The Complete Short Stories, Volume 2 Page 8

  The soldiers were still ahead of me, but George and Paul Mathieu had fallen behind. Leaning against the frosted white fencing, they were plucking the soles of their shoes. By now it was obvious why the Miami–Maynard highway had been closed. The surface of the road was pierced by a continuous carpet of needles, spurs of glass and quartz as much as six inches high, reflecting the coloured light through the leaves above. The spurs tore at my shoes, forcing me to move hand over hand along the verge of the road, where a section of heavier fencing marked the approach to a distant mansion.

  Behind me a siren whined, and the police car I had seen earlier plunged along the road, its heavy tyres cutting through the crystal surface. Twenty yards ahead it rocked to a halt, its engine stalled, and the police captain jumped out. With an angry shout he waved me back down the road, now a tunnel of yellow light formed by the interlocking canopies overhead.

  ‘Get back! There’s another wave coming!’ He ran after the soldiers a hundred yards away, his boots crushing the crystal carpet.

  Wondering why he should be so keen to clear the forest, I rested for a moment by the police car. A noticeable change had come over the forest, as if dusk had begun to fall prematurely from the sky. Everywhere the glacé sheaths which enveloped the trees and vegetation had become duller and more opaque, and the crystal floor underfoot was grey and occluded, turning the needles into spurs of basalt. The panoply of coloured light had vanished, and a dim amber gloom moved across the trees, shadowing the sequinned lawns.

  Simultaneously it had become colder. Leaving the car, I started to make my way down the road – Paul Mathieu and a soldier, hands shielding their faces, were disappearing around a bend – but the icy air blocked my path like a refrigerated wall. Turning up the collar of my tropical suit, I retreated to the car, wondering whether to take refuge inside it. The cold deepened, numbing my face like a spray of acetone, and my hands felt brittle and fleshless. Somewhere I heard the hollow shout of the police captain, and caught a glimpse of someone running at full speed through the ice-grey trees.

  On the right-hand side of the road the darkness completely enveloped the forest, masking the outlines of the trees, and then extended in a sudden sweep across the roadway. My eyes smarted with pain, and I brushed away the small crystals of ice which had formed over my eyeballs. Everywhere a heavy frost was forming, accelerating the process of crystallization. The spurs in the roadway were now over a foot in height, like the spines of a giant porcupine, and the lattices between the tree-trunks were thicker and more translucent, so that the original trunks seemed to shrink into a mottled thread within them. The interlocking leaves formed a continuous mosaic, the crystal elements thickening and overlaying each other. For the first time I suddenly visualized the possibility of the entire forest freezing solidly into a huge coloured glacier, with myself trapped within its interstices.

  The windows of the car and the black body were now sheathed in an ice-like film. Intending to open the door so that I could switch on the heater, I reached for the handle, but my fingers were burned by the intense cold.

  ‘You there! Come on! This way!’

  Behind me, the voice echoed down the drive. As the darkness and cold deepened, I saw the police captain waving to me from the colonnade of the mansion. The lawn between us seemed to belong to a less sombre zone. The grass still retained its vivid liquid sparkle and the white eaves of the house were etched clearly against the surrounding darkness, as if this enclave were preserved like an island in the eye of a hurricane.

  I ran up the drive towards the house, and with relief found that the air was at least ten degrees warmer. The sunlight shone through the leafy canopy with uninterrupted brilliance. Reaching the portico, I searched for the police captain, but he had run off into the forest again. Uncertain whether to follow him, I watched the approaching wall of darkness slowly cross the lawn, the glittering foliage overhead sinking into its pall. The police car was now encrusted by a thick layer of frozen glass, its windshield blossoming into a thousand fleur-de-lis crystals.

