by Hocking, Ian
Five men. The train arrived and she got on. Her thoughts were lost in the crowd, in the pictures sweeping by, by her fingertips on the stun gun.
There was a little boy on the train. He was about ten years old. He was on his way to school alone. His cheeks were chubby. He was nervous. He saw Saskia and smiled. She might have reached for his eyes, but a pensioner shuffled between them and the moment passed.
She alighted one stop from her destination.
She emptied the tube into the lock. She put the tube in her pocket and left the alley. On the street, she cut right into the perfumery. The air was conditioned to a chill. It was precisely 9 a.m. The perfumery had no customers. Ute walked to the back of the shop and stood near a staff-only door. She pretended to inspect a moisturizing soap. When an attendant walked by, Ute clutched the woman’s arm. “Excuse me, please, but could I have a glass of water?”
The woman’s bright smile faded. “Of course.”
She disappeared through the staff door and returned with a tiny paper cone. “I’ll have the cup back when you’re finished,” she said.
Ute took two deep breaths, drank the water, and let the cone drop. She swayed. “I’m sorry…”
“Are you feeling alright?” asked the assistant.
“Perhaps some more water…” Ute said. She fell into the woman’s arms, leaving her no choice but to take her into the back room. Ute saw linoleum and cleaning buckets. She smelled fresh coffee. The woman placed her on a chair in a small kitchen. Ute heard the running of a tap, and it was then that she looked up and withdrew her stun gun.
The woman turned. She had a mug of fresh water in each hand. When she saw the gun and Ute’s cold eyes, she let the mugs drop. They bounced on the tiles. “You own the shop?” Ute asked.
“Yes,” the woman said. She was tearful but her anger kept her alert. “What do you want? The takings? We have only been open for a few minutes, foolish girl.”
Ute put a finger to her lips. “What I have to do today has nothing to do with you or your shop. I need to get into those offices.” She pointed at the ceiling. “How?”
The woman relaxed. Ute noticed the blond highlights in her brown hair, her tan, her blue pearl necklace, and the red bandana that was tucked fashionably into the collar of her blouse. Her badge read, ‘Sabine Schlesinger’. “The fire escape.”
“No,” Ute said. She pictured her journey that morning, before sunrise, when she had stolen up those iron steps in bare feet, attached the padlock, felt it click home.
“There is another way. Out of here, turn left. There’s an interior fire door that opens onto a corridor. Then there are stairs. You realise I must call the police.”
“Of course,” Ute said. She did not lower the stun gun. “Please do not follow me. This is for your own safety. Evacuate the shop.”
“What’s going to happen to my shop?”
“Nothing,” Ute said.
She walked backwards from the room. In the tiny corridor, there was nobody. She checked on Sabine. Still there.
Ute turned and ran through the fire door. She stepped through and closed it behind her. The corridor was empty. At one end was the door with the lock that she had superglued before entering the shop. She checked its handle. Immovable.
Her one problem was the connecting door with the perfume shop. It had a push-down bar on both sides. She had to act quickly.
She removed her shoes and walked up the stairs.
“A thorough and meticulous murder,” Jobanique would tell her, three weeks later.
There was an interior door on the first landing. She put the stun gun in her shoulder bag. Ute knew that the average police response time was four minutes, plus or minus one minute. Sabine, she guessed, would not follow her.
The handle turned. It was cheap door with a cardboard filling; it did not have the presence to squeak. It could not be barricaded.
For a second time, she stepped inside.
The empty office space was huge. Its walls were glass. The air was stuffy with sunlight. There were sheets of paper, old mugs, filing cabinets, chairs and sheets of plastic.
In the centre were the mannequins. They hadn’t moved.
Immediately on her left was a small walled office. It had no windows but an open doorway. Nearby was the fire-escape that she had padlocked earlier that morning. She came closer. She felt dust on her bare feet. She heard snores.
