The relief made me suddenly pathetic and grateful. I wanted to apologise, to make amends for the hollowness of my life and its frightening silences left empty of whatever was needed from me, as though the fear of the last half hour had been made for me, to shake and change me. However late. I wanted to say, I will try to understand what went wrong.
I knew this only for one moment. Then I looked down. The cogs of a cassette tape were churning away behind a plastic panel. It wasn’t a radio broadcast. Just a tape. The printing showed: Selections: London Philharmonic: Thy Rebuke Has Broken His Heart. He Was Cut Off From The Land Of The Living. But Thou Didst Not Leave His Soul In Hell. Hallelujah. I Know That My Redeemer Liveth.
My fist banged down on the switches. The music cut off, then the radio frequencies glowed in a pale green. The static surged from the speaker. I pressed shortwave and ran the red line up and down at full volume. Nothing, again, except a long-distance surge of falling and rising and fading static, like surf breaking over the planet in huge spaces. Long wave, medium; no other sound. Beneath my breath all the time I was saying, please, anything, please, with a bile of anger keeping back the panic. Useless. My fingers wobbled over the dials and buttons, trembling to switch off and stop the hissing.
Silence, then. A vacuum as strong as the light outside, and it seemed to force its way in and flex its strength as though it fed on any hint of noise. To stop the fear in me I crossed my arms over my chest and pressed my hands under my armpits. My heart and lungs were pounding. I felt I had to hold them in, harder, to hold myself together.
What’s happened? Any, any explanation would dam the panic. Is there really a force that can make everything vanish, that could hear or sense me now, track me down, attack me? I struggled to be objective. After a few minutes I stepped out of the broken door and stood on the pavement. No, I had no feeling of being watched. Perhaps I could have defended myself against that more easily. An enormous isolation and loneliness, a sensation not of being observed but of being ignored, totally abandoned, was all I could separate from the confusion and fear. And this seemed all the more insidious because even now it was recognisable, I could feel my mind shoving blindly against its shape, a distended growth out of feelings I’d always had.
But my brain still works. This is not a dream. I am alive. This is happening. What can I do?
The sun had moved onto my car. I opened the windows. The inside was like a furnace. I sat down on the edge of the pavement in the shade. A peculiar apathy began to come over me. I felt very thirsty. I would have to break into a shop and get a drink.
Standing, I turned and re-entered the radio shop, now feeling guilty about the damage. A part of me insisted that people would soon be back and that I had better make amends. Conventional sensations reappeared. I felt in my pockets for money to recompense for the mess, but all I had was my chequebook. I took it out, got a biro and wrote a cheque for fifty dollars, cash. I even put my address on the back. Thinking, maybe fifty dollars is too much, I then took a torch from a display and put it in my car.
Ten minutes later I was sitting in the office of a filling station at the end of the street, tipping warm lemonade into my mouth. The heat and light compressed a pain inside my skull into a tight headache. I leaned back and stared up. My watch ticked uselessly away, the only sound.
After thirty years, what did I have or know that could help? No point in wondering, could I cope? No choice. I have to. I have to go and look in those houses. Break in, go from room to room, and see what’s there. In spite of the fear sticking in my spine like ice.
The dead have no power. They can’t harm. Can anyone be more than dead? My head came down and I looked through my image reflected on the glass of the window. No power? I know better than that.
Beyond the window, my car wavered in the heat, marks of evaporated water down the dust of its windscreen, like teardrops squeezed from a machine.
CHAPTER THREE
I walked towards the door of the first house I had selected; an ordinary suburban weatherboard with a neat garden. The occupants of all these houses had obviously not gone anywhere. Their milk was uncollected, festering in hot letterboxes; their doors were closed and locked. It could only follow, therefore, that the inhabitants were still inside, in an abnormal condition.
I stopped. What if it was a disease, a plague? No; I must be immune. I won’t be harmed. Go in. Not knowing is worse.
I banged on the door. Only small windows were open and all the blinds were closed. The door was a nineteen-fiftyish ground glass panel etched with a scene of a kingfisher and some mallards. I had brought a large hammer from the garage; I stood back and hurled it at the glass. The mallards shattered. I hung back, waiting. The conventional instinct made me wonder why I hadn’t tried the back door. I looked around. Even under normal circumstances there were strong taboos on entering other people’s houses. It was another sign of what I was increasingly coming to fear as a dangerous confusion in my mind, that having smashed somebody’s front door I should feel it was improper now to enter. I found myself leaning into the hallway and shouting, ‘Hello? Anybody there?’
Silence. I picked up the hammer and stepped in. Speckled brown carpet, flowery wallpaper, a telephone on a small wrought-iron stand, a framed picture of waves breaking with sunlight shining through the front wave. The far end of the hall was darkish and the various doors which led off on each side were closed.
The air had the distinctive fusty smell of a closed house, a compound of old carpet and faded cooking, a jumble sale, second-hand, dust-under-beds staleness.
I wondered whether to knock on any of the doors. The first one was on my right. Perhaps surprise would be best. Holding up the hammer in my left hand, I tensed, then pulled the door handle with my right. A heavy white thing rushed out at me, taller than me, falling onto my chest. I made the kind of noise you only make in nightmares, a whimpering attempt at a cry, and I flailed at the thing with the hammer, falling backwards over the telephone table, sprawling wildly.
Then I heaved myself up, cutting two fingers on a shard of glass. The blood ran down my hand. I dropped the hammer and sucked at the wound. With some nervous cursing I wrapped my handkerchief round the bloodstain. My heart was pounding like mad. I did not think I had ever been so appallingly frightened in my entire waking life.
I had opened the door of an airing cupboard and a large sheet had fallen on me.
The panic subsided. Thank God nobody could see me. But if I have to go through anything worse, let it happen straight away as long as there is some explanation.
Anything. Anything I can understand.
I picked up the hammer and advanced to the next door on the right. It swung open easily as I pushed it, and I peered into a bedroom darkened by closed curtains. The sheets and coverings on the double bed were crumpled, but even in the gloomy light I could discern no shapes beneath them, no heads on the pillows. After a moment I walked into the room and drew the curtains open. The bedclothes had not been flung back; they lay irregularly drawn up to the pillows, and each pillow had an indentation as if recently rested upon by somebody. Had the bedclothes been thrown aside, it would merely have looked like an ordinary unmade bed. I balked at throwing them back, but the light gave me enough confidence. There was nothing beneath them. On one side of the bed, a man’s clothes were draped over a chair; socks and shoes by the edge of the red tufted bedside carpet. A woman’s clothes lay rather more neatly on a bamboo chair on the other side of the bed. I turned away, feeling even more like an intruder than before. My eyes rested on the alarm clock beneath the bedside lamp: 6.12. Yes, of course. But my mind, having almost swallowed this consistent idiocy, finally choked on it. I stood in the bedroom looking at all the normal disorder, and beyond the contradictory impulses of relief and fear at not finding any people, I detected the first tiny anomaly in the pattern of events. It was a triumphant revelation; for a moment it cancelled every other aspect of the puzzle and I had to restrain myself from shouting out loud like a child who suddenly sees through a mystery all at once. Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of it before! It was simply this: The clocks have not merely stopped; some have been altered and then stopped.