Mandrake Read online

  From the direction of the light, still wavering closer, a voice hailed him. The fear that had hold of Queston paused, and he stood listening, uncertain. The air was cold on his face; when he touched the skin it was wet. The call came again, and the light moved out towards the road ahead. Shaking, he reached inside the Lagonda, and switched on the spotlight.

  As the beam of light leapt down the road, splitting the dark, he saw a man twenty yards away, starting back, raising an arm to shield his eyes. He carried a hurricane lamp in one hand; he wore a rough jacket, and the light glinted on leather patches over his elbows and knees. He moved out of the beam and Queston switched it off. The darkness sprang in on him again, but it seemed less powerful now.

  The man came up close to him. His stride was firm, and the face and shoulders massive, square, solid-blurred as a rough carving from rock. Only the springing grey hair and eyebrows showed that he was older than his body. He said, unemotionally: ‘Havin’ trouble, are you?’

  Queston blessed the level, normal voice, and heard the shake of his own. ‘I’ve run out of petrol, I’m afraid. Hell of a place for it to happen.’

  ‘Where are you going, then?’

  ‘Bath.’

  The man shook his grey head, slowly. He seemed to be looking past Queston, over his shoulder. ‘You’ll never get across. Not at night.’

  It seemed an odd tone, with more conviction than was called for, but Queston was relaxing into companionship, shamefacedly trying to forget his alarm. ‘Well, the main thing is to get some petrol. Or paraffin. I suppose there’s nowhere nearer than Amesbury?’

  ‘Nowhere,’ the man said.

  ‘I’d better walk back. Perhaps I can get a lift.’ His voice died as he heard it. A lift? On a road where no single car had passed him?

  ‘It’s a long walk,’ the man said, with the same abstracted air.

  ‘O well. I’ll spend the night there, and get a garage to bring me out in the morning. Better get the car off the road, though. If you wouldn’t mind helping me give her a push-?’

  The man did not move. ‘Amesbury won’t take you.’

  Was the strangeness of the words anything more than local idiom? Staring at him, Queston felt uneasiness return. ‘Why not?’

  ‘My place will take you. For the one night.’

  ‘That’s awfully kind of you, but—’

  ‘My place will take you,’ the man repeated. He jerked his head towards the dark plain. ‘Half a mile or so. I have a farm. It would be better.’

  Puzzled but grateful, Queston thought of the silent, unlit road back to the town, and the unsteadiness that still drained him.

  ‘Well… thank you very much.’

  There seemed after all no point in moving the car. He took his suitcase from the boot and set off with the man into the dark, walking behind his deliberate striding bulk along a beaten path. They passed close beside a great fallen stone lying in the grass, and Queston stared belligerently past it into the darkness which hid the rest. But this time there was only silence in his mind.

  The house, and the farmer’s wife, were indifferent. He could feel that he was silently suffered to be there; without welcome, without hostility. The woman, small and mouse-like, with the same air of calm resignation as her husband, seemed not to hear his falsely jovial words of thanks. He saw on her pointed grey face the dazed look of inside listening that he could recognize now, but still did not understand.

  The night would not let him alone. A dozen times, as he was on the point of falling asleep, something would suddenly wrench him back to consciousness: a shout, or a chord of music, that rang loud in his ears but came, he knew, only from within his mind. Once he thought he heard a long rumbling, grumbling sound outside, far off. He lay alert, listening, for a long time, and it seemed only a moment later that the man was there, shaking at his shoulder. The window was a square grey glimmer of light.

  ‘Time to go. There’s breakfast downstairs.’

  ‘Uh.’ Queston struggled to wake up.

  The farmer’s voice was urgent, as uneasy as before it had been calm. ‘Time to go.’

  ‘All right. Coming.’ He dressed, and went downstairs. Day broke like a sudden beacon, and the windows were white, pink, gold as the sun rose. They ate boiled eggs and heavy, home-made bread in silence; the woman was nowhere to be seen. The farmer could barely eat for nervousness, flicking swift glances round the room like a guilty child waiting for punishment.

  Queston said uncomfortably: ‘I hope I haven’t put you out.’

