The wiry young man beamed his pleasure. They'd got two results, then, out of forty trials. They'd repeated their result, and surely now it was just a question of refining the equipment until it was sensitive enough to clearly pick up the electro-magnetic output of the frightened animal.

  'And that,' said Brady, beginning to rise from his chair, 'is that until the New Year. Close down for Christmas. . .'

  He had been about to say more, but he stopped, feeling suddenly cold, suddenly chilled. He straightened and looked around, wondering idly if cool air from the desert environment was leaking into the laboratory. A light flickered. The research assistant frowned, looked uneasily around. For some reason Brady stared at the oscilloscope screens, at the single lines that showed the machine's own mechanical unresponsiveness, and at the fluctuating output from the brain of the female gerbil.

  And quite suddenly the signals went haywire.

  'Good God, come and look at this!'

  Brady leaned forward on the console, watching the trace from the gerbil peak and race, the animal cowering in a corner of its box, staring vaguely upwards and outwards, the leads from the skull probes tangled around its tiny body.

  'Something's scared the hell out of it. . .and the other!'

  In the desert the gerbil was racing in energetic circles; the mechanical trace, for all its insensitivity, was registering an output of electro-magnetic energy of such strength that the signal was too large for the screen.

  In the eerie silence Brady stared first at the machinery, then at the animals. Finally, the signals on the smaller screen became single, straight lines; the animals had died.

  'Well I'm damned,' he said. 'That's the first time . . . what the hell could have caused that?'

  He got no answer from the technician. Brady pulled the sleeves of his jumper down his arms, feeling cold and shivery. For no reason that he could identify he felt afraid,

  the laboratory becoming claustrophobic, threatening.

  He turned and left the room, his heart racing, his mind registering nothing but a strong, almost violent urge to get away from the place.

  As he fairly shot into the corridor, ignoring his jacket which hung just inside the laboratory door, he realized that his Section Chief, Andrew Haddingham, was strolling easily towards him, looking half puzzled, half amused. Haddingham was in thoughtful conversation with the lean, greying figure of the Department Superintendent, George Campbell. Campbell was a sour-faced Scot, a man who had little tolerance for the personal side of his employees' lives. He frowned as he witnessed Brady's slight dishevel-ment, and clamped his teeth on his unlit pipe in a gesture of annoyance.

  'What's the matter, Dan?' said Haddingham with a smile, as the three men met. 'You look spooked.'

  Brady nodded, and tried a slight grin back. He was aware of Campbell's intense, disapproving scrutiny. Dammit, he thought, at least I'm still working seriously this close to the holidays.

  He liked Haddingham, though, and got on well with the plump man. Haddingham was only slightly younger than the Supervisor, perhaps fifty-five, but he was far younger at heart and had an enthusiasm for ideas and projects that could spark even the dullest of the Ministry minds. Unmarried, and rather private about his past, Haddingham was a regular visitor at Brady's home.

  'A touch of claustrophobia,' Brady said, and glanced at Campbell. 'Been stuck in the laboratory a few hours too many.'

  Campbell, to Brady's surprise, allowed a genuine smile to touch his lips; his grey eyes flashed with something approaching pleasure. 'Good to see you working so hard, Mister Brady,' he said. 'I hope we'll be seeing some positive results from you in the coming year. Excuse me gentlemen, I have a train . . .'

  Campbell walked off, left hand in the pocket of his grey suit jacket. Brady stared after him, then glanced at

  Haddingham and laughed wearily. 'Never lets up, does he?'

  'Not on anybody, Dan,' said Haddingham, running a hand through his unkempt brown hair. 'I feel shell shocked myself, just now. Been hauled over the coals for the whole department.'

  'His way of saying Happy Christmas,' grinned Brady. 'I'd buy you a drink, but my house is a disaster zone . . .'

  He was about to turn away and fetch his jacket when Haddingham tugged at his arm, questioned the younger man with his gaze, then said, 'Youreally are spooked, Dan. What happened in there?'

