The Adjacent

by Christopher Priest

  I crossed over the delta and beyond was a huge area of marsh and undrained flood-plain. It was a forest of tall reeds, pale beige in colour, with dark seed pods clinging to the top of every stem. They waved constantly – the wind carved patterns in all directions, as the stems flexed to and fro. I stayed at about a thousand feet. Any lower than that was a risk. At a low height I could not be able to count on the altimeter giving an accurate reading, and the moving reeds were already making it difficult for me to estimate height by eye alone.

  I could see no sign of habitation. In fact it did not seem possible that this land could ever be made habitable without major drainage schemes and tidal barriers. I flew for about five minutes, constantly aware of the fuel I was using up even at this slow speed, but the presence of the Adjacent zone on Prachous was the one matter I had never entirely understood.

  I flew across the blackened ground almost without realizing what it was. I had been trying to see ahead, and I passed an area on the starboard that appeared suddenly, but seemed to flicker and disappear as I looked towards it – I was aware of a sense of something missing, a black absence.

  I circled around, gained a little altitude. As I headed back I saw the full extent of what I had somehow missed when I flew past. There was an area of deep blackness on the ground – black, as if everything had been incinerated to the point of total destruction. It did not look like burned vegetation or the wreckage of something that had been there before. It was an annulment, an absence, a piece of negative terrain.

  I flew across it, deeply disturbed by the sight. As I once more reached the plain of reeds, I gained height and circled around for another look. This time, as I flew towards the blackened ground I could see its full extent. It was immense, spreading out far to my starboard, less so on the port side. There I could see the terminator between the black impression of absence and the edge of the reed bank. It appeared to be a precise line, as straight as if it had been carved out with a massive knife.

  I increased speed – I was feeling exposed while flying so slowly. I gained another five hundred feet of altitude, circled around again. This time I was high enough to take in the whole area of blackness. I could now see that it was an exact and regular triangle, carved out of the reedland. It spread for miles.

  I headed towards it, but something about it gave me fright, and I shied instinctively away. There was something horrible about that negative sight, as if to venture too close would lead to my being drawn inexorably into it. I banked the aircraft, turning away, but then I changed my mind and held the turn, went back yet again for another look.

  The triangle had disappeared.

  I immediately thought that I had lost my bearings, but I had been flying by the compass and I knew that I was now heading back directly towards where the mark had been.

  There were buildings ahead of me.

  Where the triangle had been there was now what looked like part of a town. I saw houses, streets, an area of green parkland, a church spire. There was no movement, no traffic driving along the roads, no people in sight, just the buildings, the roads, the solid exoskeleton of a modern city. I could see the shadows thrown by the bright sunlight.

  The townscape also took the shape of an equilateral triangle, carved out of the reeds. It was the same size: each of the equal sides was at least two miles in length.

  I flew across it, banked, turned through a hundred and eighty degrees, went back. How could I have missed it before? This time I saw tall buildings, concrete and glass, rising up above the ordinary houses and streets. I saw long terraces, cars parked outside. Many of the roads were lined with mature trees. The piece of park, which ran as far as one of the straight-line sides, also had many trees, a small lake, paths laid across the grass.

  I flew away, banked again, headed back.

  The town had disappeared. The triangle of black nullity had returned in its place.

  I began to feel frightened again of what was down there, as if it were unreal, a decoy or a trap, something that was dangerous to see or know. Yet the aircraft in which I was flying gave me a feeling of immunity from what was outside. I took control of myself, tried to decide what to do. While I thought about this I had once again crossed the zone, and was on a bearing towards the sea. I made a decision.

  I put the Spitfire into a steep turn and flew back towards where the triangle had been. This time I made no attempt to fly across it, or above it, but I set myself a circular course, skirting around all three of the furthest extremities of the immense triangle, close enough that I could see, but not so near to it that I became subjected to the deep fear it invoked in me.

  I flew an anti-clockwise course, the dark triangle on my port side. I maintained a steady speed, a safe distance, the plane was cruising. I stared towards the triangle as I went around my circuit.

  It changed.

  At some points, from some angles, the triangle contained the buildings of a city – from other views it became once again that terrifying place of zero colour, black non-existence. Whenever I was close to one of the apexes, the sixty-degree angle at each of the triangle’s corners, the image began to flicker with increasing rapidity. As I banked around that angle, the shift between the two became so rapid that it seemed for a moment that all I could see was a part of the reedland, but then, as my course took me along the next side of the triangle, the shifting between the two began to slow, and at the halfway mark what I could see was a steady view: from some sides it appeared as the black triangle of nothingness, from the others it would again be the image of the city.

  I circled the zone four times, trying to work out whatever logic there might be in this incomprehensible vision, but as I started a fifth circuit I felt a certain jolt of reality. I had a larger purpose for making this flight, and I was critically wasting valuable fuel.

