Douglas Adams. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
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... wish you'd tell me whereyou got it. I have endless trouble with them, quite endless.
Never found a comfortable one in all my life. How do you find
yours?" He encountered, with a slight air of surprise, a small
silver tray he had left out with a decanter of port and three
glasses.
"Well, it's odd you should ask that," said Richard. "I've
never sat on it."
"Very wise," insisted Reg earnestly, "very, very wise." He
went through a palaver similar to his previous one with his
coat and hat.
"Not that I wouldn't like to," said Richard. "It's just
that it's stuck halfway up a long flight of stairs which leads
up into my flat. As far as I can make it out, the delivery men
got it part way up the stairs, got it stuck, turned it around
any way they could, couldn't get it any further, and then
found, curiously enough, that they couldn't get it back down
again. Now, that should be impossible."
"Odd," agreed Reg. "I've certainly never come across any
irreversible mathematics involving sofas. Could be a new field.
Have you spoken to any spatial geometricians?"
"I did better than that. I called in a neighbour's kid who
used to be able to solve Rubik's cube in seventeen seconds. He
sat on a step and stared at it for over an hour before
pronouncing it irrevocably stuck. Admittedly he's a few years
older now and has found out about girls, but it's got me
puzzled."
"Carry on talking, my dear fellow, I'm most interested,
but let me know first if there's anything I can get you. Port
perhaps? Or brandy? The port I think is the better bet, laid
down by the college in 1934, one of the finest vintages I think
you'll find, and on the other hand I don't actually have any
brandy. Or coffee? Some more wine perhaps? There's an excellent
Margaux I've been Iooking for an excuse to open, though it
should of course be allowed to stand open for an hour or two,
which is not to say that I couldn't... no," he said hurriedly,
"probably best not to go for the Margaux tonight."
"Tea is what I would really like," said Richard, "if you
have some."
Reg raised his eyebrows. "Are you sure?"
"I have to drive home."
"Indeed. Then I shall be a moment or two in the kitchen.
Please carry on, I shall still be able to hear you. Continue to
tell me of your sofa, and do feel free in the meantime to sit
on mine. Has it been stuck there for long?"
"Oh, only about three weeks," said Richard, sitting down.
"I could just saw it up and throw it away, but I can't believe
that there isn't a logical answer. And it also made me think -
it would be really useful to know before you buy a piece of
furniture whether it's actually going to ht up the stairs or
around the corner. So I've modelled the problem in three
dimensions on my computer - and so far it just says no way."
"It says what?" called Reg, over the noise of filling the
kettte.
"That it can't be done. I told it to compute the moves
necessary to get the sofa out, and it said there aren't any. I
said `What?' and it said there aren't any. I then asked it, and
this is the really mysterious thing, to compute the moves
necessary to get the sofa into its present position in the
first place, and it said that it couldn't have got there. Not
without fundamental restructuring of the walls. So, either
there's something wrong with the fundamental structure of the
matter in my walls or," he added with a sigh, "there's
something wrong with the program. Which would you guess?"
"And are you married?" called Reg.
"What? Oh, I see what you mean. A sofa stuck on the stairs
for a month. Well, no, not married as such, but yes, there is a
specific girl that I'm not married to."
"What's she like? What does she do?"
"She's a professional cellist. I have to admit that the
sofa has been a bit of a talking point. In fact she's moved
back to her own flat until I get it sorted out. She, well... "
He was suddenly sad, and he stood up and wandered around
the room in a desultory sort of way and ended up in front of
the dying fire. He gave it a bit of a poke and threw on a
couple of extra logs to try and ward off the chill of the room.
"She's Gordon,s sister, in fact," he added at last. "But
they are very different. I 'm not sure she really approves of
computers very much. And she doesn't much like his attitude to
money. I don't think I entirely blame her, actually, and she
doesn't know the half of it."
"Which is the half she doesn't know?"
Richard sighed.
"Well," he said, "it's to do with the project which first
made the software incarnation of the company profitable. It was
called Reuson, and in its own way it was sensational."
"What was it?"
"Well, it was a kind of back-to-front program. It's funny
how many of the best ideas are just an old idea back-to-front.
You see there have already been several programs written that
help you to arrive at decisions by properly ordering and
analysing all the relevant facts so that they then point
naturally towards the right deeision. The clrawback with these
is that the decision which all the properly ordered and
analysed facts point to is not necessarily the one you want."
"Yeeeess..." said Reg's voice from the kitchen.
"Well, Gordon's great insight was to design a program
which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you
wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The
program's task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate
ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of
logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the
conclusion.
"And I have to say that it worked brilliantly. Gordon was
able to buy himself a Porsche almost immediately despite being
completely broke and a hopeless driver. Even his bank manager
was unable to find fault with his reasoning. Even when Gordon
wrote it off three weeks later."
"Heavens. And did the program sell very well?" .
"No. We never sold a single copy."
"You astonish me. It sounds like a real winner to me."
"It was," said Richard hesitantly. "The entire project was
bought up, lock, stock and barrel, by the Pentagon. The deal
put WayForward on a very sound financial foundation. Its moral
foundation, on the other hand, is not something t would want to
trust my weight to. I,ve recently been analysing a lot of the
arguments put forward in favour of the Star Wars project, and
if you know what you're looking for, the pattern of the
algorithms is very clear.
