Pawley's Peepholes Read online

  “A lot you know about what most girls think,” said Sally.

  “That's what I was meaning. How could I?” I said.

  She seemed to have set her mind so firmly against the whole busi­ness that I dropped it for the evening.

  A couple of days later Jimmy looked into my room again.

  “He's laid off,” he said.

  “Who's laid off what?”

  “This tele­port­ing fellow. Not a report later than Tuesday. Maybe he knows some­body's on to him.”

  “Meaning you?” I asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, are you?”

  He frowned. “I've started. I took the bearings on the map of all the inci­dents, and the fix came on All Saints' Church. I had a look all over the place, but I didn't find any­thing. Still, I must be close — why else'd he stop?”

  I couldn't tell him that. Nor could any­one else. But that very even­ing there was a para­graph about an arm and a leg that some woman had watched travel along her kitchen wall. I showed it to Sally.

  “I expect it will turn out to be some new kind of advertisement,” she said.

  “A kind of secret advert­ising?” I suggested. Then, seeing the withering look working up again: “How about going to a picture?” I suggested.

  It was overcast when we went in; when we came out it was raining hard. Seeing that there was less than a mile to her place, and all the taxis in the town were apparently busy, we decided to walk it. Sally pulled on the hood of her mackin­tosh, put her arm through mine and we set out through the rain. For a bit we didn't talk, then:

  “Darling,” I said, “I know that I can be regarded as a frivolous person with low ethical standards, but has it ever occurred to you what a field there is there for reform?”

  “Yes,” she said, decisively, but not in the right tone.

  “What I mean is,” I told her patiently, “if you happened to be looking for a good work to devote your life to, what could be better than a recla­ma­tion job on such a character. The scope is tremendous, just—”

  “Is this a proposal of some kind?” Sally inquired.

  “Some kind! I'd have you know — Good God!” I broke off.

  We were in Tyler Street. A short street, rain­swept now, and empty, except for our­selves. What stopped me was the sudden appearance of some kind of vehicle, farther along. I couldn't make it out very clearly on account of the rain, but I had the im­pres­sion of a small, low-built lorry with seve­ral figures in light clothes on it driving across Tyler Street quite quickly, and vanishing. That wouldn't have been so bad if there were any street crossing Tyler Street, but there isn't; it had just come out of one side and gone into the other.

  “Did you see what I saw?” I asked.

  “But how on earth—?” she began.

  We walked a little farther until we came to the place where the thing had crossed, and looked at the solid brick wall on one side and the house­fronts on the other.

  “You must have been mistaken,” said Sally.

  “Well, for — I must have been mistaken!”

  “But it just couldn't have happened, could it?”

  “Now, listen, darling—” I began.

  But at that moment a girl stepped out from the solid brick about ten feet ahead of us. We stopped, and gaped at her.

  I don't know whether her hair would be her own, art and science to­gether can do so much for a girl, but the way she was wear­ing it, it was like a great golden chry­san­the­mum a good foot and a half across, and with a red flower set in it a little left of centre. It looked sort of top-heavy. She was wear­ing some kind of brief pink tunic, silk perhaps, and more appro­priate to one of those elderly gentle­man floor-shows than Tyler Street on a filthy wet night. What made it a real shocker was the things that had been achieved by em­broi­dery. I never would have believed that any girl could — oh well, any­way, there she stood, and there we stood...

  When I say ‘she stood’, she certainly did, but some­how she did it about six inches above ground level. She looked at us both, then she stared back at Sally just as hard as Sally was staring at her. It must have been some seconds before any of us moved. The girl opened her mouth as if she were speak­ing, but no sound came. Then she shook her head, made a forget-it gesture and turned and walked back into the wall.

  Sally didn't move. With the rain shining on her mackin­tosh she looked like a black statue. When she turned so that I could see her face under the hood it had an expres­sion I had never seen there before. I put my arm round her, and found that she was tremb­ling.

  “I'm scared, Jerry,” she said.

  “No need for that, Sal. There's bound to be a simple explanation of some kind,” I said, falsely.

