Sleep and His Brother

by Peter Dickinson

  “Better get to a window and be rescued after all,” he said. “Not me,” said Silver. “There’ll be cameras out there by now. My friends with beards have a lot of pals in London, pretending to be Chinese waiters. It’d be just my luck if one of ’em recognized me, the very day I learn I’m dead. There’ll be a skylight somewhere near, and this roof’s only slates. We can shove them off the battens.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Pibble.

  “OK, I’ll tell you what. You wait here while I give it a try. Shut the hatch when I’m gone, to keep the smoke out of here. Count thirty, light another match, and open the hatch again. If I’m in trouble I’ll be able to come back to the light. OK?”

  “No,” said Pibble.

  “Screw you,” said Silver as Pibble struck a match. In one astonishing spasm of effort, lumbering but rapid, he had risen from the shelves and thrust himself up into the hatch. The match went out with the flurry of movement, but Pibble heard the hatch slap back into place. He began to count. Madman, he thought. And going so fast, using all that energy. He’ll be wanting to gasp before he gets anywhere at all. At twenty Pibble had the matchbox out, with a match head poised against the scraping surface. The blundering noises shove his head had ceased. He thought he heard another noise, which was not the sound of deliberate action, nor yet any of the clicks and grunts of the woodwork changing shape under the steady heating of the smoke. It might have anything, even a big half-Arab gasping his life out. Pibble struck the match at twenty-six, worked his feet onto the shelf and rose slowly until his scalp touched the painted wood the hatch. This was even warmer than the door. He took last breath and stood carefully up, hingeing the lid back as went.

  A desert wind smote him from the right and the match went out.

  Still quite slowly he climbed through, stood, and walk forward with outstretched arms. The floor was planks, not joists. At the same moment as his fingers touched rough timber his shin knocked into hardness. He pawed at the obstacle, then stood on it. It was about eight inches high and as soon as he moved forward again his shin hit another; was on a set of steps. He reached in front of him and his fingers found glass, the skylight. With an effort he opened his eyes and saw it, too, white but opaque. He could find no catch at either edge, and was about to kick the glass out when something about the shape of the frame timbers told him what to do. He felt down and found a handle on the bottom frame; a single jerk shot the whole sash back and up, over his head—glory to Doll’s great-grandfather and the unwarpable cedar. The direction of the desert wind changed, streaming out and up; he clambered with it and rolled himself sideways onto the tiles.

  As he gasped for real air and found it, he was slithering down. Instantly a fresh panic whelmed him: perhaps the parapet only ran across the monstrous façade, and here he would shoot straight over the gutter and fall two storeys. He scrabbled uselessly at the slate until his shoulder thudded into stone.

  He stood up, shivering, in the lead gutter, and peered over the knee-high wall. The cedar was there, sharp black against the floodlights, a thick branch swooping across the parapet and brushing the slates with its needles. Through the other gawky batwings of branches he could see a cluster or bustle down at the corner of the wing to his right, and another up to his left on the edge of the gravel. An ambulance honked out into the lane. It’d take him minutes to attract anyone’s attention, and more minutes for them to get a ladder and professionals up here. He decided to have one go at finding Silver himself. As he turned back toward the hatch, smoke poured in an avalanche down the tiles and drowned him.

  He came out of it, weeping and coughing, and saw that iron steps led up from the gutter to the hatch. He climbed them, breathed carefully in and out and in, and felt his way down against the warm rush of air, eyes shut. He fancied that the last sounds of Silver’s movements, if that’s what they’d been, had come from the northern corner of the linen room ceiling, so the moment he was off the steps he started to crawl to his left, counting as he went, vowing to turn back when he reached twenty. His left hand felt the slanting beams, so that he didn’t lose direction, and his right swept in wide groping arcs across the splintery planks. It touched cloth at twelve, barely six feet from the steps.

