Edmund Cooper - Seahorse in the Sky

IT LOOKED LIKE Resurrection Day.

Or some incongruously daylight nightmare—with a touch of Breughel, a dash of Dali and a soupcon of Peter Sellers. It made you want to laugh or scream, or something. Presently people began to do both—or something. Because there is nothing more likely to disturb, disorientate or discommode than not knowing where, how, why or even who.

Russell Grahame was the first one out of his ‘coffin’. He was lucky. He knew almost immediately that he was Russell Grahame, Member of Parliament for Middleport North in the county of Lancashire.

He knew who, but he didn’t know where, how or why. He didn’t even know when. So clearly it was just a crazy dream, and presently he would be woken up by the sound of someone saying: “Please fasten your seat belts and extinguish all cigarettes. We shall be landing at London Airport in about ten minutes.”

But he didn’t waken up, because he was already awake and the nightmare was real.

The ‘coffin’ he had just vacated appeared to be made of pale green plastic. It lay in the middle of the road at the end of a neat row of similar coffins, between the building labelled ‘Hotel’ on one side and the building labelled ‘Supermarket’ on the other. The road was about ten metres wide and a hundred metres long. At each end it disappeared into grass and shrubs. It was just a thin oasis of urbanization in a great green wilderness. A taxi was parked outside the hotel. A car was parked outside the supermarket.

But there were no people—apart from those emerging from the man-size green boxes.

A dark-skinned girl literally kicked the lid off her box, stood up, shrieked piercingly and fainted. It was the signal for general pandemonium. A man and a woman, both white, were the next to emerge. They looked round wildly, saw each other and almost fell together, gripping so tightly that it looked as if they would never let go.

Two men got out of adjacent boxes, bumped into each other, fell over and almost immediately started fighting. And almost immediately stopped.

Three girls were laughing and crying, terrified but finding an odd security in their mutual terror.

Presently, sixteen people, having got out of sixteen boxes, were themselves making enough noise to wake the dead or, at least, to excite the attention of any occupants of the hotel or the supermarket. But, if anyone was in residence in the hotel, or shopping in the supermarket, they were sufficiently familiar with the mechanics of resurrection in the middle of the main and only street not to wish to investigate further.

No one came out.

The pandemonium went on and on, with people talking, shouting, gesticulating or babbling incoherently. They seemed dazed, traumatized, as if they had been through one hell of a harrowing experience. Which, of course, they had. And it was still happening.

Russell Grahame, feeling oddly detached from the whole absurd carnival, ran his left hand mechanically and repeatedly through his hair in the characteristic manner that had earned him the sobriquet Brainstroker among his few friends in the House of Commons. After a time, he became aware that his head wasn’t quite the shape it used to be. There was a bump somewhere in the region of the cerebellum. It was a fairly large bump, neat, round and with a suggestion of scar tissue on top of it. The hair that covered the bump was nowhere near as long as the rest of his hair.

Russell Grahame, M.P., licked his lips and suddenly felt very shaky indeed. He needed a drink. He needed a drink rather badly. Glancing at the hotel, he walked slowly and cautiously towards it. It would not do for a Member of Parliament—even one who had finally made up his mind to get out of that madhouse where mass euphoria was permanently topped up with abstract nouns—to fall flat on his face in the middle of the road.

The hotel foyer was empty—except for an assortment of baggage piled in a heap near the revolving doors. There was no one at the reception desk. He hit the bell three times, but no one came.

Then he saw on the wall the words Cocktail Bar, and an arrow pointing down a short passage. He went to the cocktail bar. That was deserted also. After a moment’s reflection, he went behind the bar and poured himself a very large whisky.

He took a good long pull at the whisky. Then, with trembling fingers, he felt for his cigarettes. The noise outside seemed to be subsiding a little. He felt the bump on the back of his head and took another good swallow of whisky. He began to feel a bit better.

Somebody else was hitting the bell at the reception desk. He was in no mood to go and enlighten them. Let them come to him.

They did. Or, rather, one did. The rest found their way later.

The newcomer was a man between twenty-five and thirty—tall, blond, blue-eyed and rather good-looking in an extraverted continental sort of way. Grahame was immediately conscious of feeling anciently forty and very English.

“A large vodka, and what the hell has happened to the service?” demanded the tall young man truculently.

Obediently, Grahame poured the vodka. “Cheers. There is no service.”

“Then who are you?”

The Englishman eyed his whisky seriously and took another mouthful. “Just one of the walking dead. My name is Russell Grahame.” Then he felt impelled to add: “British… And you?”

His companion opened his mouth, closed it, put down the glass of vodka on the bar with a shaking hand and looked very confused.

“Take your time,” said Grahame sympathetically. “That is something I have a notion we are not going to be short of. Something tells me we are going to have all the time in the world.”

“Norstedt,” announced the young man, with a curious element of doubt in his voice. “I am Tore Norstedt… Swedish… Pleased to meet you.”

He held out his right hand. Grahame shook it formally.

“Well, now we know each other. Have another drink. I’m going to.” He smiled. “I think it’s on the house.”

“Thank you. Yes.” Norstedt also smiled. “I think perhaps the vodka treatment is indicated.”

Absently, he felt the back of his head.

Grahame noted the gesture. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I have a bump, too. It appears to be all part of the operation.”

Norstedt slammed his glass on the bar so that some of the vodka slopped over. “What operation?

Where are we? What the devil is going on?”

“Take it easy. I’m in the dark, too. When we have drunk some of the shakes away, we’d better try to make some sense out of it… Incidentally, you speak excellent English.”

Norstedt shook his head. “Swedish. I speak Swedish—as you are doing.”

Grahame shrugged. “Have it your own way. But, for the record, I don’t speak Swedish—well, not much.” A thought suddenly struck him. “Arlanda!”

“Yes, Arlanda!” repeated Norstedt excitedly. “That’s it!”

A piece of the jig-saw was falling into place.

“Arlanda airport,” went on Grahame. “The afternoon jet from Stockholm to London… That is where I saw you—at the airport. You were right ahead of me. You—you had excess baggage. Ten kroner

…I wondered if I had enough money left to pay for mine.”

“I remember! I remember!” Norstedt was almost shouting. “I couldn’t find a taxi. I thought I was going to miss the ’plane.”

“I have been watching your lips,” said Grahame with a tightness in his voice. “By God, you are speaking Swedish! But the words I hear are English.”

“I have been watching yours also,” observed Norstedt. “The—the shapes are not Swedish, but the sounds are.”

While they exchanged these intriguing discoveries, Grahame had noted that the bell at the reception desk was being rung repeatedly, that voices were being raised in the foyer, and that those same voices were now getting louder as their owners came towards the cocktail bar.