Incarnate (36 page)

She felt free until she was back at her desk. As the others piled into the classroom and Mrs. Fisher told them to make less noise, Estelle came over. “We saw you creeping out when sir wasn’t looking. We’re telling miss.”

“See if I care.” But she did, because Mrs. Fisher might make her tell where she’d been, she would tell Mummy what Susan had done and then Mummy would protect Eve from the truant officer. All afternoon, every time Zoe or Chloe or Estelle raised a hand, Susan wanted to run out of the classroom, out of the school, except that she had no idea where she would go. “Now I want you all to paint something you’ve never seen,” Mrs. Fisher said eventually, and Susan wondered if imagining something could make it exist or whether everything that could be imagined already existed, and other things too. The idea of imagining something into existence made her more nervous than she already was, and so she painted an eclipse of the sun, which she had never seen and which was easy to do. “I would have expected something more imaginative from you, Susan,” was all that Mrs. Fisher said before she moved on to Zoe’s desk.

Susan held her breath and waited for Zoe to tell on her. She rubbed her slippery palms on her skirt, and then she wondered what she was afraid of. All she had to do was tell Eve the truant officer was coming. Eve wouldn’t be able to ask Mummy to hide her unless she admitted she hadn’t been going to school, and wouldn’t Mummy want to know why? Susan thought she knew: because Eve didn’t want too many people to see her, whyever that was. Mrs. Fisher was at Chloe’s and Estelle’s desks now, and they weren’t telling on Susan after all, but by now Susan didn’t care if they did.

She ran home as soon as school was over. Mummy shouldn’t be home for more than an hour, but Susan wanted to make sure of getting to Eve first. The streets seemed to be growing whiter under the darkening sky, though she could hardly see for her white breath. The light was on beyond the dimming window of the flat, which ought to mean that Eve was there. Surely it didn’t mean that Mummy had come home early, as she sometimes had on Susan’s first days back at school.

Susan turned the key and hurried upstairs into the smell of cats. As she opened the door of the flat she saw Eve sitting watching television, except that it was switched off.

She looked at Susan as if she were the intruder, but Susan wasn’t nervous. Eve couldn’t stop what was going to happen now that Susan had made the call. “You didn’t go to school today,” Susan said at once.

Eve stared at her, then shrugged. “Some schools don’t go back on the same day as yours.”

“You don’t go to school ever.” Susan felt she’d beaten Eve at her own game, especially when Eve didn’t answer. “Why don’t you?”

“You know why.”

Did she mean she didn’t want to be seen by too many people? Could she really hear what Susan was thinking? It no longer seemed to matter. “Someone’s told the truant officer you don’t go to school,” Susan said. “The teacher told me so. They’ll lock you up in a special school if you’re still living here when the truant officer comes.”

“Mummy won’t like that.” Eve was staring at her with the look she’d had when she crushed the beetle, and not only then. “Mummy won’t like what you did.”

So she knew it was Susan who’d called the truant officer. Perhaps it had been obvious. Susan didn’t care, it was done now. She tried not to care when Eve said, “Mummy said she wanted to see you as soon as you came in.”

That was just like Eve, talking about Mummy as though she were Eve’s and not even telling Susan until now what Mummy had said. “Where is she?” Susan demanded.

“In the bedroom,” Eve said with an odd lopsided smile, and stood up as Susan made for the hall. She must think Mummy would be on her side, but Susan didn’t think so: Mummy wouldn’t like the truant officer coming here and asking her why Eve didn’t go to school. Maybe it would make her angry, maybe she would take it out on Susan. Anything that Mummy did to Susan would be worth it so long as Eve went out of their lives.

Susan told herself all this as she ventured into the hall, but she couldn’t help being afraid. Mummy must be lying down, for the bedroom light was off. “Mummy?” she said.

When there was no answer, she stepped into the dark. An echo made the boxy space seem larger than it was, an echo of her footsteps and of Mummy moving on the bed in the dark. Susan reached out and pulled the cord, pulled it twice and heard it click, but the light didn’t go on. “I don’t want to stay in here, Mummy,” she said, suddenly afraid of the largeness of the movements and of the echoing dark.

