The Prayer Machine

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  ‘Which?’

  ‘The one you suggested to Father Stillwell.’

  ‘Ah, he’s spoken to you?’

  ‘Yes. He said you would use yourself as bait to keep Mr Prentice from sliding into total psychosis.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to sound conceited.’

  ‘I know … Well, we must proceed objectively without too many preconceived notions.’

  Ann Marie said with a touch of anger, ‘Father Stillwell had no right to pass on my remarks, even to you. What else did he say that was private between him and me?’

  ‘Ann Marie, you can’t blame a preacher for preaching. It’s his job. Father Stillwell didn’t talk with me, he talked at me. He was not personal in the sense you mean. Besides, aren’t you trying to have it both ways? You’ve left the church, so in theory at least you can’t regard what you say to Father Stillwell as sacrosanct.’

  ‘That is a technicality, Dr Schuber.’

  ‘Maybe. But to my mind your decision was hasty.’

  ‘So now, are you going to preach also?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What time do we start the therapy?’

  ‘Seven o’clock tonight. I’m giving the police till then to come up with some definite information concerning whether or not that canister was opened.’

  ‘If they haven’t found it they cannot know.’

  ‘Still, we mustn’t be pessimistic. At least they’ll know what happened if they find it. To open the cannister you have to break the seals.’

  ‘Doctor, it could be anywhere in Devon.’

  ‘I’m aware of that. I also know that geiger counters won’t help find radio-cobalt inside a lead container.’

  ‘What happens if they do find it — do you go ahead still with the therapy?’

  ‘Naturally. I don’t believe in Mr Prentice’s ability to work magic. If they don’t know where to find it, he won’t either. Where’s Neil now?’

  ‘In Exeter. Can I borrow a car? I’m not allowed to drive the convent car any longer.’

  ‘Yes, take the jeep.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Schuber.’

  ‘Hadn’t we better drop this “Dr Schuber” business? We’re all in the muck together now.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And while you’re about it, make sure Neil limits the amount of liquid he takes from two o’clock onwards.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Well — is there something else?’

  Ann Marie spoke hesitantly. ‘Neil says it’s essential to record tonight’s therapy.’

  ‘We’ve had to return the video.’

  ‘Just the sound, then.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He says … if he fails to get back …’

  ‘What’s this new slant?’

  ‘If he fails to get back, I mean, out of the trance, any information he may attempt to pass would come out … backwards. I know it sounds …’

  ‘Batty? On the other hand it’s his mind that will be speaking. So if he predetermines that he’s going to talk back-to-front we must be prepared for it.’ She handed the file over. ‘You’d better get cracking on creating the maximum transference possible in the time — if you believe in your cause. I concede that you look as if you could achieve anything.’

  ‘I did not seek a compliment, but thank you. However, there’s no technical jargon — a “tranference” or anything else — to cover what I have to try to do.’

  Once more, Jane felt snubbed, and could feel the hotness of her cheeks. This time she buried her head in the filing cabinet, searching for nothing.

  *

  Just for irony’s sake the weather in Exeter turned out perfect.

  Neil said, ‘We might almost be in your Provencal countryside. How does this compare?’

  ‘Very favourably … if only I could remember what Cannes really looks like … but there’s a certain innocence about Devon weather.’

  ‘But not always.’ He was thinking of the foetid nettles in the lane. He said, ‘Is Riviera sunshine innocent?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s merely there to ensure that everyone wears those terrifically dark glasses — you know? — No eyes and all goggles. What happened up at the college?’

  Neil said, ‘I managed to study the seismograms without explaining why I was doing it. Of course, they’re corrupted by the heavy traffic. But at least I was able to check that there had been a definite pulse at the time of the last nuclear tests — your very own French ones.’

  ‘Don’t remind me.’

  ‘I shan’t hold you entirely responsible … Anyway, there is no sign that earthless quakes show up on the trace. Braknell showed up all right, though.’

  ‘Complete with murderous looks?’

