The Complete Short Stories

No one else wanted anything to do with the statue, so I was finally presented with it. Lorraine Drexel left Vermilion Sands the day it was dismantled. Raymond spoke briefly to her on the telephone before she went. I presumed she would be rather unpleasant and didn’t bother to listen in on the extension.

‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Does she want it back?’

‘No.’ Raymond seemed slightly preoccupied. ‘She said it belonged to us.’

‘You and me?’

‘Everybody.’ Raymond helped himself to the decanter of scotch on the veranda table. ‘Then she started laughing.’

‘Good. What at?’

‘I don’t know. She just said that we’d grow to like it.’

There was nowhere else to put the statue so I planted it out in the garden. Without the stone pedestal it was only six feet high. Shielded by the shrubbery, it had quietened down and now emitted a pleasant melodic harmony, its soft rondos warbling across the afternoon heat. The sitar-like twangs, which the statue had broadcast in the square like some pathetic love-call from Lorraine Drexel to her dead lover, had vanished completely, almost as if the statue had been rescored. I had been so stampeded by the disastrous unveiling that I had had little chance to see it and I thought it looked a lot better in the garden than it had done in Vermilion Sands, the chromium struts and abstract shapes standing out against the desert like something in a vodka advertisement. After a few days I could almost ignore it.

A week or so later we were out on the terrace after lunch, lounging back in the deck chairs. I was nearly asleep when Carol said, ‘Mr Hamilton, I think it’s moving.’

‘What’s moving?’

Carol was sitting up, head cocked to one side. ‘The statue. It looks different.’

I focused my eyes on the statue twenty feet away. The radiator grille at the top had canted around slightly but the three stems still seemed more or less upright.

‘The rain last night must have softened the ground,’ I said. I listened to the quiet melodies carried on the warm eddies of air, and then lay back drowsily. I heard Carol light a cigarette with four matches and walk across the veranda.

When I woke in an hour’s time she was sitting straight up in the deck chair, a frown creasing her forehead.

‘Swallowed a bee?’ I asked. ‘You look worried.’

Then something caught my eye.

I watched the statue for a moment. ‘You’re right. It is moving.’

Carol nodded. The statue’s shape had altered perceptibly. The grille had spread into an open gondola whose sonic cores seemed to feel at the sky, and the three stem-pieces were wider apart. All the angles seemed different.

‘I thought you’d notice it eventually,’ Carol said as we walked over to it. ‘What’s it made of?’

‘Wrought iron — I think. There must be a lot of copper or lead in it. The heat is making it sag.’

‘Then why is it sagging upwards instead of down?’ — I touched one of the shoulder struts. It was springing elastically as the air moved across the vanes and went on vibrating against my palm. I gripped it in both hands and tried to keep it rigid. A low but discernible pulse pumped steadily against me.

I backed away from it, wiping the flaking chrome off my hands. The Mozartian harmonies had gone, and the statue was now producing a series of low Mahler-like chords. As Carol stood there in her bare feet I remembered that the height specification we had given to Lorraine Drexel had been exactly two metres. But the statue was a good three feet higher than Carol, the gondola at least six or seven across. The spars and struts looked thicker and stronger.

‘Carol,’ I said. ‘Get me a file, would you? There are some in the garage.’

She came back with two files and a hacksaw.

‘Are you going to cut it down?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Darling, this is an original Drexel.’ I took one of the files. ‘I just want to convince myself that I’m going insane.’

I started cutting a series of small notches all over the statue, making sure they were exactly the width of the file apart. The metal was soft and worked easily; on the surface there was a lot of rust but underneath it had a bright sappy glint.

‘All right,’ I said when I had finished. ‘Let’s go and have a drink.’

We sat on the veranda and waited. I fixed my eyes on the statue and could have sworn that it didn’t move. But when we went back an hour later the gondola had swung right round again, hanging down over us like an immense metal mouth.

There was no need to check the notch intervals against the file. They were all at least double the original distance apart.

‘Mr Hamilton,’ Carol said. ‘Look at this.’

She pointed to one of the spikes. Poking through the outer scale of chrome were a series of sharp little nipples. One or two were already beginning to hollow themselves. Unmistakably they were incipient sonic cores.