She had just reached the doorway, which seemed more distant from the cord than it ought to be, when Eve stepped in front of her and gave her a shove backward. It was so unexpected that Susan stumbled the length of the room, tried to save herself from falling over the end of the bed before she realized it wasn’t there. She was still stumbling backward, because there was no wall to stop her. The dark was even larger than it sounded. She threw herself forward, toward the lit doorway in the distance, and only managed to stand still. “What’s happened?” she cried in a voice that didn’t sound like hers. “What have you done with Mummy?”

“She’s there with you. She likes the dark.” Eve might have been grinning, as her voice was, but it was impossible to tell, because of what was happening to her face. “It’s time you met her. My Mummy, not yours.”

She was reaching out to close the door in the shaky wall. Susan knew that once the door was closed she would be lost in the total darkness. She was running as she had never run before, running as if she could outrun having to think about what Eve had said, yet the doorway was still impossibly distant, and something else was wrong. At first she thought Eve had shoved the dressing table into the doorway to block her way out, even if she reached it; she thought she was seeing herself in the mirror. Eve closed the door tight and Susan heard the soft unhurried movements that now seemed as large as the dark, the movements and the giggling whisper that were between her and the vanished door. The dark cut her off from the world forever and the last thing she saw was that Eve’s face was no longer Eve’s. It was her own.

35

T
HE YOUNG WOMAN
in the white lab coat who smelled of soap and duplicator paper led Martin through the pale green corridors to the auditorium and showed him a seat at the back. Though a film was being projected on the curtainless screen, all the lights were on, and so he recognized Stuart Hay as soon as the man in the front row turned to glance up the steep rake at him. Hay was quite stout now and had grown a clipped red beard, but there was no mistaking Molly’s description of him. his faint superciliously skeptical expression and the appraising glance he gave Martin’s escort. He nodded curtly to Martin and turned back to the film. Martin tried to watch it too, to understand what it was supposed to be, to quell his instinctive dislike of Stuart Hay.

Presumably the film was more than nonsense, since the fifteen or so businessmen in the small auditorium were watching it intently. Some of them were taking notes, flashing gold cuff links and expensive watches. Martin tried to be comfortable on the meager seat that threatened to fold up if he sat back—presumably the seats were meant to make sure that nobody would fall asleep—and wondered why nobody was laughing at the film. Actors appeared in different scenes with different dubbed voices, a character was driving an invalid car in one scene but walking in the next, a man and woman were clearly married in one scene, but later proved to be married to two other people. “The End,” a title said, and the film went on. When Martin couldn’t suppress a snort of mirth, three businessmen glared at him.

The film broke halfway through a scene. Martin assumed it was a faulty copy until Hay said, “I’ll join you gentlemen in the canteen shortly.” Martin waited as the businessmen climbed the steep steps past him, and then Hay joined him. “Mr. Wallace,” he said and gave Martin a handshake like a handful of firm sponge. “What did you think of our film?”

“Hard to say without seeing it through.”

“You think so?” His grin seemed somehow too friendly. “Did it make any sense to you?”

“Some.”

“Really? What sense did it make?”

Martin felt he was being satirized. Under the stubbly red hair Hay’s flushed face looked argumentative. “The technique isn’t that radical,” Martin said.

“I suppose not.” His grin wagged the beard, which looked like a brush that had been used to redden his face. “Sorry about that. I’m not laughing at you. The way people’s minds work fascinates me. We set up that film so there was no way it could make sense, yet everyone who sees it tries to reconstruct it and nearly everyone manages to persuade himself he understands it, says scenes are missing or remembers details that weren’t there. It’s a valuable experience. It gives our subjects an insight into how their minds work.”

“That’s what you do now, is it?”

“Right, and there’s hardly a one of them doesn’t thank us at the end of the course. Ask them if you like.”

He was leading Martin down the corridor to the canteen. His defensiveness only strengthened Martin’s resolve not to be distracted. “I’m not here for that,” Martin said.

“Why are you here, Mr. Wallace?”

“I told you on the phone.”

“Tell me again.” His grin was a challenge. “It was a bad line.”

“You wrote to Molly Wolfe. She sent me to find out what you wanted and why.”

