Cloud Walker, All Fools' Day, Far Sunset

by Cooper, Edmund

  Sadistically, Greville poured more water at the feet of Professor Francis Watkins. ‘Now tell us all about your religious persuasion,’ he said pleasantly. ‘If it sounds interesting, we might even give you a drink of water. If you can convince us that it’s rather jolly to chop people up and crucify them, we might even be kind enough to finish you off. But don’t bore us. We don’t like to be bored.’

  Despite his ghastly appearance, and despite the pain, the man on the sacks managed to smile. ‘Anything is a fair trade for water,’ he murmured. ‘Sir, you are addressing a conscript lay member of the quite extraordinary order of the Brothers of Iniquity. I was starving and they fed me. I was useful and they let me live … The great joke is that I once had the effrontery to consider myself an authority on abnormal psychology.’ He began to laugh, but the laughter died into a thin, bubbly scream.

  Suddenly Liz took the jug out of Greville’s hand. She bent down, and cradled Professor Francis Watkins in her arms like an overgrown child. Then she gave him some water.

  ‘Thank you, my dear. It hurts, you know. It hurts even to discover that there is compassion left in England today.’

  EIGHTEEN

  Despite his optimism – and in the circumstances it must have been justifiably described as such – Professor Francis Watkins, authority on abnormal psychology and temporary Brother of Iniquity, was not mortally wounded. A bullet had passed through his shoulder, another had ploughed through the top of his leg, and his arms and hands had been bitten by dogs. But with reasonable care, he would live.

  That much Liz discovered when, regardless of Greville’s obvious disgust, she ripped away the ‘monk’s’ habit and began to clean up the wounds as well as she could. The blood coming from Professor Francis Watkins’s mouth was simply due to the fact that he had bitten his tongue rather badly when the wounds were still fresh and giving him quite a lot of pain.

  Greville resented the man on the pile of sacks. He resented him because his own blood-lust was dying, because, caught between pity and hatred and revulsion, he was no longer sure of himself. Professor Francis Watkins was not a young man. He was fat and sixtyish and pathetic. He was the kind of transie to whom things were destined to happen simply because he completely lacked the art of avoiding anything. As some people are accident prone, this man was disaster prone. That, thought Greville, you could tell at a glance. If anything terrible was going to occur, he was the kind of man who would be naturally drawn to it as to a magnet.

  The water revived him a little, and so did Liz with her inexpert ministrations. While she cleaned him up the tears streamed down his face in gratitude; and when he had got over the crying he began to pour out his story – regardless of the pain it caused his tongue – in a spontaneous act of confession.

  While civilisation was collapsing upon itself, Professor Francis Watkins, whose own psychology turned out to be more abnormal than he had formerly supposed, retired to his library with stocks of food as large as he could muster, prepared to sit out what he had first regarded as only a temporary and rather interesting return to the Dark Ages.

  But the Dark Ages got darker instead of lighter, the food store dwindled slowly away; and in the end he was forced to go out and risk his life – and, more important, the future of his library – for such delicacies as potatoes, turnips and, in the end, even carrion. He was no cook, but he had discovered that you could eat practically anything if you boiled it long enough.

  The trouble was he was not much good at finding food. Sooner or later he would have to quit his beloved library or die in it of starvation. He could not drive a car, he could not fight and he could only just manage to pull the trigger of a gun. The wonder was that he had managed to survive it all.

  Finally, when he had gone two days without food, an idea came to him. Civilisation had collapsed, but surely small centres of culture and learning must be flourishing somewhere? He just could not imagine a world in which all that he regarded of value had disappeared.

  Granting, then, the existence of intelligent groups of people more fortunate than himself – people, doubtless whose primary concern would be the preservation of all that was worthwhile (to him, this only meant books) until the return of sane social organisation – it merely remained for him to find one of these groups, attach himself to it and wait patiently until the world was ready to appreciate the significance of Freud and Jung, of Adler and Pavlov, of Yevtushenko and Eysenck once more.

