Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

I say nothing. I nod, and go inside.

He spends the rest of the day tinkering with the car engine. I sit upstairs pretending to read one of the books, a Koestler theory about synchronicity. I can’t eat in the evening. He has a meal alone at the far end of the room. We make small talk.

The blocked panic inside me makes a pain like acid dammed against nerve endings. I start to see strange objects. There are bits of litter scattered here and there on the carpet. Scraps of paper, wrappers, corks, cellophane glinting in the light, dark marks, shadows, things half-seen under chairs and tables. From the corner of my eyes they change. The carpet is dark green. There are stains. White bits of raw bone. Human segments. A red edge on flesh. An eye knocked from its socket. I can’t look directly. The book trembles. I steady it on the chair arm. The pain has narrowed my range of vision so I can only look ahead, and my spine seems fixed to prevent efforts to move.

He comes and sits opposite, still chewing, and puts his feet up on another chair. The bones and muscles work beneath the surface of his face. He drinks dark red wine. And even jokes about the insect.

‘What if there was only one, eh? And I had to hit it. I mean, kill the only one left!’

He clasps his arms on his chest, holding the stem of the wine glass. His eyes glance at his wrist, then at me, then back at his wrist after a pause. The action is nothing. But it happens at the dangerous corner of my sight. It’s not ordinary. Not at all. I know what he is doing. He can detect my pulse rate from the vein next to the carotid artery in my neck, he’s timing it for sixty seconds by his watch. Abnormal. Extremely abnormal.

Was that really his face in the photograph? The inner muscles slide around deviously. I try to connect the images. He swallows; the face skin goes slack as though hanging from the upper bones of the skull. I remember my own face in the mirror and how something has the power to change what is familiar and remould it beyond recognition.

‘You should get some sleep,’ he says.

I unlock the connecting door between our rooms on my side. He is in the basement switching off the generator. I place the gun ready by the bed. I shall stay awake. And wait to see what he might do.

When the light goes the darkness is so complete there are no walls or ceilings, and the sensation with eyes open or closed is the same, a great floating and turning in space.

The long oblong panels shine down a white fluorescent illumination even and clear over the whole room. They dehydrate colours and cast no shadows so that everybody in the place moves around with no shadow as if in a new dimension. They have begun to cease to exist.

The whispering seems to stop when I turn. I happen to glance at people who are talking and see them look away in another direction furtively. The usual secrecy of the centre has an added intensity. It thickens around me at a certain distance. When I enter rooms or move towards people there is a feeling that new conversations are suddenly begun, and certain subjects are avoided. They no longer mention their wives or children.

Perrin leaves a paper on my desk. The research committee want a report on our work. There have been doom-laden articles in scientific journals about the ethics of genetic engineering: US Experts Warn of ‘Terrible Risks’ . There is talk of a departmental investigation.

I am in the car going back to my flat in the winter dark, rain spotting the windscreen and the wipers rhythmically flicking it away, cleaning a space, flicking it away, and I remember the needles on the dials of the sonic frequency machine at the lab flicking across and back time and time again. Then there is a noise, a squeal of a dog and the tyres, and I can hear my own pulse. I come up through the darkness and the doctor says you probably have slight concussion, it wasn’t very serious, just a bump, these tablets will help with the headaches but be careful with them.

Atkinson is driving me back from work until my car is mended. Probably shouldn’t say this but in strictest confidence of course Perrin is a bit worried about you, the strain of, er, and then we have been working very long hours on the project, it’s bound to tell, and you’re due for some leave so why not take a couple of weeks off and have a bit of rest, Bay of Islands, Coromandel, Taupo, somewhere you can get away from it all.

Well, I’ll tell you what I think and I don’t much care if it reaches Perrin’s ears. He wants me out of the way when the next quarterly research committee meeting comes round. No, it’s true. The research grants will be cut next year and he knows his project will get downgraded if he hasn’t produced any results. Whilst I’m away he’ll persuade the D-G to have me transferred back to your section because you’re short-staffed. Then he’ll use my idea for high frequency sound waves and when it works his section will get all the credit.

Oh now I don’t think that’s it at all, I’m sure he has your best interests at heart and there is a bit of concern about the possible effects of high frequency sound waves, well, concern about the effects on basic metabolisms and the resonating of the molecular structure, it’s very much an unknown quantity. And the physicists are worried about this ‘feedback amplification problem’ or whatever they call it, about which we know less than zero—

You’re in on this, aren’t you? He’s put you up to it.

No, for heaven’s sake, it’s not like that. All I’m saying is that now you’ve had this accident with the car and been shaken up a bit, you have a good reason to slip off for a couple of weeks.

I see the truth. I can tell by Atkinson’s tone of voice. I might say the wrong things to the committee; they want me out of the way. Perrin is afraid.

I am in the flat at Takapuna. There is never anybody there. I work later hours and fill the time to avoid having to spend too long in the flat by myself. At weekends I lose track of time altogether. One day I am in a shop and I cannot remember why. One Sunday it is evening and I find myself sitting staring at the wall. For how long? Have I had a meal? I go into the kitchen and check the dishes in the sink to try to work out if I have had a meal because I cannot remember. The plates have piled up. It is not possible to tell. One evening I wake in front of the television and a singer comes on and I shout for Joanne to come in because he is her favourite singer. Of course Joanne is not there. I am aware of what is happening.

Then one day at work there is a mistake. The frequency setting on the sound modulator is turned from low, B1, to much higher, B10, which is easy to do because the figures look similar and the decimal points are not clear. Inside the radiation chamber I have samples of DNA molecules from a range of viruses, fungi and bacteria, and from selected insects, birds, and animals, including human samples.

It should be quite straightforward. I am alone in the radiation unit and the door is closed. I switch on. The samples have already been irradiated. The insulating headphones clamped over my ears register the tonal signal of the frequency. I know immediately the setting is wrong. But in the instant it takes to reach up and switch off, I feel something gigantic happen, something which seems to stop time and rush through the structure of the room and the cells of my blood and the inside of my skull. It waves me aside like a wing beating past. The sound is a great slam of reverberating white noise in the distance of somewhere else altogether, another universe, far beyond the frequency of what animals can hear and see; unimaginable. Even as it happens I can feel that it’s still only a hint of something even more immense, a near miss in the dark from a pitch-dark force like a locomotive the size of a planet brushing past the front of my face. Because it seems to be both inside and outside me at the same moment the feeling is dreamlike, of being lifted and shaken in sleep. But I manage to switch off. The whole impulse must have lasted less than a second.