She sat up, dusted a few grains of sand from her hands, and rubbed sun tan lotion carefully into her back and shoulders. Pierre was always complimenting her on how smooth and brown her shoulders were. Then she rolled over on her stomach and spread out her arms. This was the best time of day for sun bathing. The warmth along her body was like a caress.
The heat made her feel sleepy, and yet she couldn't relax. She had been feeling tense all morning. She had slept badly the night before, with one vivid nightmarish dream just before dawn. Would the effect of a dream last for so many hours?
Oh, it might. She had dreamed that she was running, running, endlessly running, over a rough terrain under the light of an enormous, an incredibly large, moon. The moon had filled a quarter of the sky. In the end, "they" had caught her; she had awakened bathed in sweat, with her heart pounding horridly, while Pierre breathed quietly beside her—When had the moon ever been that size?
Yes, her tenseness could be the lingering effect of the dream. But it could, on the other hand, be just another example of what Pierre had christened her PES—perception extra-sensorielle.
Oh, her PES! Colette, in one of her semi-autobiographical stories, had complained that her long hair, "like a well rope" was the bane of her life. Denise's bane had been her PES. It would not have been so bad if her faculty had been consistent, but it was not. It was chancy, erratic, unreliable, an exasperating in-and-outer. Sometimes Denise could tell what a letter that had not yet been received would say, or could quote, verbatim, a conversation that Pierre and his boss had had in one of the gangways five hundred meters under the ground. At other times, Denise seemed to lack even ordinary perception, and couldn't tell whether the people around her were angry or pleased.
Her PES had embittered her schooldays. It hadn't taken the other girls long to discover that Denise could often tell what questions would be asked in a forthcoming examination, or predict how much pocket money a parent or guardian would give. Then, when Denise had been unable to perform to order, they had refused to believe it was because she couldn't. One girl, Odile something from Lorraine, had wanted Denise to make her a love charm. When Denise had refused, Odile had gone about muttering that Denise was a dirty, stingy witch.
A witch? Was that what Pierre thought she was? No, but she wasn't quite certain just how he did feel. He had teased her unmercifully during their engagement, seven or eight years ago, when the Soviet experiments on telepathy had seemed to show that the best telepaths were the mentally ill. On the other hand, he had asked her advice more than once.
Last month, for example, he had called her in to say where the richest part of the gangue the miners were following was. The reports of the mining company's geologists were so full of qualifications as to be useless. She had told him what she thought, and he had taken her advice. It had worked out well. Within five or six days the workers had found a wonderfully rich lode.
Ah, a useful wife! When the company had sent him here, to Noumea in Nouvelle Caledonie, Denise had resolved that the reputation of her schooldays should not follow her. Precognition, telepathy, cryptaesthesia—she had meant to keep her uncanny faculties strictly to herself. But something, perhaps from the time Pierre had asked her to predict the course of the lode, had leaked out. It was more than her fancy to think that the mine workers, when she met them, regarded her peculiarly.
Denise rolled over on her back and sat up. She was feeling more tense and anxious than ever. Something had gone wrong at the mine, she was almost sure of it now, though she didn't think it was a physical disaster or anything in which Pierre was personally involved.
She shook her head to clear it. Were the Soviets right in their suspicions of the mental balance of people with these wild gifts? Outside of her PES she wasn't a particularly remarkable person. But lately she had been feeling odd most of the time. Two weeks ago, for example, she had awakened from troubled dreams to find herself standing, barefooted and in her nightgown, in front of the entrance to the mine.
She had been badly frightened at first, unable to realize where she was or how she had got there. The full moon, riding high overhead, bathed everything in a flat white light. She had felt that there was something strange about the moon.
Then it had come to her that she was standing by the mine, and must have walked in her sleep to get there. She had made her way painfully back down the gravelled drive and along the sidewalk to the house. She didn't think anyone had seen her. She hoped not. She had slipped into bed beside Pierre without waking him.
