by Hilary Bailey
Here is a deceptively quiet story of a future Earth where mankinds ills of aggression and violence have been done away with, and a calm, near-pastoral Utopia prevails. But it is a mysterious, ominous Utopia of civilized townships surrounded by wild and dark forests— and the forests are once again encroaching.
Hilary Bailey’s full name is Hilary Bailey Moorcock: her husband is the well-known writer and editor Michael Moorcock. She’s the author of “The Fall of Frenchie Steiner” and “Dogman of Islington,” among a number of other first-rank sf stories, and after you’ve read this understated but trenchant story, you’ll want to watch for her byline in the future.
* * * *
This afternoon, at last, I can put down my instruments, push aside my drawing board and watch the sunlight undulating over the long sweep of shadowed lawn in front of my house, see the waves of light playing over the grass right down to the first scattering of trees where the forest begins. From the glass-walled room at the top of the house the great curve of the lawn is like an ocean. And I can look up at the dark sky through the glass ceiling, gazing at the clouds which gather, part and move. When I turn my head I see the white city lying behind me—the straight, tree-lined avenues, the large houses with their pillared porticoes, the gardens brilliant with flowers and bushes. To right and left the lawns sweep down into the forest, darkening and lightening under the erratic sun. This house is a promontory of the city, an isthmus between it and the forest.
Below, the house is silent. Regan and Arthur are resting because Regan is playing tonight in our concert hall and Arthur is being allowed to stay up and hear her.
Tomorrow I shall be driving her along the Mendip Road to Juram, where she is to play for the citizens there. Our new car is ready, all but the batteries. If we decide to go. It would be pleasant to glide along the smooth paths through the forest—if, that is, we decide to go.
I must get ready soon for the council meeting where my plans are to be discussed. What a fuss over such a small, obvious project! But I think everything is settled at last and approval will be automatic.
I can remember going into the forest as a boy, on a dare, edging slowly through the trees and tangled brushwood, wondering if I had gone far enough to win the dare, with the darkness increasing as the trees grew thicker, bare legs scratched by fern and bramble, hearing the scutterings and flapping of wings in the gloom, tense with listening, forcing one foot in front of the other—oh, the tales that circulated about the Headless Man and the Hunchbacked Monsterwoman of the Forest—but, good heavens, enough of this. It’s quite time to get ready for the meeting. I must begin to lay the things out—but how dark it was in there. There were the terrifying little scratchings and scrapings in the undergrowth, no light, my feet cracking fallen branches at one moment and up to the ankles in mud the next. Day was like night in the forest. And at night—no, nothing could increase that blackness. No one could endure it. It is too dark.
* * * *
I say hi, ho, but no one answers. The woman is by the fire with the babe. I crash down entangled and struggle up again. Why don’t the bastards come? That on my leg is the dripping of blood from my sacks. Hi! Ho! No answer. Why don’t the bastards come? I’ll smash her hands, the bitch. Up again and stumble on. Move, move, move.
* * * *
A note before we leave for the performance. The council has decided that the work is to begin next week. Keeney, the town clerk, continued to oppose but was overruled in the end. Why all this fuss about a simple, useful item? Regan says the children tell tales about how he traps rabbits from the forest—his house being on the outskirts on the other side of the town—and then eats them. One boy says he saw him burying the bones in his garden. But all this is nonsense. Goodness knows what makes children dream up these gruesome horrors to frighten each other. Keeney certainly has a gross and ruddy look. His eye is wild and distant too. He must be a throwback to more savage times. It makes you wonder how such a man could ever be elected to office by our citizens. Yet I do seem to remember a time when Keeney was quieter, paler, probably even a bit thinner. Is it my imagination?
I seem to be using these pages to gossip about fellow citizens, which would be much disapproved of if it were known. Looking through these pages, which I have kept since I gained my architectural qualifications at the town of London (and I must say I was thankful to gain them and leave that vast community, a dismal specter of history repeating itself), I notice that it is only in the past year that I have started to make comments not directly connected with my work. A sign of approaching oddity? I hope not. The city cannot afford eccentrics.
* * * *
at last they come. I can see their fire. They need my sacks, old bloody sacks. Hi, ho, hee, hee. I’ll hide the other sack. Let them roast hedgehogs while we feast in secret. Hallo, hallo, I’m here. Come on, you bastards, hurry.
* * * *
The glide and hum of our cars through the streets did not sound over the birdsong, and as we went past the quiet, white houses with their colorful gardens, the birds were just settling for the night. The concert hall was full. Regan’s playing was charming—some short pieces by Bach and Chopin and two of the delightfully intricate songs for the piano by our neighboring citizen, Jones of Piwelli. Nevertheless I wish Regan would take up writing music again. If only she had been more persistent, could have ironed out those roughnesses and unevennesses which she was so unprepared to work at Nevertheless, as I sat in the concert hall I myself designed, surrounded by our friends and listening to the music rippling from the fingers of my wife at the piano, I wondered if any existence could be happier. We have our small lovely towns, interconnected but distant from each other. We have our beautiful homes; our children are reared according to the most humane principles, carefully guided into adulthood by all the citizens. Machines free us from drudgery so that we can all lead self-motivated lives. Our small numbers mean that creating and maintaining the machines occupies only a few of us, those who love the work, for a proportion of their time. And, of course, our simple dietary wants are easily met by a small number of dedicated men and women among the citizens.
No work, no want, no misery—as I sat in the hall with the sweet summer scents wafting through the open windows, I rejoiced. The past seems like a long horror story of grinding toil, men and women teeming like rodents —and, of course, the final self-inflicted end as the world went up in flames, roasting the men and women in it like the corpses of animals over one of their own spits.
