J. Ballard - The Complete Short Stories

A week or so later we were out on the terrace after lunch, lounging back in the deck chairs. I was nearly asleep when Carol said, ‘Mr Hamilton, I think it’s moving.’

‘What’s moving?’

Carol was sitting up, head cocked to one side. ‘The statue. It looks different.’

I focused my eyes on the statue twenty feet away. The radiator grille at the top had canted around slightly but the three stems still seemed more or less upright.

‘The rain last night must have softened the ground,’ I said. I listened to the quiet melodies carried on the warm eddies of air, and then lay back drowsily. I heard Carol light a cigarette with four matches and walk across the veranda.

When I woke in an hour’s time she was sitting straight up in the deck chair, a frown creasing her forehead.

‘Swallowed a bee?’ I asked. ‘You look worried.’

Then something caught my eye.

I watched the statue for a moment. ‘You’re right. It is moving.’

Carol nodded. The statue’s shape had altered perceptibly. The grille had spread into an open gondola whose sonic cores seemed to feel at the sky, and the three stem-pieces were wider apart. All the angles seemed different.

‘I thought you’d notice it eventually,’ Carol said as we walked over to it. ‘What’s it made of?’

‘Wrought iron — I think. There must be a lot of copper or lead in it. The heat is making it sag.’

‘Then why is it sagging upwards instead of down?’ — I touched one of the shoulder struts. It was springing elastically as the air moved across the vanes and went on vibrating against my palm. I gripped it in both hands and tried to keep it rigid. A low but discernible pulse pumped steadily against me.

I backed away from it, wiping the flaking chrome off my hands. The Mozartian harmonies had gone, and the statue was now producing a series of low Mahler-like chords. As Carol stood there in her bare feet I remembered that the height specification we had given to Lorraine Drexel had been exactly two metres. But the statue was a good three feet higher than Carol, the gondola at least six or seven across. The spars and struts looked thicker and stronger.

‘Carol,’ I said. ‘Get me a file, would you? There are some in the garage.’

She came back with two files and a hacksaw.

‘Are you going to cut it down?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Darling, this is an original Drexel.’ I took one of the files. ‘I just want to convince myself that I’m going insane.’

I started cutting a series of small notches all over the statue, making sure they were exactly the width of the file apart. The metal was soft and worked easily; on the surface there was a lot of rust but underneath it had a bright sappy glint.

‘All right,’ I said when I had finished. ‘Let’s go and have a drink.’

We sat on the veranda and waited. I fixed my eyes on the statue and could have sworn that it didn’t move. But when we went back an hour later the gondola had swung right round again, hanging down over us like an immense metal mouth.

There was no need to check the notch intervals against the file. They were all at least double the original distance apart.

‘Mr Hamilton,’ Carol said. ‘Look at this.’

She pointed to one of the spikes. Poking through the outer scale of chrome were a series of sharp little nipples. One or two were already beginning to hollow themselves. Unmistakably they were incipient sonic cores.

Carefully I examined the rest of the statue. All over it new shoots of metal were coming through: arches, barbs, sharp double helixes, twisting the original statue into a thicker and more elaborate construction. A medley of half-familiar sounds, fragments of a dozen overtures and symphonies, murmured all over it. The statue was well over twelve feet high. I felt one of the heavy struts and the pulse was stronger, beating steadily through the metal, as if it was thrusting itself on to the sound of its own music.

Carol was watching me with a pinched and worried look.

‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘It’s only growing.’

We went back to the veranda and watched.

By six o’clock that evening it was the size of a small tree. A spirited simultaneous rendering of Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture and Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto trumpeted across the garden.

‘The strangest thing about it,’ Raymond said the next morning, raising his voice above the din, ‘is that it’s still a Drexel.’

‘Still a piece of sculpture, you mean?’

‘More than that. Take any section of it and you’ll find the original motifs being repeated. Each vane, each helix has all the authentic Drexel mannerisms, almost as if she herself were shaping it. Admittedly, this penchant for the late Romantic composers is a little out of keeping with all that sitar twanging, but that’s rather a good thing, if you ask me. You can probably expect to hear some Beethoven any moment now the Pastoral Symphony, I would guess.’

‘Not to mention all five piano concertos — played at once,’ I said sourly. Raymond’s loquacious delight in this musical monster out in the garden annoyed me. I closed the veranda windows, wishing that he himself had installed the statue in the living room of his downtown apartment. ‘I take it that it won’t go on growing for ever?’

Carol handed Raymond another scotch. ‘What do you think we ought to do?’

Raymond shrugged. ‘Why worry?’ he said airily. ‘When it starts tearing the house down cut it back. Thank God we had it dismantled. If this had happened in Vermilion Sands…’

Carol touched my arm. ‘Mr Hamilton, perhaps that’s what Lorraine Drexel expected. She wanted it to start spreading all over the town, the music driving everyone crazy—’

‘Careful,’ I warned her. ‘You’re running away with yourself. As Raymond says, we can chop it up any time we want to and melt the whole thing down.’

‘Why don’t you, then?’

‘I want to see how far it’ll go,’ I said. In fact my motives were more mixed. Clearly, before she left, Lorraine Drexel had set some perverse jinx at work within the statue, a bizarre revenge on us all for deriding her handiwork. As Raymond had said, the present babel of symphonic music had no connection with the melancholy cries the statue had first emitted. Had those forlorn chords been intended to be a requiem for her dead lover — or even, conceivably, the beckoning calls of a still unsurrendered heart? Whatever her motives, they had now vanished into this strange travesty lying across my garden.

I watched the statue reaching slowly across the lawn. It had collapsed under its own weight and lay on its side in a huge angular spiral, twenty feet long and about fifteen feet high, like the skeleton of a futuristic whale. Fragments of the Nutcracker Suite and Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian’ Symphony sounded from it, overlaid by sudden blaring excerpts from the closing movements of Grieg’s Piano Concerto. The selection of these hack classics seemed deliberately designed to get on my nerves.

I had been up with the statue most of the night. After Carol went to bed I drove my car on to the strip of lawn next to the house and turned on the headlamps. The statue stood out almost luminously in the darkness, booming away to itself, more and more of the sonic cores budding out in the yellow glare of the lights. Gradually it lost its original shape; the toothed grille enveloped itself and then put out new struts and barbs that spiralled upwards, each throwing off secondary and tertiary shoots in its turn. Shortly after midnight it began to lean and then suddenly toppled over.

By now its movement was corkscrew. The plinth had been carried into the air and hung somewhere in the middle of the tangle, revolving slowly, and the main foci of activity were at either end. The growth rate was accelerating. We watched a new shoot emerge. As one of the struts curved round a small knob poked through the flaking chrome. Within a minute it grew into a spur an inch long, thickened, began to curve and five minutes later had developed into a full-throated sonic core twelve inches long.