But normal people didn't walk in their sleep. Suddenly Denise felt a desire to see her own face. She hunted in her beach bag for a mirror and looked into it.
In the little glass she saw a dark-haired green-eyed young woman, pale-skinned except where the sun had touched her. The face was comely enough if one didn't object to high Tartar cheekbones (Pierre had told her once that he thought girls who didn't have high cheekbones were sissies, adding that if there was one thing he couldn't stand, it was a Sainte Nitouche).
Was that the way she looked? Denise wondered. A calm, rather restrained young woman with dark hair? The face in the mirror didn't seem to belong to a woman who would walk in her sleep or be intermittently given to PES. She put the mirror down with a sigh.
She looked at her watch. Heavens! It was later than she had thought. She must hurry. Pierre always came home for lunch and Marie, the Melanesian maid, was no sort of cook unless one stood over her.
Denise jumped to her feet. She pulled a beach dress of red and white pareu cloth on over her bathing suit, still a little damp, and gathered up her beach bag and miscellaneous equipment. She ran up the path to the bus stop.
The bright blue bus got her home a little before Pierre. She bathed, changed her dress, and was in the kitchen with Marie, explaining the mysteries of a court bouillon, when she heard his step in the hall.
"Hello," she said. And then—she was quite sure now—"There's trouble in the mine."
Pierre frowned. "I wish you wouldn't do that."
"Do what?"
"Know what I'm thinking about before I tell you."
Denise was silent. "Yes, there has been trouble," her husband went on after a moment. "Get me a drink, cherie, and I'll tell you about it—unless, of course, you know all about it already."
She laughed. She poured sherry from the decanter—Pierre had a most un-French fondness for sherry as an aperitif—and handed him the glass. "It's nothing serious, is it?" she asked.
He shrugged. "Not yet, but it's disturbing. This morning about nine Goubu—you remember Goubu, he's one of the shop stewards—came into the office, quite agitated, to say that the men in his gang couldn't work because the whole stope was full of 'shapes'.
"He doesn't speak French very well, and for quite a while I couldn't tell what he was talking about. I thought it was something about the spirits of the dead. These people are superstitious, you know, and they never liked that part of the level after they found some bones in it."
"Is that where I told you to try drilling?" Denise put in.
"Yes. As I say, I thought it might be something about ghosts. But it wasn't that. When I used the word 'spectres', Goubu shook his head. He kept saying it was 'shapes'. So finally I went down in the lift with him.
"Denise, it was the damnedest thing. It wasn't just the stope by then, it was the whole level. The place was full of them."
"Them?" Denise asked.
"The shapes. They—it's hard to describe them. They were flat, interpenetrating shapes of black or dark gray, two or two and a half meters big if one looked at them full on, and they were in motion constantly. The nearest I can get to it is to say that it was like watching sheets of silhouette paper slipping in and out and around and through each other without ever a pause or stop."
"Were they any particular shape?" Denise said. "I mean, were they silhouettes of anything?"
Pierre frowned thoughtfully. "I'm not sure. They seemed to change as I watched. Geometric shapes, possibly
—squares and triangles and ellipses and so on. But some of them were much more complex.
"The miners were all standing at one end of the gallery, huddled together. Goubu said, 'Voila, M'sieu Pierre—the shapes!' "
"I couldn't think of anything to say. Goubu was watching me. Finally I said, 'It must be the lights.'
"Goubu just laughed. I don't blame him, really. But I had a crew of electricians come down and check the lighting. They couldn't find anything to account for the shapes.
"Then I put in a call for more blowers. I thought it might possibly be the ventilation. We got the level so airy you couldn't keep a match going in it. But the shapes kept oh moving in and out of each other monotonously.
"I couldn't think what to do. Finally I had everybody called out and sent the explosives people in to lay a string of small charges, two or three meters apart, the length of the gallery. I guess I had some idea of blasting the shapes out of it.
