Land Under England

by Joseph O'Neill

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Face of a Stranger

  MY GUIDE passed along the quay with the swift, even pace of these people, then turned to the left and mounted a flight of steps that led up the wall of the quay.

  At the top we found ourselves on a narrow platform of rock, from which more flights of steps led upward towards the lights of the settlement. Above that, again, I could see a great mass of masonry towering from west to east, with lights showing through a great number of openings that rose in tiers over one another, as if there were dwellings, storey above storey.

  We had now reached the top of the plateau, and the enclosures of the settlement stood in front of us.

  Somewhere in these enclosures my father was waiting for me. A broad road led through the enclosures towards the great Wall. We followed this. It was well lighted with globes on pillars.

  I stared ahead eagerly. At every moment I thought I might see him coming to meet me.

  From the main road other paths ran to right and left, but we kept on straight towards the wall. The road was mounting upwards, first in a slope, then by broad shallow flights of steps. At the top of one of these flights we came upon an armed man. I stared at him. It was the first soldier that I had seen in this country. He was armed, like a Roman legionary, with short sword in a belt and a spear in his hand, but he wore no armour—not even a helmet. He was an automaton, and paid no attention to us.

  The great Wall was now looming high over us, a magnificent piece of rough masonry at least a hundred feet in height.

  Two soldiers appeared from the right. My guide handed me over to them. They turned back to the right, then to the Wall again, and, after a few more paces, stopped.

  We were at the door of a sort of porch that stood out from the Wall. A man came forward and beckoned me to follow him. My knees were trembling so that they hardly supported my body. I heard my teeth clicking against one another with a sound so loud in that silence that it almost deafened me, or was it the pounding of my heart that was beating on my ears with such a roaring?

  We were passing along a stone corridor, with rooms opening off it to the right. Then the corridor turned a little to the left, and a door opened in front of us. My guide passed through it. I followed him. We were in a long, low room. There were four armed men in the room, one at each side of the door we had entered and one at each side of a door at the far end on the right. We went towards this. At the door my guide stopped for a moment, and motioned me to stop. Then he passed through the door. In a moment he came back and beckoned me to follow him in. I did so.

  I was in a long hall, with a table at the far end. At the table three men were sitting—two men of the normal size of these people; the third man, who sat between them, was a head and shoulders over them. It was my father.

  Even at the distance of the length of the hall I could see his face—not very distinctly, owing to the confused lighting, but quite enough to know that it was he.

  I began to run. The guide caught me by the arm. Immediately a soldier caught me by the other arm. I pulled my arms away from them violently and hurried up the hall.

  Then, as I came clear into the ring of lights that fell from the globes on to the faces of the men at the table, I stopped. The man in the centre was not my father! The outline of the face was the same as his, but there the resemblance stopped.

  I was looking at the face of a stranger—not merely of a stranger as men are strange on earth, but of a creature entirely alien. The eyes stared at me with a dead fixity and were completely empty. But it was not only the eyes. The rest of the face was as blank and vacant as the eyes— empty of all the little detailed features that made the face I knew, empty of all humanity, all associations, all memory and experience.

  I stood staring in dismay. Then, as I looked, a change began.

  A thrill ran through me. The eyes were beginning to come alive with expression. But what was happening? The expression that was coming into them was an expression of hatred.

  I stood staring, transfixed by the change that was coming over the face. It was no longer empty. The eyes were alive. They were now glaring with life, a life that seized and held me with hatred.

  I stared back with a sickening feeling. All the time that I had been coming to meet him I had been so sure that, even if he had become an isolated automaton, I would, the moment I met him, rush over to him, put my arms round him, call him all the dear names we had for him, and so seize him back again from them. I had been dreaming that, if only I could meet him, no barrier that they could have put between us could withstand the force of the impact of my love for him.

  Now I stood dumbly staring at him. I made no attempt to call or approach him. I would as soon have called out to the mask that was the face of the brute spiders as to that face in front of me. Compared with it, the faces of even the most isolated automatons were kindly. They at least were not malevolent, but those eyes that were staring at me out of my father’s face were full of hatred.

  It was not merely a message that was coming to me from him. It was a torrent of loathing for everything I stood for—my loves and hopes and fears, my memories of him and of my mother and of our life together, all the associations that went to make up my personality; those staring eyes expressed such hatred of it all that I felt myself trembling under their impact.

  I instinctively tried to back away from him, but I could not move. His loathing of me was seizing me, pouring over my mind, burning it, searing it.

  I tried to put up my hands to ward off the horror. I could not. I was paralysed, gripped in a vice. I made a convulsive effort, like the effort of a man in a dream to escape from some dreadful thing. Then I felt myself falling—falling—through gulfs——

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Conflict

  THE PERIOD that followed the meeting with the man that had taken possession of the body of my father is for me one of horror.

