The Depths Read online

  Chapter Seven

  INVITATION …

  Palfrey moved back a little, away from the woman, but stayed on the bed. Again she rested her hands on the bedspread, and again the fluffy edges of the jacket half concealed and yet revealed the beauty she was offering. Palfrey felt quite composed, quite sure of himself, and yet his mind was not working as quickly as he wished, and as it usually did; she had slowed down his reactions. That was hardly surprising. He smiled at the reflection. She gave a quick answering smile, making him realise how easy it was to see the funny side with her. The funny side of what? Was this situation so funny? How was it he could sit here and talk with her and jest with her – while the Radio Officer was cold in his coffin, Simon Alting was seriously ill in hospital, Julia was in danger – or had been – in grave danger, and many innocent people had died, Gorvell perhaps among them?

  Why didn’t he feel agitated? Or angry? Why wasn’t he concentrating on the need to twist this situation to the best possible use? What made him so calm? – or was the word complacent?

  “Did you hear me?” she asked. “Why don’t you come and help to make the future?”

  “I am helping to make it.”

  “You may think so, but all you are really doing is rebuilding the old world on top of the dying one. You’re too good for that, Sap; you’re much too good.”

  “Where is this new world of yours?”

  He had an absurd notion that she would begin to talk about life on another planet; absurd, because he knew what conditions were like on the planets which had so far been discovered by man, and knew also that life was virtually impossible on them. But when she said “new world” she gave the impression that she was really talking of a different place from earth.

  He must stand up; must move away from her.

  She leaned forward again and for the first time took his hands; hers were cool and very soft, but she held him more firmly than he had expected.

  “Sap,” she whispered, “it can be wonderful, so very wonderful down with us. And you are one of the men we need most.”

  Down with us. This was the first indication she had given that the world she came from was below the earth – or below the sea. For the first time he realised that the bed jacket was filmy and almost like the skin of a delicately coloured fish; there was a gossamer beauty about it, about her, almost as if he were seeing her through faintly iridescent water.

  Down with us.

  “So this is an offer,” Palfrey said. He freed himself and stood up. She lay back on the pillows, smiling serenely, as if his attitude amused her. He had a strange feeling, that she was older and wiser than he, in spite of her youthfulness.

  “Yes,” she said. “It is a very serious offer, and you would be most unwise to refuse it.”

  “Just where do you want me to come?”

  She did not answer at first. He thought the serenity of her smile lessened, as if something had annoyed her. When she did speak, it was almost sharply.

  “You will find out soon enough.”

  “Exactly what do you want me to do?” he asked next.

  Now that he was further away from her, his mind worked more freely; it was as if closeness to her beauty exerted a kind of thraldom which a distance even of a few feet could break. He stood with his back to the window, studying her; and he told himself that he had never seen a woman or child who looked so—blemishless. Every part of her that he could see was free from physical blemish.

  “If you want to know more,” she said, “you must come and talk with the Patriarch.”

  “Who is the Patriarch?”

  “Sap,” she said softly, “there isn’t a chance, not a single, solitary chance, of you learning anything from me by sudden questions, trick questions, or subterfuge of any kind. There is absolutely no chance at all. We have ways of making sure that we cannot be compelled to talk. Some of our men, our agents, come to the Upper World to carry out special missions. We had two agents on the Seafarer, one now dead, one alive, and two in Nice. Others can be summoned quickly. Usually they return with their mission accomplished,” she went on. “Occasionally they fail. Some, who are injured so that they can never return to us, kill themselves. One did, here in the South of France. He escaped from the ship – the Seafarer – after killing the Radio Officer and attempting to prevent the woman Julia from reporting to you. He broke his arm in an accident. That impaired his physical perfection. He passed on a message to another of our agents, and killed himself. I was told of this before I came here. When I arrived here, I posed as a maid, which is very easy – but everything in the Upper World is easy to us, if we desire it sufficiently.”