  Pibble felt his way round the inert shape. As he put his arms under the shoulders the whole figure threshed, once, in a galvanic spasm, and he lost his grip. He stood, verified the slope of the beams, bent again, and began to heave the body hack toward the steps. No nonsense now about not wasting oxygen. In thudding dizziness he felt the steps nudge against his calves; he dropped the shoulders and plunged for the open air, where he lay for a full half minute, gasping and watching the ridge for the next roiling wave of smoke. Next time in he got Silver’s head and shoulders onto the steps, but lacked breath and strength to heave him straight out. Third time, with three tearing bursts of heaving he got the head out onto the rim of the skylight, went down to the bottom of the steps and bundled the loose limbs upward, out, working his own shoulder under the heavy buttocks and shoving at the inert flesh.

  Then he had to wriggle past the hateful mess of unbudgeable looseness and breathe again.

  This time when he felt his way back from the saving air Pibble found that he had in fact forced the body out as far as the waist. It was only when he was rolling it sideways onto the tiles that he realized it might not be Silver at all—it might be Gorton, come, hidden, and then trapped in the smoke. He groaned with relief as the body slithered into clearness and he could see the noble profile of the confidence trickster.

  Pibble was giving him the kiss of life, with none of the squeamish­ness he’d experienced while practicing the technique during first-aid courses, when Silver suddenly shook his head.

  “Get out of my mouth,” he muttered as Pibble withdrew; at once he turned convulsively away and vomited onto the lead.

  Pibble wriggled his arm under his shoulders and lifted him slightly up. Silver’s eyes opened.

  “Je-sus!” he said. “Je-sus!”

  “I’ll get the firemen in a moment,” said Pibble. “I haven’t had time. How do you feel?”

  “So-so. You got me out of there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks. Leave the firemen out of it, for the mo. I’ve half killed both of us to get me out on the quiet, and it’s a shame to waste it, yeah?”

  “All right. We’ll give you a few minutes to see how you feel. I don’t think we’re in immediate danger. The wind’s shifted again. Take it easy.”

  Silver smiled and shut his eyes. Pibble coaxed him a few feet along the gutter out of the mess of sickness and lie back.

  A quarter of an hour later, when the smoke was beginning to pick out the pattern of the tiles as it seeped between them, he was sitting sideways on the cedar branch and working his way down the slope toward the trunk, his hands sticky and foul with a coating of resin and bark dust.

  “In my circus days I coulda walked down here,” said Silver from below him.

  “I’d rather you didn’t try. I’m damned shaky and I expect you’re worse. Hold it.”

  They both sat quite still and let a party of five firemen pass below them. It was ludicrous—two old men, the two oldest people on the premises apart from Lady Sospice, lurking like kids in the bushes while the adults fussed about in the open Pibble suddenly thought of something which made their adventure more purposeless still.

  “We’ve left your briefcase in the attic,” he said, “I’m sorry.

  “Forget it,” said Silver. “You comfortable?”

  “Fair.”

  “Let’s rest a bit, then. I live a nervy kinda life, and the worst of it is I got to seem calm all the time. Yeah, I’ve had enough practice, so it’s almost second nature, but a sort of pressure builds up inside, so when something breaks I overreact, like just now. I don’t know what I thought I would do with those files. It’s only a few months’ work lost, and most of that sc
ratching around. If Thanassi’ll have me back I can get it all together again—better, in fact—in six weeks. It’s a clean slate, and now I’ve got you to work with—”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to leave me out of it,” said Pibble.

  “Oh, hell, man. I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “It isn’t the money. I could do with that, as a matter of fact. Did you have any background material on the families from which the children came?”

  “A bit, but very patchy. I’d hardly begun. I went and talked to a couple of families in the London area, and I was planning to hire an assistant to cover the rest, all the ones I could find. Why? Want that job? It’s yours, but you’d be wasted.”

  His voice had been becoming steadily fainter, the gasping pauses between the phrases longer and more painful.

