He came in again over our lawn one night, ragged, trembling and hungry. I went out to meet him. He stuttered out some horrible tale of what had happened to him—I forget it now, thank God—and at that moment the townspeople appeared in a mass. He gave me a despairing, hopeless look and ran back again over the lawn into the darkness. Try as I might, I’ve never forgotten his limping run over the grass, the way he ducked as he went into the trees. I left food on the grass for a week and it always went—packaging as well, so I know it was not taken by an animal. And then the food was left there, night after night, and after ten days I gave up putting it there. I’ve often wondered if he came back starving on the eleventh day, and the twelfth, and found nothing. But it was a big risk for me to leave it there. I doubt if I would do as much today.
Regan and I were staring at each other in horror. “Don’t let’s report him now,” she said. “We’ve got to go to Juram. We can find him there and talk it over.”
“It’s wrong,” I warned her.
“Perhaps he’s ill,” she told me. “Friends may be able to help.”
We both knew there was no possible excuse for not going immediately to the council. In Juram we would be virtually unobserved talking to Keeney. It was secretive, furtive and uncitizenlike. Let all your conversations be open to scrutiny: that is one of our precepts.
But we packed up swiftly and the three of us set out along the forest road for Juram.
* * * *
Recollection of that scene at Keeney’s, the knowledge that we were acting in secret in defiance of the rights of our fellow citizens, apprehension about the trip—all these things troubled me deeply as we went. We were also sailing along in total darkness, apart from the light thrown by our headlamps. It was pouring rain and the road was unpleasantly potholed. I continually scanned the road and the verges of the forest, as we went. Once or twice I imagined movements at the borders of the road, the shaking of bushes and grasses and so forth, but we glided on uneventfully, seeing and hearing nothing. Soon we were in Juram. It is a charming and well laid out city. The market square, with its colored dome and tropical plants, is particularly fine. The gardens have more flowers and the houses, in some cases, better proportions than in our own city. Nevertheless, I like ours better.
We went straight to the Town Hall when we arrived, to register our presence and to inquire after Keeney. We crossed the domed square, where the light was filtered through to provide a charming colored floor, and went straight up the marble steps into the Town Hall.
After giving our names and city of origin, we went to find Keeney. Imagine our surprise when we were told that our town clerk was not in Juram, had not been there since the week before and was not even expected at any time in the future. It was inconceivable. Where on earth could he be? The most alarming thoughts filled our minds. Nevertheless we naturally showed no surprise to the officials of Juram, not wishing to betray that there were any irregularities in our town arrangements. We merely said we must have mistaken the day.
Naturally, having tea in the Strangers’ Restaurant, we chatted the matter over between ourselves in low voices until Arthur intruded in an objectionable way. “Ugh!” he said. “Old Keeney, flesh-eating Keeney.”
We immediately silenced him, partly in case anyone at a nearby table should hear, partly because his exuberant rudeness did not suit us. But Arthur continued in the same vein. “He’s got a dog. It lives in the house. They all pat it on the head. Ugh—it makes me feel sick. Keeney’s revolting.”
I told the boy he was making us feel sick, but I secretly thought that as things had turned out, we should have paid more attention to the children’s fantastic tales. “I bet I could tell you where he is—the dirty old man,” he added.
I pressed him to tell me, but he would not say. In fact he appeared afraid to tell me. Regan was now so upset that I urged her to go and relax in one of the rooms upstairs before the performance while I took Arthur on a sightseeing tour of the town.
As we went around the museum, examining the fused, charred and horrendous relics of the town’s past, I again put pressure on Arthur to tell me where to find Keeney and he refused again to tell me. I decided he was just making childish mysteries and dropped the subject.
I was scarcely in the mood for Regan’s recital after the hectic events of the day and she, I could tell, was almost equally disturbed. She played with an unwonted vigor and passion—the audience was perturbed by it and slightly displeased. The applause at the end was polite. In a way I had almost enjoyed her uncontrolled playing, but I did not expect anyone else to do the same.
She did not mention the performance at all over supper. She talked only of Keeney, about where he might be, about the dog. “We’ve got to find him, we’ve got to find him,” she kept repeating.
Arthur was asleep in the Strangers’ House, and I was for staying in Juram overnight and returning in the morning. But Regan, still speculating hysterically about Keeney, wanted to go home straightaway and was very distressed at the idea of not setting off immediately. It upset me so much to see her in this state that I gave in.
By the time we had woken Arthur and got him in the car, all I wanted to do was go home and get into bed. As we glided out of Juram, Arthur sat in the back crooning a tune he was making up and knocking together three round stones on a string which he had bought himself. Regan sat rigid in the seat next to me wearing on her face an expression of intensity I had not, I must say, seen since the days of our courtship and early marriage.
