Dark Society

by Brian W. Aldiss


   ... for though he left this World not very many Days past, yet every hour you
         know largely addeth to that dark Society; and considering the incessant
   Mortality of Mankind, you cannot conceive that there dieth in the whole Earth
                                                 so few as a thousand an Hour...

                                                       -- Sir Thomas Browne 1690


People in  their millions,  dead and  unobliging. Marching  the clouded streets,
trying still  to articulate  the miseries  that had  constricted their  previous
phase  of existence.  Trying to  articulate what  had no  tongue. To   recapture
something...

An  undersized military  computer operator  in Aldershot  tapped an  unimportant
juridical decision into the Internet, addressing it to a distant army outpost in
a hostile country. Like the mycelia of fungus, progressing unseen underground in
a mass of branching filaments as if imbued with consciousness, so the web of the
Internet system  spread unseen  across the  globe, utilising  even insignificant
Army  ops  in its  blind  quest for  additional  sustenance -  and  in so  doing
awakening ancient chthonian forces to a resentment of the new technology  which,
in  its  blind  semi-autonomous drive  for  domination,  threatened the  forces'
nutrient substrata deep in the planetary expanses of human awareness. The little
op, signing over to the next shift, while those concealed forces were already in
a way that took no heed of time or human reason - moving, moving to re establish
themselves in the non-astronomical universe,  checked with the clock and  betook
himself to the nearest chipper.

The  battalion had  commandeered an  old manor  house for  the duration  of  the
campaign.  Other ranks  were housed  in huts  in the  grounds, well  inside  the
fortified  perimeter. Only  officers were  comfortably housed  in the  big,  old
house.

Year by year they  were destroying the mansion,  pulling down the oak  panelling
for fires, using the library  for an indoor shooting gallery,  misusing anything
vulnerable.

The colonel damped the audio on his power box and turned to his adjutant.

'You heard most of that, Julian? Division sitrep from Aldershot. Verdict of  the
court martial just in. They've found our Corporal Cleat mentally unstable, unfit
to stand trial.'

'Dismissed the service?'

'Exactly. Just as well. Saves any  publicity. See to his discharge papers,  will
you?'

The adjutant stalked towards the door and called the orderly sergeant.

The colonel  went over  to the  wood fire  burning in  the grate  and warmed his
behind. He stared out  of the tall window  at the manor grounds.  A morning haze
limited  visibility  to  about two  hundred  yards.  Everything looked  peaceful
enough. A group of soldiers  on fatigues were strengthening the  security fence.
The tall trees of the drive  were in themselves a reassurance of  stability. Yet
it never did to forget that this was enemy territory.

He  failed to  understand the  case of  Corporal Cleat.  Certainly the  man  was
strange. It happened that the colonel knew the Cleat family. The Cleats had made
a great deal of  money in the early  eighties, trading in a  chain of electronic
stores, which  they had  sold off  at great  profit to  a German  company. Cleat
should have become an officer; instead he had chosen to serve in the ranks.

Some quarrel with his father, silly bugger. Very English habit. Went and married
a Jewish girl. Of course,  Vivian Cleat, the father, had  been a bit of a  tight
arse and no mistake. Got himself knighted for all that.

It was useless to  try to understand other  people. The Army's concern  was with
ordering  people,  getting them  organised,  not understanding  them.  Order was
everything, when you thought about it.

All the same,  Corporal Cleat had  been guilty. The  whole battalion knew  that.
Division had handled the matter well,  for once; the less publicity the  better,
at a rather tricky  time. Discharge Cleat and  forget about the whole  business.
Get on with the damned war.

'Julian?'

'Yessir?'

'What did you make of Corporal Cleat? Arrogant little bugger, wouldn't you  say?
Headstrong?'

'Couldn't say, sir. Wrote poetry, so I'm informed.'

'Better get in touch with his wife.  Lay on transport for her to meet  Cleat and
get the man off our hands. Goodbye to bad rubbish.'

'Sir, the wife died  while Cleat was in  the glasshouse. Eunice Rosemary  Cleat,
age twenty-nine. You may recall her father was a herpetologist at Kew. Lived out
near Esher somewhere. A verdict of suicide was brought in.'

'On him?'

'On her.'

'Oh, bugger. Well,  ring Welfare. Get  shot of the  man. Get him  off our hands.
Back to England.'


