The Inner Wheel

Book 112: Gateway Essentials

by Keith Roberts

Genres: Short Stories; Science Fiction; Sci-fi Anthologies & Collections

Synopsis

Men hammered at phones as the lines burned their hands; distributor caps split, engines flashed into flame as gasoline from torn lines doused their blocks; computers rebelled, barraged their operators with lunatic results. An army of poltergeists was loose, ripping and snapping, jamming beyond all repair the machinery of war.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

The voices are in a void. The void has no color. Neither is it dark.

There are formless shapes in the void. There are soundless noises. There are swirlings and pressures, twistings and squeezings. The voices fill the gaps between nothingness. The voices are impatient. “Where?” they ask. “Where …?”

“I told you where….”

“See for us and tell again…. Where is he …?”

“Getting on a train….”

“Tell us what you see. Where is the train …?”

“In a station, where do you think …?”

There are hammers and whips and pincers.

“WHERE IS THE TRAIN?”

“T-Tanbridge. Please, THE STATION IS TAN-BRIDGE——”

There are flickerings. “Gently,” say the voices. “Gently. Tell us what you see….”

“I…. There are roses. The platforms are covered with them. The … train is green. The sky is very bright blue. Everything is quiet, nobody moving about. The coach stands in its bay. I see the sunlight lying across it and on the platforms. It lies in s-squares on the platforms, on the footbridge. There is a breeze now. A piece of paper blows and skips; the roses sway. I hear the little thorny sound of leaves scratching together. Please, no more….”

Somewhere there might be giggling. Somewhere there might be rage. “Tell us about him….”

A lens moves, seeing but unseen, examining textures of glass and wood and leaves. The station is haunted in the hot, still afternoon.

“He is … sitting in the train. In the front seat, just behind the driver’s cab. He is … tall. He is … dark. His hair is dark and rather long. It hangs across one eye. His face is thin. His eyes are very blue. His hands look … strong. Well kept, bony. Square nails, white half-moons where the cuticle is pushed back. He uses a good aftershave——”

The giggling again. “You like him….”

“Leave me alone——”

Jostlings. “See…. We want to see….” The not-colors swirl.

“No—”

“ … dispatched in accordance with your order of the twenty-third….”

“I’M TRYING TO WORK——”

“Gently….”

“Leave me, then. Leave me. I’ll tell you….”

“Good,” say the voices. “Good. Tell us what you see….”

“He’s … taking out his cigarettes. Lighting one. Flicking the match in the holder. The m-motorman is coming now. He gets in, starts the engines. Puts the … handle thing on that works the brakes….”

“No,” say the voices. “No, no…. See for us. See deep….”

“No——”

Awfulness. The un-shapes scramble and pulse. “Deep,” say the voices. “See deep….”

“I shall … be sick….”

“DEEP …!”

The camera, the lens, floating close and closer. Somewhere inside the train, inside the man, inside the eyes are other pictures for it, closed each within each like a nest of mirages. The pictures twinkle, fade and strengthen and fade again, reduce themselves to glimmering node points, swell. Somewhere, someone bites lips till they taste salt. Only the voice is calm. It speaks from the gray place the other side of terror. It husks and limps, feeling shared pain.

“I … see the rain. It bounces on pavements, pours along gutters. I see houses. Rows of houses. Their bricks are bright with the rain. I see a church, or a chapel…. All round——Oh, it’s a chapel, chapel of a c-cemetery. The … houses all round like a high wall in the rain. The … men walking. The thing they are pushing doesn’t make a noise because the cart has rubber tires. The … people are coming now. Their shoulders are bent in the rain. They say, ‘It always rains on days like this….’ I see the f-flowers; the rain is on the flowers, on their petals. The earth is dark because of the rain. I see the … coffin going down into the grave….”

“Gently,” say the voices. And, “Gently, gently….”

“I see the houses again. One house. The people are inside and the great whispering cars have gone…. The rain cries against the windows like a thing shut out wanting to get in and the people don’t know what to say to each other, what to say to him…. An old lady is making tea. There are sandwiches all ready, but he can’t eat; he knows the bread is full of flesh—PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME SEE ANY MORE——”

“Enough,” say the voices. “Gently, enough…. We know he’s coming now; he’s nearly here. It’s enough….” And the camera, the eye, withdraws itself silently, folding in, closing, shutting away.

