Skin and Other Stories Read online

  'Wouldn't dream of it,' Sergeant Noonan said.

  'Please,' she begged. 'Please eat it. Personally I couldn't touch a thing, certainly not what's been in the house when he was here. But it's all right for you. It'd be a favour to me if you'd eat it up. Then you can go on with your work again afterwards.'

  There was a good deal of hesitating among the four policemen, but they were clearly hungry, and in the end they were persuaded to go into the kitchen and help themselves. The woman stayed where she was, listening to them through the open door, and she could hear them speaking among themselves, their voices thick and sloppy because their mouths were full of meat.

  'Have some more, Charlie?'

  'No. Better not finish it.'

  'She wants us to finish it. She said so. Be doing her a favour.'

  'Okay then. Give me some more.'

  'That's the hell of a big club the guy must've used to hit poor Patrick,' one of them was saying. 'The doc says his skull was smashed all to pieces just like from a sledgehammer.'

  'That's why it ought to be easy to find.'

  'Exactly what I say.'

  'Whoever done it, they're not going to be carrying a thing like that around with them longer than they need.'

  One of them belched.

  'Personally, I think it's right here on the premises.'

  'Probably right under our very noses. What you think, Jack?'

  And in the other room, Mary Maloney began to giggle.

  The Sound Machine

  It was a warm summer evening and Klausner walked quickly through the front gate and around the side of the house and into the garden at the back. He went on down the garden until he came to a wooden shed and he unlocked the door, went inside and closed the door behind him.

  The interior of the shed was an unpainted room. Against one wall, on the left, there was a long wooden workbench, and on it, among a littering of wires and batteries and small sharp tools, there stood a black box about three feet long, the shape of a child's coffin.

  Klausner moved across the room to the box. The top of the box was open, and he bent down and began to poke and peer inside it among a mass of different-coloured wires and silver tubes. He picked up a piece of paper that lay beside the box, studied it carefully, put it down, peered inside the box and started running his fingers along the wires, tugging gently at them to test the connections, glancing back at the paper, then into the box, then at the paper again, checking each wire. He did this for perhaps an hour.

  Then he put a hand around to the front of the box where there were three dials, and he began to twiddle them, watching at the same time the movement of the mechanism inside the box. All the while he kept speaking softly to himself, nodding his head, smiling sometimes, his hands always moving, the fingers moving swiftly, deftly, inside the box, his mouth twisting into curious shapes when a thing was delicate or difficult to do, saying, 'Yes ... Yes ... And now this one ... Yes ... Yes. But is this right? Is it - where's my diagram? ... Ah, yes ... Of course ... Yes, yes ... That's right ... And now ... Good ... Good ... Yes ... Yes, yes, yes.' His concentration was intense; his movements were quick; there was an air of urgency about the way he worked, of breathlessness, of strong suppressed excitement.

  Suddenly he heard footsteps on the gravel path outside and he straightened and turned swiftly as the door opened and a tall man came in. It was Scott. It was only Scott, the doctor.

  'Well, well, well,' the Doctor said. 'So this is where you hide yourself in the evenings.'

  'Hullo, Scott,' Klausner said.

  'I happened to be passing,' the Doctor told him, 'so I dropped in to see how you were. There was no one in the house, so I came on down here. How's that throat of yours been behaving?'

  'It's all right. It's fine.'

  'Now I'm here I might as well have a look at it.'

  'Please don't trouble. I'm quite cured. I'm fine.'

  The Doctor began to feel the tension in the room. He looked at the black box on the bench; then he looked at the man. 'You've got your hat on,' he said.

  'Oh, have I?' Klausner reached up, removed the hat and put it on the bench.

  The Doctor came up closer and bent down to look into the box. 'What's this?' he said. 'Making a radio?'

  'No, just fooling around.'

  'It's got rather complicated-looking innards.'

  'Yes.' Klausner seemed tense and distracted.

  'What is it?' the Doctor asked. 'It's rather a frightening-looking thing, isn't it?'

  'It's just an idea.'

  'Yes?'

  'It has to do with sound, that's all.'

  'Good heavens, man! Don't you get enough of that sort of thing all day in your work?'

  'I like sound.'

  'So it seems.' The Doctor went to the door, turned, and said, 'Well, I won't disturb you. Glad your throat's not worrying you any more.' But he kept standing there looking at the box, intrigued by the remarkable complexity of its inside, curious to know what this strange patient of his was up to. 'What's it really for?' he asked. 'You've made me inquisitive.'

  Klausner looked down at the box, then at the Doctor, and he reached up and began gently to scratch the lobe of his right ear. There was a pause. The Doctor stood by the door, waiting, smiling.

  'All right, I'll tell you, if you're interested.' There was another pause, and the Doctor could see that Klausner was having trouble about how to begin.

  He was shifting from one foot to the other, tugging at the lobe of his ear, looking at his feet, and then at last, slowly, he said, 'Well, it's like this ... the theory is very simple really. The human ear ... you know that it can't hear everything. There are sounds that are so low-pitched or so high-pitched that it can't hear them.'

  'Yes,' the Doctor said. 'Yes.'

  'Well, speaking very roughly any note so high that it has more than fifteen thousand vibrations a second - we can't hear it. Dogs have better ears than us. You know you can buy a whistle whose note is so high-pitched that you can't hear it at all. But a dog can hear it.'

  'Yes, I've seen one,' the Doctor said.

  'Of course you have. And up the scale, higher than the note of that whistle, there is another note - a vibration if you like, but I prefer to think of it as a note. You can't hear that one either. And above that there is another and another rising right up the scale for ever and ever and ever, an endless succession of notes ... an infinity of notes ... there is a note - if only our ears could hear it - so high that it vibrates a million times a second ... and another a million times as high as that ... and on and on, higher and higher, as far as numbers go, which is ... infinity ... eternity ... beyond the stars.'

  Klausner was becoming more animated every moment. He was a frail man, nervous and twitchy, with always moving hands. His large head inclined towards his left shoulder as though his neck were not quite strong enough to support it rigidly. His face was smooth and pale, almost white, and the pale-grey eyes that blinked and peered from behind a pair of steel spectacles were bewildered, unfocused, remote. He was a frail, nervous, twitchy little man, a moth of a man, dreamy and distracted; suddenly fluttering and animated; and now the Doctor, looking at that strange pale face and those pale-grey eyes, felt that somehow there was about this little person a quality of distance, of immense immeasurable distance, as though the mind were far away from where the body was.

  The Doctor waited for him to go on. Klausner sighed and clasped his hands tightly together. 'I believe,' he said, speaking more slowly now, 'that there is a whole world of sound about us all the time that we cannot hear. It is possible that up there in those high-pitched inaudible regions there is a new exciting music being made, with subtle harmonies and fierce grinding discords, a music so powerful that it would drive us mad if only our ears were tuned to hear the sound of it. There may be anything ... for all we know there may -'

  'Yes,' the Doctor said. 'But it's not very probable.'

  'Why not? Why not?' Klausner pointed to a fly sitting on a small roll of copper