He was whimpering with the pain of his arm and his head now, and he felt quite faint and very weak. Occasionally, when he twisted on the rough bed or strove to avoid the attentions of a particularly persistent bug, deep lacerations on his back gave him a nasty twinge too, but really they were better now… he’d quite forgotten now how he’d come by those. And, come to that, he couldn’t for the life of him make out where he was at this moment. He’d remembered very little after that crash, except the desperate urgency to get his hands on that little piece of metal (almost instinctively he tightened his grip on it as he thought of it) and then, vaguely, of being dragged out of the car by a big man in a dark-green uniform who had handled him surprisingly gently, and then of finding himself surrounded by a lot of ruffians with guns in their hands — guns which certainly were not being pointed at him, but even so Mr Ackroyd, who had never in his life known anything like this in Pocklington or Liverpool or even London, hadn’t cared for the look of that crowd; they’d looked so scruffy, and very dangerous — like the boys who’d made his life hell at school — but they’d been all right really, as he had to admit now. Decent enough lads.
His next memory was of standing in the cool night wind which funnelled lightly down the valley, the tatters of his suit — an over-padded suit which he didn’t even know he’d got — flapping round his meagre body. He’d shivered, he knew that — he remembered shivering violently, perhaps with shock, until one of the lads had stepped forward and slung a kind of smock round his shoulders — almost like a sack, it was really, but it had kept him warmer. Another thing he recalled was that he’d hummed his little tune to these chaps, just to be friendly like, and they’d seemed rather astonished and looked at one another a bit funny like, and then after that he just went blank until he found himself in a nice warm room, dark and friendly and cosy like his mum’s kitchen, where he was lying on a table without a stitch of clothing on his body, and a woman was washing him all over with steaming water from a copper and plenty of coarse soap.
A woman!
Sick and weary as he had been, he hadn’t liked that; in fact, it had given him quite a little shock. She’d looked old and withered enough, but still, in all his life Mr Ackroyd had never been bathed by any woman — not counting his mum — except Mrs Ackroyd, and that only when he’d caught chickenpox from Annie when he was too old for it to be as funny as Annie had seemed to think it when she saw her dad all spotty. What those lads would think if they could see him so undignified — those lads that worked for him in — in… Gibraltar. That was it, Gibraltar! Just for a moment, during that washing process, Mr Ackroyd’s thoughts had fined themselves up a little.
Suddenly, through the mists and the pain and the misery and the indignity, Mr Ackroyd had recalled something of desperate urgency and importance, something to do with a test and Gibraltar’s and N.A.T.O.’s top brass, and maybe the Minister of Defence and vitally important defence secrets, something which, if that fault should develop again and he didn’t get back there before the machine overran itself, might come to a question of life and death — literally. In a flash — and only for a flash of time — memory had partially returned to Mr Ackroyd’s tortured mind, and he knew that he had to get back to Gibraltar at once, and no nonsense, in case something should go wrong. He’d sat up on the table, giving a little cry. At once and firmly a big, hot-water-reddened hand had descended upon his chest; soapy water had splashed into his eyes, and he’d been pushed flat.
A cross voice — the old woman’s voice — had told him (though he didn’t follow the lingo, he’d taken the meaning) to lie down and be quiet, to rest and to submit for his own good. He’d protested volubly, but it was no use.
The moment had gone then. There had been no more strength left in his body, and no further recollection in his head. He’d just closed his hand tight over that little piece of shiny metal until the teeth on it bit into his flesh and left a little semicircle of blood-pricked dents. He wouldn’t let them take that from him whatever happened.
After that, though he wasn’t aware of this, he’d begun to cackle stupidly, and then he’d hummed a little. Dum-da, dum-da, dum-da, dum-da…
Afterwards Señora Gallego had plenty to say to a crowd of her cronies that she’d met in the market.
“He will not speak one word that I can recognize.” She looked about her; she was speaking rather loudly, shrilly, glorying in her new-found notoriety as the keeper of the madman from the outer world; never since Señor Luica’s death had the citizens hung so closely on her words. Dark old eyes glittered as she went on, “He only hums a tune, and now and then, in delirium, he says things in a tongue which I do not understand. The sargento says he has papers telling that he is Spanish, but that he talks in what the sargento believes is English.” She shrugged, then flung her arms wide. “I do not know. I shall, however, pray to Our Lady to help him. Of a certainty he is mad. He clings like a child to a little piece of shiny stuff which he holds in his hand, and he will not let me touch it — even me! One would think his very life depended upon it.”
The good old woman laughed shrilly. Some one inquired what the sargento intended doing about the madman.
Señora Gallego said, “He will be kept as he is, if the charity of the good people of Vercin will recompense me for looking after him.” She glanced round keenly; the crowd edged away a little. “A poor widow,” she went on, rather more loudly and forcefully, “cannot easily feed the extra mouth. If no help comes the sargento says he will have to be sent where any other lunatic would go. There is but the one place for madmen so far as I know — the prison, at Ronda or Cadiz.”
A little while after Mr Ackroyd had seen that fat, scarlet-and-silver, slow-moving slug on the road he heard voices outside the room in which he lay.
Of course, he didn’t understand what they were saying, and his voice-recognition was all jumbled up. A danger-signal flashed, but only momentarily, in his addled brain as he heard one voice, a woman’s, which seemed to be expressing relief over something or other.
They were talking very excitedly, and Mr Ackroyd wondered what could be up now. But as they went on talking his mind wandered off them again, and he lost interest. In his mind’s eye he saw, indistinctly, a mass of rock and some white, flat-roofed buildings climbing up the side of it, and then a long, dark tunnel and a cavern leading off it. Mr Ackroyd couldn’t think what the cavern was for. There was so much noise — a noise which seemed to be getting louder even as he listened to it… dum-da, dum-da, dum-da… yes, that was it, and there was something about a fault which he’d reported on — how long ago? — which had to do with that noise.
Mr Ackroyd giggled weakly to himself when he realized that the noise had only been his own humming.
He stopped humming, and he felt a tickling sensation on his eyebrows. It stopped, and a fly buzzed in the air, circling his face. It irritated him, that fly, and he began trying to slaughter it as it zoomed near the end of his nose, and then tickled his ear; he hit out at it with his little piece of oddly shaped metal, but the fly was too smart for him… after a while it came down on his straggly moustache. Mr Ackroyd blew and hit.