Sleepwalker (17 page)

Peter tried to remember what people had been saying around him. Davis had said something. Something about having nothing else to do.

Peter wanted to laugh, and he nearly did. He would find something for Davis to do.

But faces were waiting for him to speak. He had spoken, hadn't he? He had said he didn't know what he was going to do. That was a clear statement, wasn't it? What did people want? “I don't know,” said Peter. “I don't know what I will do.” He said this with exaggerated clarity. That should make it clear to them that he did not want to talk, and he did not want to listen.

If only it were quiet.

After the meeting, Mandy stepped beside Peter. She took his hand, and told him something that he didn't quite understand through the buzz of voices in his mind.

“A ghastly time,” she said. “And that poor Alf, with his hand.”

Peter nodded. Poor Alf.

“It's no wonder you're so upset,” she was saying.

Poor Alf. Poor Davis. Davis was going to find something very important to do very soon.

“We should go flying,” Mandy was saying. “You used to tell me about your cars and your airplanes. It's not so cold that we couldn't go out this afternoon.”

All those voices.

Mandy's presence did quiet the voices somewhat. He could hear her clearly, and that was something. He reflected on what she had suggested.

“You seem so awfully tired, Peter,” she said.

The site was empty now. Everyone had gone but Davis and Irene, who stood near Trench One.

“Everyone,” she was saying, “needs a holiday now and then.”

They walked together for a while, Ducks made slender, V-shaped wakes on the Ouse. A crew was rowing in the distance. The clouds were bright white and off gray. There was only a slight wind, from the west.

“You don't think, do you,” she asked, “that there is anything really very sinister about all this?”

He did not answer. Her voice did quiet his mind. It stilled the tangle of voices, all those little boys using words like
nasty
and
naughty
and saying that they see what is happening.

Her soft voice. “I mean anything—and now I hate to use the word. Anything supernatural.”

When he added up the costs of the equipment, the heat gun and the soldering iron and the spare engines and fuel pumps, he had over a thousand pounds worth of investment. He told her she could pick the plane she wanted to fly, and she selected a Galaxy Silver Cloud.

“But you don't think that's the best one, do you?” she said.

“No—here. Take this one. The red one. The Boddington Spitfire.” It was a handsome model, with a wingspan of over half a meter.

They carried it, the voices mere whispers now, along the Ouse, over stiles, and up to a place where there were only cows, beyond the Ring Road, out where it was not York anymore, and the Minster was a stipple on the horizon.

Peter trembled. What had happened to him over the last weeks? His mind was clear now.

What had happened to me?

He wanted to ask her: Mandy? What have I done?

But she wouldn't know about the cats. Cats. Had he really done that? That was the old Peter, the Peter of his teenage years. He was thirty-eight now, and he had outgrown all that old sickness years before.

Hadn't he?

This was his fastest plane. It could take off in less than three meters of flat ground. Peter found a place where it could taxi for a while. Mandy laughed, and it was more fun to see it bouncing. Then he powered up, the hot-oil whiff of fuel exhaust in the air. It was up hard—he nearly stalled. The plane banked into the wind.

The controls were a black box, looking much like a radio. Mandy said that she wanted to try, and he let her. The controls had a single antenna, but there was nothing simple about them. An Apex computer combo, it had pulse-code modulation so a random signal from another transmitter somewhere would not interfere with Peter's commands.

The plane staggered in the wind high above them, but Mandy could put it through its paces. Peter showed her how to adjust the pitch-trim control slightly. The Spitfire looked black now, it was so high.

Mandy learned minute by minute. The plane banked, slipped, corrected. Peter soared with it in his mind. The green quilt of Ryedale swung before him.

The antenna glinted in the afternoon. At 35 megahertz, Mandy had the plane on an invisible harness, nearly like controlling its .5 diesel engine with a breath, or with a thought. Its propeller gleamed with sun for an instant.

His hand stretched forth and took the controls from her. “I was just finally learning how they worked,” she said.

