by Simon Clark
‘They’ll be sore,’ I told her. ‘But they’ve only just broken the skin.’
‘They don’t want to hurt you yet,’ she said.
‘I wouldn’t gamble on it staying that way.’ I helped her with the T-shirt.
‘You called me a crash-test dummy.’ Her dark eyes were unnerving. ‘They’re going to keep hurting me, aren’t they?’
‘Madeline.’ I stepped back from her but kept my hand on her arm. ‘For the time being, I’ll protect you.’
‘For the time being?’
‘It’s hard to explain, you’re changing. Soon you’ll want to hurt me.’
‘Mason.’ She was hurt by my suggestion. ‘I’d never hurt you.’
‘You might think that now …’ I shrugged.
She held my gaze for a second, then, ‘When you were asleep I saw someone standing right where you are now.’
‘Go on.’ For some reason a shiver ran down my spine.
‘It was too dark to see him properly. There was something strange about him. I don’t know how he entered the cell and he kept very still.’
‘Did he say anything?’
She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t make out any features; it was just a figure … or a suggestion of a figure. Very indistinct, but it made me feel strange when I saw him. Like I was losing my balance.’ Recalling the visitor appeared to trouble her so after shaking her head again as if to dispel the disturbing memory she took hold of my hand so she could compare it with hers. The Y-shaped scars matched perfectly. ‘We both have the same scar. I’ve never had a scar there before. Inside me I feel unreal. It’s a way I’ve never felt before. What I can see of my body is changing, too.’
‘That doesn’t strike you as freakish?’
‘I know that it should but it doesn’t.’ She released my hand as if reluctant to do so. ‘Mason? You think the change is going to go deeper than my features changing, don’t you?’
‘If you’re talking about gender?’ Once again I shrugged. ‘The things I’ve seen in the last three weeks have been so strange I shouldn’t be at all surprised if I have to start calling you mister in the next few hours.’
‘I won’t change my sex. It doesn’t work like that.’
‘How do you know?’
‘When we’re conceived we are neither male nor female. It’s only when the embryo has been in the womb for a number of weeks that the sex of the child is triggered. I was born female, Mason. There’s no reason I’ll change spontaneously.’
‘So you’ll be my identical twin. Only a female identical twin.’ I grimaced. ‘If human biology has gone so topsy-turvy then anything’s possible.’ I’d barely got ‘possible’ through my lips when a crash sounded from above. We both looked up. At any moment we expected to find the sharpened broom handles jabbing down into our faces. As always the glare of the lights was too intense to see much other than flitting silhouettes. Only then came another crash. On the other side of the bars appeared a face. I didn’t recognize the man. His blue eyes were like fire as they blazed down at me from a distance of a foot. I drew Madeline toward me to protect her the best I could if they attacked. Only it wasn’t us they attacked.
They were holding the stranger face down on the bars of the cage that formed our ceiling. There they beat him. Whether it was with sticks, or whether it was kicks I don’t know. For ten minutes they gave him their undivided attention. His eyes were wide open all the time, staring down in shock at us, as if he was indignant beyond belief they were doing this to him. The blows were loud; his face jolted to the rhythm of the beating. Soon he howled loud enough to shake Natsaf-Ty’s old bones in Tanshelf Museum. The noise could have been akin to that made by a buffalo tangled in razor wire. An impossibly loud bellowing with hardly an intake of breath. Blood released by the man’s wounds dripped through the bars on to the white tiled floor. I had ample time during the attack to speculate. The stranger was an Echoman, that’s what I figured anyway. By now I began to suspect I saw a certain look in their eye that gave them away. As the man made the bovine bellowing I found myself gazing dispassionately at the face as it became a visual expression of the agony he felt as his bones snapped.
