THE THIRTY-FIRST OF JUNE
JOHN RUSSELL FEARN
* * * *
PART ONE
Unfinished Journey
The sound of revelry drifted into the mellow summer darkness on this June evening. The French windows of the great residence were open to the faultless lawns; shadows chased each other in the gloom. Festoons of Chinese lanterns glowed like fireflies and made the solitude of the romantic far too bright for their liking. The music of a dance orchestra, the clink of glasses, the buzz of voices, the laughter of guests.
Henry T. Mythorn was doing things properly, as he had done throughout his life. The millionaire industrialist was in the midst of a house-warming. Mythorn Towers was one of the few ancestral homes left in Britain and Henry T. had seen to it that it had become his. Now, after a year of renovation and improvement, he and his family had moved in—and gathered about them all the guests, friends, and intimates they could find.
Most of them were prepared to stay until the small hours, but not so Nick Clayton. He owned a London cabaret that opened at one in the morning, and he always made a point of being there, no matter what. And because Nick Clayton was worth several millions—earned by his father before him—he usually had his way.
Outside in the driveway stood his car. Beside it, utterly impersonal, his chauffeur-manservant Dawlish was waiting in rocklike calm. The car was a big, open one and capable of carrying five more passengers besides the driver. The four others who were congregated around Nick Clayton in the hall were ready for departure, though by no means anxious to go.
In fact, Bernice Forbes, Nick's particular girlfriend—at the moment—openly said so. She looked rather like a big doll in her costly fur coat, her flawlessly made-up face slightly pinker than usual with annoyance.
“Can't your manager look after the Club for once, Nick?” she demanded. “Things here are just beginning to warm up.”
Nick smiled. It was the smile of a rogue yet with generosity in it. He lived well and heartily and wanted everybody else to do the same. Blonde-haired and passably good-looking, he was a playboy who, nevertheless, turned tome of his huge financial backings into worthwhile propositions. And the Apex Night Spot was one of them.
“We're going back, Berny,” he replied firmly. “I like to handle everything for myself.”
Bernice pouted and gave a shrug. Henry T. and his wife, both of them big and opulent, looked disappointed.
“If that is how it has to be, all right,” Henry T. smiled, shaking hands. “I don't suppose the rest of us will disperse until the small hours. Pity you can't stay.”
“He could if he wanted,” commented forty-year-old Harley Brand acidly.
“You said you'd be glad of a night's rest for once,” Nick reminded him dryly, and Harley Brand scowled.
He was a financier in the city, heading for wealth too if certain plans matured. His wife, a pale woman of thirty-two, stood beside him without saying a word. In his climb to power the still young Harley Brand had forgotten one thing—to remember how much he owed to Lucy Brand's long suffering patience.
“Well, let's go!” Nick ordered cheerfully. “Just on midnight. We can make it in thirty minutes. Come on, Berny!”
He caught the girl's fur-coated arm and she hurried beside him down the broad steps to where the huge land cruiser with its chromium-plated fittings was standing. Dawlish, the chauffeur, was so immovable he looked like part of the car. He swung open the gleaming doors as the party arrived.
“Hey, wait for me!”
Nick paused and turned as he was about to follow Bernice into the wide front seat. A girl in a light dustcoat, her red hair streaming in the warm night wind, came hurrying down the steps, breathing uncommonly hard for such slight exertion.
“Give me a lift to London, Nick?” she asked brightly.
“Sure thing, Betty. Squeeze in the back.”
“Okay. I'm not up to house-warming tonight. My ticker's acting queerly.”
Harley Brand and his wife moved up a little to make room for the girl and she settled down beside them and smiled rather woodenly. They smiled back but did not speak. Betty Danvers was a problem girl, and only she knew why. She was twenty-five years of age, pretty, and spent her life in a whirlwind of pleasures and extravagance, drawing constantly on her father's seemingly endless bank account. Some said she was worthless; others liked her brightness.
The chauffeur moved with stiff-necked dignity to the wheel, started up the engine, and then set the huge car gliding down the driveway and out into the lane which ran across country to the main London-south coast road. The wind sweeping past the car was nearly sub-tropical and the stars were gleaming in masked beauty through a high screen of mist.