  Palfrey thought: “Upper World?”

  He said: “Why was it necessary to kill—”

  “Sap,” she interrupted, “life and death in your sense has no importance to us – death is the means to an end. Only a very few are indispensable. It is necessary to make sure none of our agents is caught. It is also necessary to show how ruthless we can be. Don’t try to adhere to your own standards. It will get you nowhere. There is no way in which you can find out who the Patriarch is, nor where I come from, nor what he is doing – unless you do what I tell you to, and go where I tell you. I can promise you this: there is a new kind of wonder, a new concept of life, a state of exaltation and of ecstasy easily available to you. It is available to anyone who is invited, and to anyone who helps to make this new world. If we didn’t want you, I would not be here.”

  “You would not be offering yourself,” Palfrey said, sharply, “with the Patriarch’s connivance—”

  She laughed again; whether she intended to or not, she made him feel a little foolish.

  “Oh, Sap, you are too old-fashioned to be true. I told you not to use the archaic standards you are used to. What is relationship between the sexes if it is not to help to create new worlds, new people, new concepts – what is there wrong about a physically perfect man with a fine mind mating with a physically perfect woman with – shall I say a good mind?”

  “Is modesty old-fashioned, too?” asked Palfrey drily.

  “I have to try to meet you halfway,” she said. “Sap, while you work for the governments of the dying world you are wasting your time, throwing away wonderful opportunities. I am offering you one to break from it all. You will never regret taking it, I can promise you that. We need you. We need all men of ideals, men with clear minds, men who know exactly what they want and where they are going. Sap—”

  He stood, quite still, watching her.

  She thrust the jacket off her shoulders with a swift shrug. She pushed the bedclothes back, and, with another quick movement, got out of bed. She was breathtakingly beautiful. Flawless – without blemish. His heart began to beat suffocatingly fast, he felt it difficult to breathe.

  “Sap.” She stepped towards him with her arms outstretched. “Why don’t you let me show you what this new world can be like? I promise you that it will be something more wonderful, more ecstatic, than anything you’ve known before. No woman could ever give you what I can give.”

  It was a strange, almost a frightening moment. He felt as if she were actually touching him and he could not move away, but would have to surrender. His thoughts were in turmoil; thoughts no longer of Julia Shawn, the ship, Corvell, Stefan Andromovitch, but just of this woman and her promise and her beauty, her talk of the new world divorced from all the old – the old world that he had lost with Drusilla, the old world which—

  Drusilla.

  “No woman could ever give you what I can give you,” this woman had said.

  Drusilla’s face seemed to hover in front of Palfrey. Drusilla, tall, in her way so very lovely. And his, loving him until she had died as he had loved her; and as he still loved her memory. No woman could give what Drusilla had given him.

  “Sap!” this woman cried. She was just
in front of him, touching him; her eyes were huge and pleading, as if she sensed that she was about to lose him. “Sap, come with me. Let me convince you—”

  Instead of backing away, he closed with her, put his arms round her, held her tight, and then hoisted her off her feet. She seemed too startled to shout or to move. He carried her over to the bed as if he were going to surrender to her seductive body. Then he flipped a sheet off, and rolled her in it. There was a flurry of pink and white legs, arms, body – next moment she was like a cocoon, with only her head showing at the top and her feet at the bottom. He picked up another sheet, and repeated the swaddling, so that she looked like a huge white cotton bobbin, fat in the middle and tapering down to head and to feet. She had still not recovered from the shock. When he stood back, leaving her facing him, her mouth was open and she was gasping for breath, and her eyes looked huge.

  “Now let’s have a little talk,” he said. “I feel safer when you’re like that.” He grinned at her. “Who are you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You may think you’re proof against persuasion,” Palfrey said, and a grimmer note deepened in his voice, “but you’ll find out that you’re not. The old world has its methods of persuasion, you know – successful ones, too. We have perfected a brain-washing technique which will do in an hour what used to take months. Drugs are the secret. The drugs break down all forms of resistance. We add a little physical roughness and some mental pressure for good measure, but the real secret is in the drugs. It’s much better to talk freely without the drugs, but if necessary I can administer them.”