  ‘What? No. No. That was last night. Have you finished now? Are you ready?’

  Queston could have eaten twice as much, but he stood up. ‘Fine.’

  The man led him out, picking up a can in the kitchen. ‘I can let you have three gallons of petrol. I keep it in reserve. I have more, but this will get you away. The path is up here.’ He set out so swiftly that they were half running. Striding beside him in the cold early sun, Queston gave him money, and wondered as the man uneasily took it whether he was nervous of his small silent wife. She hadn’t looked a shrew. At least, not the human kind. He looked at the man thoughtfully. ‘Why on earth didn’t you suggest my having the petrol last night?’

  The man paused, and looked him in the face, smiling rather ruefully. His grey eyebrows quirked at the corners, and for a moment there was only good humour where the distress had been. ‘Last night? You’d never have got through last night. You don’t seem to understand things. Doesn’t do to be a stranger these days. I don’t know if you’re goin’ far, and I don’t want to know. But you take my advice if you are, and go by day.’

  And that was all, and no explanation to it, for suddenly the face that creased in friendliness glazed over, and was fixed in a kind of fear; as if, Queston thought, it had heard some dreadful shouted threat. Yet he had heard nothing. He thought with a shudder of the night before; was it that…? But before he could look again at the man’s face he was away, beckoning, stumbling with speed, and soon they came over the rise towards the car. The Plain rode green towards the sunrise, a thin mist white-levelling its hollows; the horizon was a white haze. When Queston turned towards Stonehenge, he stared in astonishment and the beginnings of shame. Surely the stones had not been so small, so small and mild?

  The farmer had brought a funnel with him. Already he had the cap off the fuel tank, and was hastily tilting the can. When it was empty he almost pushed Queston into the car, and his voice was strained, the accent suddenly strong: ‘Go off, then. Back to Amesbury, or you’ll be in the same trouble. You’ll need more than this to cross the Plain. Good luck.’

  He turned away, and Queston heard the Lagonda’s familiar whine, and swung round across the road to face the way he had come. As he drove away, he glanced in his driving-mirror and caught a sight of the farmer that almost stopped him again.

  The man was lying on the ground, his arms and legs outstretched, writhing as if in pain. But as Queston’s foot faltered on the accelerator the body jerked upright to its knees, and the arms came up, flung wide, and he saw that there was no pain there but only a kind of grovelling horrible obeisance. The man bent forward, his forehead touching the ground, his hands flat downwards moving to caress the grass. As the ugly, unnatural picture telescoped into the little mirror Queston felt his throat contract, and he pushed his foot hard down on the accelerator and let the car thrust him escaping out of sight.

  He drove through Amesbury, through Andover, through small villages edging the road; he drove very fast, without stopping, without passing another car. He no longer cared about reaching Bath; nothing could have sent him back to the Plain. Again the road was empty, and in the towns and villages people paused and stared after him. He drove on, the morning sun higher now behind him through the autumn trees. It was just past nine o’clock by his watch. Fear was rising in him fast. Something more than a Ministry was at work in this countryside. He had been right all along. His game of ideas had not been a game. But to think of it as reality was appalling,
impossible, and he pushed the flickering ideas away.

  Outside Basingstoke he stopped for fuel at a small garage where a round-faced boy of about fifteen filled up the tank. The boy lingered by the window as he gave Queston his change, peering in out of light myopic eyes. ‘Which office you from, mister? ’ His podgy face was fearful, admiring.

  ‘No office,’ Queston said.

  The boy’s eyes widened. ‘But that’s a Ministry car, i’n’t it?’

  ‘No.’ Careful, careful. To hell with them. No.

  ‘Cars is off the road now, except the Ministry.’ He looked calculatingly at Queston and then swung round, calling towards the garage: ‘Dad!’

  Queston skidded out of the yard and away, without looking back. He drove on through Hook, past row upon row of deserted houses on the old L.C.C. estates that had been the New Town; past, on the Camberley road, empty barracks in endless fines, a military desert. He saw no one. A thin, mangy dog darted across one silent barrack square.