  ‘He wanted to know what I was doing at the university.’

  Ann Marie said, ‘One might ask why he was there himself.’

  ‘I know why he was there. He’s trying to prove that TNA is not only harmful as a treatment but basically toxic to the body.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Probably. Most things are, if you take enough. Butter can be fatal. But he’s got this convention coming up and he’s determined to clamp down on Jane Schuber. Anyway, the reports are that he’s injected some mice with huge doses.’

  ‘In that case they’ll all fall down a black mouse-hole.’

  ‘Where’s your car?’

  ‘Parked in Cathedral Square. It’s Jane Schuber’s old jeep — complete with two inches play in the steering. By the way, I’m no longer a nun.’

  ‘I guessed. Nuns don’t normally dress like that. Do you think what you did was wise? It’s all a bit sudden, surely?’

  ‘Everybody tells me that. But you can’t gradually stop being a nun, like Dr Jeckyll slowly becoming Mr Hyde.’

  ‘I appreciate the problem. But which of the two is really you?’

  She grimaced. ‘Perhaps both.’

  ‘Then we both have a problem.’

  ‘You are still in my charge though, Neil Prentice.’

  ‘So where are you taking me, in this old wreck?’

  ‘The moor,’ she said instantaneously, without thinking.

  ‘Why there, particularly?’

  She stared straight ahead. ‘I don’t know.’

  Cathedral Square was scorching in the sun; but the cathedral itself stood stark against a black sky to the west. It highlighted the stonework — recently refaced — so that an almost claustrophobic shimmer of light flooded the forecourt in contrast with the portentous threat beyond it.

  Neil said, ‘Does it feel strange?’

  ‘A little.’ She grimaced. ‘The cathedral — it disapproves. It glowers. Like Father Stillwell. He glowers sometimes.’

  ‘I think you’ll miss it all.’

  ‘I can’t have it both ways. That’s the trouble. You have to choose. There are so many forces in people’s lives. Yours, for instance. What is it you’re really seeking all the time?’ She got in the westbound traffic stream. ‘You go further and further into your own mind. Why?’

  ‘Because it isn’t mine. Not entirely.’

  She nodded. ‘I know what you mean. I was like that. My mind belonged to God. Much went on inside it that was … not my business. It was God’s business and I felt He chose the wrong person.’

  ‘You won’t find it easy to shake him off.’

  ‘I know. But your problem is even bigger. They won’t allow you to shake them off.’

  ‘You do really believe that?’

  She drove on in thoughtful silence. ‘I watched you carefully, during the therapy. You were lying on the operating table. And yet you had departed. I knew it. I was very much afraid about it. Your body wasn’t you, for a time. It was … empty, yet it had a pulse, and it breathed, and sometime it moved, a little. But you’d gone. Where?’

  ‘Where I’d gone depends on how you interpret what really happens when you give someone TNA.’

  ‘But you have a belief, surely?’

  ‘If I have, it’s very diffi
cult to put into words.’

  ‘You’re afraid to put it into words.’ She gazed at him frankly. ‘I am not Dr Braknell, you know.’

  ‘Ann Marie, there are people somewhere who need help desperately. And if they seem to be only in my mind, that is because it’s the only way they can reach us.’

  ‘For what?’

  He said, ‘What does one community want to tell another? It can only mean some mutual danger; either one we have to avoid ourselves, or one they’ve got themselves in and need our aid.’

  ‘Or both.’ Ann Marie frowned into the sun. ‘It makes me shudder a little. No wonder Jane Schuber can’t be consistent about it. It’s bewildering and frightening.’

  ‘Unless I’m merely very ill.’

  ‘I’ve considered that.’

  ‘Well perhaps we’d better stop talking about it.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter out here. In the daylight. With all these people scurrying in and out of the shops. It’s when I’m alone, trying to think it out. Who are they? What do they want? Why did they choose you and how do they think you can help them?’

