The Triple Man

by R Fanthorpe, Lionel Fanthorpe, Patricia Fanthorpe

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Psychology recognises the existence of multiple personalities inhabiting the same mind. To the ancients such strange transformations were evidence of demonic possession, and even today there are reputable experts who would not rule out the possibility that something else can take over a human mind.

To the victim of such personality change there are long periods for which the memory cannot account, periods during which the secret enemy is in charge.

Walter Hamilton was a perfectly normal, well-adjusted man in early middle age when strange gaps in his memory first began to worry him. At first he tried to ignore the tell-tale symptoms of schizophrenia but other clues presented themselves.

The face in the crowd scene on a telerecorded film vaguely familiar. It wasn't his fave... but there were undeniable similarities. A picture in a newspaper worried him more...

Before he could extricate himself he was trapped in a tangled web of interwoven personalities, unable to find himself, powerless to break away from the sinister complications of his two other lives.

Release date: September 30, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

HAMILTON removed the last of his grease paint and sat looking with mixed feelings at the triple reflections in his dressing-room mirror. Straight ahead of him he saw a fringe of iron-grey hair that tried unsuccessfully to cover what was rapidly turning into a Shakespearian forehead. The same forehead was framed on either side by thicker, darker tufts that guarded the brows like sentinels outside a Palace gate. Even without their make-up the brows were dark, the eyes beneath them, lined, wrinkled at the corners and set now more deeply than he would have wished. The nose between them was straight and strong, of medium size, neither acquiline nor Romanesque but nevertheless more than the insignificant olfactory smudge with which a few unfortunates seem to be blighted. The cheek bones were quite high, not stark or gaunt, but angular enough to make the face expressive. Walter Hamilton was quite satisfied with his cheek bones. He looked critically at his ears; the lobes were lengthening a little; middle-age he told himself. Perhaps that word middle now sounded a little optimistic. The ears were bold but not over prominent; in that respect they matched the nose. The right was just a little higher than the left. He wondered whether it was a trick of the reflection. He turned his attention to the mouth. The lips were full, sensitive and probably, if he was sufficiently honest with himself, sensuous. The lower protruded a little above its partner; there was a petulant quality about the lower lip. The jaw was firm and strong looking but it lacked the quality of a Hapsburg, or for that matter homo neanderthalensis.

Walter Hamilton glanced at the reflection of his left profile. It was one of those awkward, sidelong glances that produce pain in the optic muscles, without really giving a satisfactory view. He adjusted the mirrors a little and sighed. The profile, the left profile anyway, was not all he would have liked. There seemed somehow a softish quality to the flesh as though it were trying to fulfil the sensuous promise of the lower lip. The high cheekbones, so pleasing from the front, only added to the depth of the eyes, giving an appearance that almost bordered on the cadaverous. Walter Hamilton loved life, clutched at it greedily, drew it into himself, absorbed it like blotting paper. The thought of death was the absolute anathema. He didn’t like that faintly cadaverous left profile. His eyes travelled swiftly to the other extreme. He put a hand to his left brow, rubbed the eyelid gently and found the pain in the optic muscle eased slightly. He strained towards the right profile. That was decidedly better. He’d always insisted on full face or right profile when professional photographs were being taken. He always made his entrances in a way that showed the right profile. He would go to great lengths, elaborate lengths, to avoid exposing the touch of the flesh and the touch of death that were all too evident on the left. The jaw line of the right was stronger and the protrusion of the lower lips, sensitive and firm at the same time. The cheek bone gave character, not morbidity; the nose seemed straighter, even Grecian, the eye looked a little clearer, more purposeful, the brow more paternal, patriarchal almost; the hair was a little thicker; there was a trace of its youthful fullness. Hamilton felt his spirits rising as he continued to study his right profile like a dedicated high priest contemplating the object of his devotion within the holy of holies.

The telephone ended his reverie. It jarred shrilly, cutting an unwelcome swathe through thoughts that had just become pleasurable again. Hamilton’s brows came together in a thick, dark, aggravated line. He picked up the phone with an affected, dramatic gesture. The brows rose a little. Through lowered lids he studied the new reflection. He was a man using a telephone. It took him back to incidents in a dramatic education. There had been a whole lecture and demonstration on the use of a stage telephone Hamilton arranged his arms a little more as though the mirror were an audience. The audience was getting the full effect.

