‘Hello?’ he said quietly. He didn't use a name, for obvious reasons, but I knew who he was asking for. ‘Are you there?’
‘And if so, did you bring any grass?’ the hostess added, getting a big laugh. I shook my head, partly at how foolish we were seeming, partly because there seemed to be a faint glow in one corner of the room, as if some of the receptors in my eyes were firing strangely. I made a note to check the beckies when we got back, to make sure none of them could have had an effect on the optic nerve.
I was about to say something to help Philip out of an embarrassing position when he suddenly turned to the hostess.
‘Jackie, how many people did you invite tonight?’
‘Eight,’ she said. ‘We always have eight. We've only got eight complete sets of tableware.’
Philip looked at me. ‘How many people do you see?’ he asked.
I looked round the room, counting.
‘Eleven,’ I said.
One of the guests laughed nervously. I counted them again. There were eleven people in the room. In addition to the eight of us who were slouched over the settees and floor, three people stood round the walls.
A tall man, with long and not especially clean brown hair. A woman in her forties, with blank eyes. A young girl, maybe eight years old.
Mouth hanging open, I stood up to join Philip. We looked from each of the extra figures to the other. They looked entirely real, as if they'd been there all along.
They stared back at us, silently.
‘Come on guys,’ the host said, nervously. ‘Okay, great gag – you had us fooled for a moment there. Now let's have another smoke.’
Philip ignored him, turning to the man with the long hair.
‘What's your name?’ he asked him. There was a long pause, as if the man was having difficulty remembering. When he spoke, his voice sounded dry and cold.
‘Nat,’ he said. ‘Nat Simon.’
‘Philip,’ I said. ‘Be careful.’
Philip ignored me, and turned back to face the real guests. ‘Does the name “Nat Simon” mean anything to anyone here?’ he asked.
For a moment I thought it hadn't, and then we noticed the hostess. The smile had slipped from her face and her skin had gone white, and she was staring at Philip. With a sudden, ragged beat of my heart I knew we had succeeded.
‘Who was he?’ I asked quickly. I wish I hadn't. In a room that was now utterly silent she told us.
Nat Simon had been a friend of one of her uncles. One summer, when she was nine years old, he had raped her just about every day of the two weeks she'd spent on vacation with her relatives. He was killed in a car accident when she was fourteen, and since then she'd thought she'd been free.
‘Tell Jackie I've come back to see her,’ Nat said proudly. ‘And I'm all fired up and ready to go.’ He had taken his penis out of his trousers and was stroking it towards erection.
‘Go away,’ I said. ‘Fuck off back where you came from.’
Nat just smiled. ‘Ain't ever been anywhere else,’ he said. ‘Like to stay as close to little Jackie as I can.’
Philip quickly asked the other two figures who they were. I tried to stop him, but the other guests encouraged him, at least until they heard the answers. Then the party ended abruptly. Voyeurism becomes a lot less amusing when it's you that people are staring at.
The blank-eyed woman was the first wife of the man who had joked about ouija boards. After discovering his affair with one of his students she had committed suicide in their living room. He'd told everyone she'd suffered from depression, and that she drank in secret.
The little girl was the host's sister. She died in childhood, hit by a car while running across the road as part of a dare devised by her brother.
By the time Philip and I ran out of the house, two of the other guests had already started being able to see for themselves, and the number of people at the party had risen to fifteen.
After four beers my mind was a little fuzzy, and for a while I was almost able to forget. Then I heard a soft splashing sound from below, and looked to see a young boy climbing out of the stagnant water in the pool. He didn't look up, but just walked over the flagstones to the gate, and then padded out through the entrance to the motel. I could still hear the soft sound of his wet feet long after he'd disappeared into the darkness. The brother who'd held his head under a moment too long; the father who'd been too busy watching someone else's wife putting lotion on her thighs; or the mother who'd fallen asleep. Someone would be having a visitor tonight.
When we got back to the house after the party, and tried to get into the lab, we found that we couldn't open the door. The lock had fused. Something had attacked the metal of the tumblers, turning the mechanism into a solid lump. We stared at each other, by now feeling very sober, and then turned to look through the glass upper portion of the door. Everything inside looked the way it always had, but I now believe that even earlier, before we knew what was happening, everything had already been set in motion. The beckies work in strange and invisible ways.
Philip got the axe from the garage, and we broke through the door to the laboratory. We found the vat of MindWorks empty. A small hole had appeared in the bottom of the glass, and there was a faint trail where the contents had crawled across the floor, cutting right through the wooden boards at several points. It had doubled back on itself, and in a couple of places it had also flowed against gravity. It ended in a larger hole which, it transpired, dripped through into a pipe which went out back into the municipal water system.
The first reports were on CNN at seven o'clock the next morning. Eight murders in downtown Jacksonville, and three on the university campus. All committed by people who must have been within sneezing distance of David on our walk the day before. Reports of people suddenly going crazy, screaming at people who weren't there, running in terror from voices in their head and acting on impulses that they claimed weren't theirs. By lunchtime the problem wasn't just confined to people we might have come into contact with: it had started to spread on its own.