  I have no clear memory of it in the upper regions of my consciousness, since I was held down in a deep coma for most of the time, but my whole being remembers it as if it were some pre-natal experience that was sensed with every nerve. I can give no continuous account of it, however, that could convey a coherent impression to any human being, beyond the fact that I felt like a creature whose mind and will were being dismembered by forces that were physical in their impact.

  There are fragments of memories that drift through my mind; memories of an overpowering hail of blows that seemed to rain on my will; shadows like great dark wings that were battering and blinding me; a snarling horror that was tearing at my mind with beak and talons—but these can only have been phantoms of my own mind, scattered debris of some great mental suffering that I endured for a time that seemed an eternity, but that, for all I know, may have been short by human reckoning.

  Another memory that remains with me from that suffering is a conviction that, if I gave myself up to the thing that was attacking me, I could have great peace.

  This memory takes the form of a glimmer of rays that seemed to keep coming to me from above—a beating of bright power, as if from a great light that would descend upon me and destroy the horror, and envelop me in peace and perfect joy, if I would only surrender myself to it.

  For moments even, the horror would cease. I would get a glimpse of perfect happiness. Then, with my refusal, there would come the swift searing impact again. For I always refused.

  That was the marvellous thing. I refused to give myself up.

  It was not that I was heroic. I feel that I cried out in my suffering, and cringed and whined. I have no conscious memory of that, but my body still seems to remember, in every nerve, pitiful whining cries that must have been wrung from it—cries, perhaps without sound, with which I must have answered the pressure on my mind when it became so unbearable that I must yield in some thing or die.

  I did not intend to die, unless I could find no other way of escape from surrender to the thing that was violating me, and I did not intend to surrender, e
ven if death were the final penalty that I must pay for not giving myself up.

  I know why I did not give in. It was because, through the very torture that was being inflicted on it, my mind grasped fully the nature of the thing that encompassed it.

  Until then the darkness had been only hovering over me. It had been hovering like a vulture whose wings shut out the world, but it had not closed with me. It had not come close enough for me to know it, as I learned to know it now, and this deep comprehension that I was obtaining of it made it impossible for me to accept it as long as my mind held. My emotion had been too profoundly aroused to allow of my will yielding.

  If they had had sufficient understanding of me to invade me through the love I bore my father, they might have got me. Only through my father could they have worked on my emotion, but they had killed him, and put into his body this thing that hated me and could only arouse in me a corresponding hatred. Now they could never get me while I was alive and sane.

  They may not have had any choice in the matter. Possibly my father could have been resynthesised only by deepening his monomania of hatred for the “Hun,” the barbarian that had destroyed Rome. He had come to them late, and it is possible that they could have handled him in no other way but through his hatreds, which could not then be disentangled from his passionate love for Rome. If they had got him as a child, they could probably have eradicated in him all the seeds of hatred, as of all other feelings, except love of the State, but he had developed on his own lines in another world in which love of country, for most men, means a potential hatred of all other countries that might attack her. Now that his body was emptied of all knowledge and memory and emotion, except its love for the Roman State, the mind that possessed it could have only one feeling towards me when we met—a hatred of this thing that was not absorbed.

  The creature that remained of what had been my father, instead of meeting me with love, met me with outrage. The result was that my emotions were roused to the fiercest opposition, and my mind was not alone left clear for resistance, but was driven on to it with every power it possessed.

  One result was that, while my will bent all its forces to defend my personality, even if necessary at the cost of my life, my subconscious mind soared above the conflict, surveying and directing my energies to the fullest use of every power of endurance of which I was capable.

  In this survey it left nothing unexamined, nothing untouched. It saw this underworld State clearly as the monstrous machine that it was—a blind thing, with no vision, no pity, no understanding, not even an understanding of that human need to love that it used to enslave its victims.

  It saw that I was the only human being left in that world outside the machine; that, under that dome, which was the land of England, I must make a stand for humanity against the Frankenstein’s monster that, having devoured the highest as well as the lowest, now functioned mechanically in a world in which man, as we know him, had ceased to exist.

  It saw that, if this machine that had come alive could obtain knowledge—not wisdom or real knowledge, for of that it was incapable, but the technical knowledge that I had stored in my brains —if it could force this knowledge into its possession, with me as the controlling and directing robot, and add our scientific powers to its own tremendous discoveries, then a new and ghastly era might open up for mankind.

  As I have said, I did not know all this consciously at the time, since my consciousness was only the spasmodic one of a man in a deep fever; but I must have known it with deep subconscious knowledge, for, when I awoke from the fever, I knew it all fully, clearly, as I have often on waking known clearly things that I did not know when falling asleep.

