He existed no more.
The three capering crimson figures that had been with him existed no more.
The mass of sentient, brown protoplasm that had been with him existed no more.
Redpath felt the death of the Once-born. He sank to his knees in the pure, peaceful emptiness of the cellar and for an instant, with the last vestiges of the telepathic facility which had been foisted upon him, he experienced the surprise and satisfaction which coursed through the composite entity of the alien ship. He even picked up echoes of the smaller joy, faint as starlight in the noon-time sky, of the invisibly falling pod as it was recalled from the brink of non-existence.
Then the third eye of his mind closed for ever.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
There remained a lingering sadness, an intense pity for four human beings whose lives had been blighted by something worse than any disease, who had lived in dreadful captivity, and whose deaths had come in a climax of pain and terror. And there must have been many others throughout the years—people like Prince Reginald and the Rodgers, the unfortunate owners of the house in Gilpinston. Who was to say how many flayed bodies of humans and animals and birds, perhaps still alive, had been spirited out of the cellar and disposed of by Albert or Miss Connie?
Redpath knelt for a time on the clean white concrete of the underground floor, wondering if he would ever again know a peaceful night of sleep, then it came to him that he, at least, was still alive—and was faced with all the practical responsibilities of the living.
He went through the silent house from top to bottom, turning out all the lights, making sure there were no smouldering scraps which might later create a full-scale blaze. His progress was slow—largely because the pain from his ankles and injured left shoulder had combined with that from the older wound at his stomach to impede or complicate his every move—and it was past one o’clock when he let himself out through the front entrance. He made certain that the lock on the outer door had engaged properly, then picked up his hold-all and the portable television set and went along the short, red-tiled path to the street.
The rain was still falling steadily, producing yellow candy floss haloes around the street lamps, and the windows were dark in every house. There was no sound except for the lapping of water in the cast-iron downpipes and gutters. It’s beautiful, he thought, gazing about him in deep contentment. If my hair was black, and if I had bullet holes in me instead of odd punctures, this could be a great old Francis Lederer movie.
He squared his shoulders and, without a further glance at number 131, set off in the direction of the blue-green aerial glow which marked the course of the Woodstock Road. Before he had taken a dozen paces the wetness of the pavement had penetrated what remained of his shoes, but he was in a mood to enjoy any kind of natural sensation, and he continued walking steadily, undismayed.
On reaching the first corner he turned right and was angling across the street when a cherry-coloured mini came into view a short distance ahead. His immediate recognition of the vehicle had nothing to do with any kind of prescience. Blinking with gratitude, he stopped under a street lamp and waited until the car had drawn to a halt beside him. When Leila opened the near-side door he raised the television set as a signal for her to lower the back of the passenger seat, then stowed it with his bag on the rear seat, all without speaking. He maintained his silence while he got in, sat down and closed the door.
“Just tell me one thing,” he said, after what seemed a suitable pause, “did you bring me a stick of Chicago rock?”
“Oh, John!” She blurted his name with a mixture of evident concern and relief. “I’ve been so worried about you. Last night you were so…”
“I know what I was like last night, but I promise you I won’t be like that ever again. It’s all over.”
“I did try to go to the States,” she said quietly, huddling into her coat. “But I ran out of nerve.”
He shook his head. “No—you ran out of conviction. You couldn’t really believe any of it, could you?”
“I’m sorry, John.”
“It isn’t your fault.” He smiled his reassurance. “I want you to do me a couple of favours, though. The first one is that I want you to listen to me while I go over the whole thing right from the start. There’s nobody else I could talk to about this, and I need to spell it all out just once, just to get it clear in my head, just to separate the nightmares from the reality before I bury the whole episode. Is that all right?”
“I’m listening.” She returned his smile, put her hand on his shoulder and quickly withdrew it as he flinched away. “What’s the matter, John?”
“That reminds me of the second favour I was going to ask— would you please drive me to the hospital?”
“What have you done to yourself?”
“What have I…?” The simple, natural question—with its implication that, in the absence of any proof to the contrary, his various injuries had to have prosaic causes—gave Redpath a sudden clear insight into how his story was going to sound.
This hole in my shoulder? Why, quaint old Miss Connie did that with a pick just before I set fire to her.
This burn on my hand? Oh, I got that because the Once-born paralysed me and made me hold a blazing petrol bomb a bit too long.
That skin missing from round my ankles? That’s where the Once-born started to eat me. It lives on keratin, you see. That’s right—the protein you find in skin and hair and nails and feathers and claws. It’s a good job for me my socks are nylon and my shoes have plastic uppers. Otherwise I’d really have been in a mess! Yes, sirree!
Redpath reviewed the account of the past three days which he had been going to present to Leila. It began at breakfast time on Tuesday, with his hindsighted belief that Albert had appeared briefly on his doorstep with the intention of warning him, and had himself been frightened off by a vision of how the Once-born could repay treachery. Albert featured prominently in the mid-part of the story, too—whisking Redpath off to America on the instantaneous magic carpet of psychokinesis and deliberately letting him see what the Once-born did to human beings. And, of course, Albert had played the most important role of all in the final climactic scene. Everything had hinged around the handicapped, doomed, heroic little man—but where was Albert now? Was there any point in telling Leila that Albert and the others had probably been consumed in the huge open-hearth furnace of the Calbridge steelworks, but that it might have been in a volcano or at the centre of the Earth or at the centre of the sun?
How could she believe what he had to say? Looking back on the entire nightmare, how could he believe it himself?
“John, I asked you what you’d done to yourself,” Leila said.
He looked at her abstractedly for several seconds, coming to a decision. “I jabbed my shoulder on a spike that was sticking out of a wall, and after that I spilled some acid around my ankles.”
“Then I’d better get you to the hospital.” She put the car into gear and accelerated away from Raby Street. “Some people shouldn’t be allowed out alone.”
“I’m one of them. What do you think we could do about it?”
“That is the most inelegant proposal I’ve ever heard of,” Leila commented, keeping her gaze on the road ahead. “I suppose I should consider it on those grounds alone.”