"So much so, in fact, that looking at Pentagon policies
over the last couple of years I think I can be fairly sure that
the US Navy is using version 2.00 of the program, while the Air
Force for some reason only has the beta-test version of 1.5.
Odd, that."
"Do you have a copy?"
"Certainly not," said Richard, "I wouldn't have anything
to do with it. Anyway, when the Pentagon bought everything,
they bought everything. Every scrap of code, every disk, every
notebook. I was glad to see the back of it. If indeed we have.
I just busy myself with my own projects."
He poked at the fire again and wondered what he was doing
here when he had so much work on. Gordon was on at him
continually about getting the new, super version of
Anthem ready for taking advantage of the Macintosh ll,
and he was well behind with it. And as for the proposed module
for converting incoming Dow Jones stock-market information into
MIDI data in real time, he'd only meant that as a joke, but
Gordon, of course, had flipped over the idea and insisted on
its being implemented. That too was meant to be ready but
wasn't. He suddenly knew exactly why it was he was here.
Well, it had been a pleasant evening, even if he couldn't
see why Reg had been quite so keen to see him. He picked up a
couple of books from the table. The table obviously doubled as
a dining table, because although the piles looked as if they
had been there for weeks, the absence of dust immediately
around them showed that they had been moved recently.
Maybe, he thought, the need for amiable chit-chat with
someone different can become as urgent as any other need when
you live in a community as enclosed as a Cambridge college was,
even nowadays. He was a likeable old fellow, but it was clear
from dinner that many of his colleagues found his
eccentricities formed rather a rich sustained diet -
particularly when they had so many of their own to contend
with. A thought about Susan nagged him, but he was ued to
that. He flipped through the two books he'd picked up.
One of them, an elderly one, was an account of the
hauntings of Borley Rectory, the most haunted house in England.
Its spine was getting raggedy, and the photographic plates were
so grey and blurry as to be virtually indistinguishable. A
picture he thought must be a very lucky (or faked) shot of a
ghostly apparition turned out, when he examined the caption, to
be a portrait of the author.
The other book was more recent, and by an odd coincidence
was a guide to the Greek islands. He thumbed through it idly
and a piece of paper fell out.
"Earl Grey or Lapsang Souchong?" called out Reg. "Or
Darjeeling? Or PG Tips? It's all tea bags anyway. I'm afraid.
And none of them very fresh."
"Darjeeling will do fine," replied Richard, stooping
topick up the piece of paper.
"Milk?" called Reg.
"Er, please."
"One lump or two?"
"One, please."
Richard slipped the paper back into the book, noticing as
he did so that it had a hun-iedly scribbled note on it. The
note said, oddly enough, "Regard this simple silver salt
cellar. Regard this simple hat."
"Sugar?"
"Er, what?" said Richard, startled. He put the book
hurriedly back on the pile.
"Just a tiny joke of mine," said Reg cheerily, "to see if
people are listening." He emerged beaming from the kitchen
carrying a small tray with two cups on it, which he hurled
suddenly to the floor. The tea splashed over the carpet. One of
the cups shattered and the other bounced under the table. Reg
leaned against the door frame, white-faced and staring.
A frozen instant of time slid silently by while Richard
was too startled to react, then he leaped awkwardly forward to
help. But the old man was already apologising and offering to
make him another cup. Richard helped him to the sofa.
"Are you all right?" asked Richard helplessly. "Shall I
get a doctor?"
Reg waved him down. "It's all right," he insisted, "I'm
perfectly well. Thought I heard, well, a noise that startled
me. But it was nothing. Just overcome with the tea fumes, I
expect. Let me just catch my breath. I think a little, er, port
will revive me excellently. So sorry, I didn't mean to startle
you." He waved in the general direction of the port decanter.
Richard hurriedly poured a small glass and gave it to him.
"What kind of noise?" he asked, wondering what on earth
could shock him so much.
At that moment came the sound of movement upstairs and an
extraordinary kind of heavy breathing noise.
"That..." whispered Reg. The glass of port lay shattered
at his feet. Upstairs someone seemed to be stamping. "Did you
hear it?"
"Well, yes."
This seemed to relieve the old man.
Richard looked nervously up at the ceiling. "Is there
someone up there?" he asked, feeling this was a lame question,
but one that had to be asked.
"No," said Reg in a low voice that shocked Richard with
the fear it carried, "no one. Nobody that should be there."
"Then..."
Reg was struggling shakily to his feet, but there was
suddenly a fierce determination about him.
"I must go up there," he said quietly. "I must. Please
wait for me here."
"Look, what is this?" demanded Richard, standing between
Reg and the doorway. "What is it, a burglar? Look, I'll go. I'm
sure it's nothing, it's just the wind or something." Richard
didn't know why he was saying this. It clearly wasn't the wind,
or even anything like the wind, because though the wind might
conceivably make heavy breathing noises, it rarely stamped its
feet in that way.
"No," the old man said, politely but firmly moving him
aside, "it is for me to do."
