Nails in the Sky
Page 14
A buzzing numbness tingled in his ears, rushing over him from the head down, and he fought the urge to roll his eyes back into his skull and cry as Sheila said, “Alex, you and everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever known—Ruth, Crink, Jules, Clark. Every person on the planet is dead.
“I know I don’t remember her. Ruth. And I’m pretty sure you’re not going to want to hear this but...it’s because she never existed. I mean, well, she might have existed at some point. But right now? In your life as you know it? She doesn’t exist. Technically, nobody exists, any more. Not for years, now, in fact. The world, everyday life, history, art and the universe, from the smallest, most insignificant tiny details, through to wars and epic poetry, has long-since stopped being anything.”
“Long since what, exactly?” Alex asked, arching an eyebrow and leaning into the sofa back. Had everyone lost their fucking minds? He was here because this woman knew secrets about his imaginary friend. Maybe now wasn’t the time for judgement.
“Well,” she said, a shadow falling over her eyes, as Alex sat, captivated and agitated to the point of wanting to crawl out of his skin.“At one stage, four hundred and fifty to five hundred years ago, the human race, in its insatiable quest for easier living, improved technology and aggressive expansion, wiped out any means for sustainable living. There was nothing left. They were going to die. And, as so often happens when we smell smoke, the house was already burning down. In spite of our best attempts, all our knowledge and the final, heart-breaking union of the world’s governments towards fighting off a common threat, we died out sooner than anyone even predicted.”
Alex frowned. “Died out. Like dodos.”
Sheila nodded. “Poof.”
Alex had a pit in his stomach. Panic rose inside him, and a cresting surge of guilt and worry shot through his chest. He was wasting his time. Why did he feel compelled to sit here and listen to this insanity? Ruth could still be out there somewhere. Where the hell was Ruth? What the hell had happened to Crink that he couldn’t remember her? He felt helpless.
There was something he needed to know, though. “Frank.”
“I tell this man the world is dead and he asks me about Frank, the invisible man.”
He rubbed his eyes and cursed himself. What was even happening? “What do you know about Frank?”
She sneered, “Jesus, Alex, fine. The short of it is, I’m what the geek community call an “empath”. I get readings off of people. Weird shit, and very random. Sometimes it’s a mood, sometimes it’s the song that’s in their head. People, their...energy, these things, follow them around wherever they go. Like a cloud.”
Alex scoffed, “And you read him off of me?”
“First time you knocked me over outside Eden Grove.” She raised her glass, in a mock toast. “How else do you think I know what I know?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe Crink told you? Maybe you heard me talking to him—yes, I talk to my imaginary friend, don’t start with me. Point is, there are dozens of reasons you could know that.”
“I know you dream about him following you around at night.”
Alex went quiet, his mouth still hanging open, unsure of where to commit his focus next, inward or outward.
She continued, “I know he scares you. An old man imaginary friend? Makes sense, that sounds terrifying. I know that when your dad died, he sat on the edge of your bed for six days while you shut yourself in your bedroom.”
“Sheila, stop.”
“I know that you tell him things you don’t tell Julie,” she said.
“Sheila...”
“And things you don’t tell Clark.”
Alex slammed his hand into the arm of the couch, shaking the frame so her glass tumbled off its coaster, across from him. “Enough already!”The room went quiet, the only noise being Sheila’s breathing, her eyes locked on Alex who was trying hard to ignore her stare.
“Every last one of us. Alex,” she said, eventually.“I know this is crazy, but...you need to believe me. It was the end. The world, scarred and pockmarked from industrialisation and harvesting, species after species, toppled into the domino abyss of a crumbling catastrophe; it went over a precipice from which we could not return.”
“It took more than a hundred years, more than one of our lifetimes, but a blink in the eyes of the world. What was left when it was all over was a husk of a planet, cold and dead, floating through space.”
A full, heavy minute passed before he snorted inappropriately loudly. He then turned away, his mouth hidden behind his hand, barely containing his laughter.
“Would you mind sharing with the class?” Sheila asked, calmly.
He drew a deep, happy breath. “Oh, it’s nothing. I was just...it’s poetic, I guess, wanting to tell someone they’re insane, and not being able to, because you’re both space ghosts.”
“Your friend isn’t missing, Alex. You wanted an answer; I’m giving you one. Imagine your consciousness as a living thing—”
“God!”
“Like an extra arm,” she raised her voice.“Or, if you want to go with the more popular imagery, a third eye. An offshoot net of impulses, ideas, intelligences, and raw, undirected emotion we live in.
“It could be the most important part of your life, and you would never know, because you were merely inside of it, from day to day.”
“Fish never perceive the water around them.” Alex sighed.
“Precisely. The world around you is a network of interconnected impulses, or ‘will’, fuelling the abstract events, colours, emotions and developments of our lives. But it’s not real. We are a series of events and feelings in a timeline that burned themselves into the fabric of the universe. We lived on, without ourselves, after we killed the world.
“There’s nothing left, Alex. This is everything—an afterglow of a life wasted. A ghost planet, ghost people, remembering themselves, their families—looping continuously in the moments of a protracted non-existence. We are spectres on the dead ship Earth, floating for centuries in the black, drippy silence of space. All it took was for us to need to be alive, and we were, even after we died.”
Alex squinted in the vanilla-cookie glow and regarded this girl in the way a parent regards their kid’s shitty neighbour friend when he tells them he invented Oreos.
“Which brings me to the matter of your friend Ruth and, probably Albion de Villiers too.”
“Wait, you know about De Villiers?”
“Just because nobody knows what you’re talking about doesn’t mean nobody’s listening when you talk, Alex.” She smiled at him, a new softness in her eyes.
