Sleep and His Brother

by Peter Dickinson

  After the glare of the searchlights the stairway was like black felt; the air might be breathable, but it looked stifling He nipped back into the room—even Mrs. Dixon-Jones’s erratic lighter would be preferable to total dark. But it was gone. Nothing for it. He climbed slowly on hands and knees remembering that it is fatal to work yourself into the frenzy of action when you begin to pant. The bedroom at the top was only permeated by a faint, far smell of burning, though the searchlight glared into it and the pumps and the flames roared together. But the corridor was black, and swirling.

  He shut the door, thankful for the dead, misguided craftsmen who had fitted it so well to its jamb that no trickle seeped through; till their work actually burned it was almost an airlock. He counted doors in his mind and decided that the laboratory, Silver’s room, and Doll’s were the third, fourth and fifth down the long corridor to the back of the building. He took one more good breath and walked firmly out into the smoke, moving easily to the corner, feeling his way round, crossing the corridor and counting doors. It was difficult not to feel that the smoke was chasing him, as the smoke from a bonfire sometimes seems to. His nerve was already failing him as he reached the fourth door, groped for the handle, found it on the other side, opened the door, and stagger through. Involuntarily he took an eager gulp of air and began to choke; it was breathable, but not good.

  And the room was Doll’s. It was nice to be able to see, though the light here was not the blue-gray glare of the floodlights but the bloody light from where half the windows on the far side of the courtyard were fountains of murky orange. Tassels of flame dotted the southwest spire below the copper sheathing, and the weathercock was hidden in the upward-flowing smoke. While the wind held, this side was probably safe from the flames, but he felt he had already taken risks enough. He hurried into Silver’s den.

  It was empty.

  Furious with himself at his mad pursuit of a hunch, a belief that for consistency’s sake Silver would rescue what he could of his research papers, Pibble stood and swore at the empty leather chair. Its black shadow wavered slightly with the orange light from the burning wing, so that though (perhaps) he sensed another slight movement behind him, he didn’t connect it with anything in the room.

  The crash of agony at the back of his skull was the first, and last, he knew.

  7

  Perhaps he was never really unconscious. There was blackness and in it he was being shoved about while his arms threshed weakly at an enemy as vague as smoke. And then there was the orange light and he was lolling on softness, but with a searing head. He tried to jerk himself up, into a posture to meet another attack, but an iron bar across his chest held him back.

  “You try to get out, fuzz, and I’ll hit you again.”

  The slow, sad voice was Silver’s, not Gorton’s. Pibble lolled again.

  “The smoke’s getting very bad in the corridor,” said Pibble. “If these doors didn’t fit so well we’d be asphyxiated.”

  Silver said nothing. He was working through his filing cabinet, carrying folders to the window to peer at the name on the label, dropping some to the floor, and putting others into a big briefcase. Pibble discerned that he was tied to the leather chair with the cord of the desk lamp; he would be able to wriggle out, downward, in a few seconds the minute he was left alone. If he was left alone. Between the diminishing pulses of pain from the back of his skull he tried to decide what to say to Silver—who, to judge by the attack and that single sentence, had assumed that Pibble knew all. No time, with the chomping flames working along the far wing so fast, to try to coax him into believing that Pibble knew nothing after all.

  “I thought you’d be here,” he said. “I’m glad you weren’t simply making a run for it.”

  Silver hesitated with a file above the briefcase, then tossed it angrily across the room so that it sprayed a trail of papers to the wall; if the firemen didn’t manage to save this wing the flames would have a good snack to start with when they got here. From the furnace beyond the courtyard rose a sudden snorting explosion. The blast of it whuffled against the panes and Silver peered out at a part of the far wing Pibble couldn’t see.

  “Rue Kelly’s lab,” he said.

  “Were you ever a fire chief?” said Pibble.

  Silver tore the file he was holding clean across and threw it on the floor.