Richard followed him helplessly through the door into the
small hallway, beyond which lay the tiny kitchen. A dark wooden
staircase led up from here; the steps seemed damaged and
scuffed.
Reg turned on a light. It was a dim one that hung naked at
the top of the stairwell, and he looked up it with grim
apprehension.
"Wait here," he said, and walked up two steps. He then
turned and faced Richard with a look of the most profound
seriousness on his face.
"I am sorry," he said, "that you have become involved in
what is... the more difficult side of my life. But you are
involved now, regrettable though that may be, and there is
something I must ask you. I do not know what awaits me up
there, do not know exactly. I do not know if it is something
which I have foolishly brought upon myself with my... my
hobbies, or if it is something to which I have fallen an
innocent victim. If it is the former, then I have only myself
to blame, for I am like a doctor who cannot give up smoking, or
perhaps worse still, like an ecologist who cannot give up his
car - if the latter, then I hope it may not happen to you.
"What I must ask you is this. When I come back down these
stairs, always supposing of course that I do, then if my
behaviour strikes you as being in any way odd, if I appear not
to be myself, then you must leap on me and wrestle me to the
ground. Do you understand? You must prevent me from doing
anything I may try to do."
"But how will I know?" asked an incredulous Richard.
"Sorry I don't mean it to sound like that, but I don't know
what...?"
"You will know," said Reg. "Now please wait for me in the
main room. And close the door."
Shaking his head in bewilderment, Richard stepped back and
did as he was asked. From inside the large untidy room he
listened to the sound of the Professor's tread mounting the
stairs one at a time.
He mounted them with a heavy deliberation, like the
ticking of a great, slow clock.
Richard heard him reach the top landing. There he paused
in silence. Seconds went by, five, maybe ten, maybe twenty.
Then came again the heavy movement and breath that had first so
harrowed the Professor.
Richard moved quickly to the door but did not open it. The
chill of the room oppressed and disturbed him. He shook his
head to try and shake off the feeling, and then held his breath
as the footsteps started once again slowly to traverse the two
yards of the landing and to pause there again.
After only a few seconds; this time Richard heard the long
slow squeak of a door being opened inch by inch, inch by
cautious inch, until it must surely now at last be standing
wide agape.
Nothing further seemed to happen for a long, long time.
Then at last the door closed once again, slowly.
The footsteps crossed the landing and paused again.
Richard backed a few slight paces from the door, staring
fixedly at it. Once more the footsteps started to descend the
stairs; slowly, deliberately and quietly, until at last they
reached the bottom. Then after a few seconds more the door
handle began to rotate. The door opened and Reg walked calmly
in.
"It's all right, it's just a horse in the bathroom," he
said quietly.
Richard leaped on him and wrestled him to the ground.
"No," gasped Reg, "no, get off me, let me go, I'm
perfectly all right, damn it. It's just a horse, a perfectly
ordinary horse." He shook Richard off with no great difficulty
and sat up, puffing and blowing and pushing his hands through
his limited hair. Richard stood over him warily, but with great
and mounting embarrassment. He edged back, and let Reg stand up
and sit on a chair.
"Just a horse," said Reg, "but, er, thank you for taking
me at my word." He brushed himself down.
"A horse," repeated Richard.
"Yes," said Reg.
Richard went out and looked up the stairs and then came
back in.
"A horse?" he said again.
"Yes, it is," said the Professor. "Wait -" he motioned to
Richard, who was about to go out again and investigate - "let
it be. It won't be long."
Richard stared in disbelief. "You say there's a horse in
your bathroom, and all you can do is stand there naming Beatles
songs?"
The Professor looked blankly at him.
"Listen," he said, "I'm sorry if I... alarmed you earlier,
it was just a slight turn. These things happen, my dear fellow,
don't upset yourself about it. Dear me, I've known odder things
in my time. Many of them. Far odder. She's only a horse, for
heaven's sake. I'll go and let her out later. Please don't
concern yourself. Let us revive our spirits with some port."
"But... how did it get in there?"
"Well, the bathroom window's open. I expect she came in
through that."
Richard looked at him, not for the first and certainly not
for the last time, through eyes that were narrowed with
suspicion.
"You're doing it deliberately, aren't you?" he said.
"Doing what, my dear fellow?"
"I don't believe there's a horse in your bathroom," said
Richard suddenly. "I don't know what is there, I don't know
what you're doing, I don,t know what any of this evening means,
but I don't believe there's a horse in.your bathroom." And
brushing aside Reg's further protestations he went up to look.
The bathroom was not large.
The walls were panelled in old oak linenfold which, given
the age and nature of the building, was quite probably
priceless, but otherwise the fittings were stark and
institutional.
There was old, scuffed, black-and-white checked linoleum
on the floor, a small basic bath, well cleaned but with very
elderly stains and chips in the enamel, and also a small basic
basin with a toothbrush and toothpaste in a Duralex beaker
standing next to the taps. Screwed into the probably priceless
panelling above the basin was a tin mirror-fronted bathroom
cabinet. It looked as if it had been repainted many times, and
the mirror was stained round the edges with condensation. The
lavatory had an old-fashioned cast-iron chain-pull cistern.