Thank God we are now at peace.
As I write, men arrive with rules and markers and go down over the lawn to within a hundred and fifty yards of the forest’s edge. The next few months, while the work continues, will be trying for those of us with houses on the city boundaries, but common sense must be served.
* * * *
tug a spine from my soft mouth to hell with these hedgehogs and the lazy women cooking them while the music and dancing go on. Lie on my back with the child beside me playing some trick with beetles and ants. I can see some stars above through the branches. The sky’s a fine thing if you’re not afraid of it. There are places where it’s all sky. Well, I’m not afraid of the sky. Thrum, thrum of the music. I’ll go down and dance soon, oh, that tall, deep, wide sky, how mad it is.
* * * *
It is raining this early morning. The sky is dark and cloudy as it moves over my head. The lawn down to the forest is dark and drenched. The men have not arrived to start their work. I feel annoyed that they should be discouraged by bad weather. Not that there is any need for haste, but such inefficiency and sloth gall me— we aim to lead a civilized life but must always strive to prevent cultivation and grace from deteriorating into laziness and enervation. What happens if it rains all summer? We all agreed the work should be completed by October, simply so that it should not drag on all through winter and into spring. As I say, there is no real need for haste, but if a job is being done it should be done swiftly. I shall go and speak to Keeney, who is, no doubt, partially responsible for the delay.
My irritability probably stems from the argument with my wife. At breakfast this morning she said we must make ready for the visit to Juram. I said that the weather was too bad, that the dripping of the trees over the road would penetrate the hood of the car. She demanded to know, if we could not travel in May, when could we travel? I said that the overcast sky, combined with overhanging trees, would make it too dark to drive. She responded by mentioning our car lights. Finally she called me irrational. Perhaps I am.
I do not want to take the forest road to Juram with my wife and child.
In the end she said that if I would not take her she would go alone or ask Keeney, whose business often takes him on visits to the Juram town officials, to take her with him. She began to toss her long hair about, a sign of determination. Eventually I gave in and said we would go. But I do not like it. I really do not like it at all. I like it less and less as the sky becomes more and more overcast and the rain heavier. It will be pitch-black on the Mendip Road and it is not altogether well maintained these days. Why Regan—but there, she must pursue her career. Although it is a pity she will not make herself concentrate and spend more time at home composing. Nevertheless, it would be a poor lookout for a concert pianist if she never played for anyone but audiences of her own townspeople. If you like, that is one of the few disadvantages of our social structure—we are somewhat cut off from each other. Our cars, although pleasant to drive in, travel scarcely any faster than one would on foot. Our journeys are lengthy, if pleasant and relaxing. We have no roar or stink or lung-clogging fumes, but our progress is slower than it was in the days of coaches drawn by horses. But we are not rovers who must go racing from place to place, nor speed-lunatics who will sacrifice all pleasantness for the excitement of crashing along.
Now the sky overhead looks truly black and threatening. I shall put my things together for the journey and hope that at the last moment my wife will see sense. And I shall go to see Keeney and inquire about why the work has not started.
* * * *
A most alarming experience. I am still trembling.
Keeney was not there. I walked to his house, circumventing the town center, taking the broad and pleasant roads toward the edges of the forest. Even under rain and heavy skies our streets are still beautiful and the smell of the lovely gardens under rain is delicious.
Naturally I was shocked, although I tried not to be, when I reached Keeney s house. It is set on the edge of the town with streets on one side, and, on the other, the expanses of vegetable gardens and fruit trees which extend almost to the forest. What a spectacle met my eyes! To begin with, he has dug up his garden, so that the whole area, about an acre, I suppose, looks like a plowed field. And at the same time he has uprooted every paving stone from the path leading to his door and tossed them, higgledy-piggledy, to one side. To reach his front door I was obliged to trudge along the flattened earth where the stones had been, getting mud all over my shoes and the bottoms of my trousers. I considered it most careless and thoughtless of Keeney. Admittedly, sometimes the desire for change and alteration leads one to drastic action, but one has a duty to use a certain restraint and make sure that the changes are conducted with discretion so that they do not produce an unpleasant effect like that. It is surely unsuitable for a senior town official to reduce his home to such a filthy and depressing condition.
By the time I reached the door, I was in an understandable state of apprehension. I was not looking forward to my task of reproaching Keeney with his laxness over the question of the building work. And other things disconcerted me too, though I did not notice them consciously at the time.
When I got to the porch, the front door would not open—naturally I pushed it, and pushed again, but it would not yield. Can you imagine it? The man had, to all intents and purposes, locked his door, as if someone in the house were in the process of arriving or departing this earth. After my attempts to open the door I thought again and wondered if this were the case. But no one had visited us to tell us not to go to Keeney’s house. Mrs. Keeney had certainly not informed the council that she wished to bear a child—in any case, at her age such a request would never have been granted. Keeney’s daughter, Adela, was unmarried. The council had not been informed that any of the family were ill. The only possibility was that there had been an accident to one of them, or, unworthy thought, that Adela had defied the law again and committed the act which had nearly had such serious consequences for her before. I naturally pushed this thought from me. I reflected at that moment that the oddity which had struck me as I stood pushing the unyielding door was that the curtains in the upper rooms were drawn. But not in the lower—I had seen perfectly well into the living room as I squelched my way up to the house. As I stood on that step with the rain teeming down into Keeney’s chaotic garden, I lost my temper and decided that, unannounced Arrival or Departure or not, I would gain entry. I first found the bell and rang it, and failing to get any result, began to knock and pound on the door. After I had been knocking for some time, I heard the bolts being drawn back . . .
