‘There’s no one here,’ said Dermot.
‘There might be someone in there,’ I said. There was a door marked PREP ROOM. ‘That’s where lab assistants would hang out.’
‘Making LSD from leftovers,’ said Dermot. ‘After you. It’s your manhunt.’
I knocked on the door, and Betts answered it.
III
Without much wanting to, I remembered the experiment. I’d been unable to see Tina and Betts during it. I’d always assumed that Tina was undergoing the same treatment as me, looking into mirrors and being prodded by Betts. I realized that she might not have been. Until Roger had started to ask me about her, I’d never questioned it. Of course she was going through the same thing. I’d brought something out of the sodden Welsh air, something that had broken in and wrecked the room and then … and then what? What had it done? Run off again, vanished the same way it had come? Got a job in Eastenders, even then known to be a good home for the ugly and misshapen?
Tina hadn’t done anything like that. Tina hadn’t produced anything at all. What had she been doing? I’d known that psychology experiments were eight-tenths bluff. She’d told me that, and she’d asked me to take part. Psychology was all double-bluff and double-blind.
Perhaps she’d led me along. Perhaps she’d always led me along. Perhaps she’d been in on something. Perhaps I was her third-year project.
I tried to remember the thing that had come skipping in from the mountains, covering miles in seconds. I’d only seen it in the mirrors, running along. Perhaps it had only been in the mirrors and I’d imagined the rest. Light is a wave or a particle depending on the circumstances, according to quantum physics. Perception affects reality.
My imagination was certainly affecting my reality. It was populating it with video-game offcuts. Betts had been involved in that, or at least in the genesis of it.
He stood in the doorway to the prep room, and I saw that he’d changed a lot. He was thinner, for one thing. And apart from that, he was someone else.
IV
I realized that the lab assistant didn’t look much like Betts after all. I’d been expecting to see him and my mind had filled in the rest of the details itself. This was a younger man, with a shaved head with the shadow of black hair under the skin. He looked at the two of us.
‘Yes?’ he asked.
‘We were after someone,’ I said. ‘We think he came to work here. He was called Betts.’
‘You’ll mean Josh,’ said the assistant. ‘He was here for a while, but he left. You have to, really. This place has been closing down since it opened. There aren’t many job opportunities here.’
‘We noticed you weren’t all that crowded,’ said Dermot. ‘We thought they might be out getting the sheep in from top field or something.’
‘It’s a ridiculous place for a college,’ said the assistant. ‘I’m Dan,’ he said, offering his hand. We took turns shaking it.
‘So where is everyone?’
‘No one ever turned up. There was a landowner who lived somewhere round here, and he owned this land. Nice work if you can get it. He left his money to the local community, as long as they built a college with some of it.’
He looked around the lab.
‘I don’t think they wasted much of it on this place. Still, it keeps me in a job.’
‘What did Betts do?’
I couldn’t get used to Betts having a forename. For some reason, I’d never thought of him with one. And if he had to have one, it should have been a more fitting one than Josh. That didn’t suit him at all.
‘He got bored,’ said Dan. ‘I avoid that. I read a lot. We do get students from time to time, too.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘He went to a pharmaceutical company somewhere. Not one of the majors, some tiny place that does independent research. The sort of independent research that discovers what you pay them to discover. You know what I mean? If a brewery asks them to, and hands over the readies, they find scientific evidence that drinking makes you thin and brilliant. He wanted to get out of college work. He never seemed settled here.’
‘You seem settled.’
‘You can always sell things to students,’ Dan said. ‘Especially if you have access to chemicals. LSD from leftovers isn’t far off the mark.’
He winked at Dermot.
‘I didn’t think you’d heard us out there,’ said Dermot.
‘It pays to keep an ear open. I don’t know how they’d take to me knocking out barndance Es.’
‘Have you got any samples?’ asked Dermot. ‘Only reality is wearing us down. My friend here is suffering from too much of it. I feel it’s my duty as his guardian to get him out of it.’
