Peculiar Lives Read online

  Fearing a third intrusion, I span around in alarm and looked about the study. No-one was present, although a log fell in the fireplace, disturbed by a sudden breeze. I turned back to ask Percival what he had meant, but there was no-one there. He and the American had vanished silently, from barely five feet in front of me.

  For a long while, I gave serious thought to what I ought to do. Percival had said enough to give me grave misgivings for his safety; yet I had the strong impression that, wherever he and the Negro had disappeared to, it was nowhere I might follow them. Nor did I have any idea of where to seek the companion with whom Percival was visiting town, and after a moment’s consideration I realised that this person (whom I probably would not know) would very likely be in hiding in any case.

  At length, and with a somewhat familiar sense that Percival’s affairs were frustratingly beyond my scope to help or hinder, I decided that there was no action I could take. I waited, in the hope that one or both men might return as abruptly as they had left, but nothing of the kind occurred. After a short while I fetched my pipe from my desk drawer, lit it with an ember and smoked quietly, once again contemplating the night sky.

  Quite recently, or so it seemed to me, the stars over London had been hatched across by searchlight beams and streaks of fire, traversed by men encased in flimsy machinery and bound on errands of desperate hostility. Since then, peace had prevailed; and yet man even now might be preparing for a crisis still more troubling, one from whose effects he, and perhaps the world that gave him birth, might never recover.

  Still though, those sparks of cosmic fire blazed down indifferent, and this came as a welcome comfort to me.

  Diverse Encounters

  Enter Mr Spears

  On the following day I received two further visits, neither of them so dramatic as the encroachments of the previous evening, but each with its own significant consequences.

  The first of these appointments had been arranged for some time. My caller was St John Spears, a wealthy American philanthropist with whom I had been in correspondence. The interest he had taken in my writings, both novelistic and philosophical, had been flattering, an occurrence which (I ruefully considered) had been altogether too uncommon in recent years. Mr Spears arrived in the middle of the morning, driven by a chauffeur whom I awkwardly invited to wait out the meeting in my sitting-room, while I entertained his employer in the study.

  Mr Spears bore little resemblance to my visitors of the preceding night. He was a dynamic figure of perhaps half my age, with a high forehead, a wide, almost lipless mouth and narrow eyes, and compensated for his relatively small stature by remaining in constant, forceful motion. He politely refused my offer of a seat, and took a glass of neat soda-water in place of the whisky which I poured myself. As we spoke he stood restlessly, sporadically forgetting himself and pacing a few steps in one direction or another, before recollecting his manners. From his appearance I guessed that he must have both Jew and Spaniard in his ancestry, and certainly he exhibited that mongrel vitality which so distinguishes the white American from his staid European cousin.

  I had hopes of encouraging my guest to take an interest in some plans which I had drawn up years before: a programme of social and biological improvement which would require the support of a weighty coalition of political and private backers if it were ever to receive tangible application. The project involved, at a mundane level, the promotion of matrimony between individuals selected from the population as having desirable heritable characteristics; the encouragement of voluntary sterilisation among those less favoured by nature; and certain experiments in breeding from contrasting varieties of the species, as for instance the Ethiopian with the Eskimo, or the Maori with the Masai, in an effort to identify those which produced the strongest and most vital strains.

  ‘As you no doubt remember,’ I told my visitor now, ‘between the wars schemes such as this one enjoyed great popularity among the educated classes in both our continents. Sadly there has been a falling-off of interest in recent years. The war has, I fear, intervened to sap men’s idealism, turning them against the kind of social engineering which our race so desperately needs.’

  In fact I had long since despaired of ever finding backing for the venture. I had assumed, foolishly perhaps, that as an ardent reader of my work Mr Spears would make at least a sympathetic listener; and so he was (although as I have indicated he brought to our encounter a restlessness which I found disconcerting), but little more. He spoke perceptively of incidents in recent history and of the developments which, in their light, the immediate future might be expected to bring; and he professed a profound interest in the question of interplanetary travel and colonisation, another of my perennials and one on which I had addressed the British Rocket Group some years before. (Mr Spears claimed to have been in the audience on that occasion, although I had no memory of him.) Most unusually for one of his nationality, and all the more so for a prosperous man, he spoke approvingly of international socialism as an ideal, although he admitted to reservations about its practice.

  I may be an old man, and naturally vain as I dare say many authors are, but I have not yet succumbed to geriatric imbecility. It would have been quite clear that Spears was flattering me, and that his visit had an ulterior purpose, even had I not had cause to be wary (and of his countrymen in particular) following the occurrences of the evening before. So it transpired: once he reckoned that he had humoured me for long enough to put me at my ease, Spears turned the conversation around to the subject of my novels, and of The Peculiar in particular.

  ‘It’s a funny thing,’ Spears mused, glancing sideways at me as he brought himself up short from a brief bout of pacing. ‘That book was published as fiction, one of your English “scientific romances”, like Mr Wells’. That was the line all your reviewers took anyway, the ones who read it. But I think there’s more to it than that. You start off saying, “This is a true tale: while the names of the participants have been altered,” or something, “I myself witnessed many of the events recounted herein, while others were divulged to me afterward by unimpeachable witnesses.” Forgive me if I’m not word-perfect –’ (he was not) ‘– but it looks to me like your book wants to have the cake and eat it. So which is it, Mr Clevedon? Is The Peculiar a made-up story, or a real one?’