  His mind skated and raced. He was in the stockbroker belt now, the big cosy houses set back in their beech-brown gardens from the road; beautiful fake miniature mansions of warm red brick. Before Sunningdale, he drew in to the nearest big pair of gates, left the car, walked up the drive and rang the bell. There was no answer. He drove to the next house, and tried again. No answer. No answer at the next house, or the next.

  Queston drove on, slowly. As the fifth roof appeared through the branches he saw smoke rising from its cluster of chimneys in a thin blue stream. He drew up outside, and sat looking out of the car. There was a quick movement at one window, too swift to identify. The house seemed no different from the rest: big, gabled, red-leaved clematis round the door. Queston walked round the car, and in through the gates; and then he stopped abruptly.

  The sensation was fainter this time, but there could be no doubt. There was no mistaking the silent shout of ill will, the invisible wall of hostility that to touch meant an awful paralysis of fear. This house was emanating the same thing, whatever it was, that he had encountered at Stonehenge.

  Queston did not wait to investigate. He backed quickly away and into the car, and drove on.

  He turned a corner, and saw another car. It stood beside the next pair of gates; a big sky-blue Jaguar, with a man and woman busy at the open boot. They were stowing suitcases and boxes inside, and more were strapped to the roof. Queston slid to a halt beside them. He was growing more thirsty for human companionship, ordinary human dull conversation with no sinister overtones, than he had thought he could ever be.

  They did not even glance at him. As he drew up, the man turned back towards the house. The woman straightened quickly. ‘George! Where are you going? Do hurry up!’

  ‘Haven’t turned the gas off.’ The man disappeared into the front door.

  ‘As if it mattered! ’ The woman looked briefly at Queston now, but she spoke to herself. She was about thirty, and beautiful; her eyes dark, wide-set, and a curve to her mouth that told him suddenly and brutally how long he had been alone. But the eyes were shadowed, and the mouth slack in distress.

  Leaning across to his nearside window, Queston said bluntly: ‘Where is everybody?’

  The woman turned to look full at him, and he saw with a shock of disappointment and alarm that the mask was here too, over the beauty; the glazed, dazed detachment, and the listening for something unheard.

  ‘We’re going home, we must go home,’ the words bubbled out of her as if he had touched a spring. ‘We must get back to London… I don’t know what made us want to come away, we don’t belong here. We had the house built… we’re going home now. Think of London, think of the theatres, and the shops, and the river—’ She looked anxiously back towards the house, and her flurry was ridiculous and not ridiculous at all. ‘O what is George doing, I wish he’d hurry. We must get home…’

  Queston drove on. He had no idea where he was going. He existed only in this moment like a man alone in a country overrun by war, or pestilence; all normality gone. He knew dimly that he was entering the edge of a cataclysm in which everyone but he was caught up; all around him, something which had for years been steadily, relentlessly growing had suddenly broken loose.

  And he knew what it was, but still he dared not acknowledge to himself that he knew.

  He followed the main road. After ten minutes the blue Jaguar streaked past him in a gasp of speed, and vanished round a bend. He saw no other car, until he came to the river, and the junction where a narrow curving bridge drew the way to London out of the main road, over the Thames. Beyond the bridge, the road was blocked high with a dreadful pile of metal, the mingled ruin of several cars.

  He put his foot hard on the brake and saw, as he stopped, wide-sweeping skid marks swinging up to the crash and away over the bridge. The man in the Jaguar had seen the perilous wreck only just in time.

  No ambulances, no police, no crowds. No warning of any kind; only the wrecked cars, lying silent and entangled in the road. He left the Lagonda and went nervously towards them, and saw that the remains of a lorry lay there too, buckled in among the monstrous heap. There were no bodies.

  He saw a round-edged bite taken out of the lorry’s crumpled door, where acetylene cutters had been at work; and beside it, still visible, the insignia m.o.p. What could the Ministry be using lorries for?

  Blood lay spattered everywhere in darkening patches, some still scarlet and wet. Looking at it, Queston turned from a twitch of memory, and was suddenly an indignant citizen. For all anyone seemed to care, the wreckage could lie there to gather worse disaster, trapping any car that came fast and unsuspecting round the bend. Not even a warning; damn it, there should at least be a warning. He forgot that apart from the Jaguar, he had at no time seen any other car on the road.