  “But it's more than that, Jerry. Didn't .you see her face? She was exactly like me!”

  “She was pretty much like—” I conceded.

  “Jerry, she was exactly like — I'm — I'm scared.”

  “Must have been some trick of the light. Any­way, she's gone now,” I said.

  All the same, Sally was right. That girl was the image of herself. I've wondered about that quite a bit since...

  Jimmy brought a copy of the morn­ing paper into my room next day. It carried a brief, face­tious leader on the number of local citi­zens who had been seeing things lately.

  “They're beginning to take notice, at last,” he proclaimed.

  “How's your own line going?” I asked.

  He frowned. “I'm afraid it can't be quite the way I thought. I reckon it is still in the experi­mental stage, all right, but the trans­mitter may not be in these parts at all. It could be that this is just the area he has trained it on for tests.”

  “But why here?”

  “How would I know? It has to be some­where — and the trans­mitter itself could be any­where.” He paused, struck by a portentous thought. “It might be really serious. Suppose the Russians had a transmitter which could project people — or bombs — here by tele­port­ation... ?”

  “Why here?” I said again. “I should have thought that Harwell or a Royal Arsenal—”

  “Experimental, so far,” he reminded me.

  “Oh,” I said, abashed. I went on to tell him what Sally and I had seen the prev­ious night. “She sort of didn't look much like the way I think of Russians,” I added.

  Jimmy shook his head. “Might be camou­flage. After all, behind that curtain they have to get their idea of the way our girls look mostly from maga­zines and picture papers,” he pointed out.

  The next day, after about seventy-five per cent of its readers had written in to tell about the funny things they had been seeing, the News dropped the face­tious angle. In two days more, the thing had become fact­ional, divid­ing sharply into what you might call the Classical and Modern camps. In the latter, schismatic groups argued the claims of tele­port­age against three-dimen­sional projec­tion, or some theory of spon­ta­neous molecular assembly: in the former, opi­nions could be sorted as beliefs in a ghostly inva­sion, a suddenly acquired visi­bi­lity of habi­tually wandering spirits, or the immi­nence of Judge­ment Day. In the heat of debate it was rapidly becom­ing diffi­cult to tell who had seen how much of what, and who was enthu­siasti­cally bent on im­proving his case at some expense of fact.

  On Saturday Sally and I met for lunch. After­wards, we started off in the car for a little place in the hills which seemed to me an ideal spot for a pro­posal. But at the main crossing in a High Street the man in front jumped on his brakes. So did I, and the man behind me. The one behind him didn't quite. There was an interesting crunch of metal going on on the other side of the crossing, too. I stood up to see what it was all about, and then pulled Sally up beside me.

  “Here we go again,” I said. “Look!”

  Slap in the middle of the crossing was — well, you could scarcely call it a vehicle — it was more like a flat trolley or platform, about a foot off the ground. And when I say off the ground, I mean just that
. No wheels, or legs. It kind of hung there, from nothing. Standing on it, dressed in coloured things like long shirts or smocks, were half a dozen men looking interestedly around them. Along the edge of the plat­form was lettered: pawley's peepholes. One of the men was pointing out All Saints' Church to another; the rest were paying more attention to the cars and the people. The police­man on duty was hanging a goggling face over the edge of his traffic-control box. Then he pulled him­self together. He shouted, he blew his whistle, then he shouted again. The men on the plat­form took no notice at all. The police­man got out of his box and went across the road looking like a volcano that had seen a nice place to erupt.

  “Hey!” he shouted to them.

  It didn't worry them, but when he got within a yard or two of them they noticed him, and they nudged one another, and grinned. The police­man's face was purplish, he spoke to them luridly, but they just went on watch­ing him with amused interest. He reached a truncheon out of his back pocket, and went closer. He grabbed at a fellow in a yellow shirt — and his arm went right through him.

  The policeman stepped back. You could see his nostrils sort of spread, the way a horse's do. Then he took a firmer hold of his truncheon and made a fine circular sweep at the lot of them. They kept on grinning back at him as the stick went through them.

