The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  “Irregular hours do not seem to disturb you in the least,” he observed, with a hint of feigned resentment. “You could not have gone to your bed before five last night, and yet you seem perfectly refreshed. You look ten years younger than I do, although I cannot believe that you are.”

  “Nonsense,” I said, knowing full well that the last thing he wanted was a confirmation of the fact that I was older than he – although of course I was. “You are as handsome as ever, and now that night has fallen the gleam is returning to your own eye. We are two of a kind, you and I; we only come to life after dark, when even the workers of the world must retreat from their toil to the world of thought and imagination: the world where truly human life is lived.”

  More hypocrisy, I thought, more seduction. But how could one possibly have a conscience about lying to a man who prized great lies far above the humble truth?

  “All the workers of the world do not toil by day,” he remarked, as my good Bavarian took advantage of a rare stretch of clear road to whip his team to a fast trot. “Actors work by limelight, and even playwrights sometimes find inspiration in what common men would call insomnia.”

  “That is not work,” I said, “no matter that it is the means by which some men earn their coin. Work is what happens in the fields and in the factories, producing the bare necessities of life. Wheat and meat, clothing and shelter, are the means of physical survival, and their production alone may qualify as authentic toil. The theatre belongs to the life of the mind, to the fabulous realm of luxury and whoredom which is merely the means by which men make life worthwhile.”

  He looked at me curiously, but did not smile, as I had hoped he would. Perhaps he felt insulted by my implication that what playwrights did was a kind of whoredom rather than a species of true labour.

  “Modern factories take no account of day or night,” he said, soberly. “Machines do not care for the sun, or for sleep, but only for power – and because machines are blind and tireless, the men and women who attend them must work shift after shift around the clock. Perhaps it was Wells, and not Copplestone, who read the meaning of their common dream more perspicaciously. Perhaps the tribute of blood was in truth being paid to the machines themselves, not to the overseers whom Copplestone carelessly called vampires.”

  Wilde’s was the fashionable socialism of the upper classes, scrupulously benevolent and safely abstracted from over-extravagant demonstration, but it was by no means insincere. He might have felt a deeper and more painful hatred of social injustice had he been apprenticed to a blacking factory or a draper’s shop, but his vision could not be faulted on grounds of clarity.

  “I had not thought to find you in such a serious mood,” I said, half-apologetically. “I hoped that the anticipation of more gorgeous fabrications would have helped you to be gay.”

  He made a visible effort, then, to throw off his tiredness and the slight peevishness with which it had infected him.

  “You are right, my friend,” he said, “as you almost invariably are. We are two of a kind, despite that you are nobly born and I am not. We are true aristocrats of the mind and of the heart. Forgive me for envying your composure. Ever since I wrote the terrible parable of Dorian Gray I have become acutely conscious of the ageing process, and there are times when I simply cannot help feeling old. My mind is brilliantly young, but my flesh . . .”

  “I would readily trade my sturdy flesh for an artist’s soul, like yours,” I told him.

  He looked at me in the strangest way. “I once wrote a tale of a fisherman’s soul,” he said, “which was cast out to roam free, rather as Copplestone’s soul has roamed, but was so corrupted in the process . . . oh, enough of this dour allegorizing! Let us look forward; let us fix our minds on the remotest future, on the world of the overmen, whose mastery of nature has permitted the transcendence of all frailties. Tell me, Count, do you suppose that the gift of thought will be restored to poor, deprived humanity in Copplestone’s third vision? Do you think that they might somehow turn the tables on their vampire conquerors?”

  “The good ought to end happily, the bad unhappily,” I quoted, casually. “That is what fiction means. But Copplestone so ardently desires to present us with truth and not fiction that he will surely disregard such elementary rules. No, I cannot believe that he will end his story as conventionally as that. I trust, however, that he has kept the best of his surprises up his sleeve, and that he will have something to reveal which none of us could possibly anticipate.”

  I permitted myself a private smile as I said it, thinking that there might be one surprise which I could anticipate – but I spoke more truly than I knew. Because of Wilde’s tardiness we were the last to arrive at Copplestone’s house, and the last to learn of his death.

  We were shown into the dining room, where the others awaited us. The table was not laid but they were all seated around it, very solemnly. The doctor had taken the place at the head of the table which Copplestone had occupied the night before, and he beckoned us impatiently to be seated.

  “This is terrible news,” said Wilde. “How did it happen?”

  “Copplestone died in his sleep,” said the doctor, sadly. “I had given his manservant an instruction that the professor was not on any account to be disturbed, and it was not until noon that he finally crept into his master’s room and found him dead. The man has poisoned himself with his damnable drugs.”

  “We cannot be certain of that, W*****,” his friend put in, mildly.

  “Surely, Mr H*****,” said Wilde, less sarcastically than he probably intended, “you can’t think that Copplestone was murdered?”

  “If he was,” said H*****, quietly, “I doubt that we could prove it. But he was robbed, and on that account I think we must reserve our judgement about the precise manner of his death.”

  “Robbed?” said Wilde. “What was stolen?”

