The Dark Side (10 page)

Mike followed his awed, joyful gaze. To himself Mike had to admit that the gnome, propelling himself through the water with his ears, arms folded in tremendous dignity, was a funny sight.

“Must you drop rocks and disturb us at our work?” the gnome asked.

Greenberg gulped. “I’m sorry, Mr. Gnome,” he said nervously, “I couldn’t get you to come up by yelling.”

The gnome looked at him. “Oh. You are the mortal who was disciplined. Why did you return?”

“To tell you that I’m sorry, and I won’t insult you again.”

“Have you proof of your sincerity?” the gnome asked quietly.

Greenberg fished furiously in his pocket and brought out a handful of sugar wrapped in cellophane, which he tremblingly handed to the gnome.

“Ah, very clever, indeed,” the little man said, unwrapping a cube and popping it eagerly into his mouth. “Long time since I’ve had some.”

A moment later Greenberg spluttered and floundered under the surface. Even if Mike had not caught his jacket and helped him up, he could almost have enjoyed the sensation of being able to drown.

In Heinlein’s “They” we met a theme which has fueled some of the most powerful writing ever done in imaginative fiction. Here it is again, in a different and more evocative, perhaps more disturbing, form. Who are you, really—and how do you know you are?

Regard London suburbanites. Then abandon the attempt at crystalline classification. The suburbanite tag is the only thing they have in common.

Some commute. Others tend their gardens. The brick boxes of city clerks sidle up close to the fifteen-room mansions of stockbrokers. The party wall of a semi-detached villa is a barrier between universes; in this half lives a sweetly respectable retired grocer; in the other, a still-active second-storey man with a fat and ailing wife and a nymphomaniac daughter.

Sometimes there’s a community sense. But more often, neighbors stay strangers throughout their lives.

For instance, no one knew 50-year-old Tristram Makepeace. Not even himself.

British reserve can be a damnably frightening thing.

One morning, in the long, winding, tree-lined avenue in the so-suburban suburb where he lived—

“Hey!”

The postman turned at the gate. Tristram Makepeace hurried down the path of his neat, bush-enclosed front garden, leaving the door of his villa open.

“Not here,” he said, and held out an envelope.

The postman took it, read the typewritten address.

E. Grabcheek, Esq.
c/o Tristram Makepeace,
36, Acacia Avenue.

The postman, blank-faced, looked at the thin, tall, hollow-cheeked bachelor. “That’s you, sir, isn’t it? And it’s your address.”

Makepeace drew his dressing gown closer against the chill morning air. His voice was high, with limited range of inflection. “But I don’t know anyone named Grabcheek. There’s certainly no one staying with me. It’s lucky I was up in time for the delivery this morning. I’m not, as a rule, you know.”

But the postman returned the letter firmly. “Can’t take it back. Sorry. They’d only send it out with the next round. Sure you don’t know anyone called Grabcheek?”

“Of course I’m sure. I can’t accept delivery.”

The postman hesitated, made a slow admission. “It’s none of my business,” he said. “I usually just look at the address. But knowing you live alone—well, it caught my eye. You
did
accept delivery, you know, just the other day. The name stuck in my mind: Grabcheek. And there was another before that.”

Makepeace blinked pale eyes, disturbed. “But I didn’t—I haven’t seen anything like this before.” He fluttered the envelope.

“Well, I shoved “em through your door. Right address as far as I’m concerned. Now I’ve got to get on; I’m behind time already.”

“But this is ridiculous. Look here, my man—”

The postman, determinedly preoccupied, duty-bound, snapped the gate shut behind him. “Look under the mat,” he said, without glancing up from the sheaf of letters in his hand; and he walked on, leaving ex-Captain Makepeace very much alone in the world.

Makepeace looked under the coir mat near his front door as he went back in. Dust. Blasted dust everywhere in this place. But no letters. Anyway, falling from the letterbox in the door, they couldn’t have slid under the mat. The postman was a fool, or mistaken.

But—Grabcheek was not the sort of name one would forget.

He examined the envelope. A local postmark. He held it up to the light through the glass-panelled door. Nothing showed through. Envelope too thick.

Not for a moment did it occur to Tristram Makepeace to open it. He just wasn’t the sort of man to open another person’s letters. Which should indicate what sort of man he was.

After his inadequate breakfast of tea and toast, he re-enclosed the letter in a larger envelope and addressed it to the Post Office in High Street, with a terse note typewritten on his old portable: “No one of that name here… T. Makepeace.”

