The Egg-Shaped Thing Read online

  The Egg-Shaped Thing

  Christopher Hodder-Williams

  Copyright © Christopher Hodder-Williams 1967

  The right of Christopher Hodder-Williams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1967 by Hodder and Stoughton.

  This edition published in 2016 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Stage One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Stage Two

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Stage Three

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Stage Four

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Author’s Epilogue

  Stage One

  Chapter One

  It seemed, as I tossed and turned far into the night, maddened by a dripping tap I was too irresolute to fix, that I owed too many people too many things.

  I had become aware of all too many acts of kindness; and since the crash of my little company, and the squalid enquiry, I had appeared to those who had seen me through the worst of the disaster as someone mesmerized. They were waiting for me to snap out of what they judged to be a mood of self-pity…the more psychologically enterprising called it ‘depression’. All I knew was that I was waiting for something I couldn’t express. It was intangible but very real. I couldn’t convey it to anyone and though what friends I had left wanted to believe it amounted to something positive, they were rapidly coming to the conclusion that it was merely an excuse for inertia.

  Though the flat they helped me to find in Trasgate New Town was comfortable and modern, the setting was grim enough. The view from the window was visually as bankrupt as my finances. Tesh Philbar had remarked caustically, when I gave him supper there one night, that it was technically a penthouse since it was built as an afterthought upon a flat roof.

  Unfortunately, the outlook did not amount to quite what the word ‘penthouse’ might lead someone to expect: instead of a sunny park, or a river, or at least one of those panoramic views of a thriving city advertised in the appropriate brochure, there was the untidy, grimy cluster of chimneys and corrugated-tin water tanks and television aerials…and below these, forgotten gardens littered with motor tyres and inexplicable rolls of wire-netting.

  The ruin of my little company, Sceptre Electronics Ltd., was a deliberate, calculated act that had its roots in fear. They used Helen. I could have made things tough for her and she half hoped I would reap vengeance. At least, for her, it would have resolved something. No doubt I preferred to keep her in a kind of negative state. Pretty nasty…but that’s how I felt.

  The only person who attempted to understand the position during this unsavoury period was Tesh Philbar. The crack about a penthouse was not aimed at me; and nor were most of his comments.

  While trying to work up the resolve to get up and silence the bathroom tap I went over some of that memorable conversation in my mind.

  “Tesh, what’s the matter with me?”

  “Events are what’s the matter with you.”

  “Everybody else thinks I’m pretty twisted.”

  “It suits them. You want to push a fist in somebody’s face, but as they’re all pretending to be so generous you can’t do it.”

  I said: “That isn’t how they see it.”

  “Unfortunately it isn’t how you see it, either. How can you possibly assess what really happened when you’re so determined to twist the whole thing against yourself?”

  “Look, Tesh…You know Helen and you know me. Who was to blame?”

  “Why do you keep asking that?”

  “Surely it’s a fairly pertinent question?”

  “It’s simply putting yourself eternally on trial. On and on the argument goes. What’s the point? Is everything supposed to be explainable in terms of human relations? It might not basically be you and Helen at all. Ever thought of that? What about all that BRUNDASH palaver Davvitt was mixed up in?”

  “Don’t remind me!”

  “Couldn’t that be at the root of it?”

  “It doesn’t explain why Dick Davvitt bent over backwards to break my company.”

  “Surely both he and Guy Endleby could have had a perfectly ordinary motive? At any rate Guy’s doing very-well-thank-you, these days…and I can’t do a thing about it,”

  “But Davvitt?” I said. “Guy’s a businessman and likes money. But what does a scientist like Davvitt gain from ruining me? Unlike Guy he wasn’t interested in Helen, so it couldn’t have been that, either.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t let’s get back to her.”

  “Seconded.”

  Tesh went on: “Grinding out the old Helen saga doesn’t go anywhere towards explaining why you once made surely the oddest remark on record?”

  “Which — among the many — was that?”

  “You repeated it to me on the same day…What you said to your psychiatrist.”

  “Oh Lord!”

  “Now let me see if I’ve got this right,” said Tesh, ignoring interruptions. “He brings up your evil past…”

  “It’s a hobby with them.”

  “And you get to April nineteen fifty-nine.”

  “That’s a long time ago.”

  Tesh wouldn’t let go, though. “It was when you first quarrelled with Helen.”

  “So?”

  “The head-shrinker asks you why.”

  “That’s between me and the head-shrinker.”

  “Then why did you tell me? He asks you what happened and you say: “‘I don’t know; it hasn’t happened yet.’” Tesh waited for this reminder to reach its target. “You said that — and it’s now nineteen sixty-six!”

  I got up restlessly, crossed to the window and the dreary view. “I was sick.”

  “Even if you were, it must have meant something. No one ever found out just what. Do you know now?”

  “No. I want to forget the whole business.”

  “You mean, the BRUNDASH file? — Even though you’re quite content to go on remembering Helen…along with all the malice and the taunts?”