As we glided through the trees in the darkness, a memory came through my fatigue. I recalled—and it can only have been a deliberate forgetting—the name of the little girl who had hidden, and tried to rear, the little dog. It was, of course, Regan herself.
* * * *
I can see her now, fat doe caught in the bush. Is she caught? She must be, for I see stars in a gap in the trees overhead, I see her. Creep up, creep up, singing my song in my head—catch, catchie, catcho, I’ll kill you, dearie. And raise my club and leap. But she breaks, and runs on a broken leg. Follow swiftly, I’ll tire her yet. Soft, catchie, catcho, I’ll batter her head with my club, drag her back, her head, my club, all bloody. Run, panting, nearly there. The light, the sky, the open—I’ll have to cross, I’ll have to cross, I’ll have to cross.
* * * *
And I recalled that Regan had been an unorthodox child. Her mother feared for her.
We glided along the dark forest road. I pushed the car up to fifteen. Arthur crooned and knocked in the back. Regan sat in the same pose, pale and intent, as if listening to an important message from an invisible stranger. My headlights beamed along the forest edges. The weather was still—nothing stirred. I was half-asleep.
And suddenly Regan screamed and Arthur shouted, “Look—Dad!”
There was a shaking of bushes and the lower branches of the trees on one side of the road. Fifty feet ahead a deer broke from the trees and ran across the road.
I was about to speak when Regan screamed again.
The bushes parted and a man ran out in pursuit of the deer. He stopped short in the middle of the road, a club raised above his head, blinded by our lights. His eyes were tight shut against the glare. His mouth was open in a roar of pain, revealing blackened and broken teeth. He was short, thickset, his skin pasty and white, his eyes rimmed in red. He wore a torn shirt revealing blue tattoos in a geometric design all over his chest. His trousers were made of some animal skip. His feet were bare, toes splayed, ending in thick, curved nails. He wore a leather cap on which were sewn three or four hedgehog skins. His hair was long, black and matted. One short, very pale arm, covered in black hairs, was badly gashed and dripped blood onto the road.
He stood there roaring, with his eyes tight shut, as we drifted toward him.
I acted swiftly, stopping the car and switching off the lights at the same time, hoping desperately that he would go away. In the darkness, I guess, he and any others with him would be able to see us, although we could
not see them. We sat there in the darkness on the forest road. Behind me Arthur moved a little.
Then I said, “I’m going to turn the lights on and start away quickly. If they’re around us they may be dazed by the lights. Hold on to the handles of the doors.”
I turned on the, lights and the car leaped forward— down a perfectly empty road. In the darkness the man had run back into the forest.
After a pause Arthur said, rather shakily, “What was that? Who was that?”
Neither of us answered.
“It’s what they say, isn’t it?” Arthur demanded. “The forest’s full of the misborn, isn’t it?”
I said, “It’s true that in the early days of the towns they used to put malformed babies just inside the forest edge—and they said they were picked up and reared there by the others. But my grandfather said that his father told him that they died.”
He had said, in fact, that everyone knew they died. Their cries could be heard if you went too close. That must be one of the reasons why our houses have by tradition always been set so far back from the forest—so that people could not hear the cries of the dying babies.
I could hear Arthur retching in the back of the car.
“It was all a long, long time ago,” Regan told him. “There are no malformed babies now.”
“So you say,” said Arthur. Regan did not reply. I wondered why not and then realized that I knew. The False Arrivals. A woman would take to her bed, bear a child, the council would visit, as usual, and she would declare the child Arrived and Departed. The women must know about all this. The men did not, said they did not, thought they did not—there are things people must forget, pretend not to know until they really do forget. I had forgotten that Regan was the girl with the small dog in the potting shed. She had forgotten the child who came before Arthur. City life relied on this forgetting. What else had we forgotten, eliminated, suppressed? For a second, there on the forest road, I was in a nightmare world where I was living my life beside a monster I never saw, a fiend which sat beside me as I ate, lay in bed with me at night, which I gazed over, around and through and never noticed at all.
Arthur’s clear, plangent voice pierced this evil dream. “Well, if that man wasn’t misborn, and he didn’t look it, who was he, then? Where did he come from?”
Neither of us spoke. Then Regan said, “Arthur. You know very well what happens when someone in the city does things they shouldn’t. Perhaps they steal or—whatever they do.”
“There isn’t anyone like that in the city,” he said.
“Well, suppose there were?”
“The council asks them to go to another town,” he said, remembering what he had learned.
“What happens if they go there and go on doing whatever they were doing in our town? What does the new town do?”
“They probably ask them to go to another town,” he said.
“And suppose they do it again, and again, in every town they go to?”
He thought, then said, “I suppose you mean they put them in the forest.”
“That’s right,” she said. “The man you saw was probably one of those. There are women too.”
“It can’t be very nice in there. Suppose they want to come back?”
“I think if they really wanted to live in the towns they would behave themselves,” she said.
