Walking Dead (8 page)

Of course he'd known for years that the Company operated in ugly ways in some areas, but that knowledge seemed to belong to a different grammar from the awareness which was now forced on him. Once before, years ago, he'd gone through a comparable experience, the disintegration of a heroin-addicted friend. He'd had the theoretical knowledge, had smoked a bit of pot, had seen TV documentaries, had gossiped about friends of friends; but none of that seemed to bear on the actual, visible, tangible falling apart, the vomiting, the dirt, the disappearance of trust, the fury at Toni's stupidity in letting this happen to herself, the horror at his own gladness when she took the necessary step and wiped herself out. I wish I'd told Lisa-Anna about Toni, he thought. It might have helped her understand …

As usual the Caribbean nightfall had taken him by surprise, the quick dusk vanishing unnoticed. He went downstairs, took his bike out of the garage and used the operation of fixing its lamps on to inspect the street. A man was leaning against a palm tree twenty yards up the slope; rather further down the other way a large car was parked—unusual, because few cars were left unattended in Front Town after dark, there being a tendency for wheels to disappear from them even when the driver was only away ten minutes. So somebody must be sitting there, waiting.

Foxe pedalled slowly up the slope, trying to behave exactly as he'd done every evening for the past two months. He knew he must be easy to follow as his appeared to be the only properly lit bike on Hog's Cay—in fact he sometimes wondered for what purpose his previous set of bike-lamps had been stolen; certainly the thief would have made himself very conspicuous by attaching them to his own machine. Down the hill the car's engine started. It too climbed slowly. A door slammed in the dark—presumably the second watcher was now aboard—but the engine note didn't change. Foxe threaded himself carefully into the traffic of Independence Square, busy with unpredictable taxis just now as the tourists began to arrive at the big casino for a preprandial flutter—a sort of appetiser for the real money-losing sessions of the evening. Galdi wouldn't be there yet, he had a theory that one's awareness of the flow of chance is keenest when one is exactly two-fifths drunk, so he'd still be in his warm-up procedure. Foxe let the slight slope freewheel him along the far side of the square and into the market, where the last of the fruit-stalls were closing down but the knick-knack and souvenir stalls glittered, as they would till the small hours, under their butane lamps.

The car followed Foxe down over the cobbles. The clatter of his bike drowned minor noises, but twice he heard its sharp hoot, and once a crash of scraped timber, perhaps where it had knocked over one of the tottering towers of empty fruit-boxes. Several voices shouted angrily at it. The market crossed the border at the bottom of the hill and all of a sudden you were in Back Town, with its ranker smells, and ramshackle houses, and stalls selling cheap pots and garish cloths and patent medicines. By this time of night all these were closed and folded away, leaving the road hummocked with litter through which bold rats—wild rats, alien as Martians from Foxe's charges—rummaged. The road ended in a stagnant pool where some drain surfaced, so Foxe as usual dismounted and portaged his bike across the stepping stones. As he rode out into the wider street beyond he heard the tires behind him squelch through the muck.

This was the road where he'd been stopped by the Prime Minister's procession. He turned right along it, then almost at once left into the dark alley beside the lightless dance-hall, or pub, or whatever it was. Again, as on that day, there was a ladder leaning against the wall with a man at the top and another watching at the bottom—in fact Foxe, swerving to miss the sudden loom of the ladder in his headlight beam actually crashed into this second man.

“What you doing? Where you going?” shouted the man.

“Sorry,” said Foxe, half-dismounted. He glanced up and saw by the glow from Front Town that the painter at the top had almost completed the symbol which had been obliterated on that other day—the big circle with the fuse-like bar protruding at the top.

“Police car coming,” he muttered, then remounted and pedalled on. The man shouted. Lights shone into the alley. A horn blared, ending in a crash and a scream, another crash and more shouting. Foxe rode on round the corner, following the familiar twisting journey between the shanties. Smells apart, the place was rather attractive at this time of night; flaring light shone through irregular doors and windows, the air was full of music, mostly from several Caribbean stations but some actually made on the spot by groups sitting in front of their houses, bashing or tootling at improvised instruments; some of these people were so used to Foxe passing that they had familiar jokes about the sex and habits of his bike, which they shouted at him. He answered as usual, but thought as he clattered along that the police car would have trouble following him through this obstructed maze. They must know where he was going. Why didn't they simply drive round to the bottom of the promontory road and wait?

