by Beauman, Ned
The rain had started all at once, as if some part of the sky’s masonry had suddenly collapsed, and they’d been caught outside with no shelter near by except a few inadequate trees. Then his father had spotted the Model T Ford parked a short way up the slope, and they’d dropped their bicycles and sprinted over, gambling that they would find its doors unlocked.
‘What if the man who owns the car comes back?’ said Bailey. There was a folded roadmap of southern California at his feet and he saw guiltily that the water dripping off him had already soaked it through. He could smell that a big dog sometimes travelled in this car.
‘He won’t come back. You can’t drive in this rain.’
‘Do you remember that Model T we saw on the roof in that town in South Carolina that time? What was it called?’
‘Scarborough. I remember.’
He heard thunder, not far off. ‘What are we going to do now, Dad?’
That morning, beneath one of those glassy March skies with a few grey stormclouds like the smears of soot on the inside of a blown light bulb, they had finally arrived at Tiny Lustre. Five years it had taken them to bicycle from Boston to California; five years of doubling back and turning aside and looping around and hiding out; five years as a mad doodle on a map of the continent, a housefly exploring a sunlit ballroom, a western vector so faint it might as well have been a statistical accident; five years avoiding the agents of the Phenscots and the Catholic Church, and the bustles in which those agents might lurk; five years of hotels and flat tyres and De Rerum Natura; five years to get to this freethinkers’ colony not far from Temecula where they could hide in safety until the despotism of religion had been overthrown. Every few months his father had sent coded letters to Tiny Lustre to update its leaders on the progress of their clinamen, but of course he couldn’t ever reveal their current location in case the letters were intercepted and the code was broken, so he had received no news in return.
The colony was approached by a dirt road winding up through the pines. As they came near they had got down off their bicycles as they always did, and Bailey had realised almost with disbelief that this might be the last time they would perform this little ritual. Tiny Lustre was intended to be self-sufficient, so among the log cabins there were goat pens and chicken coops and vegetable patches. But all that seemed to be in a state of some neglect, and they couldn’t see a single human being. At the far end of the colony there was a big meeting hall with cracked clerestory windows, and they wondered if everyone might be assembled in there, but when they pushed open the door they saw only two tiny white rodents skittering away like backgammon dice between the benches. If he were a Pentecostal Christian, Bailey thought, he would probably assume that the Rapture had come. Except that the men and women of Tiny Lustre were all atheists. Could atheists have a sort of Rapture, too? Could the sheer heat of your scepticism be so great that you were converted instantaneously into gamma rays?
‘Perhaps they’re all swimming in the lake,’ his father said. ‘Hello?’ he shouted after that. ‘Is anyone here?’
They heard a noise behind them and they turned. An old man in dungarees stood there with a carrot in his hand as thin as a chisel. ‘You looking for Yoakum and the others?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘They’re gone.’ He bit the end off the carrot. ‘Hope you haven’t come far.’
‘What happened?’
‘No gossip behind other people’s backs,’ said the old man. ‘That’s a rule here.’ He looked around. ‘But I guess the rules don’t mean much any more. Well, the long and the short of it is, Yoakum was having relations with other men’s wives. Three of them at least. All came to light at once. No violence here, that’s another rule, so we just sent him away with his things. Week later, police came up here from Temecula and said they’d had a report we’d been keeping women and girls chained to trees and suchlike. Must have been Yoakum. They didn’t find anything – nothing to find – but they started clearing us all off. Said we didn’t have a right to farm this land. They never liked us down in town.’
‘We were coming to live here,’ Bailey’s father said.
‘You the ones been writing to Yoakum? In the special code?’
‘Yes.’
‘He talked about you. He couldn’t make head nor tail of that code most of the time, but he knew you were coming. Well, you can hang around here as long as you like. Can have your pick of the cabins. But the police ought to be back before long. They know I’m still here and they want me gone.’
‘In that case, we won’t stay. There’s another community like this in Ohio. Not as big as this one, but we can go there. Thank you for your help.’