  I made one last crossing of the zone. This time I knew that for the rest of the long flight I had to take the Spitfire to the operating altitude at which it had been designed to fly, and where I could burn what fuel remained more economically while flying faster. I made a last turn, opened the throttle to gain the best speed for a climb, then flew directly across the zone called Adjacent. As I did so I leaned forward, pressed the switch that until that moment I had never touched, the one that would start the powerful reconnaissance camera installed in the belly of the aircraft. I set it to run automatically, with one picture being taken every two seconds.

  I heard the servo motor begin to run, felt its vibration, as I crossed the closest edge of the dark triangle, and moments later I saw the signal light on the operating box flicker on and off, as one frame after another was exposed.

  I left the camera running as the great Merlin reached its full power, and the Spitfire climbed at speed to the familiar heights of the open sky.

  30

  An hour later I was on a bearing of 260 degrees and had long ago passed safely out of Prachous air space. I was in a sky of high, billowing clouds. Below me was the sea with many islands in sight. Increasingly I saw larger pieces of land pushing out towards the islands, and I knew that before long this course would take me over the continental mass for most of the remainder of the flight. I was at just over twenty-five thousand feet, much lower than the operating ceiling at which the Spitfire reconnaissance pilots normally flew, but at this altitude the plane was cruising at high speed on a weak mixture. Because I was flying without maps, I needed to be able to see the ground from time to time. The aircraft’s cockpit heater blew warm air gently across me.

  An immense column of heavy cloud lay ahead, blinding white at its anvil-shaped crest, but a thunderous dark below. I knew what it was, knew I should avoid it, but I had been trying to dead reckon from looking at the ground. The long trailing shelf of the anvil was already above me and a stinging shower of hail was falling. It drummed terrifyingly on the Spitfire’s wings and fuselage, crashing against the canopy. The cumulonimbus stretched across the sky in front of me. My only option in the time left to me was to attempt
to climb above it. Once again I raised the nose of the aircraft, but I was still climbing when I rushed against the wall of the cloud and slipped headlong into the turbulent darkness within.

  31

  I struggled through the dense cloud for nearly half an hour. Lightning streaked around me and violent up- and down-draughts battered the aircraft. The constant hailstones sounded like the impact of bullets. I was repeatedly thrown against the canopy or the fuselage – once the Spitfire acted as if it had rammed headlong into a solid obstruction. I was jerked forward in my seat against the control column, causing an unwanted dive. Any hope of maintaining my bearing was lost the moment I entered the cloud, because the internal currents were so violent and unpredictable that I could only hope the aircraft would stay in one piece and the engine would not fail or overheat. Sometimes it was impossible even to be sure the plane was still upright. This was the first and only time in all my solo flying that I felt out of control and in danger of crashing. Several times I was convinced I was going to die. The best I could do was cling on to the joystick, nursing the throttle with one hand, trying to keep the aircraft safely in the air.

  I escaped from the cloud as suddenly as I had blundered into it. I flew out, more or less straight and level, moving in a few seconds from the terrifying up-draughts into calm, still air, blue and blue and blue around me. I was dazzled by brilliant sunshine.

  I immediately checked my instruments, looking for any clue that the plane might have suffered critical damage, to the engine, to the flying surfaces, or to the hydraulics and fuel lines. All seemed well but it was impossible to be certain. I adjusted the mixture and the engine resumed its reassuring droning noise. The plane was still flying and it responded to my movements of the stick and rudder pedals. From the altimeter I discovered that we had ascended nearly five thousand feet while we were inside the storm cell. I let the plane descend to the former altitude. I checked my bearing, adjusted the direction, flew as calmly as I could, although I was feeling badly shaken up by the experience. From that point on I kept a wary eye open for any more storm clouds of that sort.

  The long day continued. I was flying blind, depending entirely on my compass. I had no idea where I was. The land below me was unbroken countryside, impossible from this height to pick out any features. As far as I could see in any direction there were no distinguishing marks, no mountains, urban conglomerations, coastlines, not even a river whose shape or position might tell me something. All I could cling to was the 260 degrees bearing, my only route, my only way to the place I thought of as home.

  Something glinted in the sky to starboard. It happened so quickly that it vanished by the time I turned towards it for a better look. I flew on. Then it happened again and this time I saw that it was a single-engined aircraft, dark against the bright sky, but the sun was glinting from its wings as it kept swinging from side to side – that was how fighter pilots kept a watch below them. Fear gripped me again. A second fighter plane had now joined the first, zooming up from below. Were the fighters friend or foe? They were too far away for me to identify them definitely, but I knew almost beyond doubt that they must be German. I was in the most distinctive British warplane of all but it was unarmed – in any event I had no idea how one went into combat while flying, so a fight was never an option. They were backing off, taking up a position somewhere behind me, presumably gaining height so they could launch an attack on me.

  Moments later a fiery trail of bullets passed above my canopy, disappearing somewhere ahead of me. Something impacted on the Spitfire, behind the cockpit. The plane lurched, but although it had been wounded and it felt less responsive to the elevators, it continued to fly. Then one of the attacking planes zoomed past me and for a couple of seconds it was clearly in sight. I recognized it at once – I had been trained to spot every aircraft known to be flying, allied or enemy. This was a Focke-Wulf 190, the only German fighter that could match the high performance of a Spitfire. I glimpsed the spotted dark green camouflage on the upper surfaces, the black Luftwaffe cross clearly visible, the swastika sinisterly painted on the fin. The Focke-Wulf roared low above my plane, and I swung the stick to one side to avoid it. The German plane then banked away from me. The second Luftwaffe plane followed it, without seeming to have fired at me.