Then he made a few ineffectual flicks at dust. Sometimes he wished he could borrow the vacuum cleaner from the woman next door; a little like tanks they were, the way they mopped up the dusty opposition. But the neighbor just looked at him with a polite “good morning.” And he daren’t ask her. He went to cash his pension cheque, and re-posted the double letter on the way.

He mustn’t worry about the letter. That was a sure way to bring back his old trouble. Worrying. And about nothing at all.

Mustn’t worry. He had his house, his pension, his garden, his books, his acquaintances at the local public house.

He went in there, on his way home, spent his pension more liberally than usual.

He told the regulars about his mystery.

“Should have opened the bloody thing,” grunted the landlord. irritated with honesty that could perpetuate such a mystery.

“Fancy telling us; said a straight-gin widow, also annoyed. “Now we might never know.”

Makepeace looked round the bar. “No one here called Grabcheek, I suppose?”

A shaking of heads.

When he got home that afternoon, a little drunk, there had been a second postal delivery.

.E. Grabcheek, Esq.,
c/o Tristram Makepeace,
36, Acacia Avenue.

He thrust the letter into the pocket of his old tweed jacket, went upstairs to sleep on the bed he had forgotten to tidy that morning.

He awoke with a dry mouth in the early evening, memories of the day blurred. He put his hand in his jacket pocket. There was no letter. He shrugged.

Mind overlapping itself, Tristram: don’t you remember you posted it back to the post office… Or was that another one? Doesn’t matter. Don’t worry.

Two days later, Tristram Makepeace, after a night disturbed by dreams of flowers floating over a desert, was up again in time to hear the postman’s early double knock.

Two letters were lying on the dusty coir mat. One was for:

E. Grabcheek, Esq.,
c/o Tristram Makepeace,
36, Acacia Avenue.

The other, officially franked, was for him. It contained the earlier letter to Grabcheek and a note from the local post office:

“… must inform you that this letter was properly delivered, and we have no authority…”

Makepeace did not open either of the Grabcheek letters he held in his shaky hands in that dusty hallway.

Don’t blame or praise him. He was the sum of what others had made him, and deep, deep, was his dead father saying:
It’s just not done to open other people’s letters, old man.

He sent both letters, unopened, to the Postmaster General of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

He got them back from the PMG’s secretary’s secretary, unopened, with red-tape regrets, on a strange and sunny morning a week later. A covering note of eyebrow-raised politeness suggested that, as the occupier of the villa, he might have a right to open them.

Very well.

He would. Blast his father.

Oh no no no he didn’t mean that, truly he didn’t mean that, what a silly thing to say anyway, and he hadn’t said it, really, it was. something outside him, something he wasn’t responsible for, so touch the wall three times and everything will be all right. Don’t worry. Mustn’t worry.

Makepeace flung one of the Grabcheek letters on the small table in the hallway. Dust fluffed up and made a sunbeam visible.

He went into his dining room with the other letter and sat down over the remains of his breakfast.

It must be all right to open it. All he had to do was read the sender’s address, then post it back “NOT KNOWN.”

He opened it. The paper inside was blank.

Makepeace remembered some of his army language. He swore for thirty seconds in his flat, high voice, then ripped envelope and blank sheet into fragments.

“Silly bloody hoax,” he said finally, and felt relieved.

He went out into the hall to do the same with the other letter. It had disappeared from the table.

Then Mr. Makepeace, very empty, with time at a dead stop in his blank, cold mind, fell to his knees and patted at the dusty carpet. He breathed dust.

He got up. “It was there,” he announced. “It was there, I know. I threw it there, and I saw it lying there.”

He thumb-and-fingered his twitching eyes and touched the wall three times.

Dear father, I love you. Mustn’t worry.

Of course he hadn’t thrown the letter there. He’d taken it into the dining room with the other one, and torn both of them up into tiny scraps, and put them on the big willow-pattern plate.

He went back into the dining room, not breathing very deeply.

There was nothing on the plate, or on the table. No single fragment of paper.

The house was very still.

Of course, the postman hadn’t called that morning at all. That was it. The whole thing was a damnable half-dream, one of those partly-controllable dreams, and he always felt sleepy in the mornings nowadays.

But the tingling feel of paper being torn… He held himself stiff for a moment, refusing to think, forcing his mind to rare silence. Then, methodically, unhurried, he looked under the dining room table. He looked at the shut windows, fronting on Acacia Avenue. He searched the house, in cupboards, under beds, upstairs, downstairs.

In the coal cellar, he found himself idly turning over pieces of bad-quality coal, watching smooth black shiny surfaces reflect light from the tiny window. He had forgotten what he was searching for.

