The Coincidence Engine

by Sam Leith

  ‘Pee. Beer. Heh. Uh gudda.’

  Bree realised, with relief, he was still remembering. He looked confused again. ‘Uh gud urr. Iss winnndy.’ He made the whooshing noise again.

  And then his face shone and his lids sagged. ‘Uzz inna plane… Inna… Hadda mos’ amazin’ dream…’

  Bree got up. She didn’t know what she knew, and she couldn’t think of anything else to ask because she didn’t know what she didn’t know. That was normal. That was her job.

  ‘Saw rrainbow,’ said Fisk. ‘Byooofu’. ’Mazin’ dreammm…’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Fisk,’ she said, but he wasn’t really noticing. She left.

  As she crossed the parking lot to the Chrysler, she ran over the conversation in her memory. She didn’t speculate. There was never any value in speculating. But something nuggeted in her mind.

  ‘I’m not a pilot,’ he had said. ‘I told the policeman.’

  Bree, who had seen the records, thought: What policeman?

  An amazing dream.

  Fisk, subsiding back into morphine sleep. Going down through the layers. There was a humming of bees. The air all around him was wet and it smelled of tin and electricity. The trees were dark, dark green and the sky was grey in all directions.

  He was driving a car. Not his own car. He knew in the dream that it wasn’t his own car, but it somehow belonged to him. The car was a vintage Plymouth as big as a whale. Fisk wallowed in a wide front seat upholstered in blood-covered leather. Fat drops of rain were splatting and dragging across the windshield, hauled sideways by the wind.

  Rain was wetting his cheek. Fisk had the windows open. He knew he had a passenger, on the front seat with him – he could see them from the corner of his eye – but he couldn’t bring himself to look round. He wasn’t scared of his passenger – sharer, he thought; my passenger is my sharer – but something prevented him from turning his head to look. His eyes were on the road.

  He cruised on the speed limit. Fifty-five miles per hour, but the scenery changed only very slowly. He felt unease as he looked ahead, at the road pulling towards him lickety-split, and the scenery making its way sluggishly past like a moving staircase with the handrail out of sync.

  A bit away from the highway, before the treeline, he could see the gator fence. There were gators lined up behind it. They were moving their limbs slowly, purposefully. One, then another huffed and lolled and then, with lazy weight, started to haul themselves up the fence vertically, link by link. He noticed the passenger (sharer, he thought again) was gone. Nobody was there.

  The wind picked up, flapping erratically into the driver-side window. It was sheety and gusty and it tasted like batteries on his tongue. Fisk suddenly realised that the car wasn’t moving at all. The road continued to spool towards him, but it was a special effect, like in an old movie. He realised he needed to pee.

  He was outside the car, standing by the highway. Fisk was experiencing something halfway between memory and hallucination.

  He didn’t remember getting out of the car, but he could see it. There was somebody, he couldn’t see who, driving it, and somebody on the passenger side. The wheels were turning – whitewalls blurred – but it was keeping level with him.

  Here in the wind he felt scared. The wind caught his cuffs and belled his sleeves out with a great sad sound like a foghorn. The navy fabric of his uniform trousers, wet from the rain, clung to his legs like Saran wrap. His captain’s cap flipped up and vanished horizontally, end over end, out of his sight before he could turn to see it. He turned his back to the wind. The sky ahead, back down the highway where he had come from, over the delta, was black as stone.

  He moved his hand to his zipper, and POOM! He was nowhere.

  Chapter 2

  ‘The coincidence engine is starting to work. I saw it with my own eyes.’

  The Intercept was from nobody. It had been more or less sieved from static. Shortwave frequencies, an echo of an echo. The original signal was, they thought, perhaps, a fax; it still retained some formatting features. But its origin and its destination were unknown, and the very fact that they found it continued to be a source of bafflement. It was a one in a million shot: the equivalent of getting a crossed line and hearing your best friend’s voice from the other side of the world.