  Quickly making my way around the house as the zone of safety moved off through the forest, I crossed the remains of an old vegetable garden, where seed-plants of green glass three feet high rose into the air like exquisite ornamented sculptures. I reached the forest again and waited there as the zone hesitated and veered off, trying to remain within the centre of its focus. I seemed to have entered a subterranean cavern, where jewelled rocks loomed from the spectral gloom like huge marine plants, the sprays of crystal sawgrass like fountains frozen in time.

  For the next hour I raced helplessly through the forest, my sense of direction lost, driven by the swerving walls of the zone of safety as it twisted like a benign tornado among the trees. Several times I crossed the road, where the great spurs were almost waist high, forced to clamber over the brittle stems. Once, as I rested against the trunk of a bifurcated oak, an immense multi-coloured bird erupted from a bough over my head and flew off with a wild screech, an aureole of molten light cascading from its red and yellow wings, like the birth-flames of phoenix.

  At last the strange whirlpool subsided and a pale light filtered through the stained glass canopy, transfiguring everything with its iridescence. Again the forest was a place of rainbows, the deep carmine light glowing from the jewelled grottos. I walked along a narrow road which wound towards a great white house standing like a classical pavilion on a rise in the centre of the forest. Transformed by the crystal frost, it appeared to be an intact fragment of Versailles or Fontainebleau, its ornate pilasters and sculptured friezes spilling from the wide roof which overtopped the forest. From the upper floors I would be able to see the distant water towers at Maynard, or at least trace the serpentine progress of the river.

  The road narrowed, declining the slope which led up to the house, but its annealed crust, like half-fused quartz, offered a more comfortable surface than the crystal teeth of the lawn. Suddenly I came across what was unmistakably a jewelled rowing boat sat solidly into the roadway, a chain of lapis lazuli mooring it to the verge. Then I realized that I was walking along a small tributary of the river. A thin stream of water still ran below the solid crust, and evidently this vestigial motion alone prevented it from erupting into the exotic spur-like forms of the forest floor.

  As I paused by the boat, feeling the huge topaz and amethyst stones encrusted along its sides, a grotesque four-legged creature half-embedded in the surface lurched forwards through the crust, the loosened pieces of the lattice attached to its snout and shoulders shaking like a transparent cuirass. Its jaws mouthed the air silently as it struggled on its hooked legs, unable to clamber more than a few feet from the hollow trough in its own outline now filling with a thin trickle of water. Invested by the glittering sparkle of light that poured from its body, the alligator resembled some fabulous armourial beast. It lunged towards me again, and I kicked its snout, scattering the crystals which choked its mouth.

  Leaving it to subside once more into a frozen posture, I climbed the bank and limped across the lawn to the mansion, whose fairy towers loomed above the trees. Although out of breath and very nearly exhausted I had a curious premonition, of intense hope and longing, as if I were some fugitive Adam chancing upon a forgotten gateway to the forbidden paradise.

  From an upstairs window, the bearded man in the white suit watched me, a shot-gun under his arm.

  Now that ample evidence of the Hubble Effect is available to scientific observers throughout the world, there is general agreement upon its origins and the few temporary measures that can be taken to reverse its progress. Under pressure of necessity during my flight through the phantasmagoric forests of the Everglades I had discovered the principal remedy – to remain in rapid motion – but I still assumed that some accelerated genetic mutation was responsible, even though such inanimate objects as cars and metal fencing were equally affected. However, by now even the Lysenkoists have grudgingly accepted the explanation given by workers at the Hubble Institute, that the ra
ndom transfigurations throughout the world are a reflection of distant cosmic processes of enormous scope and dimensions, first glimpsed in the Andromeda spiral.

  We know now that it is time (‘Time with the Midas touch,’ as Charles Marquand described it) which is responsible for the transformation. The recent discovery of anti-matter in the universe inevitably involves the conception of anti-time as the fourth side of this negatively charged continuum. Where anti-particle and particle collide they not only destroy their own physical identities, but their opposing time-values eliminate each other, subtracting from the universe another quantum from its total store of time. It is random discharges of this type, set off by the creation of anti-galaxies in space, which have led to the depletion of the time-store available to the materials of our own solar system.