He came out at last on to the shore road and as usual pedalled faster over the good surface, trying with the wind behind him to get up speed for the climb through the wood. Under the trees it was pitch dark apart from the fire-flies, silent apart from the light swish of surf on the headland and the shrilling of night insects. He had seen no sign of his followers, but pumped himself up the slope with all his nerves alert. Perhaps, indeed, they had made the detour and would be waiting for him here, in ambush. But when a huge moth floated out of the blackness and baffed against his headlight, soft and sinister, he was far less startled than he might have been on an ordinary night. Panting slightly he coasted over the hill-top and down to the side door below his own rooms. He had his own key for these night visits. As always, he wheeled the bike into the narrow hallway and locked the door behind him, then climbed the stairs, switching on lights as he went. In his office he dialled the caretaker's number.

“Doctor Foxe, sir?” said Charley's rasping voice.

“That's right. I'll be a bit longer than usual.”

“How are the fishing go, sir?”

“Not bad. I only got one, but the Director caught several. I'll give you another ring when I go, Charley.”

“OK OK. You see that wife of mine, tell her come home give her man his meal uh?”

“Right.”

Rats are nocturnal animals. Human experimenters are not. So rats are normally asked to perform during their natural rest-cycle. Short of installing an expensive reverse daylight system, one can either keep the rats under constant illumination or make certain that any particular animal is always put through its paces at the same time of day, so that, although they may be performing below their peak because they're in a natural rest-period, their results remain comparable with each other. Because Foxe preferred the latter system on his night-time visits to the lab he kept all the
lights he was using shaded. Most evenings there was nothing special to do, but he made these visits every night, so that when one really was necessary it caused no change in the routine to which the rats were accustomed.

Tonight was a necessary night. He sat down at the computer console, switched on the lamp above the key board, and began to tap out the instructions he had mentally prepared during his ride. Almost at once the printout clicked into duet with him. The activity was soothing because it was something he was used to, something where he was in control. When he paused to consider a new section the printout continued, clicking away dosages, timings, averages, spreads. It was a very good machine, much larger than was really needed for a lab of this kind, because (Foxe now guessed) coiled away in its memory-discs in the humming, dust-proof basement were endless details of secret Company activities. Sometimes it too paused, and when these pauses coincided with Foxe's the silence of the lab became a wall, the bastion of Foxe's castle, inside which he was lord of all destinies, including his own. A rat fidgeted in its box—a safe sound, a member of Foxe's garrison, wakeful to his will.

Except that he should not have been able to hear it. The animal room was soundproofed, so that meant that someone had left the door open. Automatically Foxe rose and walked down past the maze-room to close it, though there was no longer any point in this; all the meaningless figures were in and it didn't matter a bean now if the rats were disturbed or excited by the clicking of the computer. Still, habit is habit. The suicide hangs his coat up and puts the change from his pockets into neat piles on the dresser before he lies down to wait for darkness.

Yes, the door of the
animal room was wide open. The stainless steel bars of the boxes gleamed in faint rows, reflecting the light from the computer console, but below waist-level everything was in the blackest dark. No. Very faint, down at floor level, two small lights gleamed, nacreous but with a pinkness behind the pearl. Foxe sighed. An escaped rat was the last thing he wanted.

He crouched and moved gently towards the gleaming eyes. They vanished as claws scuttled on cork tiles, then there they were again, a few feet further in. Gently Foxe shut the door and crouched again. Somebody, that stupid old bag Ladyblossom almost certainly, had been in here, trying to work her messy little magicks, and had taken at least one rat out of its box. Laboratory rats are not quite tame, in the way that, say, domestic cats are tame. They are used to handling and not afraid of man, but a couple of careless grabs can arouse forgotten layers of wildness, and then a single rat can take all morning to catch. Foxe decided to have one more go in the dark and if that failed to snap the lights on and try and catch the creature while it was still dazed with sudden glare. He crept forward, making the little clicking noise with his tongue which he used to calm young rats while they were becoming used to handling. An old lab assistant had once shown him that it is possible to pick up city pigeons provided that once you are close to them you move in a non-hunting manner and watch them only with your peripheral vision, so now he moved without any of the tenseness of the hunter. The eyes stayed where they were, even as Foxe reached smoothly out for them. This was odd—normally even a tame rat will back to a wall and huddle there before it lets itself be caught, but this one seemed to wait in the middle of the open floor.

No. The back of his fingers touched cloth. It
was
huddled against something, a fabric-covered object like a cushion. When he was handling rats Foxe's movements were too schooled to smoothness and restraint for him not to carry through now until his fingers closed round the soft, quivering but unresisting fur. His tongue stopped clicking. He rose, stiff with sudden tension.

