Pandaemonium

by Christopher Brookmyre

  It’s getting on for lunchtime, or so Kane’s stomach tells him. His watch says it’s only eleven, though. Must be all the fresh air and exercise. He’s absolutely Hank, but determined not to break into his packed lunch until Sendak gives the order.

  They have just cleared the treeline, climbing towards a plateau, from which they have a view down into the valley between it and the larger Ben Trochart. He can see a river snaking through moorland where it isn’t swallowed by forest, snow-capped peaks in the distance beyond. There are no roads to be seen, no buildings, not even cultivated fields: no visible evidence of human settlement.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Heather says. ‘Makes you feel . . . I don’t know . . .’

  ‘Insignificant,’ Kane suggests.

  ‘I was going to say inspired.’

  ‘How about blessed?’ asks Blake.

  He and Kane share a glance: touché.

  ‘It is beautiful,’ agrees Sendak warmly. ‘It’s also cold, cruel and extremely unforgiving if you don’t treat it with respect.’

  Heather fixes both Kane and Blake with a warning stare.

  ‘First one to make a female comparison gets a boot in the peas.’

  Adnan takes in the view from the plateau and instantly renders it in HUD mode, like it’s a giant game of Civ or Age of Empires. He pictures a little cursor arrow clicking an icon in the front of his field of vision, then clicking again on the banks of the river and instantly constructing a fort. Further buildings spring up alongside, before being surrounded by troops and war machines, enthusiastically laying siege. He grins with deep satisfaction and takes a mouthful of Irn-Bru from the can he’s been handed by the alien impostor who has kidnapped Deborah and replaced her with someone quite affable.

  Deborah takes the drink back from Adnan and accepts an unwanted cereal bar from Cameron, who is sitting between her and Marianne. At Deborah’s prompting, Marianne has got out her tarot cards and is explaining Cameron’s choices, though because of the breeze she’s just getting him to turn over the top cards one at a time. His first card is The Fool.

  ‘The Fool is taking a step over a precipice,’ she explains. ‘We’re most of the time too cynical, too insular or just too scared to take a step into the unknown. But if we don’t, then we never explore, never expand our horizons.’

  Gillian and that lot are about fifteen yards away, though their ostentatious cackling is audible even over the gentle wind and the murmur of umpteen different conversations. They’re being extra noisy for her benefit, Deborah suspects: it’s not paranoia, she’s done it herself often enough when she’s been among them. It’s bound to have put a few noses out of joint that she didn’t come scampering over to them at breakfast (where they had grabbed a table for four anyway), or out on the hike this morning. She knows from experience that there’s no fun dangling possible exclusion over someone who doesn’t want to be included in the first place.

  It isn’t a statement she’s making or anything, though she’s aware they’ll be dissecting it as such. Well, it probably is, but the point is it’s not aimed at them; it’s not about them. It’s about her. That’s what she realised last night.

  It took her ages to get to sleep, but in a good way. A lot of things seemed clearer after her long talk with Marianne, and one of those was that it was a much more enjoyable experience to talk to Marianne than among that little coven. It feels easier to speak with other folk too, maybe because she’s actually listening to what they’re saying for a change, instead of looking for nuggets of embarrassment, sifting out reasons to slag them off.

  This, though, sparks a moment of obsessive-compulsive anxiety, as Deborah asks herself whether, in the midst of so much emotion and revelation, she got around to deleting that picture. She’s fairly sure she remembers doing it, but now that she’s thought about it, she needs confirmation. She pulls out her phone and surreptitiously checks. It’s gone, but it still makes her shudder to think how close she must have come to disaster, to doing something unforgivable to Marianne and calamitous to herself. It also seems amazing how far she has come from the person she was this time yesterday.

  While her phone is out, she decides to have a look at the pictures she has taken this morning, and gasps a little at the first, snapped just as they were leaving the FTOF. It’s Beansy with his bag dangling from a stick over his shoulder as he steps, smiling, off the edge of a stump and into thin air. She glances from the phone to the card in Marianne’s lap and sees exactly the same composition. Marianne lifts it to put it back in the pack, but Deborah stops her.

