At any given moment, normally, it would be almost impossible to find half a dozen clocks and watches all showing the same time. The clock in my car was always a few minutes fast each day, and I would adjust it when the difference became noticeable. If this had been my alarm clock, here, I would have expected it to be ten minutes fast as I always set it ahead a bit. But so far today I had not seen a single timepiece which had stopped at anything other than precisely 6.12. Surely a few might have shown, well, 6.09 or 6.15, according to whether they were slow or fast? Whatever force had stopped them had also had the power to enforce a unified time on them. This suggested something more than a mere paralysis of moving parts.
I strode out of the bedroom back into the hall and explored the other rooms. There was a teenager’s bedroom with posters all over the walls and jeans and T-shirts on a chair, and a children’s room with two bunk beds, and clothes festooned amongst toys. The beds were all in the same state, as though the occupants had vanished instantly whilst asleep and with no disturbance. In the kitchen I found another clock at 6.12, propped on top of an old refrigerator. The fridge had defrosted and when I drew the venetian blinds the daylight gleamed on the pool of water on the patterned lino flooring. Some shelves in the living room held badly framed photographs of the family: a formal black-and-white studio picture of a couple in late-nineteen-fifties styles on their wedding day, and several garish coloured photos of children squinting towards the camera on bright sunny days in back gardens and on beaches, the sky turquoise Kodak. I looked at the photos with a heavy feeling, a sensation of having been excluded from all the processes which had operated these people, of being as separate as a creature from another planet, unable to divide the ordinary from the extraordinary. I feared that although these people might not be dead, might not have ceased to live in any ordinary sense, nevertheless they would almost certainly not be coming back here. The arrangement of objects in the bedrooms seemed to be hard evidence of something irrevocable, of an event which was irreversible as well as mysterious, just as all photographs show an unreachable past.
The images of people from my own life who might have vanished held me fixed there for a while. I wondered if they now only existed in my mind. I was unnerved, briefly, by not being able to feel any very powerful emotion about that, and by a deeper disturbance in my memory relating to Auckland and the past which had no apparent cause. I turned away from the photographs. Was everything irrevocable? A force which can stop clocks is one thing; a force which fixes all timepieces to one setting is quite something else. It has a purpose, surely?
There was a dull, heavy thudding and rustling noise from the kitchen. I tensed and crouched behind an armchair, estimating the distance to the door which led to the hallway. No, to get out that way I would have to turn my back towards the kitchen, and I had left the kitchen door open. I waited, holding my breath, holding the hammer even tighter. Nothing happened. Slowly I stood up and advanced. There was no sign of anything in the kitchen. After a long pause I kicked the door wide open. The same thud and then a slithering came from inside the fridge. I walked across and opened the fridge door. A mass of melting ice fell out onto the lino. A large block, shaped with the ridges like a mould of the cooling unit, sagged onto the plastic tray on the top shelf. Water dripped down. A faintly unpleasant odour hung in the air, a cheesy, meaty staleness which would be the beginning of the decomposition. I closed the door hard against the slush. Microbes? The decay of meat was a process involving living cells. People had vanished leaving no trace, but meat remained and was decaying normally.
I unlocked the back door and walked out into the strong, hot sunlight. There were some scraggy rose bushes in the back garden, red oleanders, the inevitable marigolds, and the white buds of a magnolia opening like poultices. Screwing my eyes up against the powerful light I wandered around examining the flowers. There were no aphids or insects on them; none, at any rate, that I could see. A spade was leaning against the corrugated iron fence; I put my hammer down and got the spade and began to heave aside lumps of the dry rock-hard earth. It wasn’t easy. The earth I uncovered seemed as dead as sand. There were stabs of pain from my cut fingers. Sweating, I blundered back into the kitchen and turned on the taps over the sink; the water pressure was low but the dribblings soon filled a small basin I picked up from the draining board. I took the water outside and splashed it on the soil. After two or three trips the soil had darkened and become softer. The spade sank in more easily. When about twenty centimetres of soil had been levered out I fetched more water and poured it into the hole. It formed a slurry with the loose earth. I stirred and prodded at the sides of the hole as the water sank away.
Suddenly, into the mud, there was a movement, a writhing. I laughed out loud. Carefully lowering the tip of the spade into the hole I edged it into the mud and lifted up part of the dark mass like a goldminer peering for a glint of something precious. And there it was! Wriggling, bluish-pink, coiling, enormously alive: an earthworm.
I released the earth gently and knelt in the heat of the early afternoon watching the only other living creature I had found or detected in six hours of searching. A common or garden worm. I laughed again. The worm burrowed out of sight. I said, ‘Hey!’ out loud, putting my hand down to part the earth. My companion crawled off in another direction. I watched it go. Don’t start talking to worms, I thought.
I sat there for perhaps five or ten minutes, the strain ebbing away, a sick weariness mixing with the elation, until the sun on the back of my neck drove me to the shade of the carport.
So: I was not alone. The effect, or whatever, had not eradicated the microbes which made meat decay, and it had not removed life beneath the surface of the soil. I felt sure now that there was a detectable pattern to the Effect (I consciously christened it there and then) and that I would be able to make deductions, as a scientist, and that sooner or later some sense, if not some cause or explanation, would emerge. There must be a pattern; there always was, to any process. Perhaps normality would return, reassert itself, by degrees. Normal processes would continue; entropy still applied, growth and decay seemed unaffected. I lifted my roughly bandaged hand to wipe the itch of sweat from my face, and then stopped the movement because my fingers were caked with the earth I had unburied. I dashed it off on my trousers, convulsively, walking back into the kitchen and turning on the taps to wash my hand, to clean the cuts and run water over my fingers and wash and wipe them until they emerged from the rubbing of dishcloth and towel quite clean, scrubbed blue and pink.
CHAPTER FOUR
I drove at random around the streets in the afternoon, occasionally stopping to enter a house and walk quickly through its rooms. It became easier to do. The clocks all showed 6.12. The houses were all void of human beings or animals. All pets had vanished. Milk in saucers lay curdling on kitchen floors into blue and yellow liquid.