He took a passage on a ferry. He huddled in a comer of the passenger deck,  arms
wrapped round himself, fearful  of air and motion  and he knew not  what. On the
dock, he bought a pasty and ate it, sheltering from the rain. He thumbed a  lift
which took him all  the way to Cheltenham.  From there he paid  for a seat on  a
coach to Oxford. He  needed money, lodgings. He  also needed some form  of help.
Mental aid. Rehabilitation. He  did not know exactly  what he wanted. Only  that
something was wrong, that he was not himself.

At Oxford, he booked into  a cheap hotel in the  Iffley Road. In the market,  he
sought out a cheap  Indian clothing stall where  he bought himself a  T-shirt, a
pair of stone-washed jeans, and a heavy-duty Chinese-made over-shirt. He went to
see his bank in Cornmarket. In one  of his accounts, a substantial sum of  money
remained.

He got  drunk that  night with  a friendly  mob of  young men  and women. In the
morning he could remember none of their  names. He was sick, and left the  cheap
hotel in a bad temper. As he  quit the room, he looked back hastily.  Someone or
something had caught  his eye. He  thought a man  was sitting dejectedly  on the
unmade bed. There was no one. Another delusion.

He went to his old  college to see the bursar.  It was out of term  time; behind
the worn, grey walls of Septuagint,  life had congealed like cold mutton  gravy.
The porter informed him that Mr  Robbins was away for the morning,  looking over
some property in  Wolvercote. He sat  in Robbins' office,  huddled in a  corner,
hoping  not  to be  seen.  Robbins did  not  return until  three  thirty in  the
afternoon.

Robbins ordered  a pot  of tea.  'As you  know, Ozzie,  your "flat"  is really a
storeroom, and has reverted to that use. It's been - what? Four years?'

'Five.'

'Well, it's a bit awkward.' He looked considerably annoyed. 'More than a bit, in
fact. Look, Ozzie, I have a pile of work to do. I suppose we could put you up at
home, just for a-'

'I  don't  want that.  I  want my  old  room back.  Want  to hide  away,  out of
everyone's sight. Come on, John, you owe me a favour.'

Robbins said, calmly pouring Earl Grey into his cup, 'I owe you bloody  nothing,
my friend. It was  your father who was  the college benefactor. Mary  and I have
done enough for you as it is. Besides, we know what you've been up to,  blotting
your service career.  To put you  up here in  college again is  to break all the
rules. As you know.'

'Sod you, then!' He  turned away in anger.  But as he reached  the door, Robbins
called him back.


The storeroom under the eaves of Joshua Building looked much as it had done when
it had served as Cleat's flat. Light filtered in from one northern skylight.  It
was a long room, one side of it  sloping sharply with the angle of the roof,  as
if a giant had taken a butcher's knife to it. The place smelt closed, musty with
ancient knowledge percolating up from below.

Cleat stood staring angrily at a pile  of old armchairs for a while. Setting  to
work dragging them to one side, he  found his bed was still there, and  even his
old oak chest, which he had had  since schooldays. He knelt on the dusty  boards
and unlocked it.

The chest  contained a  few possessions.  Clothes, books,  a Japanese  aviator's
sword, no drink. An untrained photograph  of Eunice wearing a scarf. He  slammed
the lid down and fell back on the bed.

Holding the photograph up to  the light, he studied the  coloured representation
of Eunice's face. Pretty, yes; rather silly, yes. But no more of a fool than he.
Love had been a torture, merely emphasising his own futility. You took more note
of a woman than a man, of course. You expected nothing from your fellow men - or
your bloody father.  All those signals  women put out,  unknowingly, designed to
grab your attention...

Human physiology and  psychology had been  cunningly designed for  maximum human
disquiet, he thought.

Small wonder he had made a miniature hell of his life.


Later he went out into town and got drunk, ascending from Morrell's ales through
vodka to a cheap whiskey in a Jerico pub.

Next  morning was  bad. Shakily,  he climbed  on the  bed to  stare out  of  the
skylight. The world seemed to have  been drained of colour overnight. The  slate
roofs  of Septuagint  shone with  damp. Beyond,  slate roofs  of other   distant
colleges, an  entire landscape  of slate  and tile,  with abysses  between sharp
peaked hills.

After a while, he  gathered himself together, put  on his shoes, and  went along
the  attic  corridor  before  descending  the  three  flights  of  Number Twelve
staircase. The stone  steps were worn  from centuries of  students who had  been
installed in rooms here, each in a little cell with an oak door, to sup up  what
learning they could. The wooden panelling  on the walls was kicked and  scuffed.
How like prison,he thought.