  ‘Look,’ she says, showing her the phone.

  ‘How appropriate,’ Marianne observes. ‘The Fool. Couldn’t have picked a better model.’

  ‘I didn’t choose anything,’ Deborah says, a little disappointed (but in another way a little relieved) that Marianne doesn’t find it spooky.

  Deborah nudges the joystick on her phone to view the next pic as Marianne invites Cameron to turn over another card. The shot shows Matt hanging upside down by one foot, his other tucked behind his knee. Cameron reaches for the deck and turns over the Hanged Man. Again, the composition is identical, right down to the curiously serene smile on his face.

  ‘Marianne,’ she says, showing her the phone again and trying to keep a tremor from her voice.

  ‘Fuck,’ Marianne responds, this time leaving Deborah under no doubt that she does find it spooky. ‘That is . . . that is out there.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Cameron agrees. ‘Hey, Adnan, mate, you gotta see this. Let’s hear your quantum physics explain this shit.’

  Marianne shows Adnan the two cards as Deborah passes him the phone.

  ‘That’s the order Cameron just drew these, too,’ Deborah tells him.

  Adnan has a look at the two images. The similarity of the composition is unsettling, he would admit.

  ‘Are you familiar with tarot cards?’ he asks Deborah.

  ‘Not really. Marianne showed me some last night, but . . .’

  ‘But you have seen them before?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Adnan nods. ‘Pattern recognition,’ he says. ‘It’s one of the human traits that helped us get out of the caves and make it to here.’ He points up at the sky. ‘We see faces in the clouds because we latch on to things that make sense in the chaos. Seeing those cards last night is what prompted you to push the button when something resembling the same images appeared in front of you. No mystic forces required.’

  Again, Deborah feels a mixture of relief and disappointment.

  ‘Isn’t there room in your scientific world for a little magic?’ Marianne asks.

  Adnan sits up straighter and smiles, a response that Radar knows him well enough to read.

  ‘Aw fuck, you’ve set him off. Don’t go there, Marianne.’

  ‘No, I’m interested,’ she insists.

  ‘You’re familiar with Aleister Crowley, I take it?’ he asks. Marianne nods. ‘Well, as someone said of his supposed wizardry, “the only problem with magic is that it doesn’t work”.’

  Marianne laughs. Adnan is pleased to see that she has taken it in good spirit; more pleased that she appears to have a response.

  ‘It’s true, from a practical point of view, but he missed the point. Magic is about the realm of the imagination, about exploring the human subconscious.’

  ‘So you’d admit it’s all just . . . metaphors and symbols.’

  ‘Kind of. But that’s selling it extremely short. Look.’

  Marianne reaches into her backpack and fishes out her book on demonology.

  ‘You bring books up mountains?’ Cameron asks.

  ‘I bring books everywhere. You never know when you might get a quiet five minutes to read.’

  Adnan almost apologetically produces a Michio Kaku paperback from his own bag, just popping it up for a second as a gesture of solidarity to Marianne and a two-fingers to Cam.

  Marianne flicks through her volume, showing Adnan several plates depicting different demons from a varie
ty of cultures. He sees demons with pitchforks, with horns and pointed tails; some demons crawling on walls, others with wings, hovering in the air.

  ‘These are from all different societies, different religions, different eras,’ she says. ‘Empires that rose and fell . . . and yet they all have their own myths of the same thing. Ancient Greece, Mexico, China . . . Often very similar demons too. You can say they’re purely symbolic, just an image or an idea that spreads between humans. But why did that same image spring up independently in cultures that have had no contact?’

  ‘That doesn’t mean there is such a thing as demons, though,’ Adnan argues. ‘The idea could be something primal, something hard-wired to the human sub-conscious that—’

  Adnan cuts himself off as he realises he has just echoed what Marianne already said.

  ‘See? Magic.’

  ‘I guess that’s why gods and demons don’t show up on each other’s turf. We have Bernadette at Lourdes, and the kids at Fatima or Medjogorje seeing Mary, but little kids in European villages never see Vishnu or Ganesh or any of the multitude of Hindu gods, while nobody in India has visions of the Madonna.’