* * * *
clear out the bones I say to my wife and light a light. I can see nothing. She lies in a corner, not answering, so I beat her with my stick. She still says nothing. I beat her till the blood runs. She just groans and rolls over to face the wall. Of course, the child is weeping. I give him a kick, that’ll teach him sobbing, not that he needs teaching, and walk off. I find Hodge, who smashed his wife’s head. We go hunting. Hey, ho, crashing through bush and tree until toe run it to earth near the mere and bash it to death. Carry it back and they all come out and sing. All but my wife still skulking in the home with the women. Feasting tonight, all thanks to yours truly. Hurroo.
* * * *
. . . and Mrs. Keeney put her head out, looking worried. Naturally it would be out of order to discuss a fellow citizen, but I must say her pie and cake baking have fallen off significantly and there is talk of giving her a lighter job. She looks thinner too. Funnily enough, as Keeney increases in bulk, his wife seems to diminish.
I stepped inside the house, although it seemed to me that Mrs. Keeney was a second or two late in opening the door, so that I almost felt I was elbowing my way in.
“I trust I have not come at any inconvenient moment,” I said, really expecting her to tell me that I had. Her depressed air and the locked door all added up to an Arrival or a Departure taking place.
But she said no, I had not come at such a moment. I walked into the living room and asked if Keeney was at home. I observed that he had moved all the furniture since I was last there, somehow crowding it all over to one side of the room, which was large, so that there was a huge space of blank floor (for he had also rolled up the carpet) from the middle of the room to the window, which looked out over the muddy garden. Once again there was the same air of desolation, of changes about to be made, which I had sensed when outside the house.
Mrs. Keeney told me her husband was out, with such a weary air that I was surprised she offered me some refreshment. I accepted her offer, and before she left the room, asked what her husband had in mind for the house and garden. She shrugged, said she did not know, was not certain, and left the room. As I sat in that disordered room looking out at the rain over the garden, feeling profoundly uncomfortable and wishing I had never come, I heard an appalling sound—an eerie howling, followed by a heavy scratching and scrabbling at the door! I leaped to my feet and was retreating to the window, for I immediately recognized the sound for what it was, when, to my horror, the door opened. Mrs. Keeney entered with a tray, followed by—the beast!
“Come on,” I called, raising the window. “Let’s go out this way.”
And I freely confess I vaulted out, landing up to my ankles in the mud of the garden. Once outside I immediately realized that this was a most cowardly action, to leave a fellow citizen, and a woman at that, to face the danger alone. So I raised one leg and put it back over the sill, getting some purchase on the floor with my muddy foot and trying to heave myself back into the room, calling out, “Come on. Come this way, Mrs. Keeney.”
But the dog, a huge wolflike creature with feet as big as dinner plates, seemed to cause her no alarm. In fact they seemed on friendly terms. As the beast sniffed about her knees, she absentmindedly broke off a portion of the cake she had on the tray and handed it to him. He snuffled it down and seemed to want more. I regained a certain calm, although I was still very reluctant to go into the room. I recalled hearing of a naughty child who had once apparently got hold of an abandoned infant from a dog pack and had illicitly reared it until she was detected. It seems she had made quite a friend of the animal, which she had hidden in a potting shed, to the extent that the animal would not harm her. Eventually, of course, the dog grew older, began to hunt, was detected and destroyed. They say she wept and swore she could feed it on milk and honey. A likely story.
However, as I say, I remained calm to a point. Theoretically, too, I knew that at one time the dog had been a domestic animal—loathsome thought. So I remained, half in and half out of the window, observing the animal sitting by Mrs. Keeney, pounding its tail on the floor with its huge red tongue hanging out and its yellow fangs exposed. I took a deep breath and said, “Does this animal belong to you?”
“Yes,” she said. “It is my husband’s.”
I said with feeling, “I am very surprised.”
Then I drew my foot and leg back over the sill into the garden, said goodbye through the open window, and went back through the mud into the road. Mrs. Keeney watched me and I should say she was on the verge of tears.
I do not know how I got home. I was shaking all the way. It was not so much the encounter with the dog. It was the dug-over garden, the pushed-about furniture and Mrs. Keeney’s peculiar, nervous manner. It was the locked door. And halfway home it struck me forcibly that the boys’ horror stories about the rabbit bones must be true. Keeney obviously was not eating the beasts himself, but he must be trapping them and feeding them to the dog. The thought of that great animal wolfing down raw flesh with its yellow fangs made me retch. And of Keeney setting the traps and extracting the results with bloody hands. Then digging pits for the bones to hide the existence of the dog. The implications of the matter were horrendous.
* * * *
I was standing in my dripping clothes drinking a glass of wine when Regan came downstairs to greet me. I told her my story straightaway. Although at first she could hardly believe it, she then accepted it with strange calmness. She said, “Take off your wet clothes first. And on no account tell Arthur.”
“As if I would,” I said.
“Go on then,” she ordered. “Well have to report it to the town council immediately.”
I nodded agreement. “Then he’ll have to go to another town,” she said matter-of-factly.
I turned in the doorway. “If they’ll have him,” I said.
She paused. “Yes, I suppose—”
“Do you remember Ritchie Callender?” I asked.