Down in the inner quad, he  looked about him be-musedly. The Fellows  Hall stood
to one side.  On impulse, he  crossed the flagstones  and went in.  The hall was
built in a Perpendicular style,  with tall windows and heavy  linen-fold panels.
Between the  windows hung  solemn portraits  of past  benefactors. His  father's
portrait had been removed from near the  end of the line; in its stead  hung the
portrait of a Japanese man in gown and mortar board, gazing serenely through his
spectacles.

A scout had been  polishing silver trophies in  one corner of the  room. He came
forward now, to ask, with a mixture of obsequiousness and sharpness which  Cleat
remembered in  college servants,  'Can I  help you,  sir? This  is the  Fellows'
Hall.'

'Where's the portrait of Sir Vivian Cleat which used to hang here?'

'This is Mr Yashimoto, sir. One of our recent benefactors.'

'I know  it's Mr  Yashimoto. I'm  asking you  about another  eminent benefactor,
Vivian Cleat. It used to hang here. Where is it?'

'I expect it's gone, sir.'

'Where, man? Where's it gone?'

The scout was tall and  thin and dry of countenance.  As if to squeeze one  last
drop of moisture from his face, he frowned and said, 'There's the Buttery,  sir.
Some of  our less  important worthies  were moved  there last  Hilary Term, as I
recall.'

Outside the Buttery, he ran into  Homer Jenkins, a one-time friend who  held the
Hughenden Chair in Human Relations. Jenkins had been a sportsman in his time,  a
rowing blue, and retained  a slim figure into  his sixties. A Leander  scarf was
draped round his neck, a reminder of past glories. Jenkins agreed blithely  that
Cleat's father's portrait now hung behind the bar in the Buttery.

'Why isn't it with the other college benefactors?'

'You don't really want me to answer that one, do you, dear boy?' Uttered with  a
smile and head slightly on one side. Cleat remembered the Oxford style.

'Not greatly.'

'Very wise. If I may say so, it's a surprise to see you about here again.'

'Thanks so  much.' As  he turned  on his  heel, the  Hughenden professor called,
'Hard lines about Eunice, Ozzie, dear boy!'


He bought a bowl of soup in a Pizza Piazza, feeling ill, telling himself he  was
no longer in prison. But the narrative of his life had in some way been  mislaid
and something like an intestinal rumbling told him that there was within himself
a part he  would never know  again. Unseen, the  cancer stops to  lick chops and
then again devours... A line from a poem by - whom? As if it mattered.

A teenage girl drifted into the wine bar and said, 'Oh, there you are. I thought
I might find you lurking here.' She was studying Jurisprudence at Lady  Margaret
Hall, she said, and finding it all a  bit of a bore. But Daddy was a  judge, and
so... She sighed and laughed simultaneously.

As she talked, he realised  she had been one of  the group of students from  the
previous night. He had taken no notice of her that he could recall.

'I could tell you were a follower of Chomsky,' she said, laughing.

'I believe in  nothing.' To himself  he thought, sickly,  but I must  believe in
something or other, if only I could get at it.

'You look well-ghastly today, if you'll forgive my saying so. But then, you're a
poet, aren't you? You were spouting Seamus Heeley last night.'

'It's Heaney, Seamus Heaney, or so I'm led to believe. Do you want a drink?'

'You're a poet and a criminal,  so you said!' Laughingly, she clutched  his arm.
'Or was it a criminal and a poet? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?'

He did not want her, did not need her company, but there she stood, new  minted,
eager, unenslaved, springlike, waifish, agog for life.

'Want to come back to my dreadful dump for coffee?'

'Depends.  How  dreadful?"   Still  half-laughing,  teasing,   bright,  curious,
trusting, yet with a little something  like guile, born for a relationship  such
as this.

'Historically dreadful.'

'Okay. Coffee and research. Nothing more.'


Later, he told himself, she had wanted something more. Half wanted at least,  or
she would never have made her way  before him in her brief skirt, upwards  round
the labyrinthine coils of Staircase Twelve to that lumber room, or have  fallen,
when she gained the top, panting and laughing with open mouth - pristine as  the
inside of a tulip -  on the dusty bed. He  had not meant to rush  her. Not meant
that at all.

Well, she  was a  sporting young  lady, perhaps  aware afterwards  that she  had
unconsciously  enticed  him,  an  older  world-stained  man  with  a  smell   of
incarceration yet about him, and had departed without indecent haste, still with
a kind of smile, a smile now  more like a sneer, towards safety or  ruination as
character  dictated. Degraded,  defeated possibly,  but full  of a  spirit -  he
forced himself to hope - which would not admit to that defeat. Not like Eunice.

'Whatever  drives  us to  these  things...' he  said,  half aloud,  but  did not
complete the sentence, aware of his treachery even to himself.