  Brady hesitated just a second before deciding not to tell the other man what had occurred . . . not yet. 'Got a strange result, that's all. I'll tell you about it next year.'

  'A strange result sends you running scared from the room? What is it, Dan?'

  Brady shrugged, disliking Haddingham's sudden intensity, the way he was intuiting Brady's genuine sense of fear. 'As I said, claustrophobia, too close to Christmas. . . it really is nothing Andrew. I'm on edge, that's all.'

  Haddingham shrugged, smiled and reached out a hand to the younger man. 'Happy Christmas to you, then, Dan. And to the family. Enjoy yourselves . . .'

  'We shall. First Christmas in a new home; got to make it something special.'

  It had really been Alison who had fallen in love with the house at Brook's Corner, that previous March. Their town house in West London had suddenly - for no perceptible reason - become too small; it was perhaps because of Marianna's great enthusiasm for "projects", involving cutting paper, using clay, and sticking bits and pieces of disposable carton and package to make buildings and cars, all of which meant that living rooms, bedrooms, even bathrooms, became cluttered and untidy. And with Dominick wanting to have a room where he could bring back his friends and play music at exceptionally loud volumes (he was eleven, but had already discovered more than twenty forms of contemporary rhythm and blues), Brady had, on impulse, decided to sell and move his family westwards, to the area around Pinewood, where houses could either be of exceptional expense, or of very reasonable price.

  They had been directed to the house at Brook's Corner because, at seventy-five thousand pounds, it would not stretch them that much, even though it was in need of considerable decoration. Alison Brady had taken one look at the place and adored it. Dan Brady himself was the sort of man who could be happy anywhere that his family were happy. The house struck him as too large, too cold and too isolated, but Alison's rapture at the thought of living there was overwhelming. While the children had chased about the overgrown, partly wooded grounds (over an acre!) he and Alison had come to the decision to buy, to paint three of the rooms, and to leave the greater part of the needed modernisation for a year or so while they saved a little capital.

  They had moved in in June, and made a presentable lawn at the back, gravelled the driveway at the front, and found that rapidly, almost inevitably, they had expanded -as a family - to fill every nook and cranny of the place.

  Brook's Corner was just ten miles from the Ministry of Defence Institute at Hillingvale, where Brady worked, and he drove those ten miles, now, fast and without due care to the conditions of the road. He half hoped Alison would be home, but she was conscientious, and very much involved with two MSc projects at the College where she worked, and from years of experience Brady knew that she would only take off the day before Christmas Eve, and would work on in her department until such time as her students would relinquish her.

  He was not surprised, then, to find the house in darkness. It was four in the afternoon, a gloomy, bitterly cold day, and the central heating was off - one of the children fiddling with it, no doubt. Briskly he turned the radiators on, then poured himself a gin with tonic, going

  into the lounge where he set a log fire, but refrained from lighting it. In the corner of the lounge the Christmas tree was an immense forest of a structure, rising to the ceiling, shedding needles in spiky layers, and half covered with a mess of tinsel and coloured streamers - Marianna's ineffective attempt to decorate the tree, and an effort that would have to be discreetly corrected before Christmas Eve itself.

  Both Marianna and Dominick were at the Newmans' (causing havoc, no doubt) and Alison would pick them up on her way home from the college. That would be within a few minutes, so Brady took the opportunity to relax, feet up on one of the armchairs, gin and tonic freshened, a well-creased copy of Omni propped up before him.

  At four thirty it began to rain, the windows shaking slightly with the driving force of the dusk wind. The lounge was large and not yet completely draughtproof and Brady shivered as a cool breeze tickled his neck. Fragments of leaf that had been caught in the chimney fell into the grate, startling him. He got up, draining his drink, and glanced at his watch.

  Alison was very late. They should all have been home some time before.

  As he was about to pick up the phone to call the Newmans, it rang; Alison was on the line. 'Dan? It's Alison. Listen, I'm really stuck here. Probably for an hour . . .'

  'An hour! Oh for God's sake . . .'

  'It can't be helped. I'm behind with my own work. Pete Wright's project took a lot of reading. I've only just finished with him.'

