by Kim Curran
Aubrey was holding a cigarette up in front of her face. She rolled it around in her fingers, as if she was considering it. I’d seen her do it before.
“Why do you do that?” I asked.
She slipped the cigarette between her lips. “Do what?”
“Look at it, as if it’s the last smoke you’ll ever have?”
“Because that way, when I want to give up smoking, I can not only give up, but make all these tiny Shifts and not have smoked any. Neat huh?”
“Why don’t you just Shift and not have bothered with the very first one? Wouldn’t that be easier?”
“Well, some I might keep. Like the one I shared with Adam Jackson, for instance.”
“Well, I don’t think you should be smoking here. It’s disrespectful,” I snapped, feeling more jealous than angry.
“I think Heritage is beyond caring.” She pulled the cigarette out of her mouth and put it back in the packet anyway.
I chewed my lip, feeling helpless and angry at the same time. In the space of a week I’d seen two dead bodies. More than that, I’d see the brains of two dead bodies. The image of the guy on the Tube kept haunting me. I was having dreams each night about him reaching out to me. But I couldn’t help because when I looked down at my hands, they had become hooves and I had become a sheep. Warner would then laugh so hard that his head would explode, over and over. After seeing Heritage’s mangled body, I wasn’t looking forward to going to sleep tonight.
Besides the horror of it all, something else kept nagging at me. “Do you think the SLF did this?” I said.
“I don’t know. After that bomb, I wouldn’t put anything past them.”
“I’m starting to think that Warner, the guy on the Tube, wasn’t the bomber at all. I think they killed him too.”
“You said he was in his thirties?”
“Forty maybe?”
“Doesn’t sound like he was with the SLF to me.”
I heard the sound of clanking from the kitchen. “Do you think there’s anything we should do to help?”
“We’ll only get in his way,” Aubrey said, hugging her knees.
“We should probably check though.”
Aubrey shrugged and gave me her hand to pull her to her feet.
In the kitchen, Heritage had been stripped of his shirt and shoes and there were dark purple blotches all over his chest. Kepple was bent over the body, prodding the open skull with a wooden stick. The brains were making slurping noises. In his other hand the doctor held a small recording device and was speaking into it.
“The victim has had the cranium removed. However, judging by limited blood loss to the area, this does not appear to be the cause of death. In fact, I believe the procedure was carried out post-mortem. Going by the distinctive purple bruising to the victim’s chest, I would conclude that the actual cause of death was crush injuries.” He leaned in closer to the gaping skull and lifted a flap of skin away. “There are teeth marks around the brain and part of his brain seems to be missing. I will have to get a cast of the marks, but there appears to be two sets of teeth marks present. One are clearly feline, but… the other may be human in origin.”
Human? I thought. Someone has been munching on his brain?
“Have you seen anything like this before?” Aubrey asked.
Kepple looked up and blinked, as if only registering our presence for the first time. “Bluecoats, hmm? I hope you haven’t contaminated the crime scene.”
“We didn’t eat his brain, if that’s what you mean,” Aubrey snapped, while I looked embarrassed and hoped he wouldn’t notice where I’d thrown up.
The man harrumphed and went back to his examination. I stepped forward, trying to get a better look at the body. The initial shock had worn off and now it was like staring at a mannequin. Even the brains looked fake. Kepple was stroking Heritage’s face with a cotton bud swab and I noticed a soft shimmer on the dead man’s cheeks coming from what looked like a thin layer of dried slime.
“Is that from the cats?” I asked. Kepple grunted and carried on. “I guess not then.” I looked at Heritage’s hands and they had the same, soft sheen. As if they’d been coated in something gluey. Like saliva.
I shuddered and Aubrey looked up at me, her expression one of concern. I jerked my head to the side and raised my eyebrows. She got the hint and we both backed out of the kitchen silently, not wanting to disturb Kepple. Not that we should have worried. He was clearly a man who loved his work.
“What is it?” Aubrey asked when we were in the safety of the living room, only the cats to overhear us.
“I don’t know. Just a thought. Did you see the slime on his face?” Aubrey nodded. “Well, I bumped into this guy outside your flat, the day after we met. This fat, and I mean fat, guy.” I stretched my hands out as far as I could to indicate just how fat I meant.
“What about him?”
“He licked me. Licked my hand. And said something about wanting to eat me up. He also almost crushed me to death. If I hadn’t thrown up on him, I don’t think I would have escaped.”
“What is it with you and throwing up?”
“Hey, I’ve a delicate stomach. And you’d have been sick too if you’d smelt his stinking breath. It smelt like… well, it smelt like that guy in there. Like rotting flesh.”
“You think your fat man did this?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. It’s the stuff with the eating of the brain. And the licking.” I shuddered again.
“You should tell him.”
“Tell whom what?” Kepple appeared in the doorway behind us, and we both jumped.
“Er, it’s just that I was, threatened I suppose, well, he didn’t actually threaten me verbally, but I felt threatened–”
“What Scott is trying to say is that he thinks he may have encountered Mr Heritage’s killer.”
Kepple’s eyebrow raised a fraction. “Can you describe him?”
