He said, “I’ll leave you all to it, then. And another pot of tea wouldn’t go amiss, I reckon.”
Elizabeth nodded. “Will be done.”
Left with the two women, Mandy felt herself on edge. It was not only because of their presence, though it was an irritant to have them near her, doing things she could have done herself and, above all, talking. The talk meant nothing, communicated nothing. But there was something else that troubled her, and which she did not grasp at first. The voice. If the voice came again, they would tell the others about it; even if they did not do that, they would be sharing it, and she did not want it shared. It had spoken to her, not to them.
She said, “I honestly don’t need any help. I really am better by myself.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Elizabeth said. “You go and rest, and leave things to us.”
“No, I’m not tired.”
“We’re being selfish, as a matter of fact,” Elizabeth said. “We need something to do, don’t we, Jane?”
Jane said, “Yes. It helps.”
Her voice was subdued; she was worrying about her sister still. Mandy wanted to tell her, There’s nothing to worry about, everything will be fine. But she could tell that it wouldn’t help to say that, wouldn’t help at all.
“The mist is starting to clear again,” Elizabeth said. “Perhaps this time it will lift properly.” When the others did not say anything, she went on, “We’ll be free tomorrow, if not tonight.”
Free, Mandy thought—what does being free mean? A child is not free, because it lives in an adult world: the holidays always end in school. And the adult? One let oneself into a cage with the first choice one made, and then into another cage inside the first, and a third inside the second. Like boxes, one within the other, and each door snapping to as one went in—whether one went gladly and clear-eyed or fumblingly and reluctant, the lock was as unbreakable, the way back barred. And because the cages were inside each other, each new one pressed more closely, until, presumably, in the very last one it was no longer possible to put one’s arms out, no longer possible to breathe.
In a cool, considering voice, Elizabeth said, “It’s not a thing I usually do, but I think when we get clear of this I am going to get drunk. On champagne. I haven’t been drunk on champagne since I was a bridesmaid at my sister’s wedding.”
There had been no sound from outside, and Mandy realized suddenly that there was not going to be. Not while the others were here. She felt at once glad and impatient. They had not gone away. They were outside, waiting until she should be alone again.
The tea was made and there was nothing more that needed doing at the moment. She went with them to the salon, and stayed there, drinking tea and listening to them talk. The mist outside really seemed to be lifting. One could see quite a long way, and once Elizabeth said she glimpsed, for a moment, the pale gold of the sun. This made them all optimistic and cheerful, even Jane. She still thought, probably, that Diana might come back. But why should she, Mandy thought? Come back for what?
She moved to slip out, and George said, “What is it, Mandy?”
“Nothing. Just something I’ve remembered needs doing in the kitchen. It won’t take me long.”
“I can help,” Elizabeth said.
“No. It’s very little.”
Watching her, George said, “All right, lovey. Shout if you want us.”
She smiled, and nodded. He was thinking that it was the drink she wanted, and protecting her. He was a good man. She had been lucky in having George. She went into the kitchen and stood near the window. She could see the bottle on the table, but it was not important. She said quietly, “I’m here.”
At first there was no answer, and she though they had gone away. Then Ruth’s voice said, “Come out, Mandy. Come with us. There will be no loneliness then.”
“And will one forget things? Properly forget them?”
“Yes. Everything that needs to be forgotten.”
She stayed a moment longer. She was hesitant still, but she realized there was no room for delay. George might come to see how she was.
She went into the hall, and stopped. Going to the front door meant passing the open door of the salon. They would hear her, perhaps, or even see her. She went to the door to the basement stairs instead and, careful to make no noise, undid the catch. She pulled it back, and walked down quietly, and quietly along the passage to the door to the outside.
The bolt was not easy to draw, but she managed it. She went out, and saw that it was quite true: the mist was clearing, turning to haze and radiance. She paused, wondering which way to go. The voice had been on the other side of the house, but she did not want to go around there, where it was dark. She wanted to go toward the brightness. And it did not matter, anyway. They would find her.
She walked down the slope of snow. It occurred to her that they would see her if they looked out of the salon window, but that did not seem to matter, either. Perhaps they would call her back, but she knew she would not go.
Ruth’s voice called to her. “Mandy.”
She turned around, and saw them coming toward her— Marie and Peter, Ruth and Leonard and Andy. And Diana. There was no menace there. There was an end to memory, an end to loneliness. She looked past them at the house; she had come so far that it was hazy in the mist.
Poor George, she thought, and went to meet them.
14
Once during the afternoon, following a passing reference by Selby to the United States, Douglas thought of Caroline. His reaction surprised him. He felt neither the sick lurch of depressive anxiety, nor the rarer but equally familiar false euphoria at being rid of her. It was not so much that he thought of her more objectively; simply that she seemed less real. Reality was narrowed down to the sharp point of here and now, himself and those with him. He tried, as a tentative exercise, to hold her in his mind, see her with greater clarity, but she would not come alive, and he abandoned the attempt. He was concerned for Jane. He wished there was something he could do or say, but of course there was nothing.
