The Insider

Book 69: Gateway Essentials

by Christopher Evans

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

What happens to a man whose entire personality undergoes a sudden and profound change? Stephen Marsh is a successful management consultant, happily married and with a daughter at university. Then one day he becomes cold to his wife, is unable to relate to his daughter, is uninterested in his job and his friends. The old Stephen Marsh seems to have been replaced by an intrusive newcomer equipped with new memories and new attitudes. The deuteron-Marsh recalls a previous half-century of life as a writer who shied away from human contact, nurturing a secret which separates him from other people. Incapable of giving love or companionship, the new Marsh struggles to continue his predecessor's lifestyle, torn between a longing for solitude and the bounds of ordinary obligation and affection.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 211

Sample

On Saturday morning he awoke after a night of fitful sleep to the ringing of the telephone. He did not feel like answering
it, but his caller was persistent, so finally he got out of bed. It was ten o’clock. He found his slippers and went out into
the hallway.


The coin-box dial-telephone was out of date, but he had so far resisted the Post Office’s attempts to have him replace it
with a videophone; it was enough that he had to talk to people. Reluctantly he picked up the receiver.


“George? Is that you?”

He recognized the voice. It was Anthony Boulton, a publisher for whom he had written several books.

“Yes,” he said.

“This is Anthony Boulton. I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“How are you these days?”

“I’m well enough.”

“Good, good. What have you been up to recently?”

“A book. What else?”

“How’s it coming?”

Boulton sounded determinedly cheerful, and was obviously about to discuss a commission with him. He was a workaholic, and
it was not at all unusual that he should make a business call on a Saturday morning.


“It’s finished,” he replied. “I delivered it last week.”

“Good.” A pause. “Listen, I’ve got something you might be interested in.”

When he said nothing, Boulton went on: “We’re looking for someone to do us a novel covering the quarter-century from the beginning of the war to the middle sixties. A big family drama set against the changing fortunes of the nation. The austerity
and danger of the war years eventually giving way to victory and then a growing period of prosperity culminating in the advent
of the pop rock generation. We reckon you’re just the man for the job. What do you think?”


It was typical of Boulton to describe a prospective book as though he had already written and was quoting from the blurb.
He felt two quite opposing reactions: the first, an immediate interest in the project; the second, an unfocused but strong
feeling that he should have nothing to do with it.


“The market’s ripe for something like this,” Boulton was saying. “With the mess the country’s in, people are getting nostalgic
for the old days. It would really capture the public imagination.”


He had a pedantic urge to tell Boulton that “nostalgia” in its strictest sense was a morbid homesickness rather than a generalized
yearning for the past; but he dismissed it as an irrelevancy.


“You’ve lived through those times, George,” Boulton went on. “You must know them well. And we’d pay you good money to get
the best from you. This would be the real McCoy. A serious, literate novel aimed at a wide audience. It’s about time you wrote
to the peak of your ability—stopped dashing off all those one-finger exercises you’ve been producing over the years.”


“It’s a little late in the day for me to start adopting artistic pretensions.”

“Of course it isn’t. You have it in you, George, you know that as well as I do. It’s time you tackled something worthy of
you.”


He still had mixed feelings about the idea. In the past he had often wondered whether he was capable of producing a novel
of genuine literary merit, but he had never attempted to do so. Throughout his career he had been an adaptable and crafts-manlike
writer, producing books on commission to fill gaps in publishers’ lists, but never attempting anything too ambitious because
he had not wanted to risk attracting a mass audience or any critical attention which might have brought him into the public eye. His motive for becoming a freelance writer was primarily
that it was a solitary job which involved a minimum of contact with others. Boulton’s project appealed to his deliberately
frustrated literary ambitions, but he was, he realized, reluctant to delve back into the past, even fictionally. Boulton had
wanted him to start with the Second World War, and it was in 1940 that he had first started his existence on Earth.


“Why don’t you come over for dinner this evening?” Boulton suggested. “We can talk it over then.”

“No,” he said, feeling uncomfortable and wanting to terminate the conversation.

Boulton, knowing his reputation for reclusiveness, did not press him.

“Think it over, anyway,” he said. “We’d really like to use you on this one, George.”

“I will.”

“Ring me on Monday and let me know whether you’re interested.”

“Yes.”

“If I don’t hear from you, I’ll ring you.”


“All right.”

Hastily he put the receiver down.

It was cold in the kitchen, and as he knelt before the gas fire, pushing a lighted match through the grille, his whole body
felt leaden, in the grip of a dull ache. With a vapid blue explosion, the gas ignited.


He ate a leisurely breakfast of grapefruit, cereal and toast, then retrieved the newspaper from the letter-box. The leading
article was a report of a demonstration in Trafalgar Square against the bill to denationalize the health service, the last
act of the outgoing government. Uninterested in politics, he turned to the sports page. England were doing badly in the Third
Test against South Africa.


Boulton’s project continued to nag at him, and after washing his breakfast dishes he went through into his bedroom and study. From the bottom drawer of his filing-cabinet he removed a cardboard document-wallet and took out three typewritten
sheets of paper.