Probably, I thought, Regan did not know. Did not know. But a little girl such as she had been—showing signs of deviating, being an outsider? Her mother must have told her. She did not remember. I recalled Ritchie Callender. And I suddenly remembered someone else— Bennet, who had lived in twenty cities, who molested children, who had never been able to work. That moonlit night we were supposed to be asleep, my cousin and I, when we were woken up by the noise near our house. We leaned out of the window and saw the townspeople making rough music, beating on pots and pans and buckets, shouting. And there was Bennet, in the center of the crowd, being beaten back foot by foot into the forest, turning to them and shouting, turning back toward the forest, retreating under the full moon as they mobbed him over the lawn into the dark trees. We could not hear him above the din. We just saw his sagging mouth opening and closing as they pushed him on. My cousin, only five, had cried. I, being older, knew that Bennet, who had waited for us on the way home from school, had to be sent off somewhere. But the violence and fear frightened me. I could not see how the townsfolk could push him into the forest they were themselves so afraid of.
As we rode through the forest, those three scenes flashed in front of my eyes like photographs—the little girl laying her doll down to open the door of the shed where her dog was waiting to jump up and lick her face, my grandfather sitting behind his old carved desk telling me about the mutant babies, the moonlight falling on Bennet’s upturned, grimacing face.
And now Arthur was silent too. From now on he would carry his own photograph with him. There would be a picture of the wild man caught in the headlights of the car. There would be his mother speaking and, I suppose, my back, my silence, as I steered the car forward.
I felt I had to say something. “It’s very unpleasant, Arthur, but try not to think too much about it. These things have to happen. And don’t tell any of the other children. It would only frighten them. There are very, very few people in the forests and they are only there because the towns cannot have them. We could not have people like that in the cities.”
As I spoke I wondered how many people there really were in the forests. Three, four, five hundred years of antisocial men and women, abandoned babies, girls with unpermitted Arrivals. How many were there? How many? How had we in the cities let this happen? I felt my head was bursting. I didn’t want to think these thoughts and yet they came crowding in, overwhelming me. And there was a perverse satisfaction in not being able to control them, like drinking too much wine, knowing it was unwise but not being able to stop. I wished Regan would speak so that I could reply and we could talk all the way home. But she had resumed her frozen, intent position. She was too engrossed in her thoughts to speak.
We thought they died, I told myself. At least, no one consciously thought that, but at the backs of our minds we assumed it was true. We never acknowledged it to ourselves, let alone to each other. Now, never mind how destructive the thought, we had— Why else were they building it—and I was the designer—and my mind seemed to collapse under the weight of it all. In my ears was the sound of someone groaning, groaning, groaning.
* * * *
I am exhausted today. It is very early, and as I sit in my room at the top of the house, a few feathery wisps of cloud move in the blue sky above. There too is the long sweep of sunlit lawn down to the trees. Normally at this hour I can hear the birds singing. Today the men are working, digging the foundations for the ramparts. There is the sound of spades hitting the metal markers which show the course of the wall. The men call out to each other. Wheelbarrows full of bricks leave tracks on the dewy grass. Piles of bricks are dropped onto it from the barrows.
What did we say when the council confirmed the order for my plans? How did we put the proposal to each other? I seem to remember something about deer straying into the city in winter and spoiling the fields and gardens, small children straying out of the city into the forest. It all seemed very convincing at the time. I suppose, because it had to be convincing. We needed the ramparts. We needed to ignore the reasons why we needed them. But we must have known. We must have known.
* * * *
at the feeding last night they sang of a wall of square stones outside the forest. I say, they want to keep us in, mates. I don’t know why I say that. I had a flash in my brain, that’s why. Outside there is light to glare and make you shut your eyes. You cannot open them or they burn. But those other men, they say, sleep on soft lying places, off the ground, under shelter. This place is hard. I’ll fetch more leaves. The woman is sobbing in her sleep again. The child wails. Bloody noise. No, I’ll sleep now.
* * * *
The sun
is up high now. I have put off my visit to the council for too long. I have so much to say. I must report my sighting of the man last night on the road. I must tell about Keeney’s dog. I must ask the council to find out where he was yesterday when he should have been in Juram. I have an idea—it’s absurd—that Keeney will harm me if I go to the council, the way Lesley used to when she was ten and I was seven. How disloyal to think this of a fellow citizen. I should report myself to the council as well. The sooner I make my report and return to get some sleep, the better I’ll feel.
Regan comes in, ready to go out...
I asked her if she would prefer to stay at home and leave the council visit to me. She said she believed she ought to come, but when she picked up her handbag her hands were trembling. I thought: What are we all coming to?
I said, “Let’s go straightaway, then, and get it over with. We can leave Arthur at the Children’s Hall.”
Universe 5 - [Anthology] Page 20