Near at hand, a relay clicked.


The sky darkened over  Oxford. The rain came  down again as if  the hydrological
cycle  were working  out a  new means  -JL of  replenishing the  Thames from  an
untapped level  in the  troposphere. It  washed against  the lumber room windows
with antediluvian splendour.

Towards evening he stirred himself and ventured further into the recesses of the
room. There he discovered a crate full  of his old books and videos. Pulling  it
out he found, hiding further in the gloom, a box containing his old computer.

Without particularly conscious volition, he  carried the Power Paq from  its box
and plugged it in to the mains. He dusted off the monitor screen with his  sock.
LCDs winked at him.

He pushed in a CD protruding like a tongue and rifled the keys with his fingers.
He had forgotten how to operate the thing.

A leering face came on, moving into close-up from a red distance. He managed  to
remove it and eject the disc, whereupon a slight whirring started and a sheet of
A4 paper began extruding from the  fax slot. He regarded it in  nervous surprise
as it floated to the floor. He switched off the computer.

In a minute, he picked up the message and sat on the bed to read it. The  sender
of  the  fax  addressed  him  by  his  first  name.  The  text  was  only partly
comprehensible:

	Oz as was Oz,

	If I say I know where you are. Physical action. Its low comedy marks us,
	but such. It is such. Where there are no placed no place no position  at
	all as regarding bakers' shops.

	Or to say only to  say or to say all  the more the more there  is to say
	like stamens on  the pyracanthus. Is  yours also? Also  an ingredient. I
	hope it comes through. Trying.

	Clear the street.  Clearer in the  street. The crooked  way. I mean  the
	clear the path from. You and I. For ever its.

	The existence. Can you speak of existence of what does not existence.  I
	clear nonexistence. I nonexist. Speak.

	Speak  me.  New  street   no  clear  street  clear   communicate.  Slow.
	Difficulty.

	Past tense.

	Eunice


'Bloody  nonsense,' he  said, screwing  up the  paper, determined  not to   show
himself he was disturbed  by the mere fact  of the message. A  haunted computer?
Rubbish, balls, idiocy. Someone was trying to make a fool of him;

one of the fellows of the college, most like.

A peremptory knock at the door.

'Come.'

Homer Jenkins  entered the  lumber room,  catching Cleat  standing there  in the
middle of  the room.  Cleat threw  the ball  of paper  at him. Jenkins caught it
neatly.

'Evenings are closing in.'

'The rain should clear.'

'At least it's mild. Don't you need a light in here?'

Polite North  European noises.  Jenkins came  to the  point. 'A  young woman has
invaded the  porter's lodge  with a  complaint against  you. Sexual molestation,
that kind of thing. I am quite able to deal with young women of her kind, but  I
must warn  you the  Bursar says  that if  there is  such an occurrence again, we
shall have to rethink your position, doubtless to your detriment.'

Cleat stood his ground.

'That study of yours on the Spanish Civil War, Homer. Have you completed it yet?
Is it published, or are you still stuck on that bit where Franco became Governor
of the Canary Islands?'

Jenkins was  fully Cleat's  equal when  it came  to standing  one's ground.  The
Jenkins family had enjoyed wealth  for several generations, ever since  the days
of  Jenkins'  Irresistible  Flea  Powder  (no  longer  mentioned  by  the  newer
generations). They owned rolling acres  on the Somerset border. Foxhunting  went
on there, and archery. This background made Homer Jenkins confident when it came
to standing his  own ground. He  did it, moreover,  with a kind  of smile and an
outward thrust of the chin.

In a calm voice, he said, 'Ozzie, you received some recognition as a poet before
you  served your  stretch in  clink, and  of course  the college  welcomed  your
success, minor though it was.  We attempted to overlook your  other proclivities
vi's-d-vi's your father's endowment to Septuagint.

'However, if you wish  to get back on  your feet again, and  restore if possible
your reputation, you must be advised that the college's benevolence extends only
so far. Retribution is never pleasant.'

Turning  with calm  dignity, he  made for  the door.  'You sound  like  Hamlet's
father!' Cleat shouted. Jenkins did not turn back.


He woke on the following morning to a faint click, audible even above the  sound
of rain on the roof just over his bed. Another note was emerging from the fax.

	Oz was,

	0 Im getting the it of hanging hang of it. Soon soon hobnails on streets
	I speak  you ordinary.  Difficulty. Garble  garble other  physical laws.
	Lores

	Follow me ill repeat it follow.

	Follow dont keep still. Still love you still. Still or moving.