  Brady felt a touch of irritation. He was rapidly trying to get into the spirit of the impending Christmas, and very much wanted to spend time this evening tidying the tree, and getting the last paper-chains slung in the downstairs rooms. He was finished with Hillingvale for the rest of the year, and chauvinistically felt a touch of resentment that Alison wouldn't finish with her own work place with equal enthusiasm.

  'Never mind,' he said. 'Get home as quickly as you can. I'll get supper going. How about the kids?'

  'Could you pick them up? The Newmans will be screaming murder by now. Would you mind?'

  'Okay. Hurry home.'

  Before he left he set the log fire alight, so that they would all come home to a cosy lounge. It was only a twenty minute round trip to John Newman's.

  And he wouldn't stay for a drink.

  Alison almost called Dan right back again, just to say that there was cold pork to be used up for supper that evening, and before they started on anything else, but she refrained. Dan hated her to fuss about the house and kitchen, liking to share the responsibility for all those drab and irritating chores that make a household run smoothly. He was a good cook, if one of erratic inclination, and their only real point of difference in the kitchen (in twelve years of marriage) was that Dan tended to cook extravagantly, and in quantities more suited to a barracks than a family of four, whereas Alison practiced a frugality instilled upon her by both her childhood, and her year in Kenya.

  She left her small second-floor office, turning out the light as she did so, and walked briskly along the corridor to the extensive library. She only really needed an hour to cross-check three references for her paper (with Pete Wright) on zonal agriculture on clay-based river terraces, but she wanted to get it done before tonight because she knew that tomorrow - the last day before the Christmas break for the staff - there would be no work possible in the atmosphere of drunken boisterousness.

  On the way to the library she picked up her coat, ready to leave as soon as possible.

  Alison Brady was thirty-four years old, a sprightly, energetic woman, thin to the point of being skinny, but content to be so because she loathed the idea of fat people, and of becoming plump and unfit herself. She was a sports fanatic, playing at least half an hour's badminton every day, and was increasingly scornful of Dan for neglecting his body so much.

  Like husband Dan, Alison was an informal dresser, preferring jeans and a jumper to tailored skirts and blouses; but there was an elegance about her that made her always seem perfectly dressed for any occasion. She wore her dark hair naturally wavy, and swept it back from her forehead; she knew the style suited her, and she was not by any means averse to the flattering attentions of her teenage male students.

  In the library she dumped her coat and papers on one of the desks nearest to the door and walked into the complex of rows of books and journals to seek the three journals she wished to consult. Pete Wright was working busily at the back of the library, seemingly unexhausted by the marathon supervision session with his tutor that afternoon. There were no other students or staff in the library; of course not. It was three days to Christmas and only the workaholics were left.

  Later, in the peace of her own house and lying still in the darkness, she would be able to remember the exact moment at which she had known someone else had entered the library. She hadn't heard anything, neither the door opening and shutting, nor a footfall; she hadn't seen anything, or smelled anything. It was a sensation as intangible and discrete as it was potent and certain. As she stood leafing through the Journal of Industrial Agriculture she just knew that a third party had entered the library, and was walking down the aisle of books towards her.

  She didn't bother to look up, merely stood closer to the side of the narrow alleyway between the shelves to let the person pass. After a second or two she realised that he had stopped and was staring at her, and with just the slightest of unpleasant sensations on her skin she glanced round to see who it was.

  'Oh God!'

  The words came as involuntarily as the journal slipping from her fingers. The book hit the floor with a crash, and Alison reached down, confused and upset, to retrieve it.

  She looked both ways along the aisle. Her knees were like jelly, hardly able to support her weight as she walked slowly out from the bookshelves, frightened and disturbed by her certain knowledge that someone had walked up behind her.

  The student was gone. She was alone in the library. The room was empty, cold, and musty with the smell of old journals; rain beat noisily against the high windows; wind shook the overhead strip-lights.

  She placed her journals on one of the tables and sat down, her hands shaking, her whole body trembling with fright. She stared across the room at the journal-shelves, and the dark, deserted gangways between them.