  Just as a supersaturated solution will discharge itself into a crystalline mass, so the supersaturation of matter in a continuum of depleted time leads to its appearance in a parallel spatial matrix. As more and more time ‘leaks’ away, the process of supersaturation continues, the original atoms and molecules producing spatial replicas of themselves, substance without mass, in an attempt to increase their foothold upon existence. The process is theoretically without end, and eventually it is possible for a single atom to produce an infinite number of duplicates of itself and so fill the entire universe, from which simultaneously all time has expired, an ultimate macrocosmic zero beyond the wildest dreams of Plato and Democritus.

  As I lay back on one of the glass-embroidered chesterfields in a bedroom upstairs, the bearded man in the white suit explained something of this to me in his sharp intermittent voice. He still stood by the open window, peering down at the lawn and the crystal stream where the alligator and the jewelled boat lay embalmed. As the broken panes annealed themselves he drove the butt of his shot-gun through them. His thin beard gave him a fevered and haunted aspect, emphasized by the white frost forming on the shoulders and lapels of his suit. For some reason he spoke to me as if to an old friend.

  ‘It was obvious years ago, B——. Look at the viruses with their crystalline structure, neither animate nor inanimate, and their immunity to time.’ He swept a hand along the sill and picked up a cluster of the vitreous grains, then scattered them across the floor like smashed marbles. ‘You and I will be like them soon, and the rest of the world. Neither living nor dead!’

  He broke off to raise his shot-gun, his dark eyes searching between the trees. ‘We must move on,’ he announced, leaving the window. ‘When did you last see Captain Shelley?’

  ‘The police captain?’ I sat up weakly, my feet slipping on the floor. Several plate glass windows appeared to have been fractured and then fused together above the carpet. The ornate Persian patterns swam below the surface like the floor of some perfumed pool in the Arabian Nights. ‘Just after we ran to search for the helicopter. Why are you afraid of him?’

  ‘He’s a venomous man,’ he replied briefly. ‘As cunning as a pig.’

  We made our way down the crystal stairway. Everything in the house was covered by the same glacé sheath, embellished by exquisite curlicues and helixes. In the wide lounges the ornate Louis XV furniture had been transformed into huge pieces of opalescent candy, whose countless reflections glowed like giant chimeras in the cut-glass walls. As we disappeared through the trees towards the stream my companion shouted exultantly, as much to the forest as to myself: ‘We’re running out of time, B——, running out of time!’

  Always he was on the look-out for the police captain. Which of them was searching for the other I could not discover, nor the subject of their blood-feud. I had volunteered my name to him, but he brushed aside the introduction. I guessed that he had sensed some spark of kinship as we sat together in the landing craft, and that he was a man who would plunge his entire sympathy or hostility upon such a chance encounter. He told me nothing of himself. Shot-gun cradled under his arm, he moved rapidly along the fossilized stream, his movements neat and deliberate, while I limped behind. Now and then we passed a jewelled power cruiser embedded in the crust, or a petrified alligator would rear upwards and grimace at us noiselessly, its crystalline skin glowing with a thousand prisms as it shifted in a fault of coloured glass.

  Everywhere there was the same fantastic corona of light, transfiguring and identifying all objects. The forest was an endless labyrinth of glass caves, sealed off from the remainder of the world, (which, as far as I knew, by now might be similarly affected), lit by subterranean lamps burning below the surface of the rocks.

  ‘Can’t we get back to Maynard?’ I shouted after him, my voice echoing among the vaults. ‘We’re going deeper into the forest.’

  ‘The town is cut off, my dear B——. Don’t worry, I’ll take you there in due course.’ He leapt nimbly over a fissure in the surface of the river. Below the mass of dissolving crystals a thin stream of fluid rilled down a buried channel.