  “The vial which he showed to us last night,” said H*****. “The vial which he intended to offer to us, so that one of us might venture to confirm that his supposed visions of the future were accurate.”

  “But that surely cannot matter,” I put in, smoothly. “Dr W***** still has the formula.”

  “I fear,” said the doctor, blushing beneath his whiskers, “that I have not. As soon as I became aware of the theft from Copplestone’s laboratory I checked my pocket, and found that the envelope had disappeared. It must have been removed from my jacket while it hung in the closet last night.”

  “Not so, W*****,” said H*****. “Had someone entered our rooms, their visit would have left evidential traces. However reluctant you are to admit that your pocket was picked, it happened.”

  “But who would do such a thing?” asked Wells. “And why?”

  “Perhaps the thief did not care to compete with others for the privilege of using the drug,” said H*****.

  “I doubt that the competition would have been fierce,” said Tesla, drily. “Had the thief known that Copplestone lay dead in his bed, he could have been reasonably certain that there would be a dearth of volunteers.”

  “Perhaps the professor’s worst fears were justified,” I suggested, cynically. “Perhaps the vampires who rule the world whose secrets he penetrated did indeed contrive to find a way to reach back into time, so that they might cancel out his discovery, thus promoting their contingent future to the security of destiny.”

  This was not a line of inquiry which H***** desired to explore. “This is a serious matter,” he said, sternly. “Copplestone is dead, and the remainder of the drug has been stolen. I accuse no one, but the fact remains that the only people who knew in any real detail what Copplestone believed he had discovered are here in this room. The doctor and I have questioned the servants, but neither of them had any real idea of the nature of their master’s work, and no evident motive for the theft.”

  “I cannot see that any of us had an evident motive,” said the American. “There was nothing in what we heard last night to suggest that Copplestone’s visions were an
ything more than mere delusion, and Mr Wells gave us some reason to suspect that the delusion may have had a perfectly ordinary seed in something he had read or heard about.”

  “As far as I can see,” Wells put in, “there are only two people in this room who had ample opportunity to seize both the vial and the formula. Has anyone else been to this house today, except for Dr W***** and Mr H*****?”

  “That,” said the great detective, seemingly untroubled by the back-handed accusation, “is one thing we ought to ascertain.”

  Understandably, no one confessed to having visited the house. I assumed that no one had. I had not; there had been no need, when I could so easily send another in my stead.

  “Are you certain, doctor,” said Crookes, “that Copplestone did not get up after you put him to bed last night? He might have removed the vial himself. Perhaps he discarded the compound, having thought better of his offer to let us poison ourselves with it.”

  “We did not find the marked vial,” H***** said. “That suggests . . .”

  “This is a waste of time,” said Tesla. “If we’re here to listen to the third part of Copplestone’s story, let’s hear it. Otherwise, I’ll be on my way. I’ve no intention of sitting here while Mr H***** interrogates me.”

  “How is it,” I enquired, curiously, “that we may hear the third part of the story, given that poor Copplestone is no longer alive to tell it?”

  “I discovered that there is a written record of Copplestone’s third vision,” the doctor explained. “It must have been made immediately afterwards. His suspicions regarding the attempts which might be made by the people of the far future to prevent his publicizing his discoveries, however absurd they may have been, were quite real. The verbal accounts which he gave us of his first two dreams were, of course, much fuller and more considered than this written version of his third dream, but . . .”

  “Oh, get on with it, man!” said Wilde, intemperately.

  The doctor looked around for moral support, but there was little to be found, even from his friend. The doctor, somewhat shamefacedly, left the room to fetch the relevant document.

  “Let us leave the matter of the theft to one side, for now,” said the detective, equably. I noticed, though, that his eyes were fixed on me. I wondered what he might possibly have deduced or found out that inspired him to favour me with such a glance, but I was very careful to meet his gaze without the least hint of discomfiture.

  XIII

  “You must remember,” said the doctor, “that these documents were not intended for publication. There is doubtless much of Copplestone’s experience that is omitted altogether, and what passes for straightforward reportage is continually interrupted by comments, questions and what I can only describe as philosophical rhapsodies. There is much herein which remains wholly mysterious to me.”

  In the privacy of my thoughts I echoed Wilde’s admonition, but at last he began to read.

  “I must be calm. I must at least try to make a sober and intelligible record. To put pen to paper is to diminish the experience ludicrously, perhaps to distort it utterly, but I must try.

  “The hill again, less steep. The forest very different: huge trees, far taller and straighter than anything known on earth in my own time; the foliage ranging from turquoise to purple, the light filtered through the canopy subdued and bluish – comfortable to the eyes of overmen?

  “Machines everywhere: tiny metal cells able to associate, like the golem, transforming themselves into complex ‘organisms’. What are the limits of their virtuosity? How many different kinds are there? Why did organic life not evolve according to this pattern, so that hordes of protozoans might come together to take whatever form might suit their temporary circumstances? Could the shapeshifting overmen be the product of some such evolutionary sequence?