  ‘I can see why you threw up your job, Ann Marie.’

  ‘Job! Yes, that brings it down to earth with a big bang. Vocation sounds so convincing … so why did I give up my “job”?’

  ‘Because you’re far too intelligent to be a nun.’

  ‘There are plenty of intelligent nuns. It’s not because I think I’m smart that I got out. It’s my emotions. They’re different. I cannot sublimate them any longer. It isn’t as if I stopped living — anything like that. Nuns do live.’

  ‘They live other people’s lives.’

  ‘Isn’t that exactly what you’re doing now, Neil? In my Order there was plenty to do.’ She smiled. ‘But, you see, I have nice brothers. They teased me often and so I’ve never taken myself seriously. You have sisters?’

  ‘One or two.’

  ‘You must know!’

  ‘Well, two. Both very silly. They married even sillier men with lots of money and no brains. I think marriage is just as neurotic as being a nun …’

  It was the first time he’d heard her really laugh, and she really did laugh in French, a merry sound that went with the completely lineless face. ‘As Americans say: same difference. But what about children? You don’t like them either?’

  ‘I have a child. Proper little bastard he is too.’

  ‘But from your tone I judge he is a nice little bastard?’

  ‘He’s my best friend.’

  ‘And his mother?’

  ‘She married a stockbroker.’

  ‘So she is now stultified?’

  ‘Completely. But neurotic with it.’

  ‘I cannot imagine a neurotic stockbroker’s wife with her husband’s bastard step-son.’

  ‘The husband advises me on investments.’

  ‘Does he advise her on investments, also? Is that what they do all the time in their bed — discuss stocks and shares?’

  They drove through Dunchideok, where the water tower was. The nettles seemed to have grown doubly thick in the course of twenty-four hours. Now, in the sky, there was only a thin slit through which sunlight still poured. It hazed spectographically through the treetops as if through prisms. Ann Marie said, ‘And your illness — where does that fit in? Or was it brought on by the stockbroker?’

  ‘I’ve been wondering about that illness.’

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘Well, I used to have dreams. They always began the same way. There were these rings … doughnut rings, coming towards me, each ring a different colour. And the voices trying to break through but not formed properly. Almost as if ..’

  ‘Yes? Don’t stop.’

  ‘… as if the People were trying to get through, even then. But they hadn’t perfected the means of doing so. They could disturb space/time, they could disturb me, but couldn’t penetrate with anything intelligible. There were days when the weather was very like how it was yesterday —’

  ‘If you look ahead you’ll see it is there on the moor still.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why you thought of going up there … At the peak of my illness I remember often shouting for the nurse, pleading that I wanted the storm to break, I couldn’t stand the tension — literally, I mean the high tension, the static electricity stored up there in those huge cunim clouds. Then some fancy doctor was called in. He talked a lot about aural hallucinations and got me very worried. I remember that, all right.’

  ‘He sounds pretty tactless … You had started this research — this metapsychology?’

  ‘By then, yes. I was fool enough to mention it to this chummy doctor. Somehow he got it out of me when I wasn’t looking, so to speak. He said something like, “They all rationalize with some involved theory like that”, some such remark. So I shut up about it.’

  ‘This was before the concept of a black hole was in all the scientific magazines?’

  ‘Yes. Six months later, of course, astronomers were complaining that the trajectory of certain celestial bodies didn’t make sense by normal standards. They didn’t even fit Einstein. I began, then, to think of black holes in a special context. It didn’t occur to me that the People were deliberately making me think of black holes, so that I linked them in my mind with metapsychology. For that matter, I didn’t realize until last night that it wasn’t really me who’d decided to go to Norton. They wanted me to go there. They saw to it that I did.’

  At this, Ann Marie looked very thoughtful, biting her lip as if weighing the remark in another light. Aloud she said, ‘Look at those clouds. See? The ugly blackness?’