  That was the theory. It seemed a good theory. There was only one problem. Professor Francis Watkins had acquired one of the best private libraries on psychology in the whole of England. He did not want to abandon it. Indeed, it was his duty not to abandon it. Therefore he could either remain with it and die or take the best books with him. Unfortunately he had no means of transport.

  But he was nothing if not a resourceful man. Hunger had sharpened his wits. He could not drive a car, but he could certainly push a small cart. If he could find a cart.

  He couldn’t. However, he found a substitute – or to be strictly accurate, he found three substitutes. They were perambulators that he discovered in a derelict baby-wear shop. They were the only forms of transport that he could lay his hands on.

  So he filled them full of books. The choice was heartbreaking. Even loaded to overflowing, the perambulators could only carry about twenty per cent of the books that he considered essential for the foundation of a decent library in psychology.

  And having filled the perambulators with his best books – the task of selection alone took him the best part of three days – he set off into the bright blue yonder. He didn’t know where to go, but he felt that if he journeyed long enough in almost any direction sooner or later he would find sanctuary.

  His method of progress was simple. He would push the first perambulator about a hundred yards, then he would come back for the second, and then for the third. Assuming that he could get enough food to keep body and soul together, he calculated that he would be able to cover five miles a day. At that rate, he told himself, it ought not to take longer than a month before he came across people who were similarly dedicated to keeping the intellectual achievements of the world alive.

  There were only two flaws in the grand design. He didn’t really know where he was going; and even if he did, he certainly couldn’t find enough food to sustain him while he was getting there.

  On the strength provided by about six pounds of very old potatoes and the rancid remains of a two-pound tin of butter, he wandered about for eight or nine days, meticulously pushing the first perambulator, going back for the second and then for the third. It was a miracle that be avoided being eaten by dogs or rats. And perhaps in doing so he had used up his entire ration of miracles.

  For, having consumed the last of his potatoes and the last of his butter, he suddenly realised that he was not going anywhere at all, and lay down to die. It was then that the Brothers of Iniquity found him.

  If he had been more than half alive, they would have killed him. As he was obviously more than half dead, they did their best to save him. Their best consisted simply of giving him food and keeping him warm. For a day or two he raved, believing that, surrounded as he was by tonsured heads and robes of Hessian and even sack-cloth, he had truly arrived back in the Dark Ages. But then he grew lucid and began to get better.

  So the Brothers of Iniquity shaved his head, provided him with a monk’s habit and initiated him as a compulsory novice. The initiation rites of the Brothers of Iniquity were simple and exceedingly effective; the novice was forced to do what he most disliked doing. Men who were physical cowards were forced to fight against veterans of the Order with knives, razors or bottles. Men who were naturally courageous were made to endure all kinds of indignities without the means of retaliation. Men who were normally sexed were handed over to a group of homosexuals. Men who could not swim were thrown into a river. Men who could not bear to be alone were given a period of solitary confinement. And so on. Every man had his Achilles’ heel, a
nd every man was subject to public exposure and degradation.

  Professor Francis Watkins was not greatly interested in women, so the Brothers of Iniquity produced for him a half-starved nymphomaniac whom they had acquired in their travels and neglected to rape or kill only because she would have welcomed both or either.

  The nymphomaniac, a gaunt and physically strong woman who looked about twice her actual age, was given a bottle of whisky and the promise of solid food for every successful completion of the sexual act that she could achieve with Professor Francis Watkins. The two of them were locked in a cellar for a day and a night – at the end of which time Professor Francis Watkins was hysterical and the woman had earned a credit of three meals. The degradation was witnessed by a senior Brother, who kept a long but somewhat entertaining vigil for the purpose.