  He picked up a tyre-lever lying beside one of the misshapen cars, and peered round doubtfully. Something red. A warning flag had to be red. He realized unhappily that only one thing was possible, and he took out his handkerchief and soaked it in a puddle of blood. Then he tied it to the lever, walked back round the corner and forced the free end into a rubber stud in the centre of the road. It leaned there dismally, the handkerchief hanging limp; the astonishing bright red would be brown before long, but at least it was a warning. He felt an absurd smugness at the thought as he walked back to the car. It was his last gesture in support of a world that had died.

  He drove on, across the bridge, out to the long straight road through the Royal lands of Windsor; silent land cut off by a dark wall of firs looming over either side of the road. He drove fast, feeling threatened, enclosed. The trees still walled the road, stalking him; if it weren’t for the fence and the asphalt, he thought, I might be driving through any age, out of time.

  In Windsor the sense of warning was there again; a mute hostility that would let him through the place, but would spring if he dared to stop. With quick staccato flicks at the wheel he spun the Lagonda round corners at fifty, and heard the engine sing hollow in the empty streets; in from the bleak park, past closed and sightless shops, past the door of a house hanging helplessly in the wind; past the little theatre on the hill, entrance dark, picture-frames bare, with a tattered poster flapping from its board. But the town was not unpeopled. He saw sentries at the castle gates and the heads of others lining the walls. They flowed past him, remote, medieval; again he had the sense of being caught in unreality, with time rushing him back into minds and longings that were centuries dead.

  Then he was down the hill and over the Thames again, into Eton, with the hostility of the place pursuing him like a persistent noise. Only when he was out of the town, passing the mounded trees of the playing-fields, did the shouting and the tension die; and suddenly he found that he was driving now in peace, detached again, through a new indifferent place that cared nothing about his troubles and was not forcing him away. He passed a hoarding: ‘Slough Welcomes Careful Drivers.’

  From the central island that faced him, with traffic-lights flashing pointles
sly red-gold-green, up and down in their frozen automatic sequence, three roads led away. All three were broad, walled with shops, all chrome and glass and silence. He turned off the engine and sat there in the centre of the empty town. Nothing moved. The emptiness of this place was unlike any he had encountered yet; a more absolute desertion. Andover, Amesbury and the rest had been deserted, but not dead; through the animosity of the places themselves he had sensed the mistrust of individuals, the unseen families behind curtained windows and closed doors. But here, there was no hostility of any kind; and no life.

  Warily he let the Lagonda slide along the length of the main street, past shops whose windows still shouted with the bright custom-catching labels of an affluent town: ‘Grand Autumn Sale’… ‘Deep Freeze Your Fruit at Summer Prices’… ‘This Week’s Bargain, Sugar 5c. a Pound.’ With no crowds to see them, the phrases were pathetic, shrill. He toured the back streets, past dreary, dream-repeated rows of neat, dull houses from which no smoke rose; at intervals, defiantly, he pressed his horn, flinching each time at the loud virulent bray. But no one came out to look, and no curtain moved.

  He drove past the silent railway station, a low concrete mausoleum; and on through a vast trading estate where old railway lines criss-crossed the roads, rusting into the asphalt, to click briefly under the tyres as he passed. There was nothing. He saw only bleak black warehouses and the cluttered yards of factories, a dead mechanical world stretching unbroken on either side. Chimneys and water-towers, lifts and derricks, loomed over his head like great empty husks, symbols of the end of things.

  Things? Or people?

  He drove back to the central crossroads, and irritably past the dutiful traffic-lights, idiot robots flashing directions at cars that were not there. It was a dead town, dead and spiritless, and he was uneasy because he did not understand. When all other places were taking on a monstrous life of their own, why was there none here?

  He pulled in to the kerb outside a shop-window full of cameras and soap. He looked down the grey empty street, and tried not to think. Without really expecting it to work, he turned the radio knob on the dashboard; he had used it perhaps twice in the few years since he had bought the car.