Inside, it was dull and hot. She counted six sleeping men. They were lying, mostly naked, overlapping by foot and hand. Ute had once been scared by these men. Now she was disgusted. There was a camping toilet in one corner. In another, a television and a computer games console. There was a large duvet in the centre. The stench of sweat and semen was overpowering.
Ute took the can of lighter fluid from her bag. She squirted it onto the duvet. It was a good feeling. She was pissing on these men. Next she took a match and flicked it into the centre. The duvet erupted. Thick smoke poured outward in a carpet, hugging the ground, making for the door. She did not hurry to withdraw her stun gun. Humans cannot smell while they are asleep. She had checked.
She saw the moustached man who had led her from the club. He had bought her drinks. He was middle-aged and balding, but Ute had always preferred older men. He had drugged her Martini. Mildly, but enough. Later, he had injected her with scopolamine and morphine as she crouched to re-tie her shoe. Life had become hazy and slow. Her resistance had fallen away. For passers-by she was a drunk. The man waved them on with a laugh.
She fired the gun. Two darts flew out and embedded themselves in his buttocks. They connected to the stun gun with strong, insulated cables. The darts had barbs. They could not be extracted without ripping flesh. The man grunted but did nothing more. He was drugged. There was a second trigger to activate the charge. She did not squeeze it yet. First, she fired darts into all of the men. There were six of them; she had ten pairs of darts.
She shot the man who had taken her from the club. He had smoked a large joint the entire time. It must have been two or three hours. He re-lit with his Zippo, opening the lid on his thigh on the downstroke, lighting the wick on the upstroke.
She shot the others too. All of them. The drugs extinguished their pain.
The drugs. She remembered the moustached man injecting her again. He had put a fatherly arm across her shoulders and taken her for a walk. He had led her to the Rhine. One last injection: the rest of the syringe. A gentle push and she fell.
She pulled the trigger.
Callused arms had found her in that cold, empty hell. Pulled her onto a deck. Shouted words in a language she did not understand. Wiped hair and muck from her mouth. Shone light in her eyes. Injected her.
She pulled the trigger again. This time the groans were louder, angrier. Eyes sought her. They were monstrous but they were pathetic. She realised that they would never be as strong as her. She had returned.
They’ve killed you, said a voice, high in her mind, yet another voice, much lower, said And killed themselves.
She pulled the trigger a third time. Bodies convulsed. The smoke was thicker now. One of the men began to realise his fate. He tugged at the barbed darts in his chest. Ute watched the skin stretch. It would not rip. Finally the man collapsed in the smoke.
The only light in the windless office came from the doorway. She reached back and pulled the door shut. The burning duvets produced their own light. She watched the flame. It was as blue-green as a firework.
Something grabbed her ankle and Ute screamed. She pulled the trigger again and the hand tensed. It fell and lay flaccid on her foot.
She pulled the trigger again and again. The elements of her mind combined to urge her on. She was a mob that lusted for the death of these men, even as it hastened her own. With each pull of the trigger, she imagined herself raping them, firing into them, inching them towards the edge of an abyss with each dirty push.
The smoke was thick and poisonous now. Thirty seconds had passed. She felt sick and near collapse.
“This, gentlemen,” she shouted, “is what it feels like when you’re fucked.”
Someone muttered a word. She could not quite hear it. Behind the burning duvets, a figure rose. It muttered the word again. It shimmered through Ute’s tears.
The word was ‘Weibsstück’. Bitch.
It stepped forward and Ute gasped. It was a woman…and she was momentarily awed at her own stupidity. The men were lying supine, satiated. Of course there was a woman. A woman like Ute herself. She reached forward to help the victim from the room.
She would have a straightforward escape through the door to the staircase and, from there, through the perfume shop to freedom.
The woman grabbed her throat and pushed hard. Ute dropped the stun gun and they broke through the door. In daylight, her eyes seemed to be more animal than human. Cat’s eyes. The eyes were familiar; she had been present at Ute’s rape. She had looked on.
