Groping my way across the room I sat down in an armchair by the door to the bathroom. A slight trembling and shivering came over me. The room had cooled. Against the fatigue which pushed me deeper into the chair, I tried to think about what had happened. The idea of an evil as some kind of personalised thing had not occurred to me during the day. I’d been scared in the first house I’d entered, but those were merely momentary shocks, irrelevant to the bigger puzzle, easily solved. The disappearance of every living object, the fixing of all time mechanisms at 6.12, the absence of radio transmissions from all wavebands surely couldn’t be connected to an Effect which manifested itself as a specific thing corporeal enough to creep around and squat for hours on staircases? Perhaps there was nothing outside except a stray dog or cat or opossum, any odd animal which might have escaped the Effect like me?
The fact that I could consider this was, I realised, a sure sign that the menace outside had gone. No animal could have radiated malignancy like that. If I’d survived the Effect because of some freak or accidental immunity, then I might have a special resistance which something was trying to break down. There might be no logic to these phases, just a sequence of threats or attacks. I shall find out more, I thought. The dark lightened, my bravado increased. I know it’s evil, it comes at night, and I think I can keep it at bay with my mind under control. If I hold that control I can survive.
When I woke up the sun was streaming in from the bright silence.
CHAPTER FIVE
For a few seconds of course I wanted to believe that everything would now be normal again. The absence of sounds defeated this idea even before I moved to peer through the blinds. The moment I moved, a succession of powerful muscular pains wrenched at my spine and shoulders, then at my legs. I remembered what had been happening and that it was acutely real. My bad dreams had never involved physical pain; they had been memorable for terror, the vertigo of falling or slipping down slopes towards chasms, or the impulse to run from some horror but not being able to, or the feeling of slow suffocation under deepening water; there had even been dreams in which I had to wander through strange buildings, opening doors of rooms which contained unrevealed horrors. But never physical pain.
I walked around the motel unit, wincing, looking out. Was it safe to go outside? All seemed clear. The word ‘normal’ would not do. I packed up my belongings and the food so that I could load the car quickly. The sooner I got away from here, the better. The Effect was so closely tied in my mind to this place that I thought its force might weaken the further away I went. The place to go, obviously, was Auckland. There were sure to be people there out of half a million. Surely.
Having moved the barricade from the door, I checked again and then unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped out onto the balcony. Nothing had changed. I went down the stairs and glanced at my car, turning round slowly as I moved, my eyes checking the other cars, the back fence, the motel doors, the exit road, the cars again. When I felt reasonably safe I unlocked the boot of the car and went back up to the room to get my things.
Five minutes later, sweating, slightly out of breath, I had packed and loaded everything I thought I might need, including some blankets, sheets and pillows from the motel beds, plus some pots and pans, cups, cutlery and plates. There was no question of leaving a cheque; yesterday’s confusions seemed ages ago. Yet when I was ready to go, I found I was pausing, standing at the foot of the steps in the shade, trying to recollect something, reluctant to leave. I sat down on the steps and wiped my face with a handkerchief. As I pushed the handkerchief back into my pocket my arm banged against the iron railing of the stairs, and the whole rail vibrated. The sound came back from the darkness in the night. I realised I must be sitting exactly where the object had been; right there, the menace, the thing, the embodiment.
Once more, with an awareness now of following a repeated series of actions, I was leaping into my car, slamming the door and driving away from the motel onto the main road, a spit of loose stones under the wheels. And again I was heading into town, to the right, instead of away towards Auckland to the left. I was badly shaken. The tremor of the staircase had set up a resonance inside me which was acutely unnerving because it wasn’t wholly accountable merely as the memory of last night, allied to the fear of the thing outside. It was more, but it was inexplicable. My mind had marked a threshold; I knew that. And the full reason for this attack of nerves lay well on the far side of that threshold, locked away.
The town was unchanged, silent, full of hot light, narrow shadows, stopped objects. The locked houses were as dead as yesterday, their shut blinds like white eyelids across empty sockets.
I located a sports shop. The door resisted my attempts to break in; I had to smash the window and clamber in through the display of fishing rods, aqualungs, and golf clubs. Finally I found the gun cabinet, the rifles padlocked to a rack. It took an hour to pillage every cupboard and cabinet and drawer, forcing them open with a crowbar from the garage down the street, sorting out cartridges, bullets, and bolts, hacksawing the locks on the rack, cursing and sweating all the time, before I finally had a serviceable Remington hunting rifle and a large, wicked-looking pump-action shotgun, a 12-gauge which took six cartridges. I loaded the car with the guns and some boxes of ammunition, putting the Remington handy on the passenger seat.
The shotgun made me nervous. I placed it on the back seat on pillows and rugs. I also took a gas-operated cooking unit with spare cylinders, a sleeping bag and some containers to hold water or petrol.
The car had filled up considerably by the time I drove to the garage again. Robinson Crusoe, I thought. Self-sufficient, ready for anything. I was feeling more confident. I filled the petrol tank, hand-cranking the pump; checked batteries, oil and water, then filled a couple of the plastic containers with petrol and stacked them safely in the boot. Safe? If I had a crash, the detonation of all this would wake the dead.
The phrase disturbed me as it went through my mind, and I stopped, closing the boot, leaning on the sun-hot metal.
But the rush of practical concerns over-ran the pause. A few minutes later I was driving out of town, the doors locked from the inside, the windows half open, fresh air drying the sweat on my face, the loaded guns at the ready.
In the whole landscape nothing else was moving or alive. I sped faster and breathed deeper with a sudden exhilaration. Everything was shining in an empty clarity stretching away in all directions. There were no problems except the Effect. It had drained the world of every other puzzle and mystery. Except me.
CHAPTER SIX
I drove west through empty settlements and towns, abandoning more and more of the road code, cornering recklessly, not expecting to meet any other vehicles. Then, suddenly, I came round a bend and there was a milk tanker across the road and I was skidding sideways and braking, ramming the grass verge on the right. The car bounced violently, all the loose objects, guns, cans, were knocked off seats, clattering around, whilst I wrenched at the wheel. I missed the tanker by centimetres and came to a stop on the verge, the air shaken out of my lungs. The smell of burned tyres drifted in with the taste of dust. After a few deep breaths I opened the door to get out, but it jammed against earth and grass. I had to reverse onto the road.