And neither of us spoke. Ritchie Callender had been one of our contemporaries. We had gone to school together, played together, robbed the orchards together. In his teens he had started doing a lot of gambling, neglected his work in the fields and finally got a girl pregnant and told her to say nothing to the council. When people eventually found out, the council tried to get another town to take him. But the councils of the towns he went to either rejected him outright or kept him a month or two and returned him to us. No town would accept him, he could not stay with us—so we had to exile him.
He came in again over our lawn one night, ragged, trembling and hungry. I went out to meet him. He stuttered out some horrible tale of what had happened to him—I forget it now, thank God—and at that moment the townspeople appeared in a mass. He gave me a despairing, hopeless look and ran back again over the lawn into the darkness. Try as I might, I’ve never forgotten his limping run over the grass, the way he ducked as he went into the trees. I left food on the grass for a week and it always went—packaging as well, so I know it was not taken by an animal. And then the food was left there, night after night, and after ten days I gave up putting it there. I’ve often wondered if he came back starving on the eleventh day, and the twelfth, and found nothing. But it was a big risk for me to leave it there. I doubt if I would do as much today.
Regan and I were staring at each other in horror. “Don’t let’s report him now,” she said. “We’ve got to go to Juram. We can find him there and talk it over.”
“It’s wrong,” I warned her.
“Perhaps he’s ill,” she told me. “Friends may be able to help.”
We both knew there was no possible excuse for not going immediately to the council. In Juram we would be virtually unobserved talking to Keeney. It was secretive, furtive and uncitizenlike. Let all your conversations be open to scrutiny: that is one of our precepts.
But we packed up swiftly and the three of us set out along the forest road for Juram.
* * * *
Recollection of that scene at Keeney’s, the knowledge that we were acting in secret in defiance of the rights of our fellow citizens, apprehension about the trip—all these things troubled me deeply as we went. We were also sailing along in total darkness, apart from the light thrown by our headlamps. It was pouring rain and the road was unpleasantly potholed. I continually scanned the road and the verges of the forest, as we went. Once or twice I imagined movements at the borders of the road, the shaking of bushes and grasses and so forth, but we glided on uneventfully, seeing and hearing nothing. Soon we were in Juram. It is a charming and well laid out city. The market square, with its colored dome and tropical plants, is particularly fine. The gardens have more flowers and the houses, in some cases, better proportions than in our own city. Nevertheless, I like ours better.
We went straight to the Town Hall when we arrived, to register our presence and to inquire after Keeney. We crossed the domed square, where the light was filtered through to provide a charming colored floor, and went straight up the marble steps into the Town Hall.
After giving our names and city of origin, we went to find Keeney. Imagine our surprise when we were told that our town clerk was not in Juram, had not been there since the week before and was not even expected at any time in the future. It was inconceivable. Where on earth could he be? The most alarming thoughts filled our minds. Nevertheless we naturally showed no surprise to the officials of Juram, not wishing to betray that there were any irregularities in our town arrangements. We merely said we must have mistaken the day.
Naturally, having tea in the Strangers’ Restaurant, we chatted the matter over between ourselves in low voices until Arthur intruded in an objectionable way. “Ugh!” he said. “Old Keeney, flesh-eating Keeney.”
We immediately silenced him, partly in case anyone at a nearby table should hear, partly because his exuberant rudeness did not suit us. But Arthur continued in the same vein. “He’s got a dog. It lives in the house. They all pat it on the head. Ugh—it makes me feel sick. Keeney’s revolting.”
I told the boy he was making us feel sick, but I secretly thought that as things had turned out, we should have paid more attention to the children’s fantastic tales. “I bet I could tell you where he is—the dirty old man,” he added.
I pressed him to tell me, but he would not say. In fact he appeared afraid to tell me. Regan was now so upset that I urged her to go and relax in one of the rooms upstairs before the performance while I took Arthur on a sightseeing tour of the town.
As we went around the museum, examining the fused, charred and horrendous relics of the town’s past, I again put pressure on Arthur to tell me where to find Keeney and he refused again to tell me. I decided he was just making childish mysteries and dropped the subject.
I was scarcely in the mood for Regan’s recital after the hectic events of the day and she, I could tell, was almost equally disturbed. She played with an unwonted vigor and passion—the audience was perturbed by it and slightly displeased. The applause at the end was polite. In a way I had almost enjoyed her uncontrolled playing, but I did not expect anyone else to do the same.
She did not mention the performance at all over supper. She talked only of Keeney, about where he might be, about the dog. “We’ve got to find him, we’ve got to find him,” she kept repeating.
Arthur was asleep in the Strangers’ House, and I was for staying in Juram overnight and returning in the morning. But Regan, still speculating hysterically about Keeney, wanted to go home straightaway and was very distressed at the idea of not setting off immediately. It upset me so much to see her in this state that I gave in.
By the time we had woken Arthur and got him in the car, all I wanted to do was go home and get into bed. As we glided out of Juram, Arthur sat in the back crooning a tune he was making up and knocking together three round stones on a string which he had bought himself. Regan sat rigid in the seat next to me wearing on her face an expression of intensity I had not, I must say, seen since the days of our courtship and early marriage.
As we glided through the trees in the darkness, a memory came through my fatigue. I recalled—and it can only have been a deliberate forgetting—the name of the little girl who had hidden, and tried to rear, the little dog. It was, of course, Regan herself.
* * * *
I can see her now, fat doe caught in the bush. Is she caught? She must be, for I see stars in a gap in the trees overhead, I see her. Creep up, creep up, singing my song in my head—catch, catchie, catcho, I’ll kill you, dearie. And raise my club and leap. But she breaks, and runs on a broken leg. Follow swiftly, I’ll tire her yet. Soft, catchie, catcho, I’ll batter her head with my club, drag her back, her head, my club, all bloody. Run, panting, nearly there. The light, the sky, the open—I’ll have to cross, I’ll have to cross, I’ll have to cross.
