polite to Webster, but having established that I was merely Paul’s tutor, he ignored me. He gave Paul just enough attention to show Webster that he was interested in the boy.
“You’ll be wanting to see our colour studio, of course,” he said.
“Of course,” said Webster.
Roberts took us round the empty studio, apologising for how little there was to see when the place was deserted. Really it was not much more than an empty stage set, with stacked furniture and empty desks. He did a good job of expressing how innovative Logie Baird’s work was, how much better this high-resolution image was and how far it had come on with colour transmission.
Webster asked penetrating questions about cost and the size of the audience, and the competition from electronic technology. He seemed well-informed. At a suitable pause he seemed to notice Paul again.
“My son wishes to carry out an electrical experiment with some of your equipment,” he said, “Don’t you, Paul?”
Paul nodded seriously.
Roberts smiled, not sure if this was a joke. As soon as he realised it was not, he slipped easily into asking exactly what was needed, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for a small boy to play with broadcasting equipment like a Hornby train set. Logie Baird had chosen his man well. The influential would-be investor would be humoured to the utmost.
“Everything is in here,” said Roberts, unlocking another door and throwing it open. “I think we might need an engineer to help. I’ll see if I can rustle one up.”
Paul took two steps forward, eyeing the metal racks of machinery, scanning up and down. Some of it was labelled, most of it was incomprehensible.
“I don’t need any help. I can find what I need,” he said shortly.
“Keep an eye on him, will you, Blake,” Webster instructed. “Roberts and I will finish the tour.”
Roberts gave a backward glance, but I assured him I would not let the lad break anything.
The workbench was too high and Paul chose to work on the floor. On several occasions he directed me to fetch down items from high shelves. Other than that I played no part in his work. He was quick and methodical, constructing assemblies one after the other with the skill of a watchmaker. When complete, he placed each unit to the side and started on the next. He might have been any boy playing with his Meccano set, until you saw the precision of each movement he made—and the disconcerting way that he used both of his hands independently at once, as though each possessed a will of its own.
I began to feel lightheaded. I had been keeping my mind open. I accepted that there was more to it than a schoolboy behaving eccentrically. I even accepted that there might be forces at work which were beyond the ordinary. God knows I had enough reason to believe in that possibility. But I had never really grasped the implications.
He did not seem to mind my watching, but worked with a single-minded concentration.
“Is the light good enough?” I asked as he bent over a tiny part. He paid no attention.
My knowledge of electronics is rudimentary, but it seemed to me—perhaps it was no more than suggestion—that he was indeed making some kind of transmitter.
“Can you really send a signal through time?” I wondered. I remembered my friend Daniel, who would have been able to give me an erudite summary of Einsteinian space-time in the time it took to polish his glasses.
“And if you do…why, you could send it back to before you began your journey and save yourself the effort of coming in the first place. Wouldn’t that be a paradox? And what if, when you go back fifty million years, you put down mousetraps and exterminate the forebears of the human race? You would kill your own many-greats-grandfather! Or what if you change the course of history here—”
He stopped and looked up at me.
“Don’t put me off,” he said.
I wondered then if I might have made a terrible mistake.
What if I was not helping a stranded traveller to return home? The signal he was sending might really be the beacon for an invasion force. If one alien mind could come through time and take over a human being, why not a million, or ten million? My scalp prickled as Paul continued his careful, patient, remorseless assembling.
I knew he was poor at lying. At least, he was when he had to make something up on the spot. When he wanted to deceive, he left the truth unspoken rather than lying directly. No, I had to believe his story about going back.
Paul took something from his pocket and wired it into the apparatus. Something small that glinted in the light. I moved around to get a better look.
“What is that, some sort of crystal?” I asked.
In forty-five minutes the workings of it were complete, and Webster and the dapper Roberts were standing behind me, chatting away like old friends or new conspirators. I had found the empty carcass of a television set, which Paul was using as a framework to arrange the components into their correct configuration and wiring them together.
Roberts cast a critical eye over it. Electrical engineering must have formed some part of his background. He was the sort who spent his leisure time tinkering with the latest electrical machinery. His expression went from one of ironical amusement to astonishment.
“The boy made this himself, did he?” He looked from Paul to Webster and me, as though he suspected a practical joke. He looked at the device again.
“It sends a special type of radio wave, “ said Paul. “The waves are all lined up together, here.”
“What’s that then?” asked Roberts, squinting at the crystal, a clear sliver about the size of a cigarette.
“Something Paul dug up,” said Webster. “At a place in Dorset. Paul demanded we go there to look for fossils. We were there for hours. I was shovelling away like a Trojan. We found some fossils in the end—what did you call them, Paul?—but this was the only thing he was interested in. There was this granite cube: I had to split it open with a chisel, and this was inside.”
A granite cube might have been there for millions of years. But how difficult would it be to find something after that length of time? Perhaps not quite impossible if you chose your landmarks well.