“He was pretty unforgettable.”
“Then you should give your report to the Regulators when they arrive. I am done here. An ambulance will be arriving shortly to bring the body to the morgue. Good day.” Without as much as a backward glance he left.
“Do you think he’s going to do anything about the fat man?”
“Well, it’s not really his job to go chasing after killers,” Aubrey said.
I wandered back into the kitchen. Kepple had placed a white sheet over the body giving the man some kind of dignity. The cats were perched on the surfaces, looking annoyed at us for taking their snack away. I felt Aubrey lean her head against my back.
“Can they, you know, stop this? Can someone Shift so he doesn’t have to die?”
“I don’t know. They’ll look at all the evidence. But we can’t turn back time. We can only undo our own decisions. If someone was thinking of visiting Mr Heritage a few days ago, but changed their mind, then maybe. But it’s not like you can go back with a warning or anything. As soon as you go back, the memory starts to fade.”
“Not always though,” I said, uncertain. I’d been worrying about why I was able to remember my old realities, when no one else seemed to be able to. “Sometimes it’s like when you wake up from a dream and you can just hold on to it, right?” I really hoped that I wasn’t alone in this.
Aubrey shrugged and shook her head. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t dream.”
I heard the whoop whoop of a siren and a black, unmarked car pulled up outside. We wandered out to meet it.
The guys from the Regulators were efficient enough as they took our statements. They even weren’t too condescending when I told them about my experience with the fat man.
“We’ll look into it,” they said. Before flipping closed their notepads. I assumed they’d do all that DNA stuff and track him down. That’s if it was his saliva, and not just cat spittle that was stuck to Heritage’s face. The ambulance Kepple had promised arrived shortly after and the body was carried away. Soon we were the only ones left in the house. Us and the cats.
“Who cares? Evil things.”
“Not the biggest cat fan then?” I’d always been rather fond of cats. I had one as a kid called Mr Tuffy that ran away. And I still checked every black cat I saw, just to see if it had a white spot on its nose, like mine had.
“They totally creep me out. It’s as if they know,” Aubrey said.
“Know what?” I asked.
“About the Shifts. It’s as if they can see all the realities at once. And they’re judging you for making the wrong choice. That, and they’re so bloody smug.”
She ran her fingers through her hair and sighed. “Come on. I’ll have to write this all up. What did I tell you?”
“Fieldwork blows?”
“Sure does.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Watching Aubrey type was an exercise in patience. Her two index fingers hovered above the keyboard, making small circling motions, as she tried to hunt out the next letter. She pounded each key as if worried it would run away.
I sighed as she struggled to find the n.
“What?” she said, looking up from her notes.
“I can’t believe you can’t type.”
Aubrey fixed me with one of her finest stares. Then started typing without taking her eyes off me. Words appeared on the screen without hesitation: “Scott Tyler is a moron.”
“You can type!” I said.
“Shudup,‘“Aubrey hushed, and hit the backspace deleting her typing.
“But why pretend?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
“Because if they know I can type forty words a minute I’ll end up with some ballache desk job after entropy. If they think I’m a complete luddite then I might be able to join the Regulators. So…” She pounded the n. I moaned again.
“You do it then.” She pushed away from her desk and waved me into place. With two hefts of my chair I positioned myself in front of the screen. Aubrey had started typing up her report on Heritage’s death. All she’d managed so far was to write his name, date of birth, date of death and one line.
In the course of my duty, along with First Class Shifter, Scott Tyler, I found Henry Heritage’s body in…
I looked down at her scribbled notes and flexed my hands over the keyboard.
“Is that an r?” I asked
She leant over to look. “It’s a k.”
“Your handwriting is terrible.”
“Look, if you’re going to be a dick about it, I’ll do it.” She pulled the notebook away and we played tug of war over it for a bit. I won in the end.
After a few minutes, Aubrey spun around on her chair, bored. “Do you want a drink?” she asked jumping out of the seat, leaving it spinning.
I nodded and continued to type. I was just about to hit save on the report when I got that weird, floating feeling I now knew meant a Shift was happening. I saw the words on the screen flicker and oscillate, like someone was switching between two channels on the TV. I focused in on one word ‘murder’ which kept being replaced by another: ‘suicide.’ The two words, the two realities, hung in place for a moment, fighting for dominance. And then the moment was gone. The Shift had taken place.
I looked at the screen and read the report. The report I knew I had written, just moments before, but it wasn’t the one I remembered.
In the course of my duty, along with Scott Tyler, Shifter First Class, I found Henry Heritage’s body in his kitchen. His wrists were slit and when Doctor Keppel arrived it was declared that he had committed suicide.
The new memory found its place in my mind. Aubrey and I had found Heritage’s body splayed on the kitchen floor, a stained kitchen knife lying next to him. But I knew that wasn’t how it had happened originally. Someone had made a Shift and I knew it wasn’t me. Someone was trying to erase the truth. Erase the old reality. But why a suicide? If they could make a Shift, why let Heritage die at all?