  For several hours, led by this strange white-suited figure with his morose preoccupied gaze, we moved through the forest, sometimes in complete circles as if my companion were familiarizing himself with the topography of that jewelled twilight world. When I sat down to rest on one of the vitrified trunks and brushed away the crystals now forming on the soles of my shoes, despite our constant movement – the air was always icy, the dark shadows perpetually closing and unfolding around us – he would wait impatiently, watching me with ruminative eyes as if deciding whether to abandon me to the forest.

  At last we reached the fringes of a small clearing, bounded on three sides by the fractured dancing floor of a river bend, where a high-gabled summer house pushed its roof towards the sky through a break in the overhead canopy. From the single spire a slender web of opaque strands extended to the surrounding trees like a diaphanous veil, investing the glass garden and the crystalline summer house with a pale marble sheen, almost sepulchral in its intensity. As if reinforcing this impression, the windows on to the veranda running around the house were now encrusted with elaborate scroll-like designs, like the ornamented stone casements of a tomb.

  Waving me back, my companion approached the fringes of the garden, his shot-gun raised before him. He darted from tree to tree, pausing for any sign of movement, then crossed the frozen surface of the river with a feline step. High above him, its wings pinioned by the glass canopy, a golden oriole flexed slowly in the afternoon light, liquid ripples of its aura circling outwards like the rays of a miniature sun.

  ‘Marquand!’

  A shot roared into the clearing, its report echoing around the glass trees, and the blond-haired police captain raced towards the summer house, a revolver in his hand. As he fired again the crystal trellises of the spanish moss shattered and frosted, collapsing around me like a house of mirrors. Leaping down from the veranda, the bearded man made off like a hare across the river, bent almost double as he darted over the faults in the surface.

  The rapidity with which all this had happened left me standing helplessly by the edge of the clearing, my ears ringing with the two explosions. I searched the forest for any signs of my companion, and then the police captain, standing on the veranda, gestured me towards him with his pistol.

  ‘Come here!’ When I tentatively approached he came down the steps, scrutinizing me suspiciously. ‘What are you doing around here? Aren’t you one of the visiting party?’

  I explained that I had been trapped after the crash of the helicopter. ‘Can you take me back to the army post? I’ve been wandering around the forest all day.’

  A morose frown twisted his long face. ‘The Army’s a long way off. The forest’s changing all the time.’ He pointed across the river. ‘What about Marquand? Where did you meet him?’

  ‘The bearded man? He was taking shelter in a house near the river. Why did you shoot at him? Is he a criminal?’

  Shelley nodded after a pause. His manner was somehow furtive and shifty. ‘Worse than that. He’s a madman, completely crazy.’ He started to walk up the steps, apparently prepar
ed to let me make my 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, or you’ll get lost.’

  ‘Wait a minute!’ I called after him. ‘Can’t I rest here? I need a map – perhaps you have a spare one?’

  ‘A map? What good’s a map now?’ He hesitated as my arms fell limply to my sides. ‘All right, you can come in for five minutes.’ This concession to humanity was obviously torn from him.

  The summer house consisted of a single circular room and a small kitchen at the rear. Heavy shutters had been placed against the windows, now locked to the casements by the interstitial crystals, and the only light entered through the door.

  Shelley holstered his pistol and turned the door handle gently. Through the frosted panes were the dim outlines of a high four-poster bed, presumably stolen from one of the nearby mansions. Gilded cupids played about the mahogany canopy, pipes to their lips, and four naked caryatids with upraised arms formed the corner posts.

  ‘Mrs Shelley,’ the captain explained in a low voice. ‘She’s not too well.’

  For a moment we 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 I thought I was looking at an elderly woman, probably the captain’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 like 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 me of my own wife in the last minutes before her death.

  ‘Shelley.’ Her voice cracked faintly in the amber gloom. ‘Shelley, it’s getting cold again. Can’t you light a fire?’