by Jeff Noon
One of the younger kids dared to ask: “What does it say, Benedict?”
The teenage didn’t answer. Instead he turned to look at Nyquist. “I believe this…” He held up the sheet for all to see. “I believe this is for you.”
Nyquist took hold of the paper. He read through the three short lines of text quickly. All around the children were hushed, their faces expectant, their mouths agape. One boy started to weep, he just couldn’t help himself. The branches of the tree were reaching out, the twigs scrabbling for purchase on the wall and ceiling, leaves rustling madly like the pages of books being turned at speed. The birds and bugs flew around the trunk, suddenly agitated. The whole room was alive, listening, waiting.
Nyquist read through the paper’s contents a second time.
Zelda Courtland was murdered.
Find out who did it.
Find out!
And it was only on this second read-through that he realized: the message was written in his own handwriting.
The Other
THE TOWER block had fallen back into silent mode. Not a sight or sound greeted John Nyquist as he continued on his way, this time taking the elevator up to the sixth floor. The message taken from the tree drove him forward. Zelda, Zelda, Zelda. The name meant so much to him, yet he still didn’t know why. But if he believed the message, then she’d been murdered, just as Alice in apartment 14 had predicted. For some reason, the search for Zelda’s killer had taken possession of him. Perhaps by finding the identity of Zelda’s killer, his own mystery would be solved, that he would find out both why he was here and why his past life was shrouded in such darkness.
When he got there, the door to apartment 67 was closed. He rang the bell and knocked on the paneling. He placed the side of his head against the green painted wood and listened. He banged on the door with his fist. No one responded. He tested the door and wondered about trying to batter it down. But it was firmly fixed in place, with no give to it.
And then someone screamed from within.
It was a man’s voice, as far as he could tell. It sounded like a person in extreme pain, dying even. The noise rang out and then stopped abruptly.
Nyquist felt as though the scream had gone right through him like a drill. He felt the pain the man must be feeling and he gasped and folded himself over as though wounded in the stomach. He almost expected to see blood on his hands when he pulled them away; but no, they were clean.
The scream came again, the exact same pitch and duration as before.
Nyquist cried out, almost in sympathy. Somebody was being attacked, or even killed. Was Zelda in there? He didn’t know, he just didn’t know. He wasted precious seconds banging his shoulder against the door. It did no good at all. Then he ran along the corridor to the next door along, apartment 66. It was open a little way, the wood splintered around the lock. Someone had taken an axe to it. He slipped inside and called out, “Is there anybody here?” He hurried into the living room. The furniture lay scattered about, many pieces broken or upended, and the carpet was littered with papers and the smashed shards of ornaments and mirrors. The place had been ransacked. Nyquist jerked opened the full-length window that led out onto the balcony. He ducked under one washing line, and then another. The night sky lay over the city, bathing in moonlight and mist each story, sleeping or awake, on each and every street and corner. The sight made him feel dizzy. Quickly he turned to look at the balcony belonging to apartment 67. There was a gap between the two balconies, too long for him to jump easily across, especially considering that he would have to leap up on this balcony’s metal railing first, and then take to the air, all in one swift movement. He looked down: the ground seemed to be many miles away, an impossible distance. A tiny fire burned in the central space and a couple of ant-like figures moved around. It was a long way to fall.
The man screamed again. It was clearly heard, coming through the open window of the next balcony.
Nyquist rushed back into the apartment and desperately searched among the remains of the occupant’s life until he found a coat hook on the wall. He pulled this loose and carried it back to the balcony. Here he untied both clothes lines from the far end of the rail and attached the hook to them. He stood at the rail closest to next door’s balcony and swung the double-ply line in a circle and then let it fly though the air until it clattered against the rail of the other balcony. It fell away. He cursed and tried again. On the third attempt the hook caught on the rail and he pulled on the line and felt it was safe, knotted firmly to the rail in front of him and fixed by the metal coat hook to the other rail, opposite. He knew that hesitation was fatal, so he immediately stepped up onto the balcony’s rail and pressed one hand against the wall of the building. He had dragged the line close to the wall so he could step onto it, and walk across it, holding onto a series of drainpipes he had spotted fixed on the wall between the two apartments.
It should be safe enough, if he kept his cool.
He took the first step, placing the gap between the sole and the heel of his shoe on the line. One hand clung tight to a metal pipe. He lifted his other foot and placed this shoe in front of the other one. He was now aloft, suspended in space, held up by a double-ply of washing line. It sagged a little as he shuffled along.
Hand over hand he grabbed the pipes that branched off the main drainpipe, moving along slowly, keeping his body as close to the wall as he could.
He forced himself to stare at the brickwork, rather than to glance downwards.
The next apartment was quiet now. The screaming had stopped.
But Nyquist had to carry on, he was committed to this action.