  “The machines immediately responded to my presence. It mattered not at all that ten thousand years or more had passed since my last manifestation; once a society has true history, nothing can be lost or forgotten, and machines are exceedingly patient. It would not have mattered to those watching for me had I never embarked upon my third expedition; they would have waited for ever, without impatience or disappointment. No flying machine this time. No journey. No confrontation. No locking of curious stares by man and overman, victim and vampire, primitive and sophisticate. Had I realized what was happening I would have been frightened and appalled, but the process of possession was invisible and painless. The insectile machines came, saw, associated, did their work and dissolved.

  “What the machines did was to make more machines, even tinier than they: ephemeral machines whose magnitude was akin to that of the bacterial organisms which are the agents of many diseases. They infected me with the ‘artificial germs’ which they had made. Were the mechanical germs specifically designed to infect a timeshadow rather than a whole body? If so, how? Does the ability of the machines to employ this mode of communication imply that the overmen have now added this kind of precognition to the repertoire of their mental abilities? How complete is their mastery of time? Have they, at last, become managers of contingency, architects of destiny?

  “Other questions now have to be added to those which occurred to me as the knowledge of what had been done to me was slowly made clear. Did the infectious agents bind so intimately to my timeshadow that I brought them back with me? Might they be the seeds of my destruction? Difficult to believe; more likely that only that which I sent forth can possibly return – but perhaps this is mere wishful thinking. In thirty thousand years, what might men not accomplish? I mean overmen, of course. If the overmen are to be believed, mere men are too violent to be capable of much achievement, too ready to destroy one another and hence to destroy their species . . .

  “What, in the end, did I actually do in the course of my third excursion into the future? I walked to the top of the hill, found a gap in the forest canopy, beneath which green grass grew. (Left for my benefit? Surely too narcissistic an interpretation?). There, I could see blue sky, white clouds, and the sun. Later, I was able to see the stars . . . the same, fixed stars we see today. I was able to see everything that was constant, everything which linked my world to the world in which I had come. I was allowed to see that nothing truly fundamental had changed. All I actually did, with my absurdly heavy-seeming half-body, was go to the crest of a hill and sit down on the grass, for half a day and half a night. And yet I saw the whole world of the overmen, in all its grandeur and glory!

  “It was surely not an experience planned and executed solely for my benefit, but a kind of adventure available to any and every inhabitant of that fabulous era. In that far future, no mind will require the carriage of the body to go wandering, nor will any require the kind of crude separation which my compound induces. Perhaps the overmen have finally mastered the art of timeshadow projection (far more cleverly than I, if so), but it is likely that they have not bothered, because they have something far better. They have machines which can infect a body like the agents of disease, but are designed for creation rather than malaise. They have machines too tiny to see, which breed in the blood and swarm about the brain – even the anaemic fluids and shadow-brain of a timeshadow – and thus induce the brightest and most brilliant of fevers: the fever of experience; the fever of memory; the fever of knowledge.

  “I wish I could say ‘wisdom’ instead of knowledge. Perhaps that was what the machines were designed to give me. Perhaps, if I had not been an attenuated timeshadow, the overmen could have filled me with all their wealth of understanding. Perhaps, on the other hand, they do fear the vicious circle which might result from the communication of too much knowledge from future to past. Perhaps they were careful to give me a vision without coherence: a dream censored of all that might enable me to hasten its actualization. There is no way of knowing . . .

  “I have walked on the surface of the planet Mars, which we see but dimly through our telescopes: the arid, near-airless Mars of pink sands and jagged ridges, awesome clefts and
gouged-out craters; the Mars of my today. And I have walked on the surface of their Mars: the Mars of the overmen; the moist, scented Mars of purple skies and blue-black forests; the Mars of seemingly-eternal half-light; the Mars of gargantuan gliders and gossamer-winged skycraft; the Mars of their today . . .

  “I have walked on the surface of Titan, satellite of Saturn, which is to us a mere point of light: the Titan entombed by many kinds of ice; bare, brutal, lonely Titan. I have walked, too, on the Titan of the overmen: the Titan of crystalline cities; the Titan of domed jungles; lush, lovely, hectic Titan. And from both stations I looked up at Saturn itself; at Saturn’s rings; at the gaseous face whose features had, in the second instance, at last begun to change, to harden, to become distinct . . .

  “I have seen the worlds inside the asteroids: the hollow worlds whose inhabitants remake themselves because they had no need of legs. I had no need to walk there either, and so I flew, on wings which were a part of me, and danced four-handed jigs all around the decorated walls . . .

  “I have seen the earths which orbit other stars: the myriad earths, the countless Edens. I have trod the streets and soils of worlds where life has followed other paths than ours. I have seen, and known, sentient creatures made in every image and none, some like earthly animals or plants, others, seemingly, mineral and some without fixed form at all. I have heard their speech and their music – and I have seen too that these species, like the overmen, obtain in the end command over their own forms, attributes and ambitions. I have seen the wonderful wilderness of life in the sidereal system: the life of a million worlds; the life of a thousand starfaring cultures; the life which fills the great gaseous clouds between the stars; the life which is irrepressible, uncontainable, ever-changing. I have watched the meetings of the minds and bodies of different species, have been party to their communions, their mergings and their separations . . .

  “I have not seen mankind. In all of that, I have not seen mankind.