There was an old cream-painted wooden cupboard standing in the
corner, with an old brown bentwood chair next to it, on which
lay some neatly folded but threadbare small towels. There was
also a large horse in the room, taking up most of it.
Richard stared at it, and it stared at Richard in an
appraising kind of way. Richard swayed slightly. The horse
stood quite still. After a while it looked at the cupboard
instead. It seemed, if not content, then at least perfectly
resigned to being where it was until it was put somewhere else.
It also seemed... what was it?
It was bathed in the glow of the moonlight that strearned
in through the window. The window was open but small and was,
besides, on the second floor, so the notion that the horse had
entered by that route was entirely fanciful.
There was something odd about the horse, but he couldn't
say what. Well, there was one thing that was clearly very odd
about iI indeed, which was that it was standing in a college
bathroom. Maybe that was all.
He reached out, rather tentatively, to pat the creature on
its neck. It felt normal - firm, glossy, it was in good
condition. The effect of the moonlight on its coat was a little
mazy, but everything looks a little odd by moonlight. The horse
shook its mane a little when he touched it, but didn't seem to
mind too much.
After the success of patting it, Richard stroked it a few
times and scratched it gently under the jaw. Then he noticed
that there was another door into the bathroom, in the far
corner. He moved cautiously around the horse and approached the
other door. He backed up against it and pushed it open
tentatively.
It just opened into the Professor's bedroom, a small room
cluttered with books and shoes and a small single bed. This
room, too, had another door, which opened out on to the landing
again.
Richard noticed that the floor of the landing was newly
scuffed and scratched as the stairs had been, and these marks
were consistent with the idea that the horse had somehow been
pushed up the stairs. He wouldn't have liked to have had to do
it himself. and he would have liked to have been the horse
having it done to him even less, but it was just about
possible.
But why? He had one last look at the horse, which had one
last look back at him, and then he returned downstairs.
"I agree," he said. "You have a horse in your bathroom and
1 will, after all, have a little port."
He poured some for himself, and then some for Reg, who was
quietly contemplating the fire and was in need of a refill.
"Just as well I did put out three glasses after
all, said Reg chattily. "I wondered why earlier.
and now I remember.
"You asked if you could bring a friend, but appear not to
have dor_e so. On account of the sofa no doubt. Never mind,
these things happen. Whoa. not too much, you'll spill it."
All horse-related questions left Richard's mind abruptly.
"I did?" he said.
"Oh yes. I remember now. You rang me back to ask me if it
would be all right, as I recall. I said I would be charmed, and
fully intended to be. I'd saw the thing up if I were you. Don't
want to sacrifice your happiness to a sofa. Or maybe she
decided that an evening with your old tutor would be
blisteringly dull and opted for the more exhilarating course of
washing her hair instead. Dear me, I know what I would have
done. It's only lack of hair that forces me to pursue such a
hectic social round these days."
It was Richard's turn to be white-faced and staring.
Yes, he had assumed that Susan would not want to come.
Yes, he had said to her it would be terribly dull. But she
had insisted that she wanted to come because it would be the
only way she'd get to see his face for a few minutes not bathed
in the light of a computer screen, so he had agreed and
arranged that he would bring her after all.
Only he had completely forgotten this. He had not picked
her up.
He said, "Can I use your phone, please?"
Chapter Nine....
Gordon Way lay on the ground, unclear about what to do.
He was dead. There seemed little doubt about that. There
was a horrific hole in his chest, but the blood that was
gobbing out of it had slowed to a trickle. Otherwise there was
no movement from his chest at all, or, indeed, from any other
part of him.
He looked up, and from side to side, and it became clear
to him that whatever part of him it was that was moving, it
wasn't any part of his body.
The mist rolled slowly over him, and explained nothing. At
a few feet distant from him his shotgun lay smoking quietly in
the grass.
He continued to lie there, like someone lying awake at
four o'clock in the morning, unable to put their mind to rest,
but unable to find anything to do with it. He realised that he
had just had something of a shock, which might account for his
inability to think clearly, but didn't account for his ability
actually to think at all.
In the great debate that has raged for centuries about
what, if anything, happens to you after death, be it heaven,
hell, purgatory or extinction. one thing has never been in
doubt - that you would at least know the answer when you were
dead.
Gordon Way was dead, but he simply hadn't the slightest
idea what he was meant to do about it. It wasn't a situation he
had encountered before.
He sat up. The body that sat up seemed as real to him as
the body that still lay slowly coolingon the ground,
giving up its blood heat in wraiths of steam that mingled with
the mist of the chill night air.
Experimenting a bit further, he tried standing up, slowly,
wonderingly and wobblingly. The ground seemed to give him
support, it took his weight. But then of course he appeared to
have no weight that needed to be taken. When he bent to touch
the ground he could feel nothing save a kind of distant rubbery
resistance like the sensation you get if you try and pick
something up when your arm has gone dead. His arm had gone
dead. His legs too, and his other arm, and all his torso and
his head.
His body was dead. He could not say why his mind was not.
He stood in a kind of frozen, sleepless horror while the
mist curled slowly through him.
