The Shift Key

by John Brunner

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

When the sleepy town of Weyharrow is enveloped by a mysterious fog, the inhabitants find themselves behaving in strange and dangerous ways. Dr Steven Glaze, a young probationary GP, prescribes a most unorthodox treatment for arthritis; the vicar proclaims in morning service that the villagers are in the hands of the devil; and Phyllis Knabbe tragically commits suicide. Throughout the village people have seemingly taken leave of their senses. Soon word leaks out and Weharrow becomes inundated both by the national press and a bus load of hippies seeking a magical experience, who believe that a nearby ancient pagan temple is somehow responsible for this strange phenomenon. But Steven Glaze and Jenny, a reporter for the local newspaper, feel sure that there is more to this than meets the eye and they set out to discover the cause - supernatural or otherwise - of everyone's drastically altered behaviour.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 224

Sample

Victor Draycock awoke to the taste of excitement.

Last night he had been restless. Despite the swirl of autumn mist that filled the valley of the River Chap, he had had to take a midnight walk in order to unwind. Later, though, in sleep, it seemed his subconscious had been working overtime. He had figured out precisely how best to phrase an article he had been planning for the past two months, publication of which in the Chapminster Chronicle had been as good as promised.

In the village of Weyharrow Goodsir, where he lived with his wife Carol and their six-year-old son Tommy, a dispute was raging about the two kinds of visitors it attracted, especially during the summer. There were prosperous tourists lured by its picturesque site and handsome stone buildings; they met with the grudging approval of the local gentry because they did nothing more disruptive than take photographs, uttered properly admiring comments, and lunched or dined expensively at the Bridge Hotel, whose landlord was chairman of the parish council. Then there were the others, mostly under thirty, mostly shabby, drawn here for entirely different reasons, who were more likely to sit shirtless and barefoot on the car-park wall of the pub across the road. They met with no approval at all from the gentry, though some from the young folk of the village, to whom they constituted a welcome diversion in a generally boring existence – and likewise from Victor, who prided himself on siding with the younger generation and had made himself immensely unpopular with the officious ladies of the Weyharrow Society by referring to the second type of visitors as ‘pilgrims’.

His article was intended to dot the said ladies one in the eye, haul them over the coals and otherwise leave them discomfited.

All of a sudden he saw it complete, as though he had read it in a dream and remembered it word for word.

He glanced at the bedside clock. Over an hour remained before the regular time to rouse/wash/dress/feed young Tommy and get him off to school. But the light beyond the bedroom curtains indicated that last night’s mist had melted, leaving – for October – a fine morning. This was too good a chance to miss.

Beside him Carol still lay peacefully asleep. Moving gently so as not to disturb her, he eased his bony frame out of bed, detoured to the adjacent bathroom to pee – he left the loo unflushed for fear of waking Tommy – and brush his teeth and comb his lank black hair, then made himself a mug of instant coffee. Balancing it with care, still in pyjamas and dressing-gown, he scrambled up the counter-balanced ladder that gave access from the upstairs landing to the cubbyhole above the eaves where dwelt his pride and joy, his computer cum word processor, safe for a year or two from the inquisitiveness of his son. (How long before the boy grew tall enough to reach the dangling rope that hauled the ladder down?)

He was delighted with the machine that here reposed on a desk he had botched together out of scraps. He had owned it for barely three months, but it had proved as simple to use as the salesman had promised, and working on it had become second nature in next to no time. His old typewriter, on which he bestowed a scornful glance in passing, was gathering dust because he kept forgetting to bring up a plastic bag to wrap it in.

Its successor, on the other hand was lovingly protected under half an old sheet. Bundling that up, he switched on, loaded the necessary floppy discs, and began to thump the keyboard in the grip of white-hot inspiration.

Countless people [he began] who have never visited the west of England know the name of Weyharrow Goodsir, the historic village that straddles the River Chap between Chapminster and Hatterbridge, a few miles south of Trimborne.

