by Simon Clark
The train was due in ten minutes. Just time to get to an ATM for some more cash. Life on the road, sleeping in a van, being tracked by Echomen does mad things to your head. I’d lost track of how much money I had so for whole moments I stared as the screen blinked ‘Insufficient Funds’. I have sufficient funds, I told myself. I had the machine print me a statement of my last dozen transactions. There you have it … I’d left my old life in the city in a rush. So, I’d not cancelled the bank debits. The bulk of the cash had gone on a month’s rent for rooms I no longer lived in – and would never see again.
I could have eaten a bag of coffee beans right then, never mind drinking a cup. A night without sleep, the battle with the trucker Echoman, had left me with a craving for caffeine. But without so much as a coin in my pocket all I could do was return to the bench on the platform, stare at my puddle of spilt coffee and wait for the train.
The train arrived in my hometown of Tanshelf at midday. If a supreme Being does control the weather then that Being had decided that despite all the lousy stuff that had had happened to me in the last three weeks I still looked too perky for my own good, so the heavens opened wide to dump their deluge on me. Without money for a taxi or bus back home, or even enough for a coffee in the station café I had to stand in the overhang of the town hall as rain blasted the streets like liquid gunfire. Tanshelf is a market town. If you ever doubted that this was a place farmers brought their harvests and livestock to trade, the street names and tavern names would beat that pernicious doubt right out of you. Where I stood beneath the canopy, I could look through the falling water at streets that radiated from the town square – Beastfair, Horsefair, Oatsfair, Cattlefair, Oxfair, Goosefair, Swinesfair (‘fair’ being the old English word for market). Then the taverns that comprise a fair-sized chunk of the town’s businesses allude to a market heritage, too – Beastfair Vaults, The Drovers, The Ancient Shepherd, The Lamb, The White Swan (known locally as The Mucky Duck), The Wheatsheaf and so on.
The weather played jokes on me. Rain suddenly eased. Blue sky appeared over the Corn Exchange so I set off on what would be a half-hour walk to my mother’s house. Only I’d gone a mere twenty paces when the rain blasted along the street again, driving shoppers inside and me into something called The Buttercross. This is an archaic structure in the town square where merchants would make their deals. It comprises eight stone pillars that hold aloft a tiled roof. The open archways don’t keep the wind out but it keeps the rain off. I ducked inside. In its centre, a wooden bench that’s maybe twenty feet long. The only other person in there was the town vagrant. He’d occupied the place for the last thirty years, so I recognized him from childhood when I’d cross the market square to catch my bus home. I can’t remember his real name but everyone called him Old Snotter.
Now here was Old Snotter lying on the opposite end of the bench where I now sat waiting for the rain to abate. Old Snotter hadn’t changed. He had a huge ginger beard that hid most of his face. Ginger eyebrows bushed over his eyes. More ginger hair stuck out from under a baseball cap. The impression you got was of a big gingery orangutan. You couldn’t really tell what clothes he wore because he made a kind of overall out of black plastic sacks. He tied one each around his legs, then he tore holes in another for his arms and head and pulled it over his torso like it was a glossy black fetish T-shirt. You never talk to Old Snotter. He never talks to you. Old Snotter lives in his own alcoholic world a billion miles from planet Earth.
So I waited for it to stop raining. As I waited it sank into me that I was back in Tanshelf for the first time in half a year. All those months ago I crossed this very square to the station, no doubt Old Snotter had been snoozing here on the bench, then I boarded the train that carried me to capital city where I had well-paid work making TV for the internet. For six months I laboured hard all day, crafted films that won praise and (more importantly for my boss) premium rates for the piggy-back commercials. I lived a permanent state of NOW. When I wasn’t shooting with my camera I was at parties with friends; the kind of parties that never seemed to have a beginning or an end. Sometimes I left a party in the morning, worked all day then returned to the same party at night that was still blazing along. Then three weeks ago, the world I believed was relatively sane, stable and set to continue in its rock-solid orbit went pffft!
So here I am back in Tanshelf, I told myself. If it’s not overly poetic this is a place paved not merely in Yorkshire stone but with memories. Over there by the bus stop is where I won my first real kiss from a girl. Outside The Mucky Duck, that’s where I threw up so violently after my first boozy night my watch strap broke, and I carried my vomit-smeared watch home in my pocket. I found it glued to the lining in the morning. As I sat there on the bench near Old Snotter, with the rain hissing against the roads, I marvelled at how Tanshelf town looked so familiar, yet so strange, even though it had only been six months. There was an iron sculpture of a tree where Tony Allen climbed to impress a girl and all his money fell out of his pockets. The coins went rolling everywhere; a bunch of ten year olds pounced on them before vanishing into the back alleyways.