Presently the car entered Little Brook village with its solitary new signpost saying very definitely—TO MYTHORN TOWERS. Trust Henry T. to think of that! The villagers had apparently retired and the car's headlights swept across scrupulously whitewashed walls and then upon the ivy-clad bulk of the village church. The clock was just striking midnight.
“Ten—eleven—” Nick intoned, then at the twelfth stroke he frowned a little. Instead of booming out it seemed to cut itself off short, like a gong in a radio program suddenly switched out.
“Sounded queer,” Bernice agreed, seeing his puzzled glance. “Probably the bell's as cracked as the village inhabitants.”
“Could be,” Nick admitted.
By this time the car was on the cross-country road that connected eventually with the main London-south coast major highway. Dawlish sat immovable at the wheel, his cadaverous face lighted by stars and dashboard reflections. The dark field on either side made a perfect background for his profile.
On, and still on, the engine making hardly any sound and the speedometer registering 66 mph. On and on, until Nick began to frown a little as he saw no sign of the broad, deserted road ending. The headlamp beams pierced the misty night for a tremendous distance, but there was only the road, dusty and not very well surfaced, and the great deserted expanses of fields on either side.
“How much further?” Bernice asked at last, sitting up in some surprise. “Dawlish, are you sure you're on the right road?”
“Certain, miss. I turned left at the signpost which brought us on the road along which we came from London.”
As if to satisfy himself that the road must end somewhere Dawlish increased speed—up to 70, and then 80, but the headlights continued to blaze along a white ribbon which stretched on, on, and ever on until it lost itself in the starry backdrop.
“Stop!” Nick commanded at last, his voice taut. Dawlish obeyed and as the car came to a standstill there was an appalling quiet.
“What's—what's happened?” Bernice asked at last, and she could not be blamed for sounding frightened. “Are we on the wrong road, or something?”
“Evidently we must be, Miss,” Dawlish answered. “I set the trip-milometer before we started and we've traveled thirty miles. Yet we're still on this country road.”
“I imagine the explanation is fairly simple,” Harley Brand said, though he did not sound convincing. “We've hit one of those confounded country roads which go in a circle. If we go on far enough we'll come back to the signpost.”
Silence. Dawlish looked at the stars. Bernice, being next to him, was attracted by his action and looked also. And her none too agile brain was puzzled by what she saw.
There was something queer about those stars. Instead of being bright points of light they were silvery-looking streaks, broad at the top and narrow at the base, as though they had been driven into a great pool of dark and been shorn off in the doing.
Stars like shaved-off rods? Utter silence? The empty fields and nowhere a sign of life or the solitary gleam of a distant lighted window?
“Where the hell are we?” Nick demanded at last, and his enquiry brought them all into action again. They moved vaguely with no fixed idea in mind.
“Circular road, Nick,” Harley Brand insisted.
“It's something more than that, sir,” Dawlish responded, a queer note in his voice. “Take a look at the stars. Not only do they look odd, but not one of them has any recognizable position. I've just been studying them.”
“I wouldn't know a star from a planet, and even less their positions,” Nick growled. “Surprises me you know so much.”
“I've studied astronomy, sir, amongst other things. Usually I can find any particular star or constellation, but not this time! And when the stars fail you for direction you're—lost!”
“Ridiculous!” Nick declared, scrambling out of the car. “There'll be bound to be a patrol man along soon, or a passing car, or—or—something.”
Nobody answered.
“There'll have to be!” Nick insisted.
“How much petrol have we?” Betty Danvers asked, and Dawlish glanced at the fuel gauge.
“Practically empty, Miss Danvers. I was intending to fill up at the garage just beyond Mythorn—only we haven't passed it.”
Again the mystified quiet. Then Bernice exclaimed, “I've got it! Let's look at a road map.”
Dawlish dug it out of the cubbyhole and six anxious faces bent over it in the dim glow from the dash.
“Here's Little Brook,” Harley Brand said, pointing. “Here is the road leading through it to Mythorn Towers—Yes, and here's the spot where the new signpost has been erected where we turn the corner. Then we go straight to—”
There was no road marked where they had been traveling. They looked at each other with half-closed eyes, striving to mask a deepening apprehension.