	Eunice


He sat  with the  flimsy paper  in his  hand, thinking  about his  late wife.  A
fragment of a poem came to his head.

	Being among the men taken captive
	 The men the enemy humiliated
	 The men who cursed themselves
	The men whose beloved women had
	 Preceded them to hell


He began to conjure up a long  poem where a man, captive like himself,  suffered
all to be  reunited with a  dead wife, even  if it entailed  a descent into hell
itself. He  thrilled to  the vision.  Perhaps he  could write  again. Words  and
phrases jostled in his mind like prisoners seeking release.

This  time, he  did not  screw up  the message.  Without necessarily  giving  it
credence,  he  nevertheless  felt  belief  of some  kind  stir  within  him  - a
remarkable phenomenon in itself.

Yes, yes, he would write and confound them all. He still had - whatever he  once
had. Except Eunice. For her he felt  an unexpected longing, but he set it  aside
under the  prompting to  write. He  rummaged about  in his  chest, but  found no
suitable  writing  materials.  A  journey  down  to  the  nearest  stationer was
indicated. An image swam before his eyes,  not of his dead wife, but of  a mint,
unblemished pack of white A4 copy paper.

Locking the door of his room behind him,  he stood for a moment in the gloom  of
the landing. Waves of uncertainty  overcame him like a personalised  nausea. Was
he any good as a poet? He had been no good as a soldier. Or a son. Or even as  a
husband.

He would bloody well show  the likes of Homer Jenkins,  if he had to go  through
hell  to  do  so.  But  the gloom,  the  airlessness  of  this  top landing  was
oppressive...

He went slowly down the first flight  of stairs. The rain was falling even  more
heavily now, making an  intense drumming. The further  down the stairs he  went,
the darker it became.

Pausing at one landing, he peered out of a slit-like window into the quad below.
So heavy was the downpour, it  was hard to distinguish anything clearly,  beyond
walls of stone inset with blind windows. A flash of lightning came, to reveal  a
fleeing figure far below, carrying what looked like a plate - it could not be  a
halo! - over his head. Another flash. Cleat had a momentary impression that  the
whole college was sinking, sliding down intact into the clayey soils of  Oxford,
where bones of gigantic reptiles lay yet undiscovered.

Sighing, he continued downwards.

A little  fat man,  fortyish and  sallow, with  rain dripping  from his hair and
blunt face, bumped into Cleat at the next stairwell.

'What a soaker,  eh? They told  me you were  back, Ozzie,' he  said, without any
great display of  delight. "There^s one  of your metaphysical  poems I've always
rather liked. The one about, oh, you know - how does it go?'

Cleat did not recognise the man. 'Sorry, it's been-'

'Something about first causes. Ashes  and strawberries, I seem to  remember. You
see, the way  we scientists look  at it is  that before the  Big Bang, the  yiem
existed nowhere. It had nowhere to exist in. At all at all, as our Irish friends
purportedly say with  some frequency. The  elementary particles released  in the
initial -  you understand  explosion is  hardly an  adequate word  - perhaps you
poets can  come up  with a  better one  - yiem's  a good  one - the initial bang
included in its bargain  bundle both time and  space. So that in  that first one
hundredth of a second-'

His eyes blurred with intellectual excitement. A small bubble of spit formed  on
his lower lip like a  new universe coming into being.  He had begun to wave  his
arms, when Cleat protested that he did not want to be drawn into a discussion at
that moment.

'Of course not,'  said the scientist,  laughing, and clutching  Cleat's shirt so
that he would not escape. 'Mind you, we all feel the same.'

'We don't. We couldn't possibly.'

'We do, we cannot grasp that initial concept of nothingness, of a place  without
dimensions of  space or  time. So  nothingy\hat even  nothing cannot  exist.' He
laughed in a panting sort of way, like an intelligent bull terrier. 'The concept
frightens the hell out of me - such a no-place must be either bliss or perpetual
torment. It is the task of science to make clear what previously was-'

Cleat cried out that he had an appointment below, but the grip on his shirt  did
not slacken.

'Where science appears  to meet religion.  This timeless, spaceless  space - the
pre-y7em universe,  so to  speak -bears  more than  a superficial resemblance to
Heaven,  the old  Christian myth.  Heaven may  still be  around, permeated,   of
course, by fossil radiation-'

The scientist interrupted himself by  bursting into laughter, pressing his  face
nearer to Cleat's.

'Or of course  - you'll appreciate  this, Ozzie, being  a poet -  equally, He//!
"This is Hell, nor are we out ofit...", as Shakespeare immortally puts it.'