He looked back down at the him, the ghastly, astonished=
looking him-thing lying still and mangled on the ground, and
his Hesh wanted to creep. Or rather, he wanted flesh that could
creep. He wanted flesh. He wanted body. He had none.
A sudden cry of horror escaped from his mouth but was
nothing and went nowhere. He shook and felt nothing.
Music and a pool of light seeped from his car. He walked
towards it. He tried to walk sturdily, but it was a faint and
feeble kind of walking, uncertain and,well,
insubstantial. The ground felt frail beneath his feet.
The door of the car was still open on the driver's side,
as he had left it when he had leaped out to deal with the boot
lid, thinking he'd only be two seconds.
That was all of two minutes ago now, when he'd been alive.
When he'd been a person. When he'd thought he was going to be
leaping straight back in and driving off. Two minutes and a
lifetime ago.
This was insane, wasn't it? he thought suddenly.
He walked around the door and bent down to peer into the
external rear-view mirror.
He looked exactly like himself; albeit like himself after
he'd had a terrible fright, which was to be expected, but that
was him, that was normal. This must be something he was
imagining, some horrible kind of waking dream. He had a sudden
thought and tried breathing on the rear-view mirror.
Nothing. Not a single droplet formed. That would satisfy a
doctor, that's what they always did on television - if no mist
formed on the mirror, there was no breath. Perhaps, he thought
anxiously to himself, perhaps it was something to do with
having heated wing mirrors. Didn't this car have heated wing
mirrors? Hadn't the salesman gone on and on about heated this,
electric that, and servo-assisted the other? Maybe they were
digital wing mirrors. That was it. Digital, heated,
servo-assisted, computer= controlled, breath-resistant wing
mirrors. . .
He was, he realised, thinking complete nonsense. He turned
slowly and gazed again in apprehension at the body lying on the
ground behind him with half its chest blown away. That would
certainly satisfy a doctor. The sight would be appalling enough
if it was somebody else's body, but his own. . .
He was dead. Dead... dead... He tried to make the word
toll dramatically in his mind, but it wouldn't. He was not a
film sound track, he was just dead.
Peering at his body in appalled fascination, he gradually
became distressed by the expression of asinine stupidity on its
face.
It was perfectly understandable, of course. It was just
such an expression as somebody who is in the middle of being
shot with his own shotgun by somebody who had been hiding in
the boot of his car might be expected to wear, but he
nevertheless disliked the idea that anyone might find him
looking like that.
He knelt down beside it in the hope of being able to
rearrange his features into some semblance of dignity, or at
least basic intelligence.
It proved to be almost impossibly difficult. He tried to
knead the skin, the sickeningly familiar skin, but somehow he
couldn't seem to get a proper grip on it, or on anything. It
was like trying to model plasticine when your arm has gone to
sleep, except that instead of his grip slipping off the model,
it would slip through it. In this case, his hand slipped
through his face.
Nauseated horror and rage swept through him at his sheer
bloody blasted impotence, and he was suddenly startled to find
himself throttling and shaking his own dead body with a firm
and furious grip. He staggered back in amazed shock. All he had
managed to do was to add to the inanely stupefied look of the
corpse a twisted-up mouth and a squint. And bruises flowering
on its neck.
He started to sob, and this time sound seemed to come, a
strange howling from deep within whatever this thing he had
become was. Clutching his hands to his face, he staggered
backwards, retreated to his car and flung himself into the
seat. The seat received him in a loose and distant kind of way,
like an aunt who disapproves of the last fifteen years of your
life and will therefore furnish you with a basic shecry, but
refuses to catch your eye.
Could he get himself to a doctor?
To avoid facing the absurdity of the idea he grappled
violently with the steering wheel, but his hands slipped
through it. He tried to wrestle with the automatic transmission
shift and ended up thumping it in rage, but not being able
properly to grasp or push it.
The stereo was still playing light orchestral music into
the telephone, which had been lying on the passenger seat
listening patiently all this time. He stared at it and realised
with a growing fever of excitement that he was still connected
to Susan's telephone-answering machine. It was the type that
would simply run and run until he hung up. lie was still in
contact with the world.
He tried desperately to pick up the receiver, fumbled, let
it slip, and was in the end reduced to bending himself down
over its mouthpiece. "Susan!" he cried into it, his voice a
hoarse and distant wail on the wind. "Susan, help me! Help me
for God's sake. Susan, I'm dead... I'm dead... I'm dead and...
I don't know what to do.. " He broke down again, sobbing in
desperation, and tried to cling to the phone like a baby
clinging to its blanket for comfort.
"Help me, Susan... " he cried again.
"Beep," said the phone.
He looked down at it again where he was cuddling it. He
had managed to push something after all. He had managed to push
the button which disconnected the call. Feverishly he attempted
to grapple the thing again, but it constantly slipped through
his fingers and eventually lay immobile on the seat. He could
not touch it. He could not push the buttons. In rage he flung
it at the windscreen. It responded to that, all right. It hit
the windscreen, careered straight back though him, bounced off
the seat and then lay still on the transmission tunnel,
impervious to all his further attempts to touch it.
For several minutes still he sat there, his head nodding
slowly as terror began to recede into blank desolation.
