Peculiar Lives Read online

  By now she had missed her train, and practically her appointment itself. Finding a public box she telephoned her apologies to her intended contact, who was displeased with her, and expressed himself upon this theme at some length. This conversation concluded, Emily inserted the money for a second call, but reconsidered when she saw an aimless-looking man waiting outside the box for her to finish. She pushed the button to return her money instead, and left the telephone box and the station, taking several buses and an intentionally circuitous route back to her rooms. Once home, she made the telephone call.

  What became of the young pilferer Violet and her captors, and how Emily became once again embroiled in her story, I will tell shortly. Meanwhile, I must begin to recount my own part in these events, and therefore give some details of how I occupied myself, the evening of that same day.

  Myself And Percival

  I had been working, with no great degree of enthusiasm, on an article for one of our more sententious national newspapers; one of the few whom my credentials as a novelist and philosopher still suffice to impress. The substance of my remarks, as so often in recent years, concerned the current imperfection and future perfectibility of mankind.

  If this is a subject to which I find myself returning frequently, and ever more urgently, as my days as a member of that remarkable species draw to a close, it is because for the first time in man’s short history he really and surely holds in his hands the power to achieve, not merely his survival, but his betterment. If I myself am not to persist, it is of grave importance to me to know that my descendants and those of their generation should do so, and should become more closely and more competently suited to their role as guardians and protectors of this planet.

  The great wars of this century, and other atrocities of recent memory, reveal more starkly than before the desperate necessity for a new race of man to surpass our own, who will stand aloof from the partisan politics of faction, and strive for his own perfection and that of his fellows. As mankind’s instruments of war wax ever more bloodily sophisticated, and the nations of this Earth acquire the power to crush whole cities, perhaps whole populations, at a lightning-stroke, this need to make the human race more aptly suited to its lofty role in creation is borne ever more forcefully upon the enlightened mind.

  Even now, in what will be (if time, and certain other forces, permit me indeed to complete it) my final work, I find this message directing my words, urging me to trespass once again upon the patience of my long-suffering reader. Alas, I can do it scant justice with the powers remaining to me. Suffice it to say that, while I endeavoured on this earlier occasion to expound upon my theme, the evening had drawn on, grown late and leached away into the night; and I, old man that I am, had grown intolerably weary.

  At length I realised that the little fire which burned in the hearth of my study might be the occasion of this debilitating drowsiness, and I opened the french windows, letting in the night air. (My wife, who would normally admonish me against such behaviour, was away at the time visiting a sick relative.) It was chill, and my breath caught in the cold. The scent which accompanied the darkness outside, of London with its people and machines and vegetation constantly inhaling and exhaling, drew me to step out for a moment into my garden, from which I scrutinised the clear night sky.

  From a young boy I have been powerfully affected by the sight of the stars. Their distance and coldness are a source of wonder to me, and I was soon wholly taken up in reverie. So sure I felt of solitude that it came as a dreadful shock when close by, as if conjured by my meditation, a young voice greeted me with a cheerful ‘Hullo, Clever-clogs!’

  ‘Good Lord!’ I exclaimed, shaken but quickly realising that I was in no danger from this particular interloper. ‘Whatever are you doing here, Percival?’

  ‘Let’s go inside, old man,’ the figure in the darkness said at once. ‘Garden fences have ears, you know.’

  We retreated into my study, which was, I now acknowledged, intolerably stuffy. I left the french windows open. ‘Gosh, what a fug!’ Percival declared. ‘Are you trying to stifle yourself, Clever-clogs, and begin our great work for us? I was planning on keeping you around till later on, you know.’

  In the dull glow of the fire’s embers, Percival looked much the same as he had been described to Emily by her perturbing policeman. (At that time Miss Blandish and I were not acquainted, and I was unaware of what had transpired that morning at St Pancras.) In my earlier book, The Peculiar, I have outlined Percival’s appearance in these terms:

  Percival’s frame is muscular yet slender, and almost simian in aspect. His ovoid head is large out of proportion to his body, like an infant’s. Now in his fifteenth year, in size and development he resembles a child of perhaps ten or eleven. His eyes are large with yellowish-green irises, his pupils vesical slits like those of a cat; his ears too are large, and uniquely whorled. The back of his cranium is scrubbed with tightly curled hair, blue-black in colour, and his fingers, of which he has six on each hand, are preternaturally long and thin. His toes are also long, and unusually dexterous. His body is smooth and hairless, and his sexual characteristics underdeveloped for his age. Although his overall air attests to a sensitivity too fragile for normal human existence, Percival is in fact as strong as a mule, with that animal’s hybrid vigour, and enjoys a mental resilience equal to his physical robustness.

  At the time of which I am writing I had not seen Percival for five years, and yet I found him very little changed. His protracted adolescence was plainly still in progress, and a stranger might have classified the twenty-year-old as a gawky, over-intellectual lad of fourteen years or fewer.