'Marlowe!'  screamed Cleat.  Tearing himself  away from  the other's  grasp,  he
rushed off, down the next flight of steps.

'Tut, of course,  Marlowe...' said the  scientist, standing alone  and lonely on
the stair. 'Marlowe. Must remember. Good old Christopher Marlowe.'

He mopped his streaming brow with a used tissue.


But it was getting so dark. The noise grew louder. The stairs turned about  anti
clockwise in tortuous lapidity, and with  them went Cleat's grip on reality.  It
was a relief when the steps terminated and he came to a broader space, marked at
each end by archways, beyond which dim lanterns glowed in the darkness.

He was slightly puzzled. Somehow, he  seemed to have overshot ground level.  The
clamminess of the air certainly indicated he was underground, lost in the  ample
cellarage of  Septuagint. He  remembered the  cellarage of  old; here,  no dusty
racks of bottles  were to be  seen. The halitus  of his breath  hung in the air,
slow to disperse.

Going forward  hesitantly, he  passed under  one of  the arches  into a  cobbled
space, where more steps presented themselves. He looked up. Everything was  hard
to make out. He could not determine  whether rock or stone or sky was  overhead.
No  rain  fell. He  found  it uncanny  that  the downpour  could  have cut  off.
Something prompted  him not  to call  out. There  was nothing  for it  but to go
forward.

His mood was glum. Not for the first time, he was on bad terms with himself. Why
was it  he could  not establish  friendly relationships  with others?  Why be so
unpleasant to the fat  scientist - Neil Someone,  could it have been?  -who was,
when all  was said  and done,  no more  eccentric than  many other  dons in  the
University of Oxford.

Oxford? This could not be Oxford, or even Cowley! He plodded on until, uncertain
of his whereabouts, he paused. Immediately,  a figure - Cleat could not  tell if
it was male or female - was passing by, grey of aspect and clad in a long gown.

'Have you seen a stationer near here?'

The figure paused, tweaked up his cheeks in the genesis of a smile, then  strode
on. As Cleat started off again, the figure vanished - there, then not there.

'Shit and yiem, very peculiar,' he said, hiding a distinct sense of unease  from
himself. Vanished, completely  vanished, like one  of Neil Someone's  elementary
particles...

The steps broadened,  became shallow, petered  out into cobbles.  On either side
stood what passed, he supposed, for houses; they contained no signs of life.  It
was  all very  old-fashioned in  an artificial  way, like  a  nineteenth-century
representation of sixteenth-century Nuremburg.

He continued  uncertainly to  descend once  more until  he came  to a wide space
which he mentally termed the Square. Here he halted.

As soon as  he stopped, the  surroundings began moving.  He took a  pace back in
startlement: everything  stopped. He  stopped: buildings,  roadways, broke  into
uneasy movement.  He took  another pace:  everything stopped.  He stopped again:
everything he could  see, the dim  and watercolour environs  about him, launched
into movement again. A sort of forward but circular movement.

An image came to him of a crab, the crab who believes that everyone but he walks
sideways.

This relativity of movement  was the least of  it. For when he  walked, not only
was the  universe stilled,  but it  was empty  of people  (people?). But when he
stood still, not only did the universe begin its crabwise shuffle, but it became
the stage for a bustling crowd of people (people?).

Cleat thought longingly of his safe army prison cell.

Remaining stock still,  he attempted to  single out faces  in the crowd.  To his
mortal  eyes, how  dead and  unobliging they  were! Jostle  they certainly  did,
pushing past him  and past each  other, not hurriedly  but merely because  there
seemed  so little  room: although,  with the  constant movement  of streets  and
thoroughfares, the  various ways  seemed to  be expanding  at a  steady rate  to
accommodate them. Their clothes lacked colour and variety.

It was hard to distinguish male  from female. Their contours, their faces,  body
languages, were somehow blurred. He found by experiment that by keeping his head
rigid and allowing  his eyes to  slide out of  focus he could  in fact make  out
individual faces:  man, woman,  young, old,  dark, light,  occidental, oriental,
long-haired,  short-haired,  bearded or  otherwise,  moustachioed or  otherwise,
tall, thin,  stocky, fat,  upright or  stooped. Yet  - what  was wrong  with his
retina?  - all  alike without  expression; not  merely without  expression,  but
seemingly without the facility to conjure up expressions. Abstracts of faces.

Surrounding him on all sides was  an immense dark society, who appeared  neither
alive nor  dead. And  this society  was proceeding  this way  and that, entirely
without ambition or objective.

They were like phantasms. Chillingly silent.

