by Douglas Draa
“We’re not travelling back in time. I refuse to go back in time on this. I need more than just good. Good is not good enough. Sometimes just being there is better. Dumb boring reliability. I mean, you haven’t asked. You haven’t even bloody asked.”
He looks guiltily at the ceiling. Their daughter is up there, in her room. Severely impaired motor skills. Unable to speak, or feed herself, due to cerebral palsy caused by oxygen starvation during the forceps-delivery birthing process. “How is she?”
“She has name. Clare is the same. She’ll always be the same. She’ll never grow up, she’ll never leave home, she’ll never be any different from the way she was five years ago when you got the hell out.”
“I’m not a bad man.”
“No Dom. You’re just weak, easily led. This is important. But oh no, you just had to call off for liquid courage first. Didn’t you? Didn’t you? You think I can’t stink it on you?”
“It happens.”
“Sure, it happens. No matter what you imagine—somewhere, at some time, it’s happened to someone. You think I care about that?” her painted nails are tipped with flame. He sees the tiredness in her eyes that belies the softness of her voice. The defensive hurt. He’d put those things there. The defiant strength is all hers. He’d never been able to match that.
“What does he want, this creep that’s looking for me?”
“Listen, and listen good. He left a skype address. That’s all he told me. I’ve delivered the message. Now it’s done. Goodbye Dom.”
One day you wake, and you’re conscious of change. Everything you knew is broken. Nothing is intact. Like a hang-over without the pleasure of the booze the night before. You’re aware of the world in which you live, but also conscious of another. Another plane of existence you can feel around you, but can’t define. As though you’ve stepped over the event-horizon into a parallel continuum. It’s almost visual, but not quite, something you glimpse from the corner of your eye, but can’t focus in time. When you look, it’s not there, there’s nothing. Yet you still half-see it.
* * * *
Sitting cross-legged on Brighton shingle watching the endless lap of the tide, thinking of cosmic energies and thinking of Japanese poet Matsuo Bashõ. Starlight roaring in your veins, starlight pulsing in your brain. While chemicals melt it all into fluctuating flux. The setting sun is a burnished drop of gold hovering just above the sill of the world. What is life but what our senses tell us? There’s no way of getting outside your own head. So you sit, working your way through it all, as Basho would have done. He’d have reduced it down to three precise lines of text.
Then there’s another light. Brighter than the sun. Washing ripples of fire across the shingle. It’s all so highly contrasty, it’s scary. Your nerves are cracking. Your hands so tight-clenched your fingernails break and puncture half-moons in the flesh of your palm. The sound of weight applied to, and settling upon loose stones. Causing a shivering trickle of pebbles. And two dark figures above you, black against the whirling sky.
“Dom Hemming. Arise.” You rise, in awe of it all. They pace, one on either side of you. Their touch is ice. Their words are riddles. Their words are conundrums, denser than a Bashõ haiku. You follow. The scrunch of shingle coming peripherally, as if from the pace of someone else’s feet. Along the seafront people are slow-moving, elderly couples, some people walking dogs, joggers wearing iPods, families laughing and talking. How is it they can’t see what’s going on? How can they be so unaware? The black figures must be operating an invisibility shield, a force-field that disrupts the passage of light. Clever stuff. Advanced technology.
Their craft thrums softly at the kerbside, as though straining, eager for the off. It swallows you into its softly enveloping upholstery. It moves forward as the drive is engaged, then accelerates into smooth motion with a low hiss. It feels strange. It feels exhilarating. Even with eyes closed the images still flicker by on the inside of your retina like a high-definition movie, with full CGi embellishments. Sometimes it gets difficult to parse out what’s real and what is overlaid effect. You’ve seen these movies, you know. It seems like no time at all that the craft ellipses in towards their station. Back on your feet, gravity seems lighter. You take big ponderous strides.
They use a swipe-card, and the metal gate slams down once you’re inside. We are in a clinical white room. We sit in a close circle. Me, and the two others.
“He’s totally loaded.” The one sitting to my left is looking at me, but he’s speaking to the one sitting to my left. “We’ll get nothing. This is pointless.”
