Suspension

by Bron Fane, Lionel Fanthorpe, Patricia Fanthorpe

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact; Fantasy; Occult & Supernatural; Horror

Synopsis

Catherine Wilder was a strange girl, lovely but lonely. Sir Henry Wilder, her father, was the kind of eccentric, medical researcher who preferred to work in complete isolation. Catherine withdrew deeper into herself as the oppressing loneliness of her father's remote mansion weighed upon her mind.
When she first heard the voice she wondered whether the mansion was haunted, then she feared for her sanity. But it was neither madness nor the supernatural which threatened her.
Mezak appeared to her suddenly in the twilight of the mansion's gloomy corridors. He was more romantic than her wildest dreams. Although some of his language was beyond her understanding at first, it gradually became possible for them to communicate. Mezak was from the future, the remote future, but Catherine slowly realised that she was in love with him! Her father's strange research into super-freezing and suspended animation gave her only a remote chance of reaching him, but she was prepared to take that chance. As Catherine placed herself in the freezing chamber, numbness and darkness crept over her.... Would she ever open those beautiful eyes again?

Release date: February 27, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

“SOME more tea, father?” Catherine looked up at Sir Henry enquiringly.

“Eh … Eh … what’s that, my dear?”

“Tea.”

“Yes, yes, I suppose so.” Sir Henry was buried in the paper. Not the inevitable Times or Telegraph of the popular conception of men like Sir Henry Wilder, but a medical publication loaded with so many obscure technicalities and so much jargon that it made little or no sense to even the most intelligent of laymen.

Sir Henry reached a hand for the cup which Catherine placed deftly in front of him. He stirred vaguely spilling tea into the saucer as he did so.

“Careful, father, you’re spilling it.”

“Oh! am I? How silly of me!” Sir Henry tore himself away from the medical journal long enough to guide his cup rather unsteadily towards his mouth and then his attention was focused again exclusively on his magazine.

“Father, you’re spilling tea down your beard.”

“Oh, dear me, I’m getting so dreadfully careless.”

Sir Henry put his magazine down with a weary sigh, took a silk handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and began mopping at his leonine grey beard. It was a wild, bushy affair but it had about it something of the magnificence of a Victorian academician. Sir Henry Wilder was very much a Victorian at heart. He was a Victorian by preference; he was a Victorian insofar as Victoria’s reign was the era of time which, from his limited knowledge of history, appealed to him most.

He was an anachronism of 1964, thought his daughter. He looked so much like a character from Rider Haggard or Conan Doyle, even perhaps from Kipling. But he didn’t really seem to merit a place in the harsh realities of the mid-1960’s.

Catherine gave up the unequal attempt to conduct a conversation with her father and delved instead into her own breakfast. Food in “Grey Gables” was not accompanied by the normal social pleasures of mealtime to which most families look forward.

Catherine had been looking after her father ever since she had left school. It had not, in fact, been more than five or six years, she thought, but it seemed a great deal more. The old man was so inadequate as a human being thought Catherine wearily, that neither food nor conversation had any impact on him, and it was only at mealtimes that she saw him anyway. On all other occasions he was either asleep in his room or working down in that peculiar laboratory of his in the cellar.

She reflected that she had a great deal to be thankful for, old Sir Henry might have been oppressive, heavy handed or interfering; he was certainly none of these things. It was just his complete and utter lack of interest in anything outside his work. Whether the old man did feel any normal paternal affection Catherine was undecided. Occasionally he would look at her with the warmth of a jolly, bewhiskered Father Christmas, and she would imagine that, just for a moment or so, she detected a spark of love in his eyes.

On other occasions, living with her father was like living with a machine or an automaton. He lived for his work. Ever since Catherine’s mother had left the old scientist, Catherine had really wondered whether he had really missed her. His food appeared on the table and as Catherine put away the cornflake packet, she realized just how deep was the rut into which they had fallen. But what, she asked herself, was the point of preparing anything interesting for a man who was only a mouth behind a medical periodical.

