The house was still throbbing, but a moment later it locked and became rigid. I leaned against the dented wall and let the spray pour across my face from the sprinkler jets.
Around me, its wings torn and disarrayed, the house reared up like a tortured flower.
Standing in the trampled flower beds, Stamers gazed at the house, an expression of awe and bewilderment on his face. It was just after six o’clock. The last of the three police cars had driven away, the lieutenant in charge finally conceding defeat. ‘Dammit, I can’t arrest a house for attempted homicide, can I?’ he’d asked me somewhat belligerently. I roared with laughter at this, my initial feelings of shock having given way to an almost hysterical sense of fun.
Stamers found me equally difficult to understand.
‘What on earth were you doing in there?’ he asked, voice down to a whisper.
‘Nothing. I tell you I was fast asleep. And relax. The house can’t hear you. It’s switched off.’
We wandered across the churned gravel and waded through the water which lay like a black mirror. Stamers shook his head.
‘The place must have been insane. If you ask me it needs a psychiatrist to straighten it out.’
‘You’re right,’ I told him. ‘In fact, that was exactly my role — to reconstruct the original traumatic situation and release the repressed material.’
‘Why joke about it? It tried to kill you.’
‘Don’t be absurd. The real culprit is Vanden Starr. But as the lieutenant implied, you can’t arrest a man who’s been dead for ten years. It was the pent-up memory of his death which tried to kill me. Even if Gloria Tremayne was driven to pulling the trigger, Starr pointed the gun. Believe me, I lived out his role for a couple of months. What worries me is that if Fay hadn’t had enough good sense to leave she might have been hypnotized by the persona of Gloria Tremayne into killing me.’
Much to Stamers’s surprise, I decided to stay on at 99 Stellavista. Apart from the fact that I hadn’t enough cash to buy another place, the house had certain undeniable memories for me that I didn’t want to forsake. Gloria Tremayne was still there, and I was sure that Vanden Starr had at last gone. The kitchen and service units were still functional, and apart from their contorted shapes most of the rooms were habitable. In addition I needed a rest, and nothing is so quiet as a static house.
Of course, in its present form 99 Stellavista can hardly be regarded as a typical static dwelling. Yet, the deformed rooms and twisted corridors have as much personality as any psychotropic house. The PT unit is still working and one day I shall switch it on again. But one thing worries me. The violent spasms which ruptured the house may in some way have damaged Gloria Tremayne’s personality. To live with it might well be madness for me, as there’s a subtle charm about the house even in its distorted form, like the ambiguous smile of a beautiful but insane woman.
Often I unlock the control console and examine the memory drum. Her personality, whatever it may be, is there. Nothing would be simpler than to erase it. But I can’t.
One day soon, whatever the outcome, I know that I shall have to switch the house on again.
Abel knew.
Three months earlier, just after his sixteenth birthday, he had guessed, but had been too unsure of himself, too overwhelmed by the logic of his discovery, to mention it to his parents. At times, lying back half asleep in his bunk while his mother crooned one of the old lays to herself, he would deliberately repress the knowledge, but always it came back, nagging at him insistently, forcing him to jettison most of what he had long regarded as the real world.
None of the other children at the Station could help. They were immersed in their games in Playroom, or chewing pencils over their tests and homework.
‘Abel, what’s the matter?’ Zenna Peters called after him as he wandered off to the empty store-room on D-Deck. ‘You’re looking sad again.’
Abel hesitated, watching Zenna’s warm, puzzled smile, then slipped his hands into his pockets and made off, springing down the metal stairway to make sure she didn’t follow him. Once she sneaked into the store-room uninvited and he had pulled the light-bulb out of the socket, shattered about three weeks of conditioning. Dr Francis had been furious.
As he hurried along the D-Deck corridor he listened carefully for the doctor, who had recently been keeping an eye on Abel, watching him shrewdly from behind the plastic models in Playroom. Perhaps Abel’s mother had told him about the nightmare, when he would wake from a vice of sweating terror, an image of a dull burning disc fixed before his eyes.
If only Dr Francis could cure him of that dream.
