Double or Die

by Charlie Higson

  An old man in a uniform sat at a desk; he gave the boys a quick once-over.

  ‘You here for the lecture?’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Perry boldly.

  ‘It’s already started,’ said the guard and he passed the boys a clipboard with a piece of paper attached. ‘You’ll have to hurry. Sign in first.’

  The two boys scribbled some illegible names on the list and then followed the sign up the stairs towards the lecture.

  They found their way into an exhibition hall where several rows of chairs had been set out among the displays. The audience was a mixed bunch. There were a few nurses and people in Red Cross uniforms, a small group of eager-looking Boy Scouts, some young men and women who were probably medical students and some older, more serious-looking men with beards and spectacles.

  A lecturer was standing at the front next to a screen on which a slide was being projected showing a group of soldiers posing stiffly for the camera.

  ‘We’ll wait in here for a while,’ James whispered, finding a seat at the back. ‘Then when we get an opportunity we’ll slip away and have a look round.’

  ‘All right,’ said Perry and the two boys sat down.

  James took in his surroundings. The walls of the room were lined with shelves and cabinets containing odd things in jars. He read some nearby labels with a mixture of fascination and horror: Female monstrous foetus, found in the abdomen of Thomas Lane, a lad between fifteen and sixteen years of age, at Sherborne, in Dorsetshire, June 6th, 1814… Imperfectly formed male foetus found in the abdomen of John Hare, an infant between nine and ten months old, born May 8th 1807… Human female twin monster, the bodies of which are united crosswise, sacrum to sacrum… Intestines of Napoleon, showing the progress of the disease that carried him off… Embalmed body of the first wife of the late Martin Van Butchell…

  He hadn’t really given much thought to what might be on display in the museum but realised now that it was full of medical curiosities. Perry nudged him and nodded towards the front. He had gone slightly pale and James wondered what could be worse than the things in the jars he had been looking at.

  A new slide was being projected on to the screen showing a man’s head. One side of it looked like it had been completely eaten away. The cheek was hollowed out, the eye missing, and large, crude staples held the pieces of flesh together. The wound was clean and the man had a bland, almost bored expression on his face.

  The lecturer was speaking. ‘During the war, we learnt a great deal about the effects and treatment of gunshot wounds and great advances were made in the field of plastic surgery. We gave help and hope to countless young men with horribly deformed and mutilated features. This next series of slides shows the step-by-step reconstruction of one such young man, Private Edwin Carter, who received a high-velocity, large-calibre bullet in the face at the battle of Passchendaele, in October 1917.’

  James almost had to look away as the next slide came up. Again, the man looked calm and blank, despite the fact that his nose and upper jaw were missing and in their place was a dark hollow.

  One of the Boy Scouts jumped up from his chair and ran out of the room, holding his mouth and nose, his skin green.

  ‘This next slide clearly shows how cartilage from the man’s shoulder, and skin from his back and thigh were used to begin rebuilding the missing tissue…’

  One of the Red Cross workers, a skinny young woman with bobbed hair, now followed the Boy Scout out of the room, looking equally sick.

  James stood up.

  ‘Now’s my chance,’ he said to Perry, who didn’t look round, but merely nodded, his eyes transfixed by the awful pictures.

  James headed towards the lavatories, where he could hear the Scout being sick, but didn’t go in. Instead he peeled off and sneaked into the next gallery.

  Dim working lights showed him an eerie scene. He was in a great hall, three storeys tall, with windows around the edge of the high, domed roof. The upper two levels consisted of book-lined walkways that circled the hall surrounded by iron railings on which were mounted the antlers and horns of numerous dead animals. Below them, the main floor of the hall was crowded with more wooden display cabinets and a variety of bizarre skeletons. There were dinosaurs and prehistoric beasts, but also more modern curiosities, like an elephant, an ostrich and a giraffe as well as the remains of several humans. James saw one human skeleton that must have been over eight feet tall. He assumed it must be of a caveman or something, but when he went closer and read the label he found that it was the skeleton of Charles Byrne, an Irish giant who had died in 1783. Next to him was the tiny skeleton of a girl, less than two feet tall, Caroline Crachami, a Sicilian dwarf.

