The Shift Key

by John Brunner

  ‘I can’t get over it!’ he kept exclaiming, and then proceeded to describe what it was he couldn’t get over. By the weary expression on Mr Mender’s face, Tim deduced that this was far from the first time he’d said the same thing in more or less the same words.

  ‘I mean, in a village like ours, if you can’t trust the doctor and the parson, who can you trust? In the old days you’d have said the squire, I suppose, but with poor old Marmaduke Goodsir in the state he is, and Basil having behaved in that extraordinary fashion …’

  He grew aware that Mr Mender’s attention was wandering, and cast about for a fresh audience. Spotting Tim, he twisted around on his stool and demanded, ‘What do you make of what’s going on?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,’ Tim answered diffidently. ‘I’ve been in the kitchen all day.’

  ‘You mean you haven’t heard that the locum tenens sent me a prescription for a still-warm chicken on the Health Service?’ Mr Ratch was delighted, and moved to the next stool, closing the gap. ‘You haven’t heard about Mr Phibson being possessed of the Devil, or what Basil Goodsir said about hanging people for sheep-stealing? No? Well, let me bring you up to date!’

  Listening, while in some relief Mr Mender collected used glasses for Megan the barmaid to wash, Tim felt a stir of private anxiety. He’d had that strange conviction about the day’s special, hadn’t he? It had given him a very odd feeling to discover that Mr Mender was right and he was incontestably wrong, despite his inner certainty. Not to be able to feel you could trust your own memory … Had Mr Mender mentioned it?

  Seemingly not, for if he had Mr Ratch would certainly have included it in his long list of inexplicable events. To the ones already mentioned he added what Mary Flaken had done to the Blockets, and what Miss Knabbe had allegedly tried to do to Mrs O’Pheale, and some very odd stories that his children had recounted when they came home from school, the younger who went locally chuckling about the behaviour of the Surrean girls, the older who was at Powte laughing inordinately about some trick that had been played on one of those stuck-up Ellerfords …

  ‘Take all that together,’ Mr Ratch concluded triumphantly, ‘and what does it add up to? Does it sound to you like the Devil making mischief? Well, that’s what Mr Phibson’s saying, in so many words!’

  Tim shook his head in polite wonderment, asking himself the while whether what had happened to him felt like a prank played by the Evil One. He decided that it didn’t, and drained his glass.

  ‘Well, I’m sure it’ll all blow over,’ he said, slipping down from his stool. ‘And now, if you’ll excuse me …’

  The moment the door swung to behind him, Mr Mender leaned confidentially on the bar.

  ‘Something just struck me,’ he said. ‘You know that boy’s my chef? Well, he was acting very strangely this morning. Though he seems to have got over it. Still, it was extremely odd.’

  Mr Ratch was preparing to listen with interest when a siren sounded on the bridge. All eyes turned to the rain-smeared but uncurtained windows facing the street, and Megan paused with a wet mug in her hand to ask the air, ‘Fire engine?’

  ‘Ambulance,’ Mr Ratch said authoritatively – and there it was, rushing by with its blue lights flashing. ‘Hmm! I wonder what’s up. Mind if I use your phone, Nigel?’ – to Mr Mender.

  ‘Help yourself.’

  He was back in a few moments, looking puzzled.

  ‘Apparently it’s Mrs Ellerford. Collapsed, or something.’

  ‘Mrs Ellerford? Do I know her?’

  ‘Secretary of the Weyharrow Society. Doesn’t mix much otherwise.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I recognize the name … Do you suppose she’ll be all right? I mean, after what you’ve been saying about the locum –’

  ‘At least he’s had the sense to call an ambulance. She’ll be taken care of. That’s another funny thing, though, that I forgot to mention earlier. According to my oldest, her sons arrived at school today complaining about the way she acted at breakfast. Gave them some kind of slimy muck and insisted it was what they always had. It wasn’t. They said they’d never seen it before.’

  He wagged his balding head solemnly back and forth.

  ‘Devil or no Devil, Nigel, you can’t deny there’s something very fishy going on.’

