The questions hit him simultaneously, like a swarm of shotgun pellets.
If he had had an attack, why should other people in the house have taken the trouble to move him to a different room?
If he had had an attack, where was the usual aftermath of headache, bodily pain and confusion?
If he had had an attack and had drifted from unconsciousness into a lengthy sleep, why did he feel that he had lain down only a few minutes ago?
Where was everybody?
Redpath—driven by a formless suspicion—stood up and walked to the window. He parted the screening curtains of white lace and stood for a moment, rigid with shock, as his disbelieving eyes took in the details of what lay beyond.
The view was totally unfamiliar to him.
He was looking down on a roughly triangular area bounded by rows of tall houses built of sandstone—a constructional material he could not reconcile with the Woodstock Road district of Calbridge. Throughout the area was a hodgepodge of garages, outhouses, walls, corrugated iron fences, clothes lines, telephone poles and parched trees. Two large saloon cars were partially visible in the midst of the clutter, apparently abandoned. Above the rooftops and television aerials was a sky which looked stratospheric in its dark blue clarity.
I’m not even in the same house! I’m not even in the same PLACE!
Redpath released the curtain and pressed the back of a hand to his lips.
I must have been out cold for hours, after all, and they must have taken me somewhere while I didn’t know what was going on, perhaps out of Calbridge altogether, and for all I know they thought I was dead and for all I know they might have dumped me somewhere and they’d no right to treat me like that…NO RIGHT AT ALL!
Redpath strode to the bedroom door, flung it open and went out onto a landing, deliberately making a great deal of noise with his feet.
“Anybody there?” he shouted into the stairwell, noting as he did so that the house was very similar in its general layout to the one in Raby Street. “Is anybody at home?”
The silence was complete except for faint traffic sounds filtering in from the street. He hesitated, looking around him, absorbing the curious fact that the location of the room he had just left—top rear in a three-storey dwelling—corresponded exactly with that of his room in the other house. The realisation brought with it a stabbing of unease and self-doubt. Could it be that he was almost totally confused? Could it be that he was actually in the same house as before, and that his preconceptions about the bedroom furniture and the view from the window were memories transplanted from some other time and place? No previous attack, not even a grand mal, had ever left such a degree of disorientation in its wake—but who was to say what effects Nevison’s cursed Compound 183 might have on a brain that was already being ravaged by neural storms?
Chastened, his anger subsiding, Redpath went down to the next landing. It extended through to the back of the house and terminated at a narrow window, the pebbled glass of which bore no design. Did the absence of the fleur-de-lis prove anything? Redpath thought it might, but he found it difficult to decide what the significance could be.
He continued down to the ground floor, turned back towards the room he believed to be the kitchen and tapped lightly on its door. There was no reply. He pushed open the door and paused on the threshold while he took in details of the long room with its array of sage-green fitted cupboards. The sink was a modern stainless steel affair instead of semi-antique porcelain, and the refrigerator was much larger and standing in a different corner—more points of disagreement with the house in Raby Street. It looked as though …
Wait a minute, dumbo! You never saw the kitchen of the other house. You got all that stuff about the old sink and the position of the fridge from your latest nightmare!
Try to get a grip on yourself!
Redpath turned his head to the right and saw—in exactly the location predicted by his nightmare—another door which could have led into a pantry or down to a cellar. He blinked at it, feeling a touch of coolness on the nape of his neck. The door itself was completely different—a patent folding model of white plastic segments in place of the bright red panelled slab of wood he had visualised—but there was something eerie about finding it in that precise location. He put out his hand, caught the slim chromium handle and slid the door aside. Beyond it was a flight of concrete steps leading down into the darkness of a cellar.
Redpath advanced helplessly to the topmost step. The air which billowed up around him from the blackness was too warm. Stale and heavy. His shuttling eyes picked out a whitish blur on the wall close beside him and he identified it as a light switch. He depressed the toggle of the switch and nothing happened, then he realised it was already in the down position. That could mean that the power was already on and that the cellar light was broken, or that the switch had been amateurishly wired upside down. A third possibility—that the switch was part of a two-way circuit—flicked into his mind and was immediately dismissed.
You can’t tell me, old son, that anybody in his right mind would want a facility whereby he could go down into a spider-haunted crypt and switch the lights off while he was still down there.
Investigating the second possibility, Redpath tried pushing the toggle upwards. It moved easily, and a fluorescent brilliance pulsed into being at the bottom of the steps. He went half-way down the steps and sank on to his heels to give himself a view of the entire cellar. The square room had smooth concrete walls and floor, and it was quite bare, devoid of all the lumber and discarded possessions that Redpath expected to find in a basement.
The only contents he could see were perhaps a dozen dark red, fist-sized objects scattered around the floor.
Prompted by a blend of curiosity and masochism, Redpath completed his descent into the cellar and hunkered down to examine the nearest of the small shapes. It was a bird, possibly a pigeon, which looked as though it had been sandpapered to death. The plump little body was intact as far as its musculature was concerned, but all traces of feathers and skin had been cleanly removed. Redpath’s mouth twitched as he saw that even the beak and claws were missing, and for an instant the apparition he had glimpsed through the spy-hole at breakfast time—the face sculpted in redly-oozing beef—hovered at the edge of his perception.
It’s time to get out of this place.
He stood up and walked backwards until the nosing of the first step was pressed against his ankles, then he turned and sprinted up the treads towards the kitchen. He had almost reached the white plastic door when it riffled its segments, as though they were feathers on an enormous wing, and partially slid across to bar his way. Without taking time to think, Redpath brushed the door aside, plunged through into the kitchen and almost immediately was out in the hall.
That door must have a faulty catch or something like that, a spring-loaded return mechanism which sticks and delays the action. I mean, I know I’m a murderer and deserve everything that’s coming to me, but there has to be a limit…
He reached the front door, which was half-glazed with plain glass, wrenched it open and hurried out to the street, casting about for a landmark which would give him some idea of where he was. The street offered all its tiredness and shabbiness up to the morning light, like a very old tramp trying to gain free nourishment by sun-bathing, but that was its only similarity to Raby Street or any other part of urban Calbridge. Redpath looked at the brown sandstone fçades, the short flights of broad steps leading up to the entrances, the unfamiliar design of the lamp standards—and was forced to accept the fact that he had no knowledge of his whereabouts. He could have been abducted to almost any part of the country.