  James wandered from display to display. The cabinets contained more jars. As well as the freaks and curiosities, there were countless specimens of hideous diseases and accidents, and he couldn’t help thinking about all the terrible ways in which a person could die.

  He realised that he himself had been close enough to death in the last twenty-four hours to smell its foul breath. He hadn’t thought about it before. He had kept moving and forced the memories to the back of his mind, but now the strain on his nerves was beginning to show and a dark mood was descending on him.

  It was cold in here and his head ached. He was dog-tired. His body was stiff and he was suddenly aware of the bruises he’d got in the accident last night.

  He looked at yet another skeleton and it looked back at him from its hollow eye sockets. He was all too aware that no matter how handsome you looked, how full of life and energy you were, underneath your skin was a grinning skeleton. Sooner or later we all die. If violence didn’t get you, disease would, and if somehow all the diseases in the world missed you, then there was only old age to look forward to and the slow decay of the body.

  He shook his head and swore under his breath: ‘Come on, James, this isn’t helping. Get on with what you’ve come here to do.’

  He hurried into the next room, past a display of surgical instruments. He was becoming used to seeing bizarre objects, so he barely stopped to look at a row of pickled lungs, a collection of hairballs removed from humans – one the size of a football – one of Robert the Bruce’s ribs and the mummified hands of one of John of Gaunt’s sons.

  This was Room Five.

  He saw a sign that read ‘Series D. The evolution of the nervous system – of the brain and spinal cord.’ There was a row of cases, entirely covering one wall, showing brains of all shapes and sizes. From fish brains and tiny things belonging to rats, right up to massive elephant and whale brains. He scooted along the cases, reading the numbers and then climbed to an upper gallery where there were more cases.

  He came to the brains of apes – chimpanzees, orang-utans and gorillas – and then at last he found Case Twenty-two.

  He peered in. More brains. But what was the significance? He read the labels: Nos. D683 & D683a the brains of two microcephalic idiots. No, surely that wasn’t what he was looking for.

  But what?

  And then a name caught his eye: No. D685 the brain of the famous mathematician, Charles Babbage, donated by the owner, 1857.

  Babbage? Where had he heard that name before?

  Babbage… A mathematician.

  Fairburn and Peterson had been mathematicians at Cambridge.

  Cambridge. Yes. That was where he’d heard the name, from another mathematician. The student, Alan Turing. He’d said something about improving on Babbage’s work.

  James hadn’t understood what Turing was talking about and hadn’t paid much attention at the time, but this must be what Fairburn had meant in his coded letter to Peterson.

  He looked at the brain. It was in two neat halves, each in its own jar, like the two halves of a giant walnut. James peered at the knobbled, pale-grey lumps, swimming in clear liquid. It was hard to think that this had once been the brain of a great genius, that it had been crammed with lofty ideas, because now it was nothing. Empty and dead and useless. />
  When James got back to the lecture there was another man on the stage. He was wearing a rifleman’s uniform and had a row of medals across his chest. He was obviously a gunshot survivor. Half of his face was shiny and mottled. The skin around one eye was pulled out of shape and his nose looked like a lump of rolled dough. A scraggly moustache below it barely concealed a scarred and twisted lip.

  ‘Thank you, Bill,’ said the lecturer and the soldier left the stage to applause from the audience.

  ‘Now,’ the lecturer went on, ‘I would like to show you the effects of a bullet wound on soft tissue.’

  An assistant brought up a preserved specimen and placed it on a table. It was the cross section of a human torso and you could clearly see where a bullet had gouged a jagged path through it.

  James tugged Perry’s arm.

  ‘We can go,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Perry, jumping up. ‘I don’t think I could take m-much m-more of this.’