So Bailey and his father had got back on their bicycles and gone back down to the road at the foot of the wooded slope. Then the rain had started and they’d found shelter in the Ford. ‘What are we going to do now?’ Bailey asked again.
‘We’ll go to the colony in Ohio, as I told the man. We’ll find our sanctuary there instead.’
‘How long will it take us to get there?’
‘I don’t know. We’ll have to take all the same precautions, of course. Remember that man we saw in San Jacinto: there’s no reason to think They’ve relaxed Their vigilance. What fallacy would that be?’
For Bailey not to answer his father’s question with the correct subheading from The Complete Taxonomy of Anthropic Cognitive Unsoundness was physically uncomfortable. But instead he said, ‘That’ll take years.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘I don’t want to do that, Dad. I want a life. I want to go to college.’
‘That’s not possible just now.’
‘I’m not going to Ohio with you.’
‘What else do you suggest we do? Take the train back to Boston? I haven’t protected you all this time so that They can do to you what They did to your mother.’
Thunder so loud that Bailey could almost see ripples in the air. ‘What did They do to her?’
‘You know it’s best not to dwell on that, son.’
‘You think she was a human sacrifice. You think They drained her blood in that chapel because she was going to leave Their religion.’
‘It’s best not to dwell on that.’
‘You’ve never said it right out, but that’s what you’ve always wanted me to think. But it might have been anything. It might have been an accident. Or she might have taken her own life.’
‘There’s no evidence for that,’ said his father.
‘Or you might have murdered her yourself.’
‘I know you’re disappointed about Tiny Lustre, son – I am too – but it isn’t rational to let your anger get the better of you.’
‘Is it rational to care more about your mother than about some woman in Mongolia? Is it rational to mourn your own mother’s death when so many others just like her die every hour of the day?’
‘As you know, I address this question at length in the third chapter of the Taxonomy, and it is my conclusion that—’
‘What about your father?’ said Bailey. ‘Is it rational to mourn your own father’s death? Or doesn’t it mean anything at all if he’s found dead in a car by the side of the road?’
‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Professor Bailey,’ said Clarendon. ‘My father is still alive. I thought we were talking about the Teleportation Accident.’
‘Yes. As I was saying. The Teleportation Accident was an act of human sacrifice. Just like the Aztecs used to practise. And Lucy’s grandparents on Hispaniola. And the Court of Miracles in Paris. And the Esoteric Order of Dagon in Innsmouth. Except that Lavicini made it work. He understood what violence can do. And if he’d been born in this century, he would have understood, as Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus, that “gravitational force” and “electric charge” and “Planck’s constant” and even “causation” are just the same as Dagon and Tezcatlipoca and Yahweh and Ryujin – patterns that men think they’ve seen, when the real pattern is far, far too complex
for them to see, like a child with a crayon finding funny shapes in a logarithmic table. He was a brilliant man. And at the moment all those people died, he gained the power to appear and disappear anywhere he liked, as the devil himself can, according to the Bible. He was able to shift his own spatial coordinates so that he wasn’t crushed under the Théâtre des Encornets. My Teleportation Device will do the same with any object. You are giving far more help to the State Department now, Clarendon, and more to your country, than you ever could have with your phasmatometer. I had thought of using Lucy tonight but then you saw me with her and you might have caused difficulties when she was found.’
‘You don’t look very well, Professor Bailey. I think we should go back downstairs.’
‘There is void in things,’ Bailey said. He heard the squeak of a green wheelbarrow. ‘Have you seen it? I’ve seen it. There is void in things. Lucretius says so and I’ve seen it.’ He reached out.
‘What the devil are you doing, son?’