  Unable to fight I could only try to evade. The one advantage I had was the advanced flying performance of this Spitfire XI, increased even more by the fact I was now light on fuel, and of course it lacked the deadweight of heavy machine guns buried in the wings. I threw the nose down, flung open the throttle and dived towards the ground. I turned, levelled out, dived again. My indicated airspeed was greater than 400 knots.

  I lost sight of the German planes but I knew they must be somewhere around. I kept scanning the sky, but the sun was lowering in the west and the sky was too dazzling for me to see with any certainty. I saw two more aircraft – it might have been the original two, but it made no difference. They were flying at me from dead ahead and slightly to the side. I briefly saw the flickering flash of the guns embedded in their wings, but our combined speeds meant that these planes were only in sight for a couple of seconds. They swooped up and past me, one of them flying so close to my Spitfire I was certain of a head-on collision. It went just above me, though, kicking the Spitfire with the violence of its wake.

  I flew on without sustaining any more damage.

  The ground came closer, so I levelled the aircraft while trying to maintain the fabulous speed. Never before had I flown such a fast plane. The sheer thrill of that outweighed even my fear of being shot at by more German aircraft. High speed made me safe, made me feel safe. I went on and on, now so tired after hours at the controls that I was flying almost by instinct alone. I loved this aircraft more than I could express, even to myself. It seemed to anticipate my moves before I made them, sometimes even before I thought of making them, a sort of instinctive extension of me, a part of my consciousness that had been equipped with wings. I was still on the same bearing, somewhere over Europe, probably over the German homeland or perhaps a part of the occupied territories.

  I was alone in a hostile sky, the sun sinking towards the horizon ahead of me. I wanted to be home, away from this, away from the past. I had a life ahead of me. The shore appeared suddenly and I flashed across the breaking waves. I was now flying low, at about two thousand feet. Anti-aircraft guns mounted on a ship moored offshore opened up on me as I streamed past. I saw the tracer bullets bright in the evening sky, curling up, nowhere close to me. Within seconds I was out of their range. It was getting dark – I guessed that in this summer evening there would be about an hour of subdued daylight left that would be good enough to let me fly safely. All I would need was the sight of a runway, straight and level. I took the plane down even lower, until I was only about two hundred feet above the surface of the sea. I could not maintain this height by instruments so I watched the sea ahead as it seemed to dash towards me, hypnotic in its steadiness and sense of unstoppable rush. I was yawning. My mouth was dry, my muscles were exhausted, my eyes were sore from constant straining through the brightness of the sky. I flew on, with no idea where I was, where I was going. If I was over the wrong sea, or had drifted away from my course, I might fly forever above these waves until the last drop of fuel had been used. But then, ahead, low on the horizon, a sight of land. I took the plane up to about a thousand feet, stared ahead, saw the flat coast hurtling towards me, dark, unlit, almost unprotected. It looked so harmless, the edge of a small island at war, vulnerable in the declining twilight. I closed the throttle a little, and the Spitfire slowed. I was almost at the coast, saw the white of the waves fringing the beach, the quiet shore of Great Britain. This was the place I thought of as home, the island that had taken me in when I had nowhere else to go, the island country I had grown to love and wanted to defend. I crossed the English tideline, saw below me an area of dunes, a small town nearby, beyond there were silent fields, mature trees. I slowed my beautiful, wounded aircraft even more
and flew carefully across the crepuscular countryside, looking for an airfield where I might safely land.

  PART 8

  The Airfield

  1

  THE RETURN

  Tibor Tarent waited until the Mebsher was not only out of sight, but also until he could no longer hear the distinctive high whining of its turbines. The personnel carrier had been driven away towards the east, which was the direction for the time being from which the wind was coming. For several minutes the sound of the Mebsher’s engine came intermittently to him, as the cold wind bore it across the high Lincolnshire Wolds. The further it travelled the more distorted by the wind, and to Tarent the increasing distance lent the sound an eerie, other-worldly quality. It was close to midday in full daylight, and the sun was breaking fitfully through the racing clouds, but that far off wailing made him think of night. In particular, of those nights in Turkey when people had come to the field hospital too late to be treated, had been forced to wait outside the locked compound overnight, who howled in pain as they died in the dusty, enervating heat of the Anatolian night. It was a regular task in the morning for the orderlies to retrieve the bodies of those who had not survived the hours of darkness.

  The Mebsher, its turbines howling into the distance, had become a carrier of human remains, of people whose image had been doubled by death. He thought of Lou Paladin trapped inside the grey steel compartment, accompanied by people he knew were dead. Who was that she was sitting next to? That man who had the same cameras, the same face and no doubt the same name? How could he ever explain to her what had occurred?