Only Forward

by Michael Marshall Smith

  Alkland looked at me, eyes wide.

  ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘They do.’

  ‘And do you know why?’

  He shook his head. I told him.

  ‘Because something’s coming to get you.’

  When Alkland was full to bursting point we took our leave of the woman. She showed us to the front door, chattering all the way. As we stood outside she pressed a small bundle on the Actioneer, and he thanked her with a shy graciousness that made her blush.

  ‘That’s the best food I’ve ever had in my life,’ he said, with patent honesty.

  ‘Oh hush, now,’ she said, obviously pleased. ‘You two take care, you hear? There’s monsters out there tonight.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘Well, just take care,’ she repeated, slowly closing the door. ‘Lovely shirt, by the way.’

  The valley we found ourselves in was different to the one we’d left. The same sort of thing, but different. We followed the path down the slope until we reached the bottom, and then walked beneath the towering sides. It was still night, and dark.

  ‘Something is coming to get you,’ I said, picking up where we’d left off. ‘We have to find out what, and stop it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because otherwise you’ll die,’ I said simply.

  Alkland stopped walking.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The first time I saw you, in the hotel room in Stable, you were having a nightmare. On the roof, when you dozed off for a few moments, you had a nightmare. In my apartment, you had a nightmare.’

  ‘People get nightmares.’ He knew what I was talking about, but was too scared to admit it.

  ‘Not like that, not like the ones you’re getting. And your skin, Alkland, like Villig said: you can see it in your skin. You’re getting ill. You can’t see it, but you’re looking even worse now. So far it’s just cosmetic, but it won’t stop at that. Something’s getting at you from within, and if it reaches you, you will die.’

  ‘Is this something to do with the Centre?’

  ‘No. This is a thing the Centre knows nothing about. It just happens sometimes. It’s like a bug, a glitch.’ That was being economical with the truth in a big way, but this was neither the time nor the place for a history lesson. If I had my way, it would never be the time.

  ‘So why did you bring us here?’

  ‘Because if this isn’t sorted out, then you’ve got nowhere to go. There’s no point me protecting you from the Centre if something’s screwing you up from the inside in the meantime, is there?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘How long have you been having nightmares? Not just the usual, this kind.’

  Alkland considered.

  ‘A couple of weeks.’

  About the same time he found out about Dilligenz II, in fact, which was possibly but not necessarily interesting. Emotional trauma could have got the ball rolling, I supposed, but it didn’t make much difference either way. One of the frustrating aspects of dealing with this kind of thing is that there are very few rules. Sometimes things mean something, sometimes they don’t. It doesn’t make much difference in the end.

  ‘So what can we do?’ Alkland prompted.

  ‘I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see.’

  ‘Wait and see. You should have that tattooed on your forehead.’

  ‘Alkland, that’s the way it works. I was hired to find you and take you back to the Centre. Simple, straightforward. And yet now here I am dicking around in here trying to help you stay alive. The life of someone very important to me is at risk because of you. If you include mine, the lives of two. Things happen, the job changes. Life’s like that: it’s linear and it twists and turns and you just have to follow it and see what happens. There are no cross-cuts, no helpful hints, no subtextual clues. Things just happen, and all you can do is try to get the hell out of their way.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Life is one great Plan B. Wonderful.’ He turned away.

  ‘Alkland. Don’t piss me off. So far I’m on your side in this.’

  ‘And a lot of help that’s been. I’ve been shot at, almost blown up and now I’m running from shadows in a place that doesn’t even exist.’

  ‘Without me you’re fucked,’ I said, staring at him, and left it there. He stared back at me, his anger fading, because it hadn’t really been anger in the first place, but fear.

  ‘I know,’ he said eventually. ‘I hate that.’

  We started moving again, and after a while he apologised. I told him that he was a dream compared to a lot of the people I’ve had to deal with, and provided a few examples that in the end even made him laugh. It was the fact that the lady I’d carried through the swamp had soon after burnt down our hiding place by not properly stubbing out the cigarette I’d told her not to light in the first place that did it. The air cleared between us, and things were all right again.

  I didn’t mind, wasn’t at all surprised that he’d had to blow off eventually. They always do. People always find it so frustrating that there’s no structure they can see, that they just have to follow the river downstream and see what they find. They want to know the plot so they can guess the end, because they’re afraid of what it might be. I can understand that, even though I know it’s not the way things work. I never know what the hell’s going to happen next, but I can live with that.

  ‘So,’ he said after a while, ‘where are we going now?’

  ‘We’re trying to find a jungle,’ I said.

  ‘Oh.’ He appeared to realise the significance of that. ‘Like the one I dreamed?’

  ‘Yes. Somewhere around there will be your, stream, and around there will be where the action is.’

  ‘My stream?’

  ‘Everybody has a stream in Jeamland. It’s where their dreams come from.’