  It wasn’t even a term the Directorate’s officers had been specifically searching for. But ‘coincidence engine’ was close enough to send up a flag: they’d been combing for ‘probability’, ‘paradox’ (since that had been the inaccurate but hard-to-shake term that had briefly attached to the project), ‘singularity’, ‘Heisenberg’ (in variant spellings) and a half-dozen other key terms and areas. Red Queen, who made no secret of not being a scientist, explained to the Directorate’s staff that they were looking for ‘weird stuff and people who seem to know about miracles’.

  But then that was more or less a description of what they’d been doing ever since those wackos around the second Gulf War revived the Directorate of the Extremely Improbable. Red Queen would have preferred to work in the State Department, and Red Queen had made this noisily clear – which was almost certainly why Red Queen had the job. In this department, producer capture was not a good idea.

  But the arrival of the Intercept, coming so soon after the hurricanes and the satellite photograph, had seemed too much of a… well, there it was.

  Someone had flagged it, and now it was here.

  The hurricane blew through the junkyard and it made a plane. I saw it. First the gathering wind, and then the sky was filled with metal clashing and screaming and spinning. Rivets swarmed. Currents of air dashed and twirled plates, chairs, tin cans, girders and joists, pinging and banging off rocks. Noise like you never heard. Unholy howl. Rushing and screaming.

  Knock, knock, knock and the metal clashing and curving and denting and sticking with great screams. Beyond conception. Beyond seeing. The panel of a trailer. The corrugated sides of a container cracking and flattening. A flash in the middle of it, right in the middle, of a tiny man suspended in air, pedalling his legs like he’s treading water and his tiny mouth open and his eyes little dots of terror. Something forming around him.

  And finally the wind calmed and the thing was made, the metal miracle. Water running in beads down its flanks under the heavy sky. To the west, the cloud broke and in the distance the sky was bright, like through a tunnel. There was a double rainbow. And on the other side, the sky was a sheet of black. A terrible promise.

  The rotors of the engines were idling in the last of the wind. And sitting high in the air, strapped safely in the cockpit, was the pilot – mouth opening and closing, eyes wide, staring into the enormous sky. It works. I saw it.

  Its author, Red Queen reflected, sounded about as well adjusted as that guy who eats flies in the Dracula movie. But the thing about the plane had caught their attention.

  And there had been a hurricane. This they knew. Hurricane Jody had moved through the Gulf of Mexico for three days in the first week of August, feeding on the warm air rolling off the coast in the unending heatwave. It refused to blow itself out and refused to come ashore.

  Occasionally, like a big dog twitching its tail, it brushed against the land. In the early morning of the 24th, a kiss-curl of the fatal weather system – it looked like a wisp of cloud on the satellite image – had flattened four miles of the Florida Keys.

  The contents of two recently evacuated trailer parks had been lifted sideways, chewed to splinters in the hurricane’s mouth, and sprayed seaward like refuse from an industrial woodchipper. A film crew from Fox News went with them.

  The hurricane’s retreat had taken a near-perfect hemispherical bite out of the coastline. Thousands of tons of yellow sand were pulled into the sea. Small boats sailed inland through the air and anchored among defoliated palm trees.

  The hurricane had retreated, circled at sea, ambled south and west.

  It came ashore again sixty-one hours later, on a stretch of coastline where the civic contingency plan
ners had not expected it. The centre of the storm had started moving north-west at twenty knots. Its leading edge sucked a renowned Louisiana gambler bodily through the window of a riverboat casino, never to be seen again, and a steel roulette ball punched four inches into the tree stump to which the boat was moored. The storm’s left flank had sideswiped a single loop of the coastal highway, gridlocked with late-departing refugees, killing forty-eight motorists and 122 pedestrians.

  Then, abruptly, it changed direction again and headed back out to sea, brooded.

  And then, on the night of August 10th, it had headed inland again, and it did not stop at the coast. It had made landfall east of Mobile and headed up and over the delta with savage speed.

  Chapter 3

  It was still just light in Glisson Road when Mary Hollis arrived home.