Most, no doubt, recognize it because it has featured in so many publications of the British Tourist Authority. It’s a village of classic form, centred on a triangular green. On one side stand the church, the parsonage and the village hall; on the second, a line of houses punctuated by the primary school; on the third, more houses some of which have been converted into shops, concluding with a petrol station whose pumps and workshops are customarily excused by residents showing visitors around on the grounds that, though they are a bit of an eyesore, one has to pay the price of progress. Perhaps it’s indicative of Weyharrow’s world view that its people have been saying much the same since 1926, the year the garage was erected …

On a rise overlooking the valley of the Chap, catching the morning sun a fraction earlier than the houses below, stands Weyharrow Court: a stone-built manor house dating back to the fourteenth century but much modernized and added to.

The Court has seen many changes in the village apart from that intrusive garage. Farms that once abutted the green have long been built over; the ancient ford has been replaced by a bridge – shivering now under the burden of traffic it was never designed for – thanks to which, between the wars, the ‘new estate’ of incongruous brick houses sprang up on the other side of the river; and, of course, the woods that formerly fledged the valley’s flanks have been cut down, to the considerable profit of the Court’s proprietors, the Goodsir family, who still own about half the land in the area, including most of what’s been built on.

Noticing the name of the village, most people assume it must have been in the possession of the same family since time immemorial – or at least since the Norman Conquest, to which we owe so many similar names (Norton Fitzwarren, for example, and the Fitzpaines to be found further west).

Not so. ‘Time immemorial’ in this sense reaches back no further than the age of a Masonic lodge.

Proud of that little gibe, Victor paused to savour it, sipping his coffee. He reviewed the previous paragraph, altered ‘in the possession of’ to ‘held by’ without needing to consult his instruction manual, and resumed.

True, Weyharrow stands on a most ancient site. Its ford marked an important crossing-place, used by Roman legions and Saxon traders, and ultimately what financed its replacement by a bridge – timber in the fifteenth century, stone in the seventeenth – was the toll levied on drovers taking cattle, sheep and even geese by road to London.

And it is also true that it formed part of an estate granted by William the Conqueror to one of his retainers. His name, though, was nothing like Goodsir. If a faded inscription at Hatterbridge is to be believed, it was Odo de Beyze, but he died before Domesday Book was compiled.

In any case, for some reason he studiously neglected this corner of his land. It may have been because the river marked its border, and his neighbour was a powerful rival; it may have been, as we shall see, for a subtler reason. At all events, at his death the estate changed hands, and continued to do so at frequent intervals for the next five or six hundred years.

Victor paused for more coffee and amended ‘land’ to ‘lands’.

By the eighteenth century there was little to be seen at Weyharrow save the church, the manor house (now the Court), a few wattle-and-daub cottages, and a number of scattered farms whose occupants enjoyed a widespread reputation for debauchery and ungodliness.

And one other important and substantial building, adjacent to the ford – not the modern Bridge Hotel, but the inn, then called the Slaking House … where, presumably, one slaked one’s thirst (though some claim it had to do with processing lime).

This was known far and wide as not just a tavern but a rendezvous for riff-raff. Smuggled goods were traded there; robbers and highwaymen begged refuge from a succession of corrupt landlords who, for a price, were prepared to guide them to hideouts in the then-dense woods, and many local farmers sheltered them in barns or sold them horses to help them on their way.

Romantic as such a situation may now seem, that was not how it struck the Reverend Matthew Goodsir, of Northumberland, when – thanks to a distant cousin dying childless – he inherited the lordship of the manor.

He was an enthusiastic supporter of John Wesley and the Methodists; indeed, he had been stoned out of his pulpit in Northumberland for heresy and his patron had deprived him of his living. He took the coincidence between his own name and the tag that had already come to be applied to Weyharrow as a divine omen, moved to the Court – which he found partly ruined and which he restored – and set about purifying the morals of those unexpectedly fallen into his charge.

However, his plans met with an obstacle at once.

He wanted, naturally, to close the Slaking House, that den of iniquity. The incumbent landlord, one Jacob Fidger (a name still found in the village), figuratively thumbed his nose, and with impunity. Almost alone of the people in the area, he rejoiced in freehold possession of the ground his tavern stood on. At some point in the previous century the lord of the manor had needed funds to send his eldest son to court, and the taverner had supplied them against title-deeds in perpetuity.

