Chronocules Read online

  Chronocules

  D. G. Compton

  PROLOG

  About twenty years before this story begins—give or take a few years, the Simmons s.b. effect being untried and seriously (not that it mattered) inaccurate—the desolate silence of Penheniot Village, at the top of Pen- heniot Pill which is a creek off the small harbor of St. Kinnow in the county of Cornwall, was shattered by the practiced farting of young Roses Varco. He trudged down the tiny derelict main steet and farted comfortably as he went.

  The roofless houses received the sound resignedly, as they had received the weather (and human neglect) over the last generation or more. But a ramified family of rooks, just settled for the night in the high elms around the saw-mill, rose angrily at the sound and abused still further the ivy’d tranquility. Roses looked up at them, his only audience, and waved his arms dis^ jointedly. Then he stopped waving, and watched instead their steep circles against the sky. When he did not remind himself that they were birds he could see them as vast black sailing ships, tacking far far above him. After a while their noise made them birds again, and he continued, disappointed, down the path to the jetty.

  Once there he sat down on the rotting planks, dangled his feet over the edge and stared at the mud. On those days there was water up to the end of Penheniot Pill for perhaps only one hour on each tide, three or four scummy inches that crept up as far as the jetty supports, rested, and then ineffectually up the creek to the foot of the jetty on which he was sitting.

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  There had been a time when Penheniot Pill had been deep water, dredged for cargo ships waiting to go up river. In those days Penheniot had provided sheltered moorings for a tiny fishing fleet. To serve this a small boat yard had been built near the beach. The group of cottages at the head of the valley had prospered, the one nearest to the stream being enlarged and converted into a saw-mill. The village had been busy and growing, and the Council had even surfaced the steep little lane leading up to the main road to St. Kinnow. There was talk of a Penheniot village hall.

  The Great Depression came. Coastal cargo trade dwindled almost to nothing, tramp steamers rusting on the calm water of the Pill while around them the silt gathered, mud brought in by the sea, gravel and stones washed down by the stream. When finally the steamers were towed away to die and the mud slid gently in to fill their places, Penheniot died with them. As the deep water left the village, so also did its reason to exist. One by one the cottages were abandoned. The saw-mill closed and was given over to owls and badgers. Grass pushed up the asphalt down the middle of the brave new lane—never at its best more than a narrow burrow between high banks under a roof of scrubby oaks—up to the main road. Ivy grew over roofs till its weight brought them down. The victory of insensible nature was almost complete.

  Reuben Varco’s brood was the last to go, long after the baker had refused to call and the school bus had given up waiting at the top of the lane for the errant Varco children, the old woman toiling daily the four miles to the town for food and her husband’s tobacco. The day she died, suddenly, falling face down into the fire but (so the doctor said) dead before she could have known what was happening, the oldest daughter

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  started to pack her own and the other children’s things. She left next morning, ignoring old Reuben’s abuse, taking the four children with her. They moved into a council house in St. Kinnow, into bingo and fish and chips, into credit salesmen and understanding social workers.

  Her father chose to stay behind in the place he knew. He died a month later, chopped his foot up in the woods and quietly bled to death. There were people who said—there are always people to say these things— that he’d done it on purpose, that he could quite well have shouted for help and that somebody would have been bound to hear him. That it was his daughter drove him to it. Clarice survived their talk, as she had done for a full seventeen years already, pointed out all that time as the pathetic daughter of that drunken, no-good Reuben Varco.

  Clarice Varco survived, and went on surviving. When the next child down was old enough to take over she moved out yet again and married a ship’s cook. He quickly gave her four children and then departed. At least there was a pattern to her life, and it may be that she found this fact reassuring.

  The great upheaval in Roses’ life, the death of his mother and the move to St. Kinnow, had come seven years before, when he was ten. Alone among the Varco children he found his new environment totally unsympathetic. What little he understood was taken from him, replaced by bright new pleasures requiring skills he felt in his bones he could never master. So it was that Clarice came to see him less and less, that the household was spared the exercise of his one special talent, and that the mossy, gap-windowed hovel down at the end of the Pill, his father’s house, received increasingly the doubtful favor of his company. At first

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  for hours, and then for days and weeks, and finally for months on end he camped unhindered in the back kitchen, among the few pieces of moldering furniture that Clarice had not wanted.

  The years passed. He knew to keep the ivy chopped back from the roof and chimney, but he was neither surprised nor seriously upset when a September gale removed half the slates on the windward side of the cottage. He needed no more than a dry comer, and the floor above would surely give him that. What he lived on nobody knew. But he never starved, and there were people—those same people—who said there must certainly be a mint of money under the floorboards somewhere, salted away by that mean old no-good Reuben. Admittedly, if that were so, then Roses was the only one of his family in whom the old man would ever have dared confide. Poor, simple Roses, who never dodged the flying bottles and gave complete devotion in return.