  ‘Joe, where are you going?’ Yvonne Book demanded, leaning over the banisters. She was ready for bed, in a pink nylon nightie, slippers trimmed with nylon fur, and a quilted blue dressing-gown. Leaving the bathroom, she had expected to find her husband undressed also. Instead he was in the hall buttoning his jacket and reaching down his rain-cape from its peg.

  She added suddenly, Has there been another phone call that I didn’t hear because the bath was running out?’

  ‘No,’ Joe sighed. The evening had been one long succession of phone calls, mostly reporting the fact that the Doctor’s House wasn’t answering and the callers weren’t being transferred. But he’d got on to the exchange and sorted that one out. ‘No,’ he said again. ‘But while you were upstairs I heard an ambulance go by. I think it stopped on the green. I’m just going to check up.’

  ‘Must you?’

  ‘I think I’d better. I’ll be as quick as I can.’ He blew her a kiss and hastened out into the rain.

  Left alone, Yvonne wondered glumly whether she’d been right to marry a policeman.

  Particularly since, now they were older, their kids were getting an awful lot of stick from their school-friends …

  But they were lucky that their father had a job. Any sort of job. So many of the other children’s fathers were unemployed. Probably it was mainly jealousy.

  A little comforted by the idea, she made for bed.

  ‘Won’t it come right?’ Carol Draycock said anxiously, cutting off the TV sound with the remote control.

  Returning to the sitting-room from the attic where he had spent the evening struggling to reconstruct the article he had written this morning with such fluency and impact, Victor scowled and shook his head.

  ‘I don’t understand what can have gone wrong!’ he said for the twentieth time. ‘I know all the main commands by heart! The only ones I have to look up any more are the rare ones that I scarcely have a use for. And I could have sworn I knew that one as well as my own name!’

  ‘Did you check it in the manual?’

  ‘Of course I did!’

  ‘And –?’

  ‘And it’s not the way I remember it!’ He slumped into an armchair, shaking his head bewilderedly.

  Carol looked at him steadily for a long moment. At last she said, ‘You do so hate being wrong, don’t you?’

  ‘Show me someone who enjoys it!’ was his curt response.

  ‘Well, I think you ought to get used to the idea that you’re bound to make mistakes now and then.’

  ‘Haven’t I had that abundantly demonstrated today? First the bloody machine, then the bloody Ellerford kid, then the bloody Head – I’ve had a day full of bloodies!’

  ‘No need to snap at me, though …! I’m going to make some hot chocolate. Want some?’

  ‘Yes, please – No, even chocolate might keep me awake, the state I’m in. Bovril and milk, please. I didn’t eat much supper, did I?’

  But after his drink he sat brooding for the best part of another hour before she could persuade him to turn in.

  Phyllis Knabbe lay sleepless and weeping, alone in her cottage. Moira had not come back. Doubtless she had carried out her brutal promise to find a man for the night. At any rate she had repeated it when she set off for the pub.

  Oh, the looks on the faces of the people when Miss Knabbe had finally ventured out this afternoon to do some necessary shopping …! The children had been worst. She had passed the bus-stop on the green just as Tom Fidger was bringing them back from school. How word had reached them, she could scarcely guess, but obviously it must have (had Tom told them? Would he have?) for they were grinning and passing mocking remarks, and she knew without needing to be told that they
concerned herself. Why, Ursula Ellerford’s boys, who were normally quite polite, had brushed past her without a glance of recognition. Wasn’t that sufficient proof?

  She had rung Ursula repeatedly. There had been no reply. She too must be shunning the idiot who had done so scandalous a thing.

  And she didn’t even have the company of Rufus. He had not come back all day. Not even when the rain started.

  At last she forced herself out of bed and went into the bathroom. There was a nearly full bottle of sleeping-pills in the medicine cabinet. She filled a cup with water and shook two of the tablets into her palm. Having gulped them down, she hesitated for a moment, then reached a decision.

  She shook out another, and another, and another, and swallowed, and swallowed, and swallowed …

  In the small hours Rufus squalled his lungs out at the kitchen door. Miss Knabbe was far past hearing, and for good.

