by Lee Thomas, Gary McMahon, S. G. Browne, Michael Marshall Smith
As if he wanted to make a point of not smoking.
These thoughts took a short time to run through my head. Someone who looked like me had stolen one of my books, and sat here. He'd drunk beer, but hadn't smoked any cigarettes.
Someone who looked like me, but didn't smoke.
Someone who looked exactly like me.
I couldn't call Considine again. Or... could I? I should, surely. This kind of thing was his job. I took a nervous sip of beer. Whoever this guy was, he was spiralling closer. He was trying to send a message. About what, I wasn't sure. I suddenly knew what he was trying to do, however. He was starting to intermingle his life with mine, to the point where some of the blame for the terrible things he'd done would start to seep toward me.
The real blame wouldn't be mine, of course, but if he began to be seen where I should be seen, then he was making me a part of it. Our lives would become seamless, we would become the same person, and I would be guilty too. Who was he? How did he look so much like me? And what was he trying to do to us?
There was a soft sound to one side of me, and I looked up wildly. Expecting... what? A mirror image of myself. A murderer.
But it wasn't. I took me a moment to realise who I was seeing, because she wasn't dressed in the hotel's black uniform, but in jeans and a blouse.
It was Alicia, and in her right hand she was holding a lit cigarette.
"Hello Nick," she said.
"Christ," I said, my heart thumping. "Don't you ever get to go home?" She smiled, and I was reminded of the waitress again. Oh you fooler, her face seemed to say.
And since when had she called me by my first name?
"We should go up now," Alicia said, softly. "It wouldn't be good for me to be seen with you. I'll go first, you follow. Okay?"
I just stared at her, baffled, and she walked towards the elevators. When the doors opened she turned, and flashed a small, demure smile before going in.
I waited for about five minutes, feeling more and more afraid. What was going on? What had he said to her? What had he got me into?
I am stupid.
I am so very stupid.
When I realised, I stood up and ran to the elevators. I banged the button with my fist until the doors opened, and then I leapt in and slapped the button for the eighth floor. The carriage seemed to take forever to climb. When the doors finally opened I tore out of the elevator and down the corridor, fumbling the key from my pocket as I ran. I slipped taking a corner and almost fell, but then fetched breathlessly up outside the door. Alicia was nowhere to be seen, but this had to have been where she meant. She had to have been coming up here.
She had arranged something with him, thinking it was me...
I jammed the key into the door and turned. Nothing happened. I tried again.
It was locked from the inside.
Then I heard a sound from the room, a muffled scream, and I knew for sure that he was in there, and that my life was never going to be the same again.
* * * * *
I'm in a town in Maine at the moment, somewhere very small, in the woods. It was as far as I could go without leaving the country. I cannot get out of the USA. I left the hotel with my wallet and the clothes I stood up in, but even if I had my passport, I'm sure I'd get stopped if I tried to fly. Everything else is gone. Yesterday I called my parents and girlfriend and said goodbye.
Whatever happens, I'll never see England again.
I ran. There was nothing else I could do. I saw the first newspaper reports the following day, and then followed it on the web. Deep cigarette burns at regular intervals over the torso, except where it had been cut open in order for packs of Marlboro Light to be inserted. A ridiculous piece of symbolism, like someone parodying every psycho movie of the last twenty years. This time the murderer had also hacked off the victim's arms and legs. These had been arranged in a pattern on the floor. The detectives didn't know what the pattern was supposed to represent, and I don't think they'll ever work it out. It's nothing but the traced inner workings of a smog which fizzes and sparks in the dark, the shape of cigarette smoke as it bends in the wind.
One of the hands was missing. The right hand.
Her smoking hand.
The next day there were more details. The box was mentioned, the box which my software was supposed to have been delivered in. The only fingerprints found on it matched the prints all over Alicia's watch, which had been torn off and inserted in her throat. The murderer had never done that before, and could only have done so to make absolutely sure I was nailed – because these prints matched those taken from a suspect questioned on the day of the murder, an English writer now the subject of a country-wide APB. The paper I was reading was up in arms about the fact that this man had been released from custody, to kill again. There were calls for Considine to lose his job. When I read the story, sitting on a train going across Virginia, I wanted to call him up, and tell him it wasn't his fault. I didn't, of course.
Then yesterday there was a photo, a blow-up of the man believed to be the murderer, captured on video as he left the hotel in the early hours. It was grainy, but it was plenty clear enough.
It was me.
But it wasn't. I was halfway to the airport by then. At least... I think I was. It's unclear in my mind. I can't remember what really happened over the last few days, and what I made up, what I fictionalised. Yesterday evening, as I sat rocking back and forth on my motel bed, I had a sudden recollection of paying a stoned cab driver to tell a lie, if anyone asked – to put me somewhere that I'd not actually been, to give me a window of opportunity. Did that actually happen, or is my mind just trying to adjust the plot for it to make sense, to back-fill reality to that it flows from A to B?
I'm not sure. But it wasn't me. I didn't kill any of them. Not really. Something happened, and someone arrived to lay waste to my life, as a punishment, and a revenge. For what I was doing to him, I guess. To us.