“Maybe the map's old?” Betty suggested.
“Recent issue,” Nick replied; then, his brows knitted, he looked around him in the quiet. Finally he took a torch from the car's side pocket and flashed the beam at his feet. The road was not macadam-surfaced, but hard-baked soil, not unlike a trail out west which has been subjected to ceaseless sun-blistering. Dust lay thick upon it. It even looked as if rain had not descended for ages—and this, for England, was incredible, dry though the summer had been.
“I don't get it!” Nick confessed at last, and switched off the torch.
Dawlish clambered out of the car and surveyed.
“Maybe we're dead?” Betty Danvers suggested dryly.
“Which isn't funny!” Bernice flared at her.
“All right, girls, keep your tempers,” Nick reproved them, sensing the thin edge of hysteria. “We'll work out something—I hope.”
He turned and headed round the front of the car to speak to Dawlish, then he stopped half way, completely astounded. As if things were not bad enough already there was a new mystery added. For, though he was directly intercepting the beam of the offside headlamp, he was not casting a shadow! The beam tunneled straight on into the dreary emptiness.
Nick glanced back at the car. The girls and Harley Brand were arguing amongst themselves and had not noticed this latest phenomenon—but Dawlish had. There was a rather grim smile on his lean features as Nick came to his side.
“You noticed that?” Nick asked.
“Yes, sir. Unusual—but explanatory.”
“Explanatory? How d'you mean?”
Dawlish lowered his voice. “I don't wish to scare the ladies, sir, so maybe I'd better make things clear to you to begin with. And maybe Mr. Brand, he being the other man in the party.”
Nick shrugged and then called, “Hey, Harley! A moment!” Harley extricated himself from amidst the three talkative women and came over to where Dawlish and Nick were standing.
“Dawlish has a theory,” Nick said. “Maybe we should listen.”
“I believe,” Dawlish said quietly, “that we have driven out of our normal space and time into hyper-space.”
Nick and Harley exchanged looks.
“Sounds crazy,” Harley decided.
“No more crazy than there being no shadows, sir.”
Harley started. “No what?”
Nick demonstrated by putting himself in the way of a headlight beam. Unfortunately Betty Danvers witnessed it.
“Look!” she cried hoarsely. “Nick's transparent! Light goes clean through him!”
That did it! In another moment all the girls had tumbled out of the car and were prancing around the headlamps, fascinated and shocked by what they beheld.
Nick gave a regretful smile and glanced at Dawlish. The man's calmness was unshakeable.
“What does it mean?” Bernice demanded finally.
“It's a matter of mathematics, miss,” Dawlish replied.
“Oh don't bother me with those! Can't you give it neat?”
“I can, miss, but I doubt if you'd believe me. However, from the look of the stars, and the fact that there are no shadows, I think we have unwittingly driven from three dimensions into four—or if not that then into a sub-area of space which is very close to, but not actually a part of, our own space. Possibly it has its own time-ratio.”
“Are you trying to scare the women?” Harley demanded.
“No, sir. I find it as uncomfortable as they do to be marooned in an alien space.”
“Alien space be damned!” Nick said bluntly. “The obvious move is to drive back the way we came. We'll inevitably come to our starting point. Have we enough juice?”
“Just about, sir, but I must warn you that the effort is unlikely to meet with success. If, as I think, we have slipped into hyper-space, the chances against our passing straight out of it again are millions-to-one against. I could explain why, but it would take considerable time.”
“Drive back,” Harley ordered. “Only thing for it.”
Dawlish shrugged and held the car doors open for the party to re-enter. Then he settled at the wheel, started up the engine, reversed the car, and began to speed down the empty road in the direction whence they had come.
Everybody was quiet, completely sobered. It was only as moment followed moment that they realized just how awful was the position. They had come into nowhere out of the normal everyday world and had not even glimpsed the point where they had crossed from the one state to the other. All of them being more or less ruled by their knowledge of the everyday, they were quite sanguine that the drive back would restore them to the point where the signpost stood near the church clock.