Ute tripped but the woman followed her down. Her gripped remained. Like the men, she was high. Ute could feel her head expanding with trapped blood. She scrambled backwards. They made progress across the floor. Ute felt the world darken. Above them, the ceiling of the main floor was on fire. That’s my gift, Ute thought. Plastic embers began to fall like ash. Still the world darkened.
They crashed into the pile of mannequins. The landslide covered them. The dolls were heavy and one struck the woman near her temple. Her grip relaxed momentarily. Ute took a breath before it was re-established. She had come here to die, but, more than this, she had come to kill her attackers. She would not be satisfied with all but one of them.
Inside her shoulder bag, which had not moved in the struggle, she found the canister of lighter fluid. Ute’s fingertips and toes began to sparkle. Her bladder muscle trembled. She jammed the can into her attacker’s mouth. It could not suffocate her, but that was not the intention. She twisted the can savagely so that it caught on the woman’s teeth. The thin metal tore and Ute pulled it free. The stranglehold lessened as the woman realised that her prey now had a weapon with a razor’s edge.
Ute did not wait. She rubbed at the woman’s throat to the right of her windpipe. The skin opened like a second month. The woman’s grip relaxed and, for the first time, her cat-eyes dropped away. She pushed off to escape into the mannequins. The air was blue-grey with smoke.
The woman slithered away. She had almost gone. Only her ankles remained. Ute grabbed one and pulled her back. The woman yelled.
Don’t do it, said a high-up voice. Kill her and she wins. She’s taken your life. Take control.
A deeper voice said: She deserves to die. Kill her now.
Ute reached for the other ankle. The woman jammed the cold ball of her foot in her throat. The pain stopped time. When finally she tried to move, she could see only the expressionless mannequins and their hard, plastic fingers. They seemed to crowd her. They were dead. They wanted her dead too. There was no up or down. And from the gaps between one mannequin and the next there issued only smoke, not air. She screamed.
The coffin lid would not budge. She was in the undignified oven of a crematorium. The darkness was no longer absolute. Cracks appeared. She saw her simple funeral clothes by orange light. She would escape her coffin now, oh yes, into a fire that might let her linger, let her relish the last few moments of life with a height of sensation she had never known. The crackling flames. Smoke. Distant organ music. The murmurs of David Proctor, thanking the priest for a lovely service. Saskia would have wanted it that way.
Saskia.
The hawk that returned.
The Time Machine (II)
Ute was back. Her ghostly passenger, who, according to Bruce, had been the late Kate Falconer, was gone.
She remembered her first kiss. It had been on tiptoe behind a supermarket. She saw the face of a local shopkeeper, Herr Horst, the faces of her foster parents, some fellow schoolchildren, and a poster of Saturn she had won at a fair. Spending hours learning to hula-hoop. A school trip to France. Her favourite film was The Daughter-in-Law. Her foster mother’s name was Fride. They had lived in Cologne. Her Uncle Wolfi had once saved her from drowning. He had died within the year from skin cancer.
In the darkness, a woman said something. Ute decided it was Jennifer. David was here too. Jennifer spoke again. It was English. Ute didn’t speak English. “Ich verstehe nicht, was du sagst,” she replied. “Ich habe vergessen, wie man englisch spricht.”
“OK, lass uns deutsch sprechen,” Jennifer replied.
David asked, “Ist…alles klar, Saskia?”
“No,” she replied. She kept her sentences simple. “I feel strange.”
There was a gun in her hand, but she did not know how to hold it. She let it drop. Her memories blazed.
“You will feel strange for a while,” said another voice.
“Who are you?”
“I am Ego, David’s personal computer,” the voice said in flawless German. “But before I was given to him, I was in your possession. I have some information for you.”
“Tell me.”
“It is a message from Saskia.”
“Ach so,” she said. Her thoughts were disordered. But an undercurrent was clear: she mourned the loss of half her mind. “If the message is from Saskia Brandt, this must mean that I will travel backwards in time. It must also mean that the chip will be reactivated. I am Ute, now, but I’ll become Saskia again.”