‘I do have some homebrewed acid,’ said Dan. ‘It’s not as good as stuff you’d buy. I don’t have access to much equipment here.’
He searched through a crowded cupboard, found something, and handed Dermot a few small squares of coloured paper.
‘Keep out of reach of children,’ said Dan, ‘and don’t operate any heavy machinery while under the influence. Now, you were after Josh Betts. He went to this little pharmaceutical company called, let me think, it was something to do with Neil Young. Bright Harvest Research Laboratory, that was it. Made me think of Neil Young, anyway. It’s a little place near Stourbridge. In the West Midlands.’
‘We’re from there,’ I said. ‘Or near there.’
‘I thought so,’ said Dan. ‘It was either that or you had to blow your noses. You should be able to get hold of him there. They don’t encourage visitors, though.’
We thanked him and left. Dermot sniffed his newly acquired pieces of paper.
‘The wonders of science,’ he said, opening his wallet and slipping the little coloured squares inside. ‘What’s for lunch, then?’
‘We haven’t got anything. You know, I really thought he’d be there. I would have bet on it.’
‘All bets are off,’ said Dermot. ‘As is our man Betts himself.’
There was a silent pause.
‘You can laugh you know,’ said Dermot, huffily stamping off to the car.
V
On the way home, he insisted that we stop for cider.
‘These fucking yokels have real cider, stuff that stops you feeling your teeth. We need to get some. We need to get as much as we can.’
‘What’s wrong with you? You’ve suddenly turned into Hunter S. Thompson.’
‘It’s real cider,’ he said. ‘Come on, we only get supermarket cider at home. That’s a fucking girl’s drink. We need this backwoods stuff. Stop at the next place that sells it. It’s not like we’re buying crack cocaine. It’s only cider.’
‘The stuff in your wallet isn’t just cider. That’s a class-A drug.’
‘I don’t bother with the lower classes when it comes to drugs. I only do class A. I’m a drugs snob.’
‘You’re mad enough without drugs.’
‘Cheers,’ he said. ‘Pull over here, they’ve got a sign up. This is the very place.’
Jutting from a bulbous hedge was a hand-written sign advertising cider. A badly drawn arrow apparently pointed at the hedge. As we passed, I saw that there was a stile set into the hedge. Beyond it a muddy path led off into greenery. I pulled over and looked again. There was no sign of a farmhouse.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked him. ‘There isn’t anything here.’
‘There’s a sign,’ he said. ‘They have cider for sale. If they didn’t have cider they wouldn’t have a sign.’
‘We could get some from somewhere else. Anywhere else, really. All the farms down here sell it.’
‘I want it from this farm,’ he said. ‘This is the one for me. The next one might be closed.’
He’d made his mind up. I knew that it’d probably take longer to dissuade him than to walk to the farm. It couldn’t be too far away. We got out of the Audi and I bleeped it shut as we crossed the road. I climbed over the stile and put a foot gingerly onto the ground. It had been mudd
y not long ago, but had since dried into solid ruts and ridges.
Dermot followed me.
‘This is a field,’ he said accusingly. ‘You’ve brought me into a field.’
‘You told me to bring you. You insisted.’
‘Well I’m hardly to be trusted, am I?’ asked Dermot. ‘What are these?’
They were buttercups. The field had been left to its own devices. It was full of buttercups, dandelions and thistles nestling in what looked like long grass. The thin trail led across the field, to another stile in another hedge.
‘These are flowers,’ I said. ‘They won’t hurt you.’
‘You ever heard of nettles? Those are flowers and they fucking hurt.’
‘Come on,’ I said, walking ahead of him.