So Dawlish drove on and on, the miles flicking by on the trip-mileometer, and the road stretched between the endless fields. Endlessly, with never a break. And, as the trip continued with its six troubled passengers, the sky began to lighten considerably and the stars paled. Nick found himself looking for a moon, but could not see one.
“Dawn coming, or moon rising,” he told Dawlish, finally.
dawDawlish glanced at the dash-clock. “One-fifteen, sir, so it isn'tn—unless Time here is very different. It's moonlight we can see, but not the moon itself.”
“Why not? There isn't a cloud in the sky.”
“We do not see the moon, sir, for the same reason that we can't see shadows. In four dimensions light-waves do not obey the accustomed laws.”
“But we can see the stars—I think.”
“True, but do they look like stars, sir? No! They are like bars, their bases tapering off into nothing. Even their light is not as we are accustomed to seeing it.”
Nick gave it up. He became moodily silent, like the others, watching anxiously for some sign of the road ending. None came, and after nearly an hour of swift travel the engine suddenly started missing, coughed, and finally died. Slowly the car came to a standstill and Dawlish put on the handbrake. “Petrol's finished,” he announced.
Nick followed a line of thought and switched on the car radio. Rather to his surprise it presently began to operate, giving forth a dance band into the utter silence and milky glow of this weird land.
“Well,” Nick said brightly, “we can't be so far off trail!”
“On the contrary, sir,” Dawlish sighed. “One might receive radio quite clearly when millions of miles away in space, but it would not solve the problem of reaching the spot from which the radio program emanated!”
Nobody argued about this because nobody understood it. The dance band continued for a while, then the announcer spoke. “That concludes our dance music for tonight, and the time is now just upon midnight. We bid you all—”
The voice died away, and all the twiddling of knobs that Nick gave the set failed to restore it to life.
“That announcer's crazy!” Betty Danvers exclaimed. “It's long past midnight—twenty past two, in fact. For the love of heaven, what sort of a nightmare have we landed in?”
“If my guess is right,” Dawlish said, thinking, “daylight should come eventually, and then we may be able to assess the position more easily. Until then I think we ought to try and sleep. The air is warm, we have plenty of rugs, and I took the liberty of preparing the picnic basket, sir, in case you decided on extra traveling.”
“Extra traveling is right!” Nick commented dismally.
“Sleep?” Bernice repeated. “Under these frightful conditions I couldn't sleep a wink! Don't be so ridiculous, Dawlish!”
“I'm sorry, miss, but are the conditions so awful? We have peace all around us. Frankly, and with the greatest respect, I might say that I find things here more restful than in the ordinary way.”
That awkward silence came back again. It appeared that, quite unobtrusively, Dawlish was taking things into his own hands—perhaps because he knew far more about the situation than anybody else.
Nick cleared his throat. “I think Dawlish has the right idea. Come on, girls, take the back seat, cover yourselves with the rugs, and do what you can to snooze. We men will take the front.”
There were plenty of grumbles—but he was finally obeyed.
When Nick awoke again it was daylight and Dawlish's lean, immobile face was stooping over him. He was holding a plastic cup in which tea was steaming.
“Good morning, sir. Somewhat incongruously, I am afraid, I have here your morning cup of tea.”
“Thanks.”
Nick took it, hoping for the moment that he would find himself in bed at home with the satin curtains drawn back. But no! He was still in the car with a cloudless sky overhead and a considerable amount of heat beating down upon him from an invisible sun. It was the weirdest awakening he had ever known. Then he remembered the others and looked about him.
The girls were still in the back of the car, nibbling at the picnic sandwiches and balancing cups on their knees. They looked pasty, disheveled, and thoroughly miserable—even Betty Danvers, who usually managed to keep a bright smile under all circumstances.
Some distance away from the car, contemplating the landscape as he slowly turned on his heel, was Harley Brand. Now and again he scratched his head, then shrugged to himself.
“How's life, girls?” Nick asked, absently watching Dawlish busy with the small picnic oil cooker.
“Rotten!” Bernice declared with finality.
