Walking Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  “Who’s there?” he whispered.

  The rats in the boxes stirred at his voice. Shivering, he backed to the door and snapped the light on.

  Ladyblossom lay supine on the cork tiles. Her face was blotched yellow and purple, her teeth bared in a stretched grimace. Drunk, he thought with sudden relief; but her broad chest did not stir, nor the breath gargle in her throat. Without even looking at it Foxe slipped the rat into his jacket pocket and knelt beside the body.

  Her flesh was warm but rubbery in texture. Her left arm was pinned beneath her body and her right lay apparently loosely across her stomach, but when he tried to feel for the pulse he found that muscular contraction was dragging the arm so fiercely down that he was unable to push his fingers between it and her body. He tried to feel directly for the beat of her heart, but it turned out that Ladyblossom kept her considerable bust under control with a rigid lattice-work of corsetry. He could detect no sign of breathing.

  He let out a long breath, trying to sigh away his fright, and rose. Well, the first thing was to ring Charley. Then it would be his responsibility—poor old Ladyblossom—probably poisoned herself with some potion. But why here? Why in Foxe’s lab, goddamit?

  He was aware of the door opening before he had finished turning towards it. His heart gave one appalling bang and his whole body went rigid, then he completed the movement much more slowly until he was face to face with Captain Angiah, who stood half-lounging in the doorway with his big pistol dangling from his brown, long-fingered hand.

  THE PIT

  1

  As the plane climbed it seemed to create the dawn, rising into whiter and yet whiter light. Itchy with sleeplessness and nervous tension, Foxe undid his safety belt and tried to relax into the soft upholstery, but a wriggling movement at his hip reminded him that he still had responsibilities outside his own skin. He took Quentin out of his pocket, stroked the sleek fur between his shoulder-blades and put him on the table, where he promptly produced a neat little dropping like the black stone of an olive. His touch was strangely restorative. The violet Q on the white fur behind the dark head seemed to glow with its own light. He nosed around the table-top, found Foxe’s arm resting on the edge and immediately began to burrow up inside the sleeve of Foxe’s jacket.

  Spools of talk ran and re-ran themselves in Foxe’s mind.

  “You are under arrest in connection with suspected homicide.”

  “Oh, don’t be stupid. I can’t have had anything to do with it. I’ve been out fishing with Doctor Dreiser all day, and your own men were watching us.”

  “Nobody was watching you.”

  “Come off it. I caught one of them with my own tackle.”

  “That is irrelevant. Under our law, in cases of serious crime all witnesses and potential witnesses are automatically taken into custody.”

  “What the hell’s a potential witness?”

  “Anyone the investigating officers believe may have knowledge bearing on the investigation.”

  “That means anyone at all.”

  No answer.

  “May I ring the British Consul?”

  “You will see him on Main Island.”

  “But there’s one here, on Hog’s Cay.”

  “An Honorary Consul only, and he is on holiday.”

  “Anyway, I don’t …”

  Pause. Actually to admit that he wasn’t going to Main Island if he could help it … Captain Angiah seemed to half-guess his thought.

  “You will not really be inconvenienced, Doctor Foxe. Your arrest will be merely technical, and the President has offered you rooms in his palace while you are working on Main Island. Our investigations will certainly be completed by the time you have finished your work there. These magical slayings are usually straightforward. Are you ready to go now?”

  “No. I was half way through getting some figures out of the computer: I can’t leave it like that.”

  “Then please hurry.”

  That was the point at which Foxe should have put the rat back into its cage—or perhaps twenty minutes later when he’d stood up from the computer console, having fixed things so that someone else could extract and use the rest of the figures. But by then there’d been three or four policemen in the animal room, and Charley was standing by the door, his face greyish and covered with sweat pearls. Besides, if the rat could get out of its cage once it might do so again. And besides …

  Even now, lolling in the aeroplane, Foxe couldn’t analyse why he’d felt it was somehow a small victory to walk out of the laboratory with a rat in his pocket, as if it were a concealed weapon. Of course he didn’t then know that he’d got Quentin.

