Brian Aldiss - The Monster Trilogy

Fear brushed her, to be followed by a kind of puzzlement. ‘Did I live this moment before? Didn’t I see it in a movie? A dream … ?’

She inhaled deeply, irrationally feeling a wave of kinship with this man, although he breathed no word.

Unconsciously, she had allowed her robe to fall open, revealing her nudity. The stranger’s eyes were fixed upon her – not upon her body, her breasts, the dark bush of hair on her sexual regions, but on her throat.

Could there really be some new thrill, something unheard of and incredible, such as Joe seeks? If so … if so, lead me to it.

This was a different hedonism from the aerial plunge from the womb of the speeding plane.

‘Hi,’ she said.

He smiled, revealing good strong white teeth with emphatic canines.

‘Like a drink?’ she asked. ‘I was just getting stewed all on my ownsome.’

‘Thanks, no,’ he said, advancing. ‘Not alcohol. You have something more precious than alcohol.’

‘I always knew it,’ Mina said.

Lack of motion. Stillness. Silence.

‘More goddamned trees,’ Bodenland exclaimed.

At least there was no swamp this time.

He stepped over the driver, tied and cowering under his tarpaulin,and slid open the door. After a moment, he stepped down on solid earth. Somewhere a bird sang and fell silent.

These were not the trees of the Carboniferous. They were small, hazel and birch and elder, graceful, widely spaced, with the occasional oak and sycamore towering above them. Light filtered through to him almost horizontally, despite heavy green foliage on every side. He guessed it was late summer. 1896, near London, England, according to the driver and the co-ordinates. What was going on in England, 1896? Then he thought, Oh yes, Queen Victoria …

Well, the old Queen had a pretty little wood here. It seemed to represent all the normal things the time train, with its hideous freight, was not. He savoured the clear air with its scent of living things. He listened to the buzz of a bee and was pleased.

Seen from outside, the train when stationary was small, almost inconsiderable, no longer than a railroad boxcar. Its outside was studded and patterned with metal reinforcers; nothing was to be seen of the windows he knew existed inside. Somehow, the whole thing expanded in the relativism of the time quanta and contracted when stationary. He stared at it with admiration and curiosity, saying to himself, ‘I’m going to get this box of tricks back to my own time and figure it all out. There’s power beyond the dreams of avarice here.’

As he stood there in a reverie, it seemed to him that a shrouded female figure drifted like a leaf from the train and disappeared. Immediately, the wood seemed a less friendly place, darker too.

He shivered. Strange anxieties passed through his mind. The isolation in which, through his own reckless actions, he found himself, closed in about him. Although he had always believed himself to have a firm grip on sanity – was not the world of science sanity’s loftiest bastion? – the nightmare events on the train caused him to wonder. Had that creature pinned to the torture-bench been merely a disordered phase of sadistic imagining?

He forced himself to get back into the train and to search it.

It had contracted like a concertina. In no way was it possible to enter any of the compartments, now squeezed shut like closed eyes. He listened for crying but heard nothing. The very stillness was a substance, lowering to the spirits.

‘Shit,’ he said, and stared out into the wood. They had come millions of years to be in this place and he strained his ears as if to listen to the sound of centuries. ‘We’d better find out where the hell we are,’ he said aloud. ‘And I need to eat. Not one bite did I have through the whole Cretaceous …’

He shook himself into action.

Hoisting the driver up by his armpit, he said, ‘You’re coming too, buddy, I may need you.’

The smothered voice said, ‘You will be damned forever for this.’

‘Damned? You mean like doomed to eternal punishment? I don’t believe that crap. I don’t really believe in you either, so move your arse along.’

He helped the creature out of the train.

A path wound uphill, fringed with fern. Beyond, on either side, grew rhododendrons, their dark foliage hastening the approach of night. He peered ahead, alert, full of wonder and excitement. The trees were thinning. A moth fluttered by on a powdery wing and lost itself on the trunk of a birch. A brick-built house showed some way ahead. As he looked a dim light lit in one of its windows, like an eye opening.

Tugging his captive, he emerged from the copse on to the lawn. The lawn was sprinkled with daisies already closing. It led steeply up to the house, which crowned a ridge of higher ground. A row of pines towered behind the roofs and chimneys of the house, which lay at ease on its eminence, overlooking a large ornamental pool, a gazebo and pleasant flowerbeds past which Bodenland now made his way.

A young gardener in waistcoat and shirtsleeves saw him coming, dropped his hoe in astonishment, and ran round the other side of the house. Bodenland halted to give his reluctant captive a pull.

On a terrace which ran the length of the house stood classical statues. The sun was setting, casting long fingers of shadow which reached towards Bodenland. As he paused, another light was lit inside the house.

Uncertain for once, he made towards the back door and took hold of the knocker.

The ginger man was watching and listening again, an opera glass in his right hand. With his left hand, he stroked his short red beard appreciatively, as if it had been a cat.

He stood in the wings of the Lyceum Theatre with the delectable Ellen Terry in costume by his side, gazing on to the lighted stage.

On the stage, before a packed auditorium, Henry Irving was playing the role of Mephistopheles in a performance of Faust . Dressed in black, with a black goatee beard and whitened face, the celebrated actor spread out his cloak like a giant bat’s wings. Back and forth he stalked, menacing a somewhat aghast Faust, and chanting his lines:

So great’s his Christian faith, I cannot grasp

His soul – but I’ll afflict his body with

Lament, and strew him with diverse diseases …

Thunderous applause from the audience, all of whom believed in one way or another that they were in some danger of damnation themselves.

When the play was finished, Irving took his bows before the curtain.

As he made his exit into the wings, he passed the ginger man with a triumphant smirk and headed for his dressing room.

Both Irving and the ginger man were smartly attired in evening dress when they finally left the theatre. The ginger man adjusted his top hat at a rakish angle, careful that some curls sizzled over the brim to the left of his head.

The stagedoor keeper fawned on them as they passed his nook.

‘’Night, Mr Irving. ’Night, Mr Stoker.’

The ginger man pressed a tip into his hand as they passed. Out in the night, haloed by a gas lamp, Irving’s carriage awaited.

‘The club?’ Irving asked.

‘I’ll join you later,’ said the ginger man, on impulse. He turned abruptly down the side alley to the main thoroughfare.

Irving swung himself up into his carriage. ‘The Garrick Club,’ he told his driver.

In the thoroughfare, bustle was still the order of the day, despite the lateness of the hour. Hansoms and other carriages plied back and forth in the street, while the elegant and the shabby formed a press on the pavements. And in doorways and the entrances to dim side-courts were propped those beings who had no advantages in a hard-hearted world, who had failed or been born in failure, men, women, small children. These shadowy persons, keeping their pasty faces in shadow, begged, or proffered for sale tawdry goods – matches, separate cigarettes, flowers stolen from graves – or simply lounged in their niches, awaiting a change of fortune or perhaps a nob to relieve of his wallet.