Incarnate

by Ramsey Campbell

  Presumably the film was more than nonsense, since the fifteen or so businessmen in the small auditorium were watching it intently. Some of them were taking notes, flashing gold cuff links and expensive watches. Martin tried to be comfortable on the meager seat that threatened to fold up if he sat back—presumably the seats were meant to make sure that nobody would fall asleep—and wondered why nobody was laughing at the film. Actors appeared in different scenes with different dubbed voices, a character was driving an invalid car in one scene but walking in the next, a man and woman were clearly married in one scene, but later proved to be married to two other people. “The End,” a title said, and the film went on. When Martin couldn’t suppress a snort of mirth, three businessmen glared at him.

  The film broke halfway through a scene. Martin assumed it was a faulty copy until Hay said, “I’ll join you gentlemen in the canteen shortly.” Martin waited as the businessmen climbed the steep steps past him, and then Hay joined him. “Mr. Wallace,” he said and gave Martin a handshake like a handful of firm sponge. “What did you think of our film?”

  “Hard to say without seeing it through.”

  “You think so?” His grin seemed somehow too friendly. “Did it make any sense to you?”

  “Some.”

  “Really? What sense did it make?”

  Martin felt he was being satirized. Under the stubbly red hair Hay’s flushed face looked argumentative. “The technique isn’t that radical,” Martin said.

  “I suppose not.” His grin wagged the beard, which looked like a brush that had been used to redden his face. “Sorry about that. I’m not laughing at you. The way people’s minds work fascinates me. We set up that film so there was no way it could make sense, yet everyone who sees it tries to reconstruct it and nearly everyone manages to persuade himself he understands it, says scenes are missing or remembers details that weren’t there. It’s a valuable experience. It gives our subjects an insight into how their minds work.”

  “That’s what you do now, is it?”

  “Right, and there’s hardly a one of them doesn’t thank us at the end of the course. Ask them if you like.”

  He was leading Martin down the corridor to the canteen. His defensiveness only strengthened Martin’s resolve not to be distracted. “I’m not here for that,” Martin said.

  “Why are you here, Mr. Wallace?”

  “I told you on the phone.”

  “Tell me again.” His grin was a challenge. “It was a bad line.”

  “You wrote to Molly Wolfe. She sent me to find out what you wanted and why.”

  “Faper not fofip, eh?” He held open the canteen door. “The Foundation for Applied Psychological Research,” he explained when Martin stared at him, “which was here before the Foundation for Industrial Psychology. That’s where you are now.”

  Martin felt uneasy and couldn’t think why. “You mean this is where Molly came eleven years ago?”

  “That’s what I said. Why not?” He slid a tray that bore two plastic cups of muddy coffee along the counter to the till and paid the sniffing cashier. “Thanks, pet,” he said with a wink, and turned to Martin without warning. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

  “I shouldn’t think so.”

  “Strange, could have sworn I had.” His grin was even friendlier. He led Martin to a table among the businessmen, who were discussing a computer language and seemed almost to be talking in it. “Sorry, I’ve forgotten what you wanted to know.”

  Perhaps he thought that sitting with the businessmen would inhibit Martin. “Molly Wolfe wants to know why you wrote to her after all this time,” Martin said without bothering to lower his voice.

  “No particular reason. I just thought it was time to check.”

  “After eleven years of not checking? That’s not the way your letter reads.”

  “It was designed to get a response. Not that it did, except from you.”

  “You wrote to everyone who took part in your experiment?”

  “Yes, of course. Why would I single out Miss Wolfe?”

  Martin suppressed an angry response. “What aftereffects were you expecting?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Part of the scientific method is not to anticipate.”

  “Maybe so, but don’t tell me you expected nothing.” Losing his temper wouldn’t help Molly. “You must have expected your original experiment to achieve something.”

  “You ought to ask Guilda Kent about that. She was running the show.” He stirred three spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee and sipped before he went on. “We wanted to look at correlations between the prophetic dreams of different subjects and whether different conditions might affect their dreaming.”

  “But did any of the dreams come true?”

  Hay looked as if he hadn’t expected such a naive question. “A few seemed specific enough. None of Miss Wolfe’s, I’m afraid, at least not so far as I know. Again, Dr. Kent would be the one to ask. She took her research with her when faper became fofip. What we’re doing here now wasn’t for her, she said.”

  He swallowed half his coffee in one gulp. “Five minutes, gentlemen,” he called. “Will you excuse me now, Mr. Wallace? I think I’ve answered all your questions.”

  Martin seized Hay’s wrist as he put down the cup, and felt how the bones would creak if he gripped hard. “You haven’t told me what happened here eleven years ago.”

  “I’d call it collective hysteria, probably involving hallucination. Would you mind?” He tugged his wrist free, gently but firmly. “In retrospect it isn’t surprising. There was a very strong rapport between the subjects, stronger than they were able to cope with. They did appear to share dreams. I agree we should have had more safeguards, if that’s what is on your mind.” He pushed his chair back. “If you’re asking about the subjective experience of what happened, of course I wouldn’t know. I should have thought you would have got that from Miss Wolfe.”

