The Crystal World

by J. G. Ballard

  The mulatto had climbed up on to the firmer surface near the summer house. As Thorensen approached he began to gesticulate and shout, waving his panga at the broken surface as if trying to cover up his failure to catch Ventress. Thorensen nodded, then dismissed him with a bored wave. Walking forward across the surface, he began to test the half-formed crystals with his feet. For several minutes he paced up and down, gazing in the direction of the river, as if marking out the dimensions of the subterranean channels.

  He returned to Sanders, the damp crystals on his shoes giving off glimmers of colored light. He listened in a distracted way as Sanders explained how he had been trapped in the forest after the crash of the helicopter. Sanders described his accidental meeting with Ventress and, subsequently, the discovery of Radek's body. Remembering Ventress's bitter protests at the time, Sanders stressed his reasons for this apparent attempt to drown a dead man.

  Thorensen nodded dourly. "Maybe he has a chance." As if to reassure Sanders, he added: "You did the right thing."

  The mulatto and the naked African half-swathed in surgical tape were sitting on the steps of the veranda. The mulatto was honing his panga, while the other rested his rifle on his one bare knee, scanning the forest. He had the slim intelligent face of a young clerk or junior foreman, and now and then glanced at Sanders with the look of a man who recognized another member, however remote, of the same educated caste. Sanders remembered him as the knife-wielding attacker whose dark reflection he had confused with his own in the hall of mirrors at Thorensen's house.

  Thorensen was gazing over one shoulder at the windows of the summer house, only half-aware of Sanders standing beside him. Sanders noticed that, unlike Ventress's suit and his own clothes, Thorensen's leather jerkin was unaffected by the frost. "Can you take me back to the army post?" he asked Thorensen. "I've been trying to get out of the forest for hours. Do you know the Bourbon Hotel?"

  A morose frown twisted Thorensen's long face. "The army's a long way off. The freeze is spreading all through the forest." He pointed across the river with his revolver. "What about Ventress? The bearded man. Where did you meet him?"

  Sanders explained himself again. Neither Thorensen nor the mulatto recognized him as Ventress's defender during the attack at Port Matarre. "He was taking shelter in a house near the river. Your house, he said. Why were you shooting at him? Is he some sort of criminal-trying to steal from your mine?"

  There was a laugh at this from the young African with the rifle. Thorensen nodded without expression. His manner was furtive and shifty, as if unsure of himself and what to do with Sanders. "Worse than that. He's a madman, completely crazy."

  He turned and started to walk up the steps, waving to Sanders as if prepared to let him make his own way into the forest. "You'd better be careful, there's no knowing what the forest is going to do. Keep moving, but circle around on yourself."

  "Wait a minute!" Sanders called after him. "I want to rest here. I need a map, I've got to find this Bourbon Hotel."

  "A map? What good is a map now?" Thorensen hesitated, glancing up at the summer house as if worried that Sanders might in some way defile its luminous whiteness. As the doctor's arms fell limply to his sides Thorensen shrugged and beckoned his two men to follow him.

  "Thorensen!" Sanders stepped forward. He pointed to the young African with the bandaged leg, "Let me look at his dressing and make him more comfortable. I'm a doctor."

  The three men on the veranda turned together, even the big mulatto watching Sanders with interest. A note of calculation crossed his bilious eyes. Thorensen was looking down at Sanders as if recognizing him for the first time.

  "A doctor? Yes, Radek said-I remember. All right, Doctor-?"

  "Sanders. I've nothing with me, no drugs or-"

  "That's O.K., Doctor," Thorensen said. "That's good, in fact." He nodded to himself, as if still uncertain to invite Sanders into the summer house. Then he relented. "Right, Doctor, you can come in for five minutes. I might want to ask you for something."

  Dr. Sanders climbed the steps onto the veranda. The summer house consisted of a single circular room and a small kitchen and store at the rear. Heavy shutters had been placed over the windows, now locked to the casements by the interstitial crystals, and the only light entered through the door.

  Thorensen glanced around at the forest and then holstered his pistol. As the two Africans made their way round to the back Thorensen turned the door handle. Through the frosted panes Dr. Sanders saw the dim outlines of a high four-poster bed, obviously that removed from the bedroom in the mansion where he and Ventress had sheltered from the storm. Gilded cupids played about the mahogany canopy, pipes to their lips, and four naked caryatids with upraised arms formed the corner posts.