“Who's there?” he whispered.

The rats in the boxes stirred at his voice. Shivering, he backed to the door and snapped the light on.

Ladyblossom lay supine on the cork tiles. Her face was blotched yellow and purple, her teeth bared in a stretched grimace. Drunk, he thought with sudden relief; but her broad chest did not stir, nor the breath gargle in her throat. Without even looking at it Foxe slipped the rat into his jacket pocket and knelt beside the body.

Her flesh was warm but rubbery in texture. Her left arm was pinned beneath her body and her right lay apparently loosely across her stomach, but when he tried to feel for the pulse he found that muscular contraction was dragging the arm so fiercely down that he was unable to push his fingers between it and her body. He tried to feel directly for the beat of her heart, but it turned out that Ladyblossom kept her considerable bust under control with a rigid lattice-work of corsetry. He could detect no sign of breathing.

He let out a long breath, trying to sigh away his fright, and rose. Well, the first thing was to ring Charley. Then it would be his responsibility—poor old Ladyblossom—probably poisoned herself with some potion. But why here? Why in Foxe's lab, goddamit?

He was aware of the door opening before he had finished turning towards it. His heart gave one appalling bang and his whole body went rigid, then he completed the movement much more slowly until he was face to face with Captain Angiah, who stood half-lounging in the doorway with his big pistol dangling from his brown, long-fingered hand.

THE PIT

1

A
s the plane climbed it seemed to create the dawn, rising into whiter and yet whiter light. Itchy with sleeplessness and nervous tension, Foxe undid his safety belt and tried to relax into the soft upholstery, but a wriggling movement at his hip reminded him that he still had responsibilities outside his own skin. He took Quentin out of his pocket, stroked the sleek fur between his shoulder-blades and put him on the table, where he promptly produced a neat little dropping like the black stone of an olive. His touch was strangely restorative. The violet Q on the white fur behind the dark head seemed to glow with its own light. He nosed around the table-top, found Foxe's arm resting on the edge and immediately began to burrow up inside the sleeve of Foxe's jacket.

Spools of talk ran and re-ran themselves in Foxe's mind.

“You are under arrest in connection with suspected homicide.”

“Oh, don't be stupid. I can't have had anything to do with it. I've been out fishing with Doctor Dreiser all day, and your own men were watching us.”

“Nobody was watching you.”

“Come off it. I caught one of them with my own tackle.”

“That is irrelevant. Under our law, in cases of serious crime all witnesses and potential witnesses are automatically taken into custody.”

“What the hell's a potential witness?”

“Anyone the investigating officers believe may have knowledge bearing on the investigation.”

“That means anyone at all.”

No answer.

“May I ring the British Consul?”

“You will see him on Main Island.”

“But there's one here, on Hog's Cay.”

“An Honorary Consul only, and he is on holiday.”

“Anyway, I don't …”

Pause. Actually to admit that he wasn't going to Main Island if he could help it … Captain Angiah seemed to half-guess his thought.

“You will not really be inconvenienced, Doctor Foxe. Your arrest will be merely technical, and the President has offered you rooms in his palace while you are working on Main Island. Our investigations will certainly be completed by the time you have finished your work there. These magical slayings are usually straightforward. Are you ready to go now?”

“No. I was half way through getting some figures out of the computer: I can't leave it like that.”

“Then please hurry.”

That was the point at which Foxe should have put the rat back into its cage—or perhaps twenty minutes later when he'd stood up from the computer console, having fixed things so that someone else could extract and use the rest of the figures. But by then there'd been three or four policemen in the animal room, and Charley was standing by the door, his face greyish and covered with sweat pearls. Besides, if the rat could get out of its cage once it might do so again. And besides …

Even now, lolling in the aeroplane, Foxe couldn't analyse why he'd felt it was somehow a small victory to walk out of the laboratory with a rat in his pocket, as if it were a concealed weapon. Of course he didn't then know that he'd got Quentin.

“Coffee, suh?”

A white jacketed steward had appeared, smiling in the nightmare.

“Yes please,” said Foxe. “And some popcorn or something for my friend.”

The man's eyes widened. Foxe reached up under his collar, withdrew Quentin and placed him on the table. When he glanced up again the smile had vanished and the black cheeks were blotched with sudden sweat.

“Yes, suh,” whispered the steward then turned shivering to the other passenger.

“Coffee, Captain?”

“Beer,” said Captain Angiah.

“How long is the flight?” said Foxe.