“On the contrary. Because he’s so out of it he’s incapable of telling fiberoonies. Now’s the best chance to get what we need.”
“Tell us.” Speaking to me now. “Tell us what you saw.”
“I already told it all to the police, they didn’t believe me.”
“So tell us, exactly what occurred. We could prove more sympathetic. They were in your cab. You picked up two men. They are in your taxi. You were attacked. There are gunshots from an overtaking car. You took evasive action.”
“I’ve seen it in those big dumb action-movies. The road is a white scar. You hang a sharp turn, wrong way onto a one-way strip. The bad guys aren’t supposed to follow. Well, it shakes them. It certainly shakes them, but they do follow us. By then I’ve gained an advantage. On-coming trucks and cars are spinning this way and that way, a gravitational dance, blaring horns, yelling, giving me the finger. There’s an underpass, illuminated. We’re hurtling down its curve. The bad guys in hot pursuit. Traffic howling around us in a series of random and unlikely misses. But we’re doing it. Once we get out the other side we can connect with the inner orbital, we can lose them… but it doesn’t work out that way. An oncoming coach fails to clear, it clips us, clobbers us hard, shatters into us, stoves in the front wing, wheels spin and spark. A shock physical impact, bouncing us around like pinballs in an arcade game, as I fight the wheel in a shrieking skid. The punch hurtles the two guys behind me. Mr Matsu, and his assistant. It must have been that. It must have been. Next thing is, we’re slewed up on the central reservation concrete island. In an amazing stillness, but for the pulse and hiss of the fractured radiator, the ziss-ziss-ziss of a revolving wheel. And the cops already there. Their blue light flash-flash-flashing.”
“Slow now. Freeze it. What exactly are you seeing. Each detail.”
“I turn around to look. Two guys in the back seat of the cab. One directly behind me. The other to the right. And the stench of burnt meat. The passenger side guy—Mt Matsu, is out cold. The one immediately behind me—the assistant, is twitching and spasming, his head is a mess, it’s smashed open, as though it exploded from the inside…”
“Could it be the result of the autowreck, or maybe the shooting?”
“I’ve seen impact wounds. To me, these resemble no impact wound I’ve ever encountered.”
“But you wouldn’t discount the possibility?”
“Hell. What do I know? I say what I see. This is what I saw. Next thing he stops twitching. And simultaneously the other guy, Matsu, opens his eyes.”
“Could be coincidence. Nothing more.”
“That’s not the impression I got. It was instantaneous. And the expression in the eyes, as they shock open, is pure terror.”
“Naturally there’d be terror. He’s been in a near-death auto-collision. The inside of his assistant’s head is smeared all over the inside of the cab. C’mon, how could he not be in shock.”
“Yes and yes. But no. What I got is, something transferred from one guy to the other. In the instant of death, it awoke in the other head.”
They lean back. My head is clearing. The buzz working it’s way out of my system. The room is not a mothership. It’s just a room. The two men are not galactics. Just men. Carl and Lennie, ha-ha.
The one to the right looks at the one to the left, Carl to
Lennie. “What do you think?”
“There’s an indeterminacy factor. But it’s pretty low. I’d hazard we’ve got a new transfer.”
That’s when it clicks. “I know who you are. You’re the bad guys. It’s you that started this off. It’s you attacked my cab…!”
They refrain from anything resembling denial. It’s good to have a physical target for rage. You can’t rail against the lure of sweet oblivion. You can’t hold narcotic dependency in your fist and crush the life out of it. You know it’s chewing away like rats inside your head, that it was the cause of all the bad things in your life. You lose, and you lose, and you keep on losing. The marriage that ran aground. The career-structure that dissolved. But you can’t hit out at that. This is something real to lash out at. But you don’t. You just sit there and sweat. This is looking increasingly to be a three-bottle problem.
Dom Hemming munches Wasabi peas from a Matsu pack, and listens, as the Men in Black speculate. “Look, I’ve wended my way through a wilderness of chaotic metaphysics searching for answers. I know my Sci-Fi. Once I thought there’s just a chance the thing could be Saturnian or Mercurian. There are fluidic silicon-based entities on Mercury, the only life-form capable of existing in such extreme temperatures. And there are tenuous gaseous things eternally hovering within gas-giant Saturn, resembling triangular bats that glide on storm-belts and atmospheric currents.”