  “What are you saying, Tesh?”

  “You know perfectly well what I’m saying. You may not enjoy the Helen saga — but it’s a damn sight less frightening than what went with it!”

  I had been virtually a mental patient when I’d said that. It was a long time ago. Fix the tap and be damned. You can’t change anything now.

  Moonlight had stage-managed its way into my bathroom…Portrait of a Dripping Tap by Moonlight, James Fulbright, 1966, It all seemed eerie…but then you can make anything look eerie, at that hour.

  I was quite pleased with the bathroom, which I had done up myself. Go bankrupt, and you feel unduly proud of such things, clinging to them absurdly. So…pseudo-marble P.V.C. around walls and geyser alike. The only effort I’d made about anything for a hell of a long time.

  Splosh…splosh…splish!

  Supposing I were to telephone that fool psychiatrist and tell him that my moonlit dripping tap reminds me of something that hasn’t happened yet? No…the last thing I told him was much more meaningful.

  I told him to go to hell. He’d smiled jovially and shaken me by the hand and said: “That’s right! You don’t need me any more. Jolly good luck.” A magnificent beam and an open door.

  I pe
ered out of the bathroom window at the corrugated tin. A life sentence? I felt very bankrupt indeed as I screwed the tap tight against the washer and gloated in my triumph. No more sploshes, so no more memories.

  Except things don’t work out quite like that. I got as far as the mucky little kitchenette and the percolator and it all started up again.

  Because that’s when I heard the screaming of the cats.

  Three feline throats, torn and wrenched by some unheard of terror, sent their death wail echoing hollowly around the moonlit chimney-stacks. It got hold of my spinal nerves and sent a pulse through my body, so that the percolator lay shattered on the floor.

  I stood, totally incapable of movement, until the last cracked discord ceased abruptly and left a tarnished silence.

  At last I glanced toward the bathroom window. The moon, partially obscured by cloud, continued to stare blankly at the scene.

  I grabbed the flashlight from under the debris in the hall cupboard and squirted light through the bathroom window.

  No sound, no movement.

  Dark, obscene shadows, thrown by broken chimney-pots and rusty wire-netting, interlaced into hideous, suggestive patterns which shimmered, as if alive, with each swivel of the lamp.

  No cat moved there.

  Nothing in existence could move after such an articulate expression of total terror.

  But the shock had done its work. It had stimulated a million neurons in my brain…a brain that suddenly wanted to dictate actions.

  So that, before I realized what I was doing, I was climbing out of the window on to the parapet, working my way around the next roof toward a compulsive goal.

  I knew — as one does sometimes through some fourth-dimensional perceptiveness — that it was from Davvitt’s roof that the sound had come.

  The moon had been snuffed out by long, purple-black clouds. Below me somewhere were the forgotten gardens. Their negative degree of soul was repeated up here on the mucky roof, lighted splotchily now by the lamp. I remembered my resolve, made the day I moved to Trasgate, never to get used to it, however long it took to clear out. I never had.

  My foot slipped, shattering a skylight. Slivers of glass plopped on to a water tank somewhere below, then clinked together till they settled metallically on the bottom. I waited for nearby windows to be flung open in angry protest. Nothing happened. But it was a warning. I couldn’t easily see the edge of the parapet. It was a long way down.

  I reached the end of the block, discovered a four-foot gap which marked the set-square corner where the houses in Davvitt’s road met mine.

  I hesitated, measured, focused the lamp and jumped.

  Inordinate pride as I stood, like a drunken conqueror, on the next section of roof. For what? No owl hooted, no train shunted, no aircraft flew. Surely I was dreaming? Only dreams deliver up menacing sounds and thoughts like those which had given me volition. Yet one brief flash of the lamp, downward into the hollow below, illuminating as it did one isolated clothes-line bewilderingly far away below me, was enough to convince…

  The layout of Davvitt’s roof appeared quite inexplicable. For on it was built what looked at first sight like a concrete blockhouse — a great hunk that occupied most of the roof area, but left sufficient space for walking around it.

  I took a closer look at the concrete. Conspicuous absence of windows. Why? What was it? Some kind of laboratory, built on a roof and yet blind to the sun?

  With caution I walked around two sides of the square, and found that a kind of spoke protruded obliquely from the corner like the entrance to an air-raid shelter. There was a door inset. Through the crack I could see a concrete staircase going straight down into the house itself. From here you couldn’t see just how you got into the inner box…there was just the beginning of a sort of cat-walk…and that made me think of the cats again. So far, no sign of them. I was beginning to think my intuition had been wrong.

  So I walked around the third side of the square.

  A weird sort of thrumming in my head…was I getting ill again? I was beginning to feel dizzy, and I seemed to remember the feeling, as if it were from long ago.

  Chancing to look up, I noticed that I had not been entirely right about the lack of ventilation. A louvred ventilator was just by my left ear. Ridiculous I know, but I couldn’t help feeling that the thrumming was being caused by that.

  I moved away.