They jostled by Cleat until he could  stand the tension no more. As he  began to
run, as he first tensed his  leg muscles for flight, the vast  homogeneous crowd
vanished, was gone in an instant, leaving him isolated in a motionless street.

'There must be a scientific explanation,' he said. The only one that occurred to
him was that  he was suffering  a kind of  terminal delusion. He  shook his head
violently, trying to think himself back into the familiar old expanding universe
of hurtling velocities to which he was accustomed. But this present cloudy world
remained, obeying its own variant set of physical laws.

What  had  Eunice's  second  message said?  Wasn't  that  something  about other
physical laws?

A cold horror gripped him, drying his throat, chilling his skin.

Bracing himself  to proceed,  he told  himself that  whatever was  happening, he
deserved what he got.

He walked and walked, to emerge at last before a different kind of building;  an
attempt, he thought, at  some kind of a...  well, town hall? It  conformed to no
order of architecture he knew, being built of a spongy material, with  elaborate
flights of  steps leading  to no  visible doorway,  with balconies  to which  no
access was visible, with towering columns supporting no visible roofing, with  a
portico  under which  no one  could walk.  It was  preposterous, impossible  and
imposing.

He stopped in some wonderment - though wonderment was a quality of which he  was
rapidly being drained.

Immediately he stopped, the universe was set in motion and the enormous building
bore down on him like an ocean liner on a helpless swimmer.

He  remained  rooted to  the  spot and  thus  found himself  entering  the great
structure.

A  brighter  light  than  he  had  hitherto  encountered  in  the  cloudy  world
illuminated the inside  of the hall.  He was at  a loss to  think where it  came
from.

Scattered   about  the   floor  were   huge  piles   of  belongings,   extremely
tatterdemalion  in aspect.  Cloudy personages  were picking  through the  heaps.
Everything moved  with that  unsettling crabwise  movement, as  if caught in the
whirlpool of a spiral nebula.

If he  stood stock  still, he  could see  what was  happening. He found he could
relax his  auditory nerve  much like  his optical  one, and  so was able to hear
sounds for the first time. The voices of the personages drifted to him, high and
squeaky,  as if  they had  inhaled helium.  They seemed  to be  exclaiming  with
delight as they disinterred items from the heaps.

He moved forward  to see more  closely. Everything vanished.  He halted. It  all
returned. No, I don't want this... But when he shook his head involuntarily, the
building became no more than an echoing empty place, moving with the stealth  of
a cat.

The  various  heaps  consisted  of  curious  old  belongings.  Mountains  of old
suitcases, many  battered and  worn as  if humanly  exhausted from  a long,  sad
journey. Stacks  and stacks  of footwear  of all  kinds; lace-up  boots, ladies'
slippers,  clodhoppers,  children's  patent  leather  shoes,  bedroom  slippers,
brogues, shoes for this,  shoes for that, worn  or new, shoes enough  to walk to
Mars and back by themselves.

Eyeglasses in as  large a glassy  heap, pince-nez, horn-rims,  monocles, all the
rest  of  them.  Clothes: countless  rags  of  every description  indescribable,
towering up towards the roof.  And - no, yes -  hair! Hair by the tonne,  glossy
black, lily white, all shades in between, hair of humans, curled and bobbed  and
straight, some scalps with pigtails,  their ribbons still trailing. Teeth,  too,
the most terrible pile of all, molars, wisdoms, dog teeth, eye teeth, even  milk
teeth, some with flesh adhering to their forked roots.

They vanished. Instinctively, Cleat had  moved, shaken by an agonising  sense of
recognition.

He fell to the ground, remaining kneeling. The dreadful interior came back.

Now he saw more clearly, by unfocussing his eyes, the people who picked over the
sordid array.  They merely  reclaimed what  had once  been theirs, what remained
rightfully theirs.

He saw women - yes, that's it,  bald women of all ages - reclaiming  their hair,
trying it on, being made whole again.

Many others of the dark society  stood by, applauding, as the seekers  were made
whole.

Then he thought he saw Eunice.

Of course, she had  Jewish blood in her  veins. Here in this  terrible place you
might find her, among the wronged, the disinherited, the slaughtered.

He crouched where he was, not daring to move in case she vanished. Was it she? A
watercolour version of the Eunice he had once loved?

Something like  tears moved  upwards through  his being,  a gigantic remorse for
mankind. He cried her name.

Everything vanished except the great empty hall, unmoving as fate.

He froze, and she was approaching him!

She held out a hand in recognition.

Even as he reached for it, she vanished.

When he froze into stillness, she and all about her faded back into being.

