Free The Complete Short Stories by J. G. Ballard Page A

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.
    Carefully I examined the rest of the statue. All over it new shoots of metal were coming through: arches, barbs, sharp double helixes, twisting the original statue into a thicker and more elaborate construction. A medley of half-familiar sounds, fragments of a dozen overtures and symphonies, murmured all over it. The statue was well over twelve feet high. I felt one of the heavy struts and the pulse was stronger, beating steadily through the metal, as if it was thrusting itself on to the sound of its own music.
    Carol was watching me with a pinched and worried look.
    'Take it easy,' I said. 'It's only growing.'
    We went back to the veranda and watched.
    By six o'clock that evening it was the size of a small tree. A spirited simultaneous rendering of Brahms's Academic Festival Overture and Rachmaninov's First Piano Concerto trumpeted across the garden.
    'The strangest thing about it,' Raymond said the next morning, raising his voice above the din, 'is that it's still a Drexel.'
    'Still a piece of sculpture, you mean?'
    'More than that. Take any section of it and you'll find the original motifs being repeated. Each vane, each helix has all the authentic Drexel mannerisms, almost as if she herself were shaping it. Admittedly, this penchant for the late Romantic composers is a little out of keeping with all that sitar twanging, but that's rather a good thing, if you ask me. You can probably expect to hear some Beethoven any moment now the Pastoral Symphony, I would guess.'
    'Not to mention all five piano concertos - played at once,' I said sourly. Raymond's loquacious delight in this musical monster out in the garden annoyed me. I closed the veranda windows, wishing that he himself had installed the statue in the living room of his downtown apartment. 'I take it that it won't go on growing for ever?'
    Carol handed Raymond another scotch. 'What do you think we ought to do?'
    Raymond shrugged. 'Why worry?' he said airily. 'When it starts tearing the house down cut it back. Thank God we had it dismantled. If this had happened in Vermilion Sands...'
    Carol touched my arm. 'Mr Hamilton, perhaps that's what Lorraine Drexel expected. She wanted it to start spreading all over the town, the music driving everyone crazy - '
    'Careful,' I warned her. 'You're running away with yourself. As Raymond says, we can chop it up any time we want to and melt the whole thing down.'
    'Why don't you, then?'
    'I want to see how far it'll go,' I said. In fact my motives were more mixed. Clearly, before she left, Lorraine Drexel had set some perverse jinx at work within the statue, a bizarre revenge on us all for deriding her handiwork. As Raymond had said, the present babel of symphonic music had no connection with the melancholy cries the statue had first emitted. Had those forlorn chords been intended to be a requiem for her dead lover - or even, conceivably, the beckoning calls of a still unsurrendered heart? Whatever her motives, they