  Thorensen cleared his throat. "Mrs.-Ventress," he explained at last in a low voice.

  9 Serena

  They gazed down at the occupant of the bed, who lay back on a large satin bolster, a febrile hand on the silk counterpane. At first Dr. Sanders thought he was looking at an elderly woman, probably Ventress's mother, and then realized that in fact she was little more than a child, a young woman in her early twenties. Her long platinum hair lay in a white shawl over her shoulders, her thin high-cheeked face raised to the scanty light. Once she might have had a nervous porcelain beauty, but her wasted skin and the fading glow of light in her half-closed eyes gave her the appearance of someone preternaturally aged, reminding Dr. Sanders of his patients in the children's ward at the hospital near the _léproserie_ in the last minutes before their death.

  "Thorensen." Her voice cracked in the amber gloom. "It's getting cold again. Can't you light a fire?"

  "The wood won't burn, Serena. It's all turned into glass." Thorensen stood at the foot of the bed, peering down at the young woman. In his leather jacket he looked like a policeman uneasily on duty in a sick-room. He unzipped the jacket. "I brought these for you, Serena, they'll help you."

  He leaned forward, hiding something from Dr. Sanders, and then spilled several handfuls of red and blue gem-stones across the counterpane. Rubies and sapphires of many sizes, they glittered in the thinning afternoon light with a fevered power.

  "Thorensen, thank you-" The girl's free hand scuttled across the counterpane to the stones. Her childlike face had become almost vulpine with greed. An expression of surprising craftiness came into her eyes, and Sanders sensed why the burly mine-owner treated her with such deference. Seizing a handful of the jewels, she brought them up to her neck and pressed them tightly against her skin, where the bruises formed like fingerprints. Their contact seemed to revive her and she stirred her legs, several of the jewels slipping to the floor. She gazed up at Dr. Sanders, and then turned to ThorenSen.

  "What were you shooting at?" she asked after an interval. "There was a gun going off. It gave me a headache."

  "Just a crocodile, Serena. There are some smart crocodiles around here. I have to watch them."

  The young woman nodded. With a hand still clutching the jewels she pointed at Sanders. "Who's he? What's he doing here?"

  "He's a doctor, Serena. Captain Radek sent him, he's all right."

  "But you said I didn't need any doctors."

  "You don't, Serena, I know that. Dr. Sanders here was just looking by, to see one of the men." During this labored catechism Thorensen kneaded the lapels of his jacket, looking everywhere around the room but at Serena.

  Sanders moved closer to the bed, assuming that Thorensen would now let him examine the young woman. Her tubercular breathing and severe anemia needed little further diagnosis, but he reached forward to take her wrist.

  "Doctor-" On some kind of confused impulse Thorensen pulled him back from the bed. He made an uncertain gesture with one hand, then waved Sanders toward the kitchen door. "I think later, Doctor-right?" He turned quickly to the young woman. "You get some rest now, Serena."

  "But, Thorensen, I need more of these, you only brought me a few today-" Her hand, like a claw, searched the counterpane for
the jewels, the handfuls that Thorensen and the mulatto had taken from the wallsafe earlier that afternoon.

  Sanders was about to protest, but the young woman turned away from them and seemed to subside into sleep, the jewels lying like scarabs on the white skin of her breast.

  Thorensen nudged Sanders with his elbow. They stepped into the kitchen. Before he closed the door Thorensen looked down at the young woman with wistful eyes, as if frightened that she might dissolve into dust if he left her.

  Only half-aware of Sanders, he said: "We'll have something to eat."

  At the far end of the kitchen, by the door, the mulatto and the naked African sat on a bench, half-asleep over their weapons. The kitchen was almost empty. A disconnected refrigerator stood on the cold stove. Thorensen opened the door and began to empty the remainder of the jewels from his pockets on to the shelves, where they lay like cherries among the half-dozen cans of corned beef and beans. A light glacé frost covered the enamel exterior of the refrigerator, as everything else in the kitchen, but the inner walls of the cabinet remained unaffected.