“Walter Hamilton here!” The voice was controlled, modulated and smooth. There was a professional timbre to it. It had flexibility, expression. The voice was oral plastic. It could be moulded to any function Walter Hamilton decreed for it, tragedy, comedy, drama or smooth polished professionalism, the kind he was using now.

“Walter! Darling. I’m so glad you’re there; I thought you might have left.”

“Is that Gert?” Hamilton wrinkled his nose at his own reflection.

“But of course, darling. I’d wondered if you’d forgotten the party?”

Oh God, thought Hamilton—that party! He wanted to puke. There would be Gert and the rest of the satellites. It took a physical effort to control the feeling of nausea. This is being an actor, thought Hamilton; this is what earns the money. The performance itself is easy, it’s living the life afterwards.

“But of course, darling; I’d be absolutely delighted; it’s so sweet of you to ring I’d have been simply furious if I’d forgotten. I’ve been looking forward to it all the week.” Liar! Damnable, hypocritical, face-saving, band-waggoning liar, said a voice deep down in his mind. It was so deep Hamilton wondered if it was the voice of truth. Wasn’t there a fable about truth living at the bottom of a well?

“You coming with Rose and the others?” He thought of Victor Rose.

“I don’t think so, darling; I’ll come under my own steam.” The drawling affectation dripped like honeyed poison into the receiver.

“John Guilder could pick you up.”

“No, I think I’d rather come independently, darling. They won’t mind; I’m sure they won’t. I’ve got one or two things to do and I don’t want to hold them up, you know how it is.”

“Yes, of course, but you won’t be late, will you?” There was a solicitous quality in Gertrude’s voice he thought. It reminded him of a time when he had been accosted in Bombay. Gertrude just hadn’t the knack any more than the woman in Bombay had had.

“I must be dashing now, darling; I’ve got so many things to get ready.”

“Yes, I have to change too; so see you later then. It will be absolutely wonderful; I’m sure everybody will be there.”

“Oh everybody!” effused Gert.

Walter Hamilton replaced the telephone receiver as a keeper replaces a venomous, anguine reptile. So that was that! Weakness he told himself, social weakness, the inability to say no. Perhaps it was just as well he wasn’t a woman! He raised an eyebrow appreciatively at his own joke. So now he was committed to this sanguinary party. He swore mentally for a full three minutes without repeating himself. He took another glance at that hated left-hand profile; the swearing seemed to be coming from that side somehow. The left corner of his mouth was twitching, as though echoing the words. Damn it, somebody had once said that thought was internalized action. Perhaps that was all it was; did it matter? He stood up and looked down, the mirror showed three decapitated reflections, a body without a head, three bodies without heads. Life had got like that lately: headless, pointless, mindless; perhaps he was overworking? He glanced around at the dressing-room clock; damn Gertrude and her stupid party. Why the hell couldn’t they leave him alone. He thought bitterly of the crowd he would have to endure for the two hours before dinner and during the meal itself. He would probably slip away straight afterwards but he’d got them for three hours, even if he let himself run as late as convention would permit. Gert and Claude would be bad enough, but that incredible Ossie Rix would probably be there, and she’d already threatened over the phone that Vic Rose and John Guilder were coming. Of all the pale nonentities that ever inflicted themselves on human society, Rose and Guilder seemed the nadir. Wordy, old Paul O’Neil would be as inevitable as tripe and onions on a Wednesday night in Rochdale and the dutiful, though self-opinionated Leslie would be accompanying his verbose patriarch. Still, Walter’s face brightened, perhaps Helia would come too. The old man didn’t usually let her far out of his sight.

Hamilton’s mind tried to put faces to other nameless lay figures in the kind of crowd which the Daines usually invited. Norrie Forte! Oh yes, there would be Norrie Forte! As inevitably as thunder storms in June or icy roads in January, Norrie Forte would be there. Perhaps, apart from Helia, the only other compensation would be Harry. He should have asked Gert whether Harry was coming. Harry repesented an oasis of reality in a desert of superficial idiocy—this crowd was so shallow.

He changed quickly and strode out of the dressing room with a purposeful tread. He passed the stage doorman’s office and smiled the smile of the successful actor to the stage doorman, just like the business of the telephone, he told himself, it was a scene. This time he wasn’t playing to a mirror, he was playing to a real life audience. I am being a successful actor; I am greeting a stage doorman. He might have been a condescending head master chatting to his caretaker about flowers in the school garden.