“ … to our order number C5086….”

The voices are in a void. The void has no color. Neither is it dark.

In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year.

Jimmy Stringer lay back in the seat, blew smoke, regarded the Hush Puppies that terminated his slimly trousered legs. The rhythm of the line of poetry pattered in his mind, stressed by the carriage wheels that rang now, fiercely-mourn, fiercely-mourn, over the rail joints. A great artist had strung those syllables together sometime before he died of … was it 18 Scotches, in a New York bar? Jimmy shook his head, eyes vague. Before, the words had been just angry, lovely sounds; now he knew what they meant.

Ahead, the branch line stretched into sun haze. A little flag stop swam into sight, platforms wreathed again with roses, standards and climbers that exploded like silent fireworks against the thick blue of the sky. He saw lamp standards gay to their tops with the brightness, fresh paintwork on railings and trellises, glowing flower beds edged with whitewashed stones. The train brakes came on in a series of diminishing whooshes, the coach breathed to a stop, and the driver turned off his engines.

Jimmy stroked ash from his cigarette into the tray, sat feeling the sun strike through glass to burn his cheek. Somewhere, footsteps ticked, faded into silence. Above the carriage, a wooden bridge spanned the single track. In front, the rails curved slightly to the right and vanished between low-mounded hills. Somewhere out there, a town Jimmy had never seen existed in four-o’clock drowsiness. He asked himself, Will it be any good? Will it be a place I can stay in for a while? He told himself, Somehow it’s crazy, but you’re a man on the run. Can you stop running there?

Running. There are times when the mind balks, hits a fact it can’t take, throws up an equation that gives a batty answer. Then maybe the deep, thinking part of you whimpers and arches back into stasis, and after a time of that, any course of action seems good. So you start to run. You’re not running to anywhere, just away from where you are. You’re an electric puppet; the impossibility rides there on your shoulder while your motor nerves twitch and your body takes you away and away.

A problem is an equation. Made up of elements. Singly you can take them; it’s trying to fit them all together that makes your skull sing. Jimmy remembered an element: the studio back in town. Light filtering through inadequate windows, littered drawing boards, filing cabinets top-heavy with drifts of paper and card. The yellowing fluorescents, their tubes flyblown; electric cords, cellophane-taped here and there to the edges of desks, that fed tired Anglepoise lamps from a medusan confusion. It was a place where you could work and work and see your dreams give up and curl at the edges and realize the ad game was a machine, a bloody machine that sorted the heavyweight souls from the middleweight, the middleweight from the lightweight, the lightweight from the souls that didn’t rate at all. The man who sat at your elbow painting in the shine on endless successions of bright-green lawn mowers had been a Prix de Rome.

An element, an aspect of existence. Further back, buried in the impossible matrix of time, were others. His father … only the image of him was fading, losing itself under a rippling and a hotness; the glaring, hopeful, hopeless time people call adolescence. Stringer rubbed his face. Adolescence is the time you want freedom. You take it, snatch it, eat it, maybe, before the folk round you grab it back. Nobody can help you. Not then. Least of all a tired old man trying to come to terms with life.

So he’d shucked his father off and gone to London to learn how to be a Great Artist with capital letters, and maybe there’d been times over the years when he’d thought the old devil wasn’t too bad after all; he’d just breeze back home one day and say hello. But the day had never come. Instead, there was a telegram. It told him the thing he’d planned on doing, it wouldn’t get done now. It told him he’d run out of tomorrows.

Jimmy stubbed the cigarette and lit another. A coach cleared the line ahead. A signal dropped its smoky-amber arm. The driver pulled back jerkily on the deadman’s handle. The carriage began to gather speed. Moved out into the sunlight, nosed among the hills.

Jimmy told himself, The old man had had it good those last few years. Better than he’d ever realized. He’d made the grade, in his own way, even got his name up over the gate of the yard in faded swaggering letters: JOHN STRINGER, SCRAP DEALER. And, underneath, a motto, a legend: EVERYTHING HAS ITS PRICE.