Nick drank his tea and surveyed. He could hardly have contemplated a more dreary panorama. Everywhere, save in the direction he took to be the east, were the endless fields of dry, brownish-green grass, flat as a billiard table, Nowhere a hill or mountain. To the east, though, there was a curious gray blur that could have been a distant ocean. Otherweise, not a bird, not a movement, not a flower.
“I think, sir,” Dawlish said, when the “breakfast” was about over, “that we should hold a conference. I'll ask Mr. Brand to join us.”
Harley came over immediately and leaned on the edge of the car morosely, waiting for somebody to say something. Nobody did, except Dawlish.
“I think,” he said, “that we can take it as an accepted fact that we have strayed into some space contiguous to our own. A fourth dimension does exist, but up to now it has only been in the realms of mathematics. But it is also a fact that other spaces and planes exist alongside our own, and now and again there is an overlap. As the ocean plunges its waves forwards and then retracts them, carrying with it driftwood which is borne out on the ebb, so other dimensions occasionally overlap our own and, by chance, somebody or something is perhaps picked up and drawn away on that ebbing, dimensional tide. Space within space, angles within angles, is the top and bottom of the Universe.”
“Marvelous, for a chauffeur!” Nick declared, grinning.
“I still think we're on a circular road!” Harley insisted.
“That you can forget completely, sir,” Dawlish told him. “The missing shadows, and absence of visible sun and moon in a cloudless sky is sufficient evidence of the fact that we are, at this moment, in a different space from our own. Light has undergone a change, so probably has time itself—as witness the announcer last night telling us it was just on midnight when we knew it was twenty past two.”
“But how did we get here?” Nick demanded.
“We may never discover that, any more than we can remember ourselves being born. We were shifted from one space to the other, and our only clue was the queer sound of the last note of twelve as it struck from the clock tower.”
Nick gave a start as he remembered. “You noticed it too, then? A sort of cut-off effect?”
“Yes, sir. At that moment we must have crossed from one space to the other.”
“But surely,” Lucy Brand asked, “we can find our way back if we follow this road as far as it will go?”
Dawlish shook his head. “I'm afraid not. Just as one can never be sure that the waves on a shore will strike the same spot twice, so we cannot be sure of finding the way out. If we get out at all it will be by the merest chance; just as the merest chance brought us here.”
There was dead silence—until Nick exploded.
“Dammit, man, do you realize what you're telling us? You are as good as saying we've got to stop here for the rest of our lives!”
“Yes, sir. I base my opinion on the fact that those who came here before us never returned to the everyday world.”
Harley raised his head and looked blank. “Who the blazes ever came here before us?”
“Quite a few, sir. The records of missing people show that many thousands of people vanish every year without trace. Take two examples—Henry Potter of Maida Vale, who on the nineteenth of January, nineteen sixteen, stepped back into his home to pick up an umbrella he'd forgotten, and was never seen again! Or the case of Dorothy Arnold of New York, who vanished from a busy shopping center in the middle of a summer afternoon. As for ships, they have disappeared in endless numbers and nobody has ever solved how, or why.”
Harley straightened up. “So our names can now be added to the world's record of missing people? How very nice! However, we are pretty healthy at the moment, but what happens when the picnic stuff gives out? I've seen neither food nor water in this confounded place.”
“Water there must be or grass would not grow,” Dawlish answered. “We'd find water if we dug down.”
“I'm doing no digging!” Bernice declared impatiently.
“Before long, Miss Forbes, you may have to do many things in order to survive. As for food, I think we have an ocean in the distance there, and it may contain fish. I think we ought to remove everything we need from the car and then head towards that ocean—on foot, of course.”
The women looked in dismay at their light evening shoes and costly dresses, the latter showing under the opened coats.
“Back to the primitive in one easy lesson!” Betty Danvers said finally. “Well, I'm game. Let's go, girls!”
But for her there would probably have been trouble with the grumbling Bernice and Lucy Brand, but against the younger woman's example they could not stand out, so they descended stiffly to the dusty ground and stretched aching limbs.
Nick clambered out too and joined Dawlish. Harley came wandering round the rear of the car and stood on the outside of the group, hands in the pockets of his evening trousers. He was unshaven and completely despondent.
“Rugs, picnic equipment, and stove,” Dawlish said, handing out the various articles to one or other. “This is all we need. I am sorry to abandon the car, sir.”