He could see every little mark in the wall, every blemish, discolorment, every bit of chipped plaster, every damp patch where rain had dripped down from a leak, every elongated splodge of yellowing bird shit, the gaps between bricks, the powder of the bricks rotting away and falling as his hands and clothing brushed against them, the speckles of paint long dried, the dirt, the loose screw in the bracket that held the drainpipe in place, the embossed serial number on the pipe: D127. He saw them all, every detail. This was his world and he clung to it for dear life. And then his eyes focused once more on that one tiny screw, on the way the bracket shuddered as his hand reached for a new grip on the pipe.
He could see the tiny gap opening as the bracket worked even looser.
Dust fell from the gap, floating away in the air.
He was going to fall. Both hands clutched at the pipe, his fingers gripping even tighter in a sudden panic. The line sagged further under his full weight, as he reached the middle point of his journey. For a moment he rested there, it was all he could do. His hands and feet were frozen in place. Not a single step could be taken.
And then the bugs came. They came from the night sky, drifting in like pieces broken off the moon, shining yellow with their different letters on display. First one, then another, a third, and then suddenly ten or more of them. A swarm. They circled and buzzed around him, battering against his clothes and his skin where it was exposed, at the hands, the face; he could feel one of the insects crawling in his hair.
Nyquist clung on. His whole body shivered with repulsion at the very thought of the bugs touching him. Three of them crawled about on the brick wall right in front of his eyes. He could read them, each glowing letter:
Y E S
A fourth joined them.
E Y E S
They moved again, and one took off suddenly:
S E E
It was the world’s tiniest ever novel. Yes, he saw it. His eyes knew the truth. Here he was, far above the ground suspended between a drainpipe and washing line, and he was reading a story told to him by insects. It was absurd. The laughter broke him out of his fear. He had to either go back or move on, whichever was best. Move on. Always! Move on! Keep moving. It was the only mantra he knew. Jolted into action, he moved his feet, taking a series of steps in quick succession. His hands grappled with the pipe even as it loosened further. He h
ardly noticed when one of the screws worked itself completely free of the crumbling plaster and fell away on its long journey towards the ground. Once this first screw was gone, the others followed easily, one by one. The bracket separated from the wall and the pipe swung free. For a moment Nyquist seemed to hang in stasis. And then he felt he was already falling, as the pipe broke away from the wall, the other brackets breaking in turn.
The alphabugs swarmed away in panic.
He reached out desperately and managed to get one foot onto the balcony rail. It gave him a little purchase, enough to enable one last jump towards safety. His body seemed far too heavy to make it that far, made of lead, but now one hand gripped the rail, and then the other, and he pulled himself up and over and collapsed in a heap on the balcony floor.
It took him a few moments to get his breath back, and a moment further to feel the pain in his shin where it had banged against the rail. Let that be. He was alive. He got to his feet and walked into the living room of apartment 67.
There was no sign of the screaming man.
The room was empty. But another part of the word tree was growing here, from floor to ceiling, and Nyquist knew he must be directly over apartment 37, where he’d met Benedict and the children. The fact gave him a kind of bearing: he was ascending vertically. He was on a straight track.
The room was quiet beyond the rustling of the tree’s black leaves. No birds flew here, no insects crawled in the wood. He made his way to the hallway, but then hesitated on the threshold of the bedroom, suddenly cold and shivering. Memories rose from the dark and fluttered away almost immediately. He had seen this room before, he was certain of it.
And one small step through the doorway caused his heart to flutter.
He was walking in a ghost’s footsteps.
Moonlight streamed in through the half-open curtains. The sheets on the double bed were tangled and bloodstained. He saw matted hair and blood on the skirting board next to the bed. Someone had been injured here, or perhaps worse. He bent down close to the floor and touched the blood and felt the ghost take him over once more. He saw through a kind of mist or gauze the events that had taken place here at some previous time. He saw blood in his own eyes, on his own hands. He saw the other man’s knife. He felt his hands, bunched into fists, punching over and again at the man’s face and head. He felt his hands gripping around the man’s neck. And he heard again the scream of pain, as one man killed another. He saw all this clearly as the scene came into sharp focus before him, conjured from the room’s memory, and he knew the truth.
This man, whoever he was, had died at Nyquist’s own hands.
He stumbled back from the sight.
The scream played out yet another time.
This is what he had heard, from the corridor outside, this repeated scream.
Nyquist imagined a tape loop circling from one reel to another, over and over, forever playing that terrible, agonizing sound.
The vision was all so real he felt he could reach out and touch the flesh of his victim, he could smear his fingers in the blood of the wounds. For a moment Nyquist’s sense of balance shifted and he felt woozy, weak on his feet.
The screaming stopped at last, and the horrific vision faded away.
He waited in the cold silence, hardly daring to move.
The bed glowed in the moonlight.
His eyes closed. He tried to come to terms with this act of violence, whatever it might be: a vision, a dream, a part of reality he had forgotten about, blocked out. But something disturbed him, a fluttering at the eyelids, a sparkle of colors. But the room was still empty. Pale moonlight lay across the bed like a discarded wedding gown. From far away he could hear a noise, a regular beeping sound, some sort of electronic device at work. The sheets seemed to move slightly of their own accord and the light intensified over the bed, first as a blur of silver, and then as a darker substance in the air, a shape, a ghostly form, a transparent grey mass slowly forming before his eyes.