The voices. He spun the plane downward, letting it fall in tight circles, then he brought it out of the spin, powered up, and then cut the throttle.

The voices. So naughty. She's such a very nasty girl, isn't she, this big saucy naughty girl. Take those controls away from that nasty, naughty girl. You know what she likes to do.

He brought the red Spitfire low over the cultivated field. The clods had been plowed just recently, and the white clouds hovered over all of it, as though the world held its breath.

Nasty girl.

The plane whipped across the field, and she squealed, and laughed. It missed her, its engine a loud crack as it went past. It was going so fast it was tiny in the distance as he brought it around. She thought it was fun. She thought it was a kind of sport. Peter backed away from her.

“Peter.”

The Spitfire was just off the tops of the grass. There—it cut some of the weeds. He eased it up a few centimeters, just enough to whisk the tussocks of grass. The burr swelled to a loud whine.

“Peter!”

He laughed.

This time it got her, and glanced away, the engine losing power and growling, then surging upward, and cutting way back around in a beautiful turn. It took less time now because the impact had slowed the plane. It came in on a higher arc, not an arc, really, so much as a straight line.

She fell to the ground and it nearly smacked the grass. He brought it up just in time.

“It's not funny, Peter. Give me that.”

It came from behind as she snatched, and missed, and tried to grip the antenna, which of course she could not do. The wings expanded in size until they were right behind her head and the engine howled. Her eyes grew wide, reading in Peter's eyes what was about to happen.

The air was littered with flying parts, propeller, struts, engine, hair.

And blood, blood everywhere, all over the dirt, and all over Peter's arms, and even his face, and on his lips, hot salt that he licked.

Blood.

Then he remembered. The terrible thing he had struggled to forget all day came back to him, and he fell to his hands and knees in horror.

The blood before him went gray as his vision dimmed. He closed his eyes.

In his flat last night he had made a terrible discovery.

21

Irene and Davis wandered the dig. It was a lonely place now. Even Peter had slouched off with Mandy, and Davis wished he could spend the day working with a trowel at the bottom of one of the trenches.

Irene was too quiet, and then Davis discovered why. “I must go to London for a few days, Davis,” she said, sounding much more subdued than usual.

He looked away. This was the worst possible time for news like this. “I'll miss you,” he said raggedly.

“I can tell you are annoyed with me. But I am an editor, with important responsibilities for the next issue, and I have done no work at all. I wish I could stay here.”

“I want you to do well,” said Davis, trying to sound cheerful, “and be proud of your work, and then I want you to come back to me.”

“It is only two hundred miles. Only two hours by train, Davis. I am supposed to be there for four weeks. It is in my contract. But I will do what must be done, and I will return. They will not be able to prevent me.”

“Why are you trying to reassure me?”

“Because I can see how you love me.”

From any other woman he had ever known this statement would have been embarrassing, or even, conceivably, annoying. But it was true. He loved her. He had not formulated those words, even in his own mind, but there it was, as clearly as if he had seen it on a passing newsstand:
DAVIS LOVES IRENE
.

“And of course you have guessed by now that I love you, Davis. I don't want to leave you. Not even for a minute. But I will come back.”

The railway station was crowded, Davis supposed, but he didn't really see anyone else. He was bewildered by the confusion of such good news and such bad news all at once. Irene loved him. This neon message was the world to Davis now. And yet she carried a backpack and a large leather purse. Her train was due in three minutes. He saw only Irene, with her dark eyes and her smile. Even sad, as she was now, she expressed herself with a smile.

The Intercity One-Twenty-Five rumbled into the station. Brakes squealed. Hands reached from windows to open doors. They were surrounded by passengers and suitcases.

Davis kissed her. He whispered into her ear, so she could hear over the announcements. “Come back soon. I love you.”

“I will come back, Davis. Don't worry. Look at me. Why am I so sad to be going for a few days? Only a few days, and only to London. Why am I so sad?”

Perhaps, thought Davis after she was gone, you know something.

