The Black Corridor

CHAPTER FOUR

James Henry's pale hands, stubby and freckled, shook as he bent forward in his chair and stared into Fred Masterson's face.

'Do something, Fred, do something—that's what I'm saying.'

Masterson gazed back, thin eyebrows raised cynically, long forehead creased by parallels of wrinkles. 'Such as?' he asked after a pause.

Henry's hands clenched as he said: 'Society is polluted physically and morally. Polluted by radioactivity we're continually told is within an acceptable level—though we see signs every day that this just isn't so. I cannot allow Ida or Felicity to bear children with the world as it is today. And worse, in a way, than the actual environment is the infinite corruption of man himself. Each day we grow more rotten, like sacks of pus, until the few of us who try to cling to the old standards, try to stay decent, are more and more threatened by the others. Threatened by their corruption, threatened by their violence. We're living in a mad world, Masterson, and you're advising patience...'

Beside him on the Ryans' couch were his two wives, tired, identically pale, identically thin, as if the split cell which produced them had only contained the materials for one healthy woman and had been forced to make two. As Henry spoke they both gazed at him from their pale blue eyes and followed every word as if he were speaking their thoughts.

Masterson did not reply to James Henry's tirade. He merely stared about him as if he were thoroughly tired of the discussion.

The furniture of the Ryans' living room had been pushed back against the walls to seat the group which met there every week.

The blinds were drawn and the lights were on.

Seated on his own with his back to the window was Ryan's Uncle Sidney, a thin, obstinate old man with a tonsure of brown hair round his bald head. The rest of the group was seated around the other walls. The seat in front of the window, like the front row at public meetings, was always the last to be filled.

Fred Masterson and his wife Tracy, who wore a well-cut black floor-length dress, the conservative fashion of the moment, and fully made up black lips, sat opposite the Henry family on their sofa.

Next to Masterson sat John Ryan's first wife, Isabel. She was a dowdy, pinch-faced woman. On John's left sat his other wife, the beautiful Janet. Against the fourth wall were Ryan and his wife Josephine.

The women wore blacks and browns, the men were quietly dressed in dark-coloured tunics and trousers. The room, bare in the centre, entirely without ornament, had a dull look.

Ryan sat and in his head worked out some estimates for a new line of product in his head. As a silence fell between James Henry and Fred Masterson, he turned his mind away from his business problems and said: 'This is, after all, only a discussion group. We haven't the power or the means to alter things.'

Henry opened his green eyes wider and said urgently: 'Can't you see, Ryan, that the days of discussion are practically over. We're living in chaos and all we're doing is talking about it.

At the meeting next month——'

'We haven't agreed to a meeting next month yet,' said Masterson.

'Well, if we don't we'll be fools.' Henry crossed his legs in an agitated manner. 'At the meeting next month we must urge that pressure...'

Tracy Masterson's face was taut with stress. 'I've got to go home now, Fred.

Masterson looked at her helplessly. Try to hang on...'

'No...' Tracy hunched her shoulders. 'No. It's people all around me. I know they're all friends... I know they don't mean to...'

'A couple more minutes.'

'No. It's like being shut up in a box.'

She folded her hands in her lap and sat with her eyes downcast.

She could say no more.

Josephine Ryan rose and took her by the arm. 'I'll give you some pills and you can sleep in our bed. Come on, dear..' She drew the younger woman up by the arm and led her into the kitchen.

Henry looked at Masterson. 'Well? You know why your wife is like this. It all dates from the time when she was caught up in that UFO Demonstration in Powell Square. And that's an experience any one of us could have at any time—as things are now.'

As he spoke there came the sound of chanting from nearby streets. A window broke in the distance and there were shouts. A noisy song began.

From the bedroom Tracy Masterson started to scream.

Fred Masterson got up, paused for a moment and then ran towards the sound.

The rest of the group sat frozen, listening as the hubbub came closer. In the bedroom Tracy Masterson screamed and shouted: 'NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO.'

Josephine Ryan came back, leaning against the doorway. 'The pills will take effect soon. Don't worry about her. Who are the people in the street?'

No one replied.

Tracy screamed again.

'Who are the people in the street?' Josephine moved further into the room.'Who?'

The noisy voices subsided, giving way to the same low chanting, in a minor key, which had begun the procession.

Now Ryan and his friends could hear some of the words.

'Shut up the land.

'Shut up the sky.

'We must be alone.

'Strangers, strangers all must die.

'We must be alone.

'Alone, alone, alone.

'Shut out the fearful, darkening skies.

'Let us be alone.

'No strangers coming through the skies.

'We must be alone.

'No threats, no fears.

'No strangers here.

'No thieves who come by night.

'Alone, alone, alone.'

'It's them, then. The Patriots.' Mrs Ryan looked at the others.

Again no one replied.

The chanting was close under the windows now.

The lights went out. The room was left in complete darkness.

Tracy Masterson's screams had diminished to a whimper as the drug took hold.

'Bloody awful verses, whatever else...' Uncle Sidney cleared his throat.

The group sat surrounded by a chanting which seemed, in the utter darkness, to be coming from all over the room.

Suddenly it stopped.

There was the sound of running and sharp cries. Then a pitiful high screaming like the sound of an animal being killed.

Uncle Sidney stirred in his chair by the window and stood up.

'Let's have a look out, then,' he said calmly. His finger went to the button on the window sill.

As James Henry shouted 'No!' Ryan was halfway across the room, arms stretched toward his uncle.

It was too late.

The blind shot up.

The window covering the whole of one wall was open to the night.

Ryan stood petrified in the middle of the floor as the flickering light cast by a thousand torches in the street played over him. Henry half out of his seat, stood up and was completely still.