Nyquist was entirely held in the spell of the moment.
The beeping sound grew louder.
A definite shape was forming, a figure of some kind. It was lying on the bed in front of him, a person arriving out of some other realm – that was the only way he could think of it.
A man. A sleeping man.
Nyquist stepped closer to the bed.
At first the sleeper’s face was blurred, indistinct, a set of crude features. But then the face formed itself as though out of clay: the eyes, the mouth, the ridge of the nose, the hair, the single crease on the brow. The colors of the skin.
Nyquist gasped.
He was staring at himself, his own face and form.
“Who are you?”
It was an absurd question, but the only one he could ask.
There was no answer. The other Nyquist lay there, wrapped in clean white bed sheets, a bandage visible on one arm. The bleeping sound came from a series of hospital monitors half-seen around the edges of the vision. Tiny green and red lights blinked on and off. And the line of a graph pulsed in time with the sleeper’s heartbeat.
Nyquist bent closer, face to face.
He could hear his other self breathing. He could see the words that crawled over the face and upper chest area. And then the sleeper’s eyes opened wide suddenly, and his body arched upwards, straining against his bonds. Nyquist staggered back and watched in terror as his other self fell back onto the sheets and lay there. And then the man on the bed looked across the room, across some unfathomable space, and Nyquist could only repeat his words from before: “Who the hell are you?”
The other answered quietly with the same question: “Who are you?”
And for a moment Nyquist actually thought he was talking to himself. But then the man on the bed spoke again: “Do you need to ask?” The voice was Nyquist’s own, an exact copy, but muffled, heard from the bottom of a deep well.
He reached out and his hand moved through the body of the other, as though it were made of mist, or whatever substance dreams were made from. And into this mirror he looked and looked deep and felt he was falling into his own being at last, becoming real, a creature of flesh and blood. Nyquist couldn’t understand the feeling. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what I am.”
But the other ignored this plea, saying instead, “Listen. Listen to me. I haven’t got long. Find out…”
The man on the bed coughed and was unable to finish the sentence. Nyquist felt it in his own throat, this painful desire to speak, without being able to speak, not properly.
He moved closer once more, kneeling on the bed. “What is it? What do I need to know?”
“Zelda was murdered.”
“Yes, I know that. I’ve learned that.”
“Find out…”
“Find out who killed her? Yes, but how? Where do I start?”
The translucent body of the other self was fading away as smoke on a summer’s day. He made a final effort: “Two people.”
“Go on. I’m listening.”
The other’s lips were barely moving as his face merged into the grey light of the room. “Dreylock. And…” He coughed again.
Nyquist reached out, trying to hold onto his other self. It was no use, his hands went right through the shimmering body to touch the bed sheets beneath.
Nyquist cried out. “Talk to me!”
The lips of the other moved on, but silent now.
Two characters who could never quite meet. Two narratives with the same hero, but worlds apart.
And then the other managed to speak further. “Wellborn.”
“Dreylock and Wellborn?” Nyquist asked, hoping for confirmation. “Who are they?”
“One of them knows the truth. I’m certain of it…”
That was the last word. Both body and voice had faded away. The moonlight lay across the empty bed once more, the blood stains clearly visible on the sheets. Nyquist was alone. He moved away from the bed and sat down in an armchair. He wanted to remain there for
a short while, to think about what he had learned in the last few minutes. But a noise disturbed him.
It was the sound of a key in the front door of the apartment.
The Other Side
BELLA MONROE’S voice woke him from sleep. She was sitting at his bedside, talking over and over to herself, the words neverending. He glimpsed her face in the corner of his unwavering eye. Sometimes she would lean closer to look directly into his face, but he could read very little from her expressions. Her lips were moving, her words a mumble under her breath. He couldn’t hear her properly. Bella, he said, Bella, speak to me, speak more clearly, speak louder, let me hear you. I need to hear your voice. But she ignored his pleas. Nyquist was unheard, unknown. And unknown in the dark he listened to the woman’s breath and he gazed at her face, and knew she was his only companion at this time.
He was still reeling from his journey to Melville Five, his meeting with his other self in apartment 67. What had been said between them, between himself and his reflection? He couldn’t remember, not fully. He could only hope that enough had been given, enough knowledge, one clue or another, a key, a code. Something, a gesture even. A single word might do it, if only his other self could understand the message.
Did he mention Dreylock as a possible suspect for Zelda’s killing? Did he warn him that Wellborn was still alive, still at large in the world?
Monroe talked on and on.
Nyquist could feel himself sinking into a final darkness. He tried once more to view his other self moving through the corridors and rooms of the distant tower, but this time the vision eluded him. Death was prowling at the edges of his story.
Monroe’s voice…
He concentrated on her voice. This would pull him up and clear for a little while, that simple human connection. But then he would slip away once more as the word virus worked at his body, never tiring, never expiring, always renewing and merging and mutating. It was doing its best to keep him alive, but he feared now that it was all too little and too late…
Monroe’s voice! Listen. Listen to her!