The day was still hot, but it had become hazy. The air felt like a warm flannel. I began to sweat. Hefty bees visited flowers and filled their knees with pollen. Dermot swatted at them, missing them completely. I was sweating; he looked as though he’d been in a shower. His little wild face was dripping, his tight curly hair was plastered to his scalp. I watched him flailing inaccurately at the bees and climbed over the next stile. The path crossed a small stream by way of a bridge made out of two narrow planks. Dermot made his way across it as though it lay over a deep ravine. There were scrubby bushes on either side of the stream. A butterfly flew from a bush and passed me at close range. It was a bright blue, and when it passed me it became invisible for a moment. It was as though it had vanished. It reappeared on its way to Dermot so that he could flap his hands at it, which was his response to all insects.
I realized that it had vanished because it had been a two-dimensional sprite, rather than a polygon figure. It had dimensions in x and y, but not z. No one wastes polygons on background details like butterflies. They’re lucky if they get animation, let alone polygons. As it passed me I had been on its plane of origin. My line of sight had matched its z-axis position.
I also realized that it must be another hallucination. Reality is in 3D. Reality doesn’t include sprites.
‘Dermot,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Can you see that butterfly?’
‘Where?’ he asked, looking where I was pointing. He clearly couldn’t see it. He squinted.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said, as it didn’t seem to. It was only a butterfly, after all. It wasn’t about to savage us.
The path led up an incline away from the stream and into a little plantation of pine trees, set neatly at the corners of imaginary squares. After we walked a little way through the neat plantation, we saw that there was a house with white-painted walls visible between the trees. The paint obscured any detail, the house looking at that distance like a white space with a red roof. There was a door and two windows.
‘Who lives here?’ asked Dermot. ‘Hansel and fucking Gretel?’
The house stood in a regular rectangle of garden. A fat barrel stood by the door. I looked in it, on impulse. There might be something useful in there, I thought. There wasn’t. There was only water, which failed to give my reflection.
Dermot knocked on the door. It opened towards us. A man stood there, looking like a farmer from a BBC drama about the eighteenth century. He rolled his large eyes. Like the water, they didn’t hold any reflections. Reflections take too much work.
‘What can I do for you gents?’ he asked. ‘Not seen you before.’
His accent was awful, way off the mark. Dermot didn’t notice. Behind the man, I could see the dark walls of his hallway stretching back perhaps four feet. After that, they fell into a strange black fog. There were no other details.
‘We saw the sign,’ said Dermot. ‘For cider.’
‘I’m not with you,’ said the man.
‘Can we buy cider here?’ I asked.
‘I’m not with you,’ said the man.
‘Do you have cider for sale?’
‘I’m not with you,’ said the man.
‘Do you sell cider?’ I asked.
‘Of course we do! Never heard a question like it. I’ll just get you some.’
He retreated into the hallway, vanishing into the fog after he’d gone a few feet. Dermot was looking nervous.
‘What the buttery fuck is going on?’ he asked.
‘You have to ask exactly the right question,’ I said. ‘There’s not much detail here. It’s very old-school. You need to ask exactly what it wants you to ask. Otherwise you don’t get a response.’
‘What?’
‘This is one of my hallucinations. Look at it. This looks like a scene from a 16-bit adventure game. We’re standing in it.’
He shook his head.
‘You’re the one with the hallucinations, you can’t drag me into one with you,’ he said. ‘I don’t drag you into my dreams. I wouldn’t fucking allow you in my dreams.’
‘You’re here. You saw this house, it popped up when we were about twenty feet away. That’s a terrible draw distance. You saw those pine trees. They weren’t just regularly spaced. They were the same tree, lots of times. Lazy coding.’
‘It’s your lazy fucking imagination. You’ve got me into this mess. So now what are we supposed to do? Jump on fucking mushrooms?’
I didn’t have time to reply, as the man returned carrying an absurd flagon. It was large and stone coloured but with a flat texture. CIDER was written on it in a common font. He offered it to us.
‘Here we are gents,’ he said. ‘Cider.’ He stood in the doorway, head on one side, expectant.
‘Thanks,’ said Dermot. He reached out and took the flagon. ‘We’ll be on our merry way then.’
