TWICE

by Susanna Kleeman

  He forced me into the freezing water and under the boat. I thought I’d die. He yanked me up, the noises were gone, he put his mouth to my freezing ear.

  ‘Can you remember what you found? Don’t say, keep it in your head.’

  He bundled me into the boat in my wet clothes, pushed us out of the boathouse into the lake, hoodie right down over his face. He rowed and kicked me quiet. The oars, the wind in the reeds, screeching things. It getting darker and colder, the helicopter overhead. Everything was really happening, his screwed-up terrible face forcing us faster over black water in the fading light.

  We hit something.

  ‘Now,’ grabbing my hand, pulling me out and under, tipping the boat so it was over us and we were treading water with only our heads above water under the boat and I could only see his outline in glittered flashes, clutching his head. He grabbed me and moved us nearer the bank so we stood on plants with the upturned boat over us, chest deep in water, going numb, swallowing water, dragged by my hair, slapped over and over to make me shut up. His fingers jammed into his temples, jabbing at his ears with something, a knife, till they bled. Him whispering it was OK, we were escaping for real this time, he was sorry, this was what it took to escape them, me just beyond. Twisting himself, the glint of his knife, scraping his knife all over his face so it bled, a blunt shave, no more top layer. He held my hair and with his other hand sliced his clothes off with the knife like cutting skin, peeling a banana: his hoodie and t-shirt and pants, pulled off his socks and shoes, came with the knife for me and did the same to me and all my clothes, the layers, my hoodie under the burka, my jeans, my bra and pants, skinned off fast by the knife, cutting me while I gagged on lake and ex-clothes sunk in freezing water mixed with our legs.

  ‘We have to,’ doing something over and over to his leg underwater in the dark next to me that made his body shudder. ‘Shut up,’ holding the knife to my neck, sticky with his blood.

  He jerked the knife over his bloody face and body again. He hacked his hair off, lifting up tufts, binding my legs to his under the water. Then he did the same to half-drowned me: sheared me bald with his legs knotted round me, ran the blade over and over my head to scythe the last bits off, cut my head, cut my eyebrows and eyelashes, gouged me, scraped me all over, inside my ears, whispering how sorry he was while I bled and snorted water, told me he was wiping them off, then cut me deep on the thigh with the knife in a ‘V’, a bad down-and-up.

  He let go of the knife and it glittered down.

  We were naked in the freezing water under the upturned boat, missing skin layers, covered in blood and hair and ribbons of clothes, going numb. I could hardly see him, he was panting, it was freezing, every so often patches of light dappled bad sights through the water, pure fear, no control. He ducked us underwater beyond the boat, into the open lake, his hand round the back of my neck.

  He forced something vile into my mouth: a cut piece of rubber tube, thick and sandy. He pulled me down, forced me to stay underwater as he dragged us forwards through the lake away from the boat, forcing the tubing back in my mouth when it came out, forcing me to learn to use the tube as a snorkel, the only bit of us to poke through the water surface. I swallowed lake, choked, blacked out, half drowned, was numb so couldn’t feel my hands and feet getting torn on rocks and plants at the lake shallows he was forcing us through. Underwater, bleeding, shorn, naked, cut, breathing water in through the tube, spluttering half-dead, pulled down and on by him, doing this for numb time till he yanked me out.

  20

  I came to sneezing naked in the dark on my belly face-down in a deep bed of reeds and mud under trees somewhere on the lake bank, his weight on top of me, shushing into my neck, noise from machines and the ground juddering from things flying overhead. The long thin lake—I knew its shape from the mouldy atlas worlds away. We were slathered in mud, he’d caked it on, covered my whole skinned face and body while I’d conked out. I tried to shift, he pressed down.

  The shudder of machines passed. If they didn’t come soon with their dogs it was bad, he whispered after a long while—it meant they’d found us already and were biding their time, waiting to see what we did. But we couldn’t risk being clever, we had to move on now in the dark up the stream, cake more mud on as ours got washed off, paltry defence.

  He whispered how us being cold made it harder for heat-sensing tech to track us and that the mud and water would mask us from their dogs a smidge—there was still no tech to beat dogs in the matter of really tracking people, he said, not yet.