York seemed an empty place, or worse. The Minster hulked above the surrounding streets, like a presence that would soon begin to move, and slowly consume all that lay around it. The medieval streets were greasy with wet, although it had not rained for two or three days. People turned away from each other, crouched in dark brown or dark blue wool clothing. A hunched figure sold the
Evening Press
, and Davis bought a copy.

He was not reading idly. He wanted to know how secret the missing Man was at this point. And he wondered—who else thinks they have seen him, wandering the dark? But the disappearance of the Man was still, it seemed, a secret. There was only the usual string of hooliganism and minor thefts. There was a strike in a prison near Leeds, with prisoners refusing to climb down from the roof, and someone seemed to be killing cats in the Clifton district of York.

Davis had tea and a scone in Betty's, and he knew that all the while he was stalling. There was work to do, and there was no one else on the job but one man. Only Davis Lowry. Everyone else had gone away, to protect themselves.

They were not cowards. They were wise. Davis believed that the spirit, if that was the name for it, worked its way inside a person, or a thing, and pressured it until it found a weakness—physical, as perhaps with Dr. Higg, or mental, as perhaps with Davis himself, with the recurrence of his dream. He was certainly not strong enough to withstand a psychological siege.

Or was he? Perhaps he would choose to be strong. It was not a time to be afraid. He believed what he had said. If the source of the troubles was not discovered, they would only grow worse.

There was a crash.

A scone rolled toward Davis, and a long brown snake of tea wended its way across the carpet. A waitress stooped to pick up the tray.

Someone had dropped some dishes. The sort of thing, Davis reassured himself, that happens every day. A routine accident.

There was no reason to be disturbed. He repeated to himself: a routine accident.

He hurried from the tea shop.

The door to Foote's Book Shop was locked. Davis pushed the button, and then leaned on it. There was no answer, and he wondered if the button was connected to anything.

He turned away, cursing to himself, and then a squeak of hinge made him turn back. Mr. Foote's pale, irritated face glanced up and down the street, and then saw Davis bearing down upon him.

“I don't have time!” yelped Mr. Foote, but he allowed Davis to climb the stairs behind him. “I'm in the midst of a catastrophe!”

There was a sound of heavy rain, a squall. But it came from above them, within the building. The carpet on the steps was black with water. Each step was sloppy. Water made a high-pitched toneless song somewhere in the building.

It burst from a small bathroom in a corner. Heavy plumber's tools and basins and rags were everywhere, but a spray still danced from a joint beneath a sink. Mr. Foote had apparently decided to move books instead of fighting the burst pipe. He had columns of books on chairs and stools.

Davis wrestled with the joint. A heavy black wrench slipped, and slipped again, ringing loudly against the pipe. Davis was soaked. Another wrench was too small. Davis managed, using a succession of wrong-sized wrenches or spanners—or whatever, he muttered to himself, the stupid iron insufficiencies were called—to stop the leak.

He sat in a pond. It was very quiet without the incessant scream of water.

The two men mopped, and squeezed water into buckets. At last the wettest damage was cleaned up, and Davis sat before a radiator in the next room, warming himself and drying his clothes.

Mr. Foote made some tea, and collapsed into a chair. “I am grateful for your help,” said Mr. Foote. “Extremely grateful. I wouldn't have let you in except for the fact that I had called for a plumber. He'll no doubt arrive sometime tomorrow.”

Mr. Foote sipped his tea and made a face. Still too hot, he mouthed. “This was the strangest disaster I have ever seen. The pipe simply exploded. There's no reason for it to do that. I nearly lost thousands of pounds worth of architecture books. They are my most expensive sort of book, with the exception of some of the eighteenth-century botanical prints.”

“There was no reason for it to do that?”

“None at all.”

Davis explained that he had heard this sort of comment before. He told the story of the generator. “Even now, I don't know if they will be able to save the hand. I know they can work wonders, but the surgeons did not seem very optimistic.”

Mr. Foote absorbed this news unhappily.