  Aware that it would vex me, Percival crossed to my writing-desk and abstracted the latest sheet of paper from my typewriter-spool. ‘What are you writing now, Erik?’ he asked me. (On his tongue, my familiar name takes on unwelcome overtones of patronage. I prefer my derisory nickname of ‘Clever-clogs’.)

  ‘It’s just an opinion piece,’ I said, annoyed at having my half-formed arguments subjected to what would undoubtedly be sharp and perceptive scrutiny.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ Percival sighed as he scanned the sheet. ‘Poor old Clever-sticks. Still thinking of the future of mankind – meaning your kind of man, of course – when you know perfectly well he hasn’t got a thing of the sort.’

  ‘I choose to believe otherwise,’ I told him coolly.

  He discarded the article. ‘Of course there will have to be improvements made, you’re right there. And perhaps poor old Homo sapiens may be of use as breeding-stock. But it will be Homo peculiar directing the show, you know.’

  The old familiar chill, such as I had not felt for half a decade, tightened across my shoulders. I moved closer to the dying fire. ‘What is the matter, Percival?’ I asked. ‘I had thought that you were still at your Retreat. You’re safer there, surely.’

  His face became more sober. ‘It seems some men of your kind have other ideas,’ he said.

  In The Peculiar I have recounted the events which led to Percival’s foundation of the Retreat, in the late years of the recent war. Since that volume is now difficult to come by, I suppose that here I had better give a brief account of those matters, and of Percival’s early life.

  The Story Of Percival

  He had been an infant prodigy, of course. Intellectually capable beyond his years, he was uncannily sensitive to the moods and thoughts of others. He was a voracious reader in every subject from the age of sixteen months, and had devoured first children’s and then adult reading matter, throwing himself with equal zeal into practical studies as diverse as engineering, veterinary science (for he grew up on a farm) and musical performance.

  He had put his mother, a highly intelligent woman of German parentage, through a long and difficult confinement: she had died a few days after his birth, leaving Percival in the care of his father and aunt. Theirs was a modestly well-to-do Cornish family, whose ancient
Celtic stock had been infused, perhaps since pre-Roman times, with the blood of successive exotic visitors to Cornwall’s shores. Percival’s father, who had been a child at the time of the Great War, joined up soon after the more recent hostilities were declared, and died in France when Percival was twelve.

  By then, the boy had for some time been running the large farm between his studies, and had, over the course of two generations of animals, improved the livestock’s milk and egg yields fourfold. He had trained the family sheepdogs to perform complicated manoeuvres, suggestive of an unprecedented rapport between beast and master, and had designed a number of automated techniques for husbanding the stock which had allowed the farm to function with remarkable efficiency during the wartime absence of many of the labourers. After her brother’s death Percival’s aunt besought Dr Tremaine, the local medical practitioner and a close neighbour who had known and treated her nephew since birth, for help with the boy’s ever more stringent demands for education. Tremaine was an old friend of mine, and when I heard of the young phenomenon I rashly volunteered to undertake this task.

  Percival left the family farm and came to live in London with my wife and me. Very soon, his mental acuity had put to shame not only my own talents, but those of a number of quite prominent scholars, scientists and writers of my acquaintance, whom I shall not embarrass once again by naming here. The boy rapidly outstripped my best attempts at instruction, and proceeded to direct his own studies, and indeed his own career, along lines of his own choosing. However, his tender age meant that he still had use for an adult who could act for him in certain matters, and he remained habitually resident at my house when his investigations did not carry him elsewhere.

  The young genius became fond of me in his own aloof way, and it was in me that he confided when his biological researches, now advanced beyond my ability to follow, delivered him to a startling conclusion. He was (he explained to me blithely) one of a handful in his generation who were forerunners of an entirely new species of man, which he fancifully dubbed Homo peculiar. He was convinced that, a few generations from now, men and women like himself would be the dominant creatures on the planet, while men like me might expect to be at best their servants or domestic pets. At worst, we would be extinct: our world’s new masters might well decide that our selfishly jealous tendencies constituted a threat to them, and eliminate its source.

  I had needed some convincing on these points, to say the least of it, but Percival was a compelling advocate. His unique appearance had worked in his favour, and at length I had conceded (it was not in fact difficult to believe) that the boy was of a biological type quite apart from his family and peers, myself included. He was, not inhuman, but human in a different, more developed mode than that of normal men.

  As Percival had entered his prolonged pubertal period, he had begun to make contact, by means of mental disciplines which allowed him to ‘tune in’ to their psychic vibrations, with other ‘supernormal’ adolescents. It was with some of these, when finally they came into physical proximity with one another, that he began the social and sexual experiments which characterised this phase of his life, and which so scandalised our conventional neighbours.

  In this behaviour, I am afraid that Percival miscalculated badly. He had underestimated the tendency of Homo sapiens to fear that which he cannot understand, and to punish those who offend against his sense of normality. It was not very long afterward that Percival was accused of being in league with England’s enemies: he was, after all, of partial German stock, no matter that his father had fought valiantly against the Germans and been killed by them. By now Percival had many friends in the scientific establishment, and it had come to be suspected that the young outsider was abusing their good nature in order to spy upon top-secret matters relating to the war effort.