“Faper not fofip, eh?” He held open the canteen door. “The Foundation for Applied Psychological Research,” he explained when Martin stared at him, “which was here before the Foundation for Industrial Psychology. That’s where you are now.”

Martin felt uneasy and couldn’t think why. “You mean this is where Molly came eleven years ago?”

“That’s what I said. Why not?” He slid a tray that bore two plastic cups of muddy coffee along the counter to the till and paid the sniffing cashier. “Thanks, pet,” he said with a wink, and turned to Martin without warning. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

“Strange, could have sworn I had.” His grin was even friendlier. He led Martin to a table among the businessmen, who were discussing a computer language and seemed almost to be talking in it. “Sorry, I’ve forgotten what you wanted to know.”

Perhaps he thought that sitting with the businessmen would inhibit Martin. “Molly Wolfe wants to know why you wrote to her after all this time,” Martin said without bothering to lower his voice.

“No particular reason. I just thought it was time to check.”

“After eleven years of not checking? That’s not the way your letter reads.”

“It was designed to get a response. Not that it did, except from you.”

“You wrote to everyone who took part in your experiment?”

“Yes, of course. Why would I single out Miss Wolfe?”

Martin suppressed an angry response. “What aftereffects were you expecting?”

“I honestly don’t know. Part of the scientific method is not to anticipate.”

“Maybe so, but don’t tell me you expected nothing.” Losing his temper wouldn’t help Molly. “You must have expected your original experiment to achieve something.”

“You ought to ask Guilda Kent about that. She was running the show.” He stirred three spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee and sipped before he went on. “We wanted to look at correlations between the prophetic dreams of different subjects and whether different conditions might affect their dreaming.”

“But did any of the dreams come true?”

Hay looked as if he hadn’t expected such a naive question. “A few seemed specific enough. None of Miss Wolfe’s, I’m afraid, at least not so far as I know. Again, Dr. Kent would be the one to ask. She took her research with her when faper became fofip. What we’re doing here now wasn’t for her, she said.”

He swallowed half his coffee in one gulp. “Five minutes, gentlemen,” he called. “Will you excuse me now, Mr. Wallace? I think I’ve answered all your questions.”

Martin seized Hay’s wrist as he put down the cup, and felt how the bones would creak if he gripped hard. “You haven’t told me what happened here eleven years ago.”

“I’d call it collective hysteria, probably involving hallucination. Would you mind?” He tugged his wrist free, gently but firmly. “In retrospect it isn’t surprising. There was a very strong rapport between the subjects, stronger than they were able to cope with. They did appear to share dreams. I agree we should have had more safeguards, if that’s what is on your mind.” He pushed his chair back. “If you’re asking about the subjective experience of what happened, of course I wouldn’t know. I should have thought you would have got that from Miss Wolfe.”

Martin opened his mouth, but Hay had been waiting to interrupt him. “By the way, you’ve left it a bit late to tell me if she has experienced any aftereffects.”

“How should I know which they are?” The implication that he’d been neglectful infuriated Martin. “She’s been having prophetic dreams again, which she says are accurate. She’s on edge even though she’s sleeping nights. One of the others contacted her and she keeps thinking there’s another of them somewhere near. Frankly, I think these are effects of your goddamned letter.”

Stuart’s frown had cleared so quickly that Martin wasn’t sure what he had said to cause it. “Who contacted her?”|

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Then it looks as if we’ve told each other all we can.”

Martin doubted that, but Hay was following the businessmen toward the door. “How can I get in touch with Dr. Kent?”

“Good question,” Stuart said approvingly as if it were Martin’s first. “I wish I could tell you. I haven’t seen or heard of her for years. I understood she was planning to get closer to the problems of ordinary people.” He turned to Martin before stepping into the auditorium. “If you should trace her, you might tell her I’d like her to get in touch.”

Martin’s anger died as the double doors ceased to swing. He could always confront Hay tomorrow if there was anything Molly wanted him to ask, but he rather felt that Hay had nothing more of significance to offer. He strolled down the pale green corridor and glanced back belatedly at the painting that had looked like a window on a summer landscape, hills and distant Oxford, but there was only a window. No doubt the painting had been in one of the rooms he’d passed.