“True,” Ego said. “Her message is: ‘Look in the envelope’.”
“Which envelope?”
“The one you found in the West Lothian Centre.”
“I remember. But I can’t see.”
A dim glow appeared in the centre of the floor. Ego grew brighter until the pale faces of David and Jennifer appeared. They looked like timid animals on the boundary of a campfire. Ute knelt and shrugged off her shoulderbag. As she opened it she noticed the dark polish on her nails. She never wore polish. Her long hair cascaded over her face. She always tied it back. In the bag was her badge, a handkerchief, some tissues and the transparent wallet that contained the white envelope.
There was neat bullet-hole through its centre.
It was fastened with a metal popper. She opened it and withdrew the envelope. Once white, it was now spotted with black mould. The edges had yellowed. On the front it read: “Do not open this envelope”.
She ripped the seal and pulled out of the contents. It was a single sheet of A4-sized paper with some hand-written German text. Her handwriting. It read:
Dear Ute
Remember the fates. Clotho, she spins the thread of life. Lachesis, she determines its length. Atropos, she cuts it. Together we are two, but we make a third: our combination.
Follow him and stop him. What he did to you he can do again.
Love
Saskia
PS To prove this is me, there will be a bullet hole just about here:
An arrow projected from the last sentence. Ute pushed her little finger through the hole. It was precisely at the arrow’s tip. Without Ute, Falconer was no more than a memory. Her body had, perhaps, been dumped at sea or in building foundations, or fed to pigs.
Hartfield was getting away. He had killed Falconer to capture her ghost. That ghost wanted revenge. It was something that Ute understood. She had lived in Kate’s shoes just as Kate had lived in hers. She loved her, and she loved her.
“Ego, can you reactivate the chip?”
“Yes.”
“Do so.”
“Done.”
Nothing happened.
David said, “Aren’t we going to go after him?”
The English made sense. Saskia crouched to retrieve the gun and checked the magazine. Five bullets left. “Let’s go.”
As they made their way from the laboratory, she remembered the vision she had experienced before disengaging from the Asgard computer.
You will return, the witch had said, as you have returned before.
Hartfield, blank, walked quickly and silently, guide
d by his computer’s infra-red camera.
He was a clever man. Another person would have emptied the research centre with a fire, or a bomb hoax, or computer sabotage. Hartfield’s plan – like any Hartfield plan – was a lesson in parsimony. As a moderately-skilled computer programmer (combined with knowledge that only the owner of such a of facility might have the privilege to enjoy) he had simply instructed the main computer system to turn off the lights. The command was irreversible. There were no sources of light other than hand-held torches. Alas, the torches would fail rather quickly because of a malfunction in the recharging process – also under computer control, also under Harmon’s control, also part of the plan. Parsimony. Wheels within wheels.
Opening his eyes that day in 1999, he had known immediately that something was wrong. Orza had been at his bedside. His facial expression had seemed somehow alien. Hartfield could see which muscled moved and where; he could see how the skin stretched and sagged into shapes that were quite familiar. But the shapes meant nothing. He could remember smiles, but not happiness. It was, as he explained to his late wife, as if he had lost the ability to appreciate colour. The world was now black and white.
My God but it was clearer.
Over the months, Hartfield’s humanity eroded cell by cell as the nanobots completed their work. They would not respond to calls for their deactivation. They had been built to kill, and they continued as long as they had the energy to do so. They infested his brain and cut nerves in accord with some plan that their human creators could not begin to guess.
Hartfield felt the change deepen.
Humans became objects. The only object that was real was Hartfield. His acumen grew and transformed. It enjoyed new tools that were unchecked by morality. His first murder had been easy. To his dog, he had described it as prising jewels from the idol of a backward religion.
He limped down the blackened corridor until he reached the first set of stairs. A young guard stepped from nowhere. On the Ego computer screen, with its infra-red window, his irises were solid white. “Proceed to your evacuation station, sir,” he said.