“Come on.” She took his hand and led him into the bedroom. He stood beside the bed, enjoying and being oddly comforted by the submissive role, while Leila closed the door and adjusted the Venetian blinds, reducing the light in the room to the mellowness of candle flames. Standing at the opposite side of the bed, she pointed at his jacket and began to unbutton her cardigan. They undressed in silent unison, garment for garment, reaching nudity at the same time. And when they lay down together the outside world faded from Redpath’s consciousness like a dying star.
I could write yesterday off, you know. Pretend it never happened. What’s so awful about losing a single day out of a lifetime? Ray Milland lost a whole week-end and it didn’t do him any harm. Went from strength to strength, he did.
Redpath lay naked on the bed, watching Leila go about the room. His arms were folded behind his head, four pillows were arranged to give luxurious support to his back, and the relaxed state of his body was reflected in the meandering of his thoughts. He felt sane and secure, at times coming to terms with the idea that his mind was a master illusionist whose powers he had never suspected, at others speculating on the type of work he should try to obtain, or wondering how long Leila was going to let him stay with her on this visit. She had showered and now, clad only in underwear, was tidying the bedroom—an activity which made it easy for Redpath to imagine they were newly married and that life was always going to be as he saw it at that moment, an eternal springtime honeymoon, and endless stroll among the candled chestnuts of May.
That’s all I want. More and more of the same. It’s not too much to ask.
“This jacket looks as though it’s been slept in,” Leila said, lifting his brown zipper-up. “Isn’t it about time you got it cleaned and pressed?”
He dismissed the idea with an airy flick of one foot. “It costs a fortune to have suede cleaned. They should have warned me about that in the shop when I bought it.”
“Filling the pockets up with junk doesn’t help it, either.”
“Junk? Junk!” Looking at the garment’s bulging pockets, Redpath was reminded that he had let most of yet another day go by without taking his standard dose of anti-convulsant. “Would you look in the right-hand pocket and see if there’s a bottle of capsules in there?”
Leila put her hand in the pocket and brought it out filled with a medicine bottle, nail clippers, the lock and chain of Redpath’s missing bicycle, a pencil stub, a plastic dispenser for dental floss, and a triangular piece of paper which looked as though it had been torn from a newspaper.
“Right, apologise for that remark about junk,” Redpath said complacently. He was squirming into an upright position, preparatory to taking his Epanutin, when he saw that Leila was staring fixedly at the scrap of newsprint. Her expression was one of thoughtfulness, and of something else which caused a lurching sensation inside his chest.
“John?” Leila’s voice was small and uncertain. “Where did you get this?”
“What is it?” He stood up and took the paper from her hand. As he had surmised, it was a piece torn from the corners of a newspaper, but the typography had an odd, slightly spidery appearance which he was unable to connect with any local publication. He looked at the dateline and saw that it read: GILPINSTON BUGLE, TUESDAY, AUGUST 26, 1980.
There was a moment of stillness during which Redpath could hear the ocean-booming of his own heart.
“I’ve already told you where I got this,” he said, backing to the bed and sitting down, unable to take his eyes away from the single line of type. “Gilpinston, Illinois—I was there yesterday. I tried to snatch a newspaper and this piece must have come off in my hand.”
“John, please don’t…”
“How do you explain it, Leila? How do you explain this away?”
She sat down beside him and placed both hands on his forearm, holding tightly as though to give him anchorage. “John, please don’t get it backwards. Didn’t Henry predict that Gilpinston would turn out to be a real place? Didn’t he say you must have seen the name somewhere and subconsciously noted it? That’s why…”
“But look at the date, for Christ’s sake!” Redpath held the scrap of paper close to her face. “That’s yesterday’s date! Don’t you understand?”
“American papers are brought to England. Air travellers…”
Redpath cut in on her, half-shouting in his triumph. “From a small town in Illinois to a place like Calbridge! On the same day!”
Leila released his arm. “There’s something wrong here.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you all along.” Redpath jumped to his feet and began pacing the room, driven by the force of the half-formed ideas which were spuming through his mind. “You know what this means, don’t you? It’s all so simple once you accept one or two new ideas. It means that Albert, tricky Albert, can move himself around just by thinking about it. Instantaneously, anywhere he wants. He did it out in the open the first time I saw him, and I didn’t twig on. Nobody twigs on, because he goes around in an old boiler suit, and if he suddenly appears half-way along a street you automatically assume he got there by walking and you were too busy with your own thoughts to notice.
“And I’ll tell you something else—he can take people with him! That’s how I got to Gilpinston and back yesterday afternoon. Albert did it. I don’t think he likes me. He wanted to scare hell out of me, and it worked. My God, it worked.”
Redpath could hear his own words pouring out faster and faster, the sentences becoming shorter and more choppy as the time available for consideration of each new thought grew less. He had a feeling of no longer being in control, of instinct racing ahead of reason, but there was nothing he could do about it. His movements became jerky and frenetic.
“I tell you, Leila, Henry Nevison is wasting his time at the
Jeavons. He should be up in Raby Street if he wants to study parapsychology. That house! I said it was a rest home for freaks, but I didn’t realise how close I was to…They’ve all got something. Something different. Albert can teleport people. Take Wilbur Tennent—he’s a clairvoyant. Precognition. Miss Connie is a bit like Albert, but she does it with objects. Psychokinesis, they call it. PK. Apportation.
“Then there’s Betty York. I don’t know what she…yes, I do! She’s the physical component of the whole set-up. She’s what Henry would call the soma. She looks after the others, and makes sure they get fed and so forth. And she does other jobs, too. I didn’t just bump into her in the park yesterday—she came out to get me. On purpose! I’m as big a freak as any of them. I’m a telepath—and the house was short of one telepath. Maybe he died. I’ll bet that Prince Reginald character lived there, the one Wilbur is wanted for questioning about, and I’ll bet you he died, and I’ll bet you I was his replacement…
“The capsules, Leila! Hand me the capsules!” The sight of Leila’s face, pale and worried, gave Redpath a powerful jolt as he took the brown bottle from her outstretched hand, and all at once the nervous overload seemed to drain from his body. Smiling weakly, he sat down beside her on the edge of the bed and opened the bottle with trembling fingers. He felt cold and ill.
“I’m all right,” he said, putting a capsule into his mouth and swallowing it. “Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“You reckon this crazy spell will soon pass.”
She gave him an unconvincing smile. “It already has.”
“Leila,” he said, slowly and gently, “I believe every word of what I’ve just said. I don’t understand all of it, but I believe it. In one of the nightmares I dreamt the house was a living thing and the cellar was its stomach…That’s ridiculous, of course, but the analogy is there just the same. The house and those people in it are like a composite being—and they want me to join the family. I think now that they made me believe I had murdered you, just so that I’d be driven to go into hiding with them, though I don’t know how they did it. Maybe there’s a member of the family I haven’t met yet, but the point is that it was all part of a plan. Don’t you see that?”