J. Ballard - The Drought

They reached a set of wrought-iron gates rooted into the sand, and Ransom recognized the half-buried perspectives of the avenue in which he had once lived. On the other side of the road the Reverend Johnstone's house had vanished below the dust carried up from the lake.

Skirting the gate, Quilter led them through an interval in the wall, then set off up the drive. The shell of Lomax's mansion was hidden among the dunes, its upper floors burned out. They passed the entrance. The cracked glass doors stood open, and the marble floor inside the hall was strewn with rubbish and old cans.

They rounded the house and reached the swimming pool. Here at last there were some signs of habitation. A line of screens made of tanned hide had been erected around the pool, and the eaves of a large tented structure rose from the deep end. The faint smoke of a wood fire lifted from the center of the pool. The sandy verges were littered with old cooking implements, bird traps, and pieces of refrigerator cabinets, salvaged from the nearby ruins. A short distance away the wheel-less bodies of two cars sat side by side among the dunes.

A wooden stairway led dowh onto the floor of the swimming pool. Protected by the screens, the floor was smooth and clean, the colored tridents and sea horses visible among the worn tiles. Walking down the slope from the shallow end, they approached the inner wall of blankets. Quilter pushed these aside and beckoned them into the central court.

Lying on a low divan beside the fire was a woman whom Ransom recognized with an effort to be Miranda Lomax. Her long white hair now reached to her feet, enclosing her like a threadbare shroud, and her face had th. same puckish eyes and mouth. But what startled Ransom was her size. She was now as fat as a pig, with gross arms and hips, immense shoulders and waist. Swaddled in fat, her small eyes gazed at Ransom from above her huge cheeks. With a pudgy hand she brushed her hair off her forehead. She was wearing, almost modishly, a black nightdress that seemed designed expressly to show off her vast corpulence.

"Quilty…" she began. "Who's this?" She glanced at Quilter, who kicked off his stilts and gestured his mother to a stool by the fire. Leaving Ransom to sit down on the floor, Quilter reclined into a large fanbacked wicker chair, whose bamboo scrollwork rose above his head in an arch of elaborate trellises. He reached up to the swan's neck and pulled off his hat, dumping it onto the floor.

Miranda stirred, unable to roll her girth more than an inch or two across the divan. "Quilty, isn't this our wandering doctor? What was his name…?" She nodded slowly at Mrs. Quilter, and then turned her attention to Ransom. A smile spread across her face, as if Ransom's arrival had quickened some long dormant and amusing memory. "Doctor, you've come all the way from the coast to see us. Quilty, your mother's arrived."

Mrs. Quilter regarded Miranda blankly with her tired eyes, either unable or unwilling to recognize her.

Quilter sat in his wicker throne. He glanced distantly at his mother, and then said to Miranda, with a quirk of humor: "She likes cars."

"Does she?" Miranda tittered at this. "Well, she looks as if she's just in time for you to fix her up." She turned her pleasant beam on Ransom. "What about you, doctor?"

Ransom brushed his beard. "I've had to make do with other forms of transport. I'm glad to see you're still here, Miranda."

"Yes… I suppose you are. Have you brought any water with you?"

"Water?" Ransom repeated. "I'm afraid we used all ours getting here."

Miranda sighed and looked across at Quilter. "A pity. We're rather short of water, you know."

"But the reservoir-" Ransom gestured in the direction of the pond. "You seem to have the stuff lying around all over the place."

Miranda shook her head. Her rapid attention to the topic made Ransom aware that the water might well turn out to be a mirage after all. Miranda eyed him thoughtfully. "That reservoir, as you call it, is all we've got. Isn't it, Quilter?"

Quilter nodded slowly, taking in Ransom in his gaze. Ransom wondered whether Quilter really remembered him, or even, for that matter, his mother. The old woman sat halfasleep on her stool, exhausted now that the long journey had ended.

Miranda smiled at Ransom. "You see, we were rather hoping you'd brought some water with you. But if you haven't, that's just that Tell me, doctor, why on earth have you come here?"

Ransom paused before answering, aware that Quilter's sharp eyes were on him. Obviously they assumed that the little party was the advance guard of some official expedition from the coast, perhaps the harbinger of the end of the drought.

"Well," he temporized, "I know it sounds quixotic, Miranda, but I wanted to see Lomax and yourself-and Quilter, of course. Perhaps you don't understand?"

Miranda sat up. "But I _do_. I don't know about Richard, he's rather awkward and unpredictable these days, and Quilter does look a bit fed up with you already, but _I_ understand." She patted her huge stomach, looking down with tolerant affection at its giant girth. "If you haven't brought any water, well things won't be quite the same, let's be honest, but you can certainly stay for a few days. Can't he, Quilter?"

Before Quilter could reply Mrs. Quilter began to sway on her stool. Ransom caught her arm. "She needs some rest," he said. "Can she lie down somewhere?"

Quilter carried her away to a small cubicle behind the curtains. In a few minutes he came back and handed Ransom a pail of tepid water. Although his stomach was still full of the water he had swallowed in the lake, Ransom made a pretense of drinking gratefully, assuming that Quilter now accepted him.

To Miranda he said casually: "I take it you had us followed here?"

"We knew someone was struggling along. Not many people come up from the coast-most of them seem to get tired or disappear." She flashed Ransom a sharp smile. "I think they get eaten on the way-by the lions, I mean."

Ransom nodded. "As a matter of interest, what have you been eating? Apart from a few weary travelers like myself."

Miranda hooted. "Don't worry, doctor, you're much too stringy. Anyway, those days are past, aren't they, Quilty? Now we've got organized there's just about enough to eat- you'd be amazed how many cans you can find under these ruins-but to begin with it was difficult. I know you think everyone went off to the coast, but an awful lot stayed behind. After a while they thinned out." She patted her stomach reflectively. "Ten years is a long time."

Above them, from the dunes by the pool, there was a sharp crackling, and the pumping sounds of a bellows being worked. A fire of sticks and oil rags began to burn, sending up a cloud of smoke. Ransom looked up at the huge black pillar, rising almost from the very ground at his feet. It was identical with all the other smoke columns that had followed them across the desert, and Ransom had the sudden feeling that he had at last arrived at his destination, despite the ambiguous nature of his reception-no one had mentioned Catherine or Philip Jordan, but he assumed that people drifted about the desert without formality, taking their chances with Quilter. Some he drowned in the pool out of habit, while others he might take back to his den.

Miranda snuffled some phlegm up one nostril. "Whitman's here," she said to Quilter, who was gazing through a crack in the screen at his mother's sleeping face.

There was a patter of wooden clogs from behind the curtains, and three small children ran out from another cubicle. Surprised by the fire lifting from the edge of the swimming pool, they toddled out, squeaking softly at their mother.

Their swollen heads and puckish faces were perfect replicas of Miranda and Quilter. Each had the same brachycephalie skull, the same downward eyes and hollow cheeks. Their small necks and bodies seemed barely strong enough to carry their huge rolling heads. To Ransom they first resembled the children of the congenitally insane, but then he saw their eyes watching him. Still half asleep, their huge pupils were full of strange dreams.