  “Coffee, suh?”

  A white jacketed steward had appeared, smiling in the nightmare.

  “Yes please,” said Foxe. “And some popcorn or something for my friend.”

  The man’s eyes widened. Foxe reached up under his collar, withdrew Quentin and placed him on the table. When he glanced up again the smile had vanished and the black cheeks were blotched with sudden sweat.

  “Yes, suh,” whispered the steward then turned shivering to the other passenger.

  “Coffee, Captain?”

  “Beer,” said Captain Angiah.

  “How long is the flight?” said Foxe.

  “Twenty minutes,” said the Captain. “Waste of a jet flight, but Doctor O felt you would like to travel in his own plane. See there—that’s just about half way.”

  Foxe looked out of the window. All the stars except Venus had vanished, and the iron-coloured sea was rippling with silver-pinks and silver-blues. In a few more minutes, between a blink and a blink, it would take on the peacock colours of day. About a couple of miles away and separated by a mile of sea lay two islands, which might almost have been put there to demonstrate how different it was possible for two islands to be. They were both quite small, the nearer a classic coral horse-shoe, a slim curve of palm lined with shell-white beaches. Foxe guessed that the coral was supported on a volcanic cone which had never reached the surface, because the further island was just such an upthrust, a ravine-creased pillar of black rock, formed in the complex upheaval that had shaped this part of the whole archipelago. Fall Bay had been made of the same stuff.

  “What are they called?” said Foxe.

  “The tall one is Trotter, the reef Afenziah. I persuaded Doctor O to rename them. I told him it shamed us in the eyes of the world that the map of our country should contain obscene words.”

  The tone warned Foxe not to smile.

  “Are they inhabited?” he asked.

  “It is forbidden to land on them.”

  “Why on earth?”

  The steward came trembling back to put Foxe’s cup in front of him and with a darting movement to shove a saucer of salted nuts towards Quentin. Foxe caught Captain Angiah’s eye and saw a new look there, a sort of fury and repugnance. He felt too tired to work out the cause of it—it was safer to change the subject—but his unconscious mind must have made the leap.

  “Is there a lot of magic on Main Island too?” he said.

  Captain Angiah snapped his beer-can down and started to rise, staring hotly at Foxe for several seconds, then settled back into his seat and drank.

  “You are a scientist,” he said softly. “How can you talk about such things? You do us damage, you people, coming here and gossiping about these things as if we were animals in a wildlife film. How can we stop being animals and become a modern people while you keep bringing your cine cameras and your tape recorders and pay us to do these stupid dances and sing these stupid songs? They are all bad, bad rubbish. They poison minds. How can a man do his work and earn his pay when he thinks that if he makes the right charm and gives the right gifts he can go into the forest and find pirate treasure? How can a woman be persuaded to use modern contraceptives if she thinks that she will not become pregnant wh
en she binds four pieces of sharkskin between the toes of her left foot? You know that our enemies used this magic against us? We had Marxist guerrillas up in the Mountain, but they were not Marxist-Leninists, or Marxist Trotskyites or anything like that. They were Magic Marxists. Only on our Islands, and perhaps on Haiti, would such a stupidity be possible. They did not take guns or grenades to terrorise a village, no. A man would walk up to the main hut in broad daylight with three sticks and a bunch of feathers dipped in blood, and lay them down on the path in a certain pattern. Then the villagers would take all the food in their huts and put it outside the door and hide, while the terrorists took what they wanted and left.”

  “It sounds a bit more humane than guns,” said Foxe.

  “You are wrong, Doctor. It is by these means that the people are degraded and kept at the level of animals. One of my own men, a soldier, was sentry at a camp. A woman came and stood in front of him. She blew on her palm at him and said, ‘Man, you do not see me.’ He let her pass. In his own mind he never saw her. I questioned him closely, and even in front of the firing squad he would not believe that he had seen her.”

  “You had him shot!”