Why do Echomen destroy their own? Could it be they don’t understand that a human body can only survive so much physical injury? Did that indicate whatever created the Echomen weren’t familiar with human beings? Were they punishing the man for a misdemeanour? Had he avoided some chore? Was this an experiment to test the human body to destruction? If so, why conduct the experiment so me and my doppelganger room-mate could witness it? Did they beat one of their own to demonstrate what they could inflict on me when they decided it was my time to suffer? Or, and this suggested their ignorance of human psychology, did they mutilate the man in front of me to encourage me to do the same to Madeline? You’ve watched a TV cookery programme and become ravenous when they set the sizzling steak on the plate, haven’t you? So, did the Echo mind believe that this was a way to stimulate my appetite for violence?
Think again, you idiot monsters.
After they delivered a hundred or so whacks with great gusto the man stopped doing his impression of an adenoidal buffalo that had ripped itself with razor wire. Blood dripped from his mouth; he had difficulty focusing his eyes. After a moment or two the flitting silhouettes above us dragged him away. The lights went out.
We slept. Once I opened my eyes to see Natsaf-Ty ‘looking’ down at me through those closed eyelids. I recalled the old fairy-tale where a man has such powerful sight that he can look through the world. To see normally he must bandage his eyes. Natsaf-Ty has a stare that can peer into every hidden corner of your mind. At this moment I can’t remember if I ever pulled the legs off a spider when I was a child. No doubt Natsaf-Ty could peruse my memories to confirm whether or not I did mutilate arachnids.
When the light returned it shone at a different angle. This time the light beams were horizontal, not vertical. They didn’t illuminate us in our cell, they revealed a figure standing on the steel grid roof. Posing there, as if for a formal photograph, was a boy of around eleven years of age.
‘Dear God,’ I breathed.
‘Do you recognize him?’ Madeline asked.
I nodded. ‘Me. Or rather me as a child.’
‘Then don’t watch what they do to him.’
The boy stood above us on the bars in such a position that I could clearly see the face with the dark-brown eyes and the dark arches of the eyebrows that were distinctively mine even back then. The boy didn’t move. The building was silent.
Only after several minutes had elapsed did the boy move back into darkness. His place was taken by a man of at least fifty. He had white hair but his eyebrows were strikingly black arches above his brown eyes.
‘What’s this?’ A bitterness crept into my voice. ‘The seven ages of man?’
‘They’re showing versions of you at different ages. You as a boy; you as a middle-aged man.’
I growled, ‘They’re mistaken if they think this is going to break me.’
The middle-aged man standing on the cage bars held out his hand.
‘Same scar.’ My voice was matter-of-fact. ‘You’re going to have to do better than that,’ I told my invisible captors. Then I sat down with my back to the wall and paid no attention to what happened above my head.
chapter 15
The lamps stayed lit.
‘Come on, work with me, Madeline. Why are they doing this to us?’
‘To provoke us to react.’
‘That’s it, don’t you get the feeling they’re testing us?’
‘They’re setting challenges.’
Our voices shimmered in a swimming pool that had been converted into our prison. After watching the guy being beaten to a pile of crimson crap we started talking; whispers at first; whispers came a buzz. Now we talked loudly, not caring if the Echomen were making notes. This was a brainstorming session that had set us on fire. We were upbeat, enthusiastic. Here we are: Madeline is naked apart
from the T-shirt. Her bare legs move endlessly as she paces barefoot on the tile. That pacing bug has me, too. We walk, we pitch ideas, bounce phrases, get the conversation simmering merrily. Our eyes are bright, thoughts blaze inside our heads.
‘So what do we know about the Echomen? One?’ I held up a finger.
Madeline answered in a flash. ‘They are outwardly normal people who turn into replicas of others. Two?’
‘The change is physical and mental. Our minds begin to overlap. Three?’
‘Initially, they are friendly. Then they become hostile.’
‘Right. The copy desires to kill the original. Four?’
‘We know the change begins within minutes of the stranger being infected.’
I paused. ‘So the process is a result of a virus?’
‘A virus, or something like a virus. Five?’
‘Why?’
‘Why is this happening?’
‘In the natural world there’s a reason for everything.’
She rested her thumb against her bottom lip. ‘Invasion?’
‘From where?’