At least she, along with the rest of them, had been somewhat cheered by the improvement in the weather. She was clinging to the hope of Diana being alive out there, and uncontaminated by the others. He was glad that she was able to do that, but dreaded the reaction that might come when the slim hope had to be abandoned. As it must. There was no doubt in his mind—any more than there was in the minds of George and Selby—that Diana had been taken over.
George interrupted something Selby was saying about the difference between the central and the sympathetic nervous systems to excuse himself—he wanted to see how Mandy was getting on. He was obviously worried about her; unduly, Douglas thought. She had seemed remote and absent-minded all day, but there was a fairly simple explanation for that. She had probably been on the bottle for some time, and the strain of events was making her hit it hard. She would be all right when the strain was lifted—they all would.
But George called, and his voice had urgency in it. Selby ran for the kitchen, the others following him. George met them in the hall, his face tight.
“She’s gone.”
Selby said, “The window …
“Still barred.”
“No one’s come in through the front door,” Selby said, “or gone out through it. I’ve had that part of the hall in view all along.”
Elizabeth said, “Perhaps she’s in the basement.”
They all looked at the door, and saw that the catch was off. George reached it in a couple of large strides, and pulled it open. He was calling, “Mandy!” as he went down the stairs, his voice echoing.
The open door faced them at the end of the passage. They crowded through it and gazed out at the sweep of snow, the retreating mist horizon. Nothing. George plunged forward, but Selby grabbed him and held him with surprising strength.
“Don’t be a fool.”
“I’ve got to get her,” George said, “before—”
“You can’t go out there alone. And we nee
d to get clothes on. And the gun.” He hesitated. “The bolts have been drawn from the inside, George.”
George stared at the bottom of the door. He said, “Yes. She went out, didn’t she?” He looked at the two men. “Let’s go and get that gun.”
The men were pulling coats on in the hall when Elizabeth, from the salon, called, “Wait! I think …” In a different voice, she said, “Come here a minute.”
She was at the window when they went in, and silently drew their attention to what she had seen. Visibility was more than a hundred feet, perhaps a hundred and fifty. There were shapes out there, &t the very edge of vision, figures that moved. A dart of the late afternoon sun shone through and illumined one, then two of them. Marie, and Leonard Deeping. And the little figure would be Andy. Douglas tried to count—with the child, was it six or seven? Six, at least.
Jane, beside him, gave a small cry of horror. He put his hand out, and took hers. She was trembling.
“At the end,” she said. “It is …”
It was Diana. The group was moving forward, on a path that took them obliquely across the front of the house, and as they advanced they became more recognizable. Old Peter, Ruth—and a somewhat shorter figure between them, trudging through the snow in a gray woolen frock and flowered apron. Mandy.
He said inadequately, not knowing whether he was addressing Jane or George, “I’m sorry.”
In a choked voice, Jane said, “I knew it really, of course. I tried not to, but…”
George said, “She went out to them, didn’t she? Why? What made her do that?”
“They don’t mind our seeing them,” Selby said. “Rut I notice they keep out of gunshot range.” He turned to George. “You see there’s no point in going out, don’t you? She’s with them. Whatever happened, there’s no compulsion about her being with them now.”
George was staring out where the figures were disappearing into the mist to the east. He said, “I knew there was something wrong. I could tell. But I didn’t know what. I ought to have done something. I ought not to have let her be alone.”
“None of us must be from now on,” Selby said. “We don’t know how they got her out there. Perhaps they are learning to play on—well, human needs, weaknesses. I don’t see how they can do that if we stay together, though.”
Elizabeth said, “The basement door …”
“Yes, we left it open, didn’t we?” He nodded toward the window. “It seems safe enough at the moment, but you can come down with me, all the same.”
Their footsteps retreating through the hall clattered as though in an empty house. That was silly, of course. There were still five of them here, and the boy. Stephen was looking out of the window in the direction where the figures had been, though there was nothing to be seen now but mist and snow.
George said explosively, “I need a drink.”
He went off to the bar. Douglas said to Jane, “A drink would probably do you good, too.”
She shook her head. “No.” She bent down toward the boy. “Steve, shall we carry on with that game of Battleships?”
Stephen turned slowly from the window. “Yes.” Douglas was about to ask if he could join in with them, when he caught her eye. There was appeal in it, an appeal to be left alone with her misery. Or alone except for the boy, who could not hurt her with sympathy; would help, in fact, by needing to be helped. They went into the dining room, and Douglas remained standing by the window.
He felt a small chill of fear. They had gone—the Graingers, George, Jane, and the boy—and he stood here by himself. It was a temporary desertion: it would not be long before they were back. But he had a picture of what it must be like to be the last left of this diminishing band, abandoned, and waiting for God knows what. He shivered involuntarily, and went to join George in the bar.
A strange woman’s voice was speaking French, and as Douglas came into the bar he saw that George had the transistor radio switched on, and was listening to it. A brandy and a whisky bottle were standing on the counter, and glasses stood upside down on a cloth. George gestured toward them, an indication to Douglas to help himself. He poured a fairly stiff measure of whisky, and topped it up from the siphon. While he was drinking, the door opened to admit Selby. There was a pause in the broadcast, and then a man’s voice announced something in German. George switched the set off.