Josephine Ryan stood in the middle of the floor with the bottle of pills in her hand.

The dark-clad women sat in their seats without moving.

The cries and the terrible high scream went on.

Uncle Sidney looked down into the street. On the other side, in the high block opposite, all the windows were blinded.

"Oh, my God,' said Uncle Sidney. 'Oh, my God.'

There was silence until Josephine Ryan said: 'What is it?'

Uncle Sidney said nothing. He looked downwards.

Mrs Ryan took a deep breath. She walked firmly over to the window. Ryan watched her.

She steeled herself, looked swiftly down into the street, stepped back. 'It's too horrible. That really is too horrible.'

Uncle Sidney's face was hard. He continued to watch.

The crowd had caught a young man of twenty, one of the people who lived in the block opposite. They had tied him to an old wooden door, propped the door against a steel power supply post, drenched the door and the young man with petrol and set light to him.

The young man lay at an angle on the blazing door. He writhed and he screamed as the flames consumed him. The crowd pressed closely round, those in front being perpetually pushed too close to the flames by the people at the back who wanted to see. Their torches and the light cast over them by their human bonfire revealed chiefly men, most of them in their thirties and forties. The women among them were younger. All were dressed in dark, long clothing.

In the front the people were crouched, tensely watching the young man burn.

A young woman with cropped blonde hair yelled: 'Burn, stranger, burn.' The men about her took up the cry. 'Burn, burn, burn, burn!'

The young man writhed in the flames, gave a final, frantic twist of his body and was still.

When he had stopped screaming, the crowd became quiet.

Apparently they were exhausted. They sat or stood about breathing heavily, wiping their faces and hands and mouths.

Uncle Sidney pressed the blind button in silence. The blind slid down, blotting out the torches, the fire, the silent crowd below. He sat heavily in his chair.

The crackling of the fire could be heard in the Ryan's livingroom.

Mrs Ryan took her hand from her eyes, walked out to the kitchen and went to the sink. The men and women in the room heard her running water into a tumbler, heard her drink and put the tumbler into the dishwasher, heard the door of the washer close.

Uncle Sidney sat in his chair, looking at the floor.

'What did you want the blind open for?' James Henry demanded.

'Eh?'

Uncle Sidney shrugged and continued to stare at the floor.

'Eh?'

'What difference does it make?' said Uncle Sidney. 'What bloody difference...?"

'You had no right to expose us to that—particularly the women,' said James Henry.

Uncle Sidney looked up and there were a few tears in his eyes.

His voice was strained. 'It happened, didn't it?'

'What's that got to do with it? We don't want to get involved.

It's not even your home. It was Josephine's window which was uncovered when—this thing—took place. She'll be the one accused!'

Uncle Sidney didn't reply. 'It happened, that's all I know. It happened—and it happened here.'

'Very horrifying to see, no doubt,' said Henry. 'But that doesn't make any difference to the fact that the Patriots have got some of the right ideas, even if they do put them into practice in a very distasteful way.' He sniffed. 'Besides—some people enjoy watching that sort of thing. Revel in it. As bad as them.'

Uncle Sidney's eyes expressed vague astonishment. 'Do what?'

'What did you want to watch it for then?'

'I didn't want to watch it...'

'So you say...'

Masterson appeared in the doorway and said: 'Tracy's gone to sleep at last. What's been happening? Patriots, was it?'

Ryan nodded. 'They just burnt a man. Outside. In the street.'

Masterson wrinkled his nose. 'Bloody lunatics. If they really want to get rid of them there's plenty of legal machinery to help them.'

'Quite,' said Henry. 'No need to take the law into their own hands. What bothers me is this odd anti-space notion of theirs.'

'Quite,' said Masterson. 'They've been reassured time and time again that there are no alien bodies in the skies. They've been given a dozen different kinds of proof and yet they continue to believe in an alien attack.'

There could be some truth in it, couldn't there?' Janet said timidly. 'No smoke without fire, eh?'

The three men looked at her.

'I suppose so,' Masterson agreed. He made a dismissive gesture.

'But it's extremely unlikely.'

Mrs Ryan directed the trolley through the door. The group sat drinking coffee and eating cake.

'Drink up while it's hot.' Mrs Ryan's voice had an edge to it.

Isabel Ryan flinched and said: 'No thank you, Josephine. It doesn't agree with me.'

Josephine's mouth turned down.

'Isabel hasn't been very well,' her husband John said defensively.

Ryan tried to smooth things over. He smiled at Isabel.

'You're quite right to be careful,' he said.

The whole group knew, from Isabel's demeanour, although no one would have stated it, that Isabel was experiencing a phase where she supposed people were trying to poison her. She would eat and drink nothing she had not prepared herself.

Most of them knew what it was like. They had gone through the same thing at one time or another. It was best to ignore it.

Anyway, it wasn't unheard of for people who believed that sort of thing to be perfectly right. They all knew men and women who had imagined that they were being poisoned who later had died inexplicably.

'One of us ought to attend the next big meeting of the Patriots,' said Ryan. 'It would be interesting to know what they're up to.'

'It's dangerous.' John Ryan's face was stern.

'I'd like to know though.' Ryan shrugged. 'It's best to investigate a thing, isn't it? We ought to find out what they're really saying.'

'We'll go in a band, then,' said James Henry. 'Safety in numbers, eh?'

His wives looked at him fearfully.

'Right,' said Masterson. 'Time to tune into the report of the Nimmoite Rally at Parliament. The Government will fall tonight.'

They watched the Nimmoite Rally on the television. They watched it while more cries and shouts sounded from the street below. They watched as a group passed playing drums and pipes.

They did not look round. They watched the Nimmoite Rally until the President appeared in the House of Commons and offered his resignation.