  The bag in her hand, from the Marks & Spencer at the station, contained a fish pie, a small bag of prepared carrot batons and a half-bottle of red wine with a pink twist-off cap. Summer was on the way out. She felt a faint winter chill through her blouse.

  She put the bag down and fished in her handbag for her keys. As she did so, a movement – barely more than a disturbance of the air – registered in her peripheral vision. She glanced briefly up the street towards the road that led to the station. Nothing there.

  Silly woman, she said to herself aloud. Silly old bag. Only since she retired last year, though, had she started to notice herself looking over her shoulder when she turned the corner from Hills Road, or feeling nervous if she had to pass a man on the same side of the street. During all the years she worked up at the college, she had regarded the undergraduates as overgrown teenagers – unruly nephews and slatternly nieces, as exasperating and unthreatening as badly trained Labradors.

  ‘All right, Mrs H?’ bellowed in a cockney accent by a public schoolboy. ‘Where’s your gentleman caller, eh?’

  ‘Mind your own business.’

  Now, already, they had started looking bigger and more strange. If she was out at night and she heard young men walking behind her, she’d dawdle at a bus stop, or pause on the main road under a street light, to let them pass before she turned off. Sometimes, when they looked drunk, she’d make an excuse to drop into a shop.

  She was sixty-five, and she realised that she had started thinking of herself as an old woman. She had started thinking about what she looked like to others. Not the little vanities of make-up or hair – but the way her profile was changing. She felt as if she was growing smaller, taking shorter steps – as if she was gradually feeding herself to her fear.

  She found her keys in the bottom of her bag, turned the heavy deadlock and rattled the sticky little brass one into the Yale. The hall was dark and smelled of polish. She picked up her supper, and turned on the light.

  She tasted copper in her mouth, and felt her face go cold.

  The drawer had been pulled out of the hall table and her letters were spilled over the floor. The rug had been pulled up and was rucked up at the other end by the foot of the stairs. Every one of her framed photographs had been knocked from the walls and there were big jagged pieces of broken glass across the floorboards, a different colour where the rug had been.

  She felt her skin prickle. She made herself breathe, took a step and reached for the telephone on the hall table. It was an old brown plastic push-button BT model. She’d never owned a mobile phone.

  It was when she fumbled the receiver that she realised her hand was shaking. It clattered heavily onto the table. She picked it up and brought it to her ear. There was no dialling tone.

  Ahead of her, the darkness leading through to the kitchen seemed to breathe. She wanted to ask whether there was someone still there, but she didn’t want to know the answer and her mouth was too dry to speak.

  The door behind her was still open, and the street outside felt suddenly more cold and strange. She took a step away, not wanting to turn her back on the other end of the hall, and pushed her spine against the door jamb. She turned her head to look out. In the dusk just across the street there was an elderly man. He was dishevelled. Above his grey beard there was a kindly, perplexed face. He was standing still, watching her. Then something seemed to startle him. He turned his head sharply, as if looking over his shoulder.

  She stepped back out of the house and called to him, or tried to. As she raised her hand, though, he turned and dipped his head, walking back up towards the main road.

  ‘Sir!’ she yelped. ‘Sir! Excuse me!’

  His pace seemed to quicken and then, just as he was coming up to a street light, something she could not account for happened. He seemed, simply, to vanish. There was a shimmer, and where a second ago she had been watching him there was now no more than a heat haze – a smear in the air.

  A man’s shadow on the pavement shortened as it approached the street light, then lengthened on the far side, at the pace you might walk on a brisk spring evening, and then disappeared.

  By the time the police arrived, it was full dark and Mary was two doors down with Mrs Smart at number 62.

  Angela Smart had left an open pan of pasta boiling in the kitchen and opened the door to a tremulous knock. She found the old woman standing there. She wore a shapeless greatcoat and hat, and was clutching a plastic bag from Marks & Spencer up against her chest. She seemed agitated.

  ‘Mary?’ she had said. She knew Mrs Hollis from the occasional Neighbourhood Watch meeting, and to say hello to in the Co-op, sort of thing. She had long had her pegged as a meddlesome ratbag of the first water. ‘Is everything OK?’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry to trouble you. I think I’ve – I’ve been burgled. May I use your telephone to call the police?’

  There was a moment where it just hung there, and neither woman knew what to say.

  ‘But come in, of course. Come in. My goodness, were you there? Are you hurt – you poor thing…’

  She reached a hand to the other woman’s arm, and saw her shoulder shrink back and her eyes drop. Her hand tightened round the thin green bag.

  ‘I’m very well, thank you. I’m sorry. I mean, I’m fine. I think they’ve gone – but my telephone isn’t working at the moment.’

  Mrs Hollis’s tight politeness was as brittle as porcelain. If she touched her, she felt sure that she’d start to tremble and cry. She didn’t know quite how to cope with that, so she said: ‘Of course. Yes. I’ll put the kettle on.’

  She made Mrs Hollis a cup of tea. Mary Hollis, who had not since she was a young woman and been told it was common taken sugar in her tea, had two lumps. Installed on the sofa, she sipped, and scalded her lips, looking around the living room with a bland show of curiosity.

  The police showed up a little later. A man and a woman. She, a trim blonde in her early twenties; he, a thyroidal beanpole of a lad who looked barely out of his teens, and whose Adam’s apple bobbed up and down his neck like a fisherman’s float after a motorboat has passed.

  The WPC called Mrs Hollis ‘dear’, which would have annoyed her had she been more composed. Her silent companion looked ahead, gulped and bobbed.

  They went back into her house a little later. The interior of the house matched the wreckage in the hallway. Her single mattress had been heaved over and there were knife slashes through the fabric of the bed frame.

  The little room she used for her study had received the most thorough going-over – books pulled from shelves and scattered open-faced on the floor; slicks of paper spilling from the disembowelled desk. She gasped, little fluttery gasps, as the woman officer asked her, patiently: what’s gone?

  She didn’t know. The feeling wasn’t so much loss as violation. And there had not been that much to go, as she would reflect later sitting alone in her ruined room – she declined with a politeness she regretted Mrs Smart’s offer of a bed for the night. No. She couldn’t possibly.

  Not that much. They’d left her radio, the old television set. They probably wouldn’t have recognised as valuable the fine old edition of Peter Pan that h
ad been her mother’s, the one with the Rackham illustrations. It, too, had been flung to the ground. She replaced it on the shelf.

  The jewellery box on her dressing table had been upturned, its contents scattered onto table and floor below. She fished the big turquoise-and-silver brooch from the carpet when the police left, put it carefully back into the box. She started tidying. Gathering these little precious things back together, amid the destruction of the room, felt like combing the hair on a corpse.

  The knife slash through the fabric of the bed frame was especially horrible – a casual, instrumental violence. She imagined herself on the bed, on her back, the knife descending. The man with the knife looking not at her, but through her, towards something else.

  ‘You must have surprised them,’ the policewoman had said before she left, making a note in her pad.

  Mary didn’t think she’d surprised them, still less scared them. Nobody had rushed past her or clattered in the bowels of the house as she opened the door. Nobody had hoofed it over the garden fence. They’d been here, and they’d not wanted her jewellery or her nice books or her television. They’d not cared what they broke.

  She fingered the piece of paper the woman had given her – a form, something to do with being a victim of crime – and looked over again at the slash on the bed. Where the knife had hit the frame, the wood had splintered.

  Mary had said nothing to the police about the man she thought she saw vanish. She wondered if she’d been hallucinating. She didn’t want them thinking her dotty. Downstairs, she picked up the cushions and replaced them on the sofa. She slept on there that night, still in her clothes.

  Mary was right about that much. They had not been interested in her jewellery, the men who had turned over her house, and they would not have been scared of her. They had not, in fact, been interested in her house, her nice books, her jewellery, her television or anything else. They went by the names Davidoff and Sherman, and they had been intending, in fact, to burgle another house altogether.