* * * *
And I recalled that Regan had been an unorthodox child. Her mother feared for her.
We glided along the dark forest road. I pushed the car up to fifteen. Arthur crooned and knocked in the back. Regan sat in the same pose, pale and intent, as if listening to an important message from an invisible stranger. My headlights beamed along the forest edges. The weather was still—nothing stirred. I was half-asleep.
And suddenly Regan screamed and Arthur shouted, “Look—Dad!”
There was a shaking of bushes and the lower branches of the trees on one side of the road. Fifty feet ahead a deer broke from the trees and ran across the road.
I was about to speak when Regan screamed again.
The bushes parted and a man ran out in pursuit of the deer. He stopped short in the middle of the road, a club raised above his head, blinded by our lights. His eyes were tight shut against the glare. His mouth was open in a roar of pain, revealing blackened and broken teeth. He was short, thickset, his skin pasty and white, his eyes rimmed in red. He wore a torn shirt revealing blue tattoos in a geometric design all over his chest. His trousers were made of some animal skip. His feet were bare, toes splayed, ending in thick, curved nails. He wore a leather cap on which were sewn three or four hedgehog skins. His hair was long, black and matted. One short, very pale arm, covered in black hairs, was badly gashed and dripped blood onto the road.
He stood there roaring, with his eyes tight shut, as we drifted toward him.
I acted swiftly, stopping the car and switching off the lights at the same time, hoping desperately that he would go away. In the darkness, I guess, he and any others with him would be able to see us, although we could not see them. We sat there in the darkness on the forest road. Behind me Arthur moved a little.
Then I said, “I’m going to turn the lights on and start away quickly. If they’re around us they may be dazed by the lights. Hold on to the handles of the doors.”
I turned on the, lights and the car leaped forward— down a perfectly empty road. In the darkness the man had run back into the forest.
After a pause Arthur said, rather shakily, “What was that? Who was that?”
Neither of us answered.
“It’s what they say, isn’t it?” Arthur demanded. “The forest’s full of the misborn, isn’t it?”
I said, “It’s true that in the early days of the towns they used to put malformed babies just inside the forest edge—and they said they were picked up and reared there by the others. But my grandfather said that his father told him that they died.”
He had said, in fact, that everyone knew they died. Their cries could be heard if you went too close. That must be one of the reasons why our houses have by tradition always been set so far back from the forest—so that people could not hear the cries of the dying babies.
I could hear Arthur retching in the back of the car.
“It was all a long, long time ago,” Regan told him. “There are no malformed babies now.”
“So you say,” said Arthur. Regan did not reply. I wondered why not and then realized that I knew. The False Arrivals. A woman would take to her bed, bear a child, the council would visit, as usual, and she would declare the child Arrived and Departed. The women must know about all this. The men did not, said they did not, thought they did not—there are things people must forget, pretend not to know until they really do forget. I had forgotten that Regan was the girl with the small dog in the potting shed. She had forgotten the child who came before Arthur. City life relied on this forgetting. What else had we forgotten, eliminated, suppressed? For a second, there on the forest road, I was in a nightmare world where I was living my life beside a monster I never saw, a fiend which sat beside me as I ate, lay in bed with me at night, which I gazed over, around and through and never noticed at all.
Arthur’s clear, plangent voice pierced this evil dream. “Well, if that man wasn’t misborn, and he didn’t look it, who was he, then? Where did he come from?”
Neither of us spoke. Then Regan said, “Arthur. You know very well what happens when someone in the city does things they shouldn’t. Perhaps they steal or—whatever they do.”
“There isn’t anyone like that in the city,” he said.
“Well, suppose there were?”
“The council asks them to go to another town,” he said, remembering what he had learned.
“What happens if they go there and go on doing whatever they were doing in our town? What does the new town do?”
“They probably ask them to go to another town,” he said.
“And suppose they do it again, and again, in every town they go to?”
He thought, then said, “I suppose you mean they put them in the forest.”
“That’s right,” she said. “The man you saw was probably one of those. There are women too.”
“It can’t be very nice in there. Suppose they want to come back?”
“I think if they really wanted to live in the towns they would behave themselves,” she said.
Probably, I thought, Regan did not know. Did not know. But a little girl such as she had been—showing signs of deviating, being an outsider? Her mother must have told her. She did not remember. I recalled Ritchie Callender. And I suddenly remembered someone else— Bennet, who had lived in twenty cities, who molested children, who had never been able to work. That moonlit night we were supposed to be asleep, my cousin and I, when we were woken up by the noise near our house. We leaned out of the window and saw the townspeople making rough music, beating on pots and pans and buckets, shouting. And there was Bennet, in the center of the crowd, being beaten back foot by foot into the forest, turning to them and shouting, turning back toward the forest, retreating under the full moon as they mobbed him over the lawn into the dark trees. We could not hear him above the din. We just saw his sagging mouth opening and closing as they pushed him on. My cousin, only five, had cried. I, being older, knew that Bennet, who had waited for us on the way home from school, had to be sent off somewhere. But the violence and fear frightened me. I could not see how the townsfolk could push him into the forest they were themselves so afraid of.
As we rode through the forest, those three scenes flashed in front of my eyes like photographs—the little girl laying her doll down to open the door of the shed where her dog was waiting to jump up and lick her face, my grandfather sitting behind his old carved desk telling me about the mutant babies, the moonlight falling on Bennet’s upturned, grimacing face.