Dermot began to back across the lawn. That too was lazily rendered, apparently only using a small texture map copied several hundred times. I followed Dermot’s example, backing away so that I could keep an eye on things. Before we got far, I hit a bad point of view. We caught a bad angle, and I saw a seam open along the junction between the wall and the ceiling of the hall. A neutral white light shone through the gap. The man looked around.
‘Bother,’ he said, noticing the mistake. He stepped to one side in his agitation. He came to a rest halfway through the door. Not the doorway, the door. One of his shoulders, plus the accompanying arm, were on one side. The rest of him was on the other. Either the door went through the middle of him, or he went through the middle of the door.
‘Bother,’ he said again. Now that he’d got himself caught in the door he couldn’t get back out of it. He began to struggle.
‘Bother,’ he said, with some vehemence. I began to follow Dermot towards the thin stand of pine trees, or rather pine tree. The door began to shudder on its hinges as the man’s struggles became increasingly violent.
Dermot fled down the path towards the small stream. It had gone. On the way there Dermot had crossed the stream as though it had been a ravine. As if to upset him, it had now become one. The stream was suddenly at the bottom of a deep crevice two feet across and thousands of feet deep.
‘Now what do we do?’ Dermot asked, unnerved.
‘Jump over it,’ I said. ‘Think games.’
‘Horseshit.’
‘It can’t really be there,’ I said. ‘Think about it. We’re imagining it. It wasn’t there ten minutes ago, so it can’t be there now. It’s a little stream, jump over it.’
‘You fucking jump over it.’
I looked down. A small pebble rolled over the edge and fell cinematically for what felt like minutes. There was a commotion behind us.
‘He’s got dogs,’ said Dermot, looking round to see what was happening. ‘Really fucking big ones.’
I closed my eyes and jumped, landing a moment later. I looked round to see what Dermot was doing. He was taking a short run-up. Not far behind him, two enormous black dogs were prowling through the trees, glaring around with the help of glowing red eyes. They hadn’t yet seen us, or scented us, or whatever it is that dogs do.
‘Go on then boys!’ shouted the man, rattling the door again
st its hinges. ‘Tear them up!’
Dermot landed next to me.
‘I’d fucking run if I was you,’ he said.
The dogs halted. They turned towards us, having heard Dermot’s voice. Dermot was already heading for the stile. I ran after him. He jumped over it and turned round. I could tell by his face that I was in trouble. Something was very close behind me. The sound of my breath filled my ears, along with the sound of my heartbeat. Neither of them sounded all that stable. Through those sounds I heard the snuffling and panting of the dogs as they closed on me. Dermot closed his eyes. I jumped and felt something snag the leg of my trousers and then I was over the stile and in the field. I landed badly and fell. I lay on the ground and waited for the dogs to pounce.
They didn’t. When I looked up they were gone. They didn’t belong on this side of the fence. I’d imagined them on the other side. We were back in the real world.
Dermot was white and shaking. He was still holding the flagon, which had made it out of the hallucination.
‘That’s it,’ I said, standing. ‘It’s finished.’
He looked at the flagon. It was now of the more usual white plastic variety, and it held a cloudy yellowish liquid. He unscrewed the cap and sniffed it.
‘Cider,’ he said, surprised. ‘It’s really cider.’
He looked at his fingers.
‘That Dan sold us some really good shit,’ he said. He gave me a look, inviting me to contradict him. I didn’t. I knew how difficult it was to deal with my hallucinations. It seemed unfair that Dermot should get caught up in one.
He tramped off across the field.
After that, the journey home was uneventful.
TWELVE
I
When we got to my flat I dialled 1471 on the phone and discovered that Tina had been calling me while I wasn’t there. I rang her back and asked what she wanted.
‘I just wanted to ask whether you and Dermot would like to come out for tea,’ she said. ‘The weather reports say it’s getting stormy in Wales and we could use some extra bodies around in case we need to get everything upstairs in a hurry.’
Execution Plan Page 12
