The Complete Short Stories

He stood up and strolled over to the orderly room. He knew Neffi discouraged casual conversation with the control crew, but Morley’s absence puzzled him.

He reached the door and peered through the window to see if Morley was inside.

The room was empty.

The light was on. Two emergency trollies stood in their usual place against the wall near the door, a third was in the middle of the floor, a pack of playing cards strewn across its deck, but the group of three or four interns had gone.

Lang hesitated, reached down to open the door, and found it had been locked.

He tried the handle again, then called out over his shoulder: ‘Avery. There’s nobody in here.’

‘Try next door. They’re probably being briefed for tomorrow.’

Lang stepped over to the surgery office. The light was off but he could see the white enamelled desk and the big programme charts round the wall. There was no one inside.

Avery and Gorrell were watching him.

‘Are they in there?’ Avery asked.

‘No.’ Lang turned the handle. ‘The door’s locked.’

Gorrell switched off the gramophone and he and Avery came over. They tried the two doors again.

‘They’re here somewhere,’ Avery said. ‘There must be at least one person on duty.’ He pointed to the end door. ‘What about that one?’

‘Locked,’ Lang said. ‘69 always has been. I think it leads down to the basement.’

‘Let’s try Neill’s office,’ Gorrell suggested. ‘If they aren’t in there we’ll stroll through to Reception and try to leave. This must be some trick of Neill’s.’

There was no window in the door to Neill’s office. Gorrell knocked, waited, knocked again more loudly.

Lang tried the handle, then knelt down. ‘The light’s off,’ he reported.

Avery turned and looked round at the two remaining doors out of the gymnasium, both in the far wall, one leading up to the cafeteria and the Neurology wing, the other into the car park at the rear of the Clinic.

‘Didn’t Neill hint that he might try something like this on us?’ he asked. ‘To see whether we can go through a night on our own.’

‘But Neill’s asleep,’ Lang objected. ‘He’ll be in bed for a couple of days. Unless..

Gorrell jerked his head in the direction of the chairs. ‘Come on. He and Morley are probably watching us now.’

They went back to their seats.

Gorrell dragged the chess stool over to the sofa and set up the pieces. Avery and Lang stretched out in armchairs and opened magazines, turning the pages deliberately. Above them the banks of arc-lights threw their wide cones of light down into the silence.

The only noise was the slow left-right, left-right motion of the clock.

Three fifteen a. m.

The shift was imperceptible. At first a slight change of perspective, a fading and regrouping of outlines. Somewhere a focus slipped, a shadow swung slowly across a wall, its angles breaking and lengthening. The motion was fluid, a procession of infinitesimals, but gradually its total direction emerged.

The gymnasium was shrinking. Inch by inch, the walls were moving inwards, encroaching across the periphery of the floor. As they shrank towards each other their features altered: the rows of skylights below the ceiling blurred and faded, the power cable running along the base of the wall merged into the skirting board, the square baffles of the air vents vanished into the grey distemper.

Above, like the undersurface of an enormous lift, the ceiling sank towards the floor.

Gorrell leaned his elbows on the chessboard, face sunk in his hands. He had locked himself in a perpetual check, but he continued to shuttle the pieces in and out of one of the corner squares, now and then gazing into the air for inspiration, while his eyes roved up and down the walls around him.

Somewhere, he knew, Neill was watching him.

He moved, looked up and followed the wall opposite him down to the far corner, alert for the telltale signs of a retractable panel. For some while he had been trying to discover Neill’s spy-hole, but without any success. The walls were blank and featureless; he had twice covered every square foot of the two facing him, and apart from the three doors there appeared to be no fault or aperture of even the most minute size anywhere on their surface.

After a while his left eye began to throb painfully, and he pushed away the chessboard and lay back. Above him a line of fluorescent tubes hung down from the ceiling, mounted in checkered plastic brackets that diffused the light. He was about to comment on his search for the spy-hole to Avery and Lang when he realized that any one of them could conceal a microphone.

He decided to stretch his legs, stood up and sauntered off across the floor. After sitting over the chessboard for half an hour he felt cramped and restless, and would have enjoyed tossing a ball up and down, or flexing his muscles on a rowing machine. But annoyingly no recreational facilities, apart from the three armchairs and the gramophone, had been provided.