The church clock chimed one. I’d been sat there for an hour. Old Snotter still snoozed on the bench. The muscles in my rump were aching from being perched on those antique bench timbers that had accommodated rear-ends for the last hundred years or more. Through swirling rain one of the natives of Tanshelf would come hurrying across the square to briefly appear before vanishing again. On one occasion I was sure the old mummy, Natsaf-Ty, loomed through the mist of raindrops. I fancied I glimpsed the arid, red face (magically protected from the wet), the closed eyes, the tongue protruding slightly from the lips, the slow-motion movements of the withered arms and legs. Only the dark figure veered off to disappear into the storm before I had it in clear view.
‘Natsaf-Ty?’ It was a half-hearted call on my part. I knew he’d already gone. The bench quivered as Old Snotter turned over on it as if he rolled over in bed. His suit of black plastic sacks made scrunching sounds as he wriggled to make himself comfortable again on the concrete hard wood. Ginger beard tufts stuck up in spikes, they’d been stiffened by who knows what. My backside ached like fury from sitting there for an hour. Old Snotter must have anesthetized himself good. A green bottle with a couple of inches of liquor waited within his reach on the stone slabs.
As water cascaded down I watched cars crash through flash floods in Beastfair, Swinefair, Goosefair and the rest. What buildings I could see through the swirling murk had their own cache of memories I could evoke. The bookshop where I had a Saturday job when I was at college. In my mind’s eye I could see myself walking through the doors to check out the latest releases before taking my bag of sandwiches upstairs to put them in the fridge until lunch. Next to that was the bank that was held up at gunpoint five years ago. Now it was a coffee house. The memories still ran through my head when the church clock chimed twice. Two o’clock. The pain in my backside from the bench lit bonfires inside of me. I stood up and thought I saw Natsaf-Ty’s dusty flesh looking at me from the entrance to the bookshop. When I took a closer look I saw it was a woman in a brown jacket waiting for a break in the rainstorm. As for me, I’d been sheltering under the Buttercross canopy for the best part of two hours. It’s times like that, when you’ve nothing to occupy your mind, that it falls prey to all those anxieties you hide away. Now the lack of money began to bother me. I should have cancelled the payments for the rent and utilities. Now they’ve cleared out my account. I’ve no job anymore. There’s a couple of hundred in an old saver’s account, but I need to give a month’s notice to get hold of that. Maybe I should have listened to Ulric and the others and not come home after all. But what kind of life is that? Sleeping in the back of a van, or breaking into an empty house to steal time in someone else’s bed and eat their food until we have to move on. If I go to the police, what then? How can I convince them Echomen not only exist but are a threat? I stared into a puddle that featured never-ending expanding rings
as drips fell into it from the roof. But think it through, Mason. You tell the police, then what? They don’t call in SWAT they call in the psychiatric duty doctor. Then they make some enquiries after I tell them what happened. First of all that leads the cops to the truck driver who fell under the wheels of his rig when he attacked me. My prints will be on the door handles, my DNA will saturate the spearmint gum in the trash bag hanging from the hook in the cabin. Hell, come to that my DNA will be under the dead guy’s fingernails. There’s a scratch he made when he grabbed the back of my neck. Would the Y-shaped scar on the back of the trucker’s hand be enough to prove that some bizarre spontaneous cloning was taking place? I laughed. There was precious little fun in the laughter, because I knew that rather than being celebrated as a monster-killer, I’d be shot full of sedative and sat before the TV in a psychiatric ward at Tanshelf General Hospital. The church clock struck the quarter-hour. The doom-laden chime died on the rain-soaked town. Fried food smells drifted from cafés. When had I eaten last? Pizza? It had to be the pizza last night. We ate two pizzas each. That seemed such a long time ago. Ruth had shown me the Echoman’s head that wore my face. It seemed unreal now. Had the last three weeks really happened? Or did I fall asleep on the train home then dream it all?
A pair of bikes flashed across the square ridden by girls who rang their bells for the sheer joy of it.
