Craig Harrison: The Quiet Earth

I was sitting bolt upright in bed breathing fast and staring at the wall. The daylight was streaming into the motel room through the slats of the blinds. I seemed to have been awake, and asleep, for ages. I lay back and remembered where I was. The silence persisted. My watch at the bedside had stopped at 6.12. Reaching out, I shook it and the second hand began flicking round again. How long had it been stopped? I got up and went to the window which looked out onto the main road; my arm moved up towards the cord of the blind.

What?

I paused. What was happening? The casual movement, everyday, ordinary, towards opening the blind, had been interrupted by something, by an impulse to stop, which had no sensible origin at all. It was so curious and extra ordinary that I was pausing not because of the impulse itself but in a conscious effort to find a reason for it. But I had forgotten. My mind seemed to resist. The silence pressed in thickly. It was exactly like forgetting the name of a place you’ve visited dozens of times; it’s just on the tip of your mind but you can’t find it. You stop and think, and when there’s no answer you go on. Perhaps, later, you will know.

Then I reached up and opened the blind to the enormous light.

It was still early; possibly, to judge by the sun, about 8.30 am. I looked out at the grass and the road beyond. The air was clear and bright with the promise of another fine summer day. All was quiet. The scene was cut into strips by the slats of the venetian blinds, and I pulled the cord to alter the angle of the slats, looking up, ahead, and down. Perhaps it really was only 6.15; nobody had woken up yet. Saturday morning in a small town like Thames was obviously not hectic. Good. That was why I had come to Coromandel, after all; for peace and quiet.

I showered and dressed. The water pressure seemed weak. Only when I tried to use my electric razor did I realise that the power was off. I tried the lights, the radio, the electric hotplates on the cooker. All dead. Probably a fuse. I went out of the door at the back of the motel unit and looked around from the balcony. There was nobody below in the car park, and no sign of activity. Descending to the office I wandered around pressing buzzers, knocking on doors, shouting hello, but the whole place appeared to be deserted. Curtains and blinds were still drawn and the car park was full.

Curiouser and curiouser: I realised that in all the time since I had been awake, not a single vehicle had gone along the road, nor had there been any kind of noise. Even a sudden breeze rustling the leaves of a tree in the garden of one of the houses behind the car park startled me, and I went and looked over into the garden. Nobody was there. There’s a clock in my car, I thought, I’ll check the time.

I unlocked the car door. The hands of the dashboard clock stood fixed at 6.12. For a moment the breath went dry in my lungs. I slid into the car, slammed the door shut defensively, put the key in the ignition, drew out the choke, turned the key, revved the engine, reversed, then into first, accelerator down. The Marina skidded on loose stones and swept along the drive away from the motel. The clock had started again. I slowed at the end of the drive but there was no traffic and in a few seconds I was on the main road towards the centre of town.

All this happened very quickly. Because of the sight of the clock. It was impossible. What am I doing? Why am I driving into Thames at about 6.30 am, or whenever, because of a clock? And a power cut?

The first wave of panic subsided, then thickened hard as the total emptiness of the town slid past, stared back, blank. In the middle of the main street there was a car stalled at an intersection. I slowed down, drew over to the kerb and stopped fifty metres away. When I cut the engine off, the silence fell around the car like a solid thing, shutting against me. I tapped the dashboard to make a sound. My ears seemed suffocated. Reaching out I shoved the plastic indicator stick on the steering column to sound the horn, but with the panic still trembling inside me I pushed the wrong one and the windscreen washers spurted two jets of water across the glass. Cursing, I jabbed the other control and the horn bayed into the deserted street so loudly that I let go immediately and it stopped. The water dribbled and sagged down the windscreen, chopping the view of the shops, pavement, shadows, sun, car, car’s shadow, into distorted slivers, glistening even clearer. It was all very real and present.

I got out of the car, letting the door swing back and slam shut with a metallic clang which followed the noise the horn had made, spreading away along the street in both directions and being echoed and absorbed as it went.

The sun was now quite hot. I stood on the tarmac looking at the car in the middle of the road, not wanting to go any closer. It was a red Datsun. If it had been left suddenly, wouldn’t the doors be open? What the hell. I walked up to it and stared in cautiously, shading my eyes. There was nobody there. I opened the driver’s door. Ignition still switched on; petrol run dry; batteries weak. The gear was in neutral; he’d stopped at the intersection. The handbrake wasn’t on. It was very hot inside the car and I lifted myself off the edge of the seat and stood up to test the door, to see if it would close by itself if left. It stayed open. As I leaned on the door I looked down at the driver’s seat and saw the seatbelt, still fastened , stretching loosely across the seat. I slammed the door and stepped back several paces. My first instinct was to run for the Marina and get away. But I stopped the impulse. Many people never use their seatbelts. They leave them strewn all over and never notice. Fastened ? Yes, why not? People are strange. Do odd things. There are always explanations. What, then? For all this? A set for a film? An experiment? It’s a Civil Defence exercise, and nobody told me. I’m a stranger; they forgot. The real thing? A disaster, everyone gone, evacuated, they forgot me. Lots of explanations.

Back at my car I revved the engine loudly and then set off to drive round the town. No signs or clues at the police station or post office. No people anywhere, not even in the residential streets. The houses were all closed and shuttered. Empty cars stood in odd places across some roads. I checked two or three, then drove past the others. The sound of my horn in the streets brought no response. I accelerated back to the main street and parked where I had stopped before. I would have to find a transistor radio. There was an electrical goods shop nearby.

The door was locked. In the window a digital clock showed 06.12. My eyes flicked away quickly from it. I went back, got a tyre lever from the car and smashed the glass door. The noise was a shattering attack on the emptiness. It roused nothing. I waited, listening. There were not even any bird or animal sounds. My feet crunched on broken glass as I stepped into the shop. And I shivered, suddenly, in the coolness.

There was a telephone. I picked it up and listened for a dial tone but it was totally extinct. Selecting a handy portable radio I checked to see it had batteries and then switched it on and ran the dial round all the way on medium wave from 530 to 1600 kHz. There was nothing but static. With the volume up so high that the crackling and hissing sounded like the abrasions of barbed wire across heavy sandpaper, still nothing. After rechecking connections and trying again, I switched off.

A larger portable was next. The moment I pressed the first top button it howled music and my hand jerked back. The sound of Handel’s Messiah rolled against the walls and surged into the street, alive, thunderous with voices. My skin went warm; there was a slackening of all the tensed muscles inside me. A broadcast, a radio station transmitting!