"We set off the charges, but when we went back, after the dust settled, the shapes were still sliding in and out of themselves. A couple of light globes were broken, that's all."
"Then what did you do?" Denise asked.
"Then I came home to lunch."
He finished his sherry in a gulp. Marie came in from the kitchen to say, "Madame est servie," and the couple followed her into the dining room.
The room was a pleasant one, with pale green walls and a long mirror above the sideboard. Denise decided that the conversation, in the interests of good digestion, had better be kept away from the disturbance in the mine, and over the entree, an excellent poached sole with sauce Mornay, she and Pierre discussed plans for a picnic on the coming Sunday. It was not until dessert had been reached that she ventured to ask, "What are you going to do next, Pierre?"
"I don't know, ma petite," he said. He lit a cigarette. "You see, the shapes in themselves don't do any harm. You can walk straight through one and feel nothing at all. But the men object to them violently, and I don't blame them. You can't imagine how disconcerting it is to see those things moving in and out endlessly, with nothing at all to account for them.
"Goubu says the men are convinced the shapes are meant as a warning that that part of the mine is unsafe. If I insist on their working anyhow, I may have a wildcat strike on my hands.
"If I put them somewhere else to work, it means abandoning a rich lode, at least temporarily. And it's going to look darned funny in my reports."
He sighed. Denise, who had now finished her compote, accepted a cigarette from him. "Would—would you like me to go look at it?" she asked hesitantly.
Pierre snuffed out his cigarette. "You really are a sorceress, Denise," he observed. "You read my mind. Yes, I would like you to look at it. Sapristi! When something uncanny is going on, one calls in a witch to deal with it. But you'd better change your shoes. The walking in a mine is always rough."
Marie brought in coffee. Then Denise changed her shoes, and they walked leisurely over to the mine.
The parking lot before the entrance was crowded, as usual, with Peugeots and Citroens. Denise wondered again whether she and Pierre ought to get a car, as a status symbol, or whether they were better off saving their money for a vacation in France. (How odd, that Noumea was only two hours from Paris by air! It seemed centuries distant psychologically. Denise was always conscious of the Chaine Centrale, with its ridge of rugged mountain peaks, and the arid inhospitable back country. Even now, parts of the island were imperfectly explored.)
They crossed the lot, went past the administration building, and walked along a timbered passage to the lift. As they went down, Denise kept swallowing to equalize the pressure in her ears.
The lift stopped and Pierre helped her out. The first thing she was conscious of was how quiet the level was. When she had been in the mine before, there had been the thunder of pneumatic drills, the rumble of the little railway, the thud of hand power tools, plus a good deal of shouting as members of the gang communicated with each other. Now it was almost silent. A group of workers near the lift were not talking at all. She fancied with a little listening she could have heard the beating of her own heart.
They walked forward a few meters and turned a corner. "Behold," said Pierre with a gesture, "the shapes!"
They were very much as Pierre had described them, with the difference that the quality he had called "disconcerting" Denise herself would have labelled "depressing". To look at the dark shapes sliding in and out of each other made her feel downcast and overborne.
One peculiarity Pierre had not mentioned was that when she looked at the silhouettes broadside they seemed to go back a very long way, though viewed edgewise they were thinner than the blade of a knife.
Pierre was looking at her. She said, "You didn't tell me it was so sad."
He shrugged. "Do you pick up anything?" he asked.
"I'll try." She closed her eyes and tried to relax her muscles. Usually, she could pick up things best when her mind was open and passive.
This time, nothing happened. She was about to open her eyes and tell Pierre, regretfully, that she couldn't get anything, when she felt a roaring in her ears and a sharp pain in the back of her head.
Her hands went involuntarily to cover the nape of her neck. The pain was followed by a moment of wild giddiness, when she seemed to be whirling about as unsteadily as a leaf caught in a driving wind. Then things steadied and she opened her eyes.
Pierre was looking at her anxiously. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Are you all right?"
