It was beginning to get dark. At a service station half-way up the motorway she stopped and tried to phone again. She got no better results—a line awash with interference, busy with sounds like whispered conversations which changed as soon as you tried to listen in on them. When she returned to the car park, Brad was gone.
She found him in the reception area of the service station, hanging over an electronic arcade machine. A space patrol game. His hand fumbled with the joystick as he peered darkly into the kaleidoscope of shifting pin-lights behind the black glass.
“Time to go,” said Ella.
“But I haven’t beaten the invaders. The earth’s in peril.”
“You have to put some money in to do that.”
“Oh… sure.” He released the stick and followed her back to the car.
Shortly after she had turned off the motorway, Brad suddenly seemed to emerge from a daze. “I need a drink,” he said.
“Brad; it would be a good idea if you stayed off the pop.”
He gripped her wrist hard enough to make her stop the car. “I need a drink.” His eyes were almost crazy with fear and lack of sleep.
“Maybe you do. I’ll find a pub.”
She had to drive for a while along a winding and deserted country road. Dusk was slipping away quickly into darkness. She found a place with a dimly lit sign saying The Corn Man. It had the expectant hush of a pub just opened and too early for most customers. Brad marched up to the bar and ordered himself two large brandies, both of which he drank, leaving Ella to order herself a tonic water. He repeated his order, and the barmaid eyed him quizzically as she nudged his glass under the optic measure.
“Ease up,” said Ella. “Lee will bring enough to keep you satisfied.”
“Lee Lee Lee. Lee schmee.”
Brad kept a hand on one of his brandy glasses, as if someone might want to take it away from him. Ella waited patiently, in silence. At length he got up. “Must take a leak,” he said.
Ella sat nursing her tonic water until she realized that he wasn’t coming back. She even stood outside the gents’ toilets, calling to him, but she knew he wasn’t in there. She returned to her car and sat behind the wheel, not knowing what to do. Half an hour had passed before he walked out of the shadow and climbed back in the passenger seat. She thought he had the smell of vomit on him.
“What are we waiting for?” he said.
NINE
It has been often remarked that a hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.
“I’m sure it was Ella.” Honora didn’t sound at all sure.
“What did she say?”
“I didn’t hear anything. She sounded like she was phoning from another planet. I couldn’t make her out.”
Lee hadn’t quite recovered from his vision of Honora as a Gorgon, his second attack of elementals within the space of minutes. For the moment he was less concerned with Ella’s difficulties than with his own. He hadn’t drawn breath to consider what might have happened between Honora and himself if the hallucination hadn’t intervened. What’s more, he was no closer to having explained Ella’s absence.
“Where would she be phoning from?”
“She wouldn’t be too far away.”
“Why won’t you tell me where she’s gone? Why won’t you answer me?”
Lee was running short of escape lines and changes of subject. He actually contemplated faking another attack of writhing snakes in order to divert her questions. A deep intuition told him not to play games.
Fortunately Honora backed off. He tried to distract himself by shuffling playing cards on the coffee table, pretending to deal rounds of patience, but lacked concentration. Still shaken from that last attack, he felt sick to his stomach.
His anxiety was exacerbated by Honora, who gave him the jitters simply by sitting still with her hands gently clasped in an attitude of such perfect serenity that it could not fail to betray the deep agitation within. Worse, it had dawned on Lee that Honora had become aware, either by intuition or by the simple application of common sense, that Ella had gone to recruit Brad Cousins into her latest scheme. A disconcerting feeling came over him. He felt, irrationally, that he was unwittingly projecting mental pictures to Honora, or that she had found some ghoulish means of bleeding him of information.
It was difficult enough being subject to these random mental distortions without fearing that there was some kind of telepathy going on. It could be another overspill from dreamside, the residual thoughtspeak of dreamside. Anyway, it was happening. And when Lee admitted this, he felt a corresponding wave in Honora. They sat up and looked at each other, and there was a dovetailing of insight. He knew she knew, and she knew he knew she knew, and so it went, back into infinite space.
Lee continued to turn cards, gnawed at by visions of his earlier hallucination.
Honora stepped over to the window, peering out at the dusk. She snatched the curtains closed.
“Shall I tell your future?” she said suddenly. “From the cards. Shall I?”
“I don’t want to know it under the circumstances.”
“You don’t have to believe it!”
“That’s what I told myself the other night. I don’t have to believe in the power of dreaming. 1 told myself several times, but it didn’t help.”
“Nonsense. Give me the cards.” Honora knelt alongside the coffee table and gathered up the pack. Lee sat back, putting a respectful distance between himself and any possible repeat hallucination. Briefly shuffling the cards, Honora started placing them across each other on the table, intoning as she turned them up. “This crowns you, this crosses you, this circles you; this is beneath you and this is behind you; this speaks for you, this will deceive you, this will defend you, and this is all before you.”
Lee didn’t get to see his future because the phone rang. This time he answered.
“It’s Ella,” he said. “Ella, you’ll have to shout; I said you’ll have to shout; I said… Jesus this is hopeless… I said I still can’t hear you!”
Lee could just make out that it was Ella, but her message was lost in a flurry of static and signal interference. There was a wall of sound crackling from the earpiece. From the middle of it Ella’s voice piped through, but was distant and stripped of tone and amplitude. Her voice had been reduced to the narrowest frequency, a single oscillation playing along a fine wire that could have been stretching half the length of the galaxy. Ella was there and he could hear her, but he couldn’t identify a single word she was saying. The line seemed full of breathing and whisperings, and waves of static, all conspiring to crowd her out. Lee pressed his ear closer to the receiver.
“YOU’LL HAVE TO SHOUT, ELLA!” The electronic piping of her voice continued, sounding like the noise an electronic or mechanical bird might produce, against the unabated interference. “ELLA? WHAT IS IT YOU’RE SAYING?”
Lee felt his earlobe, pressed tight against the earpiece, start to get hot, then smart and sting. Then he felt a sharp sensation like a pin being inserted into the tender part of his ear. As he pulled the phone away from his head it jerked at him, as if his ear had become glued to the receiver. Pulling at it only produced a searing pain, like flesh tearing away in strips.