‘Rain.’ I muttered the word as if I had to say it to believe it. Then, at last, the cloud turned from grey to white. The buildings were glossy as if they’d been given an instant coat of varnish. The rain made the roads glisten, too. But, at last, the storm had passed. Now for the walk home. Until that moment I hadn’t thought of how I’d explain my sudden reappearance to my mother. I stepped over the big puddle that hosted the spectacle of ever-expanding rings of water. I’d easily cleared the inch deep puddle when all of a sudden I was toppling backward again. A second later I slammed down into it with a splash. The instant I realized someone had attacked me was the same instant that the sky was blacked out as a heavy shape pressed down on my face as I lay there. When I tried to shout out I felt a smooth plastic sheet with my tongue. The smell of old perspiration mixed with stale booze raced up my nostrils to provoke my stomach into retching spasm. Only I couldn’t breathe. Old Snotter’s homemade plastic suit had sealed off my airways. The weight of the tramp felt like tons rather than pounds. The force of falling, that and rapping my skull on the flagstones, fucked up any chance of figuring out what had happened exactly, other than Old Snotter had dragged me off balance and now appeared to be trying to suffocate me with his great slab of a chest. Beating his back with my free arm was useless. My other arm was pinned beneath my own body. Kicking my legs was easy to do but fruitless. A lot of fireworks started spitting sparks inside my head. My heart ached it beat so hard. For a moment I was sitting on the stairs at home again. I was ten years’ old and asking wise old Natsaf-Ty who sat on his habitual third step, ‘How old do you think I’ll be when I die?’
I tried to bite his chest flesh through the sack but all I managed to do was taste salt and dirt on the plastic membrane that he’d wrapped himself in. I wasn’t up to asking myself why he’d attacked me, only that I’d come all this way to die at the age of twenty-eight, in Tanshelf’s town square on a wet Monday in April. Old Snotter’s body movements became more convulsive. Then I saw light. Old Snotter was rising away from me. All of a sudden the air rushed back into my lungs. My coughing sounded more like barking as I sat up in the puddle. Three guys were dragging Old Snotter off of me. They were shouting to each other to hold on to him. A moment later, however, he twisted out of their grip. After that there was a glossy black blur as he raced away into the back alleyways.
‘Did you see the old devil run?’ One my rescuers had nothing less than admiration in his voice. ‘He’s at death’s door but he moves like a greyhound.’
One of the others pulled me to my feet. ‘What did you do to Old Snotter? That must be the first time he’s turned vicious on anyone.’
I wiped puddle water from my face. ‘I’ve never seen him talk to anyone never mind want to wrestle.’ Old Snotter’s taste clung to my tongue. That had to be the least pleasant thing I’ve ever had in my mouth. ‘Thanks, by the way.’
‘You’re local, then? You know him?’
‘I used to see him every time I came into town.’ I wished I had something to rinse my mouth. ‘Old Snotter … all he ever did was sit or lie on the bench. That and drink himself to sleep.’
The three men were dressed in blue, mechanics’ overalls. They were bemused by the man’s sudden violence.
‘What did you do? Try to steal his bottle?’
I shook my head. ‘I never touched him.’
‘He’s certainly taken a dislike to you.’
‘Dislike? He tried to kill me.’ As I recovered my senses I realized what had happened. He’d been too close to me. He’d turned Echo, too. This’s getting bad. They had never changed so quickly before.
‘He wasn’t trying to kill you.’ One of the mechanics picked up my wallet from the ground. ‘Old Snotter was after your money.’
The other mechanic disagreed. ‘He’s never stolen before. To my knowledge anyway.’
‘Believe me,’ I told them. ‘He wanted to kill me.’
They exchanged glances, not sure what to do next.
‘We should report it to the police,’ said one.
‘No,’ I disagreed quickly; no doubt too quickly because they were surprised by my reaction. ‘No. I must have woken him in the middle of a bad dream.’
They laughed, secretly relieved that they wouldn’t get involved with giving witness statements.
‘Yeah, it’ll be something like that,’ said one of the men.
‘He probably saw you as a pink elephant,’ added another.
The third still had doubts. ‘It was Old Snotter, wasn’t it? He moved fast for someone as decrepit as he is.’
‘Sure it was.’
‘But Snotter’s got that dirty great ginger beard. Didn’t the guy who attacked you have short dark hair?’
