Incarnate Read online

  She looked up as she took the first step. Either the walls met overhead, high up in the dark, or the sky was utterly lightless. Though the walls were full of windows, not a window was lit, and she couldn’t see a single face in the crowd she was struggling through. Their bodies felt puffy and yielding, they smelled of sodden musty cloth, but she could wake if she had to, if their hands should seize her and drag her back into the dark. Waking was the best means of escape, the only one—but suddenly she was out of the crowd, in a narrow street lit by lamps that dripped black rain. She was in front of a door.

  She mustn’t go in. This was the photograph that was waiting to be taken, the red door where green paint showed through the top left-hand corner of the upper right-hand panel, the dog-faced knocker canted slightly to the left, a brass ring in its mouth. There were six doors in that house, but if there were more— She was shuddering and reaching for the microphone in the hope that telling it would help her understand why she was so afraid, and then she remembered that it could do much more: it would let her find her way back. She raised the microphone to her face and glanced back along the cord. It had snapped.

  The frayed end lay in the gutter, the exposed wires twitching in the water that was streaming toward the drain. She Hung away the microphone, which struck the foot of a streetlamp with a hollow tinny sound. She couldn’t find her way back. There was only one way to go, for someone had opened the door.

  She wanted to turn and run, it didn’t matter where. Worse than nightmare waited beyond the doorway. But the distant frustration was suddenly close, urging her forward, and when at last she managed to make her legs move she found she was stumbling into the house, along the hall, past the staircase where she didn’t dare look up. The knob of the door beyond the stairs felt like a lump of ice in her hand. When the door opened, it seemed to drag her into the room.

  It was a back parlor. A tasseled lampshade turned the walls and floor-length curtains a smoky brown. Antimacas-sars drooped over the chairs and settee that huddled around a gas fire, its orange flames stuttering. China dolls lined up neatly, the tallest in the middle, on the mantelpiece beneath an oval mirror. The room was stifling, she could hardly breathe. Then she saw the figures in the room, and she couldn’t breathe at all.

  They must be life-size dolls. What else could they be, with their blurred pink faces? But they were moving toward her, and so was the man who couldn’t close his eyes, another man with something nodding on his shoulder, and yet another who was armless, staggering about and crying at his incompleteness. Worse, she was moving toward them. She was suffocating with panic and the heat of the room, she would wake if only she could scream—and then she saw her terrified face in the oval mirror and realized that she could do neither. She had made things change at last, by going through the doorway of the house. The frustration that had urged her forward was satisfied, and now she knew that it hadn’t been hers, nor Joyce’s, nor anyone’s. For one appalling, endless moment, everything was clear: both what would happen, and what she would have to do to prevent it from happening.

  Her convulsion tore all the wires off her skull. One adhesive pad pulled out several strands of hair. She was sitting upright in bed, staring at the pale green room, but she felt as if she hadn’t escaped the stifling brownish room. Her head was pounding, her whole body ached with jerking upright. She felt she was being dreamed.

  She went stumbling toward the door, though she wasn’t sure which door it was. Someone was crying out, but it was so distant that she could hardly believe it was her voice or that anyone else could hear. She ought to have used the microphone to cry for help, but now she was at the door, clinging to the knob without knowing if she meant to turn it or to hold the door shut. If the bare green hall was out there it would be no relief, for it led to Joyce and the others. She didn’t know why that terrified her— she had already forgotten what the dream had revealed. She knew only that the door was opening as, too late, she struggled to hold it closed.

  Stuart was there. Behind him she saw Dr. Kent, who looked baffled. Now that the door was open, Molly was able to distinguish that the cries weren’t her own after all. She couldn’t tell whose they were, which room they came from, but they sounded like the cries of someone unable to wake. At once she was sure that someone was still in the stifling brownish room.

  She was beginning to tremble as the implications of that thought grew clear. The door opposite hers labored open. It was Danny. He clung to the doorframe and seemed to be trying to focus his eyes. When he saw Dr. Kent, he lurched at her. “You made it happen,” he shouted, in a blurred voice that sounded as though he had never raised it before.

  Dr. Kent stepped back, and Danny saw Molly. His eyes widened. He staggered toward her and halted himself by grabbing the wall outside her room. The hatred in his bloodshot eyes felt like a blow in her face, and looked very much like madness. He couldn’t be about to say what she feared he would. It wasn’t true, she cried within her panic. Please don’t say it, please.

  “And you did,” he said.

  Eleven Years Later

  2

  THE RAIN came slashing across Hyde Park and plastered the traffic at Marble Arch with the leaves it had ripped from the trees. Above the rotary choked with traffic, the November sky was a tidal wave. Bayswater Road was a mass of black roofs that the spiky rain turned pale, taxis full of businessmen stuffed with expense-account lunches; tented cyclists wobbled between the buses on Oxford Street, early Christmas shoppers struggled along Edgeware Road behind the shields of their umbrellas. Molly gazed down at all this from the window of the office on the fifth floor of Metropolitan Television and couldn’t hear a sound.