Outside the September air was strangely chill; perhaps September came too soon Hamilton told himself. He thought of the grey hair, the lines on the face that looked back at him out of the mirror. September came very quickly; there didn’t seem to have been much of a summer after all. Perhaps there would be a mild October and a long, mellow Autumn. Was it the Bard who had said: “Season of mellow fruitfulness”? Yes, that was it, perhaps he could look forward now to a season of mellow fruitfulness.

He reached the corner of Park Lane and listened to the rather desultory noise from the remaining ornithological specimens bedding themselves down in the Park opposite. There was probably more real warmth and affection in the cold Autumn boughs, than there would be in the Daines’ penthouse.

He moved reluctantly through the outer doors and a uniformed commissionaire-cum-concierge - cum - Uncle - Tom-Cobbley-and-all by the look of him came forward adroitly as though estimating Hamilton’s tipping value.

“Daines,” said Hamilton coldly.

“Of course, sir.” The commissionaire opened the lift, ushered Walter elaborately into it and operated the external controls. The lift was something of an innovation. There had been a time, reflected Hamilton, when innovations would have interested him, when newness for the sake of newness might have had some kind of significance. It didn’t matter a damn now whether you pressed buttons outside or inside or whether the thing went by thought. It was taking him somewhere he didn’t want to go. It would have been better to walk in the right direction, than to lounge back in the upholstered magnificence of the latest Rolls that was purring the wrong way.

The lift stopped smoothly, no stomach dropping in these Park Lane flats. Hamilton waited for the doors to open; they did; he stepped out. The three actions seemed separately significant in his mind. The doors had opened as the ravening maw of the Daines’ smothering hospitality would open; stepping into it was like standing on the trap door of a gallows waiting for Ketch to pull a lever. There was still time to turn round and go down again, of course; there was still time to walk down the passage, out through the window and down the fire escape. There was still time to … There wasn’t really, he was deluding himself. I am the number one convention slave in some respects, he thought. Why do I allow environmental pressure to force me into a channel which I do not wish to use? Am I the captain of my fate, the master of my destiny—God, that sounded corny! Or am I flotsam and jetsam of the tidal beaches of life? He pressed the button (a beautiful, soft, plastic illuminated button with a velvet surround) which rang a melifluous electronic something or other in the bowels of the Daines’ apartment. The door opened all too quickly. Gertrude Daines stood framed in the aperture like a fifty-year-old Helen wondering why Paris was a long time rescuing her. The quick, bright, ready professional smile, the effulgent greeting came to Walter Hamilton as lines came to him when a play had been running for a year or two; they came glibly, dramatically and yet such was Hamilton’s talent that he was the lines he spoke, he poured his personality into the words.

“How absolutely wonderful of you to come.” Gertrude spun like a jewelled roundabout, a rotating Christmas tree, a tinselled carousel; her voice rang around the apartment, shrill, affected, powerful, almost blatantly false.

“I say everybody, how absolutely wonderful, Walter’s here!” There was a dutiful lull in the conversation. Hamilton looked round at an expanse of raised glasses and tilting heads. At the same time his ears were assailed by a muffled tide of greetings ranging from ‘Hiya’ in a kind of trans-atlantic drone to ‘Good old Walter’ in a Guards officers’ drawl.

If I had dropped dead, thought Hamilton, in the lift, or better still on the doorstep, they would have gone through the motions of looking shocked and surprised, but not one of them would have given a damn; it would have been something rather exciting and interesting, something to talk about at the next party and the fact that there would never have been a next party for me wouldn’t really have mattered. I would have gone out like a light and none of them would have been really affected, it wouldn’t have touched any of them below the superficially sensational level which is the plane at which they have apparently chosen to live. He stepped slowly into the room, dignity hung on his shoulders as an invisible cloak. ‘And now,’ said something deep within himself, ‘we put on the party act, don’t we Walter? Put on the party act.’ He smiled an all-embracing smile. Claude Daines came across.

“What can I get you, Walter?” Daines was a little older than his wife, three or four years, not more, and he wore his success as an old R.S.M. wears his campaign medals on November 11th. There is justification for the R.S.M., thought Hamilton, but there was no justification for Daines. As far as Walter knew he’d inherited the blasted money in the first place and it takes either a congenital idiot or a man with the imagination of Baron Munchausen to s. . .