  ‘We all have localised myths of the same archetypes,’ Marianne says. ‘Creation myths, mother goddess myths, rival sibling myths.’

  ‘Like the one about the son of God who was betrayed and killed, only to rise again, and through whose resurrection all mankind could achieve eternal life?’ Adnan suggests, eyeing Marianne closely to see how she likes her heresy. ‘Name of Osiris?’ he continues. ‘Worshipped in Egypt fifteen hundred years before Christ?’

  ‘Son of Geb, the sky god, and Nut, the earth goddess,’ Marianne says, letting him know this is not news and that he is on her turf. ‘And if you want more Christ antecedents, you’ve got Prometheus - bringer of light to man, similarly punished by being brutally hung up and his side pierced.

  ‘All over the planet, we’ve been telling ourselves the same stories since the dawn of time. You can say they’re only stories, only “metaphors and symbols” as you put it, but I think they’re more than that. Myths are like truths we somehow knew about the universe and about ourselves but didn’t quite understand, and didn’t always even understand why we knew them. For instance, civilisations all over the world worshipped the sun as a god that gave birth to Earth. Thousands of years later we discovered that the Earth was actually created from the sun as part of the debris that was whirling around it four and a half billion years ago.’

  Adnan wears a strained expression, reluctant but duty-bound to disagree.

  ‘I take your point, but they were worshipping the wrong sun.’

  ‘Here we go,’ Radar says, flinging himself backwards as if in recoil.

  ‘Our sun isn’t actually hot enough to fuse hydrogen to helium. The sun that “gave birth” to us died billions of years ago in a supernova, which created the higher elements that make up our solar system. And that means that every one of us here is literally made of stardust.’

  Marianne simply stares at him for a moment, with an expression he can’t read at all, and which he fears for a moment will turn to one he has seen on dozens of faces before, most frequently Radar’s. Then she speaks:

  ‘That is the coolest thing I have ever heard.’

  Adnan says nothing, but his honest response to what she said would comprise precisely the same words.

  ‘. . . and somebody used the word whirlwind - Michelle, it was - to describe what we’re all going through, because we’re feeling so many things at once, almost like forces out of our control.’

  They’re all gathered - everybody - in a tight circle, seated on the ground with their lunches digesting inside them. With the landscape rolled out beneath them it feels to Heather like they’re on a separate plane, higher than the world, detached from their normal reality. Blake chose his moment well. If they can’t talk about this here, then they may never talk about it at all. His voice is mellifluous but natural, infusing the atmosphere with calm. He speaks softly but audibly over the breeze, without resorting to that elevated priestly register all men of the cloth could slip into: he wants them to know he’s talking with them, not at them.

  ‘We’re all feeling loss,’ Blake continues. ‘We’re all feeling pain. We’re all feeling shock. We’re all feeling anger.’

  Heather can’t help but glance at Kirk, and notes that she is not the only one. His arms are folded and his face is stony, hard-set, determined not to betray any emotion.

  ‘And all of that is right. All of that is what we need to feel, in order to get through this. We need to feel it, but we need to express it too, because you’d be amazed how many of us here think we’re the only one nursing a particular feeling, or harbouring a certain thought. It’s only once it’s out in the open that you discover you’re not alone. Just say what you need to: it’s why we’re here. Don’t worry about what anyone thinks of you for saying it either: this mountain is like an extension of my confessional. What gets said up here does not come back down the hillside with us. Anyone who casts up anything spoken here today will be committing a grave betrayal of us all.’

  Rocks looks across to the other side of the circle: all the heads are down, bowed more sincerely than during any prayer, hiding reticent faces. This could be the longest silence this lot has collectively engaged in throughout their entire school careers.

  It stretches beyond a full minute, all of them left to their own solemn contemplation as the cold wind gusts about their ears. Father Blake offers no prompting, no pressure, though the longer it goes on, the harder it will be for anyone to go first.

  Then a voice breaks the deadlock, just a few feet to Rocks’ right. It’s wee Caitlin, which might surprise some but not him. His money was always on it being one of the quieter, more dutiful ones that contributed first; the one time the loudmouths keep it zipped.