Paul made some final adjustments, and I carried the device to the workbench and placed it carefully, following his directions on its alignment. He stood on one side, opposite the rest of us, the inventor displaying his creation.
“The electricity is fifty Hertz, one-twenty volts from the wall,” said Roberts. “Is that all right?”
“It will draw five kilowatts,” said Paul.
Roberts whistled.
“Blimey! No wonder you’re using all those high-cap units…Still, the fuses here should be good for it. If the lights go out we’ll know who to blame.”
“Plug it in,” said Paul.
Roberts connected it and threw a switch. Nothing happened that I could tell.
“It is working,” said Paul. He sounded pleased with himself.
“I can hear a high-pitched sound,” said Webster.
Roberts was still looking at the device. He was thinking in terms of sending a signal through space, but I was wondering about a signal through time. Was this exact same crystal in a strange laboratory, seventy million years ago, resonating with the pulses that Paul had just transmitted? Einstein implied that such a thing was possible, but it seemed too incredible.
“Now what?” asked Roberts, but Webster shook his head.
“The signal has been sent. Turn it off now,” said Paul. “And put it on the floor.”
Paul started to dismantle the apparatus with quick, efficient movements.
“You can leave that,” said Roberts hastily. “I wouldn’t mind having a bit of a look at it. I’ll put everything back for you.”
“No,” said Paul, continuing his demolition, pull
ing each of the pieces into its component parts before Roberts’ frustrated gaze.
“Roberts, old man,” said Webster. “You’ve been enormously helpful to me. I’m thoroughly impressed with the job you’re doing here. Here’s my card—get in touch with me when you like and we can discuss prospects over lunch one day. I’ll invite a few people you’ll want to meet.”
Roberts tore his eyes off the destruction of the radio and took the proffered business card. He was bursting with questions, but too clever to allow his surface to be ruffled.
“Thank you very much,” he said weakly.
Paul left the components neatly arranged on the floor. I did not see the crystal, which he must have slipped into a pocket.
There was a dull percussion somewhere over our heads, followed by a tinkling which sounded like the fall of a thousand tiny pieces of glass. Roberts and Webster looked mildly puzzled. Paul let out a shriek of sheer terror and shrunk down on to the floor, just as he ran away when the wind blew.
III
“Steady on old man,” said Webster, taking the boy’s hand. “Nothing to be alarmed about.”
Paul was in a state of semi-paralysis, whimpering and clinging on to Webster as he was led out.
Roberts took us to the door of the Baird studios and stepped outside with us into the South Transept. It was dark by now, and there were few people about. There were a few lights on inside the Crystal Palace, however, and a trickle of people crossing the transept in the distance. They were carrying musical instrument cases, identifying them as the members of some orchestra rehearsing that evening.
“That was close,” said Roberts. He pointed to a spot on the floor a few feet away which glittered with tiny glass fragments, as though crusted with a hard frost. I looked up from the floor to where a perfectly circular section of the glazing had been knocked out a hundred feet overhead.
High above, blue light flickered, and I thought it must have been lightning. But although it was overcast there was no rain and no storm.
Paul cried out and pulled away. Webster and I both dashed after him, and that was what saved us.
A curious sound which I can only describe as a loud popping exploded high above us; I looked up by reflex and saw a sort of white cloud shoot down at tremendous speed and engulf Roberts. The cloud was perhaps ten feet across but dense and compact. It was, in fact, just like a shimmering smoke ring.
After the cloud struck the ground, it bounced like a rubber ball and disintegrated into a fountain of glass fragments. I instinctively covered my face, but there was little need: after rebounding from the paved floor, the glass was in tiny pieces which showered off me harmlessly.
Roberts had not fared so well. The glass that had struck him had been composed of larger pieces of glazing from the roof, spinning at fantastic speed. They cut him open as though he had been thrown into a threshing machine. He was lying flat, face-down, fifteen feet away. I saw the glass blades projecting from his body; some had been driven into his skull, so great was their force. Blood welled up from every square inch, so much that it looked like a bucket of red paint had been emptied over him.
I approached, but stopped helplessly when I saw the state of the body. The volume of blood was appalling; I could not bring myself to turn Roberts over and check for a pulse.
Webster was still running after Paul, who had fled down the transept leading to the main hall.
I looked up to the source of the attack, but I saw nothing except dark sky—and another electric flicker. As my eyes adjusted I made out an ellipse of blue light directly overhead which waxed and then faded to nothing. I had a peculiar feeling of being stared at, as though the beam of an immense searchlight shone down on me, and then, after a second, moved on.
My mind struggled, trying to grasp what was happening and slipping each time. An accident? No, it was not an accident; it was connected with the signal Paul had transmitted, and he knew it. His peculiar fear of winds…I knew at once that this must be that other race he had spoken of, who were such deadly enemies of his own people, and who had waged war on them millions of years ago. And who were, somehow and unknown to mankind, still on this earth. They had intercepted the signal and traced its source.