  He stuck his fingers down my throat and made me puke. ‘In case there’s things inside.’ Then he slithered us up the rocky creek on our skinned bellies very slowly, cocking his ears at wild noises, sniffing close to my ear, grabbing the back of my neck, stuck to me with puke and mud.

  A terrible bleat and something ghastly turned its grey face to us: a woken sheep.

  I came to face-down shivering in a bush, covered in new mud and leaves, away from the lake, in a moonlit forest. He was near, in the ground, doing something. He heard me stir, came over, shoved sharp dry berries and what he said was tree fungus into my mouth: good for me, he said, vile jelly. I couldn’t stop shivering. He forced me up, whispered I had to help with what he was up to which was digging a hole in the ground for us to hide in. I stank, so did he, we were naked and caked in new mud which smelt of shit, which was shit, he said, in part: precious deer or fox shit he’d gathered and smeared us with to mask our scent from dogs till it wore off, by which time we’d be in our hole if I’d now help him dig faster.

  I couldn’t do anything: I was mad, skinned, half-dead, caked in shit. But he forced me to get up and dig, told me work would warm me and there was no choice, gave me a big stick to dig with, kicked me when I lay down or tried to get away, kicked me till I dug like he said, his calf trussed with vines to staunch the stabs he’d done to himself in the lake.

  It was cold, bare, still, clear, a big moon and stars between the trees.

  ‘Their setting,’ he said. ‘He controls the weather. Best conditions to find us, the slightest ripple. His liquid crystal ball.’

  It was a hole in the ground about three feet deep, seven feet long, four feet wide, for us to lie in. Our grave, smeared with shit to guise us, covered by big branches he’d found, these covered in turn by the dug earth and that covered by moss and fallen leaves to look natural. Sturdy enough to be driven over, he said. He tied two logs together with vines and leaves to serve as our camouflaged door. We’d breath through vents he’d made round the edge.

  He forced me down. We lay naked covered in filth next to each other on the leaf floor he’d mingled with shit to muddle the dogs. He replaced the door, we lay in damp earth together.

  He’d gathered berries, mushrooms, fungus plus leaves and twigs and roots he said we could eat. Water was easy, would collect on bark he’d put under the vents. We’d be fine, he said. Wait it out here a while. He was used to all this. This was how he’d lived before, waiting it out in holes on the run till they caught him. You got used to it. People in Tibet sat in pitch-black caves for twenty-four years to gain enlightenment, he’d seen them. Tranced you out, took you to a higher state.

  He was really sorry about all this: Flora, the baby, Poppy, Rhodri, me in here, the lake and escape, cutting off my clothes and hair, skinning me, coming for me in the first place, dobbing me in it. For now I should put all that out of my head. I was so right about him, he was a desperate fucking freak, selfish and bad from the get-go, born under a bad star, would be the death of me. He was so sorry I’d got mixed up with him now and in the past. He took my hand and pinched how sorry he was.

  IS OK, I pinched. I was sure he had good cause.

  I zonked out the first few days. I was basically very ill. He wrapped his mud poo body round me to warm even though it was warm and sticky and fetid in there and worse each day from what came out of us that he scooped up with leaves and buried on his side. I lay there with my thick head filled with stench.
Things sometimes walked over us: animals, people, dogs. They didn’t find us or perhaps they had found us and were tracking us. He could hear helicopters, drones, other machines I couldn’t hear though sometimes I could and felt the earth shake with their whirr. He said Don had tiny drones the size of flies that whizzed through trees to spy and kill, that the new black ladybirds I’d surely seen everywhere the past couple of years were Don-made snitchers brewed in labs, that bats and birds got hacked and mated with tech in their eyes and brains to serve as Don’s agents in wild places, that atom-sized armies combed Earth, ready to mince at Don’s command.