  In six months she hadn’t got used to the silence. It made her think of those moments when she would remember something so intensely that her surroundings slipped away without her noticing. She tried not to have those moments anymore, they felt too much like losing control. She turned away from the window, to the accounts Ben had dumped on her desk.

  Their program had gone over budget last month, if she could call it hers as well as Ben’s, or wanted to. Surely not even his dining could have gobbled up several thousand pounds. She skated a ruler down the columns of figures while typewriters chattered in the adjoining offices, and at last she found the culprits, though she had to phone Accounting to be sure what the secretive computer meant: the film extracts Ben had used in his program about corruption in the unions, Peter Sellers as a shop steward, Richard Attenborough suffering the silent treatment for breaking a strike. Ben had said he had contacts in the film companies who would let him have the extracts cheap, but it seemed he had run out of favors.

  She sat back feeling justified, staring at his desk opposite hers. It was bare except for program schedules and the afternoon’s memos, two piles of paper flanking the telephone at the exact center of his desk. Her desk was crowded with everything else: newspaper clippings, In and Out trays, an IBM typewriter, the telephone, which had to pass all his calls; there wasn’t room for anything of hers. It must be essential to his image of himself that his desk always be clear, as essential as the calendar girl above his swivel chair, her hip turned just enough to show a hint of curly pubic hair. The trouble was that the calendar was hanging where Molly would see it whenever she looked up, and she knew all too well what that was supposed to achieve. This was where three years at university and eleven in broadcasting had got her. She was sighing fiercely when he came in from lunch with the head of Programming, a lunch that had lasted most of the afternoon. “My God, you sound frustrated,” he said. “You can stop now.”

  He looked like his own image of perfection: black blazer with polished gold buttons, steel-gray knife-edged trousers, a polo shirt so white it was fluorescent, blue just-shaved jowls, clipped black moustache, sleek hair combed back. She couldn’t help but enjoy saying, “Your bits of film cost too much.”

  “You’re joking. What, that old stuff? They ought to be paying us for the publicity, if any of them are still ali
ve.” But he looked pleased with himself. “Dig out your maps. We’re going North tomorrow.”

  When she spread the map on his desk he reached across her to run his finger up the motorway, and she could hardly breathe for the smell of haircream. “We’ll be staying here overnight, so you’ll need to book rooms for us and the crew. Adjoining if possible.”

  “I shouldn’t think it will be.”

  He straightened up, and the back of his hand touched her breast—backhanded but no sort of compliment, she thought wearily. “Look, Molly,” he said as if he hadn’t noticed, “we have to work together. Why behave like this?”

  “I don’t think you can complain about my work, Ben, and that’s all the advertisement said you were hiring.”

  “And your personality.” He was trying to be gentle, but that was even more oppressive than the smell of haircream. “We have to get on with each other when we’re together so much of the time.”

  “Then try treating me like a person instead of a Dictaphone. You want me to book these rooms and I don’t even know why.”

  “Sorry, my mistake. I’ve been talking to one of the protesters who got inside the nuclear base. He can prove they were, whatever the Navy says.”

  “Thanks.” She folded the map and went back to her desk. “Now I know.”

  “Friends?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Fine. That’s what I like to hear.” He began to leaf through the program schedules. “Adjoining rooms then, yes?”

  “Not for us, Ben. Not now or ever.”

  He gave her a long expressionless stare and looked away, as if he’d seen nothing worth seeing. “Just do your job, then. Get the hotel.” He pretended to ignore her as she dialed, but she knew he was listening intently, and it was stiffening her words even before she spoke them. So this was the prospect Leon had found for her, the opportunity he’d convinced her she was looking for.

  That wasn’t fair to him. Metropolitan had looked to both of them like her chance to achieve something at last. Six years in parochially local radio had helped her sleep at night without starting awake in a panic, but the experience hadn’t been much use when she’d moved to London and television. She’d worked two years as researcher for a chat show hostess whose sole distinction was to sound less intelligent than any of her guests, and nobody in the audience knew that was the truth. Thank heaven for BBC and the job assisting Leon! She’d enjoyed those years once she had got used to him. She had been as disappointed for herself as she was pleased for him when MTV had offered him his own arts program but wouldn’t keep her on as his assistant, and then he’d found her the job as assistant on the news program. The show was going to be independent and fearless; it had sounded like her chance to be that too. And by God she was, as far as Ben Eccles was concerned. Thinking about her ambitions while she waited for the hotel receptionist to answer made her want, however sadly, to laugh.

  So did what the receptionist said. “If there’s only one single then of course I must have that,” Molly said, smiling sweetly at Ben. “Mr. Eccles and his crew will sort out the doubles between them.”

  Ben made to speak, but glared at the schedules instead. He ignored her when she said, “Anything else I can do?” Perhaps he meant her to feel useless, which, infuriatingly, she did. She had been reduced to gazing out at the lake, a slab of jagged slate amid the sodden park, by the time Leon came up from the studio.