  Roses shared his home with several skinny, derisive cats. In their own minds, and therefore in his too, they had first claim to whatever home comfort was available: the best seats by his fire, the warmest parts of his blanket, the leanest shreds of his bacon, the cream from the top of his very occasional milk. Now, when he was sitting on the jetty reading his book, the first nip of evening brought one of them, stretching like a croquet hoop, out of the house and down the path to the overgrown cobbles above the beach. She caught sight of Roses and paused. He had been known, if nagged, to surprise limpets on the rocks and prise them off with the blade of his knife. Although tough, limpets were among the best foods known to the cats of Pen- heniot. Limpets, and the baby rabbits they caught themselves.

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  Perhaps however—to anthropomorphize—there was something about the intentness with which at that moment he turned a page that told her for once she wouldn’t be welcome. Or perhaps at that moment an October mouse, fat with autumn fruits and making ready for the winter, stumbled obesely in the hedge not two yards off. Either way, the cat turned aside and left Roses to his book. And thus missed seeing a series of events unusual not only in Penheniot but indeed in die whole of the known universe.

  First there came from inside Roses Varco’s kitchen a very curious explosion—or implosion or adplosion or intraplosion, so hard was it to identify—preceded by a roar like an approaching express train. And the nearest main railway line was fifty miles distant, and closed anyway in some rationalization scheme. Next came a scream, a man’s scream, cut off so short as to be almost without duration, like a geometrical point that has position but no magnitude. This was followed by an exodus from the kitchen of various cats, all missing large and useful areas of fur. Finally, allowing for die time-lag inherent in Roses’ reflexes, a convulsive reaction occurred at the end of the jetty. So convulsive that the jetty’s ancient supports broke beneath the strain, causing�
��among other things—the irretrievable loss of Panther Woman and The Incredible Expanding Man in the mud of Penheniot Pill.

  By the time Roses had cursed, and waded ashore, and cursed again, he had somewhat forgotten the original cause of the rumpus. Mostly he grieved for his book. But the air was cold and his trousers, always undersized, were becoming painfully so. He decided to go home and take them off and wrap himself in a blanket while he lit a fire to dry them. His only other trousers were his best, which he never wore. Clarice had bought

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  them off a credit salesman some five years before, and he’d kept them in tissue paper ever since.

  As he approached his house he noticed an unfamiliar smell. A connoisseur of smells, he stopped by the comer of the wash-house and sniffed deeply. Certain ingredients were identifiable: hot wireless sets, aspirin tablets, the sandpaper sides of used matchboxes, and something that might be castor oil. But there were other elements for which he had no reference point. Intrigued, he squelched on around to the back door and pushed it open. The smell here was almost overpowering, so bitter it contracted the muscles at the back of his throat. It conjured in his mind’s ear the shape of a noise, something equally incomprehensible, something he had only heard once in his whole life. Suddenly he had it: the smell was the organic counterpart of the noise that had lost him his book, that had tipped him into the mud of the creek, that had caused him his present discomfort. He stooped, resentful now, and went into his kitchen.

  The room should have been dark. There was sacking over the one small window and the door opened onto a high bank with thickly wooded hillside above. Unless the lamp was lit or the fire unusually bright his kitchen was a dark place. He liked it dark. Darkness was safe;

  So for Roses to come into his kitchen and find it brightly lit was a profoundly disorienting experience, like coming into a room that was his and at the same time wasn’t. A lesser man than Roses would have turned and fled. But Roses waited, let his eyes adjust to the unfamiliar brilliance, identified the clutter everywhere as his and therefore friendly, and came further into the room. As his eyes adjusted, so also did his sense of smell, till the stink was hardly noticeable. He looked around. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. Nothing had been taken away and nothing added. Except . . . ex

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  cept that a book had been placed on the table, placed there so carelessly as to knock over the soup tin out of which he drank his tea. And this book, surprisingly but not incredibly, for in Roses’ life nothing was outside the bounds of possibility, this book was the source of the shadowless light, the light that now filled the moldiest comers of his room. Light that exposed details he had never dreamed existed: a calendar his father had hung nine years before in the alcove by the stairs, the shriveled aspidistra under the washstand, the rabbit snares hanging by the long-stopped American clock.

  Roses advanced cautiously, put out a curved, blackhaired hand. There was no heat to the book. It merely glowed, coldly, very brightly. He touched it, expecting he knew not what. The book gave him a pleasurable sensation. He picked it up, the pleasure intensifying. He opened it. He was disappointed to find there were no pictures, simply a blank page with one word in its exact center. The book gave enough light for the word to be read. Just the one word in clear, well-spaced letters.

  NAKEDNESS

  He knew what the word meant. It was a dirty word and he turned the page eagerly. On the next page again a single word, this time read more easily.

  NAKEDNESS

  And on the page opposite, again the same word, so that he recognized it at once.

  NAKEDNESS

  He held the book closer, wondering if there was something he was missing. Even with his breath dampening the surface of the page there was nothing to be seen,

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  nothing but the pale shimmering brilliance. And all the time the pleasure flowed into his body through his palms and fingers.