At first there was just the uneven drone of the incoming bombers: remote yet relentlessly pervasive. Then the distant sound
of explosions began to punctuate the night.


The teenage boy huddling in the Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden snuggled deeper into the blanket draped around
his shoulders, enjoying the peculiar feeling of cosiness which he always experienced when a raid began. He put down the comic
he had been reading and listened as the explosions gradually grew louder. It was as if a horde of giant robots were running
amok through the city, trampling everything under their enormous, pounding feet—giant robots like the one in the magazine story he’d read that had torn the Statute of Liberty off its pedestal and carried
it away into the night.


Louder and louder. In between the explosions he could hear the hectic staccato of the anti-aircraft guns. He began to feel
restless and tense, and wished his mother would come down to the shelter. But she hated it there, hated the dampness and the
smell of earth and gas-mask rubber, although she wouldn’t let him stay with her in the house during a raid. “Don’t do as I do,” she would say to him, “do as I tell you.” If his father had still been alive, he’d have made her come to the shelter, for sure.


The boy took two small wads of grubby cotton-wool from his trouser pocket and put one in each ear. The bombs were getting
close, and he didn’t feel cosy at all now, but scared. Three days ago the butcher’s shop in the next road had been hit, completely
demolished, along with two houses and someone’s car. He’d pinched a hubcap as a souvenir, and one of his friends had got a
whole front lamp.


He put his hands over his ears, but the noise grew still louder; he could even hear the horrible ripping sound of the bombs
coming down. He fell to the floor in a foetal ball, squeezing his eyes tightly shut and pressing his forefingers into his
ears to try to shut out the noise. The shelter was vibrating with the explosions, and he huddled ever deeper into the blanket
and imagined that he could withdraw his whole body into his mind where it would be safe from harm.


There was a sudden silence, out of which came a terrifying shrieking which abruptly ended with such an eruption of sound that
the very ground shuddered; this was immediately followed by a clattering on the walls of the shelter as if someone was throwing
great handfuls of stones and rocks at it. After that, the explosions gradually diminished in frequency and intensity until
finally the boy was aware only of the pounding of blood in his head. He took his hands from his ears; everything was quiet.
Presently the all-clear siren began to sound.


A fragment of rubble was blocking the entrance to the shelter, and he had to push it laboriously aside before he was able
to crawl out. Across the street a house had been hit by incendiaries and was ablaze. The bitter smell of smoke was in the
air, searchlights flashed and intersected in the night sky, and there were orange glows lighting up the horizon. Turning,
he saw that debris littered the length of the garden, all the way up to the—


He ran screaming towards the house, calling out for his mother over and over again. The bottom half of the rear wall of the
building was still intact, but the roof and the bedrooms were gone and he could see piles of rubble and broken beams through
the shattered scullery window. Everything was shrouded in a haze of dust and smoke.


His mother was sitting in an armchair beside the sink, silhouetted by a faintly pulsing silvery glow, a half-knitted striped
scarf hanging from the pins which she still held in her hands. Her body was tilted towards the washbasin, in which the great
lump of stone lay. The top half of her head had been crushed by the falling masonry, and what remained was a bloody mass of
gore and dust. The boy let out a fierce, preternatural wail, and sank to his knees, his claw-like hands going to his eyes
as if to gouge them out.


The all-clear sirens had long ceased before the boy’s keening died into a weak, helpless sobbing. Head hung over his chest,
he looked like a Catholic penitent at the strangest of shrines, his body washed by the pearly glow which still throbbed, more
strongly now, in the background. He looked up again at his mother, but against the waxing light, of which he was only now
aware, her body was simply a black shadow with no discernible features. The light was coming from the devastated living-room
beyond the scullery, and the boy stumbled blindly to his feet and clambered over the debris to the skeleton of the living-room door.


What he saw was unlike anything he had ever seen before, or could ever have imagined. An oval ball of pulsating silver-white
light, like a perfectly symmetrical egg larger than the span of his outstretched arms, sat on the middle of the plaster-strewn
carpet, its ghostly, fluctuating radiance throwing the features of the wrecked room into eerie, intermittent relief. Everything
was coated with a film of greyish plaster dust, like an ancient, decaying tomb that had lain undisturbed for centuries.


His immediate impulse was to flee from this strange and terrifying object; but as he stared at it, partly numb with shock,
partly hypnotized by its pulsations, his fear ebbed away and was replaced by curiosity. He moved towards it and stretched
out his right hand.


At the moment of contact his body went rigid, then he slumped backwards on to the floor and lay still amongst a pile of plaster
and broken willow-pattern crockery. Several minutes passed, while the light pulsed more rapidly and more brightly, before
finally his limbs moved and his eyes opened. Slowly, tentatively, he arose. He stared at the desolation all around him, then
at the egg, then finally down at his own body. A low humming began to issue from the egg, and its pulsations grew so rapid
that they blurred into a single, continuous effulgence.