  The sensation went.

  This didn’t make any sense at all.

  So I turned the lamp off and just stood there, a few feet from the vent.

  I’d never before been aware of such astonishing silence. In acoustical research they sometimes use a room known as a padded cell. This is merely a chamber so deadened by padding that you can hear your own head-noises — background hiss like an amplifier turned up full but with nothing to amplify.

  It felt like that up here; yet I was out in the open. And the nearer I drew to the louvres in the vent the more intense the silence became.

  This was sheer madness. You can’t have a source of silence. Silence is merely absence of noise; and if I moved a couple of feet from the louvres I could at least hear the shuffling of my own feet, the faint aggregate of tiny night-noises that make up what we call silence but which nevertheless falls far short of it.

  With my ear nine inches from the louvres the dizziness returned.

  And with it, something else…something that came from within me…a sort of static experience.

  An event trying to happen.

  I drew back sharply, and thought this out. I thought of the apparently assinine remark I’d made to the doctor and repeated to Tesh.

  I don’t know; it hasn’t happened yet.

  How do you remember an event when it hasn’t happened? For some reason the thought made me shudder. Yet I couldn’t fight back my curiosity. I had to look through those louvres.

  Be patient with me if you think this is all very remote. I’m not going to use hindsight to report what I actually saw. I do know now; I didn’t then.

  Because, by some peculiar trick of the mind, I forgot it as soon as I saw it…and if that doesn’t make sense then I have to report that this was only the first thing that didn’t make sense. Later I was to find it was necessary to acquire a new sort of sense, a new way of thinking things out, in order to understand what I was up against.

  But this was before I evolved that. I can only describe what happened. On the face of it, it was meaningless. Yet the fear that went with it was acute and intense.

  I snapped the switch of the lamp and it seared its brilliant beam through the louvres.

  I saw a shape.

  My pulse rate thrashed up to a hundred and forty as the vertigo crescendoed and I was spinning in a nothingworld.

  I realized, as I yawed and stumbled, that the shape I could see was very familiar and should be easy to recognize, to file in my memory, to retain.

  And yet I could not.

  I staggered away, and my shoe shuffled against something. I swung the light down; and picked up the object my foot had struck.

  It was a cat’s collar, fully buckled-up.

  And revealing a desperate lack of cat.

  So I started to walk around the fourth corner of the concrete box…

  Chapter Two

  Brilliant, blinding sunlight…the scream of an aircraft somewhere…a hard surface under me. Recollections?

  My mind didn’t seem to function sensibly. I was conscious chiefly of an appalling headache. Throbbing. To open my eyes to the daggers of sunlight — unthinkable. Buses and heavy traffic, booming from somewhere below. Around me, a few starlings…They don’t sound like birds at all; more like squeaking machinery.

  Cats!

  That’s right! A dripping tap followed by a shattered percolator followed by -

  Did I fall, then? Good God! — I’m not still on that roof? How long ago did all that happen?

  I remember I climbed along the roof to find those dead cats…Why dead? I didn’t know they
were dead. Did I find them? — I can’t remember.

  I’d got round three sides of that rooftop blockhouse. Then…the barest murmur of a dream. Road signs…a whole conclave of ‘no entry’ signs: white strip on red…and swans.

  Swans! — Oh God, what a mad sort of dream. Walk up, Ladies and Gentlemen, for the new rêve concrèt…You’re hysterical, chum!

  Louvres…a buzzing feeling in my head…

  …a cat’s collar! — with no cat in it!

  Can I move, I wonder? Just! I seem to have pains everywhere. But nothing can possibly hurt so much as the light which is trying to sear through my eyelids, turning them bright pink. Shelter your eyes with your hand, boy! Now!

  That’s odd. A pair of shoes. Right by me.

  And feet in them.

  Oh, my God…

  “So you’ve woken up.”

  It was three months since I’d last heard that voice. On that occasion it had been patronizing, authoritative and — in a peculiar way — cunning. Now, it was just curt. Most uncomplicated. Law-abiding. Outraged. And like a soldier finding the wounded body of an enemy he loathed.

  I thought Davvitt might quite easily have rolled me over with his foot. That could have been what woke me.

  “What exactly, do you think you’re doing on my roof?”

  “If you take me inside and give me a coffee I’ll try and explain.”

  The godly eyebrows went up. “Let’s hope you can.”

  I managed to drag myself to my feet. He offered no help. Just stood. No bones broken, though. This is going to be a most unfriendly interview.

  He led the way in. There wasn’t much to see. The staircase — all concrete and stainless steel — was sealed off from the rest by a heavy-looking sliding door. Very nuclear-looking, this…swish of air conditioning, heavy-duty, flush-fitting lights; and a steel platform that ran from the top of the staircase to that sliding door — rivet-lined and ominous.

  I paused, glancing at it for a moment. But Davvitt said curtly: “Down the steps and turn right.” He stood back to let me pass. He was determined I should get away from this part of the house without a backward glance.