stream of tactile, positional and psychic images that form the real data store. Very little extrapolation is needed to transpose the observer’s eye a few yards to the other side of a room. Purely visual memories are never completely accurate anyway.’
‘How do you explain why the man I saw in the garage was transparent?’
‘Quite simply. The process was only just beginning, the intensity of the image was weak. The one you saw this afternoon was much stronger. I cut you off barbiturates deliberately, knowing full well that those stimulants you were taking on the sly would set off something if they were allowed to operate unopposed.’
He went over to Larsen, took his glass and refilled it from the decanter. ‘But let’s think of the future. The most interesting aspect of all this is the light it throws on one of the oldest archetypes of the human psyche — the ghost — and the whole supernatural army of phantoms, witches, demons and so on. Are they all, in fact, nothing more than psychoretinal flashbacks, transposed images of the observer himself, jolted on to the retinal screen by fear, bereavement, religious obsession? The most notable thing about the majority of ghosts is how prosaically equipped they are, compared with the elaborate literary productions of the great mystics and dreamers. The nebulous white sheet is probably the observer’s own nightgown. It’s an interesting field for speculation. For example, take the most famous ghost in literature and reflect how much more sense Hamlet makes if you realize that the ghost of his murdered father is really Hamlet himself.’
‘All right, all right,’ Larsen cut in irritably. ‘But how does this help me?’
Bayliss broke off his reflective up-and-down patrol of the floor and fixed an eye on Larsen. ‘I’m coming to that. There are two methods of dealing with this disfunction of yours. The classical technique is to pump you full of tranquillizers and confine you to a bed for a year or so. Gradually your mind would knit together. Long job, boring for you and everybody else. The alternative method is, frankly, experimental, but I think it might work. I mentioned the phenomenon of the ghost because it’s an interesting fact that although there have been tens of thousands of recorded cases of people being pursued by ghosts, and a few of the ghosts themselves being pursued, there have been no cases of ghost and observer actually meeting of their own volition. Tell me, what would have happened if, when you saw your double this afternoon, you had gone straight into the lounge and spoken to him?’
Larsen shuddered. ‘Obviously nothing, if your theory holds. I wouldn’t like to test it.’
‘That’s just what you’re going to do. Don’t panic. The next time you see a double sitting in a chair reading Kretschmer, go up and speak to him. If he doesn’t reply sit down in the chair yourself. That’s all you have to do.’
Larsen jumped up, gesticulating. ‘For heaven’s sake, Bayliss, are you crazy? Do you know what it’s like to suddenly see yourself? All you want to do is run.’
‘I realize that, but it’s the worst thing you can do. Why whenever anyone grapples with a ghost does it always vanish instantly? Because forcibly occupying the same physical co-ordinates as the double jolts the psychic projector on to a single channel again. The two separate streams of retinal images coincide and fuse. You’ve got to try, Larsen. It may be quite an effort, but you’ll cure yourself once and for all.’
Larsen shook his head stubbornly. ‘The idea’s insane.’ To himself he added: I’d rather shoot the thing. Then he remembered the .38 in his suitcase, and the presence of the weapon gave him a stronger sense of security than all Bayliss’s drugs and advice. The revolver was a simple symbol of aggression, and even if the phantom was only an intruder in his own mind, it gave that portion which still remained intact greater confidence, enough possibly to dissipate the double’s power.
Eyes half closed with fatigue, he listened to Bayliss. Half an hour later he went back to his chalet, found the revolver and hid it under a magazine in the letterbox outside the front door. It was too conspicuous to carry and anyway might fire accidentally and injure him. Outside the front door it would be safely hidden and yet easily accessible, ready to mete out a little old-fashioned punishment to any double dealer trying to get into the game.
Two days later, with unexpected vengeance, the opportunity came.