  “You think I’m playacting, don’t you, fuzz?” he said. “Just one big game, and if the other side scores against me I do my five years like a sportsman. D’you know how old I am? Sixty- three. And nine years eight months of that time I’ve spent in prison, sent down by judges who knew less law than I do. ‘Prisoner at the bar, you have abused your natural advantages. The court psychiatrist has attempted to help you, but you have been deliberately uncooperative. I have no alternative, in view of your record, but to sentence you to five years’ penal servitude, and may the Lord have mercy on the one-fourteenth of your soul which that represents.’ I am a man of peace. I do not enjoy hitting even fuzz on the head. But will you give me peace? Four times—four times I have had my teeth into my life’s work, I have gotten started on a career which would have satisfied me; four times your kind have come shouldering in and picked me out from behind my desk and thrown me into the street. What law am I breaking now? Even my passport is straight—or straight enough. I am using my own name. I have a work permit. I’m not reckoning to lift any of Thanassi’s dough, and you try to prove I am. Nah, you won’t so much as try. You’ll just say, ‘this villain has a record. We’ve pinched him before for conning rich lay-abouts, and now he’s at it again.’ And then you, or one of the ones like you, come and lean on my shoulder and breathe down my neck until I slink back into the gutter where I have to make my bread out of stupid oafs with money they never, earned.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” said Pibble. “I meant do you know anything about fires? I’ve been taught about them, and I’ve seen quite a few. We’re not as safe as we look. You can hurt yourself pretty badly jumping from an ordinary first-floor window, and these are higher than most.”

  “Ten seconds to the fire escape. I can hold my breath that long.”

  “In any case, I think you are being a bit precipitate. Mr. Thanatos­ told me he didn’t care how valid your credentials were. You could tell him the whole story, and I think he’d let you carry on.”

  “You told Thanassi about me?” Silver sounded too sad to be angry.

  “Not on purpose. I remembered who you were when I was in the car going up to London this morning, so I used the cat telephone to ring a friend in the Records Department, just to check. I told him I wanted the details for a lecture. I didn’t tell Mr. Thanatos anything, but I tried to find out how much he knew. I wanted to talk to you. I wanted time to make up my mind. I didn’t know that my conversation with the Yard was automatically put on tape, and that Mr. Thanatos would learn about it that way.”

  “The lays I’ve had spoiled by crooked little men wanting their cut,” said Silver. “Cops, bellhops, clerks, ponces.”

  “I don’t want a cut. I had no reason to tell anyone about you, at least until I’d made sure that you were working a lay. I had the idea that you weren’t. When you skipped off just now, Superintendent Callow only wanted you to identify Mr. Costain—they’d caught him in the shrubbery while they were looking for Sam Gorton. Callow’s in charge of the hunt, you know. There was a theory that he might be coming here to look for Marilyn.”

  “That bastard Callow,” said Silver. “I know him. And I know you, too, though I’ve never had dealings with you. You’re not a crooked little cop, you’re a fastidious little runt. You’d tell. You’d argue about being a responsible citizen, yeah, but in your soul, in your soul you’d know you were telling because you were afraid they’d find out without you, and find out, too, that you’d known before them.”

  “You must have been hell in the confessional.”

  “Never tried it.
I’m low church, by habit and conviction.”

  Silver, who had conducted the previous tirade with heat mud vehemence, now spoke in tones of chilly rebuke. Astounded, Pibble realized that he was being snubbed for talking so freely about the privacies of a man’s beliefs on the strength of a single day’s acquaintance. Some subjects are taboo, even in a burning building … Suddenly he was reminded of the oddity of Kelly’s brush-off when he had asked a similarly harmless question. Perhaps it would boost Silver’s self-regard, nudge the pair of them back onto the safe and complacent relationship of doctor and layman, if Pibble asked Silver the same question now.

  “What’s a biopsy?” he said.

  The nudge was a disaster, setting off a mine. Silver strode across the room and stood over Pibble, black in the orange light, huge with nearness.

  “You want to make it worth my hitting you again when I go, and leaving you here—with the door open?”