I resisted the new reality and tried to hold on to the thread of the old one. I felt it slipping away from me. Hands shaking, I grabbed Aubrey’s notebook and a pen and turned to a clean page. Before the last grain of the reality fell away I scrawled a note.
‘Heritage was murdered by the fat man.’
I underlined it. And then circled it for good measure.
A feeling of paranoia crept over me. I looked around at my fellow Bluecoats who were all engrossed in whatever they were doing. I tore the page out of the notebook, slipped it into my pocket and looked over at Aubrey.
She was in the kitchen in the middle of a conversation with a red-haired girl. They were standing, heads close, and their voices low. It looked like they were sharing some particularly juicy gossip. But whatever the girl was saying was nothing with what I had to tell her.
Aubrey paused in talking, as if she’d forgotten what she was about to say. It was only a brief hesitation. She looked up and away, then shook her head and went back to listening to the girl. I glared at her, trying to catch her eye, willing her to know what I knew. I risked a peek at the note again. The new reality was fighting hard to take hold, and if I didn’t keep a tight grip on the old one I knew it would slip away.
I hit save on the report and strode over to Aubrey.
She paused mid-sentence as I approached. “This is Scott,” she introduced me to her friend.
I nodded briefly and then grabbed Aubrey by the arm. “Sorry, but there’s something I need to, er…” I didn’t even bother with an excuse as I pulled Aubrey away. “We need to talk,” I whispered.
“Yeah, I guessed that,” Aubrey said. “Sara was just about to tell me all about her date with weird-hair guy, so this had better be good.”
I pulled her back to her desk and pointed at the screen.
“Well done, you’ve finished the report,” she said.
“Read it.”
She sighed and sat down in front of the screen. Her eyes darted across the lines.
“You’ve spelt Kepple wrong.”
“And that’s the only thing that seems off to you?”
“Well,” she hesitated. “I’m not sure. Something seems wrong, doesn’t it? A man as neat and tidy as him, slash his wrists like that. Seems a bit weird.”
I reached into my pocket and handed her my note. She read it. And read it again. She stood up and pulled me into the corridor, leaving the soft clatter of the office behind.
“Scott, what are you on about? It was a suicide.”
“Not five minutes ago it wasn’t.”
“But we found him three hours ago.”
“Didn’t you sense it? Sense the Shift?” She looked blankly at me, so I carried on. “I was typing up the report. Your report. About how we found him lying on the kitchen floor with the top of his head missing. That wasn’t a suicide. Unless it was the most elaborate one ever. But now, there’s this other image where he did kill himself.”
“Someone Shifted?” She sounded uncertain and confused as I was.
“Yes!” I said. “Please remember.”
“I remember us going in and seeing the blood. And he was lying there. And the cats.”
“Yes, the cats! They were licking at his brains.”
“And you were sick.” She pointed at me, her eyes wide. “Oh god, I can sort of remember.”
“Like a dream, right?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Yeah, you don’t dream. But look, someone is trying to cover this up.”
“The murderer maybe?”
“We should tell Morgan. Actually, forget him, I’m telling Abbott. He’s the only one with any sense around here.”
“No,” Aubrey said sharply. “No,” she repeated, softer this time. “We need to think about this more. No one can know that we know.” She had that same scared look in her eyes I remembered from the time ARES came to take me away from her flat.
“You don’t trust Abbot?”
“It’s not that I don’t trust him, Scott. It’s just…” She sighed. “It’s jus
t that he was the one who took me away from home. He told me that everything would be OK and I believed him.”
“Oh, but I’m sure he meant–”
“Who is the fat man?” she said, cutting me off and looking down at the note again. It shook in her hands.
I told her about my run in with him outside her flat.
“And you didn’t tell me about some Shifter-hunting crazy on the loose?” Aubrey said, thumping me in the arm.
“Ouch! Yeah… sorry. I sort of forgot about him. All I could think about was making sure my sister was alive.”
Aubrey shook her head at me. “You’re sure it was him?”
“It was the saliva on Heritage’s face. It just made me think that maybe–”
The door opened and we both jumped. A girl walked into the corridor and we looked at her, and she looked at us. We must have looked pretty suspicious as her eyes narrowed.
“Look, I’m very flattered,” Aubrey said. “But you’re not my type.”
The girl smiled and looked at her feet. “Excuse me,” she said as she walked past.
I waited till she’d gone. “What did you said that for?”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“You could have said, yes, you’d love to go out with me. That would have worked just as well.”
“Yeah, right,” she said, and snorted.
I threw my hands up in despair. Aubrey ignored me and reread the note. “Heritage must have got himself into some serious trouble to have been killed by a Shifter. First there’s your guy on the Tube and now this.”
“Both were seen with the SLF and both were left with half their heads missing,” I said.
“We need to find out what is going on.”
I wanted to protest. Wanted to point out that if we went sniffing around this mess then maybe we’d wind up as mysterious suicides as well. But I knew that Aubrey would think me a coward. So I kept quiet.
“Can you remember what the fat man looked like?”
“He was pretty unforgettable,” I told her, a vague memory of saying the same thing to Dr Kepple earlier, before the Shift changed our conversation.
“Good,” she said and walked away.