I don't know how much longer I'm going to be able to last out. I'm running out of cash, fast, and I can't use my credit cards. It's possible I could get a manual job somewhere, washing dishes or something, but it would be a risk. My face is all over everything, and the Internet is no friend to someone who's trying to hide.
At the very least I have to lie very low for a while, until the initial heat is off. My only real hope is that he will kill again in Los Angeles, and divert attention away from the rest of the country. I believe he would most like to kill there, because it is that place which gave him birth. I don't think that he will kill again in that place, however. He... can't, because I'm not there. Maybe he's always been here, or nearby, loathing what I do to our body, though the smoking, and wanting some form of redress. He couldn't have done it without help, however. He couldn't have done it without LA's love. He wasn't insane enough.
Every day I wake up, expecting something to have happened in the town nearby, expecting to hear the sound of sirens. Every morning I check the bag I bought to carry the few things I've acquired, to see if Alicia's hand has appeared in there, to tell me that he is closing in, to remind me he always will be near. He is clever, but he went too far, fucked us up too completely. I can never go back now, and I have nothing left to lose.
He does, though.
He can lose the thing he has been protecting all along – our body, and our precious life. I think he knows what I'm going to do, but I'm going to make him wait.
As I sit here writing, I have four packets of Marlboro Lights in front of me, and I'm going to finish them today. Tomorrow I will do the same. And again the next day, and again. For as long as it takes. Until I get cancer.
Until the fucker dies.
«-ô-»
The Stuff That Goes On In Their Heads
By Michael Marshall Smith
I first heard the name on Mo
nday night, when I was putting him to bed. Kathy was out for an early dinner and catch-up with a friend, and so it had been the Ethan-and-Daddy Show from late afternoon. The recurring plot of this regular series boils down to me preparing one of the pasta dishes which have gained my son's tacit approval (and getting him to focus on eating it before it turns into a congealed mass), the two of us then watching his allotted one-per-day ration of Ben 10: Alien Force. After its conclusion I coax him up to the bathroom, and into the bath – usually against sustained and imaginative resistance – followed by the even more protracted process of getting him to leave the bath once more, Ethan having in the interim realized that the nice, warm tub is the best place in the world to be, and one he is not prepared to leave at any cost. Then there's the putting-on-of-pajamas and the brushing-of-the-teeth and various other tasks which sound (and should be) simple and quick but always seem to end up taking forever – little tranches of time which add up to really quite a lot of time when taken together, time that I'll never get back. We had Ethan relatively late in life (he's six, making me exactly forty years his senior) but what the older parent may lack in energy and vim is hopefully tempered by what they bring in terms of perspective, and so I understand well enough that it won't be so very long before my presence in the bathroom (or anywhere else) will not be enjoyed or even tolerated by a child who'll grow up faster than seems possible. Two more lots of six years, and he'll be leaving home. I get that. I try, therefore, to take all these little tribulations in good spirit, and to enjoy their fleeting presence in my life. But still, at the end of a long day, you do kind of wish they'd just brush their bloody teeth, by themselves, without all the stalling and prevarication.
For the love of god.
Eventually we got clear of the bathroom and processed in state to Ethan's bedroom – him leading the way, regal in pint-sized dressing gown, chattering about this and that. He resisted getting into bed for a while, but without any real purpose, and in a pro forma manner, as if he knew this part was merely part of a ritual, and he was doing it for my sake more than for himself. Eventually he yawned massively and headed toward the bed. He was tired. He always is on Mondays and Wednesdays, because of after-school club. The trick with tired children is to resist in a passive, judo-style fashion, putting up no specific barriers for them to kick against, instead letting them use their own strength against themselves. This, at least, I have learned.
When he was finally tucked up under the covers I asked him how his day had been. I'd meant to do it earlier, but forgot, which meant the enquiry was doomed to failure. Ethan appears to blank the working day within minutes of leaving the school gates, as if what happens within has no more reality than a dream, and melts like ice under the fierce sun of The Outside World. Or perhaps the opposite is true, and there's a fundamental reality about the universe of the school that is impossible to convey to we shades who live in the unconvincing hinterland outside.
Either way, he appeared as usual to have zero recollection of what had occurred between nine a.m. and four p.m. that day. When pushed for a definitive account, however, he issued a brief statement saying that it had been "fine."
"And how was after-school club?"
Many of the kids who go to The Reynolds School have parents who both work. This means the school runs a slick and profitable range of activities to tide tots over from the end of actual school to the point where their stressed-out handlers can pick them up. Ethan's after-school diversion on Mondays is swimming. This is a bit pointless, I can't help thinking. Partly because Monday happens also to be when his class does swimming anyway – and so all his piscine endeavors are concentrated on the same day; and mainly because said classes seem to boil down to the children spending most of the half hour shivering on the edge of the pool, waiting for their brief turn to splash about. Ethan's already pretty confident in the water – courtesy of a vacation in Florida last year – but untutored in terms of strokes, beyond a hectic doggy-paddle that is full of sound and fury but conveys little in the way of forward motion. We hoped the after-school club would help refine this. So far, he seems to be going backwards.