  He spun round and returned to his papers. The light from the fire was now so strong that he could read them at the cabinet without carrying them to the window. Pibble began to think about burning, about those incredible martyrs who had stood smiling on the faggots while their skins became crackling. He tried to cheer himself by arguing that he’d be very unlucky not to fall unconscious with the fumes, and then stifle, before ever a flame licked him; but that knowledge could not quench the imagination of fire. If he spoke, remind Silver of the enemy who had aborted four careers, stolen one-fourteenth of a soul, walked into this strange pitfall with an idle question about a technical medical term; but silence meant smoke in his nostrils, orange light in the room, fire in his mind. “’ot,” the tape had said. “Frightened,” it had added. It had been right.

  “I hadn’t realized that biopsies were important,” he said. “I was just being inquisitive.”

  Silver snarled quietly.

  “The trouble is that now I’m more inquisitive than ever,” said Pibble. “If you’ll tell me, I’ll swap the information for something you’d really like to know.”

  Silver stood for a moment, weighing a file in his hand. “You first,” he said.

  “How do I know that you’ll tell me anything afterwards?”

  “You don’t. It’s always like that. You want me to let you hold my wallet to show how much I trust you?”

  “If you’ll let me walk out of the room with it.”

  Silver laughed shortly.

  “Give,” he said.

  “OK. The man I rang up in Records—his name’s Bradshaw, and he gets things right—he says you’re dead. You died in the Congo. Your body was found. Your file is closed.”

  Silver let out a long sigh.

  “Dead, am I?” he said. “Hallelujah! Dead! Man, that’s great, great!”

  “Callow didn’t recognize you—”

  “Who told you he knew me?” said Silver, instantly suspicious.

  “You did. You said that you hadn’t had any dealings with me, in a way which implied you had with him.”

  “Yeah. He tried to pinch me once, and couldn’t get the evidence. He worked me over a bit then, and wasn’t happy when I stuck it out. I reckoned you told him, so I decided to cut my losses. You learn to ride at a loose mooring if you lead my kind of life.”

  “Anyway, he didn’t recognize you with the moustache and your skin that colour. How did you manage that? Injections?”

  “In Crete, man? Nah, my skin is that colour. My mother was a tart in Dublin. Dockyard area. My father must have been some kind of wog. I good as grew up under an umbrella, to keep the sun off me. The poor old bag would throw a fit if she knew how long I spend under the sunlamp these days, just to keep my colour up. But give me three weeks of English winter and I’m white, clear white outside.”

  “It must have been hard to keep it up in the Southward Islands.”

  Silver, who was now sorting through his files in a totally different manner, as though he were almost drunk with pleasure at the news of his own demise, laughed again.

  “I wore a topee, day in, day out. Best time of my life, you know? First thing I did when I got there was give the jail a raking over. My duke was hot on prison reform, in a la-di-da way, so I could give those jailers hell. Best lock-up in the colonies, by the time I left. Next thing was to screw the police chief’s missus, but she turned out so eager that I let her fall flat. There are disadvantages in being a duke, and that’s one of them. Then I got all worked up about trying to sort out those poor sods of savages, who’d been left dangling halfway between cave men and factory hands; it was that got me up against my colleagues in the liberation movement—they didn’t want a happy proletariat, or who’d there be to liberate? They turned out to be a different kind of fuzz, with beards. Fuzz in blue are happy once they’ve arrested a guy, no matter who, and got him sentenced; that’s one more crime statistic on the right side of the ledger. Fuzz in beards are happy once they’ve shot a guy, again no matter who. Once he’s dead he’s one less lackey of capitalist imperialism. Y’know they spent three years hunting for me? They got no sense of proportion. That’s when I started going out in the sun and wearing Arab clobber.”

  The light from the window suddenly died. Silver cursed in the new dark and Pibble saw his shape against the faint rectangles of the window.

  “Bloody smoke,” said Silver. “I should’ve brought torch.”

  “Smoke coming this way?” asked Pibble.