  ‘I was there,’ she says. ‘In the hall, putting my chemistry folder in my locker. I can remember that that’s what I was carrying. I can remember this sudden rise in a lot of voices, and seeing Andrew pushing Matthew. They both banged into the lockers right beside me. I can remember it really clearly. But then after that, it’s like a curtain comes down inside my head. I was there. It happened right in front of me, but my mind won’t let me think about it. All I can think about is . . . Andrew’s mum and dad . . . I’m sorry . . .’

  Caitlin fills up and can’t go on. No one seems prepared to fill the void, keeping her grief in the spotlight. Rocks feels for her, wishes somebody else would wade in, one of the teachers maybe. Then to his own surprise he finds himself speaking, just saying something to bail the lassie out.

  ‘I was there too, and I wish I had the curtain thing Caitlin’s talking about.’ He’s aware of Kirk’s head coming up, flinching in astonishment and, no doubt, dismay. Fuck him, though. He’s helping nobody with this bottled-up shite. ‘I was on the other side of the hall when Dunnsy went for Matt. I started making my way over. I was gaunny pull Dunnsy away and calm him doon, but when a fight starts, there’s always a swarm, and I never got there in time. Then I remember the swarm just melting away. It was so quiet. I don’t know if it really was quiet or if it’s just like my memory of it has no soundtrack and I see it in silence, no voices.’

  Rocks can picture it all again as he speaks. He trembles, suddenly colder, like his body has just switched off whatever force-field was protecting him from the climate on top of a highland hill in December.

  He catches Kirk’s eye. The big man is looking at him like he can’t believe he’s doing this, like just talking about it is a fucking betrayal.

  ‘I was scared,’ Rocks says, as though in answer to Kirk. ‘Or I thought I was scared, but it was mostly shock. Scared wasn’t what I was feeling right then. Scared is what I’ve been feeling ever since. I used to think nothing that bad could really happen to you. You read about stuff, you see some horrible things on telly or the internet, but it never seems real. I know we’re made of flesh and bones, but—’

  H
e has to cut himself off. Despite Father Blake saying they ought to talk about whatever they need to, it feels wrong to articulate this. He doesn’t feel he has the right to describe what he saw. You can’t share this out. You can’t ask anyone else to carry it.

  He’s seen a lot of blood at school. Who hasn’t? If there’s a fight, chances are somebody’s getting their nose burst, and he’s seen some bad ones. Dished out some bad ones, if truth be told. He was amazed and, to be honest, not a little ashamed when he saw how much Tommy Lafferty bled when he battered him in third year, but it was only blood, only fluid.

  Barker didn’t just stab Dunnsy, though: he gutted him. Rocks saw intestines, ribs and fuck knows what else spilled out on to the polished grey floor tiles. He learned a truth right then that he can never unlearn.

  ‘We’re just meat,’ he says. ‘So fragile. Since then, I’ve found myself jumping back at the kerb when cars go by too fast. My mum asked me to chip some potatoes and I couldnae do it because I got freaked out holding the knife. I’m amazed any of us make it this far. I’m amazed we got here as a species.’

  He looks at Kirk again, and this time Rocks is the one glaring an accusation. Can’t you fucking see this? he’s asking. Kirk looks away, down between his feet, maybe just a little humbly.

  Rocks has nothing more to say, but he doesn’t feel self-conscious in the next silence; he feels wide open but not vulnerable. He catches Caitlin’s eye and finds a look of teary solidarity.

  ‘We’re fragile, but we’re also precious,’ says Radar. ‘That’s why it’s so fuckin’ unfair.’

  Guthrie flinches, but gets a warning shot from Blake.

  ‘Dunnsy wasnae even seventeen yet,’ he goes on. ‘Fuckin’ Barker took away everything, not just took Dunnsy away from us, but took away everything he’d ever be. It’s just so fuckin’ . . . forever, man. No second chances. No saved games.’

  ‘That’s what I can’t get past either,’ ventures Dazza. ‘I keep expecting Dunnsy to walk into a classroom.’

  ‘There’s a school of thought in quantum physics that says he has.’