  As they left they could hear the lecturer carrying on, his voice matter-of-fact: ‘As is very clear, the first priority with a gunshot wound is to disinfect it with a powerful antiseptic…’

  Once they were outside, Perry gulped in lungfuls of fresh air. He didn’t look at all well.

  ‘I hope you found what you were looking for,’ he said. ‘Because I never want to go back into that chamber of horrors as long as I live.’

  ‘I found it,’ said James.

  ‘What was it?’

  James told Perry all about the brain.

  ‘A bit ghoulish, don’t you think?’ said Perry. ‘I’m not so sure that when I die I’d like m-my brain to be put on display in a m-museum.’

  ‘I’m not sure any museum would want it,’ said James.

  ‘Ha, ha,’ said Perry. ‘And I suppose that every m-museum in the country will be fighting to get hold of your brain when you kick the bucket, great genius that you are.’

  ‘I don’t think I want to be remembered when I die, actually,’ said James quietly. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and all that. It’s living that’s important. Doing things. Not getting bored and wasting your life. Before he died, my Uncle Max quoted a line from somewhere, “I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.” ’

  ‘So we’ve got your uncle to blame for all this, have we?’ said Perry, and James laughed.

  ‘Right,’ said James. ‘Time is ticking away. We need to get something to eat, we need to talk to Pritpal again and then we need to head for Highgate cemetery.’

  They walked down to the Strand, where there was a big Lyons Corner House restaurant. It was full and noisy, and a small orchestra was playing at one end.

  They found a cheap food counter and filled up on bread and soup, glad of the warmth and light and lively atmosphere. James soon felt restored and ready to carry on, and he had the strength to keep any black thoughts out of his mind.

  There was a phone booth in the lobby and James put a call through to Pritpal at the mission.

  ‘Who was Charles Babbage?’ he asked Pritpal when he came on the line.

  ‘He was a nineteenth-century inventor,’ said Pritpal. ‘And like Fairburn and Peterson, he studied mathematics at Cambridge. Why?’

  ‘That’s what was in the case at the museum, Babbage’s brain.’

  ‘Babbage spent his whole life trying to invent two machines,’ said Pritpal, his voice made thin and distant by the telephone. ‘They were supposed to be able to carry out mathematical calculations many times faster than any human. The first machine was called a Difference Engine. It would have changed the world if it had worked.’

  ‘How do you know about all this?’ said James. ‘Did Fairburn talk to you about him?’

  ‘Often,’ said Pritpal. ‘Like Babbage, Fairburn was obsessed with the idea of being able to turn all human thought into numbers. If you could express every thought as binary code, like on your piece of paper, then everything in the universe could be represented by ones and zeros.’

  ‘I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,’ said James. ‘You’re making my head spin.’

  ‘It’s simple,’ said Pritpal, which was what people usually said when they were about to explain something very complicated. ‘If you can turn every idea into a series of numbers, then every problem in the universe could be solved by a calculating machine. Do you see?’

  ‘Not really,’ said James. ‘But go on.’

  ‘Maybe I am explaining it all wrong,’ said Pritpal. ‘What this is all about is the idea of trying to build a machine that works like a human brain, only a million times faster, like a sort of superbrain. You put in a mathematical problem at one end, and seconds later the answer comes out of the other end, like magic. Just think of the advances that could be made in science and mathematics. This was what Babbage was trying to do with his second machine, the Analytical Engine. It was much more complicated than his first machine, but unfortunately, as with the Difference Engine, he could never get it to work. The machinery available to him at the time was not good enough. It all came to nothing.’

  ‘Do you suppose Charnage is trying to build one of these machines?’ said James.

  ‘I suppose it is possible,’ said Pritpal.

  ‘There’s only one way to find out,’ said James.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Pritpal’s voice sounded a million miles away.

  ‘We’re going to Highgate cemetery.’

  ‘James, you must be careful,’ said Pritpal.

  ‘Don’t worry. The cemetery’s full of dead people, Prit,’ said James with a laugh. ‘I’m hardly likely to come to any harm from them, am I?’