‘From another planet?’ She shrugged. ‘Another dimension?’
‘OK, it’s only speculation, but go with the idea.’
Madeline continued to pace. ‘All right. Imagine this: In the past, societies have suffered, sometimes even collapsed, when a more technologically sophisticated people come along.’
I rested my thumb on my bottom lip. ‘The superior society might not be hostile; they aren’t invading the less advanced people, but they might as well have slaughtered them anyway.’
‘Absolutely, the end result is the same. The less advanced of the two societies feels inferior. They lose their drive to achieve goals. Rather than follow their traditional route in life they either become a shadow of their former selves as their settlements decline into squalor, or—’
‘Or they are absorbed by the dominant society and become exactly like them, adopting their belief systems, culture, currency—’
‘They’ll even dress the same.’ She ran her fingers through her hair as the ideas came faster. ‘So what scenario do you have?’
‘Echomen are a weapon.’
‘Sent by?’
‘An alien civilization.’
‘How?’
‘They seeded the earth with spores or a virus millions of years ago, so they’d lie dormant until they were needed?’
‘Why are they needed now?’
‘Human beings are becoming technologically advanced. We can travel to other planets.’
‘But not the stars?’
‘Not yet.’ The heat of certainty flooded my veins. ‘Not in spaceships but our TV and radio signals have been washing through the galaxy for a hundred years.’
‘So, if there are life-forms out there they know we’re here. And that we might pose a threat to them?’
‘Exactly.’ I slammed my hand against the overhead bars of the cage. They rang like a huge bell. ‘OK, these alien creatures might be the peace-loving, stay-at-home kind of guys, but they know what we know, which is?’
‘When two cultures meet the strongest destroys the weakest.’
‘It may not be through war or any kind of hostility but that’s the outcome. Regardless of how benevolent the most powerful civilization is, it results in the death of the inferior society.’
‘So they send the Echomen.’
‘Exactly.’ Triumph at finding the answer blazed inside of me. ‘But they haven’t sent them in the conventional sense of dispatching an invading army. No, the aliens can’t risk coming to Earth in person, so they leave the Echo virus here.’
‘How does that keep the alien home planet safe?’ she asked.
‘Because the little green men with their bug eyes, we can picture them like that if it helps, because they know from our TV broadcasts that eventually we’ll build spaceships and find their planet. Then either human beings or ETs will be wiped out. It doesn’t matter if we go in peace and they receive us in peace, the dominant society will cause the inferior one to atrophy and eventually die out. So the ETs plant their time-bomb virus on any planet that develops life. Therefore, the Echomen’s purpose is—’
‘To cause chaos.’
‘That’s right.’ A smile spread across my face. ‘It’s not necessary for the aliens to conquer us. The Echo virus has a simple agenda: infect us; replicate humans; cause chaos; create disruption; spread disharmony.’
She clapped her hands together at the revelation. ‘So we’ll be too busy trying to clean up the mess the Echomen make we won’t have the time or the resources to even contemplate travelling beyond the solar system. Wait …’ She gripped my arm. ‘Mason? This theory explains so many things …’
I grinned. ‘Our Echo theory? As titles go it needs work.’
‘But aren’t you thinking what I’m thinking? Terrorists, hijackings, drug-trafficking, credit-card fraud, computer viruses – they are engines for chaos. All of them! Mason, this has been happening for years. What if good people have been replaced by evil copies?’
I scratched my head but I was still smiling. ‘You mean Hitler really was a peaceful art-lover who was replaced by a duplicate of himself; one hell bent on destroying civilization?’
‘Didn’t Hitler very nearly succeed?’
‘I agree.’ The smile died on my face the same time as an immense coldness crept inside of me. ‘I agree with you. You agree with me.’ Madeline beamed at me like this was the happiest moment of her life. ‘Madeline, you used a phrase a few seconds ago: “aren’t you thinking what I’m thinking?” Bingo.’ I took a step closer. ‘Hit me.’
‘What?’
‘Hit me?’
‘Why?’