A couple of cars passed by, but would have noticed nothing
odd - a car stopped by the wayside. Passing swiftly in the
night their headlights would probably not have picked out the
body lying in the grass behind the car. They certainly would
not have noticed a ghost sitting inside it crying to himself.
He didn't know how long he sat there. He was hardly aware
of time passing, only that it didn't seem to pass quickly.
There was little external stimulus to mark its passage. He
dicln't feel cold. In fact he could almost not remember what
cotd meant or felt like, he just knew that it was something he
would have expected to feel at this moment.
Eventually he stirred from his pathetic huddle. He would
have to do something, though he didn't know what. Perhaps he
should try and reach his cottage, though he didn't know what he
would do when he got there. He just needed something to try
for. He needed to make it through the night.
Pulling himself together he slipped out of the car, his
foot and knee grazing easily through part of the door frame. He
went to look again at his body, but it wasn't there.
As if the night hadn't produced enough shocks already. He
started, and stared at the damp depression in the grass.
His body was not there.
Chapter Ten...
Richard made the hastiest departure that politeness would
allow.
He said thank you very much and what a splendid evening it
had been and that any time Reg was coming up to London he must
let him, Richard, know and was there anything he could do to
help about the horse. No? Well, all right then, if you're sure,
and thank you again, so much.
He stood there for a moment or two after the door finally
closed, pondering things.
He had noticed during the short time that the light from
Reg's room flooded out on to the landing of the main staircase,
that there were no marks on the floorboards there at all. It
seemed odd that the horse should.only have scuffed the
floorboards inside Reg's room.
Well, it all seemed very odd, full stop, but here was yet
another curious fact to add to the growing pile. This was
supposed to have been a relaxing evening away from work.
On an impulse he knocked on the door opposite to Reg's. It
took such a long time to be answered that Richard had given up
and was turning to go when at last he heard the door creak
open.
He had a slight shock when he saw that staring sharply up
at him like a small and suspicious bird was the don with the
racing= yacht keel for a nose.
"Er, sorry," said Richard, abruptly, "but, er, have you
seen or heard a horse coming up this staircase tonight?"
The man stopped his obsessive twitching of his fingers. He
cocked his head slightly on one side and then seemed to need to
go on a long journey inside himself to find a voice, which when
found turned out to be a thin and soft little one.
He said, "That is the first thing anybody has sa_d to me
for seventeen years, three months and two days, five hours,
nineteen minutes and twenty seconds. I've been counting."
He closed the door softly again.
Richard virtually ran through Second Court.
When he reached First Court he steadied himself and slowed
down to a walking pace.
The chill night air was rasping in his lungs and there was
no point in running. lie hadn't managed to talk to Susan
because Reg's phone wasn't working, and this was another thing
that he had been mysteriously coy about. That at least was
susceptible of a rational explanation. He probably hadn't paid
his phone bill.
Richard was about to emerge out on to the street when
instead he decided to pay a quick visit to the porter's lodge,
which was tucked away inside the great archway entrance into
the college. It was a small hutchlike place filled with keys,
messages and a single electric bar heater. A radio
natered to itself in the background.
"Excuse me," he said to the large black-suited man
standing behind the counter with his arms folded. "I..."
"Yes, Mr MacDuff, what can I do for you?"
In his present state of mind Richard would have been hard=
pressed himself to remember his own name and was startled for a
moment. However, college porters are legendary for their
ability to perform such feats of memory, and for their tendency
to show them off at the slightest provocation.
"Is there," said Richard, "a horse anywhere in the college
- that you know of? I mean, you would know if there was a horse
in the college, wouldn't you?"
The porter didn't blink.
"No, sir, and yes, sir. Anything else I can help you with,
Mr MacDuff, sir?"
"Er, no," said Richard and tapped his fingers a couple of
times on the counter: "No. Thank you. Thank you very much for
your help. Nice to see you again, er... Bob," he hazarded.
"Good= night, then."
He left.
The porter remained perfectly still with his arms folded,
but shaking his head a very, very little bit.
"Here's some coffee for you, Bill," said another porter, a
short wiry one, emerging from an inner sanctum with a steaming
cup. "Getting a bit colder tonight?"
"I think it is, Fred, thanks," said Bill, taking the cup.
He took a sip. "You can say what you like about people,
they don't get any less peculiar. Fellow in here just now
asking if there was a horse in the college."
"Oh yes?" Fred sipped at his own coffee, and let the steam
smart his eyes. "I had a chap in here earlier. Sort of strange
foreign priest. Couldn't understand a word he said at first.
But he seemed happy just to stand by the fire and listen to the
news on the radio."
"Foreigners, eh."
"In the end I told him to shoot off. Standing in front of
my fire like that. Suddenly he says is that really what he must
do? Shoot off? I said, in my best Bogart voice, `You better
believe it, buddy.' "
"Really? Sounded more like Jimmy Cagney to me."
"No, that's my Bogart voice. This is my Jimmy Cagney voice
- `You better believe it, buddy.' "
Bill frowned at him. "Is that your Jimmy Cagney voice? I
always thought that was your Kenneth McKellar voice."