"Yes, I'm all right. Pierre—" She licked her lips, uncertain of what she was going to say.
"Yes? You don't look all right." He put his arm around her to steady her, as if he feared she was going to faint.
The words came to her. "Pierre," she said rapidly, "the trouble is not here. These shapes—the things in this part of the mine—are nothing but a symptom. Somebody wants ..."
"Somebody? Who? What does he want?"
She shook her head. "I don't know who. He wants, wants us to help him. But I don't know how."
Pierre looked closely at her and then released her, though he still kept his hand on her arm. "What do you mean by 'the trouble is not here'?" he asked.
"That what he wants is not here. The shapes are no more a sign of something wrong in the mine than the reflection of a wounded man in a mirror is a sign of something wrong with the glass."
"Then there's no danger?"
"I think not, no."
"But you can't tell what the—ah—person who's causing the shapes wants?"
"Not now. But there's no harm in the shapes.—I'm not sure they're caused by a 'person' in the sense you mean, Pierre. The shapes would stop if he got what he wanted."
"Would it help you to find out what it is if you stayed here longer?" Pierre's tone was almost wistful.
"I don't think so. I'm sorry."
Her husband sighed. His hand still under her elbow, they turned and walked slowly back to the lift.
The group of workers made way for them. Denise was conscious of narrowed eyes and hostile glances directed toward her. Was it possible—but really, she did seem to pick up thoughts of this kind—was it possible that they blamed the appearance of the shapes on her? The advice she had given Pierre was responsible for their having followed the gangue in the direction they had. Melanesians, despite their man-eating past, were usually so polite and friendly that when they were uncivil it was highly noticeable.
Pierre accompanied his wife through the parking lot. "What are you going to do now?" she asked as they parted.
He shrugged. "Send the men back to work. Since you say there's no danger ... If I have a wildcat strike, I have a wildcat strike. I can always send them to work somewhere else."
"Au 'voir, mon ami."
"Au 'voir, ma belle."
Back at the house, Denise busied herself with calling up Mme. Du Plessis and completing plans for next Sunday's picnic. She felt anxious and depressed. When Pierre telephoned her about four,
asking her if she could come over to the mine, she was not at all surprised.
He met her by the entrance gate. "It's got much worse since you were here," he said as they walked along. "The shapes are so thick now that the men say they can't see where to use their drills in the stope."
"Can they?"
"I don't think so. It's like trying to work underwater, or in a thick fog. Denise, I want you to try once more to see if you can't tell what this ... somebody wants us to do."
"I'll see if I can."
They went down in the lift again. The workers were standing about in bored and resentful attitudes—they were paid a flat rate, plus an incentive bonus for the amount and value of the ore they mined—and when Denise appeared they did not seem to notice her at all. One or two of them nodded to Pierre.
The shapes were far thicker than they had been. "How depressing it is!" the girl said, watching the endless murky sliding. "Doesn't it bother you, Pierre?"
"Not much. I suppose it would if I let it. But—nom d'un nom, Denise!—see if you can't tell me what to do to get rid of—of these mobile geometry lessons. The workers on the other levels are getting upset too."
Denise bit her lip. "I'll walk out in the thick of them," she said. "Perhaps if I'm physically among the shapes, I'll be able to find ..." Her voice trailed away.
"Shall I come with you?" Pierre asked. He was obviously a little anxious about her. "When you were down here before, I thought you were going to faint."
"No, there's no danger. The worst that could happen is that I might trip over something. The shapes make the visibility poor,"
She gave Pierre's hand a reassuring squeeze. Slowly, pausing every few steps to close her eyes and try to make her mind receptive and blank, she moved out among the inter-sliding shapes.
She had thought it would feel like trying to push her way through water, but she had no bodily sensation at all. It was disconcerting to see the knife edge of a shape moving straight at her, but though she blinked involuntarily the first few times, she soon got used to it. The dizziness and pain of her first attempt were absent entirely.
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