  He turned to his dressing-table, picked up a small toilet case, opened it, and drew out a bright, chromium cylinder. He unscrewed the cap from this and pulled out a hypodermic syringe. He put this down, where the woman could see it, then unclipped an ampoule of the truth drug from the cylinder.

  He picked up the hypodermic, and turned to face the woman.

  Her eyes seemed to be closing, as if she were suddenly overwhelmingly tired.

  “That won’t help you!” he said in sudden alarm. “Feigning sleep won’t be any good.”

  She opened her eyes again. He was reminded vividly of the days when his own son had been very young, six or seven perhaps, and had wanted desperately to stay up late. He had been allowed to, as a great treat. After a while, tiredness had overtaken him. Excitement, enjoyment, the thrill of staying up were all set at naught. His eyes had begun to droop, had closed, opened again, closed, opened, closed …

  He had fallen asleep, with music going and games being played and everything he wanted to eat and drink within reach. Palfrey had carried him up to his bedroom, Drusilla had left the guests for a few minutes to come and settle him down for the night. That was the kind of oneness there had been in their family.

  This girl was asleep.

  “I tell you to wake up!” Palfrey exclaimed, and he pinched her ear.

  She did not stir.

  “Wake up!” he ordered, and nipped her nostrils and held them for a moment, to try to frighten her into thinking that she could not breathe.

  She slept on.

  His own breathing was coming short and sharp when at last he stood back from her. Her eyelashes, black as her hair and eyebrows, swept the peach-bloom cheeks; there was no change in her beauty, but she had been able to induce this “sleep” at will. Sleep? Or coma? He knew of strange behaviour and strange mind control – in yogis, in religious fanatics, in men who had trained themselves all their lives to the conquest of mind over matter – but he had never seen anything like this.

  Palfrey tried the old methods; jabbing pins into the soles of her feet; pulling her hair; tweaking her ears again. She did not stir.

  He was a physician, but had not practised for many years, and he had no equipment here. He left the woman on the bed and went to the telephone and called Duval, who answered in person.

  “Do you need help, Dr Palfrey? Andromovitch telephoned from Elisabethville to say you were in some alarm.”

  “I need a doctor who can be trusted absolutely,” Palfrey replied. “How quickly can you send one here?”

  “What is it for?”

  “For someone who appears to be in a coma due to hypnosis.”

  “You need a specialist,” Duval said. His English was as good as Andromovitch’s, for he had spent much of his youth and many of the war years in England. “There is a Dr Phillippe Gaston, at the hospital. He is well known for his experiments in the hypnotic treatment of physical conditions. Coma, Dr Palfrey? Who is it?”

  “I don’t yet know. Dr Gaston won’t know, either. I want him to come simply to examine the patient and to give me a diagnosis and an opinion, then to forget the whole affair.”

  “I will arrange it,” Duval promised. Then he said anxiously: “Is there any danger for you?”

  “No physical danger,” Palfrey assured him. “Not yet, anyhow.”

  “There are two men on the promenade, opposite your room; you have only to shout for them. Two electricians are in the hotel, on the second floor near your room. You need only call for them. If you want more—”

  “Just Dr Gaston,” Palfrey said. “Oh – and ask him to bring a flashlight camera.”

  “I will. Dr Palfrey—”

  “Yes?”

  “You sound so—remote.”

  Palfrey said in a more natural voice: “I’ve had a bit of a shock, and I’m afraid it shows through. I’m all right.”

  “I hope you will still be all right when I tell you that the man who killed the Radio Officer on board the Seafarer has been found,” Duval said. “Either he shot himself or he was killed. His body was found in one of the valleys in the mountains, badly bruised and with one arm broken.”