‘There is void in things!’ he began to shout. ‘There is void in things! There is void in things!’ To do it sitting side by side like this was awkward, and the Ford’s suspension wasn’t built for any kind of tumult inside the vehicle, and his father was trying to peel his fingers away from his throat, and Clarendon was batting impotently at his face like a moth trapped between the sashes of a window, but Bailey kept up a steady asphyxiant pressure, feeling the hyoid bone break obediently under his left thumb – and after that it was only seven or eight more seconds until the other man went limp and the struggle was over. Bailey sat back and rested for a while, watching a last bead of sweat run most of the way down his father’s ruddy forehead before it paused at the hummock of a swollen vein. Then he took his toy steam engine out of his pocket and drove it again and again into Clarendon’s torso until at last it broke through the physicist’s ribcage. He reached into the tunnel he had made, used a sort of brisk corkscrew motion to wrench Clarendon’s heart out of its cavity, and bit deeply into it, leaning forward over the warm corpse so that blood didn’t drip on to his trousers. To distract himself from the taste, he thought of Lucretius. ‘For it is clear that nothing could be crushed in without void, or broken or cleft in twain by cutting, nor admit moisture nor likewise spreading cold or piercing flame, whereby all things are brought to their end. And the more each thing keeps void within it, the more it is assailed to the heart by these thing and begins to totter.’
When he had finished, he spat out a last oyster of gristle on to the dashboard and wiped his mouth and glasses with Clarendon’s handkerchief. Then he got out of the car, descended the utility staircase, and went back to his laboratory to take some readings from the ultramigration accumulator. Tomorrow, he would ask Adele to run some more tests on the Teleportation Device. He already knew they would be successful. He’d seen it in his father’s eyes.
7
Los Angeles, 1940
When the US military attacked Loeser’s house with poison gas, it was a short while after dawn and he was still in bed. He awoke to find his nostrils being savaged by an odour about a billion times worse than anything he had ever smelled in his life – a cacodemoniac swirl of rubber and garlic and dysentery and murder, perhaps not unlike what the audience at the Théâtre des Encornets began to detect just before the Teleportation Accident of 1679. Remembering something he’d read once about British soldiers and chlorine shells early in the last war, he lunged for a discarded cotton undershirt, folded it over twice, pulled his penis out of his pyjama bottoms, and pissed until the undershirt was saturated with urine. Then he held it tightly over his mouth as he ran through the sitting room and out of the house, still in his bare feet. He looked around, but he couldn’t see any bombers in the sky, and indeed on Palmetto Drive there was an old woman walking her cabbage-faced black pug as if nothing had happened. Cautiously he took the undershirt away from his face. The air out here was as glib as ever. So Loeser really had been the lone target. It was clear that President Roosevelt, as lazy as any other modern American, had decided to begin his vengeance on Germany with the citizen of that nation who happened to be most conveniently at hand.
When Woodkin answered the front door of Gorge’s mansion, he looked like he’d already been up and dressed for so many hours that just meeting his eye was enough to give Loeser a mild feeling of circadian vertigo. ‘Good morning, Mr Loeser.’
‘Have you gone into the war?’
‘The United States, you mean? Not yet, sir, although the Colonel believes it’s only a matter of time. Would you like to come in? Perhaps I could take that for you?’
Loeser realised he was still clutching the urinous wad of undershirt, as if he’d wanted to bring Gorge a nice gift and had opted for a bold alternative to the usual bottle of wine or bunch of flowers. On the way here he’d been intending to ask if he could hide in Gorge’s cellar, but instead he said, ‘Can you come over to my house? Something’s happened.’
‘Certainly, Mr Loeser.’
Even just outside the threshold, they couldn’t smell anything. Only once they were through the door did the horror make its presence known. ‘I think it’s poison gas,’ said Loeser, no longer quite convinced. ‘Methyl heptin carbonate or something.’
Woodkin wrinkled his nose. ‘You’ve had some very bad luck, sir. It’s a skunk.’
‘A skunk? Don’t be ridiculous. Skunks squirt about a teaspoon at a time. A skunk would have to be the size of an Indian elephant to make a stink like this.’
‘Not in every case. When a skunk dies and begins to decompose, its glands will sometimes swell up with microbial gas and then explode. I’ve only encountered it once before, but one doesn’t readily forget the smell.’
‘I may be untidy but I think I would have noticed if a skunk had died in my wardrobe.’
‘A house like this has more voids than you realise. It might have gotten under the floor. Or into the walls.’
Loeser thought of his ghost. ‘Or into the roof?’ he said.