  “No,” said Pibble. “I’ve been thinking about the people who work here, and Gorton, and myself. Almost all of us are obsessional about something or other, or in danger of becoming so. And even old Lord Sospice seems to have been the same. I’ve been trying to remember whether Gorton had been in any sort of trouble before he went to live at Paperham, that’s to say before he met Marilyn. I don’t think he had.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Silver. “One of the families I went to, out Dagenham way, had a thing about newspapers—they bought about six a day and kept them all. They used to keep them. in the front bedroom, but a couple of years back the weight had brought the floor down and killed the grandfather, who slept in the parlour. They’d built a shack in the garden after that. They were damned proud of it. They called it the library. They showed it to me. That the sort of thing you’re after? Something to do with the kids, you reckon?”

  “I don’t know,” said Pibble. “But I think it’s possible that one of the reasons why the cathypnics survive at all is that they’re capable of arousing an obsessive protectiveness in ordinary people like Mrs. Dixon-Jones. I can feel it in myself, and I don’t like it. Anyway, I was wondering, supposing I’m right, whether their effect on people who already suffered from latent obsessions wasn’t to bring them out and reinforce them—I mean whether Gorton wouldn’t have gone on being a comparatively harmless bully if he hadn’t met Marilyn. And your family with the newspapers: that could be either a substitute for the protectiveness which they’d felt when they’d had their cathypnic with them, and which had now been deprived of its object, or it could be something that the child had brought out. And even somebody as clever and sophisticated as Rue Kelly—”

  “Yeah,” interrupted Silver. “It’s a nasty thought; I’ll look into it, statistics-wise. I was going to tell you what a biopsy is.”

  “Don’t bother,” said Pibble. “I was only trying to change the subject in your room. I can look it up.”

  “No. I’d better tell you. Uh. Laymen always get our jargon wrong. A biopsy is a sample of living tissue, taken from a particular part of the body for study purposes.”

  “That sounds simple enough.”

  “Hold it. I haven’t finished There’s all sorts of biopsies. For instance, you can do a peripheral nerve biopsy, take your sample from somewhere there’s a nerve just below skin level, like the knee. No trouble, only a local anaesthetic. Or you can go in for the big time and do a brain biopsy, and that’s a serious op and needs lots of special kit.”

  “You’d have to open up the skull?” said Pibble.

  “Depends. For some purposes you could do a transsphenoidal, where you run in a special hollow needle just above the rye and draw out a plug of tissue, which you can either mash up and do counts of or slice off thin and look at through a microscope.”

  “Like the core they bring up to study when they’re drilling for oil,” said Pibble, thinking of Mr. Thanatos’ favourite sport.

  “Yeah, I guess so. A transsphenoidal is a trickier thing, though. You’ve got to know exactly where you’re going, guide the needle on an X-ray screen. You need a proper operating room, germ-free. All that. Yeah.”

  Silver paused and seemed to go off into a sort of trance. “I suppose a full-scale, er, craniotomy—isn’t it?—is an even more demanding job,” said Pibble.

  “Sure. Sure. Let’s get going.”

  “There may be a policeman near the bottom of the tree, but if so you can leave him to me. Superintendent Callow may have spotted this way in.”

  Silver only grunted, and Pibble felt the big bough sway slightly as he began to wriggle along it again. He seemed to be going very slowly, gasping a little as he went. At one point his face passed through a diamond of light where the searchlight of an engine just beyond the corner of the wing pierced between two layers of the black branches. His face was hideous with effort and concentration and far grayer than the unnatural glare could account for.

  “Are you all right?” said Pibble, but got no answer. Only when they reached the trunk, already considerably lower than the parapet they’d come from because of the slope of the branch, did he let out a long sigh.

  “Jesus!” he said. “I thought I’d never make that.”

  Pibble managed to work his way past him where he leaned against the trunk and climbed to a lower branch. As Doll had said, it was almost as easy as going downstairs, the branches coming exactly where they were needed. He let Silver rest again and then helped him down as if he’d been a child, placing his feet for him at each descent and talking all the time with an idiotic voice of cooing comfort. If there were one of Callow’s minions at the foot of the tree, he’d have something to gossip about in the canteen tomorrow.