Elements in a random equation. Stringer nodded to himself bitterly in the bright train. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

He tried to remember the rain, visualize the sky out-side the carriage, gray, the windows streaked with spots. The exercise was impossible. Like remembering a pain, trying to work out after it had gone why you threshed and rolled and felt like dying. But that was a defense mechanism. Maybe this was as well. Dear God, protect me from the dullness and the rain.

It had rained at the funeral. And afterward. The morning after, Jimmy sitting in a little cluttered office, the man in front of him hemming and coughing and seeming as dusty and yellowed as the shelves of files that lined the walls. Jimmy listened to the voice again scratching its way from fact to monstrous fact while the rain pattered soft against the glass. Death duties, of course; he understood a large amount would be lost. The affairs were confused. Some little time would be needed…. But the money that had been left for him, the money he’d known nothing about … yes, a fairly substantial sum by any standards.

Jimmy licked his lips, beginning to sense the sheer size of the problem his father had left him by dying alone like that. He said, “How much?” He knew his voice was unsteady, knew, too, that whatever he said would be misunderstood. And the stranger had steepled his fingers, winced to drive his glasses back up his nose, looked at him with eyes that held every expression and no expression.

“Immediately…. Well, I would say, Mr. Stringer—in round figures, you understand, very broad figures—forty thousand pounds.”

The driver touched a control and the train hooted, a long double note full somehow with the sensation of summer evenings, like the chuckle of water, the sound of a lawn mower. Jimmy shook his head again. His father had been what he never would be—a businessman. They’d told him, one of the strangers had told him after the funeral, they thought old Stringer had gone crazy when he bought that ancient half-track. Old kraut job it was, streaked with rust. They’d dug it out of some rotting stockpile down in the Channel Islands. Then John had bought another and another, snapping them up where he could find them, even bringing them in from the Continent. Forty quid here, 50 there, 100, 200 … Bren carriers, beaten-up scout cars, lorries, command trucks; German, British, American…. If it was old and smashed and had fought in the war, John Stringer would buy. Because everything has a price. Light tanks, side arms, steel helmets, badges, Flammen-werfer…. And it had paid off. Jimmy sneered. Forty thousand. Say a big outfit wants to make a film, say they need the props and you’re the only man they can come to—you can make that in a year. You’ve got to know the ropes, of course, and get to the right boys and slip tenners to odd people for not being in such and such a place at such and such a time, but these things can be arranged.

He stubbed a cigarette and caught himself lighting another almost instantly. He asked himself angrily, Could I help being born the sort of person I am with the sort of mind I’ve got? Slow to hate, slower to love, the brain forging relationships like the links of a chain, slow, slow … but when the job’s done, when the links are made, they’re good for the only part of eternity that interests me—my lifetime…. He told himself, My father was like that. He was a West Country man. He might forget, but he could never forgive. Ten years of silence while he made the money he couldn’t give me when I was young and silly and wanted to cut a dash. That’s what the wallet in my pocket says. That’s what the new checkbook is telling me. The world owes you a living, my son … so out thee can go and live like a rich little king.

He pushed his forehead against his clenched hands. I didn’t mean it, he thought. We none of us mean what we do.

The hand was shaking his sleeve gently, insistently. He looked up, startled. The old lady’s eyes searched his face, changing in quick shifts of focus and direction. “Are you all right?” she said. “Are you quite all right?”

“Er … yeah. Thanks.” He made his mouth smile. “Just maybe a little tired. Long journey … thanks for asking.”

“Ahh….” She sat back across the gangway, seeming relieved. Looked out through the window, then back to him quickly, birdlike. Nodded, smiled, bobbed her silver head. “Are you traveling to the end of the line?”

“Yes,” he said. “Place called Warwell-on-Starr.”

Sharply, “Then you don’t know Warwell?”

“No, I’ve … never been there. I reckoned I might stay awhile,” he said, “if I like it.”

She simpered. “Oh, you will…. You’ll love Warwell, everybody does. Such a nice little town.”

“Yeah,” said Jimmy carefully. “Er … yeah.”