  The very idea was ludicrous, of course. It was an article of faith with Percival (which I confess that I had never discouraged) that his kind was above national affinities. He was no more likely to give aid to a foreign power than to his native land. It seems now that there were some who hoped to use these accusations as an inducement to set Percival’s considerable talents to working for the Allied cause, but this was always a vain hope. An arrest for espionage was followed by an ingenious yet appallingly dangerous escape on Percival’s part, and a desperate period which he spent in constant evasion of the police. At length the young man was left with no alternative but to withdraw, along with his peculiar companions, to that remote location which they called the Retreat.

  I had offered to accompany them, but they were in no state of mind to welcome the society of normal men. Since then I had received a total of two communications from Percival, from which I understood that he and and his comrades had progressed in their various endeavours, including their attempts to reach out telepathically to others of their kind across the world. These efforts had succeeded in gathering together at the Retreat a band of supernormal children and adolescents from far afield: additionally, they had fostered the founding of ‘communities of the peculiar’ in other continents, with whom they were in constant psychic communion. Now, it seemed, this fragile international rapport was under dire threat.

  The Intruder At The Window

  ‘They haven’t found the Retreat yet,’ Percival told me, warming his hands at my dying fire. ‘There’s that, at least. But it’s a rotten situation, Erik. We lost contact with Maurita’s group in Argentina months ago now, and our friends in Russia are on the run. They’re confused and panicking – we can’t get any sense out of them. The New Zealand commune was always too far away to get a clear signal – the Earth gets in the way, you know – but now Nombeko’s people in South Africa can’t contact them either.’

  I asked, ‘But who is it that’s doing this, Percival?’

  He shrugged. ‘Some kind of soldier gang. They’re well armed and well trained, and they seem to have a rudimentary grasp of strategy and tactics. Who they’re working for, we don’t know – one of your silly countries or another, I suppose. We think they must have been picking off the lonely ones, the supernormals who won’t join our communities, for years now. We simply didn’t notice. Now they’ve started on our nerve-centres.’

  I was horrified, of course, at the idea of Percival’s friends, children as they were, being hunted or persecuted. If I am to be unreservedly honest, however, I felt at the idea of these arrogant supermen being cut down to size a palpably vindictive thrill. It was years since I had been in regular communication with Percival, and the calm certainty with which he habitually imbued his outrageous assertions had had little opportunity to work on me of late. I told myself that it would be perverse to hope that the brutal and ignorant might prevail at the expense of the wise and enlightened. Of course the highest type, morally and spiritually as well as intellectually, should triumph: such is the way of nature, and it is gloriously right that it should be so. Sternly then I quelled my rebellious, unworthy glee and asked, ‘What can I do?’

  Percival laughed shortly, then cocked his head a little, as if suddenly distracted. ‘There’s not a lot that you can do, dear Clever-clogs. A couple of us are in town, that’s all, finding out what we can from some people we know, and I thought I’d look you up while we were here and tell you the news. This is awfully awkward, I don’t mind telling you. We may have to bring forward our plans for the terminal –’. Quite suddenly he broke off speaking and sprang across the room, out of the glass doors and into the night, disorientating me completely. At that moment he seemed more like a frog than a monkey, and more like either than a man. From outside came a bellow of alarm followed by a violent scuffling.

  ‘Good heavens!’ I inadequately exclaimed. I have never been a fighter. Even in the Great War, I performed volunteer work as a medical orderly: I saw considerable action, but had no hand in combat. Even if I had, that would have been over thirty years ago, and I could scarcely expect my failing body to sustain such work now. Nevertheless (and s
hockingly capable though I knew Percival to be when necessary), I could not allow him to face alone what might be an armed man, or body of men. Grasping the poker, I stepped out nervously into the garden, where a pair of indistinct shapes was writhing in savage union. Percival’s spidery limbs were wrapped about the intruder, whose leather coat flapped and slapped fishlike against the flagstone path. The two of them resembled a pair of symbiotic organisms, united in some violent otherworldly coupling.

  Such fancies come upon me often, at the most inopportune moments. As I stood gathering my courage, the larger man turned his head towards me. In the dim light from the study door, I saw to my surprise that he was a Negro, with a fine-boned face, neat goatee beard and expressive eyes. Mystifyingly, he appeared to react to the sight of me with quite as much astonishment. So surprised was he, in fact, that Percival was able with a moment’s struggle to pin him to the ground and straddle his chest, his limber hands pressing the man’s wrists into the earth.

  Still amazed by whatever it was that he perceived in my countenance, the Negro swore. From the intonation, and his choice of oath, I could tell that he was an American. ‘Help me out, Erik!’ Percival exclaimed, turning to face me. He frowned, then his expression altered uncharacteristically into what, on someone else’s visage, I would have taken for confusion or even fear. ‘Erik?’ he said, with unusual diffidence. ‘Who’s that behind your face?’