And now Arthur was silent too. From now on he would carry his own photograph with him. There would be a picture of the wild man caught in the headlights of the car. There would be his mother speaking and, I suppose, my back, my silence, as I steered the car forward.
I felt I had to say something. “It’s very unpleasant, Arthur, but try not to think too much about it. These things have to happen. And don’t tell any of the other children. It would only frighten them. There are very, very few people in the forests and they are only there because the towns cannot have them. We could not have people like that in the cities.”
As I spoke I wondered how many people there really were in the forests. Three, four, five hundred years of antisocial men and women, abandoned babies, girls with unpermitted Arrivals. How many were there? How many? How had we in the cities let this happen? I felt my head was bursting. I didn’t want to think these thoughts and yet they came crowding in, overwhelming me. And there was a perverse satisfaction in not being able to control them, like drinking too much wine, knowing it was unwise but not being able to stop. I wished Regan would speak so that I could reply and we could talk all the way home. But she had resumed her frozen, intent position. She was too engrossed in her thoughts to speak.
We thought they died, I told myself. At least, no one consciously thought that, but at the backs of our minds we assumed it was true. We never acknowledged it to ourselves, let alone to each other. Now, never mind how destructive the thought, we had— Why else were they building it—and I was the designer—and my mind seemed to collapse under the weight of it all. In my ears was the sound of someone groaning, groaning, groaning.
* * * *
I am exhausted today. It is very early, and as I sit in my room at the top of the house, a few feathery wisps of cloud move in the blue sky above. There too is the long sweep of sunlit lawn down to the trees. Normally at this hour I can hear the birds singing. Today the men are working, digging the foundations for the ramparts. There is the sound of spades hitting the metal markers which show the course of the wall. The men call out to each other. Wheelbarrows full of bricks leave tracks on the dewy grass. Piles of bricks are dropped onto it from the barrows.
What did we say when the council confirmed the order for my plans? How did we put the proposal to each other? I seem to remember something about deer straying into the city in winter and spoiling the fields and gardens, small children straying out of the city into the forest. It all seemed very convincing at the time. I suppose, because it had to be convincing. We needed the ramparts. We needed to ignore the reasons why we needed them. But we must have known. We must have known.
* * * *
at the feeding last night they sang of a wall of square stones outside the forest. I say, they want to keep us in, mates. I don’t know why I say that. I had a flash in my brain, that’s why. Outside there is light to glare and make you shut your eyes. You cannot open them or they burn. But those other men, they say, sleep on soft lying places, off the ground, under shelter. This place is hard. I’ll fetch more leaves. The woman is sobbing in her sleep again. The child wails. Bloody noise. No, I’ll sleep now.
* * * *
The sun is up high now. I have put off my visit to the council for too long. I have so much to say. I must report my sighting of the man last night on the road. I must tell about Keeney’s dog. I must ask the council to find out where he was yesterday when he should have been in Juram. I have an idea—it’s absurd—that Keeney will harm me if I go to the council, the way Lesley used to when she was ten and I was seven. How disloyal to think this of a fellow citizen. I should report myself to the council as well. The sooner I make my report and return to get some sleep, the better I’ll feel.
Regan comes in, ready to go out...
I asked her if she would prefer to stay at home and leave the council visit to me. She said she believed she ought to come, but when she picked up her handbag her hands were trembling. I thought: What are we all coming to?
I said, “Let’s go straightaway, then, and get it over with. We can leave Arthur at the Children’s Hall.”
As we walked along our quiet streets, I sensed that the trees, pleasant gardens and fountains were all subtly different. I can’t explain it. Contentment, pleasure in these things, had gone. I felt as I did the day Regan bore Arthur—upset, different, how to describe it? Disturbed? It took me back to those dreadful walks home from school when I knew Lesley was waiting down the road behind the big elm, ready to pounce on me, throw me on the ground and kick and punch me.
The Council House stood there in the center of the big square with its marble statues and twenty small fountains. There were people in the square buying and selling foodstuffs and material. All spoke in low voices, smiled at each other—there were more people walking to and fro on the long marble floor of the House. The smell of aromatic tea from the restaurant was strong, as it usually is in the mornings. All over the country the doors of the Houses had just swung open, the citizens had entered and were talking to each other, the scent of the tea was wafting through hall, offices and corridors.
As we mounted the stairs to the town officer’s room, I felt quite easy and calm in my mind.
We went in. Hendricks, the town officer, sat in an easy chair by his big windows, which look out onto the square. The light flooded into the elegant room. Regan and I sat down. Hendricks poured tea for us. He is a big man, ruddy-skinned, round-headed, with a mane of golden hair. The sunlight caught it as we sat there, turning the top of his head into a cap of gold strands. I thought as he sat solidly in his chair that he must look very like a ship’s captain of the old days.
He looked at us with his large, very bright blue eyes. He said, “You look—disturbed.” There was a touch of mild dislike in his tone. Well, it is bad to have citizens walking about looking hard-pressed and upset.
“We have a reason,” Regan said, somewhat defensively.
‘I am sure you have,” he replied. There was a pause as we drank our tea. Hendricks went on looking at us and said finally, “Perhaps you would like to tell me what is amiss with you.”
I disliked the attitude implied in that “with you.” It came to me that Hendricks scented disturbance in our manner and did not wish to have any part in it. But I was confident that once we had told our stories his attitude would alter.