  I also knew that now there was a danger to mankind from this people that had not existed before. I knew that the man who had displaced my father was seizing my mind, not because he wanted me to be absorbed in the Roman State, as the others did, but because the remnant of memory in his mind had sensed the value of the scientific resources in mine, and was determined to subserve them to his fixed and ruling passion—the crazy determination to seize back again the lands of the upper earth from the barbarians.

  I have called his ruling passion crazy, but I do not mean that his idea was entirely impossible.

  It is true that, even if he were able to seize my mind and use it to equip the underearth State with modern armaments, that people could scarcely have accomplished his dream.

  Even with the extraordinary combination of powers that our knowledge combined with theirs would have given them, their State could not have stood any real chance of a successful invasion of England in normal circumstances.

  But normal circumstances are not always to be counted on even in England. If she were in death-grips with a very powerful enemy, if part of her population were in revolt, as the population in Russia revolted after the Great War, if a Fascist or Nazi section of her own citizens made common cause with the underearth invaders, because of the similarity of their doctrines, nobody could tell what might happen.

  The danger would be greater because nobody could suspect that, under the green earth of England, an outcast offspring of its own people, that had bred inward in the fearsome human swamp into which it had been driven, was gathering itself for a spring into the upper world again, under the urge of a madman who combined the evil of the light and the darkness.

  It was as if some monstrous reptile bred in the festering swamps were about to launch itself over the kindly chaotic world of men for which my heart was longing.

  If that happened, then the sun could matter no more nor the rain nor the green of grass that was the thirst of my soul.

  And it could only happen through me—if I gave in. That conviction was, I believe, one of the chief things that saved me.

  As I have said, I did not consciously think of all this, at the time, with the surface of my mind.

  I could not have done so, since for the greater part of the time, I was dark on the surface of my mind to external things. But I knew it deeply, and this knowledge that there were possibly deeper things at stake than even the existence of my own individual soul did, I believe, nerve me to the endurance that carried me through to the end. However it happened, I did endure, and I did win through.

  I won through because that people, although it is pitiless, is also passionless. When they realised clearly that I would die before I gave myself up to them, they ceased their efforts to absorb me.

  Unlike many peoples on earth, they do not desire the death of anyone merely because he will not yield to them. They bore me no ill-will. Punishment for its own sake is not part of their code. My death was not necessary to the State; therefore they did not will it.

  Their respect for the living human body is indeed an essential result of their doctrine of the irreparable waste and loss that is death, according to their understanding of it. It is to postpone this doom as far as possible that they have sacrificed all the things that seem to us worth living for; but they are logical in their doctrine, and they, who so calmly kill the individual lives of their people, will not, if they can at all avoid it, murder a human body.

  They certainly never do so deliberately, under the cover of fine catch-words such as “atonement” or “punishment” or “justice,” much less under battle-cries like “the duty of the State.” They liberated me when they saw that, if they continued to work on me, the only result could be my death.

  When I say “they,” I do not include amongst them the man who had been substituted for my father. The capacity for hatred that my father had brought from our world, had, as I have already said, not only not been eliminated with the destruction of his personality, but had been intensified in the being that had taken his place, and, if the final decision as to my fate had lain with him, I should now be dead. I had proof of this later, but, even before the proof came to me, I needed no evidence stronger than the hatred that had poured itself through the eyes that looked at me from my father’s face, and the hatred of me that the mind whic
h now possessed his body implanted on my subconscious life during the period of hypnotic trance or coma, when my body was lying helpless under its power.

  One other effect produced by my conflict with him was that I comprehended at last the truth of their statement that there was no such person here below as the father I had known.

  I could no longer have the slightest doubt. My father was dead. They had killed him and put something else in his place—a creature whose only knowledge of me was the knowledge of hatred; a being entirely incapable of anything so complicated as the life of even the simplest person on earth, though endowed with an almost superhuman will-power, generated through the liberation of its monomania from all qualifying knowledge and circumstance.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Free

  I LAY STARING UPWARDS. A quiver of nausea began to shake me. I tried to hold myself, but couldn’t. My body was moving in convulsive waves of flesh that ran round it, but, as the waves ran over me, the sense of nausea was lessening. Something was passing off me. I was feeling freer, not in the mind, but in the body, as if some cramp that had seized my frame was losing its grip.

  Gradually my body became relaxed. I lay quiet. My mind was now beginning to grasp things. A blackness was lying over it, a feeling of deep anguish and dread.

  Then suddenly there came a sense of a great liberation. I had escaped! The darkness was behind me—not on top of me, all round me. I was free of it.

  I felt myself breathing in deep gasps, like a man who has just escaped from drowning. But I had escaped. The horror had almost got me, but I had escaped. Then I remembered. It was my father!

  I lay for a moment stiffened with the knowledge.