‘It had to be Old Snotter,’ another of the mechanics said. ‘Smelt like him. And he was wearing his plastic suit.’
‘Whoever it was he’s gone,’ I added. ‘And thanks again. I appreciate it.’ I held out my hand and shook each of theirs in turn. Suddenly I felt uneasy to be in the company of others. If this process was speeding up, was I the cause? Was I infecting people? Of course, I was the architect of another problem. I’d decided to go home. Wouldn’t the same happen to them?
chapter 6
These thoughts: Am I doing the right thing? Of course I’m NOT doing the right thing! I’m going home to my mother and my sister. This ‘event’ – whatever it is that’s happening to me – is going nuclear; it’s just exploding into something else. If I get too close to another person – and that includes sitting ten feet from a total stranger then STRANGE things start happening. They start turning into me. They become my physiological echo.
But the simple action of going home rips any doubts out of my head and kicks them out of the arena. I’m home! My mother and sister are so thrilled to see me they look as if they could burst. Add to that I’m so exhausted I could hardly keep on my feet. And did I mention hungry? The emptiness in my stomach was a painful void.
‘Mason, why didn’t you phone to let us know you were coming home?’
I muttered that I’d been given a couple of days’ leave from work at short notice and wanted to surprise them. ‘They’re refitting the studio.’ The reason was vague yet faintly plausible. ‘Wires all over the place.’
‘I’ve stripped your bed, all the sheets are back in the loft.’
Eve, my twenty-year-old sister, was as delighted as my mother to see me. Suddenly the practical one, she shrugged away problems. ‘My spare bedding’s in the cupboard. Mason can use that.’
‘Pillows?’
‘He can use my new one.’
‘And there’s his cloth
es.’
‘New toothbrush … clean towels in the blanket box.’
Eve and my mother live together in the house. I could see they’d forged such a tight-knit team they anticipated what the other would say and had formed a vocal shorthand, which they understood but left me flagging. Even so, I knew they’d got everything I needed to make me comfortable.
My mother checked her watch. ‘If I go by four I can get to the butcher in time for him to cut me some nice sirloin.’
‘Whoa,’ I broke in. ‘Don’t go rushing around after me. I’ll be fine. A frozen pizza will—’
‘Not on your life.’ She grinned with such happiness it made her face light up. ‘We’ll have steak and potatoes, then cheesecake. You’ll want a beer with that, won’t you?’
‘It’s not necessary, really. I didn’t come home to put you to all this trouble.’
‘It’s no trouble. I’ll go now. Do I need a coat? No, I’ll risk it.’
Eve saw I was more than a little tatty around the edges. ‘You look as if you’ve walked all the way here from London.’
‘Only from town.’
My mother must have seen the stubble along with the dark rings under my eyes, but she was wise enough not to start a reunion with questions that could be construed as criticism. ‘Right. I’ve got my keys … purse. Eve, can you make your brother a coffee and a sandwich to keep him going until dinner? There’s chocolate cake, too, I’m sure he won’t turn that down.’
‘Unless London’s turned him funny.’ Eve pitched it as a joke but she kept doing this double-take of me that suggested I’d changed after living away from home.
That’s my mother, Delph, and sister, Eve. My mother could pass for mid-thirties. She has short blonde hair that’s so unfashionably curly that it drives Eve to distraction (with plenty of ‘Mother, you’re not going out with me looking like that.’). Personality-wise, Mom’s light-hearted, good at making jokes, very good at comic impersonations of people – not anybody you’ve ever heard of; she mimics some of our odder neighbours, family members, people she’s seen in the supermarket. She’s so good at it that she’s had us choking with laughter. As mother and father rolled into one, with her being a single parent, she can unblock drains, change car tyres, cook amazing meals (but hates fiddly baking ‘I haven’t time to do fancy’ she’d tell us). Perhaps her nicest trait is to be so likeable that she could make a neighbour’s day just by chatting to them over a fence. Eve, at twenty is at college as a mature student. She’d left school for office work then realized qualifications do help career advancement. Though she’d deny it, she’d begun to resemble our mother a heck of a lot – not the blonde, frizzy hair though. Even from the age of twelve Eve took the trouble to straighten her long dark hair. Once I even caught her using the iron to flatten it against the table. Eve seemed even taller and slimmer than the last time I’d seen her. When she stood beside our mother I could see she beat her regarding height.