  I take off my hat to that police­man. He didn't run. He stared at them for a moment with a very queer expres­sion on his face, then he turned and walked deli­be­rately back to his box; just as deli­be­rately he signalled the north-south traffic across. The man ahead of me was ready for it. He drove right at, and through, the plat­form. It began to move, but I'd have nicked it myself, had it been nick­able. Sally, looking back, said that it slid away on a curve and disap­peared through the front of the Penny Savings Bank.

  When we got to the spot I'd had in mind the weather had come over bad to make the place look dreary and un­pro­pi­tious, so we drove about a bit, and then back to a nice quiet road­side res­tau­rant just out­side West­wich. I was getting the con­ver­sa­tion round to the mood where I wanted it when who should come across to our table but Jimmy.

  “Fancy meeting you two!” he said. “Did you hear what happened at the Crossing this afternoon, Jerry?”

  “We were there,” I told him.

  “You know, Jerry, this is some­thing bigger than we thought — a whole lot bigger. That plat­form thing. These people are away ahead of us tech­nic­ally. Do you know what I reckon they are?”

  “Martians?” I suggested.

  He stared at me, taken aback. 'Now, how on earth did you guess that?' he said, amazedly.

  “I sort of saw it had to come,” I admitted. “But,” I added, “I do have a kind of feel­ing that Martians wouldn't be labelled ‘Pawley's Peepholes’.”

  “Oh, were they? Nobody told me that,” said Jimmy.

  He went away sadly, but even by breaking in at all he had wrecked the mood I'd been building up.

  On Monday morning our typist, Anna, arrived even more scattered than commonly.

  “The most terrible thing happened to me,” she told us as soon as she was inside the door. “Oh dear. And did I blush all over!”

  “All over?” inquired Jimmy interestedly.

  She scorned him.

  “There I was in my bath, and when I happened to look up there was a man in a green shirt, stand­ing watch­ing me. Of course, I screamed, at once.”

  “Of course,” agreed Jimmy. “Very proper. And what happened then, or shouldn't we—”

  “He just stood there,” said Anna. “Then he sniggered, and walked away through the wall. Was I mortified!”

  “Very mortifying thing, a snigger,” Jimmy agreed.

  Anna explained that it was not entirely the snigger that had morti­fied her. “What I mean is,” she said, “things like that oughtn't to be allowed. If a man is going to be able to walk through a girl's bath­room wall, where is he going to stop?”

  Which seemed a pretty fair question.

  The boss arrived just then. I followed him into his room. He wasn't looking happy.

  “What the hell's going on in this damned town, Jerry?” he demanded. “Wife comes home yester­day. Finds two incredible girls in the sitting-room. Thinks it's some­thing to do with me. First bust-up in twenty years. In the middle of it girls vanish,” he said succinctly.

  One couldn't do more than make a few sympathetic sounds.

  That evening when I went to see Sally I found her sitting on the steps of the house, in the drizzle.

  “What on earth—?” I began.

  She gave me a bleak look.

  “Two of them came into my room. A man and a girl. They wouldn't go. They just laughed at me. Then they started to behave just as though I weren't there. It got — well, I just couldn't stay, Jerry.”

  She went on looking miser­able, and then suddenly burst into tears.

  From then on it was stepped up. There was a brisk, if one-sided, engage­ment in the High Street next morn­ing. Miss Dotherby, who comes of one of West­wich's most respected families, was out­raged in every life­long prin­ciple by the appear­ance of four mop-headed girls who stood giggling on the corner of Northgate. Once she had retracted her eyes and got her breath back, she knew her duty. She gripped her umbrella as if it had been her grand­father's sword, and ad­vanced. She sailed through them, smiting right and left — and when she turned round they were laugh­ing at her. She swiped wildly through them again, and they kept on laugh­ing. Then she started babbling, so someone called an ambu­lance to take her away.

  By the end of the day the town was full of mothers crying shame and men looking staggered, and the Town Clerk and the police were snowed under with demands for some­body to do some­thing about it.

