Bob Shaw - The Peace Machine

“Master Auckland II,” Beaton said, giving a genuine tip. Raphoe was a notorious loudmouth, and giving him the information would set up a chain reaction of tip-offs which would bring the odds tumbling down and cost Beaton a considerable sum of money. He had an intuition, however, that he was not going to be worried about horses in the immediate future.

“It’ll be really trying, will it?”

“Randy, this time it doesn’t need to try. Now, about the car — where did you get it?”

“In the car park of the Cricketers. Do you know it? It’s a good alehouse out Breightmet way.”

“I’ll find it,” Beaton assured him, and now the knife seemed to be generating a pulsing warmth of its own, bathing his palm with sweat.

Hutchman rarely recalled his dreams, with the result that when he did awaken with one fresh in his mind it seemed — although he was skeptical about precognition — to be laden with significance and psychological implications. His last remembered dreams were the two about the timid pseudo-creatures who allowed themselves to be destroyed by women. ( Am I, he had wondered, a shaky artificial being which falls apart at the hands of female pragmatism? ) Now, however, he had the unusual experience of expecting a dream, of knowing in advance that one was coming. It was something to do with the increasing sense of being trapped in the shabby old house, or the feeling of imminent disaster which had haunted him since his car had vanished, which by a kind of transference made the dinginess of his surroundings seem menacing. As he lay down on top of the bedclothes on a gray afternoon, there was danger for him in the ancient brown bakelite of the room’s electrical fittings, despair in the shattered skeletal elements of the gas fire. And the dream came…

He walks downstairs, oppressed by the gloomy unfamiliarity of the house. There is a wedding party in progress down below and the stairwell is filled with hostile northern accents. George Atwood’s voice swells and recedes with an undersea quality. There is a painful pressure in Hutchman’s bladder which must be relieved. He tries the two toilets and the doors are locked. The pressure gets worse. Afraid of disgracing himself, he asks Mrs. Atwood if there is another toilet. Not here, she says, but the house next door is empty. Hutchman hurries Out to it. The street is filled with bright pewter light, and the worn sandstone steps of the abandoned house register vividly in his mind. The front door is lying open. Dust is drifting on the bare, rotting boards of the hall as he walks along it. There is an open door to the room on his left. He looks in and sees, lying on a couch, a figure completely covered by a white sheet. Dread grips him, but the toilet is only at the head of the first flight of stairs and the pain in his abdomen is intolerable. He walks up the stairs, opens the toilet door, and finds himself staring down into an old cast-iron bath. There is a corpse in it — yellowed, frilled with fungus, bathed in the fluids of its own putrefaction. Appalled, Hutchman sways ponderously away and turns to run. But now the front door of the house is closed. And, projecting from the inner doorway he had passed, is the corner of a white sheet. The thing which had been lying on the couch is now standing in the entrance to the front room, waiting for him to come downstairs. And even if he gets past it in full flight, while he is struggling to open the outer door it will come up behind him. Hutchman tries to scream. Run! Stay! Run! Stay!

It was still daylight when he awoke but the room seemed very much colder than before. He lay flat on his back, hands gripping the bedding as if to prevent him from falling upward while he fought off the spell of the nightmare. It had been a very basic affair, he told himself. Hammer Films stuff, and utterly ridiculous to a waking adult; but the room was undeniably colder. He got to his feet, shivering, and turned up the gas fire, causing a white front of incandescence to move up through its ruined ceramic temples, followed by bands of violet and sienna.

Run! Stay!

Perhaps he should have pulled up stakes as soon as his car was stolen. It might have been best to have got going immediately, not even returning to the house for the night. But he had been drunk at the time, and rapidly becoming sick, and it had seemed that the thief had done him a good turn by removing a troublesome piece of unwanted property. Now he was uncertain, and glands which had been triggered by his dream were urging him to run. He left his room and wandered slowly down the stairs, pausing at different levels in the structure as though he could and might decide to move horizontally through the air at any one of them. A woman’s voice floated up the stairwell. It was Jane Atwood speaking to someone on the telephone, cheerful, privileged to communicate with her friends outside. Hutchman felt a pang of loneliness, and he decided to ring Vicky. It’s possible , he thought in wonder. I can pick up the phone and speak to her. Dial a line to the past . He moved on down to the hall, where Mrs. Atwood was hanging up the phone.

“That was George,” she said curiously. “A man’s been to the shop asking about you. Something about your car.”

“Really?” Hutchman gripped the smooth wood of the banister. ”Was your car stolen, Mr. Rattray? You said it broke down when you were. …

“I’m not sure — it may have been stolen afterward.” Hutchman turned and sprinted up the stairs, moaning inwardly with panic. In his room he threw on his jacket and ran back down to the hall. Mrs. Atwood had disappeared into another part of the house. He opened the front door and glanced up and down the street to make sure nobody was coming, then walked quickly away from the house, choosing to go in the opposite direction to the main road. Near the end of the street he saw a dark-blue Jaguar sweep round the corner. It was driven by a thick-set, gray-haired man who appeared not even to see Hutchman, but the car slowed down at once and rolled gently down the street, its wheels mushing through decaying leaves. The driver was examining the numbers on the houses.

Hutchman continued walking normally until he had rounded the corner into a wider and empty cross-avenue, then began to run. The act of running required no effort, his breath seeming to come easier as though constrictive bands had been torn away from his chest. He sped along a line of trees, hardly aware of his feet touching the ground, moving so silently that he twice distinguished the pulpy sound of chestnuts dropping onto the pavement. Near the end of the avenue he abruptly became self-conscious, slowed down to a walk, and looked back over his shoulder. The blue Jaguar was backing out between the lines of trees, wallowing slightly with the lateral forces of the turn. It came in his direction, alternating through light and shade as it ghosted past the trees.

Hutchman began to run again. He emerged into a long canyon of three-storey terrace houses, saw a narrow street opening on his right, and darted down it. This street was freakishly long and featureless, running slightly uphill until its perspectives faded into the gathering mist. There was no time for Hutchman to turn hack. He loped along an irregular line of parked cars, zig-zagging to avoid groups of playing children, but now running was becoming less dreamlike and more difficult. His mouth began to fill with a salty froth and his ankles to weaken, allowing his feet to slap the ground almost uncontrollably. He looked back and saw the Jaguar in its noiseless pursuit.

Suddenly Hutchman noticed a ragged break in the confining lines of houses. He slanted toward it and entered a desolate plain which had been created by a slum clearance and redevelopment program. Its surface was composed of tumbled brick and fragmented concrete, with children moving through a low-lying mist, like members of a small alien race, bands of expeditionary Hobbits. Hutchman launched himself in the direction of the opposite boundary, another row of terrace houses beyond which the blue-white lights of a main road were already beginning to shine through the dusk. Behind him he heard the Jaguar slither to a halt. Its door slammed, but there was no time for him to take even one glance to the rear because running on the new surface was dangerous. His ankles threatened to give way every time he was forced to leap over a block of concrete or one of the rusted reinforcing rods which rose Out of the ground like snares. He aimed for what appeared to be an opening in the perimeter houses, then discovered he had wasted his strength by running. The redevelopment contractor had sealed the site off with a galvanized iron fence — and Hutchman was in a box.