'We  can never  be together,'  she said,  and her  voice carried  a distant  and
forlorn note, like an owl's cry above sodden woodland. 'For one of us is of  the
dead and one is not, my Ozzie dearest!'

She kept fading in and out as he tried to reply.

She knelt beside him, resting a hand on his shoulder. They remained like that in
silence, heads  close together,  the man,  the woman.  He learnt  to speak  with
almost no lip movement.

'I don't understand.'

'I never understood... But my messages reached you. You have come! Even here you
have come! How brave you are.'

At her whispered words, a little warmth kindled within him: so he had after  all
some virtue, something on which to build in future, whatever that future was  to
be...  He  stared into  her  eyes but  saw  no response  there,  indeed found  a
difficulty in appreciating them as eyes.

Brokenly, he said, 'Eunice, if it is you in any way, I'm sorry - just deeply and
unremittingly sorry. For everything. I'm living in  a hell of my own. I came  to
say that, to tell you that, to follow you down into Gehenna.'

It seemed she regarded him steadily. He knew she saw him not as once she had but
now as a kind of thing, an anomaly  in whatever served here as a variant on  the
space-time continuum.

'All these...' As he almost gestured, the enormous sordid piles wavered  towards
invisibility. 'What are they doing now? It's... I mean, the Holocaust, it's  all
so long ago. So long...'

She was disinclined  to answer until  he prompted her,  when her being  swam and
almost disintegrated before his eyes.

'There is no nowhere, no long ago.  Can you understand that? It's not like  that
here. Those time indicators are arbitrary rules in your... whatever  dimensions?
Here, they have no meaning.'

He moaned, covering his eyes against an overpowering sense of loss.

When  he  peeped between  his  lingers, the  building  was again  in  motion. He
remained rigid -  thinking, if there's  no now here,  neither is there  a proper
here - and passed through the walls into  a kind of space that was not a  space.
He thought he had lost Eunice, but the general movement carried her close again,
still kneeling towards him.

She was speaking, explaining, as if to her there had been no sense of absence.

'Nor is  there any  name, once  passionately spoken  but long-forgotten  in your
time-afflicted sphere, which is not tenanted here. All, even the most  maligned,
must join this vast society, increasing its number day by day.' Was she singing?
Was he hearing aright in his state of profound disturbance? Was it even possible
they communicated at all?

'The  myriads who  have left  no memorial  behind, and  those whose  reputations
linger through what you term ages - all find their place...'

Her voice faded  as he moved  imploringly, hoping for  a more human  word. If he
could get her  back... But the  thought dislocated as  again the great  hall was
empty and still, filled only with an immense silence as austere as death itself.

Again he was forced to crouch, immobile, until the semblances of habitation  and
her smudgy presence re-entered the cloudy world.

The  shade  of Eunice  continued  to talk,  perhaps  unaware that  anything  had
happened - or maybe that he had vanished from her variety of sight.

'... King Harold is here, removing the arrow from his eye; Sophocles,  recovered
from his hemlock; whole armies freed of their wounds; the Bogomils, back again;

Robespierre undecapitated; Archbishop Cranmer and his brave speech absolved from
the flames; Julius Caesar, unstabbed; Cleopatra herself, unharmed by asps, as  I
by my father's cobra. You must learn, Ozzie...'

As she droned on with  her long, long list, as  if she had for ever  in which to
specify a myriad individuals - and so  she has, he thought in dismay -  he could
only ask himself, over and over, how do I get back to Oxford, how can I ever get
back to Septuagint, with or without this phantasm of my love?

'... Magdeburg, Mohacs, Lepanto, Stalingrad, Kosovo, Saipan, Kohima,  Agincourt,
Austerlitz, Okinawa, Somme, Geok-Depe, the Boyne, Crecy...'

And will this shade assist me?

He broke into her litany.

Scarcely moving his lips, he asked, 'Eunice, Eunice, my poor ghost, I fear  you.
I fear everything  hereabouts. I knew  Hell would be  dreadful, but not  that it
would be at all like this. How can I return with you to the real world? Tell  me
please.'

The hall was still marvellously in  movement, as though its substance was  music
rather than stone. Now she was more distant from him, and her reply, dreadful as
it was, came  thin and piping,  watery as bird  song, so that  at first he could
hardly believe he had heard her correctly.

'No, no, my precious. You are mistaken, as you always have been.'

'Yes, yes, but-'

'This is Heaven we are  in. Hell is where you  came from, my precious one,  Hell
with all its punishing physical conditions! This is Heaven.'

He collapsed motionless on his face, and once again the great hall with all  its
restitutions went about its grand harmonious movements.