“Twenty minutes,” said the Captain. “Waste of a jet flight, but Doctor O felt you would like to travel in his own plane. See there—that's just about half way.”

Foxe looked out of the window. All the stars except Venus had vanished, and the iron-coloured sea was rippling with silver-pinks and silver-blues. In a few more minutes, between a blink and a blink, it would take on the peacock colours of day. About a couple of miles away and separated by a mile of sea lay two islands, which might almost have been put there to demonstrate how different it was possible for two islands to be. They were both quite small, the nearer a classic coral horse-shoe, a slim curve of palm lined with shell-white beaches. Foxe guessed that the coral was supported on a volcanic cone which had never reached the surface, because the further island was just such an upthrust, a ravine-creased pillar of black rock, formed in the complex upheaval that had shaped this part of the whole archipelago. Fall Bay had been made of the same stuff.

“What are they called?” said Foxe.

“The tall one is Trotter, the reef Afenziah. I persuaded Doctor O to rename them. I told him it shamed us in the eyes of the world that the map of our country should contain obscene words.”

The tone warned Foxe not to smile.

“Are they inhabited?” he asked.

“It is forbidden to land on them.”

“Why on earth?”

The steward came trembling back to put Foxe's cup in front of him and with a darting movement to shove a saucer of salted nuts towards Quentin. Foxe caught Captain Angiah's eye and saw a new look there, a sort of fury and repugnance. He felt too tired to work out the cause of it—it was safer to change the subject—but his unconscious mind must have made the leap.

“Is there a lot of magic on Main Island too?” he said.

Captain Angiah snapped his beer-can down and started to rise, staring hotly at Foxe for several seconds, then settled back into his seat and drank.

“You are a scientist,” he said softly. “How can you talk about such things? You do us damage, you people, coming here and gossiping about these things as if we were animals in a wildlife film. How can we stop being animals and become a modern people while you keep bringing your cine cameras and your tape recorders and pay us to do these stupid dances and sing these stupid songs? They are all bad, bad rubbish. They poison minds. How can a man do his work and earn his pay when he thinks that if he makes the right charm and gives the right gifts he can go into the forest and find pirate treasure? How can a woman be persuaded to use modern contraceptives if she thinks that she will not become pregnant when she binds four pieces of sharkskin between the toes of her left foot? You know that our enemies used this magic against us? We had Marxist guerrillas up in the Mountain, but they were not Marxist-Leninists, or Marxist Trotskyites or anything like that. They were Magic Marxists. Only on our Islands, and perhaps on Haiti, would such a stupidity be possible. They did not take guns or grenades to terrorise a village, no. A man would walk up to the main hut in broad daylight with three sticks and a bunch of feathers dipped in blood, and lay them down on the path in a certain pattern. Then the villagers would take all the food in their huts and put it outside the door and hide, while the terrorists took what they wanted and left.”

“It sounds a bit more humane than guns,” said Foxe.

“You are wrong, Doctor. It is by these means that the people are degraded and kept at the level of animals. One of my own men, a soldier, was sentry at a camp. A woman came and stood in front of him. She blew on her palm at him and said, ‘Man, you do not see me.' He let her pass. In his own mind he never saw her. I questioned him closely, and even in front of the firing squad he would not believe that he had seen her.”

“You had him shot!”

“That man was no more use as a soldier—he had become an animal. Listen, Doctor. These people are like your rats. I think you would say they are conditioned. Your rats go along your mazes because that is all they know. Our people believe in this rubbish because that is all they know, and because they believe in it the rubbish works. You can only fight that sort of superstition with beliefs of the same power. Now my sentries are at least conditioned not to allow women to come close enough to blow on their palms.”

Foxe sat silent, full of that sort of numb lethargy which always overcame him when laymen used technical terms in an argument; it was hopeless to begin to explain where and how they had got things wrong. He watched Quentin, interested in one corner of his mind to see whether he would even recognise salted nuts as food.

“You know how we broke the hold of the terrorists on the villagers?” said Captain Angiah.

“No.”

“We used conditioning. We sent Mrs Trotter up into the Mountain. They call her ‘The Old Woman' and they are more afraid of her than they are of any Magic Marxist.”

“And at the same time you reinforced the superstition,” said Foxe.

“Yes, that is the dilemma,” said Captain Angiah drily. “How do you abolish the tools which you need to govern?”