  This, however, was only the first part of the initiation. The Brothers had noted that, above all, Professor Francis Watkins wished to preserve his books. So they made him burn them. It was the only occasion on which he attempted to display courage. He refused to light the bonfire and told them that they could kill him first.

  The Brothers of Iniquity had no intention of killing him. They merely offered him the choice of burning the books or spending an unspecified time locked up with the nymphomaniac. He decided to burn his books. Anything seemed preferable to the kind of rape that had not, to the best of his knowledge, been documented or even suggested in the books he was about to destroy.

  It was only afterwards, when his spirit was broken, that he realised there were compensations in belonging to the Brothers of Iniquity. The Order, though not unique in history, was certainly unique in modern times. It embodied a form of mania that was in itself fascinating. For the Brothers of Iniquity were dedicated to the propositions that God was mad, cruel and utterly absurd.

  God, they believed (or, at least, the fanatics among them believed), had brought about Omega radiation and the Radiant Suicide simply because man was in danger of developing a rational, healthy and flourishing society. Further, they believed that God had purposely left the process of destruction incomplete because he wished to offer redemption to the chosen. The chosen were, of course, the Brothers of Iniquity. It was their mission to complete God’s work among the lesser mortals; and when they had completed the task of cleansing the planet they would then be able to enjoy the ultimate privilege of destroying themselves. At which point, according to their theologians, they were destined for immortal madness in some indescribably psychotic heaven until God should choose to have more interesting nightmares and clothe them with substance in some far and infinitely absurd anti-Eden.

  The surprising thing was not that transnormals should develop such ideas but that so many transnormals should be capable of organising themselves so effectively; for the Brothers of Iniquity were numbered now in hundreds. Their mortality rate was high; but so was their rate of recruitment. And their leader, who called himself Brother Lucifer, had the kind of demagogic quality that earlier tyrants might have envied.

  Adopting the proposition that life, being God-given, was absurd, he sought to magnify its absurdity by pursuing absolute frustration along a path of random acts. He permitted the Order to indulge in ritual cannibalism because of its absurdity; but death by torture was the fate of anyone who dared to eat pork because he decreed that pigs, being almost perfectly absurd, were therefore sublime and possibly the purest manifestation of God’s will. On one occasion he had even sacrificed about a hundred of the brethren in a forlorn attempt to save half a dozen pigs from a very large pack of dogs.

  After a time, and humiliated though he was by the constant indignities. heaped upon him in accordance with the precept of absolute frustration, Professor Watkins began almost to enjoy his experiences in a masochistic sort of way. He was in a unique position for field-work, he felt. He had still not abandoned hope that sooner or later the nightmare would end and that somehow he would once again find his way into a world of academic peace and security; but meanwhile he, the trained observer, would record the basic, naked manifestations of human madness and depravity. Some day he would be able to write about it. Some day he would be able to evaluate what had happened and perhaps use his knowledge to do what no one else had ever been able to do before – to evaluate, by negative reference, the basic criteria of sanity.

  But then he was overtaken by the random consequences of Iniquitism. The Brothers, lost in a fog, discovered Ambergreave and decided to sanctify it by their attentions. It was the first time Professor Francis Watkins had seen the philosophy of the Brothers of Iniquity put into practice on a large scale. He was terrified by what he saw. He was also badly bitten; and, in a state of moral and physical collapse, had hidden himself in the windmill, hoping that the Brothers would go away and leave him. But one of them found him before the company departed. When he would not move, and because he seemed to be wounded, he was shot twice for good measure and left to die in his own time.

  This was the story he told Greville and Liz, while taking grateful sips of water and easing himself into a comfortable position. Greville had thought that nothing could surprise him anymore. He was wrong. Professor Francis Watkins could and did surprise him. Give or take a little, thought Greville, there but for the grace of sheer chance go most of us.

  ‘I would add,’ said Professor Francis Watkins, smiling wanly, ‘that despite the care of your good lady, my own stupid constitution and your commendable patience, I would be much obliged if you would discharge that instrument of destruction in such a way as to provide me with the minimum of pain and a fairly rapid demise … I – I rather fear I have seen a little too much.’