  He hadn’t told me all this before because he hadn’t realised the extent of the deployment, that it had happened already, the flicked switch. And he hadn’t wanted to worry me, or seem mad. It sounded so sci-fi but was true: this was the world. I had to know everything now, understand why we were here, buried together, running for real. He wasn’t mad. Wake up to life outside the realm. Things were not what they seemed. I had to open myself up to that, everyone did, or else risk massive regret at the point of death, when you realised you’d wasted your life living a fake life, your one chance. Wake up, this was real. And death was close to us. It was a human right: to know the lie of our lives.

  We were lucky we could still escape, or still had the illusion of escape, he said. Soon even holes in the ground would be accessible to Don. Every square inch of the planet, above and below, that was the plan. It had already started: nanocams, mini camera-sensors smaller than salt speckled everywhere, tiny self-replicating biodegradable robot cameras laced into petrol and scattered out of planes, cars, drones, helicopters, the white lines in the sky salting the whole earth, making everything visible, fibre-optic yarn wound round the ocean floor, getting pulled tight. Don’s trillion trillion eyes cooked into plastic, glass, gluten, nylon—Earth’s new coating, Don alert to every vibration, everything come alive and pulsing back to Daddy through his techno veins.

  That’s why the burkas and hoodies and all that shearing and shaving and scraping us raw in the lake, paltry defence. That’s why we were naked, under our shit, though probably still encrusted with the nanocams Don smeared everywhere, over people and hair and clothes and trees and animals and shit. Definitely in towns and cities, soon in forests and holes in the ground, borne down by soldier-ladybugs, worms, roots, grown into trees.

  ‘Hope for the best, plan for the worst.’ As Alan used to say.

  Did I remember the message or whatever I’d found hidden in the drawers in the barn? I could talk freely now, he said and pinched: it was OK here, no nanocams down here in the dark yet, he hoped, they couldn’t hear us anymore though maybe they could though he’d gouged out his tracker. He knew I’d found something in the barn, did I remember what? Had I stored it in my head, lodged it like Alan taught, my useful mind bus that had garnered me a law degree? Could I visualise what I’d found now? Would I tell him? Could I remember the Alphabet off by heart? How about the Chinese map? YES OR NO?

  Bad about Flora. Who knew what had happened there. Might be real: was their set-up but could have real dead bodies in it too, to really freak me out. He was sorry.

  They’d operated on him a while ago, some bollocks about a polyp in his calf they needed to cut out as cover for the insertion of the tracker he’d found and gouged out in the lake. Kind of them to even pretend: usually they zonked you out, did their deeds, woke you up none the wiser. Nanocams were random but trackers were for life, unless you dug them out, ball and chain. That’s how they’d been on to us, he now saw, or else via a million other devious ways. But now the tracker blabbed from the bottom of the lake, our ritual offering. Now we were free. He hoped.

  Except we weren’t. They’d have things inside him still, probably. And him my only tainted last hope. They’d get us by his innards. And mine too by now: my inner roads patrolled by Don’s tiny troops, the old woman’s pink nail.

  But they hadn’t got us yet. Or at least weren’t showing themselves. So we were going on, no matter what, against the odds, blazing out, like the sun, like they did in olden times. Burn your fuels in glory, no eking out. The big fuck-you, the freedom we all have inside us even if it kills us. Like rocks stars, that’s why dumdums love them. Thumbing your nose. Honour, valour, wit, seduction: the old values. You do what you want till they drag you away. You don’t do their work for them. Right?

  Yes, they had the tech of trackers inside you using the fizz of human cells for their electrics so they never ran out of juice, unless the host died. So much tech I didn’t know. Cross-breeds, trans machines: the realm would get it all in the end. Tech trickled down to the dumdums eventually, most tech. Mobile phones since World War One, that kind of thing. How did I think we’d won world wars or had empires or any of the rest of it? Pure black tech magic veiled from dumdums, now focussed on me and him, the missing vectors. Something dark had glommed onto us then lost us. Now it wanted us back.

  We were lucky: we could still hear them. They’d operate in total silence soon. We were at the cusp. All that magic in books, that Alan had ever told us, Scritch things? Objects appearing out of nowhere, cloaks of invisibility, wands, seven-league boots, like in olden times? It was starting to happen again, Don’s way this time, Don’s man-made way. Could I feel it doing its maths?

