Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

‘Let’s get him into the boat,’ said Barnes.

When Courtenay was lying unconscious in the bows, Vassos lifted his hand to help Barnes aboard. It was refused.

‘Take him back and fetch a doctor,’ said Barnes. ‘You have never seen this man before; you found him on the beach. Then return here and wait for me. If I don’t come by first light, everything is changed. Go to the English bey in the town and tell him what you know.’

Vassos signified consent and rowed away into the darkness.

Since Courtenay had not been pursued and no observable alarm had been raised, it seemed probable that he had killed or otherwise silenced his assailant. At any moment this might become known; Barnes must hurry. Here was his only chance, for once Count Axel’s men were alerted no outsider would ever afterwards be able to reach the objective unseen.

Barnes, taxed though he was by the ascent, managed to do so. He stood in shadow at the corner of the main house and listened for five minutes; nothing and nobody stirred. When, after another five minutes, he rounded the further corner and came in view of the outbuilding with the bricked-up windows, he at once caught sight of a human body lying near the door in full moonlight. With the utmost speed he went to it and dragged it into the comparative darkness under a carob tree. It was that of a strongly built man in his thirties with Courtenay’s knife still deep in his side. Barnes turned the corpse face down and made for the door of the outbuilding. Its lock had not yet responded to his attentions when, behind him, he heard another door open. In no time he was hidden and watching.

A lamp approached from the house. Soon Barnes was able to recognize Count Axel in a white dressing-gown and Turkish slippers. His look of pleased expectation changed to one of mild puzzlement when, it could be assumed, he noted the absence of the man now lying under the carob. He glanced about for a moment while Barnes crouched very still and hoped very much that the small patch of blood where the man had first lain was small enough not to be noticed; then, evidently deciding that the matter could be left, the Count took a key from his dressing-gown pocket, opened the outbuilding door, entered, shut it behind him, and relocked it.

At once Barnes hurried over and went on with his work. The lock was confoundedly stubborn and the need for complete silence a severe constriction. Some seven or eight minutes went by before the lock allowed itself to be turned. In that interval it occurred to Barnes that Courtenay must have been attacked while re-locking the door, then that that was precisely when he could not have been attacked, or not effectively, because his wound was in front. So he had allowed himself to be disabled by an antagonist who had met him face to face. But his reflexes were known to be outstandingly quick. What had deprived him of the initiative?

Slowly Barnes pushed the door open an inch, two inches. Inside it was almost dark. He pushed further. A little light came through gaps in the curtain that covered a portal at the far end of a short passage straight in front of him; beyond it, he had learned, lay the main room of the building. On each side of the passage were smaller rooms, just then seemingly deserted. Barnes crossed the threshold and shut the door. Soon he was standing at the portal in an excellent position to see what was on the other side of the curtain without being seen. Some rhythmical movement and the sound of heavy breathing could be heard, but no speech. He put his eyes to the most promising gap.

A lamp, the Count’s or another, gave illumination that, while not bright, was clear enough. The room held five day-beds or couches, each with an occupant. All of these were naked. All were female. On the couch nearest Barnes there lay a girl of about twenty-five with pretty brown hair and three legs, two normally placed, the third, somewhat withered, growing out above the left hip. Opposite: was it two negro women or one? — at the shoulders certainly two, at the hindquarters as certainly one; it was easy to see why Vassos had been undecided about how many people had landed that night. Next to the two or the one, another double entity was disposed, a slim girl of about the same age as the first, evidently an Asiatic half-caste with exquisite features and the look of being some months gone in pregnancy; emerging under her left arm was something like the top half of a five-year-old child, which now stirred in its sleep. It was impossible to tell anything as to the age of the fourth occupant, because it — she — had no face, none, that is, in the human sense, only as we speak by analogy of the face of a dog or a horse or, more applicable, a tapir.

This being was actually the last to come to Barnes’s attention. The first rocked and strained in Count Axel’s arms, and Barnes had thought her normal, her face, a true face unlike that other poor creature’s, half-turned in his direction, but now, when he gazed at her again, that face turned away, and as it did so another began to come into view, another face on the same head, a Janus-head, another true face that gaped its mouth and half-closed its eyes in pleasure.

Somehow Barnes took himself out of that building without being heard, somehow he climbed and ran and stumbled down the headland without serious injury; he was bruised and bleeding in twenty places when he came to the boat and Vassos. He had waited till he was out of hearing of the house before letting himself start to sob and whimper and managed to keep almost completely quiet after they landed, though he let Vassos give him raw brandy and bread and hot goat’s milk and put him to bed and sit up with him for the rest of the night. He gives these details himself in his report, a painful chronicle with its abrupt swings from the style of a conscientious, highly trained officer to that of a sensitive man still in a state of shock and semi-hysteria. But, as he says, he could not afford to wait till such time as he might feel better: he must have orders, and a replacement.

For Courtenay was dead, had died in a monastery hospital within an hour of arriving there. It was on hearing this news that Barnes, again by his own account, wished most fervently that he had killed Count Axel when he had had the chance. But if he had, what would have happened to those occupants of the outbuilding? At that time in that place, they would almost certainly have been quietly slaughtered, and it would have taken a bold man to pronounce them better off dead. I am not as confident as Roger Harvey that Barnes’s report was acted upon, though to be sure orders to do nothing constitute action.

In any event, no answer to his request appears in the folder. The final document is a signal from the Stockholm police; Count Axel had large estates near Karlskrona; he had not resided in Sweden for thirty years; late in 1898 he had fled inexplicably from a house he owned in Portugal, leaving it full of possessions. Even in those days it could hardly have been easy for him to kidnap or buy his company and then keep it hidden; now, with governments and police quick to trace any missing person, none of it would be possible.

One small item that puzzled Barnes I can clear up. Courtenay’s last words to him had nothing to do with terror; he was trying to say a single word that I, with my Ancient as well as Modern Greek, can identify, though I have never encountered it: teratophilia, erotic attraction to monsters. No doubt Courtenay had run across it in his psychological dabblings. It stands for an inclination bound to arouse abhorrence in those fortunate enough not to share it. Nevertheless I have pondered on it and other matters a good deal these last days, since reading the contents of that folder. I have felt I have had to. Consider: I was born in June or July 1899, in the Levant; nobody living knows exactly when or where. My colouring is Nordic. I have what might be an Asiatic eye-characteristic. Also consider something nobody living knows in detail but I: near my right hip I have an old scar, very old, the relic of surgery carried out so early in my infancy that my foster-parents, who started to care for me when I was six weeks old, did not know, or said they did not know, the nature of the operation. I have read that the tendency to bear twins is strongly inherited. Finally consider what has occurred to me as I write these lines: whence do I derive what Harvey called my fascination with the bizarre?