  "Who is she?" Dr. Sanders asked as Thorenson prised the lid off a can. "You've got to get her away from here. She needs careful treatment, this is no place for-"

  "Doctor!" Thorensen raised a hand to silence Sanders. He seemed always to be concealing something, his eyes fractionally lowered below Sanders's. "She's my-wife, now," he said with curious emphasis, as if still trying to establish the fact in his mind. "Serena. She's safer here, as long as I watch out for Ventress."

  "But he's only trying to save her! For God's sake, man-"

  "He's insane!" Thorensen shouted with sudden force. The two Negroes at the other end of the kitchen turned to look at him. "He spent six months in a strait jacket! He isn't trying to help Serena, he just wants to take her back to his crazy house in the middle of the swamp."

  As they ate, forking the cold meat straight from the can, he told Sanders something of Ventress, this strange and melancholy architect, who had designed many of the new government buildings in Lagos and Accra, and then two years earlier abruptly abandoned his work in disgust. He had married Serena when she was seventeen, after bribing her parents, a poor French colonial couple in Libreville, within a few hours of seeing her in the Street outside his office as he left it for the last time. He had then carried her away to a grotesque folly he had built on a water-logged island among the crocodiles in the swamps ten miles to the north of Mont Royal, where the Matarre River expanded into a series of shallow lakes. According to Thorensen, Ventress had rarely spoken to Serena after the marriage, and prevented her from leaving the house or seeing anyone except a blind Negro servant. Apparently he saw his young bride in a sort of pre-Raphaelite dream, caged within his house like the lost spirit of his imagination. Thorensen had found her there, already tubercular, on one of his hunting trips, when his power-cruiser had broken its propeller shaft and was beached on the island. He visited her several times during Ventress's long absences, and she finally escaped with him after the house had caught fire. Thorensen sent her off to a sanatorium in Rhodesia, and his own great mansion at Mont Royal, filled with its imitation antiques, had been prepared for her homecoming. After her disappearance and the first moves toward the annulment of the marriage, Ventress had gone berserk and spent some time as a voluntary patient at an asylum. Now he had returned with the single-minded ambition of abducting Serena and taking her off once more to his ruined house in the swamps. Thorensen seemed convinced that Ventress's morbid and lunatic presence was responsible for Serena's lingering malaise.

  However, when Sanders asked to see her again, in the hope that he would be able to persuade Thorensen to remove her from the frozen forest, the mine-owner demurred.

  "She's all right here," he told Sanders doggedly. "Don't worry."

  "But, Thorensen, how much longer do you think she'll last here? The whole forest is crystallizing, don't you realize-?"

  "She's all right!" Thorensen insisted. He stood up and looked down at the table, his stooped figure with its blond hair like a gallows in the dusk. "Doctor, I've been in this forest a long time. The only chance she has is here."

  Puzzled by this cryptic remark, and whatever private meaning it had for Thorensen, Sanders sat down at a chair by the table. A siren sounded in the dusk from the direction of the river, its echoes reflected off the brittle foliage around the summer house.

  Thorensen spoke to the mulatto and came back to Sanders.

  "I'll leave you in their hands, Doctor. I'll be back in a short while." He took a roll of surgical tape from the shelf beside the cooker, and then beckoned to the injured African. "Kagwa, let the Doctor look at you."

  After Thorensen had gone Sanders examined the shotwounds in the African's leg and chest, and cleaned the rough lint pads. A dozen pellets had penetrated the man's skin, but the wounds already seemed half healed, inert punctures that showed no tendency to bleed or fester.

  "You're lucky," he told the African when he had finished. "I'm surprised you can walk at all." He added: "I saw you this afternoon-in the mirrors at Thorensen's house." The youth smiled amicably. "It was Monsieur Ventress we were looking for, Doctor. There's much hunting in this forest, eh?"

  "You're right-though I doubt if any of you really know what you're after." Sanders noticed the mulatto was watching him with more than usual interest. "Tell me," he asked Kagwa, deciding to make the most of the young man's easy-going manner, "do you work for Thorensen? At his mine?"

  "The mine is closed, Doctor, but I was number one in charge of technical stores." He nodded with some pride. "For the whole mine."