  Martin opened his mouth, but Hay had been waiting to interrupt him. “By the way, you’ve left it a bit late to tell me if she has experienced any aftereffects.”

  “How should I know which they are?” The implication that he’d been neglectful infuriated Martin. “She’s been having prophetic dreams again, which she says are accurate. She’s on edge even though she’s sleeping nights. One of the others contacted her and she keeps thinking there’s another of them somewhere near. Frankly, I think these are effects of your goddamned letter.”

  Stuart’s frown had cleared so quickly that Martin wasn’t sure what he had said to cause it. “Who contacted her?”|

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Then it looks as if we’ve told each other all we can.”

  Martin doubted that, but Hay was following the businessmen toward the door. “How can I get in touch with Dr. Kent?”

  “Good question,” Stuart said approvingly as if it were Martin’s first. “I wish I could tell you. I haven’t seen or heard of her for years. I understood she was planning to get closer to the problems of ordinary people.” He turned to Martin before stepping into the auditorium. “If you should trace her, you might tell her I’d like her to get in touch.”

  Martin’s anger died as the double doors ceased to swing. He could always confront Hay tomorrow if there was anything Molly wanted him to ask, but he rather felt that Hay had nothing more of significance to offer. He strolled down the pale green corridor and glanced back belatedly at the painting that had looked like a window on a summer landscape, hills and distant Oxford, but there was only a window. No doubt the painting had been in one of the rooms he’d passed.

  He was stamping his feet and slapping his forearms by the time the Oxford bus arrived. Nevertheless he left the bus when it reached the outskirts of Oxford, and walked through the elegant streets. Icy winds blew through the quadrangles, in one of which a guided tour had halted, heads tipped back to admire stone figures in their lairs; winds rattled the Georgian windows in the High Street. Domes and cupolas swelled
against a sky like a flood of ice, Gothic pinnacles bristled, and Martin kept having to dodge bicycles as he gazed up. It must have been an hour before he reached the Randolph, where the receptionist gave him Molly’s message.

  He called her and then, with a good deal of transatlantic difficulty, his mother. His father’s condition hadn’t changed. She said he wanted Martin, and Martin promised to be there as soon as he could. His initial panic was fading now that he knew his father was still alive, but it was giving way to a kind of nervous frustration. Of course he mustn’t blame Molly; coming to Oxford had been his idea. All the same, as he hurried out to find a travel agent’s he couldn’t help growing furious that he had wasted so much time.

  36

  DANNY sat in the parlor and stared at the aquarium and struggled not to tell his mother where he had been on New Year’s Eve. He mustn’t care that neither she nor his father had addressed a complete sentence to him since then; he mustn’t care that he felt as if he were drowning in their silence and disapproval, felt as if their disapproval were a substance that covered him from head to foot and clogged his ears. He watched the fish swimming through the castle in the aquarium and thought he had never seen anything so stupid: the fish didn’t even know what a castle was. Thinking that was no good, because he knew his parents thought that he was even stupider and more contemptible. The only way to prove them wrong would be to tell them where he had been.

  When he’d staggered down to Bayswater Road after copying Molly Wolfe’s address, he’d found he couldn’t afford a taxi. It had taken him nearly three hours to stumble home, he’d been sick all over his new suit outside Regent’s Park while revelers had cheered him on and woken all the monkeys in the zoo. When he’d picked up a handful of snow to clean himself he’d discovered that a dog had been there first, and after all that he had realized that Caledonian Road would have been a quicker way home. He’d reeled into the flat to find his mother calling the police. “Never mind the drunks, they can look after themselves, and it’s their own fault if they can’t. My son’s missing, don’t you understand?” When she had seen Danny, she’d walked away to bed, wheezing as if she would never again catch her breath. His father had stared at him until Danny was afraid of falling down from being unable to move. “By God. your mother was right about you,” was all that his father had said.

  Let the spies tell his mother where he’d been on New Year’s Eve, she wouldn’t listen because she didn’t believe in them. All the same they were confusing him, making him feel he mustn’t say where he had been, making him forget that telling was the only way to get rid of the disapproval that was suffocating him. He was opening his mouth before he had thought what to say, when his mother said, “Shall we watch the war film?”

  “It isn’t a war film, it’s some slushy thing,” his father grumbled.

  “It must have a battle in it. The Battle of the Villa Fiorita.”

  “That’s a good film.” Danny had remembered what he’d read about it. and his crotch felt warm. “I’d like to see that,” he said.

  His father ignored him, his mother gave him a sad helpless glance. “Maureen O’Hara’s in it,” she told his father. “You like her. You liked the one where John Wayne drags her to town by her hair.”

  “The Silent Man,” Danny said.

  “That’s right. Danny, thank you. We’ll watch this one this afternoon then, shall we?”

  “You’ll do whatever suits you, I expect,” his father growled and stumped away to the bathroom, scratching his stubbly chin so hard that Danny could still hear it in the hall. “The silent bloody man, good God. Pity there isn’t one here.”

  “I can watch too, can’t I?” Danny said anxiously to his mother. “I won’t distract you or anything.”

  “If you say you’re sorry and promise you’ll never do anything like that again.”