"Terrible," Ethan said.
"Terrible?" This is strong for him. He usually confines pronouncements of quality to "fine" or "okay", occasionally peaking in a devil-may-care "good". I suspect the deployment of "great" would require the school suddenly deciding to hand out free chocolate. I'd never heard "terrible" before, either. "Why?"
"Arthur Milford was mean to me again."
I snorted. "Arthur Milford? What the hell kind of name is that?"
Ethan turned his head in bed to look at me. "What?"
"How old is this kid?"
"Six," Ethan said, with gentle care, as if I was crazy. "He's six. Like me."
"Sorry, yes," I said. I tend to talk to my son as if he's a miniature adult for much of the time – too much of it, perhaps – but there was no way of explaining to him that the name "Arthur Milford", while theoretically acceptable, seemed more appropriate to a music hall comedian of the 1930s than a six-year-old in 2011. "What do you mean, he was mean to you again?"
"He's always mean to me."
"Really? In what way?"
"Telling me I'm stupid."
"You're not stupid," I said, crossly. "He's stupid, if he goes around calling people names. Just ignore him."
"I can't ignore him." Ethan's voice was quiet. "He's always doing it. He pushes me in the corridor, too. Today he said he was going to throw me out of a window."
"What? He actually said that?"
Ethan looked up at me solemnly. After a moment he looked away. "He didn't actually say it. But he meant it."
"I see," I said, suddenly unsure how much of the entire account was true. "Well, look. If he says mean things to you, just ignore him. Mean boys say mean things. That's just the way it is. But if he pushes you, tell a teacher about it. Immediately."
"I do. They don't do anything about it."
"Well, if it happens again, then tell them again. And tell me, too, okay?"
"Okay, daddy."
And then, as so often in such conversations, the matter was dismissed as if it had never been of import – instead, something I'd been rather tediously insisting on discussing – and my son asked me a series of apparently random questions about the world, which I did my best to answer, and I read him a story and filled up his water cup and read more story, and eventually he went to sleep.
* * * * *
We tend to alternate in picking Ethan up (as with most parenting duties), and so Tuesday was Kathy's turn. I had a deadline to chase and so – bar him dashing into my study to say hello when they got back – I barely saw Ethan before I kissed him on the head and said goodnight as Kathy led him up toward bath and bedtime.
Fifty minutes later, by which time I'd made a start on cooking, my wife appeared in the kitchen with the cautiously relieved demeanor of someone who believes they've wrangled an unpredictable child into bed.
"Is he down?"
"I'm not enumerating any domesticated, egg-producing fowl," she said, reaching into the fridge for the open bottle of wine, "But he might be. God willing."
She poured herself a glass and took a long sip before turning to me. "God I'm tired."
"Me too," I said, without a lot of sympathy.
"I know. I'm just saying. By the way – has Ethan mentioned some kid called Arthur to you?"
"Arthur Milford?"
"So he has?"
"Once. Last night. Why – did he come up again?"
"Mmm. And it's not the first time, either."
"Really?"
"Ethan mentioned him last week, and I think the week before, too. They're in after-school swimming together."
"I know. Last night he said this Arthur kid had been mean to him. In fact, he said he'd be
en mean 'again'."
"Mean in what way?"
"Pushed him in the corridor. Called him stupid." I thought about mentioning the threat to throw Ethan through a window, but decided not to. I didn't think Kathy needed to hear that part, especially as the telling had subsequently made it unclear whether that had taken place in what Ethan called "real life."
"Pushed him in the corridor? That means it's not just happening during swimming class."
"I guess. If it's happening at all."
"You don't believe him?"
"No, no, I do. But you know what he's like, Kath. He's all about the baddies and the goodies. It just sounds to me a bit like this Arthur Milford kid is in the script as Ethan's dread Nemesis. And that maybe not all of his exploits are directly related to events in what we'd think of as reality."
"Doesn't mean there isn't a real problem there."
"I know," I said, a little irritated that Kathy seemed to be claiming ownership of the issue, or implying that I wasn't taking it seriously enough. "I told him to talk to the teachers if this kid is mean to him again. And to tell me about it, too."
"Okay."
"But ultimately, that's just the way children are. Boys especially. They give each other grief. They shove. Little girls form cliques and get bitchy and tell other girls they're not their friends. Boys call each other names and thump each other. It has been thus since we lived in caves. It will be so until the sun explodes."
"I know. It's just... Ethan's such a cute kid. He can be a total pain, of course, but he's... so sweet, really, underneath. He doesn't know about all the crap in life yet. I want to protect him from it. I don't want him being hit, just because that's what happens. I don't want him being hurt in any way. I just want... everything to be nice."
"I know," I said, relenting. "Me too."
I rubbed her shoulder on the way over to supervise the closing stages of cooking, and privately raised my State of Awareness of the Arthur Milford situation to DefCon 4 to DefCon 3. Despite what everyone seems to think, the readiness-for-conflict index increases in severity from five to one, with one being the highest level (the highest level ever officially recorded is DefCon 2, which obtained for a while during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I knew all this from some half-hearted research for an article I was drafting on Homeland Security).