  “Yeah. Can’t see a thing. You see films of fires on TV, and they’re lovely flames, like fireworks. I didn’t reckon it’d like this.”

  “The wind’s changed,” said Pibble. “We’d better be going. You can tell me about biopsies later, or I’ll look them up in a medical dictionary.”

  “Fuzz,” said Silver explosively, “you’re a bloody fool!”

  Pibble could just perceive him stalking across the room to stand above the chair. Then a rift in the smoke let in a second of light, by which he could see that Silver was weighing in his hand, much as he had weighed the file ten minutes before, the Brancusi-like paperweight from the desk.

  “All I got to do is lay you out, sling you in the linen room, and go. They’d reckon you’d blundered in there looking for it window to jump from, and there ain’t one, so you’d been asphyxiated. If I hit you right, and you got burnt a bit, I don’t reckon they’d notice a bit of bruising.”

  Silver spoke in a peculiar grumbling tone, as though he had been landed with an unwelcome moral responsibility which he would have to see through. The dark returned. It would work, Pibble knew, provided the actual flames got that far. Forensic pathologists hate burned bodies because there is so little chance of discovering the processes that preceded the roasting.

  Suddenly an indistinguishable shout—not of panic, but of somebody giving an order—rang down the passage. Pibble almost shouted back, but realized that this might topple Silver over the edge into reluctant violence.

  “It wouldn’t work,” he said, dry-throated. “They’ve got a lot of firemen here, and engines. The less of the building there is left to save, the more chance they’ve got of saving it.” Silver dropped the paperweight with a thud.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “I couldn’t have done it anyway, I guess. I wouldn’t like you to think I’m that kind.”

  “Let’s go,” said Pibble. “If we stay here much longer we’ll get poisoned, and besides, I don’t fancy being rescued. I’d rather get myself out, unnoticed if possible.”

  “Me, too. And if the wind’s changed they’ll have men at both ends of this wing. Oh, sod it! I’m too old for jumping.”

  “Where’s the linen room?” said Pibble.

  “Over the way.”

  “Doll told me that you could get up onto the roof through it and then climb down a cedar tree. She said it was easy—easier than the fire escape.”

  “That Doll,” said Silver, still in his grumbling to
ne. “We give it a try. Last thing I want is a lot of goddamn publicity now that I’m safely dead.”

  As he stooped to untie Pibble’s cord they heard another shout, followed by a long, groaning crash. The noise seemed to come not from across the courtyard but from somewhere near the archway at the back—almost in their own wing.

  “We’ll need your matches,” said Pibble. “We’ll have to see.”

  “Right. Grab the back of my jacket. Ready?”

  The room, which had seemed so dark when first the smoke rolled over it, was now just discernible. Pibble took a deep breath of the rancid air as he saw Silver reach for the door handle. The door swung open, and the real dark shouldered through, shaped for the instant and solid, an opaque mass. He felt Silver hesitate, then lurch into the smoke. The corridor was a horizontal chimney, a roasting draft, but they were only in it for three seconds before he was crowding after Silver through another door on the opposite side and helping to slam the good mahogany behind him. It was ominously warm to the touch. Cautiously he breathed out a little, then in, and at once all his precious lungful exploded into cough While he gasped and stumbled the dark became light, an through his tears he saw Silver standing picturesque, holding a little globule of pale flame, barely bigger than a raindrop, at his fingertips. Pibble’s choking subsided; he found that the air was in fact breathable, just.

  “See that,” said Silver. “Not much oxygen in here. We got to hurry. There’s your hatch.”

  He raised his head toward a square recess in the ceiling above a slatted shelf of neatly stacked sheets. Then he dropped the match. It went out before it reached the floor. Pibble was already climbing up the shelves before the next match flared. Silver handed up his briefcase and the matchbox and then climbed himself. When they were sitting side by side, heads bowed under the ceiling, Pibble struck a match and lifted one side of the hatch about an inch. White smoke poured down as though it had been a liquid.