  ‘Where are the Brothers of Iniquity now?’ asked Greville.

  The old man shrugged. ‘Who knows. They went to the south – that is, I believe, towards Thetford – but sheer whim could take them anywhere.’ He shuddered. ‘It could even bring them back here … Now, if you would be so kind as to aim carefully and press the trigger … I really think I would be much obliged, you know.’

  If he had pleaded for life, Greville would probably have shot him. But he was pleading for death and, perhaps affected by a philosophy of absurdity himself, Greville refused to grant the final luxury.

  He save Liz an inquiring look. She nodded.

  ‘We’re taking you home,’ said Greville. He laughed grimly. ‘After all, we have our own standards of iniquity to consider.’

  Professor Francis Watkins started crying again.

  NINETEEN

  Francis – for so they came to call him – took quite a long time to recover from his wounds. Being an oldish man, unused to exertion or privation, he did not have much stamina. Nor did he have any will to live. Because of this, and out of sheer perversity, Greville determined that he should live. What was to be done with an ex-professor of psychology, Greville did not know; nor did he care to look very much into the future, for he had a presentiment that, somehow, time was running out.

  The trouble was that he, who had managed alone and had been aloof for so long, had allowed himself to become emotionally involved with mankind once more in the person of Liz. He loved her as he had never loved Pauline. He loved her enough to be more afraid for her than for himself. They had got over the stage of wanting to take from each other and had learned to give to each other. It was a delicious, agonising, heady sort of feeling. It was a mad honeymoon in a nightmare world. Above all, it was a relationship that was utterly vulnerable … And now there was Francis … And suddenly the cottage on the island that was big enough for two was overcrowded. The citadel had become an open city. The hard world of reality, disguised as an old man with bullet wounds and dog bites, had entered by insane invitation through the back door.

  They had carried Francis from the windmill to the edge of the lake in a wheelbarrow. They had ferried him across to the island, taken him into the cottage and dumped him on the bed that had so recently been a bed of love. That, thought Greville, as he levered the old man on to sheets that still b
ore the imprint and even the warmth of recent love and tenderness, was symbolically the end of the honeymoon. There would, with luck, be other times; but they would never again be like the times that had gone.

  It was still daylight, though the sun was already sinking through a quiet sky. Greville told Liz that he was going to go back to Ambergreave and explore a bit more systematically.

  ‘But what if those bloody maniacs come back?’ protested Liz.

  ‘That’s one of the things I want to find out,’ said Greville. ‘My guess is that the fog saved us last night. If they’d known there was an island in the lake, an island with a house on it, very likely they’d have had a go. According to our friend, they have pushed off towards Thetford. He may be right, but it would be damn stupid not to check on it. I’ll take the car and drive a little way along the Thetford road. I just want to make sure they aren’t going to double back.’

  ‘You’ll be careful?’

  ‘Of course, I’ll be careful. What the hell! Do you think I want to get myself hammered?’ Greville’s irritability served to disguise his anxiety.

  ‘I don’t know,’ retorted Liz. ‘Transies do stupid things, don’t they?’

  Greville held her to him for a moment, then went out of the cottage. Life, he thought, was a crazy affair. You could spend years teaching yourself not to care about any damn thing in the world. You could witness suicide, murder, mayhem, starvation, disease and massacre and remain reasonably detached. Then suddenly you were flung head first into a mud-bath of emotion. You struggled in it, you wallowed in it and finally you ended up drowning in it – and caring like hell about every god damned inconsequential tragedy in an inconsequential world.

  He rowed ashore, checked his guns and started the car. Then he drove slowly through Ambergreave, gazing at the horror and desolation that surrounded him in the now fading light, and feeling like a lone survivor in a world irrevocably committed to putrefaction and death.