Bob Shaw - The Two Timers

“Precisely what I’m saying! I’m a victim of hemicrania sine dolore, too. I’ve seen the marching colored angles dozens of times in the last nine years, and I’ve made dozens of trips — always to the scene of the argument, because I knew that was where it started. That was where my guilt lay, but you couldn’t face that, Jack.

“You accepted it for a while, then — you told us about it the night you arrived at the house — you began to focus on the scene of the killing. You began to see the trees of the park projecting up through the traffic lanes. The reason was that the murder scene had a powerful attraction for you. It had Spiedel — a ready-made vehicle for the transference of your guilt; it was a moment of danger for Kate — in which there was no time to weigh up right and wrong. There was only time to kill…”

“You’re wrong,” Jack whispered.

“Face up to it, Jack — it’s your only chance. You and I were one man at that time, so I know what lay right at the back of your mind. You wanted Kate to die. When Convery came to the door that first time you heard the same inner voice as I did, the one telling you you had been set free. But there’s nothing so terrible about it…” John’s eyes closed again, and his voice began to fade. “. . You can’t love a woman without wanting to kill her sometime… she won’t always be what you want her to be… sometimes she wants to be herself… trick is to learn to adjust… you gotta adjust…” John Breton fell asleep, his bruised face pressed against the floor.

“You fool,” Jack said. “You poor fool.”

He went up the stairs and paused with his hand on the light switch, checking the arrangements he had made to keep John imprisoned. When the other man recovered consciousness he would be able to move around the central part of the basement, but he would be unable to reach any tools with which he might free himself. John Breton would be extremely uncomfortable, Jack reflected grimly, but it would not be for very long. He clicked out the light and went back outside, carefully locking the door of the lodge behind him.

It had grown much darker while he was inside, but the sky was literally alive with light. Above the northern horizon, ghostly curtains of red and green brilliance spread their shimmering folds across the heavens, twitching and flailing in response to the awesome solar winds. The aurora was so bright that it screened out the polar stars. Familiar constellations shone in the rest of the sky, but they too had dimmed in comparison to the vast, silent pyrotechnics of the meteor display. The night world was being bombarded with fire by a frantic giant, divergent showers tracing their paths across the atmospheric shield in an unsteady rhythm, punctuated by brighter projectiles which spanned the horizons in mind-quailing arcs.

The whole fantastic scene was reflected in the waters of the lake, turning its surface into a seething mirror. Breton faced it unseeingly for a moment, then got into the car. His hand brushed against a smooth, dark object lying on the front seat. It was John Breton’s shoe — the one which had caught Lieutenant Convery’s attention earlier in the day. Opening the window, he threw the shoe out towards the water, but it fell short and he heard it bounce on the pebbles. He shrugged, started the car and slewed it around in a gravel-spitting circle.

Driving south on the Silverstream highway, he found himself continually glancing in the mirror with a feeling of being followed — even though there was nothing behind but the pulsing lights of the aurora.

Breton was relieved to find the house in darkness when he got back.

He put the car in the garage and went into the house by the back door. A glance at his watch showed him that he had been away less than three hours — it had seemed much longer. Walking through the hall, he noticed the bottle of sleeping tablets lying where he had thrown it. He picked it up and took it back to the bathroom.

The sight of himself in the bathroom mirror gave Breton a shock. His face was haggard and shaded with stubble, his clothing rumpled and streaked with dust. He looked around the room and noted with approval that, as well as a shower stall, it was fitted with a deep tub. While hot water was thundering from the tap, he searched closets and produced clean underwear, a soft, dark-green shirt and a pair of slacks belonging to John Breton. He carried them into the bathroom, locked the door and proceeded to have the hottest bath he could remember. Half an hour later he was clean, relaxed and freshly-shaven — and it felt good.

He went downstairs into the friendly, soft-toned spaciousness of the big living room and stood, hesitating, before the cocktail cabinet. He had been avoiding alcohol almost completely for years because, as far as he was concerned, drinking and hard work were mutually exclusive. But that phase of his life had passed — he had now achieved just about everything he had set out to achieve, and could afford to relax a little. He inspected the whiskey, found it was Johnny Walker Black Label and nodded in satisfaction. John and he had diverged in many ways over the nine years, but his other self was still a good judge of liquor. He poured a generous measure, carried it over to the deepest armchair and began sipping. The evocative aroma, and the warmth of distilled sunlight seeping through his system, relaxed him still further. He took another glass…

Breton awoke with a start of panic, wondering where he was. It took several seconds for his surroundings to register, and when they did, he felt worried. The wall-clock told him it was past two in the morning, and obviously Kate had not come home yet. He got to his feet, shivering after the long sleep, then heard the faint sound of the garage doors being closed. Kate had arrived, after all, and the sound of her car’s high-compression engine coming up the drive must have been what had awakened him.

Self-consciously, nervously, he went through to the back of the house and opened the kitchen door. She came towards the light, the belt of her tweed suit untied and the jacket lying open to reveal the horizontal tensions of her tangerine-colored sweater. Breton had never seen Kate look so much like Kate.

“John,” she said uncertainly, shielding her eyes. “Oh… Jack.”

“Come in, Kate,” he said gently. “John has gone.”

“Gone?”

“Well, I did warn you. I told you the sort of mood he was in today.”

“I know you did — but I didn’t expect… Are you sure he’s gone? The car’s still out in the garage.

“He took a taxi. To the airport, I think. He wasn’t communicative.”

Kate peeled off her gloves and dropped them on the kitchen table. Breton automatically locked the kitchen door, like an ordinary husband sealing up his little fortress for the night, then found Kate staring at him, somberly, in a way which invested his familiar action with significance. He made a show of carelessly flinging the key onto the table, and ensured that it ended up nestling into the fingers of her gloves. What a start, he thought. A clash of symbols.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “You mean he’s just walked out? For good?”

“This is what I was warning you about, Kate. John was reaching the point where he had to make some pretty massive adjustments to his emotional circumstances. He probably interpreted your staying away from the house today as a lack of concern.”. Breton made himself sound contrite. “You can imagine how I feel.”

Kate walked through to the living room and stood at the stone chimney, staring down into the unlit fire. Breton followed her and positioned himself at the other side of the room, carefully gauging her reactions. A too-sudden advance at this stage could trigger off the antagonism he had noticed in her earlier in the day. Kate had a conscience.