"You don't listen properly, Bill, you haven't got the ear.
This is Kenneth McKellar. `Oh, you take the high road and I'll
take the low road...' "
"Oh, I see. I was thinking of the Scottish Kenneth
McKellar. So what did this priest fellow say then, Fred?"
"Oh, he just looked me straight in the eyes, Bill, and
said in this strange sort of..."
"Skip the accent, Fred, just tell me what he said, if it's
worth hearing."
"He just said he did believe me."
"So. Not a very interesting story then, Fred."
"Well, maybe not. I only mention it because he also said
that he'd left his horse in a washroom and would I see that it
was all right."
Chapter Eleven...
Gordon Way drifted miserably along the dark road, or
rather, tried to drift.
He felt that as a ghost - which is what he had to admit to
himself he had become - he should be able to drift. He knew
little enough about ghosts, but he felt that if you were going
to be one then there ought to be certain compensations for not
having a physical body to lug around, and that among them ought
to be the ability simply to drift. But no, it seemed he was
going to have to walk every step of the way.
His aim was to try and make it to his house. He didn't
know what he would do when he got there, but even ghosts have
to spend the night somewhere, and he felt that being in
familiar surroundings might help. Help what, he didn't know. At
least the journey gave him an objective, and he would just have
to think of another one when he arrived.
He trudged despondently from lamppost to lamppost,
stopping at each one to look at bits of himself.
He was definitely getting a bit wraithlike.
At times he would fade almost to nothing, and would
seem to be little more than a shadow playing in the
mist, a dream of himself that could just evaporate and be gone.
At other times he seemed to be almost solid and real again.
Once or twice he would try leaning against a lamppost, and
would fall straight through it if he wasn't careful.
At last, and with great reluctance, he actually began to
turn his mind to what it was that had happened. Odd, that
reluctance. He really didn't want to think about it.
Psychologists say that the mind will often try to suppress the
memory of traumatic events, and this, he thought, was probably
the answer. After all, if having a strange figure jump out of
the boot of your own car and shoot you dead didn't count as a
traumatic experience, he'd like to know what did.
He trudged on wearily.
He tried to recall the figure to his mind's eye, but it
was like probing a hurting tooth, and he thought of other
things.
Like, was his will up-to-date? He couldn't remember, and
made a mental note to call his lawyer tomorrow, and then made
another mental note that he would have to stop making mental
notes like that.
How would his company survive without him? He didn't like
either of the possible answers to that very much.
What about his obituary? There was a thought that chilled
him to his bones, wherever they'd got to. Would he be able to
get hold of a copy? What would it say? They'd better give him a
good write-up, the bastards. Look at what he'd done.
Single-handedly saved the British software industry: huge
exports, charitable contributions, research scholarships,
crossing the Atlantic in a solar-powered submarine (failed, but
a good try) - all sorts of things. They'd better not go digging
up that Pentagon stuff again or he'd get his lawyer on to them.
He made a mental note to call him in the mor...
No.
Anyway, can a dead person sue for libel? Only his iawyer
would know, and he was not going to be able to call him in the
morning. He knew with a sense of creeping dread that of all the
things he had left behind in the land of the living it was the
telephone that he was going to miss the most, and then he
turned his mind determinedly back to where it didn't want to
go.
The figure.
It seemed to him that the figure had been almost like a
figure of Death itself; or was that his imagination playing
tricks with him? Was he dreaming that it was a cowled figure?
What would any figure, whether cowled or just casually dressed,
be doing in the boot of his car?
At that moment a car zipped past him on the road and
disappeared off into the night, taking its oasis of light with
it. He thought with longing of the warm, leather-upholstered,
climate= controlled comfort of his own car abandoned on the
road behind him, and then a sudden extraordinary thought struck
him.
Was there any way he could hitch a lift? Could anyone
actually see him? How would anyone react if they could? Well,
there was only one way to find out.
He heard another car coming up in the distance behind him
and turned to face it. The twin pools of hazy lights approached
through the mist and Gordon gritted his phantom teeth and stuck
his thumb out at them.
The car swept by regardless.
Nothing.
Angrily he made an indistinct V sign at the receding red
rear lights, and realised, looking straight through his own
upraised arm, that he wasn't at his most visible at the moment.
Was there perhaps some effort of will he could make to render
himself more visible when he wanted to'? He screwed up his eyes
in concentration, then realised that he would need to have his
eyes open in order to judge the results. He tried again,
forcing his mind as hard as he could, but the results were
unsatisfactory.
Though it did seem to make some kind of rudimentary,
glowing difference, he couldn't sustain it, and it faded almost
immediately, however much he piled on the mental pressure. He
would have to judge the timing very carefully if he was going
to make his presence felt, or at least seen.
Another car approached from behind, travelling fast. He
turned again, stuck his thumb out, waited till the moment was
right and willed himselfvisible.
The car swerved slightly, and then carried on its way,
only a little more slowly. Well, that was something. What else
could he do? He would go and stand under a lamppost for a
stЇri, and he would practise. The next car he would get for
sure.
Chapter Twelve...
"... so if you'd like to leave a message, I'll get back to
you as soon as possible. Maybe."
Beep.