“Maybe we’re wandering into the realm of fantasy here?” suggests the other one. Carl is logical, analytical. Both are dark-skinned, short black hair, dark brooding eyes. Middle-eastern origins?
Lennie shrugs dismissively. He’s more given to wild theory. “There are Earth-mysteries too. We think we know stuff. We know shit. We’re a mere drop in the ocean of time. During climate-change ten-thousand years ago, melting ice-age glaciers raised global sea-levels, inundating coastal cities and transfiguring the map of temperate zones. This is fact. There are city-structures submerged off the Indian coast, and on the Mediterranean seabed. The Sahara was fertile, with lakes, forests, and lost communities. This is not speculation. We now enjoy the benefits of a logical rational technological civilization. Those prediluvians were as brain-smart as us, but specialized in other directions. I’m hazarding here, free-associating if you like, but it’s possible they’re still here. Still with us. That they devised mental disciplines allowing them to survive death, in a kind of non-corporeal way. The mind-techniques were lost in the deluge, but the stories persist, passed down in the oral tradition of religions. Are you following me on this…?”
“I’m following you as sympathetically as I can. I admire optimism, no matter how deluded.”
“So you’ve got alternative theories?”
“I know what I saw” insists Dom. “But I don’t know what it means. What are we dealing with?”
“It’s some kind of parasite. That’s all we can ascertain. We, or rather the group we represent has been following it and killing it for centuries.”
“Don’t give me that. I’ve read all the Dan Brown conspiracy theories. The secret forces controlling history.”
“So don’t believe. Makes no difference. What does a parasite do when its host dies? If it’s smart it transfers to a new host, the closest one available. That’s what you saw happening. You saw a sponge absorbing souls.”
“There’s just one of these? How can there be just one of them?”
“That’s how we calculate it can die. If it’s the lost relic of a bygone age, the last remnant of its species, it must be capable of dying. If it can die, that means we can kill it. So we kill it in different ways. We’ve killed it once, we’ve killed it twice, we’ve killed it three times. But it refuses to die. We experiment with different methods. Most recently with an incendiary slug primed with a metallic sodium core. Somewhere in the atomic periodic table—we tried silver and potassium too, there must be something sufficiently poisonous to its nature that it will kill it, before it has time to slough off its borrowed human body. Yet each time, the host dies, but not the parasite. Next time, when we kill it, we must be certain it stays dead.”
I’m supposed to be the cab-driver (license revoked), but it’s me that’s been taken for a ride. It’s time to turn things around. “I can contact Matsu. I’ve got a mainline to his skype address.”
The stunned silence endures for several eternities. “So how do we play it?”
“First, we find out what he wants.”
* * * *
The link blinks up on the laptop.
“I’m Dom Hemming. Matsu requested I call.” The onscreen face isn’t the man in the cab. “Who am I speaking to?”
“I’m Mr Matsu’s personal assistant. I’m authorized to speak on his behalf. This is confidential. It will be to your advantage to understand this.”
“Understanding is not an issue so far.”
He hesitates. “Mr Matsu values his privacy. He appreciates simplicity. With goodwill on both sides this can be arranged. You’ve been interviewed by the police regarding the incident in the underpass. A man died. There will be a hearing. We know your circumstances. We sympathise. We’re in a position to assist you, your wife and daughter, through these hard times. All we require is some reciprocity.”
“Go on, I’m listening.”
“You will accept full responsibility. You’d been drinking. You made a mistake. You lost control of the vehicle, resulting in the accident. There were no other factors. If you are prepared to present this simplified version of the events at the hearing, I can assure you that your domestic financial problems are over.”
“You can set this up?”
“As good as done. We’ve already prepared a statement on your behalf. We can pdf it to you.”
“I want personal assurances. I want to hear it from him—from Mr Matsu himself, face-to-face.”
It seems he’s glancing off-screen for confirmation. Then, “as a favour, as a gesture of sincere goodwill, that will be possible. On neutral turf.”