“There are two stories we must tell you,” I said briskly. I had worked often with Hendricks on building projects. I told myself he knew me as a sensible man and a reliable citizen. “In fact,” I said, “these tales may disturb you very much. But they must be told. I will tell one, and Regan the other. Mine concerns Keeney.”
I was studying his face. His eyes flickered at the mention of Keeney’s name. He reminded me suddenly of a big, healthy child being accused of some misdeed which he has decided to deny.
I told him how I had gone to visit Keeney, of the disturbed look of the place, of the locked door, of Mrs. Keeney’s peculiar air and, finally, of the dog. Then I told him that Keeney had not been in Juram when we went there.
Hendricks said, “I am amazed. Tell me your story now, Regan.”
And she told him about our drive from Juram and the wild man caught in the headlights of the car.
When she had finished, Hendricks looked at us with his bright-blue eyes and said, “Thank you. We will look into all this.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked.
“It will be discussed in the council,” he said. He sat stiffly in his chair and looked at me as if he were expecting me to go.
“That hardly satisfies me,” I said. “These are not matters which can wait. Or be left to the council alone to decide—they are for all the citizens. Above all, I would like to know your thoughts.”
He drank some tea and said, “It all needs sifting.”
“Sifting!” I cried. “Do you imply there are errors in our reports?”
‘We need to get to the bottom of it,” he said slowly.
Regan sat up straight in her chair and said, “Come, come, Hendricks. You have accounts of disconcerting events from two responsible citizens. Either you believe that we are making up stories to mislead you, or that we are both deluded, or you must take us seriously and share your thoughts and ideas with us.”
Hendricks gazed out of the window at the people in the square.
He said, “I don’t know.”
We both stared at him. Then Regan stood up and said, “This will have been a great shock to you. Perhaps we should approach your deputy?”
“Leave it with me. Leave it with me,” he muttered.
When we went out of the room, he was still sitting there staring from the window. The sun had gone in.
On the stairs Regan said decidedly, “We must approach someone else.”
I stopped with my hand on the rail. “I wonder,” I said, “if anyone will listen to us.”
Standing on the stairs, she began to laugh. I looked at her in alarm, conscious that down in the hall people were beginning to look up at her.
“What—?” I said.
“You think anyone we tell about these events will behave like Hendricks?” she asked. She was still smiling.
“In most cases,” I said.
She nodded, fairly accepting the situation, which I could not truly understand. “I knew it,” she said. “I told my mother this would happen.”
“What would happen?’ said I.
“I said that one day she would wake up and”—she began to laugh again—”and she would be able to ignore the fact that it was raining and go for a walk without protective clothing and come home and catch pneumonia and die saying what a lovely day it had been.”
I became impatient. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Regan,” I said. “But I do know that you’re making a public spectacle of yourself. Come home.”
She sobered down and said, “I suppose so. That’s all there is to do, isn’t it?”
* * * *
the drum heater is beating tonight. He beat for many hours last night and the night before, drumming through the night while we kept fire alight with many logs. We did not sleep till morning. We love that wild drumming and our blood runs hot and fast.
* * * *
Regan, Arthur and I ate our evening meal in my room at the top of the house this evening. We had never done it before. Through the glass walls we can see south, over the broad, white streets of the city and forward, north, down over the lawn to the forest. The building work lay abandoned. The men had downed tools in the afternoon. Bricks lay in small piles along its length; tools had been flung down on the grass. The deep trench lay like a gash across the lawn between the forest and my house. The foundations were almost ready. The real work should begin tomorrow.
A cool breeze shook the trees of the forest. The sky overhead was cloudy. We sat on as the evening grew darker.
* * * *
drums beating, drums, beating, beating, beating...
* * * *
Suddenly, in the dusk, a figure appeared, treading over the ramparts, straddling them, head down to examine them.
“Keeney,” Regan said.
We sat watching him in silence.
In the gloom we could not make out his face. We could see his thickset figure walking heavily along the course of the foundations, bending over the bricks and tools.
Then, in the dusk, he stood athwart the trench, raised his big head, stood with his large hands hanging by his sides and laughed out loud, up at the sky. From where we sat we could catch the faint sound of his laughter.
Arthur said nothing at first. He looked at Keeney laughing in the dark. Then he said, “What the boys say is right.
“What do they say?” I asked.
But he only shook his head.
I looked at Regan. At last I had identified the uneasiness, uncertainty, I had felt this morning and wondered at. It was fear of the future. Regan shot a glance at Arthur.
Regan stood up suddenly and said, “I’m going down to talk to Keeney.” She ran out of the room. I heard her feet on the stairs and saw her running over the lawn —and suddenly Keeney was gone. He had vanished in the darkness.
Regan came back and said, “Come on, Arthur—bed.”
Arthur followed her out of the room. It was quite dark now. I could see the trees ahead and the dim lights of the town behind.
Later I said to Regan, “Shall we leave for another city?”
“It would be the same anywhere else,” she said.
“Other cities may be more ready to defend themselves.”
“After five hundred years of developing our kind of life,” she said mildly. ‘Electing councils, planting gardens, living by the law, playing gentle music, writing gentle verse, creating beauty, pleasure and peaceful scenes everywhere, avoiding every kind of violence, even that of birth and death, as if it were a dreadful, contagious disease—”
“As it is,” I said.