“Weather forecast,” he said. “Help yourself, Selby.”
“Good or bad?” he asked.
George, before he replied, poured brandy into his own glass, and tipped in the remains of a bottle of ginger ale. Douglas had a swift depressing vision of snowstorms, being cut off for days more, with the threat growing around them.
“Good,” George said. He drank with an appreciative smack of the lips. “Couldn’t be better, in fact. A little cloud, but nothing below ten thousand feet—three thousand five hundred meters in their version. Well above our level, anyway.”
“That is good,” Selby said. “Bloody good. So by tomorrow morning…”
“There should be nothing to prevent a sodding great armada of choppers dropping in on us. Though one will do. One will do very well.”
Douglas asked, “Where’s Elizabeth?”
“A good question,” Selby said approvingly. “She’s with Jane and the boy. And everything is locked and bolted below-stairs. We’re ready to stand siege.”
“They outnumber us now,” Douglas said. “Does that mean that they’ll attack us?”
George shook his head. “I doubt it. Only two men. And we have the gun.”
Selby said, “Unless they think we would be reluctant to do anything to hurt our …” He hesitated. “To hurt people we know. Or creatures looking like them.”
George said grimly, “If they do, they’ll find they’ve made a mistake. My best friend bought it over Cologne— he got blown into the bomb bay and was jamming up the release. I had to get him out because, quite apart from anything else, I wasn’t sure one of the bombs might not have gone on time fuse. I got him clear, all right. Piece by piece. And the bombs.”
“He wasn’t walking about,” Selby said, “looking at you.”
“Mandy’s dead,” George said. “That’s something else I learned around then—to accept death when it happens.” He lifted his glass, and drained it. “There’s no point in whining about death. Whatever’s still using Mandy’s body, I’d give it both barrels on sight, and without hesitation.”
There was no doubting the iron of his determination. After a pause, Selby said, “No, I don’t think it will come to a mass attack. The balance of physical strength is fairly even—Elizabeth and Jane are both stronger, I should think, than any of the women out there—and, as you say, we have the gun. But it will come to something. The pressure is on, and even if they haven’t got the benefit of a weather forecast, they must realize there’s a good chance that we shan’t be cut off for much longer. If they don’t clear things up tonight, they probably never will. And the stakes are high.”
“We’ll all sleep in the salon,” George said. “We can drag some mattresses down from the bedrooms. And two on watch all the time.”
Douglas looked out of the window. The day was fading rapidly; the haze was golden, low down in the west. He could see quite clearly the easy slope where, a few short days ago, he had been learning to ski. It was difficult to accept; the nightmare seemed to have been going on forever. One more night. That was difficult to accept, too. The patch of gold was shrinking, and suddenly went, leaving gray. The sun would be behind Grammont. Only one more night, but it was going to be a long one.
Selby finished his drink, and helped himself to more. “We shouldn’t put too high a slosh on, either, I suppose. Ought to keep our heads clear.”
“You’re the doctor,” George said, “but to hell with that for a prescription. I intend to get tanked up.”
He spoke with a bitter, almost feverish mirth. Had time turned back for him, Douglas wondered. Did he see this as the old days come again, the days of drinki
ng and death? Or was there something else to it—a fear of the horror of living death? Did he need to drink to blot out the memory of Mandy, walking away from him across the snow? Selby said, “If it does come to a fight …”
“Well?” George asked.
“We’d better all make sure we avoid any prolonged physical contact.”
Douglas said, “What do you mean by prolonged?”
“I wish I knew. I’m pretty sure it is a contact thing—adsorption to nerve endings, something like that. Mandy …” He looked at George. “We don’t know why Mandy went out there, but it couldn’t have been because they had taken her over at a distance. If that had happened, she wouldn’t have gone out and left the door open. She would have let them in. And all the other cases are clearly contact. But not immediate contact. Diana was struggling, trying to get free of the two who had hold of her. They need some period of physical mastery. Perhaps a minute or two, perhaps half an hour.”
George drank again, and once more refilled his glass. “In Mandy’s case,” he said, “it was nothing like half an hour.”
“It’s probably quicker where someone submits willingly. This is something we don’t know much about, and aren’t likely to, except if it happens to us. But we’d better be careful to avoid clinches as far as possible.”
“Don’t forget the gun.”
“Yes,” Selby said. “Two barrels—and you’re in the middle of a melee by the time you reload. I think we ought to break up the furniture to some extent, and equip ourselves with clubs.”
“Go ahead,” George said. He thought about this, and laughed. “Christ, yes! I don’t know what clause it comes under, but there must be something in the insurance policy to cover damage caused in resisting a Martian invasion.”
They brought mattresses down while there was still some light, and arranged them in the salon. They left lamps burning on the landings and in some of the bedrooms, partly to mislead the enemy and partly so that there would not be the feeling of darkness above them as well as all around. Selby said something about laying on a mobile patrol of the upper floors, to be on the safe side, but the idea fizzled out. No one was keen on doing anything which would involve splitting their small forces.