‘Yes, sir. I did once have a raccoon that established a pied-à-terre in my roof space.’
‘What can I do about it?’
‘I’ll have someone sent over. We’ll have to hope the body of the skunk is accessible. In many cases, there isn’t any way to get to the animal without demolishing part of the house. Until then, I suggest you put out bowls of tomato juice and baking soda to absorb the smell. I’m afraid you may find that it has already worked its way into your belongings.’
Loeser had rather hoped that a prelate as senior as Woodkin in the religion of cleanliness might have the power to drive out odour by verbal incantation alone. ‘So all my clothes are going to smell permanently of putrid skunk venom?’
‘It could be worse, Mr Loeser. There exists a rare genetic disease called—’
‘But I don’t have time to deal with this now! The first performance is tonight!’
Conspicuous not far from where they now stood was the contusion on the wall from the day in September when Loeser had hurled a German–English dictionary across the room upon discovering from the Los Angeles Herald that Eric Goatloft, director of Scars of Desire, was planning to film an adaptation of Rupert Rackenham’s The Sorceror of Venice, with Ruth Hussey as Princess Anne Elisabeth, Tyrone Power as Adriano Lavicini, Charles Coburn as Auguste de Gorge and Gene Lockhart as Louis XIV. At the time he left Berlin, Loeser had been determined that he would put on The Teleportation Accident as soon as he got back; even seven years later, and even after all the success of Rackenham’s worthless novel, he still felt that Lavicini’s story belonged to him, and there was no way he would allow himself to be pipped to its first dramatic rendering by Mr Don’t Slip into the Dark. So he telephoned Millikan and demanded that the 1940 Christmas play at the Gorge Auditorium should not be The Christmas Carol as planned but instead the world première of his own magnum opus. Millikan told him that the students and faculty of the Institute would prefer to see something appropriate to the season. Loeser made an ultimatum, which
they both knew was at best a penultimatum or an antepenultimatum. Negotiations bumped along, and at last it was agreed. This year, the California Institute of Technology Players would present a heart-warming historical fable by writer-director Egon Loeser entitled The Christmas Teleportation Accident.
Loeser was annoyed by that compromise, but he was hardly surprised. After all, in Pasadena, motorised sleighs were rolling along the streets like tanks, men in Santa Claus costumes were standing guard on corners like infantry, and carols were blaring from loudspeakers like patriotic anthems. As far as he could tell, Christmas here was equivalent to a sort of martial law. Perhaps he was lucky not to have any elves billeted in his home.
With the first performance of The Christmas Teleportation Accident, Loeser was – yes – painting the devil on the wall. In October, on the way to a party at the Muttons’, he’d mentioned the play to Bailey, and it had turned out that Bailey was already acquainted with Lavicini’s story from The Sorceror of Venice. In fact, the physicist had gone so far as to ask if he could help with the production – the Obediah Laboratories, he said, were full of devices that could very easily be adapted as novel theatrical effects. And although Loeser had decided not to attempt to replicate the mechanical Teleportation Device that had sexually upgraded Klugweil back in Berlin, it was true that in all the years he’d worked on Lavicini he had never had a clear idea of how he could convey the climactic destruction of the Théâtre des Encornets. So he had told Bailey he was welcome to help. And Bailey had now spent over a week up on ladders and gantries in the Gorge Auditorium, installing his experimental stagecraft prototype, but he still hadn’t quite finished, and Loeser still didn’t know what it actually did. Meanwhile, his cast this year were on the brink of mutiny.
So he shouldn’t have had anything on his mind except how to make sure tonight’s première wasn’t a total catastrophe. After Woodkin left, though, all Loeser could think about was his ghost. If those noises over his head at night had been no more than a mustelid squatter, then half the reason to believe in her was gone. Perhaps the late Dr Clarendon had been right after all. But then Loeser had no explanation left for the girlish objets trouvés that had continued to appear in his house. That antique wooden chest was like a forensic evidence box maintained by some aberrant police detective to investigate a sex crime that might never take place. Where did all its contents come from? How could so much just materialise? It was almost as if . . .