  He nodded. ‘That inverted boot, or anvil, or however you like to describe it, is typical of cumulo-nimbus. They’re weird, those clouds. Very dangerous to fly through, they can break up an aeroplane in just a few seconds, snap the wings off, or hurl you up and down as if the world’s gone crazy. When I flew back from America —’

  ‘This was after your illness?’

  ‘Yes … I’d got myself invited up front, on the flight deck. I’m a pilot myself, can’t resist the front end of an aeroplane. Anyway, we had engine trouble, nothing very serious, but flying on three engines instead of four, and we couldn’t get over the top of a great freak of a thing like you see ahead. We couldn’t get round it and we couldn’t go underneath it. There was no way except through the cloud.

  ‘That can be tricky. The captain throttled right back and put the seat-belt light on. I stayed up front and strapped into the jump seat.

  ‘Well, it was rough. We hit that anvil like solid steel and even though the captain held the controls hard forward we were lifted three thousand feet in a few seconds, a fantastic sensation like going up in a rocket, yet the nose of the aircraft was pointed almost vertically down. You looked at the altimeter and couldn’t believe it. The download on the wings was terrifying, we had some nasty moments, but we were flying dead slow and that saved us, I suppose …

  ‘Yet I felt disturbed for another reason, I couldn’t explain it, even to myself. I would have been justified in feeling physical fear, but something much more terrifying lay in wait inside that cloud. It was livid with lightning. The smell which so many people call ozone had entered the flight deck via the air conditioning. It was then that the captain handed me a set of headphones and mimed for me to put them on. On the intercom he said, “Radio! But how? In this mess we shouldn’t be picking up a thing, not mid-Atlantic, anyway. But have a listen … ” ’

  Ann Marie said, ‘I would have thought he would have had other things to think about.’

  ‘Yes … And it was really rough, up there. By then, both pilots were having to heave at the controls, to get some semblance of stability out of that aircraft. All I heard, at first, was the crackle of the storm lightning in the headphones. Then there came a high-pitched whine, as if someone had switched on some electrical equipment. The captain heard it too, and glanced across at the co-pilot as if to query whether he’d accidentally hit the switch for the boo
ster pumps. Then the voice came, distinct and despairing. “If you can communicon, transmit now!” Like that. The captain replied, “Go ahead”, and the voice came back: “We’re through to them! We’ve licked the dopplar shift! They’re there!” ’

  ‘Weird.’

  ‘It was. Then we broke cloud. The voices went and we flew on in silence. All of us thinking, who the hell was it? Then, after we landed, the captain played the monitor tape over to me in the crew room. The voice was clearly recorded and we thought of approaching the press. Then some nit went and shoved the tape on top of some electrical equipment. Inside was a powerful electric motor. The magnetic field from the motor wiped the tape clean. When we tried to play it over again there wasn’t a thing on it.’

  ‘What about the aircrew, Neil? Wouldn’t they admit what they heard?’

  ‘In those days a lot of people were reporting UFOs and things. Funny remarks were being made about airline pilots with lurid imaginations. I wrote to the captain so that he could confirm what happened … explained it had a bearing on some research I was doing. He never replied.’

  ‘What would your “fancy doctor” have said if you’d been able to prove it?’

  ‘The fact was, I couldn’t …’ It was getting so dark that Ann Marie switched on the lights. The moor was moist from humidity. A smell like scorched cables came acrid to their nostrils. Neil said, ‘It smelled just like that yesterday. What’s the matter? Why are we stopping?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps the jeep is frightened.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Of thunderstorms? Not usually. It’s just that there’s no one else around.’

  ‘The police can’t be far away. They’re still searching for that radio-cobalt. Here, try the choke.’

  ‘No good.’ The jeep had ground to a sullen halt near a forest. Piled high, not far from the roadside, was an unsightly refuse dump. Ann Marie said, ‘Funny place to put rubbish.’

  Neil got out and examined the engine. ‘In a national park. Very unfunny … Turn the engine. With the starter.’ She did. ‘No spark. It’s the ignition.’