  He turned the page yet again, and found a block of print whose thickness discouraged him. He riffled through the rest of die book, still hoping for pictures. Whoever heard of a dirty book without pictures? Some of the pages were odd, some colored, some looking as if they had been cut out of newspapers, some as if they had been written by hand. There were even pages with words that moved as he watched them. But there were no pictures.

  He sat down on his chair and held the book in his lap. The pleasure seeped into him till his toes curled in his soggy boots. He turned back to the first page of print The sheer volume of words deterred, but there was still a chance he could master them if he took them slowly, one by one. If there were enough dirty ones they’d keep him going. He placed a blunt black fingernail up at the top of the paragraph and started.

  When you first saw the word nakedness, he read, what did you think of? The nakedness of winter hillsides? The nakedness of truth? Or was it human nakedness . . . ? And if it was the last, was it the nakedness of your own or of the opposite sex?

  This last word had caught his eye and kept him moving till he reached it. After it he found himself wander-, ing in a very dull wilderness.

  Further, one you had conceptualized (as a matter of principle Roses skipped all words over three syllables) the word nakedness, what emotion did you allow yourself to feel? In alphabetical order:

  BOREDOM?

  CURIOSITY?

  DELIGHT?

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  DISGUST?

  EXCITEMENT?

  HORROR?

  RELIGIOUS ECSTASY?

  These questions really do have point, are really not a waste of time. For you to be able to understand an age it is necessary first for you to settle your personal attitude to one of its most basic ...

  Roses got no further. Not a sign of a story, and only two dirty words. He flung the book angrily back onto the table. It lay there glowing, almost humming to itself quietly, totally unruffled. As the book left his hands, so did the pleasure its touch had given him. He became drearily aware of his coldness, of the pinch of his tight wet trousers. The mud in his boots rose between his toes as they uncurled. Water dripped from the hem of his overcoat. He swore at the book, the cause of all his discomfort.

  He stood up, removed his coat, mopped the floor with it, and then hung it by the dead fireplace. His shirt was mostly dry, so he left it where it was—he knew the dangers of getting a chill and hadn’t taken it off since Easter. He started on his boots. The string laces had shrunk and were hard to undo. His boots had stiffened and were hard to get off. His trousers—especially since out of modesty he had to work within the folds of a tom gray blanket—were hard to drag down his goose-pimpled legs. He paused often in his struggles, swearing as his father had taught him.

  When his trousers were finally off he tucked the blanket more firmly about his waist and set about lighting the fire. He cast vaguely about the room for paper. The idea of using the stupid, incomprehensible book as kindling came to him slowly. But when it was complete in his head its absolute rightness delighted

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  him. Vengeance would be nice, vengeance for his present discomfort, vengeance for the lost Expanding Man, vengeance also for every long-worded, toffee-nosed bastard who had ever shamed him. He snatched up the book and ripped at its pages. They resisted him. Infuriated by this, and by the deceitful pleasure their touch gave him, he tried again, grasping the halves of the book one in each hand and straining his massive shoulders till he sweated. The book, pressed tightly against his chest, glowed patiently, did its best to fill him with love and gentleness and joy, and remained intact.

  He flung it on the floor and ranged angrily around the room, kicking it every time he passed. Then he fell upon it again, grunting, standing on its covers with both feet and pulling on just one meek page. It yielded nothing.

  As he grew angrier his movements became c
lumsier, _ not altogether human. He attacked the book with scissors, with the carving knife. The whole cottage trembled to his banging. The modesty blanket was on the floor, long forgotten. He stuffed the book into the fireplace, poured paraffin over it and tossed in a lighted match. The oil burned hot and smoky, leaving the book in the end as calm and pale as it had ever been.

  Outside the cottage the evening grayed imperceptibly into night. The black paraffin smoke rose tight and straight, moving secretly within itself and fading, high up, against the darkness. The last of the tide retreated from the sloping planks of the broken jetty, leaving its usual rim of thin brown slime. An owl drifted down the valley from its roosting place in the rafters of the old saw-mill. It spread its pinions, fingering the air. Suddenly Roses emerged from the end cottage, his shirt tails flapping, and hurried to his wood shed. Greenish

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  light went with him, shone on the nettles and plantain leaves, the bramble swathes trailing down out of the hedge. He attacked the book with his axe, swung again and again till his back ached. With each stroke the book gave slightly, then returned to its original shape, quite unmarked. Roses’ breathing was harsh, and echoed between the steep hillsides. He no longer swore. The noises he made were formless. He chopped till he had no more strength to lift the axe. Then he stood.

  His gasping quieted. He leaned on his axe and listened to the silence. It came to him that the book had brought him only shame, and he wanted nothing more to do with it.

  He carried it carefully down to the beach, nursing it now in his blistered hands. He waded a few feet out into the mud. With the last of his strength he threw the book as far as he could out across the water. It skittered across the surface with hardly a sound. He watched it float away on the retreating tide like a tiny candle flame. Finally it disappeared. For a long time Roses stared at the place where he had last seen it. A strange desolation lay over him. Penheniot settled its ancient stones. A curlew whooped distantly down on the mud flats by the mouth of the creek.