Catherine kept her feelings tightly under control. She wanted to stand up, snatch the cloth from the table and to scream at him over and over again but what was the point. He would probably look at her disapprovingly, prescribe a mild sedative and tell her to go to bed for a couple of days. It was the very imperturbability of the man that made him difficult to contend with, thought his daughter.

There was one oasis which broke up the desert of loneliness as far as Catherine was concerned. That was their cat Pippin. Normally, he was rubbing himself against her ankles at this hour of the morning, waiting for some little titbit from the table but as Catherine stood up and took the cornflakes back to the cupboard the familiar slinky black shape was missing.

“Pippin,” she called.

“Eh … what’s that my dear?” Sir Henry looked up.

“I was just calling the cat, father.”

“Oh! Um … er … er,” he said again, each monosyllable vaguer and less interested than the last, then his face disappeared into the medical journal once more and Catherine went in search of the cat.

The corridors of “Grey Gables” were like the corridors of other old Cumberland granges. They were long, wide and although solidly built, possessed a tendency to echo rather disconcertingly. Even in the full, though grey light of the morning, there was an eerie, rather frightening quality to the rambling old house. And, although the knowledge that her father was there saved Catherine from physical loneliness, there was a mental and spiritual isolation because of her father’s love of solitude, which seemed somehow far worse to the girl, than the knowledge that she was completely alone would have done.

Living with Sir Henry was like living with half a man. When his physical presence was in a room with you, you still got the impression that his mind was elsewhere. Catherine had the feeling that for ninety per cent of her father’s time, at least, his mind lived down in the laboratory in the cellar. As she walked down the corridor towards the kitchen carrying a stack of breakfast things she wondered just what on earth it was that Sir Henry got up to in that cellar.

He had always been most secretive about it. He was always singularly withdrawn if she tried to broach the topic to him. He would refer to it vaguely as ‘my work’ or ‘my experiments.’ More than this he blankly refused to disclose.

Catherine was still calling Pippin as she walked down the stone flagged corridor. There was no answer. She opened the doors of one or two of the last rooms which were rarely, if ever, used. There was still no sign of the cat.

“Pippin,” she called again, louder, this time. “Puss, puss, come on nice pussy; kitty, kitty, kitty.” Pippin still refused to put in an appearance. This, decided Catherine, was singularly unlike him.

It worried her a little. She paused at an angle in the corridor and listened, there was a noise. She listened again. That’s strange, she told herself; that sound, it was almost like a voice. She held her breath and froze into silent immobility. It was a voice, low and soft with a rather mellow timbre to it. She heard the voice as though she were listening to one end of a telephone conversation. The voice seemed to be running through a list of numbers, as though it were checking off numbers on a sheet.

She crept towards the door of the room nearest to this angle of the corridor from which she now stood. Scarcely daring to breathe she unfastened the handle, tiptoed inside. The room was quite empty. A thin layer of dust over everything had not been disturbed.

Catherine gave a little gasp of surprise, she had almost expected to find an intruder in the room. This emptiness was more frightening than the presence of an interloper. Her gasp echoed strangely from the tall, thick walls.

“Is there anybody there?” she asked, feeling foolish as she posed the question, for there were no footsteps in the dust and it was quite obvious that this room was utterly undisturbed. The dust moved a little, stirring discontentedly at her voice.

“Is there anyone there?” asked Catherine again. There was silence; silence like the silence of the grace. The whole house often seemed to her like a tomb or mausoleum. She backed out of the room quickly.

In the corridor she fancied she could hear the voice again, growing fainter all the time. She caught more numbers; they sounded vaguely like dates. But they were too soft and indistinct to be heard very clearly. Catherine considered the possibility of going back for her father. She was trying to imagine his reaction if she made a remark like “Father, I’ve just heard some voices in the corridor and there was nobody there!” Sir Henry would be certain to think in purely medical terms. He would assure her that she was suffering from some kind of auditory delusions. He would probably prescribe something and send her to bed for a day or two.