  It was growing dark as they left the Lyons Corner House. The streetlights were coming on and London was washed in a sickly orange glow. They found a small hardware store and bought a torch, then jumped in a taxi and set off for north London. On the way, James filled Perry in on his conversation with Pritpal.

  ‘It sounds like we could do with one of these m-machines to help us solve the cipher,’ said Perry.

  James pulled Fairburn’s letter out of his pocket. The original version that he had taken from Charnage’s study. Charnage had written notes all over it. He had obviously been trying to solve the clues himself, probably to find out exactly what information the cipher contained. James was pleased to see that most of Charnage’s ideas were way off course. He just had to hope that he could stay one jump ahead of him.

  ‘We’re getting there,’ he said. ‘We’ve solved four of the seven clues. We’re over halfway.’

  ‘What’s left?’

  ‘The poem,’ James said, ‘the bit about me not liking crosswords, and the sporting stuff.’

  ‘Remind m-me what that bit was again,’ said Perry.

  ‘How well I remember scoring the winning try in the Field Game against the Duffers,’ James read, ‘and coxing the Callisto in the parade of boats on June the Fourth.’

  ‘Anyone would think the m-man had never been to Eton,’ said Perry. ‘There’s m-more m-mistakes in that than in one of m-my Latin construes.’

  ‘List them,’ said James.

  ‘Well, for one, you don’t score a try in the Field Game, it’s a rouge,’ said Perry. ‘Secondly, the Duffers are a rowing crew, m-made up of m-masters, not a Field Game team. Thirdly, there is no boat in the June the Fourth parade called the Callisto.’

  ‘So, what’s he trying to tell us?’ said James. ‘Is it something to do with boats, do you think?’

  ‘M-maybe rouge is significant?’ said Perry. ‘A red boat, perhaps?’

  ‘Any idea what Callisto is?’ said James.

  ‘It’s a constellation,’ said Perry. ‘The Great Bear.’

  ‘Of course,’ said James. ‘I knew I recognised the name.’

  ‘So, we’re looking for a red bear sailing a boat,’ said Perry.

  The boys looked at each other and grinned and for a moment James forgot all about his tiredness and his injuries and the cold
knot of fear that sat in his stomach.

  15

  It’s Your Funeral

  ‘There you go,’ said the cabbie as he took the fare money from Perry. ‘You’ve the west cemetery to your left and the east cemetery to your right.’

  The road they were on, near to Hampstead Heath, was dark and quiet and secluded, overhung by tall trees on either side.

  ‘Which part has the Egyptian tombs?’ asked James.

  ‘You’ll be wanting the older part,’ said the cabbie, giving a handful of change back to Perry. ‘The west. But I think you’ll find it closes at dusk. Are you sure you don’t want me to take you back to civilisation?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said James. ‘We only want to take a quick look.’

  ‘It’s your funeral,’ said the cabbie and he chuckled at his little joke before driving away.

  The two boys waited for the taxi to disappear then went over to the cemetery to investigate. A substantial wall surrounded it and there was an ornate gothic chapel guarding the entrance. Just as the cabbie had warned, it was locked shut.

  Perry looked at James, who had a familiar, reckless look in his eyes.

  ‘Don’t tell m-me,’ he said. ‘We’re going over the wall.’

  ‘However did you guess?’ said James. ‘Come on, give me a leg up!’

  James scooted up the wall, then lay down flat and hauled Perry up.

  The heavy cloud cover, which had lain over London all day like a grey blanket, rolled aside for a moment, revealing a yellow moon whose light gave the boys a tantalising glimpse of the cemetery. Then the gap in the clouds closed and they were plunged once more into darkness.

  They jumped down and Perry switched on the torch. Its narrow beam picked out odd details: the statue of an angel, a granite funeral urn, an ancient, twisted tree choked with ivy. There was a wild and overgrown feel about the place and it was easy to imagine the spirits of the dead haunting it.