  “That man was no more use as a soldier—he had become an animal. Listen, Doctor. These people are like your rats. I think you would say they are conditioned. Your rats go along your mazes because that is all they know. Our people believe in this rubbish because that is all they know, and because they believe in it the rubbish works. You can only fight that sort of superstition with beliefs of the same power. Now my sentries are at least conditioned not to allow women to come close enough to blow on their palms.”

  Foxe sat silent, full of that sort of numb lethargy which always overcame him when laymen used technical terms in an argument; it was hopeless to begin to explain where and how they had got things wrong. He watched Quentin, interested in one corner of his mind to see whether he would even recognise salted nuts as food.

  “You know how we broke the hold of the terrorists on the villagers?” said Captain Angiah.

  “No.”

  “We used conditioning. We sent Mrs Trotter up into the Mountain. They call her ‘The Old Woman’ and they are more afraid of her than they are of any Magic Marxist.”

  “And at the same time you reinforced the superstition,” said Foxe.

  “Yes, that is the dilemma,” said Captain Angiah drily. “How do you abolish the tools which you need to govern?”

  He began to suck meditatively at his beer-can. Foxe watched Quentin, who seemed to be perfectly familiar with nuts, taking them one by one out of the saucer, nuzzling them about on the table till they lay to his satisfaction and then splitting them efficiently into two halves with his incisors. Mysteriously he ate only half of each nut, leaving the other half as if for someone else—his doppelganger, perhaps. Vaguely Foxe wondered whether this was a typical piece of aberrant Quentinry, or whether it was some left-over fragment of wild-rat behaviour, surviving through generations of laboratory breeding. The stupor of exhaustion washed across him. The white fur blurred in his vision, and the violet Q swam and changed. He was seeing it upside down and for a moment he was seeing something else—a white wall in Back Town, on which was painted a large circle with a vertical bar at the top, an upside-down Q. He blinked the blur away and it was still there. That explained Ladyblossom. That explained the steward. If the letters of the alphabet were not an important part of your mental make-up, then what you saw when you looked at Quentin was the illegal symbol on the dance-hall.

  Tiredness made it a strangely tedious discovery. Anybody more interested in his surroundings would have spotted it weeks ago. Or perhaps Foxe’s own turn of mind had made him blind to this trivial link between the two worlds Mr Trotter the herbalist had talked about.

  “Now there,” said Captain Angiah. “That is Main Island. Ten minutes before we land.”

  Foxe looked out of the window and saw that night had become plain day. The sun, flush with the horizon, was streaming its light across the wave-tops, and already all the colours were too bright to seem natural to Foxe’s northern eyes, though still far short of their noon-day garishness. Foxe had sometimes wondered on Hog’s Cay whether any work had been done on the colour perception of tropical peoples, compared with that of races bred to a mistier light. The plane tilted through a change of course, and when the horizon steadied, it was now blocked by a hulking cliff, a mile or so away. The usual flush of tropical brilliance crowned the rocks and streaked the ravines, and the blue sea sparkled into white foam at the shoreline, but the view was sombre; so much of the black volcanic rock stood apparently unweathered since the new-born mountain had come steaming from the sea. On these rocks the tropic sun, which made all other colours blaze as if with their own light, had no effect; their blackness drank it in and sent out nothing in return. Even the mountains of the main massif, twenty miles beyond the cliffs, had the same look, though distance and the dawn air produced a certain blueness and softness; Foxe could see that these tones existed between him and the mountains, and that the rocks themselves must be of the same unmitigable black.

  “Mount Trotter, three thousand two hundred and twenty-six metres,” said Captain Angiah. The number came off his tongue with the lilt of something learnt by rote. He had evidently ceased being the military philosopher, and was now the polite courier. Foxe found this persona more frightening than the other.

  The pilot changed course again, swinging round the south-western headland and losing height as he did so. For a few seconds Foxe was gazing along the southern coast until eyesight dwindled where headland after headland plunged in ragged parallels to the sea, each with its chain of rocky islets reaching beyond the shore-line, as though the Island were an enormous old instrument designed to comb the waves for wrecks.