Catherine shuddered a little at the prospect and decided not to tell Sir Henry after all. Instead she went on as far as the kitchen, put down the tray of breakfast things which she had been carrying until she heard the voice, and which, on hearing the voice, she had set down silently on a small occasional table in the hall. On coming out of the room she had taken the tray up again, and now, as she put it down with the slight rattling sound on the kitchen table she wondered whether the noise she had originally supposed was a voice, was, in actual fact, nothing more sinister than the faint ‘talking’ murmur, murmured by stacked crockery. She looked at the tray, none of the crockery on there could be said to be stacked.

One thing about having such a small establishment was that her father and herself made practically no washing up. She began calling Pippin again. Sometimes he did laze in the kitchen until after breakfast bat it was very unusual.

She opened the door and looked out on to the slope of the mountain beyond. In the morning light two or three sheep were cropping the sharp sparse grass in a rather desultory manner.

“Pippin,” she called. One of the sheep raised its head and looked enquiringly in her direction as though to assure himself that the message was not for him; he turned his back and continued cropping the grass with redoubled interest.

Something about the sheep made Catherine want to laugh. He was so very human she thought. Maybe this was one of the perils of loneliness. Perhaps this was the psychological danger of a place like “Grey Gables,” isolated as it was from its nearest neighbours by several miles. Maybe after a time you got to the point where you thought that sheep were people and people were sheep. Maybe a lonely girl, thought Catherine, could get to the point of imagining that animals had personalities. Who was to say that they hadn’t, she asked herself. Pippin was very certainly a personality and it became a matter of some moment with her that Pippin was missing. Something would have to be done.

There was a wild, untamed streak in Catherine Wilder. She knew that it was there and it was a thing that she deliberately fostered and nurtured. It seemed to her one weapon in the battle for independence which might give her any chance at all of victory.

Catherine picked up a coat and scarf hanging from the back of one of the broad old-fashioned wooden kitchen chairs and tying the scarf swiftly around her head she buttoned the coat loosely and rather casually around her. She set off along the little path leading from the back of the manor house up the gentle slopes immediately outside. She kept on calling Pippin over and over again but there was no answering mew; there was no reciprocal sound.

The further she walked in search of the cat the more important it became to her to find him. Pippin to her had now become something more than a mere cat and as she extended her search her anxiety became increasingly deep rooted. As well as worry and concern over the cat her mind was also filled with the strange voice she thought she had heard in the corridor. The strange voice had been reciting numbers. It couldn’t have been the tray she told herself. The tray had been standing absolutely stationary on the occasional table and the voice, or whatever it was, had still been going on.

Her mind explored several romantic possibilities; ghosts? A secret passage? She wasn’t sure that she believed in the former and secret passages are difficult to construct in thick-walled old houses built on the solid grey stone of Cumberland. True, the walls of “Grey Gables” were thick enough and to spare, but the blunt straightforwardness of the building material did not really permit the construction of elaborate internal labyrinths.

She gave up the idea of ghosts and secret passages and paused to sit on a lichen-covered boulder and think. The third prospect was romantic in a rather horrifying way. She wondered whether she was going out of her mind. It was a possibility. She tried hard to examine her immediate environment. She was alone in a huge rambling old country house, alone with her thoughts and with her eccentric old father, who kept himself so much to himself. If anybody had an excuse to start hearing voices she did. She wondered for a few moments whether this really was the answer. But if it really was an hallucination, if it was in some way a product of her own unhappy mind, why hadn’t the hallucination come in some more orthodox or understandable form.

The lonely girl, particularly the lonely girl with romantic inclinations, thought Catherine, was expected to project romantic images and there was nothing particularly romantic about the auditory fancy of a voice, quiet and rather matter-of-fact, methodically checking off a list of numbers.

The skies above the mountainside were growing grey and heavy and as Catherine looked up into the greyness she felt the first warning spot of rain. Not that rain was a stranger to “Grey Gables.”

She made her way swiftly down the path again. The storm clouds began to gather; the raindrops fell with increasing speed and became bigger and heavier as she hurried down the mountain side.

Catherine reached the gentler, lower slopes and her progress became easier, quicker. It was really raining now; raining hard. Catherine pulled the coat tightly about her. She could feel the rain soaking through her headscarf.

The path, which also did duty as a road went not onl. . .