  Ken Pecklow was laboriously writing out a description of the damage done to his turnips, chuckling now and then at what Mr Haggledon the lawyer had suggested he should try: put in an insurance claim and leave the insurers to get the money back from the Vikeses. He was a smart one, that Mr Haggledon! He’d never have thought of it by himself.

  But now and then he paused, looking worried.

  Harry Vikes wasn’t crazy. Or at any rate he’d never acted crazy like this before. Bad-tempered, maybe – given to drinking a bit too much now and then, though nothing like what overcame Joyce from time to time. There might be no love lost between the two families, but this wasn’t the same. This was different, and very strange.

  And it wasn’t as though it was just another stage in a good live quarrel, either.

  But …

  Now and then in the Farmer’s Weekly he’d seen mention of harm that could come to people using certain kinds of chemical spray. Well, everybody used them – the insecticides, the herbicides, the fungicides – and you never heard about anybody dying, or falling ill, not really. Oh, there had been that case on telly the other week, but that wasn’t a farmer, just someone who’d been cycling past a field while it was being sprayed, and it hadn’t been on their kind of level because the stuff came from a plane.

  On the other hand, Harry had bought that new insecticide and boasted about how much it had cost and how much it was going to save him in the long run. Boasted in Ken Pecklow’s hearing at the Marriage, more than once, knowing he couldn’t afford any this year.

  Could that have something to do with –?

  No. ’Course not. If the stuff was that dangerous, the government would never allow it to be sold. Besides, Parson had said … and if you couldn’t trust Parson, who could you trust?

  He went back to his slow and unaccustomed task, promising himself that he would attend church on Sunday. He hadn’t been since Christmas.

  Now and then his tongue sought out his broken tooth. It had been a small price to pay for punching Harry’s nose.

  Harry Vikes had put Joyce to bed, where she lay snoring like a pig. Alone in the kitchen but for Chief, he supped homebrewed cider and reflected on the day, wishing he could scratch his nose under its tent of sticking-plaster.

  Everything had been a disaster. He had even failed to save the sick calf; when this afternoon he’d had to call in Mr Backery the vet, she was past help. That meant a stiff bill and nothing to show by way of benefit.

  Harry could well believe that – like Parson claimed – the Devil was at work in Weyharrow. It wasn’t natural, what had happened. He couldn’t have forgotten that the piece he’d used to rent from Mr Mender belonged to Ken this year. Nonetheless, there was proof that he had …

  But on the other hand, Joyce was religious, yet her ranting and quoting from the Bible hadn’t helped them, had it?

  In the end he drowsed off, head cradled on his arms, and only Chief barking to be let out aroused him in time to set about the morning milking.

  When he came back Joyce was up and dressed, apparently no worse for wear, insisting that he come with her to church.

  Resignedly, he went to change and shave.

  To the annoyance of the retired couple she rented a room from, the phone whose number Jenny had given to her Fleet Street contacts kept ringing almost as often as the Books’ throughout the evening. After her landlord and landlady went to bed – they being early risers – she waited beside it in the hall, to snatch it up at the first tinkle.

  She was becoming a little worried about the response she had evoked. On any ordinary day an item like the parson of a West Country village going off his head would at best have rated a couple of paras down-column on an inside page. But it seemed that the national Sunday papers were looking forward to a drab weekend, particularly the popular ones that didn’t care to lead off with disarmament debates at the United Nations or news about Britain being censured in the European Court of Justice. A crazy parson in a village being attacked by the Devil was right up their street.

  When at last a quarter-hour had elapsed without the phone-bell sounding, she remembered she had eaten nothing this evening. Stealing into the kitchen to make tea and toast and fry an egg, she thought regretfully of the meal Steven had offered to buy her.

  At least, though, she had made one sound decision, by approaching the Sundays and not the dailies. Had she done the latter, the whole story could have been spoiled by a brief advance mention in a few down-market papers, no doubt in joky, mocking style, and she herself would have gained no credit. Moreover there was a good chance that, seeing Weyharrow thus pilloried, the locals would have pulled in their horns and presented a united front of denial to all reporters including herself.