The boy moved through the doorframe into the scullery. He paused to stare at his mother’s corpse, his expression a mixture
of curiosity and faint bewilderment, then went out through the back door into the garden, down the littered flagstone path
to the garden gate. A.R.P. men were herding people into groups on the street, and firemen were hosing the blazing building
opposite, the jets of water being swallowed by the inferno and regurgitated as gouts of steam. The egg’s humming rose to a
whine.


He stepped out on to the pavement and began walking down the street, gazing at the knots of people with their blackened faces
and their glazed eyes, but not pausing in his stride. Before he had gone twenty paces, a rumbling arose from the ruined house,
and suddenly its remaining structure disintegrated in a shrill explosion of white fire. He did not look back.


The pages had been written over twenty years ago: a reconstruction of the events leading up to his invasion of the boy’s mind.
He had tried to recreate the past in the hope that it would enable him to discover his true origins; but the attempt had failed
miserably, which was why he had taken the account no further.


On impulse he sat down and typed the pages out again on his new word-processor, half-hoping that he would gain some new insight
or image in doing so. But nothing of this sort happened, and he did not add a word to the original account. While the printer
produced the fresh sheets, he crumpled the originals and tossed them into his wastepaper bin.


He could remember practically nothing of his original existence. All he knew was that he had come to Earth during the madness
that was now known as the Second World War, and that his craft had been irreparably damaged, brought abruptly to the ground,
and that his life essence had been fading when he had sensed the boy’s approach and contact, and that the instinct of self-preservation
had caused him to reach out and suddenly find himself within the boy. The process of transfer had been unwitting, but it had
saved him from extinction.


But his past, his real past, had been lost in the act. Awakening for the first time in the boy’s body he had sensed strange,
incomprehensible images and associations fleeing from his mind under the welter of new impressions, thoughts and emotions
which constituted the consciousness of a fourteen-year-old human mind. He was convinced that these fleeting images were the
echoes of his former existence, the wholly alien aspects of it which could not be integrated into the human brain and had
been ejected, as the body ejects foreign matter: his true identity, vanishing like a vivid dream which evaporates as the dreamer
awakes. Effectively his consciousness had been anthropomorphized by the transfer, and he retained only the basic remembrance
of his alien origins, “becoming” instead the fourteen-year-old George Blair.


Yet this remembrance of his true nature and the deep sense of estrangement which he felt as the loss of his alien identity had remained at the core of his being from the outset and over
the years had reinforced the sense of otherness which he felt from the rest of the human race. Wandering through the streets
of London on his first night in human form, he had been coldly fascinated by the chaos and destruction which had surrounded
him. Later, when he had adapted somewhat to human life and had learned more about his fellow beings, he had developed a profound
distaste for the bizarre manifestations of human behaviour which had produced such suffering and degradation. Later still,
when he had discovered that suffering and degradation were not confined to war, that jealousy, avarice, prejudice and hatred
were pervasive in human behaviour, demeaning people on a smaller but no less invidious scale, he had resolved to detach himself
as much as possible from human contact, to live a solitary life, free from the follies and petty rivalries of his fellow beings.


And he had survived—survived for fifty-one years in human form. It had been difficult at first, but he had used the resources
which he had inherited from the boy to accommodate himself to the many difficult situations into which he had been thrust
without revealing his true nature. And as the years had passed it had become easier, if no less palatable, to behave in a
seemingly ordinary manner, to pretend to be a normal human being. For several years he had worked as a groundsman at a private
school in Essex—a satisfyingly solitary occupation which had had the propitious side effect of allowing him to improve his
education with access to the school’s library on weekends. After the war he had returned to London and for over a decade had
immersed himself in a series of routine and anonymous jobs such as general labouring and temporary office work, all the while
reading voraciously and gradually discovering that the most satisfactory form of self-expression to which he could aspire
was writing. Eventually he had begun selling articles and short stories to newspapers and magazines before finally obtaining
a commission for his first book—a routine Gothic romance—becoming a freelance writer thereafter.


He took an aged copy of the book, Death at the Witching Hour, from the shelf which he reserved for copies of his own work. It had been published under the pseudonym of “Marion Roberts”.
He opened it to the first page:


The dim lamp at the centre of the ceiling was covered by a green glass shade, its pale verdant light insufficient to penetrate
the corners of the large room. Through the bay window the bare arms of trees rose and fell beneath the dark, moonless sky.
The wind whipped shadowy leaves across the lawn, and the window frames heaved and creaked with each gust.


The coal fire which burned in the wide hearth contributed almost as much light as the electric bulb. The five figures gathered
around the fire talked in muted tones, straining their eyes in an attempt to see their companions’ faces as they addressed
them. They made no sudden movements, performing the smallest action with deliberation. All five sat or stood at right angles
to the fire, from which position they had a clear view through the window. The brass hands of the clock on the mantelpiece
indicated ten minutes to midnight.


He closed the book and replaced it on the shelf. He had written it in seven weeks, sust. . .