He sat back trying to think. The image that had flickered across his mind just then: the river, the trees, the flint church tower nestling…. But he’d never seen the place he was going to; he knew nothing about it. He decided, It won’t be anything like that. There’ll be brutal acres of rail sidings, scrubby pink little developments marching in all directions. Ten to one I shall loathe the dump.

Queer, though, this feeling of unreality, a detached half awareness, a dream state in which visions and imaginings could be as real as the touchable things round him. It was as if shapes jostled at the edges of his mind, brightnesses brighter than the sky, shadows that mocked at the sunlight. He shrugged. These were effects of heightened perception, of jangling nerves that now mercifully were beginning to ease. For days past, life had been like a motion-picture film shown on some huge screen. Too big, too close, too detailed. He’d wanted to pull back, get out from under, but he couldn’t.

Warwell. Why the devil had he run here, anyway? His father’s accountant had talked about the place, but he knew somehow the name had been in his mind before that. When? When had it started. What had triggered it? He’d wanted somewhere quiet, somewhere he could go to and be alone and think and chew at his problem, but why had one name seemed to stand out from every map he opened? Warwell, a place on a river he’d never seen.

• • •

For a time the rails had been winding through the low hills. Round the last of the bends, the way straightened and Jimmy saw how the little bridges appeared each under each, like images in two opposed mirrors. Beneath the last of them, the coach stopped again and there were the lamp standards once more, hidden to their tops by creepers that rioted the length of the diminutive station. The branch line was certainly damned pretty. Somehow, even the waywardness of it, the curving and wriggling of the tracks, soothed like a balm. As though a world was being shut away behind each grassy shoulder of the hills; as if ahead, islanded, was all that was sweet and real. Jimmy stubbed the cigarette half-smoked. There can be, he told himself, no sense of homecoming. Not to a place you’ve never seen. He glanced sideways at the old lady, expecting another comment, but she stayed quiet. She was sitting staring in front of her, half smile fossilized on her face as though she could already see the nice town ahead.

Jimmy told himself, It could just be…. Could be I’ve met a whole series of nice, interesting, interested people one after the other. A ticket clerk, a porter at Tanbridge, where I changed to the branch, an old lady on a train. All interested to hear I was going to Warwell, all keen to tell me it’s a nice little town. Sometimes life’s like that—pointless coincidences get themselves strung together like beads.

The coach was moving again. The train wheels boomed on a bridge. Jimmy leaned forward, frowning, grappling at something that refused to come out into the light … and sat quite still, feeling icy cold. Ahead, the town made itself. More hills closed off a vista of black-and-white houses, steep, wavy roofs. There was the river, swinging back to cross in front of Warwell like a moat. There was a church, flint-built and nestling.

The station was an amber box enclosing dim areas of platform. The coach glided into coolness, wheezed, stopped where the rails stopped as suddenly and startlingly as life. Stringer lifted his bags, felt the sharp rectangle of the ticket dig into his right palm. He felt out of breath and stiff, as if he were ending some huge, dangerous odyssey. He passed through the barrier, turned back to see the coach hulking against the light. Beside him a girl with good legs and burning-red hair spoke suddenly. “Heard you talking on the train,” she said cheekily. “Hope you enjoy your stay. It’s such a nice town….” She turned while Jimmy was staring and clicked away.

“Yeah,” he said. He walked out of the station into a sunlit square. He saw a garage, doors standing open, a taxi rank, a man lounging, reading a newspaper. A few yards away, the river slid cool and green and hung with willows, filling the air with some cool suggestion of presence that was more subtle than scent. Across the street, a towering ugly-pretty pile of waterside Gothic proclaimed itself the George Hotel. Jimmy walked toward it, swinging his grip, feeling the sun burn on the side of his neck. From the town beyond came a buzz of sound, cars, voices. Somewhere a wheel turned, slow, unseen and unheard, its rim as big as a valley.

The voices chirrup in the deep coolness of night, while the river glides black past the houses and the church. “Wrong,” say the voices. “Wrong, all wrong…. He’s wrong for us. Who brought him here…?”

“I … I didn’t know….”

“Wrong,”. . .