‘Tell you what, squire,’ said Landlord Fidger – so the story goes. ‘I’ll meet you and your Methodies half-way. I’ll change my sign. Instead of being called the Slaking House, from now on ’twill be the Marriage at Cana!’

‘That’s blasphemy!’ fumed the Reverend Goodsir, but there was nothing he could do, and the countryside resounded with laughter at his expense.

He would have been even more put out if he had known a few of the facts that modern scholarship has revealed.

His half-full coffee-mug was growing a greyish skin. Victor ignored it. He had hit his stride and the words were pouring out as fast as he could press the keys.

Specifically, he would have been mortified had he known that the coincidence between his own surname and that of Weyharrow had nothing to do with the family connection that led to him inheriting. It is, though, probable that he went to his grave without realizing that ‘Goodsir’ in the West Country has no connection with the ‘goodsire’ or ‘gudesire’ (godfather or grandfather) from which his own northern patronymic derived, but is rather a variant of ‘Goodman’, meaning the Devil. ‘Goodman’s Plot’ and ‘Goodsir’s Piece’ are still to be found as fieldnames, implying that the land is so poor only the Devil himself could scrape a living from it.

As to what would have happened had he known the true meaning of ‘Weyharrow’ … Well, that boggles the imagination.

The reverend gentleman fancied himself as a bit of an antiquarian – what we would nowadays term an archaeologist. But, like most such in his period, he preferred to conduct research not in the field but solely from books. (Incidentally, to his credit does stand one achievement: he founded the great library at Weyharrow Court, long a mecca for historians, although alas threatened with being broken up by the present owners. So priceless a collection deserves a better fate than being peddled abroad for private gain.)

Old Matthew was doubtless aware that there were many ancient remains in the vicinity. What he certainly did not know – this is attested by a surviving letter – was the literal significance of the village’s name.

‘Wey’ or ‘Wye’ occurs frequently all over the south of England, often if not always with the meaning ‘pagan god or idol’.

And ‘Harrow’ means ‘site of a heathen temple’ …

Victor remembered his coffee, took a sip and found it cold and nasty, set it by and carried on, fingers flying.

Members of the Weyharrow Society are forever boasting about how they ‘keep up local traditions’ – yet they are vociferous in their objection to the crowds of young people who for several summers past have descended on the village from all over Britain and even from the Continent, many arriving on foot like the pilgrims of old.

However much one disagrees with their talk of ‘dragon power’ and ‘ley lines’, it is they who are truly keeping up the local traditions – traditions far older than the Goodsirs’ day. They come to Weyharrow in search of the mystic forces that impelled our long-lost ancestors to choose Weyharrow as the site of a temple housing an idol whose fame survives in the very name of the village. It is they, rather than the residents who imagine that history began with the arrival of Reverend Matthew, who –

‘Vic! Vic!’

It was Carol shouting at the top of her voice from the landing below.

‘Vic, don’t you know what time it is? Tommy will be late for school, and so will you!’

‘Coming!’ Victor answered with a sigh.

He would have liked to add his point about how Odo, a devout Christian, must have steered clear of Weyharrow thanks to its pagan associations, but it didn’t really matter. Albeit a trifle long, what he had written was good, and he knew it. And even though he hadn’t had time to print it out or even make a backup copy, it would be safe on the disc.

‘VIC!’

‘Coming!’ he called again, and entered the ‘store’ and ‘shut-down’ commands as he had done already countless times. The screen blanked, and he reached for the power-switch.

And froze.

The VDU had lit again. Now it was displaying the bland message:

TEXT DELETED.

What?

But he had hit – he knew he had hit – precisely the commands he always used!

He sat with jaw agape, confronted with the need to reconstruct everything he had written from scratch … but his inspiration was fading even as he thought about it, fading like dew in morning sunshine, fading as completely as a dream, as the words he had consigned to his machine.

From below came the sound of Tommy squalling at the top of his lungs, and another, now despairing, shriek from Carol. Slowly, fighting the grip of paralysing disbelief, Victor rose from his chair and turned towards the ladder.

But I know I used the right command, I know I did. I know!

In most respects, apart from the unseasonable brightness of the sunshine, Weyharrow Goodsir’s day had begun quite normally, to the accompaniment of crowing cocks and barking dogs and growling tractors.