He began to suck meditatively at his beer-can. Foxe watched Quentin, who seemed to be perfectly familiar with nuts, taking them one by one out of the saucer, nuzzling them about on the table till they lay to his satisfaction and then splitting them efficiently into two halves with his incisors. Mysteriously he ate only half of each nut, leaving the other half as if for someone else—his doppelganger, perhaps. Vaguely Foxe wondered whether this was a typical piece of aberrant Quentinry, or whether it was some left-over fragment of wild-rat behaviour, surviving through generations of laboratory breeding. The stupor of exhaustion washed across him. The white fur blurred in his vision, and the violet Q swam and changed. He was seeing it upside down and for a moment he was seeing something else—a white wall in Back Town, on which was painted a large circle with a vertical bar at the top, an upside-down Q. He blinked the blur away and it was still there. That explained Ladyblossom. That explained the steward. If the letters of the alphabet were not an important part of your mental make-up, then what you saw when you looked at Quentin was the illegal symbol on the dance-hall.

Tiredness made it a strangely tedious discovery. Anybody more interested in his surroundings would have spotted it weeks ago. Or perhaps Foxe's own turn of mind had made him blind to this trivial link between the two worlds Mr Trotter the herbalist had talked about.

“Now there,” said Captain Angiah. “That is Main Island. Ten minutes before we land.”

Foxe looked out of the window and saw that night had become plain day. The sun, flush with the horizon, was streaming its light across the wave-tops, and already all the colours were too bright to seem natural to Foxe's northern eyes, though still far short of their noon-day garishness. Foxe had sometimes wondered on Hog's Cay whether any work had been done on the colour perception of tropical peoples, compared with that of races bred to a mistier light. The plane tilted through a change of course, and when the horizon steadied, it was now blocked by a hulking cliff, a mile or so away. The usual flush of tropical brilliance crowned the rocks and streaked the ravines, and the blue sea sparkled into white foam at the shoreline, but the view was sombre; so much of the black volcanic rock stood apparently unweathered since the new-born mountain had come steaming from the sea. On these rocks the tropic sun, which made all other colours blaze as if with their own light, had no effect; their blackness drank it in and sent out nothing in return. Even the mountains of the main massif, twenty miles beyond the cliffs, had the same look, though distance and the dawn air produced a certain blueness and softness; Foxe could see that these tones existed between him and the mountains, and that the rocks themselves must be of the same unmitigable black.

“Mount Trotter, three thousand two hundred and twenty-six metres,” said Captain Angiah. The number came off his tongue with the lilt of something learnt by rote. He had evidently ceased being the military philosopher, and was now the polite courier. Foxe found this persona more frightening than the other.

The pilot changed course again, swinging round the south-western headland and losing height as he did so. For a few seconds Foxe was gazing along the southern coast until eyesight dwindled where headland after headland plunged in ragged parallels to the sea, each with its chain of rocky islets reaching beyond the shore-line, as though the Island were an enormous old instrument designed to comb the waves for wrecks.

Then they were flying along this coast and looking into the individual bays, which turned out to be barely more inviting than the reefs which divided them, at most a narrow curve of steep, dark pebbly beach separating the water from sheer rock blotched with shrubs. A fishing boat in the second bay had the imperilled look of one of those small fish that scavenge for parasites along the jaws of sharks.

The fifth bay was different, though Foxe could see no reason why men had chosen to make it so; it looked no wider than some of the others, and the cliffs behind were just as steep; perhaps there had once been a beach here where pirates could careen, or perhaps the reefs happened to give better shelter. But here a town of a sort had been built, tin shacks clinging to the cliff, a little sugar-icing church on a ledge, and at the bottom warehouses, quays, cranes, an old castle at the far end of the bay and at the near end what looked like a modern hospital or hotel. The town seemed far too small to support the level of commercial activity which the harbour implied; scattered along the cliff face its shacks looked as though a monstrous wave had hurled a mass of driftwood against the rock and left it clinging wherever a niche or ledge caught it. Often Foxe could see no means of access to these dwellings; and though there were signs that the town continued beyond the cliff-top—the plane was now flying too low to see for sure—there did not seem to be any road up the cliff.

But there the harbour was, with a couple of fair-sized merchantmen moored at the quays, as well as a few fishing-boats and three new-looking MTBs; no lissom yachts or gaudy cruisers to add their note of rich frivolity. There was an airstrip too, a concrete deck laid along the further reef and reaching the land at the foot of the old fort. At first Foxe hadn't noticed this last building, so closely did its black walls and crenellations match the cliff behind it, and before he could look at it properly the plane was swinging out to align with the runway; but in his mind's eye there was something wrong with it, a sense that it couldn't somehow fit into the narrow site between the cliff and the sea.