"Shit. Damn. Hold on a minute. Blast. Look... er... "
Click.
Richard pushed the phone back into its cradle and slammed
his car into reverse for twenty yards to have another look at
the sign= post by the road junction he'd just sped past in the
mist. He had extracted himself from the Cambridge one-way
system by the usual method, which involved going round and
round it faster and faster until he achieved a sort of escape
velocity and flew off at a tangent in a random direction, which
he was now trying to identify and correct for.
Arriving back at the junction he tried to correlate the
information on the signpost with the information on the map.
But it couldn't be done. The road junction was quite
deliberately sitting on a page divide on the map, and the
signpost was revolving maliciously in the wind. Instinct told
him that he was heading in the wrong direction, but he didn't
want to go back the way he'd come for fear of getting sucked
back into the gravitational whirlpool of Cambridge's traffic
system.
He turned left, therefore, in the hope of finding better
fortune in that direction, but after a while lost his nerve and
turned a speculative right,,and then chanced another
exploratory left and after a few more such manoeuvres was
thoroughly lost.
He swore to himself and turned up the heating in the car.
If he had been concentrating on where he was going rather than
trying to navigate and telephone at the same time, he told
himself, he would at least know where he was now. He didn't
actually like having a telephone in his car, he found it a
bother and an intrusion. But Gordon had insisted and indeed had
paid for it.
He sighed in exasperation, backed up the black Saab and
turned around again. As he did so he nearly ran into someone
lugging a body into a field. At least that was what it looked
like for a second to his overwrought brain, but in fact it was
probably a local farmer with a sackful of something nutritious,
though what he was doing with it on a night like this was
anyone's guess. As his headlights swung around again, they
caught for a moment a silhouette of the figure trudging off
across the field with the sack on his back.
"Rather him than me," thought Richard grimly, and drove
off again.
After a few minutes he reached a junction with what looked
a little more like a main road, nearly turned right down it,
but then turned left instead. There was no signpost.
He poked at the buttons on his phone again.
"... get back to you as soon as possible. Maybe."
Beep.
"Susan, it's Richard. Where do I start? What a mess. Look
I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. I screwed up very badly, and it's all
my fault. And look, whatever it takes to make up for it, I'll
do it, solemn promise..."
He had a slight feeling that this wasn't the right tone to
adopt with an answering machine, but he carried straight on.
"Honestly, we can go away, take a holiday for a week, or
even just this weekend if you like. Really, this weekend. We'll
go somewhere sunny. Doesn't matter how much pressure Gordon
tries to put on me, and you know the sort of pressure he can
muster, he is your brother, after all. I'll just... er,
actually, it might have to be next weekend. Damn, damn, damn.
lt's just that I really have promised to get, no, look, it
doesn't matter. We'll just do it. I don't care about getting
Anthem finished for Comdex. It's not the end of the
world. We'll just go. Gordon will just have to take a running
jump - Gaaarghhhh!"
Richard swerved wildly to avoid the spectre of Gordon Way
which suddenly loomed in his headlights and took a running jump
at him.
He slammed on the brakes, started to skid, tried to
remember what it was you were supposed to do when you found
yourself skidding, he knew he'd seen it on some television
programme about driving he'd seen ages ago, what was the
programme? God, he couldn't even remember the title of the
programme, let alone - oh yes, they'd said you mustn't slam on
the brakes. That was it. The world swung sickeningly around him
with slow and appalling force as the car slewed across the
road, spun, thudded against the grass verge, then slithered and
rocked itself to a halt, facing the wrong way. He collapsed,
panting, against the steering wheel.
He picked up the phone from where he'd dropped it.
"Susan," he gasped, "I'll get back to you," and hung up.
He raised his eyes.
Standing full in the glare of his headlights was the
spectral figure of Gordon Way staring straight in through the
windscreen with ghastly horror in its eyes, slowly raising its
hand and pointing at him.
He wasn't sure how long he just sat there. The apparition
had melted from view in a few seconds, but Richard simply sat,
shaking, probably for not more than a minute, until a sudden
squeal of brakes and glare of lights roused him.
He shook his head. He was, he realised, stopped in the
road facing the wrong way. The car that had just screeched to
an abrupt halt almost bumper to bumper with him was a police
car. He took two or three deep breaths and then, stiff and
trembling, he climbed out and stood up to face the officer who
was walking slowly towards him, silhouetted in the police car's
headlights.
The officer looked him up and down.
"Er, I'm sorry, officer," said Richard, with as much
calmness as he could wrench into his voice. "I, er, skidded.
The roads are slippery and I, er... skidded. I spun round. As
you see, I, I 'm facing the wrong way." He gestured at his car
to indicate the way it was facing.
"Like to tell me why it was you skidded then, exactly,
sir?" The police officer was looking him straight in the eye
while Qulling out a notebook.
"Well, as I said," Рxplained Richard, "the roads are
slippery because of the mist, and, well, to be erfectl honest,"
he suddenly found himself saying, in spite of all his attempts
to stop himself, "I was just driving along and I suddenly
imagined that I saw my employer throwing himself in front of my
car."
The officer gazed at him levelly.
"Guilt complex,...
