DAGGER OF THE MIND
Bob Shaw
PART ONE
PETIT MAT
CHAPTER ONE
It was while he was pouring his breakfast coffee that Redpath became aware that something was wrong.
He paused for a moment and looked around the small apartment, straining his ears for an extra sound or a missing sound in the murmurous background noise of the building. The apartment block was coming to life in exactly the same hesitant but inevitable manner which was familiar to him from a thousand other mornings, with nothing out of kilter anywhere. He could feel the young couple directly above moving about in an ambience of hurried sex, drip-dry garments hanging like ghosts in the gallows of the doorways, moraines of toast crumbs and marmalade on the butter, and on the sideboard the holy trinity assembled into a neat pile—cigarettes, money and car keys. He could feel old Mr Coates next door slowly regaining consciousness, simultaneously relieved and disappointed over not having died in the quiet hours of the night. On the other side, Harv Middleton, sales representative handling plug-in plastic lettering for menus in cafe windows, but who liked to tell people he was “in advertising”, had already departed for the day in a cloud of conflicting perfumes. Everything was normal in the rest of the building, so the trouble had to be nearer at hand, within the four walls of Redpath’s own apartment.
He took stock of the kitchen, noting the presence and position of every object, remembering stories of how people who have been burgled sometimes fail to miss a familiar item until months afterward. Again, there was no identifiable cause for his unease, which suggested that it did not have an external source—that the subtle wrongness was developing behind his eyes, between his ears, inside his skull. He tried testing himself. Those rays of sunlight slanting down on to the parquet-patterned floor covering—were they too yellow, too bright, too cheerful? That stencilled blue-and-bronze design on his coffee mug—had it acquired new merits, was it evoking too much aesthetic pleasure? Were there exotic fragrances, such as those of Chamberyzette or champak blossoms, mingling with the ordinary homely smells of his food and drink? In short—was he experiencing an aura?
No, please, no, Redpath thought. Not today.
He went to the long chromium-rimmed mirror in the bedroom and stood close to it. The image which looked back at him in spurious intimacy was that of a tall, slim-built man in his early thirties, with closely waved auburn hair and fair, dry, freckled skin of the type which seems never to perspire. There was an irresolute, mobile quality about the mouth which could make its owner look humorous, reckless or sullen on the instant, and the brown eyes were direct and inquisitive. The overall picture was one of unobtrusive good health, something for which Redpath usually felt grateful in view of the fact that he suffered from an incurable disease. There were other times, however, when—even if only for the assistance it would afford him in the management of his condition—he felt it would be more appropriate and in some way satisfying if he could appear ill.
In the present instance, as a case in point, he had no way of knowing if he was experiencing the aura which preceded a grand mal, actually undergoing a mild psychomotor epilepsy with its characteristic disturbance of thought, or simply passing through a period of heightened awareness which had no connection with neural abnormality. He decided to take precautionary measures.
Setting his coffee aside, he went into the living-room, picked up a cigar-box full of darts and positioned himself before the dartboard hanging near the window. With his toes at the edge of a carpet tile he knew to be exactly nine feet from the board, Redpath began throwing the darts, concentrating to the utmost as he tried to place one in each division from one to twenty. There were twenty-one darts in the box, which allowed him to make only one mistake in the private contest. He had to make two attempts at the four, a shot he usually found difficult, but that had the effect of steadying his hand and eye, and he successfully picked off all the other numbers. In a second game he needed two darts for both the four and the sixteen, but in the third set he went right round the board without a single miss, leaving himself with a dart in hand. He resisted an impulse to throw the remaining dart at the bull’s eye—aware that hitting it could cause a dangerous surge of elation—and again took inventory of all those intangibles which made up his consciousness.
He felt cool, relaxed, fully locked-on to his surroundings.
Dr Hyall had recommended occupational therapy as a pre-ventative for attacks—(“It’s a long-established fact that a workman rarely has a seizure while he’s at the bench”)—and for a time Redpath had tried making jewellery and repairing watches, but all crafts had a disadvantage in that it took too long to become engrossed, to pick up yesterday’s threads. The darts, by comparison, provided him with immediate and complete involvement for hand, eye and mind. In spite of some scepticism from Dr Hyall and others, Redpath was satisfied that they shunted excesses of neural energy into harmless channels.
He retrieved his coffee and carried it back into the kitchen, now feeling a slight sense of anti-climax. You can’t win, he thought. And it’s all Leila’s fault—she should have been here this morning.
Redpath finished his coffee, placed the mug in the sink beside his empty cereal dish and ran some hot water on both. That done, and with fifteen minutes in hand before he had to leave for the institute, he felt sufficiently bolstered to face the morning paper and mail which had been lying on the hall floor since he got up. He went into the hall and knelt to retrieve the various items spilled across the doormat. On top was a buff envelope bearing the return address of Harrup & Phizackeley, Estate Agents, and he knew it was yet another reminder about the rent of the apartment, now three months in arrears. He fingered the envelope, noted that it seemed to contain more than one sheet of paper, and wondered if things had gone beyond the reminder stage. That, he decided, was a mystery whose unveiling could wait until the evening. He flicked the unopened envelope onto the hallstand and glanced at the three other letters, identifying them as two promotional circulars and an electricity bill. What was the small ad he used to see in American pulp magazines? “DO YOU GET INTERESTING MAIL?”
He sighed and, still kneeling on the floor, turned his attention to the newspaper which was the Haverside Herald, a daily serving the four towns and scattering of hamlets which made up the South Haverside district. He took it in preference to any of the nationals because, although the Herald did its best to be as despondent as any major paper, the tragedies served up in its pages were usually on a manageable scale and allowed Redpath to go on believing that something could be done. One of the front page stories in that day’s edition was a case in point—it concerned a local pigeon fancier who had just lost a third batch of prize racing birds.
“It is definitely sabotage of some kind,” said 54-year-old Mr Giddings at his home last night. “My birds made good time the whole way from France, and they were definitely seen passing over the Tiverly Edge checkpoint at ten o’clock on Sunday morning, which means they should have been—”
Redpath stopped reading as he became aware of something peculiar. At this time of the day the corridor outside his apartment received a lot of natural light, creating a thin line of silver radiance along the bottom of Redpath’s door. The strip of brightness was there now, but it was interrupted at the centre— which meant that an object had been placed against the outside of the door, or that somebody was standing there. The former explanation was the most likely—the postman sometimes simply abandoned packages that were too big for the letterbox—but it seemed to Redpath that the ends of the dark segment were wavering slightly, as became the shadow of a living thing. On the other hand, there was no sound, no evidence that a caller was getting ready to ring the doorbell, and it was hard to believe that anybody would be eccentric enough to stand vigil on his threshold. It had to be a package. The slight shimmering had to be a trick of the light, a result of foliage stirring in the tall trees behind the building or of clouds slipping across the disc of the sun.