  What had Alan mentioned about the old magic? What had he said about the good and bad, that people once knew, that Don was on the hunt for to crunch and render? Had Alan mentioned a jigsaw, the missing pieces? This poor Chris whispering into me in our grave couldn’t remember too much of what Alan had said, what with his nasty times and missing head pieces, the poor brain-mangled thing and the dip in his skull which I touched as I lay next to him, smoothing his stubble, feeling the soft hollow, the perfect circle of bone cut from the top of his head with skin grown over like a drum, a soft spot I could jab open to rummage through wet and find out who or what he really was.

  ‘They say it’s good for you,’ this hole. An ancient practice: ‘trepanation’. ‘It’s different after. Old stuff means less, whatever dragged me down, took me out of the present. I never forgot you, though. I’m not the same person I was.’

  I didn’t believe all that crap about civilisation starting in Mesopotamia or India, did I? No dumdum did, in their bones. Knowledge kept from us: walls of mega stones slotting perfectly together in Peru. A different knowledge, that something happened to, or that did something to itself with its knowledge. It stripped and shaped hills and rivers, brought trees and livestock, sailed the world. What we knew when we were animals, a body of knowledge starting then: the sky and plants and stones and magnetic lines, global paths, that got wiped out, a line drawn under. But bits of it surviving in our version and in remote places, songs they chanted. Powerful knowledge about the world and what it did, that Don wanted to snuffle up at all costs.

  Keys, fermentation, booze, bread, glass, trained dogs, metal, big stones, maps, world trade, world travel: the things that are always there.

  The oldest pyramids were perfectly aligned, the biggest and the best. Indonesian cloves found in six-thousand-year-old Sumerian graves in what was now Iraq alongside blue stones from Afghanistan and black obsidian from the South Pacific half a world away. Cocaine and nicotine from South America preserved inside Egyptian mummies. Underground cities deep below Turkey. South East Asian yam trees in West African forests. Indonesian megalith hills that are twenty thousand years old. The oldest part of Rome being the sewers, they sailed battleships down there thousands of years ago. Ancient tech we still couldn’t replicate even with Don’s machines: hydraulic power, massive pyramids built high on cliffs, lugging those huge stones up there. The knowledge of the before-world, everything better the further back you went, the brilliant solutions, mega engineering. The golden age, everything downhill. Everything the wrong way round.

  Animal knowledge, physics as instinct, your soul hitched to universal waves. He’d seen it himself first hand, teen holidays in Polynesia, conquering the Pacific alongside ma
ster sailors with no tools except their bodies and senses, navigating via their inner computer: the wind, stars, smells, the colour and patterns of waves. Encoding that knowledge in stories and movement and chants and shanties, passing it on that way, though it was dying out, like everything else. People as living libraries. Monks chanting sutras for eternity up high mountains, forget the server farms. You lose it when you start to write it down.

  Plant knowledge, from the reptile brain. Knowing the stars like migrating birds. Sniffing our way round. Our lost birthright. Dragon-hunters, reading the lay of the land, barrelling down those White Roads, snouting out the pots of gold.

  Logic was just one take, right?

  The long journey out of Africa to Australia and the now-drowned continent that Indonesia and Malaysia are the tips of. The journey from supreme ape to cultured human. The skills you’d have to learn, and learn to encode so you could pass on, the user manual for the planet. Better make those stories memorable. Like Alan did. Was I starting to see?

  Chickens are their supreme art. Stupid flightless egg-layers, bioengineered food machines, perfect portable protein factories got that way on purpose from regular birds who laid once a month and could fly away. ‘Centaurs,’ because that’s what centaurs like Kraton in Scritch really are: half human half beast, people who’ve retained their animal knowledge. Magic people—because magic is just deep knowledge of nature. Dangerous knowledge: where to press. The properties of everything. And what are plants to dumdums now? A whole bank of knowledge cut out of you and bits sold back to you as products, medicine. The taboos put on individuals with too much knowledge of nature: witches. Cut it out of you. Don’s cutting projects.

  ‘Every dumdum knows magic once existed. They crave it: their books and movies. They knew they’d been duped, the de-enchanted world.’