“Thirty thousand pounds down the drain,” Nick sighed. “Ah well, we're still alive.”
He began walking, dust stirring round his shoes, and as he went he slipped his arm through Bernice's so that she had to keep pace with him. She gave an angry glance.
“Things are bad enough without you looking so disgustingly cheerful!” she exclaimed.
“No use being miserable, Berny. If we're to die let us do it with a smile on our lips.”
“The rugged individualist,” Betty commented dryly. “Just the same, there's a lot in what you say, Nick. I know because I've tried it.”
Nick frowned as the party struggled onwards. “Tried what, Betty? What are you talking about?”
“Myself, as usual.” Betty gave a laugh. “This experience we have stumbled into is more amusing for me than anybody because, even in the normal world, I wouldn't have lasted above six months.”
The party halted, startled by the revelation. Betty had a defiant look on her pert face.
“I know all of you have got me down as a girl whose main object in life has been to get rid of father's money,” she continued. “But you've had the wrong angle. Since it doesn't matter much what we confess to each other I may as well tell you I've been having a last fling. Who wouldn't, with only six months to go?”
“You mean,” Bernice asked in horror, “that you have only six months to live?”
“That's it.” Betty shrugged and continued walking, her high heels catching in the rutted, dusty ground. “Something wrong with my heart. I heard about it six weeks ago, so I resolved to have the time of my life—and now look what's happened! I'm not the only one who's been given a death sentence! All of you have! Can you wonder why I want to laugh?”
“But you won't, Miss Danvers,” Dawlish murmured, coming up beside her with the picnic case in his hand and a rug over his shoulder.
She glanced at him quickly. She was noticing that he was far younger than she'd thought. No more than thirty-five.
“Why won't I?” she demanded.
“Because I think you are too generous-minded to laugh at people in the same boat as yourself.”
Betty raised a critical eyebrow and said no more.
“After this,” Bernice wailed suddenly, “I'll never feel clean again in all my life!”
“If that's an ocean ahead you can take a swim,” Nick said.
“Can I? In what?”
Nick hesitated, and then Harley Brand broke in: “I'm wondering how Consolidateds have broken this morning—”
“Dearest, it doesn't matter,” Lucy told him patiently.
“What doesn't? Consolidateds matter a great deal—”
“You and Consolidateds may never meet again,” Lucy went on. “Do try and get things in focus, Harley. We may finish up dying as savages, with no food, no clothes, and no hope. Your check book in your wallet will be so much waste paper.”
“Rubbish! We'll return. Dammit, we've got to!”
“Which means we must have organization,” Dawlish said. “Not so much for getting ourselves home, but for survival here. And organization demands a leader. I suggest—myself.”
“Good enough,” Nick said, before anybody could object. “You seem to know more about this mess than anybody, so it's only right. Okay, everybody?”
There were slow nods, nothing more.
Half way to the blue smudge on the horizon, which by now had taken on all the evidences of an ocean, a halt was called. One biscuit each and a small drink of cold tea was permitted, then followed a rest—particularly for the women who were looking jaded and smolderingly angry.
Then on again, and at last the first sounds in this silent, oppressive land became evident, sounds other than those the party itself was making. The growing roar of the sea, of breakers crashing on shore.
Towards four in the afternoon, according to Dawlish's watch, and checked by those of the others, the shore was reached. Utterly fagged out, the party sank down, close together, and Nick and Harley smoked half a cigarette each. Dawlish, being a non-smoker, was not troubled. He was gazing out to sea, weighing up the situation.
The sky was blue and empty, yet there was the definite heat of an unseen sun. No seagulls flew; nor was there a smudge on the horizon to reveal a distant ship.
“Dead,” Bernice whispered hopelessly. “What did we ever do to deserve being flung into a place like this?”
Presently Dawlish got up. He walked down to the tide line, mooched along it, and finally picked up some seaweed and studied it. He still had it in his hand when he returned.
“This is edible,” he said. “Just as ordinary seaweed is if you know how to prepare it.”
“Do you suggest,” Bernice asked blankly, “that we should descend to eating seaweed?...
widez2