Bayliss had driven into town to buy a new stylus for the stereogram, leaving Larsen to prepare lunch for them while he was away. Larsen pretended to resent the chore, but secretly he was glad of something to do. He was tired of hanging around the chalets while Bayliss watched him as if he were an experimental animal, eagerly waiting for the next crisis. With luck this might never come, if only to spite Bayliss, who had been having everything too much his own way.
After laying the table in Bayliss’s kitchenette and getting plenty of ice ready for the martinis (alcohol was just the thing, Larsen readily decided, a wonderful CNS depressant) he went back to his chalet and put on a clean shirt. On an impulse he decided to change his shoes and suit as well, and fished out the blue office serge and black oxfords he had worn on his way out to the desert. Not only were the associations of the cream suit and sports shoes unpleasant, but a complete change of costume might well forestall the double’s reappearance, provide a fresh psychic image of himself powerful enough to suppress any wandering versions. Looking at himself in the mirror, he decided to carry the principle even farther. He switched on his shaver and cut away his moustache. Then he thinned out his hair and plastered it back smoothly across his scalp.
The transformation was effective. When Bayliss climbed out of his car and walked into the lounge he almost failed to recognize Larsen. He flinched back at the sight of the sleek-haired, dark-suited figure who stepped from behind the kitchen door.
‘What the hell are you playing at?’ he snapped at Larsen. ‘This is no time for practical jokes.’ He surveyed Larsen critically. ‘You look like a cheap detective.’
Larsen guffawed. The incident put him in high spirits, and after several martinis he began to feel extremely buoyant. He talked away rapidly through the meal. Strangely, though, Bayliss seemed eager to get rid of him; he realized why shortly after he returned to his chalet. His pulse had quickened. He found himself prowling around nervously; his brain felt overactive and accelerated. The martinis had only been partly responsible for his elation. Now that they were wearing off he began to see the real agent — a stimulant Bayliss had given him in the hope of precipitating another crisis.
Larsen stood by the window, staring out angrily at Bayliss’s chalet. The psychologist’s utter lack of scruple outraged him. His fingers fretted nervously across the blind. Suddenly he felt like kicking the whole place down and speeding off. With its plywood-thin walls and match-box furniture the chalet was nothing more than a cardboard asylum. Everything that had happened there, the breakdowns and his nightmarish phantoms, had probably been schemed up by Bayliss deliberately.
Larsen noticed that the stimulant seemed to be extremely powerful. The take-off was sustained and unbroken. He tried hopelessly to relax, went into the bedroom and kicked his suitcase around, lit two cigarettes without realizing it.
Finally, unable to contain himself any longer, he slammed the front door back and stormed out across the apron, determined to have everything out with Bayliss and demand an immediate sedative.
Bayliss’s lounge was empty. Larsen plunged through into the kitchen and bedroom, discovered to his annoyance that Bayliss was having a shower. He hung around in the lounge for a few moments, then decided to wait in his chalet.
Head down, he crossed the bright sunlight at a fast stride, and was only a few steps from the darkened doorway when he noticed that a man in a blue suit was standing there watching him.
Heart leaping, Larsen shrank back, recognizing the double even before he had completely accepted the change of costume, the smooth-shaven face with its altered planes. The man hovered indecisively, flexing his fingers, and appeared to be on the verge of stepping down into the sunlight.
Larsen was about ten feet from him, directly in line with Bayliss’s door. He backed away, at the same time swinging to his left to the lee of the garage. There he stopped and pulled himself together. The double was still hesitating in the doorway, longer, he was sure, than he himself had done. Larsen looked at the face, repulsed, not so much by the absolute accuracy of the image, but by a strange, almost luminous pastiness that gave the double’s features the waxy sheen of a corpse. It was this unpleasant gloss that held Larsen back — the double was an arm’s length from the letterbox holding the .38, and nothing could have induced Larsen to approach it.
He decided to enter the chalet and watch the double from behind. Rather than use the kitchen door, which gave access to the lounge on the double’s immediate right, he turned to circle the garage and climb in through the bedroom window on the far side.
He was picking his way through a dump of old mortar and barbed wire behind the garage when he heard a