  As things stood, she was instructed to phone in updates tomorrow to at least two popular Sundays, to be paid for at union rate, with the virtual promise from one of them that if they couldn’t spare a reporter on Saturday they’d take a story from her and splash it. Exactly what this would do to her relations with Ian Tenterwell, she hadn’t figured out and didn’t much care. After barely more than half a year working for the Chronicle she was bored and frustrated. This looked like the best chance she had so far had to break into the big time.

  Her one real regret, as she slipped into bed, was that she hadn’t pumped Steven sufficiently about his own weird experience this morning. It was all very well to spread the story about the Devil to the sensational newspapers; ought she not, though, to have kept in reserve the sort of commonsensical explanation that a doctor might provide? Suppose it turned out to be something in the water, for example … or sprayed by a local farmer (two of them had gone mad today, hadn’t they?) … or, best of all, somebody drugging the communion wine … No, that wouldn’t fit …

  She was asleep, dreaming of international fame. The dreams would have been delightful if only there hadn’t been a rather gauche young man constantly at her elbow, trying to tell her she had made some sort of terrible mistake.

  At Weyharrow Court the evening had been indescribably awful. The din of rain on its resounding roof, spilling from neglected guttering and splashing randomly on the walls and windows, made a fitting accompaniment to the concerto of hatred within. The conductor, of course, was Helen, and Basil was the soloist.

  Cedric blessed his good sense in visiting Sheila Surrean today and buying a batch of Stick’s fine grass. Not only had it given him an appetite at the dinner-table despite the fact that the main course was some sort of horrid stew; it had insulated him from the vindictiveness of the barbed remarks that flashed continually between his parents, because Ralph Haggledon the lawyer had not turned up with a psychiatrist in tow and had declared himself singularly unimpressed by Helen’s claim that Basil was already fit for an asylum. Now and then, to their immense annoyance, he had actually been able to chuckle behind his napkin.

  When that happened, old Marmaduke – normally stone-faced and glowering – relaxed his mask a trifle, going so far as once or twice to wink.

  A point struck Cedric of a sudden. Could it be …? Of course! It could very well be that
the old man, who had talked this morning about the way his grandson laughed, had no idea of the reason. Was he not given to pronouncing strictures about the young people who descended annually on Weyharrow, accusing them in particular of being dirty and using drugs? Cedric would have rebuffed the former charge, but as to the latter …

  That made him laugh again, this time out loud.

  Just as Helen and Basil were turning to glare at him, providentially the phone in the hall rang. Cedric jumped up, tossing his napkin on his chair.

  ‘I’ll go!’ – and suited action to word.

  ‘It’s probably for me!’ Helen called after him. ‘I’m expecting a call from Marge Grewsam.’

  ‘You mustn’t believe a word that old bitch says!’ Basil cried.

  ‘Have you forgotten how pleased you were when she put in a good word and got you added to the list of JPS?’ Helen countered frostily.

  Marmaduke snapped, ‘Can’t you two talk reasonably?’

  ‘After what he did today –’ and ‘After the way she’s been treating me lately –’

  The old man closed his ears. This one, in the cant phrase, could run and run.

  Beyond the door, which he had pulled to behind him, Cedric snatched up the phone.

  ‘Hello!’

  ‘Hi!’ said a man’s voice that sounded vaguely familiar. ‘You’re Cedric, aren’t you? Is Stick there?’

  ‘Stick?’ Cedric echoed through a marijuana blur. ‘No, his number is –’

  ‘Shit, man, I got his number, but he isn’t answering. I got it the same time I got yours. Midsummer night!’

  A flash of memory filled Cedric’s mind: flaring torches, dowsers of both sexes – some, to the horror of the local folk, ‘skyclad’, ie naked – clutching hazel-forks and demanding admission to the grounds of the Court at midnight because they claimed to have traced a ley line that led to the lost site of the pagan temple …

  But he’d been fairly stoned on that occasion, too, and didn’t clearly remember either who the people were that he had met in the confusion, or even how he’d talked them out of achieving their intention. He did, though, recall that for the next two or three days his parents had treated him with unusual cordiality …