Half-automatically, army training having been superimposed on a crabbed arid tidy childhood, he made his bed—he had forgotten to do it one day last week, and it had nagged his mind terribly—and went to the public house and drank a good deal of whisky. He looked out of the bar window, and talked to nobody.

In his mind there was—

Clum, clum, nick-nock, NO… hibbledy-hobbledy, hock, Christ on a thorn tree, NO; take a pair of sparkling eyes and see that tree. MY FATHER DEATH. Forgive me who’s listening. I’m. not responsible for whoever puts things like that in my mind, clum, clum, bibbledy-do, the bastard inflicting this sort of thing on me… No, God, I didn’t say that, there’s a cold clean sweet chopper coming for my head, this way the Rhine, that way home… Rune, rune, ruin the rune, if I could master the compulsion the chopper would come quicker they say, or would say if they knew anything, so let it carry on… I won’t think my hands aren’t dirty. I slapped him with my right hand when he was drunk because he hit my mother, but I apologised and explained… STOP THINKING… Or think of anything, even the barmaid’s flabby breasts… Mother… NO… the ashtray… hard.

The glass ashtray on the table in front of Mr. Makepeace slithered over the beer-wet surface and splintered on the composition floor. He felt a little better, treated the publican to a drink, and went home down the tree-lined avenue to his villa and a lunch of sausages and worm-eaten spinach from his neglected garden.

After lunch, he took out his wallet to find the covering letter from the Postmaster General’s secretary’s secretary. He found nothing but the remainder of his pension, in crumpled notes.

He addressed himself to the wall. “I am not going mad,” he said, without emphasis. “I am not going mad.”

That was one of the things he had told himself when an unexpected German shell, ravishing the peaceful sky, had burst near him.

When he felt pain in his spine and head, undeserved pain, unfair pain, he had struggled to his feet near the demolished signal post. He had seen his father’s big, lined, hard face in the sky, and as he fell back again to the tumbled brown earth, he said, without moving paralysed lips: “That was a dirty trick, Daddy. You shouldn’t have done that. You shouldn’t have hit my mother, the sky… But I am not going mad. I am not going mad.”

In the field hospital, sitting up as a nurse washed him, he had clearly seen the back of his own neck. And that night, he had perched on the end of his own bed and watched himself sleeping.

Long lemon-washed corridors, with inset black doors, had presaged his final discharge from His Majesty’s Service. Beyond one certain black door a neurologist—or a psychiatrist—or at least a mechanistic psychologist—had told him: “We shall recommend you for a forty-per-cent pension. If you have any more of these subjective—um—experiences in between your half-yearly examinations, just report to the Ministry of Pensions.”

A thousand forms weaving through blue-shot air: forms AH 5647/45 (Officer, RAe. Med. Inf., 34), (Din. 01/16 7896), Hos. X. (F.P./2333)—S.O.—

And now—

It was all subjective, of course. The Grabcheek letters. The Grabcheek Letters, giving them undeserved caps. Like a book he’d read once… What was it?… It didn’t matter… When his head was clear again he’d reread his whole shelf of belles-lettres… Lamb. Whose Lamb led to what unexplained slaughter?

Sometime, said Mr. Makepeace to himself, with what little was left of his conscious mind, I must distemper the walls of this room again.

Meantime, he must obey orders.

Write to the Ministry. Ask for an examination. Write now.

Or wait until tomorrow, when he could check with the postman whether he had called that morning.

Now it was late afternoon, with an old, yellow sun putting cheap gilt on the roofs of the houses over the way. Now it was too late to write, anyway, for the last post had” gone. Tomorrow would do. Tomorrow would always do.

Now was the time to walk down to the local public house and tell some quite untrue tales of his soldiering days, after taking the edge off his reserve with whisky.

“
 ’E’s quite a character when ’e’s ’ad one or two… Lives all alone in Acacia Avenue… Why don’t ’e marry? Ask ’im… Always good for a gin, though… Queer old bird.
”

Mr. Makepeace walked into the hallway and examined himself in the mirror.

Old? At 50?

Yes, and tired.

He went to bed.

He waited at his dining room bay window the next morning, watching the slow progress of the postman who seemed to be calling at almost every house on his side of the avenue.

He waited until the postman was about to open his front garden gate, then hurried to meet him.

E. Grabcheek, Esq.,
c/o Tristram Makepeace,
36, Acacia Avenue.

Makepeace was aware of the cold morning air, the gravel underfoot, a blackbird singing from the laurel bushes, milk bottles clinking together somewhere nearby, the postman’s stupid unshaven face; and, faintly, from a neighboring house, “This is the B.B.C. Home Service. Here is the eight o’clock news…”