I don't know why it happened like this. Maybe we just made a mistake somewhere. Perhaps it was something as small and simple as a chiral isomer, some chemical which the beckies created in a mirror image of the way it should be. That's what happened with Thalidomide, and that's what we created. A Thalidomide of the soul.
Or maybe there was no mistake. Perhaps that's just the way it is. Maybe the only spirits who stick around are the ones you don't want to see. The ones who can turn people into psychotics who riot, murder, or end their lives, through the hatred or guilt they bring with them. These people have always been here, all the time, staying close to the people who remember them. Only now they are no longer invisible, or silent.
A day later there were reports in European cities, at first just the ones where I'd sent my letters, then spreading rapidly across the entire land mass. By the time my letters reached their recipients, the beckies I'd breathed over them had multiplied a thousandfold, breaking the paper down and reconstituting the molecules to create more of themselves. They were so clever, our children, and they shared the ambitions of their creators. If they'd needed to, they could probably have formed themselves into new letters, and lay around until someone posted them all over the world. But they didn't, because coughing, or sneezing, or just breathing is enough to spread the infection. By the following week a state of emergency was in force in every country in the world.
A mob killed Philip before the police got to him. He never got to see Rebecca. I don't know why. She just didn't come. I was placed under house arrest, and then taken to the facility to help with the feverish attempts to come up with a cure. There is none, and there never will be. The beckies are too smart, too aggressive, and too powerful. They just take any antidote, break it down, and use it to make more of themselves.
They don't need the vote. They're already in control.
The moon is out over the ocean, casting glints over the tides as they rustle bac
k and forth with a sound like someone slowly running their finger across a piece of paper. A little while ago I heard a siren in the far distance. Apart from that all is quiet.
I think it's unlikely I shall riot, or go on a killing spree. In the end, I will simply go.
The times when Karen comes to see me are bad. She didn't stop writing to me because she lost interest, it turns out. She stopped writing because she had been pregnant by me, and didn't want me involved, and died through some nightmare of childbirth without ever telling her mother my name. I hadn't brought any contraception. I think we both figured life would let you get away with things like that. When Philip and I talked about Karen over that game of pool she was already dead. She will come again tonight, as she always does, and maybe tonight will be the night when I decide I cannot bear it any longer. Perhaps seeing her here, at the motel where Philip and I stayed that summer, will be enough to make me do what I have to do.
If it isn't her who gives me the strength, then someone else will, because I've started seeing other people now too. It's surprising quite how many – or maybe it isn't, when you consider that all of this is partly my fault. So many people have died, and will die, all of them with something to say to me. Every night there are more, as the world slowly winds down. There are two of them here now, standing in the court and looking up at me. Perhaps in the end I shall be the last one alive, surrounded by silent figures in ranks that reach out to the horizon.
Or maybe, as I hope, some night Philip and Rebecca will come for me, and I will go with them.
A PLACE TO STAY
‘John, do you believe in vampires?’
I took a moment to light a cigarette. This wasn't to avoid the issue, but rather to prepare myself for the length and vitriol of the answer I intended to give – and to tone it down a little. I hardly knew the woman who'd asked the question, and had no idea of her tolerance for short, blunt words. I wanted to be gentle with her, but if there's one star in the pantheon of possible nightmares which I certainly don't believe in, then it has to be bloody vampires. I mean, really.
I was in New Orleans, and it was nearly Halloween. Children of the Night have a tendency to crop up in such circumstances, like talk of rain in London. Now that I was here, I could see why. The French Quarter, with its narrow streets and looming balconies frozen in time, almost made the idea of vampires credible, especially in the lingering moist heat of the fall. It felt like a playground for suave monsters, a perpetual reinventing past, and if vampires lived anywhere, I supposed, then these dark streets and alleyways with their fetid, flamboyant cemeteries would be as good a place as any.
But they didn't live anywhere, and after another punishing swallow of my salty margarita, I started to put Rita-May right on this fact. She shifted herself comfortably against my chest, and listened to me rant.
We were in Jimmy Buffett's bar on Decatur, and the evening was developing nicely. At nine o'clock I'd been there by myself, sitting at the bar and trying to work out how many margaritas I'd drunk. The fact that I was counting shows what a sad individual I am. The further fact that I couldn't seem to count properly demonstrates that on that particular evening I was an extremely drunk sad individual too. And I mean, yes, Margaritaville is kind of a tourist trap, and I could have been sitting somewhere altogether heavier and more authentic across the street. But I'd done that the previous two nights, and besides, I liked Buffett's bar. I was, after all, a tourist. You didn't feel in any danger of being killed in his place, which I regard as a plus. They only played Jimmy Buffett on the juke box, not surprisingly, so I didn't have to worry that my evening was suddenly going to be shattered by something horrible from the post-melodic school of popular music. Say what you like about Jimmy Buffett, he's seldom hard to listen to. Finally, the barman had this gloopy eye thing, which felt pleasingly disgusting and stuck to the wall when you threw it, so that was kind of neat.