  The trouble seemed to come thickest in the district that Jimmy had origi­nally marked out. You could meet them elsewhere, but in that area you couldn't help en­count­ering gangs of them, the men in coloured shirts, the girls with their amaz­ing hair-do's and even more amazing deco­ra­tions on their shirts, saunt­ering arm-in-arm out of walls, and wander­ing indiffer­ently through cars and people alike. They'd pause any­where to point things out to one another and go off into help­less roars of silent laughter. What tickled them most was when people got angry with them. They'd make signs and faces at the stuffier sort until they got them tearing mad — and the madder, the funnier. They ambled as the spirit took them, through shops and banks, and offices, and homes, without a care for the raging occu­pants. Every­body started putting up ‘Keep Out’ signs; that amused them a lot, too.

  It didn't seem as if you could be free of them any­where in the central area, though they appeared to be opera­ting on levels that weren't always the same as ours. In some places they did have the look of walk­ing on the ground or floor, but else­where they'd be inches above it, and then in some places you would encounter them moving along as though they were wading through the solid sur­face. It was very soon clear that they could no more hear us than we could hear them, so that there was no use appealing to them or threatening them in that way, and none of the notices that people put up seemed to do any­thing but whet their curiosity.

  After three days of it there was chaos. In the worst affected parts there just wasn't privacy any more. At the most inti­mate moments they were liable to wander through, visibly snigger­ing or guffaw­ing. It was all very well for the police to announce that there was no danger, that the visit­ants appeared unable actually to do any­thing, so the best way was to ignore them. There are times and places when giggling bunches of youths and maidens demand more ignore-power than the average person has got. It could send even a placid- fellow like me wild at times, while the women's leagues of this-and-that, and the watch-committee-minded were living in a constant state of blown tops.

  The news had begun to get about, and that didn't help, either. News collectors of all kinds came stream­ing in. They over­flowed the place. The streets were snaked with leads to movie c
ameras, tele­vi­sion cameras and micro­phones, while the press-photo­graphers were having the snappy-picture time of their lives, and, being solid, they were almost as much of a nuisance as the visit­ants them­selves.

  But we hadn't reached the peak of it yet. Jimmy and I happened to be present at the incep­tion of the next stage. We were on our way to lunch, doing our best to ignore visit­ants, as instructed, by walking through them. Jimmy was sub­dued. He had had to give up theories because the facts had largely submerged him. Just short of the cafe we noticed that there was some commo­tion farther up the High Street, and seemingly it was coming our way, so ,we waited for it. After a bit it emerged through a tangle of halted cars farther down, and approached at a rate of some six or seven miles an hour. Essen­tially it was a plat­form like the one that Sally and I had seen at the cross­roads the previous Saturday, but this was a deluxe model. There were sides to it, glisten­ing with new paint, red, yellow and blue, enclosing seats set four abreast. Most of the passengers were young, though there was a sprink­ling of middle-aged men and women dressed in a soberer version of the same fash­ions. Behind the first plat­form followed half a dozen others. We read the lettering on their sides and backs as they went by:

  Pawley's Peepholes on the Past

  — Greatest invention of the age

  History Without Tears

  — for £1 See How Great Great Grandma Lived

  Ye Quainte Olde 20th Century Expresse

  See Living History in Comfort

  — Quaint Dresses, Old Customs

  Educational! Learn Primitive Folkways

  — Living conditions

  Visit Romantic 20th Century

  — Safety Guaranteed

  Know Your History

  — Get Culture — £1 Trip

  Big Money Prize if you Identify Own Grandad/Ma

  Most of the people on the vehicles were turning their heads this way and that in gog-eyed wonder inter­spersed with spasms of giggles. Some of the young men waved their arms at us and produced silent witti­cisms which sent their companions into inaudible shrieks of laughter. Others leant back com­fort­ably, bit into large, yellow fruits and munched. They cast occa­sional glances at the scene, but reserved most of their attention for the ladies whose waists they clasped. On the back of the next-to-last car we read: