Pandaemonium

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Marianne lets this hang while Deborah nods with enthusiasm. Then she allows a pained look to fall over her face.

  ‘What?’ Deborah asks.

  ‘Again, there’s the Moon card casting a shadow. It represents fantasy and imagination, but also fear and apprehension: the things we dream up are always scarier than the real. In this case, alongside The Lovers, the conflict is sex.’

  Deborah stiffens a little.

  ‘It tells me you think about sex a lot. In fact, you sometimes worry that you think about it too much.’

  Deborah nods absently, in a way that suggests she’s barely aware she’s making such an affirmation.

  ‘You’re really interested in sex, more than you think other people might be, and you know that’s okay, because it’s just how you are. But you’re very daunted by it too. You have this mix of longing and trepidation. Something about it is confusing you, really confusing you, and that confusion is the thing that makes you most frightened and insecure. It represents the aspect of yourself that you’re most afraid of other—’

  Marianne cuts herself off as she hears Deborah breathe in sharply, a look of distressed accusation forming upon her face.

  ‘How are you doing this?’ she asks, her expression rapidly collapsing into one of anguish and panic. ‘How could you know? You mustn’t tell anybody, oh Jesus, please don’t tell anybody.’

  Tears form in Deborah’s eyes, accusation abandoned in favour of pleading. Panicking a little herself, Marianne realises she just stepped on a mine. What the fuck? All she has given Deborah is a series of Forer effect gambits that could equally apply to anybody, the last of these - sexual curiosity - being guaranteed to hit home with anyone in the whole dorm block. She can’t tell her this, though, as she’ll really fall apart if she thinks she’s been tricked into revealing . . . well, whatever it is she thinks she’s revealed about herself here.

  ‘I’m not telling anybody anything,’ Marianne says, insistently. ‘Tarot readings are as confidential as confession.’

  ‘But you know - that’s enough. How did you get inside my head? Oh God, what else have you seen?’

  ‘I’ve seen nothing that you didn’t show me,’ she says truthfully. She needs to walk Deborah back, but without giving the game away. ‘And nothing that you’ve shown me isn’t true about any of us. Who isn’t confused when it comes to sex?’

  ‘Not like this, though. You can’t tell anybody about this. If you do, I’ll just deny it and say you’re making it up, and who are they gaunny believe?’

  Marianne briefly considers offering further reassurance but realises it won’t be necessary: Deborah’s words are by way of overture.

  ‘It’s that . . . you’re right, I do think about sex. I haven’t done it, okay?’ she insists.

  ‘Me neither, actually.’

  ‘It’s just . . . when I think about it, I think about . . . other girls doing it. Not me doing it with other girls,’ she rushes to add. ‘But I wonder about what other girls have done, or if I’m imagining something, it’s some other girl or woman I picture doing it. I’m just terrified this means maybe I’m a, you know, a . . . a . . . I think I’d have to kill myself if it was true and folk found out.’

  Deborah breaks down now, tears really flowing. She puts her hands to her face and bows over. Marianne suddenly feels dirty for having solicited this. She just wanted to frighten her a little by living down to Deborah and her moronic pals’ worst expectations of the creepy Goth chick.

  Marianne reaches quickly into her bag and retrieves a paper hanky, which she waves under Deborah’s bent head until one of her hands grabs it.

  ‘I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick,’ she says. ‘You said you picture other girls doing it, not you doing it with other girls. I’m the same.’

  Deborah looks up and stares at Marianne fearfully through reddened eyes.

  ‘I don’t mean I’m worried I’m a lesbian,’ she clarifies. ‘I’m the same as in I’ve not done it, so I can’t realistically imagine myself in these situations. When I do, I can’t take the fantasy seriously, which kills the thrill. You need a proxy, a plausible surrogate.’

  Deborah is still staring at her, now even more expectantly than during her reading. Christ knows how much and how long she’s been beating herself up about this, and Marianne knows why. Unfortunately, for the same reason, she won’t take the explanation coming directly from Marianne, but she’ll probably accept it from the cards.

  ‘You see this card here, just above The Moon? That’s Strength. See the way the woman is restraining the lion? There’s compassion there as well as inner strength, but in you that’s combined with the Star card: openness and giving, and that can render you vulnerable. People close to you can take advantage of you, yet they’ll never know the times you passed up the chance to take advantage of them. You have a tendency to be too self-critical and consequently you want other people to see the best in you. You’ve created this disproportionate fear of being a lesbian because it would destroy you in the eyes of the people whose respect you seek most. However, the Strength card suggests you’re better than that: inside, you know that you don’t need their approval, and you resent the things they would try to hold over you.’

  Deborah dabs at her eyes and nose. When she pulls the hanky from her face, she looks as though an intolerable weight has been lifted, though she’s not the only one experiencing relief. For a worrying moment, Marianne fears Deborah’s going to lean over and give her a hug, but she’s just running away with herself.

  ‘That is . . . amazing,’ she says quietly. ‘How can you know all this about me? How can you tell so much from these cards? Don’t take this the wrong way, but are you, like, into witchcraft or something?’

  ‘I’m into magic, and I’m into myth,’ Marianne says, gesturing to the books that have by now fallen on to the floor. Deborah picks one up, a book of demonology, detailing nightmares and demon myths across five continents and fifty centuries.

  ‘Do you . . . believe . . . in things like this?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s not a question of believing, or of whether something is factual. Myths endure because they are true: what they tell us about ourselves is true, and sometimes myths were the way we instinctively understood these things before science and philosophy broke them down and explained them. Have a look at this.’

  Marianne reaches for her bag and pulls out her beloved third volume of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.

  ‘A comic?’

  ‘Not a comic, the comic, and this is my favourite story, about my favourite story.’

  Deborah looks on, confused, as Marianne flicks through the book to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as commissioned by the Sandman from Shakespeare as part of a deal. It is performed by Shakespeare’s own travelling company before an audience that has passed through a portal from another dimension: Oberon, Titania and Robin Goodfellow among them.

  ‘There,’ she says, finding the speech bubble she’s looking for and pointing it out.

  ‘Things need not have happened to be true,’ Deborah reads aloud. ‘Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgot.’

  ‘You getting it now?’

  ‘Kind of,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘Can I borrow this?’

  ‘Long as you know what you’re dabbling in. I mean, it starts with comics, but this time tomorrow you could be wearing all black and listening to Muse.’

  Deborah gives her an ‘aye, right’ smile and climbs into bed.

  IX

  ... nine months ago, on the drive north, on the road to here.

  Lights everywhere, flickering and indistinct: white shapes stretched and pulled by random refractions in the rain and spray before being temporarily shrunk to points and discs by the wiper blades. Nothing holds its form or position long enough for him to focus. The closest thing to a constant is the perforated blur of lines on the road, stuttering just out of syncopation like a slowing zoetrope. They flicker and blur
, sometimes lost for a second, smeared out in water and the glare of oncoming headlights. A second is a long, long distance at this speed. How far can he travel in that time? He works it out: needs something to keep the wheels turning in his mind. He’s doing eighty: inner dial shows one-twenty in kmh. Divides 120,000 by sixty, does it again. Thirty-three point three three three recurring. Another truck to overtake. The spray is blinding, the wipers flailing indignantly at maximum speed, reminds him of a woman walking off in a snit, elbows pumping. It takes eight seconds to pass, two hundred and sixty-six metres throughout which he can see only the shape of the truck and the nearby twinkle of its sidelights.

  Finally past the lorry, he takes a curve and sees the windscreen explode into a white glow. Fucker had his lights on full beam.

  ‘Dip don’t dazzle.’

  Merrick recalls that from some public-information campaign way back; can’t remember where, can’t remember when. He should try to remember, though: another mental exercise, another little project to stop his brain from trying to shut down.

  He is just so tired.

  The dazzle at least caused him to flinch, seeped just a little adrenalin into his system, but it’s going to have its work cut out counteracting all the melatonin. The dark is not helping keep his eyes open, nor is the rain, the headlights, the need to squint, the inability to stay focused upon a point or an object. He needs sunlight. He needs the rain to stop. He needs about twelve hours’ uninterrupted sleep.

  He’s got the fan blowing, taking the temperature down as low as it will go. His fingers feel stiff from the cold air jetting around the steering wheel. The outside temperature is about five degrees, but the heat from the engine means the fan can only blow so cold: it’s not an air-con system. His eyes feel bloodshot from the dry air inside the car, the lids getting intolerably heavy. Every time he narrows them to peer through the rain, it feels easier to let them fall fully closed than to open them wide again.

  He should pull over, find a lay-by, get out, waken up. He’d be drenched, though, in moments, and still have two hours’ driving ahead of him. Plus he’s on a clock and already running late.

  They gave him zero notice. He was supposed to drop everything, which was an eventuality he always knew he might have to face working for the MoD, but which in practice he had found impossible when such a scenario was finally precipitated. Thus he took time he couldn’t afford to try and collate his unfinished work into a form that his successor, if he had one, could comprehend.

  He left Dartmoor eight hours ago, having been all but escorted out of the building and pointedly reminded not only that his work there was over, but that he was only ten hours from being in breach by failing to report for duty at his new post. The option to make his own way to Ben Trochart was the only courtesy about it. The alternative was to go on a chopper that was leaving within an hour of his being reassigned, which would have precluded any opportunity to put his work in some kind of order and ensure that certain crucial documents were backed up. The prospect of just having to drop his research was anathema; the idea that the project itself might simply be abandoned one he couldn’t begin to contemplate.

  What was so precipitately important? He worked for the Ministry of Defence, but you didn’t get emergencies in research. Nor did you get rushed to a room and made to sign the Official Secrets Act, especially when you thought you already had signed the Official Secrets Act. (‘Not this version you haven’t,’ he was assured.)

  There had been ‘an incident’ at the Orpheus complex. That was about as much as he could get anyone to tell him. This confirmed a buzz on the grapevine in recent days that dozens of personnel had been pulled out of the place, and as such was perhaps the only recorded instance of a rumour about Orpheus proving well founded. It was a US-leased, MoD-owned site in the Highlands of Scotland, a former nuclear command complex that had been recommissioned as a research facility after the Cold War. Its location and scale deep underground naturally made it the subject of endless speculation among bored MoD lab-rats, to the point where it had become a running joke, a byword for the technologically super-advanced or downright impossible.

  ‘We’re waiting for Orpheus to finish Beta on that one,’ was a common way of saying something couldn’t be done.

  The one thing he did know with any certainty about it was that it was mostly a physics hive, so why were they hastily summoning up a biologist? Dwelling upon that might have provided another exercise to stave off sleep, had it not been that he’d already been pondering it for most of the drive and come up blank.

  His eyes are closing; it ought to frighten him how involuntary this seems, but it feels so beckoning, so comfortable. It’ll be okay. Just a few seconds’ rest, ten seconds, three hundred and thirty-three metres, surely he can risk that. NO. He snaps them wide, breathes extra deeply a few times, sourcing oxygen, gives his head a shake. The windscreen is a membrane, fluid and warping, stretching the light, smearing the shapes, blurring the white lines. He’s squinting, narrowing his eyes in an effort to shield the pupils, keep them from contracting so that he can see better into the rain-filled darkness. Maybe if he closes one eye and thus keeps it dark-adapted, then he can open it and close the other next time the oncoming lights are too bright. He tries. Yeah. Closing one eye feels good. It feels too good. He wants to close the other one too.