I was having a perfectly good time, in other words. A group of people from the software convention I was attending were due to be meeting somewhere on Bourbon at ten, but I was beginning to think I might skip it. After only two days my tolerance for jokes about Bill Gates was hovering around the zero mark. As an Apple Macintosh developer, they weren't actually that funny anyway.
So. There I was, fairly confident that I'd had around eight margaritas and beginning to get heartburn from all the salt, when a woman walked in. She was in her mid-thirties, I guessed, the age where things are just beginning to fade around the edges but don't look too bad for all that. I hope they don't, anyway: I'm approaching that age myself and my things are already fading fast. She sat on a stool at the corner of the bar, and signalled to the barman with a regular's upward nod of the head. A minute later a margarita was set down in front of her, and I judged from the colour that it was the same variety I was drinking. It was called a Golden something or other, and had the effect of gradually replacing your brain with a sour-tasting sand which shifted sluggishly when you moved your head.
No big deal. I noticed her, then got back to desultory conversation with the other barman. He'd visited London at some point, or wanted to – I never really understood which. He was either asking me what London was like, or telling me; I was either listening, or telling him. I can't remember, and probably didn't know at the time. At that stage in the evening my responses would have been about the same either way. I eventually noticed that the band had stopped playing, apparently for the night. That meant I could leave the bar and go sit at one of the tables. The band had been okay, but very loud, and without wishing them any personal enmity I was glad they had gone. Now that I'd noticed, I realized they must have been gone for a while. An entire Jimmy Buffett CD had played in the interval.
I lurched sedately over to a table, humming ‘The Great Filling Station Holdup’ quietly and inaccurately, and reminding myself that it was only about twenty after nine. If I wanted to meet up with the others without being the evening's comedy drunk, I needed to slow down. I needed to have not had about the last four drinks, in fact, but that would have involved tangling with the space-time continuum to a degree I felt unequal to. Slowing down would have to suffice.
It was as I was just starting the next drink that the evening took an interesting turn. Someone said something to me at fairly close range, and when I looked up to have another stab at comprehending it, I saw it was the woman from the bar.
‘Wuh?’ I said, in the debonair way that I have. She was standing behind the table's other chair, and looked diffident but not very. The main thing she looked was good-natured, in a wary and toughened way. Her hair was fairly blonde and she was dressed in a pale blue dress and a dark blue denim jacket.
‘I said – is that chair free?’
I considered my standard response, when I'm trying to be amusing, of asking in a soulful voice if any of us are truly free. I didn't feel up to it. I wasn't quite drunk enough, and I knew in my heart of hearts that it simply wasn't funny. Also, I was nervous. Women don't come up to me in bars and request the pleasure of sitting at my table. It's not something I'd had much practice with. In the end I settled for straightforwardness.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And you may feel absolutely free to use it.’
The woman smiled, sat down, and started talking. Her name, I discovered rapidly, was Rita-May. She'd lived in New Orleans for fifteen years, after moving there from some god-forsaken hole called Houma, out in the Louisiana sticks. She worked in one of the stores further down Decatur near the square, selling Cajun spice sets and cookbooks to tourists, which was a reasonable job and paid okay but wasn't very exciting. She had been married once and it had ended four years ago, amid general apathy. She had no children, and considered it no great loss.
This information was laid out with remarkable economy and a satisfying lack of topic drift or extraneous detail. I then sat affably drinking my drink while she efficiently elicited a smaller quantity of similar information from me. I was 32, she discovered, and unmarried. I owned a very small software com
pany in London, England, and lived with a dozy cat named Spike. I was enjoying New Orleans' fine cuisine but had as yet no strong views on particular venues – with the exception of the muffelettas in the French Bar, which I liked inordinately, and the po-boys at Mama Sam's, which I thought were overrated.
After an hour and three more margaritas our knees were resting companionably against each other, and by eleven-thirty my arm was laid across the back of her chair and she was settled comfortably against it. Maybe the fact that all the dull crap had been got out of the way so quickly was what made her easy to spend time with. Either way, I was having fun.
Rita-May seemed unperturbed by the vehemence of my feelings about vampires, and pleasingly willing to consider the possibility that it was all a load of toss. I was about to raise my hand to get more drinks when I noticed that the bar staff had all gone home, leaving a hand-written sign on the bar which said: LOOK, WILL YOU TWO JUST FUCK OFF.
They hadn't really, but the well had obviously run dry. For a few moments I bent my not inconsiderable intelligence towards solving this problem, but all that came back was a row of question marks. Then suddenly I found myself out on the street, with no recollection of having even stood up. Rita-May's arm was wrapped around my back, and she was dragging me down Decatur towards the square.
‘It's this way,’ she said, giggling, and I asked her what the hell I had agreed to. It transpired that we were going to precisely the bar on Bourbon where I'd been due to meet people an hour-and-a-half ago. I mused excitedly on this coincidence, until Rita-May got me to understand that we were going there because I'd suggested it.
‘Want to buy some drugs?’ Rita-May asked, and I turned to peer at her.
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