* * * *
Red taillights glide down the street. The pavement hard beneath his feet. As it should be. But an unreality too. As though, if you blink it away hard enough, you’ll see the other hidden world more clearly. The shining city of silver towers and graceful domes, the pirouette of arches and impossible skyways, coloured torpedo-bugs in a glittering storm of dragonflies. A vision from the cover of a 1940s pulp SF magazine. Then there’s the murmur of voices just below the threshold of audibility, fairy whispers and elfin chimes. You strain your ears, but you can’t make out the words. The language seems teasingly familiar, as though it’s echoes of speech you’ve heard in other lives, on other worlds of space-time. Or are the voices just loose neurons firing in your head, bam-bam-bam? Deliriums. Madness. How can you be sure? You can’t.
Mr Sharma’s hire-car Honda Civic is still there. License suspended, of course. Not that that’s a major consideration now. Carl sits beside him. Lennie in the back as he takes off. Stay within speed limits. Observe lane discipline and signals. Don’t attract unwelcome attention. He takes the route out of town, the coast road east. Something ticking away at the back of his mind. Something not quite right. He’d browsed the lap-top files they’d compiled. The pattern of what they term “transfers”. According to the tree-chart they’ve assembled the entity had manipulated its way up the Matsu management structure by switching body-to-body. Leaving a trail of husks, suicides and accidental deaths. Maybe reusing an aspirational technique it had learned over centuries. In a time of chaos, war or revolution, it would be easy. Maybe in previous centuries it had been Hitler, Genghis Khan or Ivan the Terrible. Today it must be necessary for it to manufacture opportunities. It had been Matsu’s personal assistant. Think. It was one step away from the apex. Who booked the cab from Sharma? It did. Who knew exactly where the cab would be at its most vulnerable? It did.
“I must have messed up your plans, the way I reacted
when you were going in for the hit?”
Carl nods grimly. “It should have been straightforward. The police would have filed it as a mistaken gang-related drive-by shooting. But instead, you take off like it’s a high-speed movie chase-sequence, wrong way down the one-way. Yes, it threw us. Now there’s the hearing, no-one likes loose ends.”
“Sorry. It was just instinct.”
“It paid off. In a sense. Matsu’s money-transfer is complete, through untraceable intermediaries into an independent account, to be released as a monthly pension to your wife in perpetuity. Nothing can change that.”
A lay-by pulled in off the road some twenty miles from Brighton. And there ahead, close to the cliff-edge, a parked car. They slot in beside it, and wait. Beachy Head is close. 162-metres down to the freezing sea. Lennie sits in the back. Carl in the passenger seat. Until abruptly Lennie thrusts his arms through and around, across Dom’s chest, pinioning his arms to his side. Carl reaches across simultaneously. The sharp stab of a syringe in his arm. As the two men in black get out of the car he feels the familiar narcotic ice in his veins.
The occupant of the other car has also emerged. They’re pacing across to stand together beneath a close copse of trees. Dom watches, fighting the slow crawl of drugs in his body. Cross, and double-cross. Missing pieces fall into place. Both parties require closure. Neither want the hearing to go ahead. So Dom Hemming must assume the guilt, must take it all upon himself. Until he can take the self-recrimination no longer. And he suicides off the cliff into that freezing tide. He was known to be unstable, in a bad situation, a substance abuser. No need to hunt further for motive. It can take months before bodies are hauled out. Some are never found. Whatever, it’s done. The enquiry will be closed.
Matsu starts walking towards him as the other two climb into the empty car and rev. The world is melting around the edges. But being a narcotics connoisseur has its advantages. He can navigate his altered state, to a degree. Matsu opens the car door and looks down at him. The bad guy always gloats over his victim. It’s standard procedure. Small and rather portly, with reptilian eyes, although that might be the insight gifted him by the chemicals in his bloodstream. Yes, this is the man from the cab. He recalls Matsu, and the expression in those eyes as they opened, as they shocked open in pure terror. What he’d forgotten is that a second later the terror was replaced by smug satisfaction. The transfer complete. The parasite seated in its new host.