  “I’m sorry and I promise.”

  “Just never let me down again, Danny. I’m not in the health for it. You were nearly the death of me on New Year’s Eve.”

  He hadn’t been, it wasn’t fair. Dr. Kent had if anyone had. Could she and Molly Wolfe have taken turns to keep him out so late that worrying would finish off his mother? Dr. Kent had said he wouldn’t feel free while his mother was alive. But he didn’t feel guilty now, because his mother had forgiven him. They had reckoned without her.

  Later his father went to the pub so that he could smoke his cigarettes, and came back for lunch. He didn’t say a word to Danny while they washed and stacked the dishes, but when Danny joined his parents in front of the television, he growled, “Got you watching too, has she? At least while you’re here you can’t do much harm.” Danny thought he could hear how his father felt that at least Danny was i being unselfish, keeping his mother company while she watched the kind of film only she liked. Danny smiled at how everything was fitting together on his behalf.

  When the film began, his father produced a bag of boiled sweets and gave them to Danny’s mother as if he’d bought them from an usherette. She sucked and wheezed and glanced about to make sure nobody was looking while she removed her bottom teeth to which a sweet had stuck, while Maureen O’Hara went to live with a concert pianist in Italy. Their children went on hunger strike to force them not to remarry, and it looked as if the scene was coming: “14-year-old Olivia Hussey goes across Rosanno Brazzi’s knee and has her skirt lifted for a few powerful smacks… .” That’s what the dictionary of spanking films had said. He sat back to give the wriggling in his trousers room.

  The fish gulped at their floating food, Danny’s mother sucked her sweet and rattled her teeth, Rosanno Brazzi was forcing his daughter to eat. When she spat out her food on her plate, Danny knew this was it, and suddenly realized why he was nervous: suppose his mother saw the movement in his trousers’? Brazzi pulled the girl across his knee and spanked her—“About time too,” Danny’s mother said around her sweet—and then it was over, too quickly. She stalked away to a safe distance and began to curse her father in Italian. “I wouldn’t let you get away with that,” Danny muttered.

  It looked as if Brazzi had heard him, for the actor jumped up and dragged her back to the chair. He unbuckled his belt before he forced her across his knee and slipped her knickers down. Danny pressed his spine into the easy chair as his penis rose, and could hear nothing but the cracks of the belt and the girl’s cries. It wasn’t until his mother said, “Is that the same girl?” that he realized something was wrong.

  The scene wasn’t meant to go on like this. He was making it happen somehow. His parents frowned at it and shifted resentfully in their seats as Maureen O’Hara brought Brazzi a cane, and Danny knew what Dr. Kent had done: by reminding him of Oxford she’d weakened his hold on things so that they could change. He knew that when the pleading girl raised her face to the camera it would be Dr. Kent’s or Molly Wolfe’s. He was seized by a suffocating fear that his mother would realize he was making the film change. He staggered up from his chair, though his penis almost jerked him back into it, and switched off the television.

  He was sitting down again before he saw he had achieved nothing. The girl was screaming as Maureen O’Hara used the cane. He forced himself not to grab the huge painful weight in his trousers as he limped back to the television and wrenched the plug out of the wall. For a moment, or much longer, that seemed to make no difference either, then the picture shrank reluctantly to a fading point of light. He was straightening up from the socket when his father threw him out of the way. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, you damned lunatic? Your mother was watching that and you knew she was.”

  Danny limped bewildered to his room and slumped on the bed. His penis was as reluctant to shrink as the picture had been, but eventually it did. Had he been the only one to see the scene in the film? Was that Dr. Kent’s trick? He squeezed his eyes shut to try and stop his head throbbing. He heard the music at the end of the film, and then his father marched in and threw something on Danny’s bed.

  It was a letter tha
t had been opened. Danny was afraid to read it, even when his father had gone, in case someone had written to his parents that they had seen him in Soho. Then he realized it was addressed to him. He hadn’t received a letter for years, yet his parents were still opening his correspondence as if he hadn’t grown up. They were spying on him, just like his enemies. He tore the envelope as he fumbled out the letter, and wished he had something else to tear.

  The letter was from Stuart Hay in Oxford, and it had been posted weeks before Christmas. His father must have kept it from him to protect him, and now had given it to him as a rebuke for the way he’d behaved, or because he felt Danny was no longer worth protecting. It wanted to know about aftereffects, if what Dr. Kent and the others had done was still affecting Danny. If Stuart Hay had known Danny’s address for so long. Dr. Kent must have known too. Beth of them were helping Molly Wolfe try to get hold of his mind.

  They might have succeeded if his father hadn’t kept the letter. He knew at once what he had to do. The Hercules wouldn’t be open for hours. “I’m going now,” he said when he’d put on his coat, and almost thanked his father until he saw his blank furious look.

  He ran through the streets, and half an hour later was in Soho hurrying past a line of disapproving women with placards. Dr. Kent opened her door before he reached it, and raised her eyebrows. “I’m glad you’ve come back, Danny.”

  She wouldn’t be for long. Perhaps she sensed his mood, for she sat forward at her desk and gazed sharply at him. “What makes you keep coming back, do you think?”