‘Surely you know?’
She shook her head.
‘I told you to hit me.’ I added a fake smile to my face. ‘It’s part of our Echo theory. It’ll prove what we talked about is true.’
Madeline appeared puzzled but this time she nodded.
‘OK.’ I presented my face to her. ‘Make it a good one. I really, really want to feel it.’
The slap stung all right. She was no weakling. As I flinched at the pain of the blow Madeline cried out at that same moment. In a second she covered her cheek with her hand; her eyes were watering; the pain brought a trembling spasm that shook her entire body.
My hand rested against my burning cheek. ‘It’s like looking into a mirror, isn’t it? No … it’s more than that. We agreed so eagerly with each other because when it comes down to it we weren’t talking to each other. We’re two heads with a single mind.’
The hand she pressed against her sore face bore the Y-shaped scar. She’d slapped me yet she’d felt the sting, too. Fear returned to her eyes.
‘You’re an Echo.’ I jabbed my finger at her. ‘And I’ve been stupid enough to let my guard down.’ I strode away to the far end of the cell.
When the voice started I thought I imagined it. This was a time of evil miracles. When normality was wrung inside out and made to do weird things. Echoboys, Echogirls. The stranger who became me. Or was it vice-versa? They hadn’t switched off the lights, yet at that moment there was a darkness there in our swimming-pool prison. Shadows wormed their way from the walls. The light from above cast net-shaped patterns on my skin. The tiled floor had become a criss-cross pattern of light and dark. The darkness was winning. I realized that now. Those fucking inept monsters, the things we’d laughingly called Echomen (well, there was an element of desperation in that laughter) – whatever – the Echomen had proved easy to identify, then almost embarrassingly easy to kill. So easy, in fact, that I sometimes wondered if Paddy’s gang were murdering innocent men and women. All that had changed. The Echomen had captured me. They imprisoned me here with their own version of the crash-test dummy, Madeline. Other than being female she’s an identical version of me. We think alike, we look alike. Picture the beautiful children we could spawn. That thought made me laugh out loud – such cold, dark laught
er. As dark as those shadows that flowed into the swimming pool. Shadows like that can drown a man. And now I hear a voice whispering my name. The shadows bring paranoia. The Echomen are winning. My mind’s cracking. The Echo theory? The one about intelligent life from another planet being so insecure that they create chaos on neighbouring worlds. Sweet Moses on a motorcycle! That had seemed so cogent, so accurate. It explained terrorist atrocities. You could even apply it to the cyber saboteurs who disseminate viruses on the internet. Echomen are on a quest to cause chaos. To disrupt society. To interfere with technological progress. And maybe, in the name of a borrowed faith, to load into the backs of ice-cream trucks black-market nuclear bombs: then drive them into the heart of your hometown and …
… and why haven’t I concentrated my efforts on escaping this place? Here I am in a makeshift prison cell built in the swimming pool of my old school. If I haven’t tried to escape, does that mean that there’s an Echoman inside my head? Not Madeline. Another one – another version of me – close by … feeding me ideas … suppressing thoughts of getting away … suggesting that I walk down to where Madeline leans against the wall in that T-shirt that barely touches the tops of her thighs. And what? Have sex? Even now I’m picturing kissing her face and her breasts. There’s a fiery heat inside of me. I’m imagining the sense of release it could give me if I could pump that excess heat into her cool belly. Isn’t that what she craves anyway?
‘Mason … Mason …’
Whispers rode the back of shadow. With the phantom whisperer I expected to see Natsaf-Ty. Maybe this time he’d bring those sacred crocodiles he was entrusted with way back in ancient Egypt. The mental image of the mummy with a line of high-stepping crocs wasn’t exactly amusing; even so, my head swam as if I’d taken a hefty swallow of brandy. ‘Get out of my head,’ I muttered. ‘I know you’re trying dig your way in there. You want my memories, don’t you? You’re not content with looking like me, you want me body and mind.’ My mutters were directed at the unseen copy of me that I suspected lurked nearby.