  There was not. Silver fell the last four feet, and Pibble only half caught him. He lowered him to the wet grass and walked down the slope to where an ambulance stood apparently idle behind the busy and still thundering engines. Now that the wind had shifted once again most of the smoke was moving in slow masses toward the south. There seemed to be very little glow from the fire—all the illumination came from the harsh searchlights.

  At the ambulance he bellowed and pointed, then clung to the door as they jolted and slithered out of the centre of din. Silver was sitting up under the tree, but allowed himself to be eased onto a stretcher and lifted into the body of the ambulance.

  “He’s had a bad time,” said Pibble. “But I don’t think he’s actually injured—it’s mostly shock and strain.”

  He watched while the men parcelled Silver into blankets. Now that he was almost unconscious his face, though still noble, had an oddly nondescript quality, as though the guises of healer and guru and even Arab had been largely maintained by a continuing effort of will.

  “How come?” said one of the men, straightening up. “You OK, mate?”

  “I think so,” said Pibble. “We got stuck in this wing. We were trying to rescue some important papers, but in the end we had to give up and climb down the tree.”

  “Me Princess Margaret, you Tarzan,” said the other ambulance man.

  “Have you been busy?” said Pibble.

  “Nothing much. Couple of firemen slightly singed, and one of the local kids got knocked over when the cops left.”

  “Left!” said Pibble, startled.

  “Should have seen them. Six cars at least, sirens going, all lights on, blasting up the lane. Cor!”

  “Was the child who was hurt one of the inmates?” said Pibble.

  “Nah. Just come to watch the fireworks. Only a bit of gravel rash.”

  “We’ve been pretty lucky, then,” said Pibble. “No real casualties in a fire this size.”

  “Ah, wait a bit, though—there’s one deader.”

  “Dead—who?” Not steel-hearted Alfred, surely.

  “A woman. They fetched her out twenty minutes back.”

  “I never saw Posey.”

  It was Silver, speaking from the bed, his eyes still shut.

  “The children said she’d gone home,” said Pibble. “No, they just said she’d gon
e.”

  “I would like to know,” said Silver. He opened his eyes began to lever himself up.

  “Hey, take it easy,” said the voluble ambulance man “You’re suffering from shock.”

  “Sure,” said Silver. “I’m a doctor. I know what I’m doing. Where’s my shoes?”

  All his authority flooded back as he pulled rank over the ambulance man, who muttered something, helped him to sit then knelt and laced his shoes for him.

  “Where is she?” said Silver.

  “They took her away, sir,” said the ambulance man. “But the bod in charge of the firemen; up at the front knows about her. Take a couple of blankets, sir. You better keep warm. Sure you wouldn’t like us to drive you up? No trouble.”

  “No. I’m OK.”

  “My mates are ferrying the kids down to the hospital from up there. You could hitch a lift with one of them, sir.”

  “Thanks.”

  Silver stepped out onto the turf. The drapes of the blank flowing down from his shoulders made him look magnificence in the sharp-shadowed glare, the last of his tribe, never to be bound or tamed by the polymer chains of the cities.

  “It could be Doll,” he said, as they began to walk up, stumbling where forgotten rose beds made hidden curl amid the coarse grass.

  “Not unless she followed us in,” said Pibble. “She came back to the fire with me.”

  “Rue had his nurses out. I checked the ground-floor staff. It’ll be Posey, for sure.”

  Lady Sospice still sat where he’d last seen her, poised on the slope down to the house as though she were waiting her turn to trundle down into the furnace. A group of cathypnic children, watched by Ivan and a fat woman Pibble hadn’t seen before, waited farther along the gravel. Only one policeman was visible, the local man who had let them in through the gate an hour ago. He stood up by the entrance and watched the firemen bustling about round their engines. From two ladders jets of water were being squirted through upper windows into the murk of the hall; but everybody’s posture or movement had lost the nervous urgency which had been so apparent when the fire began; they seemed settled, almost relaxed, and gave the scene a coda-like quality, telling of a drama that was almost over. A fireman in a white helmet, with three pips on his shoulder—an ADO, Pibble thought that meant—came up.