I stood rooted to the spot staring upwards. What should I do? What could I do? There was an odd modulated whistling and, although I could see nothing, a few more pieces of glass were dislodged from high above me. Something I could not see was descending through one of the holes blasted through the roof of the Crystal Palace. However I strained I could not see any more than a vague descending blur. It was slow but deliberate, a small airship rather than a bird or aeroplane. The warbling whistle rose to a peak, and I even felt a faint rush of cool air; then the sound subsided as it glided slowly after Webster—after Paul.
My hair was standing on end, not just figuratively but literally. I had been charged up with static electricity. It covered my face and hands with a sensation like soft fuzz. The spell was broken and I came back to myself, brushing glass off my jacket and out of my hair. There was not another soul about. My heart pounded wildly and my ears were ringing.
My feet started moving of their own accord. I was not walking to the nearest exit, but after the other. I turned the corner and looked down the nave. Paul and Webster were perhaps two hundred feet away. Webster had hold of the boy by both arms and was shouting at him.
The whistling changed tone abruptly, and the other changed from a blur into a solid form for a moment.
My first impression of an airship had not been so wide of the mark. An airship, or a jellyfish underwater. Its surface had a hard metallic sheen, like graphite, but it rippled like seaweed, with hundreds of small protuberances opening and closing like obscene mouths. It was surrounded by a crackling blue aura. The thing was not lighter than air, but floated on the jets of electrified air ejected downwards from those whistling mouths. It seemed to be a composite entity, made of dozens of smaller things bunched together, like a sea anemone.
I had the conviction that it was at the same time a living thing and an intricate piece of machinery: the exact intersection between living and non-living. When mechanisms evolve and fuse with our natural bodies, when our machinery is so advanced that biology supersedes flesh, perhaps we humans will become as the other.
The aura was part of it. The solid being was merely the core, the skeleton of something much larger that extended for tens of yards. The complex, swirling arrangement of plasma was a kind of external nervous system, like delicate limbs and antennae feeling all around.
Stated like this it merely sounds like a strange animal, but the other filled me with a revulsion I cannot describe. There was something terribly wrong about its very existence. Any natural creature, even something as far from humanity as a butterfly or a worm, can trigger some sort of human sympathy. We are all children of the earth, after all. But this was not part of our creation. If I was religious I might have called it unclean, blasphemous, a thing of the devil. Instead I can only repeat that it was it unutterably alien and unnatural, and the sight of it shook me to the depths of my being.
A minute earlier I had seen a man slashed to ribbons by flying glass. But I would rather witness that a dozen times than see the other again.
It pulsed with the motion of a squid or cuttlefish shooting out water, and a moment later Paul and Webster were hit by a silent, invisible explosion which threw them skidding down the nave. The other faded out again at the same instant, but I could still hear the shrill whistle of a thousand tiny flutes.
They were bowled over, but Paul regained his feet almost at once. Without the lethal knives of broken glass to give it teeth, the air-pulse simply knocked its target down or blew them away according to size. But the hurricane which uproots and throws down oak trees has little effect on a sapling, and although Paul was thrown some distance he was uninjured as he dashed away. Webster, who had been thrown heavily against a shuttered tea-stall, moved feebly.
Another change of modulation in the
whistling, and the other was gone. I hurried to where Webster was rising painfully.
“Are you all right?” I asked, holding out a hand. It was a fatuous question.
“Where’s Paul?” he demanded, supporting himself on the shelf of the stall. He winced when he tried to raise his left arm.
“Still running,” I said. “Is your arm…?”
“Ribs broken,” he said, raising a hand to them and wincing again. “For God’s sake, go after him.”
He only seemed to have a vague idea of what was happening, what Paul was running away from, what had knocked him off his feet. He had not seen Roberts’ body yet. Perhaps the part of his mind which maintained a cordon sanitaire protecting him from the horrors that lie outside of sanity prevented him from realising what we were facing.
“Please, Blake,” he said. “He’s just a boy.”
I wanted to tell him that Paul might be a boy, but he was inhabited by the mind of an alien parasite, and a fascist one at that, a being whose intentions towards mankind were at best indifferent and at worst malignant. And that the thing pursuing him was a horror beyond imagining.
I tried to help him, but Webster waved me away angrily, shouting “Go!”
I gave a wild laugh and went. Please don’t think it was courage or any sort of heroic impulse that drove me. It was more like a sort of fear. So long as I could hear the other, I would know where it was and I could keep my distance. And so long as I did not see it again I would be able to maintain my self-control.
Few of the interior lights were on, but the interior of the Palace was illuminated by the outside lights. I passed through an empty hall decorated in Spanish style, the shops and counters all shut up. I could hear a faint shrill sound—or was it just the ringing in my ears?
A figure was walking down the centre of the nave. It was a night-watchman making his rounds.
“Did you see a boy go past?” I asked.
“Running like the wind,” he said, and pointed to the next hall. “Are you his father?”
“No, his father is back there, hurt,” I said. “An accident. Please get some help for him, I’ll get the boy.”
The Dulwich Horror & Others Page 23