What had happened to Vic Draycock was merely the first of many signs that that was not how it was due to end.

Stick – his name was Simon Bember but everyone had called him Stick for so long he’d forgotten why – yawned and rubbed his eyes and found he was asleep on the living-room couch. Eventually he decided he was wrong. Actually he was awake on the living-room couch, and cold because the window was ajar. He looked at his watch. It had stopped. The hi-fi was on, though – had been all night, since he dozed off listening to his much-worn copy of Terry Riley’s In C. He switched to radio and twisted the tuning knob until he hit a station which was giving a time-check.

Early, thank goodness. Sheila was never in the sweetest of moods when he overslept.

He swung his legs to the floor, yawning hugely, and ran his fingers through his gingery beard and hair. His jeans and T-shirt looked none the worse for being slept in. But then, they never looked otherwise than as if they had been.

All the doors in the flat were open, as usual. Still yawning as though the top of his head wanted to detach itself and fly away, he made for the loo, passing the bedroom where Sheila lay asleep. Having tossed her covers aside in the night, she was bare to the waist, her pale back stranded with her long dark hair. He blew her a kiss. He liked Sheila Surrean, with whom he had now lived for nearly half a year – had known he would the moment he saw the hand-written sign she’d taped to the door of her riverside flat above what had formerly been a boat-store, converted now into rented garages. It read Wearystale.

‘Because it’s unprofitable?’ he had suggested. He had met her that evening in the Marriage, and although she had agreed to let him see her home he had been expecting at best a kiss and cuddle at her door. Weyharrow was, after all, a village chanced on a long way from the London that he wanted to escape.

‘Nobody in this damned place ever got the point before!’ was her reply. ‘Come in!’

He’d stayed …

Much to the annoyance of sundry local folk, both old and young.

And found a job into the bargain, though luckily one they didn’t envy. Tending the village green and cemetery, raking dead leaves and trimming hedges, and generally tidying up, might not appeal to everyone, but it suited Stick to perfection, especially since it meant he had access to a patch of land where the old war memorial had stood until they moved it in 1946, neglected ever since. He wasn’t much of a gardener, but there was one thing he was very good at growing and it flourished there.

Moreover it had broken down some barriers. Even certain young men – married and unmarried – who had set their sights on Sheila now talked to him politely.

And this year’s crop, as he had proved last night, was quite exceptional …

Opposite Sheila’s room, which had become his as well, was the one where her children slept in twin bunk-beds. It was time to wake them.

No, let them wait a minute longer, while he attended to an urgent problem in the minuscule bathroom adjacent to the equally exiguous kitchen.

Emerging, he called over his shoulder as he headed for the electric kettle, ‘Sam! Hilary! Time to get up!’

Water run, flex plugged in … no sign of movement.

‘Hilary! Sam! Didn’t you hear me?’

Teapot rinsed and tea spooned into it, still nothing. Time to come the heavy non-father. He marched into the kids’ room, tramp-tramp as loudly as feet in socks permitted, and whisked the covers off them both.

Aged eight and ten, they slept in T-shirts, baggy from repeated washing. Blinking, he stared down.

He’d got the names right – crayoned signs at the head of each bunk said HILARY and SAM, though to the second one was appended a footnote he did not recall: ‘PLEASE DONT ADD THE ANTHA I DONT LIKE IT.’

Funny! I could have sworn that Sheila’s kids were boys.

But what the hell? He’d always liked girls better.

Having made sure they were awake, he returned to the kitchen just before the kettle boiled in search of milk and cereal and bowls and spoons.

After smoking grass like what he’d raised this year, one never knew quite where one’s head was likely to be at.

The Reverend Patrick Phibson entered the vestry of St Matthew’s Church and prepared to don his surplice for the morning service. His eyes were sore and his belly was rumbling; he had been out until midnight comforting Mrs Lapsey who – not for the first time – had been convinced she was at death’s door, but had only called the doctor at his insistence. He had missed supper, and the sandwich he had forced down on his return still lay heavy.

He looked with jaundiced gaze on the church, as usual. Ever since his appointment to this living, which would be his last before retirement, he had felt that in spite of its respectable antiquity there was something tainted about any such edifice that had been re-named owing to . . .