  ‘Did you ever spend a long time, say six or seven years, taking drugs twenty-four hours a day?’ he asked, yawning massively. The colours were back in his face, and he looked very tired. I made a decision.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘This valley looks like it’s going to go on for ever. We’ve hit a set pattern, I think.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning it’s going to stay this way however long we carry on walking. The best thing for us to do is try to get some sleep.’ I waited for him to say something tiresome like ‘But we’re asleep already’, but he appeared to have got a grip on the situation.

  ‘Is it safe?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Wait and see, eh?’ he said, and smiled.

  13

  There are monsters.

  There really are.

  I woke up to an odd mixture of noises. On the one hand there was the rhythmic creak of insects and the cawing of birds, and on the other the unmistakable sound of someone being sick. As I opened my eyes I noticed that it was daytime, and also that it was alarmingly hot.

  Sitting up, I saw that all of my observations except one could be grouped under an umbrella observation. We were in a jungle, of a rather odd kind. The remaining observation proved simply to be correct. About five yards away, discreetly tucked behind a large frondy plant of some kind, Alkland was having a bad time. I stayed where I was and waited for him. No one likes to be the centre of attention while they’re throwing up.

  A couple of minutes later he made his way over and sat a few feet away. His entire face was now green, apart from the patches of purple around the eyes and mouth. His eyes were bloodshot as he turned to me and smiled wanly.

  ‘I don’t suppose you can magic up a pot of coffee or anything, can you?’

  I shook my head. You can’t do that kind of thing. God knows I’ve tried.

  ‘Did you sleep?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘I slept perfectly well. Then about half an hour ago I woke up knowing I was within seconds of exploding, and I’ve been pretty busy since then, as you probably heard.’

  ‘How do you feel now?’

  ‘Terrib
le. Stark, there’s a pool of water over there. I used some of the water to wash my face at half time. I saw my reflection.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Yeah. Good jungle camouflage.’

  ‘What’s happening to me?’

  ‘You’re getting sick.’

  ‘No, really? Come on, Stark, give out the information in slightly larger parcels for once.’ His voice was steady, but he was scared.

  ‘Stand up,’ I said. He stood, and I rose to look more closely at his face. Underneath the discoloration the skin was actually holding up reasonably well, largely because I’d managed to get him into here before it got too far advanced. It was still getting worse, but at a much lower rate. There were a couple of tiny patches where the skin felt a little infirm, but that was all. Alkland wriggled uncomfortably.

  ‘If you weren’t here,’ I said, stepping back from him, ‘your face would be the same colour as always. You’d simply look as if you’d been very ill for a long time. The colour here doesn’t mean anything in itself: it’s just a read-out, like an energy level indicator.’

  ‘So what’s actually happening?’

  ‘Let’s walk,’ I said.

  ‘Stark.’

  ‘I’ll explain, but let’s walk. We have to go places, remember?’

  Alkland grudgingly fell in with me as I started to push my way past the nearest vegetation.

  ‘Weird jungle,’ I said.

  It was. It was like a jungle out of a children’s book, huge picturesque trees with vines strung between them, massive ferns with broad leaves at ground level and yet with a discernible path, patchily lit by shafts of humid, glistening sunlight. Exotic birds cawed and hooted up in the panoply of leaves far above our heads, playing lead to the insects’ tidal rhythm section.

  The truly strange thing was the colours. I plucked a leaf from a nearby fern and looked at it closely. The edges weren’t smooth, but slightly jagged. The leaf was made up of small squares of colour picked from a limited palette. From a distance the effect was of gradually shifting shades of green, but close up you could see that the hues were made up of a few distinct greens intermixed with blues and yellows. From what I could see by looking round I reckoned there were about two hundred and fifty-six colours available.

  The path was a mixture of browns with patches of black and a few spots of white, and the quantised squares of colour were clearly visible without even bending down. Everything was the same: the shifting patches of intense blue way up above the trees were made up of dark blue, cyan and white, and when a cockatoo-like bird swooped across our path a few yards in front, it too was made up of intermixed squares of colour. The squares were the same size, no matter how far away the object was: the grain on the sky was no finer than that on the path. The nearer objects were, in fact, the more subtle the colouring, because the squares were smaller in relation to the size of the object.

  The whole thing was just like some three-dimensional computer graphic, and yet the leaves were warm and the trunks solid, and the loose dirt stirred under our feet as we threaded our way along the path. Weird.

  For a while we wandered along the path in silence, content to look around. It didn’t take long for the colours to cease to seem strange: the jungle was after all realistically hot and sticky, and I’m sure Alkland had never been in a real jungle anyway. As we progressed, the vegetation became thicker and thicker, pressing in on the path, and the canopy above let shafts of light through less and less frequently. Soon we were pushing our way through dense fronds in a dark green and oppressively humid gloom. There was a chance that it was Alkland’s confusion that was making the jungle become more impenetrable, so I decided to talk before things got any worse.

  ‘How much do you know about dreams?’ I asked him.