  The sight of him, of his chubby good-natured face beneath its ashblond hair and the rest of him bearlike in his sheepskin coat, cheered her up even before he said innocently, “How are you, Ben? What are you investigating now?”

  Ben clearly wanted to ignore him but couldn’t resist a retort. “Maybe I should be investigating you and your bloody silly titles.”

  “Oh, Ben, I didn’t know you cared.” Leon’s campy wriggle was barely a glimpse, a throwaway joke. “Nothing wrong with a bit of irreverence. We shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously in this game.”

  “Irreverence? You call calling a program ‘Any Farty‘ irreverent? Infantile, more like. If I’d had my way you wouldn’t have got away with it, and I don’t mind telling you I let them know upstairs. There’s enough gossip about us as it is.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve been reading Private Eye on the newsstands again.”

  “I wouldn’t wipe my arse on it.” Ben’s face was darkening, and Molly found she was wishing once again that she’d read the magazine’s lampoon of him before she had applied for the job at MTV: “Ben Eccles, investigative journalist noted for his close-up investigation of any female staff who stray his way…” “I’d like to know where they’re getting their information about us,” Ben said with a glare at Leon.

  “Not guilty, your honor.” Leon raised his eyebrows, which made his chubby face look even more amiable. “Why, I thought you were a champion of investigative journalism.”

  Ben’s glare went blank. “Did you want something here, Leon?”

  “Molly, when she’s ready. We’re due at the London Film Festival.” He glanced at his watch. “I can wait a few minutes if you like. I’ll chaperone you two and Molly can chaperone us.”

  Ben looked down, dismissing them both. “She can go. She’s done enough for one day.” As they left, Molly buttoning her quilted Finnish raincoat, he muttered, “About lime you went back to the BBC and wasting the taxpayers’ money.”

  He meant Leon, not her. She was stuck with working for a man she didn’t like at a time when jobs were growing scarcer. The weight of six months of Ben and who knew how much longer suddenly made her feel exhausted. “Would you mind very much if I don’t come with you this time?” she said as the lift took them down to the lobby.

  “I really would appreciate your company.”

  He looked so disappointed and anxious that she gave in. “But I don’t want to hang around after the film. I know you, you’ll be talking for hours.”

  “I won’t make you hang around unless you have a reason to,” he said, so slyly that she would have asked what he meant if the lift hadn’t opened just then. The lobby was deserted except for Mr. Wick the commissionaire, who wished them good-night in a voice thick with shag. Everything around his circular desk—back-to-back chairs, thick carpet, even the welcome mat big as a single bed— was green: the color of expectation, she had felt at first, until she’d learned what working with Ben involved. She turned up her fat collar as she followed Leon out through the revolving doors.

  There were new graffiti on the nine-story concrete facade, Iranian with English subtitles. Green light swept repetitively over the rainy forecourt from the rotating sign on top of the portico, the “M” sharing a leg with the “V” and sprouting the “T” like an aerial. A taxi swung into the forecourt in response to Leon’s wave.

  Queues were forming outside the National Film Theatre for tonight’s last performances, a Nigerian fantasy and an American independent film called Bierce. “SOLD OUT” was plastered across a poster for the restored print of Greed. She hurried after Leon through the black-walled corridors, past the bowls of sand and cigarette butts, into NFT 1.

  The lights were still up. A film reviewer from the BBC gave Leon a copy of his novel about John Wayne, a woman next to Molly was complaining that nobody knew how to trim a poodle these days, an Australian was holding forth behind her: “The only vertigo I got from Hitchcock was falling off my seat from boredom, The Big Sleep was one big yawn… .” Molly skimmed the program notes. All she knew about The Spin was that it was a documentary about Las Vegas, but now she realized that she’d seen another film by Martin Wallace, The Unamericans. She remembered its fierceness, the shock of a scene where a march of draft dodgers had been clubbed down by police. “Wallace is wiser than Wiseman,” the Village Voice had apparently said. “He confronts Las Vegas without fear or loathing… .” It was hoped that Mr. Wallace would answer questions after the screening, and now the lights were dimming.

  The film was powerful enough for her eventually to turn on the Austra
lian and tell him to shut up. It wasn’t so much the technique that impressed her—the intercutting of small-town penny arcades called Las Vegas with the real thing, a tracking shot through deserted Las Vegas streets from church to silent church, a protracted panning shot around a casino that picked up winners and losers at random—as it was the people in the film. The faces of the heavy losers looked as if they’d collapsed inside themselves; the eyes of children were bright as Christmas; the gamblers talked to the camera as if they couldn’t stop, any more than they could stop gambling. A woman traded jewels from her throat and her liver-spotted arms for chips, lost, came back and tried to trade her watch, turned to the camera and begged whoever was behind it to lend her money, just a hundred dollars, okay, fifty, she’d pay it back in half an hour—she knew this time she was going to win. Her voice began to fade until there was only the withered colorless face, lips still pleading, and then, abruptly, darkness. No sound, no music. The dedication—“For my parents”—appeared and faded, and the lights came on.