  He hits a straight length of road, an interchange. There are streetlights for the first time in however many miles. He can see the road stretch out, unbending, must be half a mile. Six hundred and sixty-six metres would be twenty seconds. He can close his eyes for twenty seconds. The road is straight. He doesn’t need to steer for twenty seconds, doesn’t need to look for six hundred and sixty-six metres. He can just, yes, that’s it, just . . .

  NO.

  Fuck no.

  Did he really think that? Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. That settles it.

  He sees the sign for a lay-by, indicates, pulls in. He gets out, steps into the rain, teeming down in plunging streaks picked out against the towering lights flanking the interchange.

  Jesus Christ. It was that close.

  He lets the cold of the rain lash his face, run down his collar, feels the material start to cling against the skin of his chest. He’ll get there wet and cold, but he’ll get there alive.

  Twenty seconds, six hundred and sixty-six metres. Jesus Christ.

  X

  Fizzy is telling a ghost story, supposedly about the place they’re staying in, or what previously stood on the site anyway. Deso knows for a fact that Fizzy had never heard of Fort Trochart a week ago and probably couldn’t find the place on a map right now, to say nothing of the fact that the boy’s concept of ‘historical knowledge’ means being able to name players from pre-Fergus-McCann-era Celtic teams. He’s adapting some old pish to the circumstances, but fair play, it’s appropriate for the time of night. They’ve all settled down and the noise levels have dropped all over the place, so quiet, creepy stories are a good shout.

  The main light is off and the curtains are open so they can see the stars.

  Beansy has actually dropped off. All you can see of him is a big lump under the duvet, huddled against the wall beneath the window. Deso just hopes his arse is pointing that way, though the clatty bastard can probably fart so hard that the recoil off the wall will shift the bed. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, as Mr Kane would tell them.

  Beansy was first in and out the bogs for a wash and brush-up before nighty-night, and the dozy bastard was asleep by the time the rest of them got back. Marky noticed he was conked when Beansy never responded to a question, and was all for them having a bit of fun: putting Beansy’s hand in warm water so he’d pish himself, or drawing a cock on his head with a magic marker.

  ‘Naw, we’re no’ having any of that shite,’ Deso had argued, in a way intended to convey that he would not be partaking and therefore did not expect to be on the receiving end either. Marky concurred quickly, realising what a dangerous situation
he was leading them all into. Everybody would have been sitting awake the whole night, frightened to let themselves fall asleep before anyone else. Fuck that.

  Ghost stories are decent craic at a time like this, but as Deso’s lying there, he can’t help wishing he’d brought a guitar. His fingers are fidgety: he’s moving them under the duvet, feeling an imaginary fret-board and hearing the tune he’d be playing, really softly. He opted not to bring one in case it got damaged and because it was one more thing to carry, but now he’s thinking it’ll feel like a long time before he gets another wee fix. Ordinarily, he might have been in with a chance of borrowing Rosemary’s, but he reckons it’s safe to assume that boat’s sailed now.

  He feels a wee bit bad about that business, in fact. Feels especially guilty about what he wrote on that sticker. It’ll come off, he knows, and it seemed funny at the time, but lying in the dim light with the atmosphere quite mellow, he finds himself thinking about what it looked like from Rosemary’s point of view. If somebody wrote something on one of his guitars, especially taking the piss out of something he held dear, he’d take it very personally. It was hurtful. Cuntish, to be honest. He doesn’t want to go as far as owning up and apologising, but he ought to make it up somehow. Be that bit nicer to the lassie tomorrow, let her know he thinks she’s all right, so she’ll understand it wasn’t malice, just carry-on.

  And he does think she’s all right, matter of fact. All the hymns and God patter is a pain in the stones, but she’s not as bad as some. Thon pal of hers, Bernadette, for example: fucking wee nippy sweety that yin is. Bernie seems the type that’s religious just so she can have a moral justification for being in the huff with everybody: take the religion away and she’d still have a face like fizz. Rosemary’s the opposite. She always seems burdened: an unhappy clappy. She goes on about the Good News and organises charismatic masses, but none of it seems to be bringing a lot of sunshine to the girl.