  ‘Not much,’ he admitted reluctantly. Actioneers hate admitting they don’t know about something. In the Centre they never do. They just pretend they’re an expert and then hurry off and learn as much as possible about it before they get found out. Not really an option here.

  ‘Nobody does, actually, particularly the people who think they do. A long time ago people thought they were visions. Then they thought they were reflections of the subconscious mind churning away beneath the surface.’ I had to stop there for a while, to concentrate on shoving a particularly large frond out of our way. The path didn’t look much better once it was cleared though, and the vegetation above us was now so thick that we were moving through a murky twilight.

  After a few more yards we came to a standstill, unable to go on. I turned to face Alkland and saw that the way we’d come was blocked too: the vegetation had grown over the path. We were stuck, standing facing each other’s sweating faces in about a square yard of space.

  ‘Might there not be a clearer path somewhere?’ asked Alkland, irritably swatting a small bug that had landed on his face. Though the bug had been made up of tiny squares of blacks and greys, the spot of blood that flowed from it was real.

  ‘No. Pay attention.’ I had to clear Alkland’s mind up soon, or we’d have a hell of a job ever getting out of this jungle. ‘To a degree, they were right. Dreams are a reflection. But as you can see, they’re also a reality. When you dream, you come here: this is where they happen.’

  ‘Would this place still be here if nobody dreamed?’

  ‘Yes. That’s exactly the point,’ I said, pleased. ‘Jeamland persists. It’s the way it is partly because of the dreams that take place here. But the dreams people have are shaped by the place too. They affect one another.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, nodding. ‘With you so far.’

  I glanced behind me and saw that though the way was still blocked, it seemed to be slightly lighter up ahead.

  ‘Dreams aren’t just in the mind,’ I continued. ‘They exist, and they’re part of you. Like memories, they make up much of what you are, whether you remember them or not. Again, you affect each other.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘If something goes wrong with a part of your body, if some of the cells go rabid or get screwed up by something, you get ill.’

  ‘And if something goes wrong with your dreams, you get ill too.’

  ‘Give that man a cigar.’

  ‘Stark, something peculiar is happening with all these frondy things. There seems to be a path opening up behind you.’

  I looked, and he was right. It was a pretty ragged path, overgrown and tangled up to chest height, but it was there all the same.

  ‘You can’t actually kill someone straight off in a dream,’ I said, backing slowly along the path. ‘You can’t do anything which will make them die in their sleep.’ Another lie, but he wasn’t to know, and it was very nearly the truth.

  ‘That’s a relief.’

  ‘But you can cause them to die.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You can get in amongst their dreams and stir them round, tangle them, pervert them, disease them. The person becomes ill, and they die.’

  ‘And that’s what’s happening to me?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Who’s doing this to me? I mean, who’s actually doing it?’

  ‘No one,’ I said.

  ‘Oh come on, Stark. It must be someone, and there can’t be many people who can do that kind of thing. The options must be fairly few.’

  ‘That’s just it. There’s no one left anymore who can do that, apart from me. The other one was killed eight years ago. I’m the only one left. This is just a glitch, a random Something.’

  Then a rare thing happened. I got emotional. I turned back the way we were coming and walked quickly. Now that Alkland was back on the team comprehension-wise the path was much easier, though we were passing through an area that was obviously pretty dense at the best of times. I could see what looked like a small clearing up ahead and I strode towards it. I was unbearably hot, tired and fed up, and I wanted to sit by myself for a moment. I didn’t want to have to explain anything, carry anyone or think about anything. Especially think about anything.
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  ‘Stark, wait!’ Alkland called after me, hurrying to try to catch up. The problem with my bad moods is that they’re over almost as soon as they arrive. By the time people realise that I’m angry I’m already out the other side. All my moods these days are like that, even the good ones.

  I strode on anyway, letting myself calm down a little more. I realised that I’d been on a bit of a downer for the last day or so, since the mono ride out of Colour to Eastedge. The thing is, you don’t know everything. Not even you, Mr ‘Obviously there was no gang’. I haven’t told you, so you can’t. I will do, if it’s relevant. I may do, anyway, but it’s unlikely you’ll understand. It’s even less likely that you’ll care.

  How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do? And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesn’t have any substance after all?

  Like when you’ve split up with someone, and you try to communicate the way you feel, because you need to say the words, need to feel that somebody understands just how pissed off and frightened you feel. The problem is, they never do. ‘Plenty more fish in the sea,’ they’ll say, or ‘You’re better off without them,’ or ‘Do you want some of these potato chips?’ They never really understand, because they haven’t been there, every day, every hour. They don’t know the way things have been, the way that it’s made you, the way it has structured your world. They’ll never realise that someone who makes you feel bad may be the person you need most in the world. They don’t understand the history, the background, don’t know the pillars of memory that hold you up. Ultimately, they don’t know you well enough, and they never can. Everyone’s alone in their world, because everybody’s life is different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live.

  Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down.