  Somewhere in that stillness the pages of a book were noisily turned, as if blown in a wind. A moment later there was silence again.

  But as Alison listened to the heavy silence, and stared at the shelves of books, she could not shake off the idea -powerfully felt - that someone was standing in the nearest aisle, intently and deliberately watching her.

  2

  * * *

  'I've finished them!' came the voice from the hallway, and a moment later the lounge door was noisily and awkwardly opened and tiny Marianna entered, smiling with triumph and achievement.

  From his precarious position, half-way up a step-ladder next to the Christmas tree, Brady said, 'Well done, that strange-looking child!'

  'I'm not strange-looking!' she said adamantly, as she carried her tray of papier-mache crib figures across the room to the fireside. The tray was so big that the girl could hardly walk with it. Alison rose to help her. Brady climbed down from the ladder, glad of the opportunity for a pause in the back-breaking work of decorating the tree. His daughter literally reeked of paint, he noticed, as he sat down beside her.

  'What are those?' said Dominick, peering at Marianna's creations. 'Crib figures! They're more like aliens.'

  'You're just jealous,' said the girl, with as much contempt as she could muster, then grinned with satisfaction as she settled back on her haunches and surveyed her handiwork.

  At the age of six (and two-thirds, she would insist) Marianna Brady was the smallest, skinniest definition of human chaos that her father could bring to mind. She was spider thin, and could never keep her socks above an untidy bunch around each ankle; her print dresses hung on her like tents. In the last year or so her raucous behaviour had initiated, slightly early, the growing-up process by which milk-teeth become replaced with stronger, more adult dentition; her mouth, if pretty, was a disaster zone of gaps, which she hid with her left hand when giggling, but which she only disguised because Dominick teased her. He teased her more about her spectacles, a tiny, round-framed pair of corrective lenses that the family had nick-named "granny glasses". She was slightly short-sighted in her left eye, although her right eye was perfectly strong.

  When she moved through the house she was incapable of walking; her spindly form would clatter up stairs and through the rooms in search of raw materials for her various projects, or pursuing one of the Brady's two patient, but rather war-torn cats.

  Despite the gappy smile, she was immensely pretty, and Daniel Brady's favourite child (oh yes, he would acknowledge a favourite ... to himself). He even loved her when she straddled his lap and twisted his nose as "punishment" for making her always go to bed before she'd finished whatever game she was playing, or whatever model she was making. Artistically she was very talented, as was evidenced by the set of crib-characters. If Brady had been slightly apprehensive as to what shapes and sizes would emerge from the chaotic focus of Marianna's industry - her appallingly untidy room - he was glad at least that she had the power to concentrate on a project until it was done, and to achieve personal satisfaction from her creativity.

  Dominick Brady, four years older than his sister, was a contrast in style and appearance to his sister as dramatic as it was complete. A tall, sensitive child, big-framed and destined to grow into a giant of a man, he was shy to the point of exasperation. Not at home, of course, where his voice echoed resoundingly around the spacious house in strong competition with Marianna's, but in company it would take the better part of an hour to extract conversa-tion from him.

  Neither Dan nor Alison Brady believed in forcing a child to change its natural personality, and Dom's shyness was never drawn attention to. They would simply involve him in chats and discussions in a natural way and treat him no differently when he was garrulous than when he was painfully unable to express words through the embarrassment of flushed, tongue-tied nervousness. By this simple process of not allowing Dominick to become self-conscious of his own shyness he was gradually emerging from it.

  If Dan Brady extended greater protection to his daughter, Alison was the sympathetic nest-mother to the boy. Marianna, of course, demanded and received the lion's share of attention from visitors, especially visitors who were strangers to the family. The slight seed of resentment, already sown in Dom's personality, might cause difficulties later in life, but at this pre-teens age his irritation manifested itself healthily in loud arguments, and bitter quarrels with his sister. Anger expressed was dissipated. The Bradys encouraged the vociferous exchange of frustration, even though it was painful to the ears.