  Then they were flying along this coast and looking into the individual bays, which turned out to be barely more inviting than the reefs which divided them, at most a narrow curve of steep, dark pebbly beach separating the water from sheer rock blotched with shrubs. A fishing boat in the second bay had the imperilled look of one of those small fish that scavenge for parasites along the jaws of sharks.

  The fifth bay was different, though Foxe could see no reason why men had chosen to make it so; it looked no wider than some of the others, and the cliffs behind were just as steep; perhaps there had once been a beach here where pirates could careen, or perhaps the reefs happened to give better shelter. But here a town of a sort had been built, tin shacks clinging to the cliff, a little sugar-icing church on a ledge, and at the bottom warehouses, quays, cranes, an old castle at the far end of the bay and at the near end what looked like a modern hospital or hotel. The town seemed far too small to support the level of commercial activity which the harbour implied; scattered along the cliff face its shacks looked as though a monstrous wave had hurled a mass of driftwood against the rock and left it clinging wherever a niche or ledge caught it. Often Foxe could see no means of access to these dwellings; and though there were signs that the town continued beyond the cliff-top—the plane was now flying too low to see for sure—there did not seem to be any road up the cliff.

  But there the harbour was, with a couple of fair-sized merchantmen moored at the quays, as well as a few fishing-boats and three new-looking MTBs; no lissom yachts or gaudy cruisers to add their note of rich frivolity. There was an airstrip too, a concrete deck laid along the further reef and reaching the land at the foot of the old fort. At first Foxe hadn’t noticed this last building, so closely did its black walls and crenellations match the cliff behind it, and before he could look at it properly the plane was swinging out to align with the runway; but in his mind’s eye there was something wrong with it, a sense that it couldn’t somehow fit into the narrow site between the cliff and the sea.

  The plane whined in, flaps down. The glittering sea raced past so close on either side that Foxe felt they were about to pancake on the waves, but the
n the wheels banged into concrete and juddered with fierce braking. There was none of the normal sense of easing up which comes when a plane has slowed to its taxiing speed and can rumble safely to its berth; this one stopped like a car pulled up suddenly at traffic lights. Captain Angiah rose, stretching and yawning.

  “Every time I think he’s going to hit the castle,” he said. “This runway is too short for jets.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t tell me,” muttered Foxe, collecting Quentin from the table, and sliding him into the pocket of his jacket.

  The pilot came laughing out of the flight-deck and opened the door. Short steps unfolded themselves downwards. Foxe put on his sunglasses and climbed down into the heavy glare of another Caribbean morning. Two other aeroplanes—naval fighters to judge by the way their wings were folded back above their cockpits—were parked opposite him, and a little further off a large helicopter. Only twenty yards away to the right the castle wall rose impressively into the hot blue sky, too close for Foxe to judge why it had seemed from the aeroplane to be a mere facade; but it was certainly theatrical in another sense, with the muzzles of ancient cannon jutting from its battlements, black as the black stone. Although it was obviously old it had none of the weather-gentled look of European castles, which have ceased to be guardians or oppressors and become playthings. This one was functional.

  The sleepless night and the long tension made Foxe feel as though he’d just finished a fifteen-hour flight, so it was odd to find that there were no airport formalities at all, beyond a slouching salute to Captain Angiah from a sentry at the base of the runway. The Captain nodded and strolled on; Foxe had to trot to catch him up.

  No car was waiting for them, neither jeep nor Rolls; in fact there was a curious lack of transport of any kind along the quay, where one might have expected to see queues of juggernaut lorries waiting to load or unload, or at least the battered and panting trucks that swarmed like horseflies round all minor Caribbean harbours. The only wheel Foxe saw in two hundred yards belonged to a barrow, laden with one bulging sack, which a gaunt cheeked labourer was trundling towards the castle. But this was clearly a working harbour; the merchantmen were there, the derricks gesturing beside them like insect antennae wavering above dead prey.