“Oh, certainly,” Regan said. “The cities came out of the ruin created by violence, aggression and competitiveness. But our fear of violence may have been as destructive as the violence itself. Do you know what it’s like to rear a child in constant terror of its rages, its hatreds, its inability to tell the difference between order and chaos? And then to know, and have to pretend not to know, that all these things were in us once— and probably still are? You men—hypocrites, all of you. Your Unexpected Arrivals—unexpected by you, perhaps, not by us. Your solemn conclaves, decisions that someone must leave the city for this crime or that. We women conceal the worst for you—we hide births and deaths, we deal with malformed babies as we’ve always done, we get sent away for conceiving, for giving birth without permission, we hide children who bite, whine and scream until we can eradicate enough of them to present them as citizens, we secretly threaten the older children until they abandon their uncontrolled way. And then we conceal from ourselves what we do.”
“I’m going to bed,” I said.
“Go to bed,” she said. “But we still have to face the results of what we’ve done. And what about Arthur?”
“What about him?” I asked.
“What about him indeed,” she said savagely. “When it happens—this thing we aren’t talking about—what will happen to Arthur?”
“I’ll think about that in the morning,” I said.
“Goodnight,” she said. “Goodnight.’
* * * *
the drums do not beat anymore. It is the Holy Time.
* * * *
It is happening at last.
Night after night we have come up to my room here at the top of the house. We have eaten and sat in silence as the darkness came down, catching the scents and gentle sounds from the city on one side, seeing the trees of the forest waving ahead on the other. The ramparts creep up a little each day. They are three feet high now and go all around the town at that height, like a tpy wall to stop little children from straying.
Almost every night Keeney comes at the same time and paces the length of the wall as far as we can see, with his short, heavy steps. Sometimes I think I can see him smiling.
The matters of the dog and his unexplained absence have never been raised. No one wants to know. So Keeney pads around his ramparts every night in peace.
But tonight everything is different. The city—men, women and children—have all come out in the soft, evening air. They are strolling about or sitting in groups all over the lawn behind the ramparts. The women are sewing, children playing ball, men chatting. We can hear laughter.
Arthur, sitting quietly with us, does not ask why they are there or want to go out and join them. His eyes have grown large over the weeks. We cannot tell him what is wrong. But I think he knows.
And, as we watch, it grows darker. Torches are brought out on stands and the stands are placed on the grass. There is a fire in the center of my smooth lawn. The women are heating food. Now we see people moving in and out of the light cast by the fire and the torches. An innocent and pleasant scene.
As they did not know why they wanted the wall, so they do not know why they are gathering behind its unfinished length.
Now it grows dark, really dark. There is a full moon which shines down when the cloud is not over it. It eclipses the light thrown by the torches. The children are laughing harder. The men talk more, the womens’ voices grow shriller. Some children are tired and crying.
Regan and Arthur sit with their arms around each other, looking from the window. We three notice, from our vantage point, that the branches on the forest trees are beginning to shake, although there is no wind.
Our citizens begin to sing an old song, a high, clear song. They stand in the dark singing. Tears begin to run down Regan’s cheeks.
And the first man comes out of the trees. He is very pale. He blinks, screws up his face against the light. He is a small man dressed in skins, with blue tattoos up his arms. He seems about to return to the safety of the trees and has taken a step back when the bushes part again and his woman, long-haired, tattered and very thin, comes out and stands beside him. She has only one eye. The other one is covered by a mass of scarred skin. She pulls and something, a child, comes out of the forest and stands in front of her. It is a small boy, barefoot and wearing a torn pair of shorts. He stands, head lowered, holding her hand. His head is scabby; patches of hair have fallen out completely.
Regan looks at the trio calmly. What does she think? That the woman might be her sister Jessica, who walked out into the forest when she became pregnant without authority for the second time? That the woman might have been she?
Quietly, the bushes part again and again. More and more of the forest people appear and stand together silently at the edge of the trees, getting used to the light falling into their eyes. There is a woman in a stocking cap. There is a fat man gnawing on a bloody bone. Strange how, even at this point, I find the sight of the blood running down the corners of his mouth so disgusting.
“Keeney,” whispers Regan, incredulous.
Yes, of course the man in front of the wild men is Keeney. He stands there in a suit, gnawing his piece of meat, talking to a small man in front who carries a club.
Our citizens go on singing. They have not yet seen the men and women on the other side of the barrier. But now, over the song, I hear the drums inside the forest pounding out a strong, meaningless rhythm; and as the drums get louder, the singers, at last, hear them, and their song falters and dies away. They peer across the ramparts, trying to see what is happening.
Keeney whispers to his companion, the small man. The forest people seem to gather themselves together. The drums beat louder. Suddenly the wild men and women begin to scream. Yelling in high, weird voices, they run to the ramparts, scramble over them and hurl themselves at the citizens, clubbing and spearing. In one corner Keeney’s dog fells a child and mauls it. The child’s mother tries to pull it off but the animal is tearing at its prey. The child’s face screams in the moonlight. Then the moon is covered by a cloud. In the darkness there are howls. Torches are overturned. In the light thrown by the fire I see the townspeople milling about, falling, crying out. They are like children. They do not know what is happening to them.
Arthur is asleep, asleep forever now. Our house is quiet as Regan and I watch the carnage below.
Yet I am not shocked by the scene, by the thought of our city in flames, as it will be, the pillars, the flower gardens, the fountains all destroyed. Our city turned its back on pain, violence and disorder. Now the accumulation of all that chaos over five hundred years is on us.
The horde pauses in its work. The moon reappears. Our men, women and children lie dead and wounded on the torn-up grass. The people of the forest look at the house and suddenly, like leaves driven by the wind, they begin to run toward us. Keeney, at their head, glances up at the window where I am sitting. He opens his mouth in a scream and leads them on and on in my direction. Soon we will hear their feet on the stairs.
Soon. Very soon.