  I took a deep breath, smiled and said, ‘It’s a traditional pretence in fiction, Mr Spears. The author must pretend that the things which he has imagined are all true, and his readers must pretend that they believe him. I am scarcely the first novelist who has affected to have witnessed events with his own eyes, nor will I be the last.’

  ‘Right,’ Spears said impatiently. ‘But, Mr Clevedon, a lot of what you tell in that book really did happen. Your military intelligence services did arrest a fifteen-year-old boy for espionage towards the end of the war, and he really did escape, in a way which looks a lot like what you put in your book. His name was –’ and he gave Percival’s real name, the one which I have not used either here or elsewhere.

  I nodded. ‘I recall the case,’ I said. ‘It was in large part what inspired me to write the tale I did. Young ________ must have been a strangely gifted child, and the strangely gifted have always been an interest of mine.’

  ‘I’m interested in gifted children too,’ said Spears. He raised his hands, in a typically expansive gesture of submission, and continued: ‘OK, I’ll lay my cards on the table. It’s my belief that these kids of yours are real, and I want to help them. That’s why I’m here. Like yourself I take an interest in the future of mankind, and it sounds to me like those children could be that future. From what you wrote in your story I guess you think so too.’

  ‘The novel’s narrator certainly thinks so, Mr Spears. But I’m afraid he was as fictional as Percival and Bridget and the other characters. He has some qualities in common with me, just as Percival is partially based on what I could find out about young ________, but he has no more
real an existence than they. I’m very sorry to have wasted your time.’

  ‘Hear me out,’ Spears said doggedly. ‘At the end of your book, you have “Percival” and his pals going off to start a new life for themselves on an island in the South Seas. Now, they’re gifted kids as we’ve said, with a lot of ingenuity and practical sense. But an island can’t provide the resources they need to build a proper civilised society. It’s no life for a child, Mr Clevedon, living like a savage. I’m a rich man as you know, a very rich man. I can get hold of engineers, building materials, fertilisers, agriculturalists...’

  He paused then. I suppose that, if I had come to the conversation unforewarned, I might have blurted out at that point that Percival (that was to say my character) had been an expert in agriculture, and thus confirmed Spears’ conjecture that to me that young man’s existence was no mere fiction. It seemed as if the characteristic crudeness of the American’s approach might still mask certain subtleties.

  Fortunately, the previous night I had been forewarned by Percival himself. ‘I am very sorry,’ I told Mr Spears, with all the sincerity I could muster. ‘I don’t know what else I may say to convince you. If my characters truly existed, I am sure that they would be most grateful to find themselves added to your roster of good causes. However, you will understand that, as they are my characters, such a thing would be categorically impossible. I am sorry if anything I wrote has caused you to make such an unfortunate error.’

  Spears sighed sharply. The noise recalled vividly to me my time in France, and the cough of a Stokes’ mortar exhaling its lethal charge. I was alone in my house, and Percival had said that the ‘soldier gang’ which was pursuing him and his associates was ruthless. If St John Spears were one of its number, then it might well occur to him to threaten me for information. Even in my prime I had entertained no illusions as to my own capacity for heroism under torture.

  To my intense relief, however, Spears merely thanked me curtly, and stood up to leave.

  An hour later, after I had retired to my sitting-room and consumed a second whisky and soda (which I felt I had singularly merited), I heard a low whispering in the study, and a quiet voice called out, ‘Erik?’

  ‘Percival?’ I replied, greatly relieved. ‘Is that you?’ Instead of my youthful friend, however, two women entered, having evidently let themselves in through the french windows which I had believed were locked.

  It was my first meeting with Emily Blandish, and for that matter with Violet, although I recognised immediately that the latter bore a selection of those physiognomic and anatomical oddities which distinguish Percival’s kind from the mass of ‘normal’ humanity. Emily I found to be a strikingly attractive, thoughtful woman in whose level gaze I discerned a strange admixture of worldliness and nervous innocence. She was one who had seen a great deal of what men have made of the world, and yet retained a cautious optimism regarding its future. I warmed to her.

  ‘Percival said to come here if there was trouble,’ the younger woman said without preamble. ‘There’s a bloke watching the street, though, so we came in the back.’ Her voice was confident and clear, her accent pure East London.

  Violet And The Constables

  Violet was seventeen years old, and had been recruited to the Retreat after Percival and the others had made telepathic contact with her some three years since. She had had a rough childhood, in which her natural aptitude for thievery had been severely tested. Certainly born illegitimate, and very likely the product of incest, her unusual appearance had made her repulsive even to those of her immediate family. For her as for many others, the Retreat had been a welcome sanctuary. Her familiarity with certain of London’s less exemplary neighbourhoods and communities had been what had made Percival choose her as his companion on his return to the city.