  Palfrey exclaimed: “Dead,” in a shocked voice.

  “I am afraid so,” said Duval. “If you need me again, telephone and I will be here.”

  Palfrey said: “I’m sure you will. Thank you, Duval.”

  He rang off.

  The breeze was still stirring the blind, but did not seem so strong as it had been, or else he was used to the noise. He kept thinking of the man who had been on board the liner; who had been given the task of stopping Julia from reporting what she had seen, who had killed the Radio Officer, and who in turn was dead. That man had been the most likely way of tracing the source of the attacks. Now the only hope was through this woman on the bed.

  She was the only hope, remember. Yet she had come of her own free will, expecting to find him here, supremely confident of her power over him, although he had decided to come ashore only a few hours ago. Very few people had known that.

  It wasn’t true, he reminded himself. Several people had known, and one might have talked – members of the crew or of the passengers. The woman had not needed second sight to anticipate his presence here, but she had needed to be very quick.

  She and the agents she talked of must have been in Nice, so it should not be too difficult to identify her or to trace her leader.

  He wasn’t convinced, even as he told himself that.

  He sat down, wrote out a description of the woman, checked, and made sure that it was as accurate as he could get it. Then he telephoned Merritt in London, and dictated it to him. Merritt would relay it to Nice, to Paris, and to all Z5 agents everywhere.

  “The lassie sounds quite a belle,” Merritt conceded. “I’ll get this out to all our people and to all police forces, Sap. You want to know from anyone who’s seen her – anyone, anywhere. Is that right?”

  “Especially from anyone who knows where she lives, or knows her family.”

  “I’ll do everything I can,” Merritt promised.

  Palfrey knew that he would do more; working through Z5 and through New Scotland Yard, through Interpol and other international police organisations, he would do everything that c
ould be done to trace this woman.

  Woman? Or girl?

  How was it that she seemed to combine youth with age, and simplicity with maturity?

  As the thought passed through his mind, there was a tap at the door. Duval’s two men would not allow anyone who was unauthorised to come, but Palfrey opened the door carefully, ready to dodge to one side.

  The man outside was tall, very thin, middle-aged, somehow very French. He carried a doctor’s black bag in one hand and a camera in the other.

  “M’sieu?” He gave a quick, mechanical smile. “I am Dr Gaston. You are expecting me, I believe.”

  Chapter Eight

  COMA

  “It is certainly very remarkable,” Dr Gaston said. He stood back from the bed, where the girl-woman lay, and pulled the sheet up from her knees to her chin. He stood back, a hand at his own chin, frowning. Palfrey had already discovered that he was inclined to strike attitudes – to frown, clap his hands together, lean back with his head on one side, purse his lips and mumble to himself; but everything Palfrey saw of the way the man worked suggested that he knew his job.

  He began to toy with the stethoscope dangling from his neck.

  “Undoubtedly, coma – but for what reason? It is not alcoholic. It is not encephalitis lethargica – you say you have seen no sign of waking when you have called and shouted at her? Nor have I. I see nothing to suggest any cerebral thrombosis indication or any virus disease, and the onset of the condition was too sudden to allow for such a diagnosis, whatever the other signs. I do not know enough of her history to suggest a cerebral vascular lesion.”

  He stood back from the bed and stared at Palfrey. He thrust his bony chin forward, and rubbed his hands.

  “M’sieu!”

  “Have you come to any conclusion?” asked Palfrey, patiently.

  “I have formed an opinion which I would not wish to state in evidence without much more knowledge of the patient’s history, and further acquaintance with other outside factors. I have come across a form of it several times in the past. I think it could best be called a hypnotic trance, in this case self-induced. It has been most common in Eastern countries, particularly in India, the Sudan and in parts of Persia. But this comes as no surprise to you, Dr Palfrey, of that I am sure.”