John Lymington - Night of the Big Heat raw by Unknown Author

Author:Unknown Author
Language: eng
Format: epub

3

Patricia came in, bold and impatient. She glanced immediately at Callum, caught Frankie’s intercepting glance and looked away towards Harsen.

Stone came in behind her, his eyes shifting everywhere, gleaming as they saw the apparatus lying about Harsen got up.

“Sit down,” he said. “Anywhere, but sit down. I can’t lecture without a seated audience . . He seemed to be grumbling at something.

Only Patricia obeyed. She sat on the window seat. The other three merely withdrew round the walls to leave the pacing man more room.

It was then that the light grew very bright, faded and went out.

The women cried out; Stone let go a curse. Callum went to the still open door and peered into the blackness.

“They’ve all gone,” he said. “Must be a failure.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Harsen snapped. “Dark helps one to concentrate. Pull the curtains.”

In the darkness the intense heat felt solid, like velvet touching the skin, stifling nostrils.

Patricia pulled the curtain and the grey pale of the night showed there.

“I wonder the power kept going so long,” Harsen said. “I think there is some deliberate attempt to paralyse it..

“The heat might account-” Stone said, and they heard his voice tremble and then fade in a hiss of breath. He was scared stiff but fascinated still.

For a long moment there was a silence. Everyone in the room seemed to be listening, probing the thick darkness for a sound from outside. Then Harsen began to pace, a grey ghost in the shadows.

“Who and what I am does not matter,” he said. “We are going to consider only what is happening outside now. You have already some idea as to what it is. Before tonight I confess what I had in mind I thought at heart was a bad dream. That I was leading myself astray by dreadful imagination and fears.

“It was this which caused me yesterday to leave certain papers with high authority and to come to this Island, the centre of the recent disturbances.

“I did not expect things to move as quickly as they did. I was horrified to learn that the man’s experience of a week ago was dismissed as a drunken vision. It was nothing of the sort. It was true. You are fortunate indeed that something went wrong that time which has caused—as far as we can tell—a pause in the experiments.”

“You mean that there were actually giant spiders alive that night?” Callum said.

“Yes.”

“Then where did they go? No one has seen any since or any trace of such things.”

“They could hide in the Downs. There are caves,” Stone said.

“If any survived, they might have done that,” Harsen said. “I am not a naturalist, so I don’t know what spiders might do. But in this case, it would not have been necessary to hide. They would just not be seen.”

“Invisible insects?” said Callum . “But Franker saw them!”

Harsen seemed to ignore the interruption.

“What is being experienced here now is a series of radio transmissions, not just of sound, of vision, or of heat, but of actual matter.

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