  Between them, Emily and Violet acquainted me with the episode leading to the latter’s arrest at St Pancras, and with what had occurred thereafter. The girl had been taken by the sinister policemen, who she was quite convinced were not policemen, to an ordinary-looking town-house which was most certainly not a police station, and incarcerated in a cell. This room appeared to have been recently adapted to its current purpose. A sturdy metal plate had been let into the wall, and to this Violet was handcuffed.

  Having made sure of Violet’s immobility, the ‘policemen’ exchanged their uniforms for functional boiler-suits, retaining the electronic headpieces which Emily had observed beneath their helmets. As Emily had realised at the railway station, Violet’s peculiar talents included a kind of hypnotic suggestion at a distance, akin but not identical to Percival’s telepathy. By playing on the suggestibility of the human mind, Violet was capable of persuading an observer not to notice her, thus rendering herself effectively invisible even when committing a public crime. She had been able to exert this power evenly across a large and ever-changing crowd; and it had been sporadically effective even upon Emily, who had considerable experience of mental influences and who besides had had her attention by then fully focused on her quarry. If this same gift had failed to affect the false policemen, then these aural contrivances (which Violet now speculated acted as an artificial aid to concentration) were undoubtedly responsible.

  The treatment which Violet had received in the town-house had been very brutal, although it was clear to her that the men had been instructed not to kill or maim her. She harboured no illusions, however, that this arrangement would persist indefinitely. Her captors had been seeking information about the location of the Retreat, and secondarily about the current whereabouts of Percival, whom they knew by name. Violet was contemptuous of their efforts to persuade her to talk: a mind like hers, she said, was hardly going to give its friends away out of sheer terror, merely because some human animals were making sure her body hurt.

  Whether she would have remained so sanguine after a longer time in captivity, I cannot tell. In any case, Violet set about arranging an escape at her earliest convenience. Her first act once left alone was to attempt to communicate telepathically with Percival, but she found that young man beset by difficulties of his own. (This had been the afternoon before his nocturnal visit to my house, and I would soon learn that he and that night’s other intruder had had an earlier encounter around this time.) She turned instead to the group-mind of the supernormals at the Retreat, which was large enough and diffuse enough to communicate in the aggregate even at so distant a remove.

  The supernormals’ understanding of their own capabilities had developed enormously since that time when Percival had carried out his own risky abscondment from military custody. Working as a single entity, with Violet’s mind as its focal point, the community was able to locate in the vicinity of the house a middle-aged priest, formerly an army chaplain, who while most certainly not a member of the higher species had a degree of mental sensitivity considerably more developed than the norm. This was sufficiently acute to render him susceptible to suggestion by the group-mind, and that night the unfortunate man dreamed feverishly of confinement, of being trapped, cut off from all his fellows and his world.

  He awoke with the confused but overwhelming notion that there was a soul in need of his immediate and specific aid. In something of a trance state, he located his service revolver, walked to the house where Violet was being held prisoner, and broke in through a rear window. He shot two of the guards as they tried to defend the building, wounding one in the thigh and killing the other outright, then released Violet from her bondage shortly before the wounded man succeeded in summoning aid. Violet fled, leaving her deliverer to the mercies of her erstwhile captors.

  Although I should have been expecting something of the kind, both Emily and I were appalled by Violet’s callousness toward her rescuer. Violet was quite sanguine about the man’s sacrifice, however. His involvement had been necessary, not merely expedient, and the exchange of his life for her freedom had been a simple matter of priority. I was familiar with this cold-hearted ty
pe of moral calculation from my conversations with Percival, and I knew that it was what made such actions as Violet’s thievery, essential as it was to finance her and Percival’s investigations among London’s underworld, acceptable to them both.

  ‘He was a superstitious, silly man anyway,’ Violet said contemptuously, her errant cockney vowels and elusive consonants suddenly recalling Percival’s more educated tones. ‘Maybe he was brighter than the average for one of you, but he didn’t understand the things his half-open mind let him see. He caught the fringes of the thought-talk of his betters, and thought he heard the voices of angels, or messages from God. He never could have been one of us, even if the church hadn’t got to him so young as it did.’ She refused all further discussion on the matter, saying, ‘Of course you can’t understand,’ as if that was an end to it.

  After her release, Violet had delayed in following Percival’s instructions that they should rendezvous, if separated, at my house. Considering that, in comparison with the fraudulent policemen, Emily was very much the lesser of two evils, she had returned quite coolly to the railway station, apparently expecting to find her former pursuer looking for her there; as, indeed, she was.

  By this time Emily was concerned that she had received no word from her own associate, the man who had fought with Percival in my garden on the previous night. (I was relieved to learn that, despite their common nationality, the interloper had had no connection with St John Spears: like Violet, I could not believe that Emily was involved with the ‘soldier gang’, and the latter was willing to vouch without reservation for her Negro friend.) After her initial encounter with Violet, Emily had left St Pancras station with the firm conviction that the peculiar pickpocket was someone of importance to their work. Having exhausted all her other avenues of enquiry, she had returned to the station in hopes of discovering where the policemen might have taken their young prisoner.