  "An important job." Sanders pointed toward the bedroom door, beyond which the young woman lay. "Mrs. Ventress-Serena, I think Thorensen called her. She's got to be moved from here. You're an intelligent man, Mr. Kagwa, you realize that. A few more days here and she'll be as good as dead."

  Kagwa turned away from the doctor and smiled to himself. He looked down at the bandages on his leg and chest and touched them wistfully. "'Good as dead'-a fascinating phrase, Doctor. I understand what you say, but it's best now for Madame Ventress to stay here."

  Barely controlling his voice, Sanders said: "For God's sake, Kagwa, she'll _die!_ Haven't you grasped that? What on earth is Thorensen playing at?" Kagwa raised his hands to restrain Sanders. Turning on his strong leg, he leaned the other against the table. "_You_ are speaking, Doctor, in medical terms. Listen!" he insisted when Sanders tried to remonstrate. "I am not giving you any ju-ju magic, I am an educated African. But many strange things happen in this forest, Doctor, you will-"

  He broke off as the mulatto barked something at him and went out onto the veranda. They could hear Thorensen approaching with two or three men, their boots crushing the brittle foliage along the bank.

  As Sanders moved toward the door Kagwa touched his arm. A warning smile held the doctor's attention. "Remember, Doctor, walk one way through the forest, but look two ways-" Then, rifle in hand, he limped off on his white leg.

  Thorensen greeted Sanders on the veranda. He clumped up the steps, zipping up his leather jacket in the tomb-like coldness of the summer house.

  "Still here, Doctor? I've got a couple of guides for you." He pointed to the two Africans who stood at the bottom of the steps. Members of the crew of his motorcruiser, they wore jeans and blue denim shirts. One had a white peaked cap pulled down across his forehead. Both carried carbines and were scanning the forest with marked interest. "My boat is moored near here," Thorensen explained, "I'd send you back by river if the engine hadn't seized up. Anyway, they'll get you to Mont Royal in no time."

  With this he strode off into the kitchen, and a moment later Sanders heard him enter the bedroom.

  Surrounded by the glistening figures of the four Africans, etched in hoar frost against the darkness, Sanders waited for Thorensen to reappear. Then he turned and followed his guides, leaving Thorensen and Serena Ventress barricaded together in the sepulchre of the summer house. As they entered th
e forest he looked back at the veranda, where the young African, Kagwa, was still watching him. His dark body, almost exactly bisected by the white bandages, reminded Sanders of Louise Peret and her references to the day of the equinox. Thinking over his brief conversation with Kagwa, he began to realize Thorensen's motives for trying to keep Serena Venrress within the affected zone. Fearing that she might die, he preferred this half-animate immolation within the crystal vaults to her physical death in the world outside. Perhaps he had seen insects and birds pinioned alive inside their prisms, and misguidedly decided that this offered the one means of escape for his dying bride.

  Following a path that skirted the inlet, they set off toward the inspection site, which Sanders estimated to be some three-quarters of a mile down-river. With luck an army unit would be stationed at the nearest margins of the affected zone, and the soldiers would be able to retrace his steps and rescue the mine-owner and Serena Ventress.

  The two guides moved along at a rapid pace, barely pausing to choose their direction, one in front of Sanders and the other, wearing the peaked cap, ten yards behind. After fifteen minutes, when they had covered very nearly a mile and yet were still within the main body of the forest, Sanders realized that the sailors' real task was not to guide him to safety at all. In turning him out into the forest Thorensen was no doubt using him, in Ventress's phrase, as a decoy, confident that the architect would try to reach Sanders for news of his abducted wife.

  When, for the second time, they entered a small glade between two groups of forest oaks Sanders stopped and walked back to the sailor in the peaked cap. He started to remonstrate with him, but the man shook his head and beckoned Sanders on with his carbine.

  Five minutes later Sanders found that he was alone. The pathway ahead was deserted. He made his way back to the glade, where the shadows shone emptily on the forest floor. The guides had disappeared into the undergrowth.

  Sanders glanced over his shoulder at the dark grottoes around the glade, listening for any footsteps, but the sheaths of the trees sang and crackled as the forest cooled in the darkness. Above, through the lattices that stretched across the glade, he could see the fractured bowl of the moon. Around him, in the vitreous walls, the reflected stars glittered like fire-flies.