Alex sped the conversation along, unwilling to slow down for anything as complicated as that particular smile. The smile, hers, vanished as soon as he did. “Okay, so what’s your big, fat explanation for these disappearances, Ms Kingston?”
“The moment anyone living this global illusion finds out the truth, they are erased. The network is so strong, so resilient, that these people, these memories of people, are blinked out of existence. The world around us rewrites itself to have never included them, in any way, and these people just never exist.”
“Have never existed.”
“Never in the history of the world.”
“So, Ruth...stopped existing.”
“She never began to exist. Aside from you, a matter I’m afraid we’ll have to address in a little while, there is no one left on this earth with whom Ruth has any connection whatsoever. Not even me. She’s been overwritten.”
-
Alex had had enough. “I have to go,” he said, getting up from the couch and flattening out the crease in his pants. He had to find Ruth. “Your nonsensical jibber-jabber, though amusing, is making me want to headbutt a lawnmower blade.”
She chased after him, stopping him cold at the front door as she said, “It’s the reason nobody remembers Frank, Alex.”
“Frank’s imaginary.”
“He’s real. Well, I think he was. Then he disappeared. You r
emember him, but you were too young to understand nobody realised he was missing. That’s why. Frank to you became Frank-the-imaginary to everyone who knew you.”
“Can you let me out, please,” he pleaded.
She bit her lip. “You know something’s wrong! You’ve known it for months, oh my god how much do you need to be convinced, Alex van der Haar? This? Right here, what I’m telling you? It’s already costing me much more than you know, but...you need to know more. There are bad things coming, I can feel them.”
“All right, Psychy the Psychic,” he said, turning to her in the passage and walking backwards towards the front door. “Know what?”
“The worst part of the disappearances is it doesn’t have to be any profound moment that does it. It’s often quite mundane. You might not even know yourself, initially. At your core, your psyche is always turning the world over, considering everything. You’re always thinking, including many thoughts you don’t even know you’re having. And those subconscious processes are what get you. They’re what makes you realise you’re not here. It just happens.”
–
In the PE magistrate’s courtroom, Judge Kriegler and a courtroom full of advocates were waiting for Chuck Daedalus to appear on the witness booth screen. He was scheduled to appear for his arraignment.
“Your worship,” remarked the prosecutor, “no one appreciates the staggering inefficiency of the St Albans prison staff as much as I do, but we do have other cases to see to today.”
Kriegler smiled placatingly down from his desk at the flustered man. “We’ll give them five more minutes and then move on, yes, Mr Richards?”
The attorney bowed back to the judge. “As your worship pleases.”
The gathered men had been waiting since the courtroom opened thirty minutes before, the first five cases for the day bumped up to after lunch, in an unprecedented showing of procedural fast-tracking in the South African court system.
Daedalus wasn’t showing. The room guard had left five minutes previously to follow up with his cell manager. The ellipses of attorneys sat murmuring in their corner of the courtroom while they waited.
The feed cut to the prison manager’s wood-lined office wall. Dale, a man with twenty-three years in the South African police force, and ten working prisons in the Western and Eastern Cape, stepped into the frame. He was a stubbly man of greying temples and crystal-blue eyes. He’d worked through seven guard strikes, a series of heavy retrenchments, and the arduous 2027 to 2028 interprovincial relocation of two thirds of the inmates between St Albans and Pollsmoor prisons. That had ended in twelve guards getting fired, and the security cameras from five entire wings needing to be replaced at both prisons.
He sat in front of his desktop webcam, followed onto screen by the chief prison guard, Jan van Nerret. It was the first time Glen had seen Dale looking worried. “An issue’s come up here at St Albans, your honour.”
From his right, Glen could hear Kirsty, the stenographer, stop typing. The whole room sat silent for a full three seconds before he asked Dale to clarify what he meant.
“Chuck Daedalus escaped last night.”
“He fucking what?”
Kirsty raised an eyebrow at Kriegler, who immediately told her without looking away from the camera to start getting this on record again. “He...had an inside man who helped move him out, your worship.”
“How the hell did this happen?”
“We’re looking into it, your worship. We’ve got guards sweeping the grounds. He may still be on site.”
“Jesus Christ, Dale.”
“Um, your worship. There’s one other thing.” Another pause. “He murdered his cellmate.”
–
Earlier that morning, before Chuck’s televised appearance, a guard named Frik, who had, with quick-won devotion, been a convert of Daedalus for months already, bounced a rubber knobkerrie along the passage wall on the way to his cell. His uniform, ironed to force specifications, shuffled like moth wings against the pale glow of blinds at sunrise.
Frik had walked this route dozens of times since transferring to St Albans the year before, the dull reverberation of his truncheon bounding a dead rhythm down the hard, clinical hallways. Arriving at Chuck’s cell, a solitary unit on the corner with a door facing the far wall, he slid open the heavy iron gate.
“Mr Daedalus. Is everything ready here?”
“It is if you’ve taken care of things.” Chuck was lying back on the floor, reading a copy of Elle, his feet resting on the bunk bottom. The room was falsely calm. Straightened and spotless.
Ducking into the stonewashed purgatory, Frik realised he’d never actually seen anybody come in to clean this cell. “I stashed the bodies and ganked Van Beuren’s pass. The east gate entrance changes its guard in thirty-five minutes, which gives us a half-hour window.”
–
Judge Kriegler listened, incredulous, to the updates from St Albans twenty minutes later. He understood that one slip on a smartphone or social media app could spill the guts of this breakout fiasco into the South African media circus. Within seconds he went from judge to babysitter, collecting his colleagues’ cellphones and iPads to stop them updating, while court 27 waited for confirmation that Daedalus had actually escaped.
“Dale! I just need some clarification here. What details can you give me?”
“Look, there’s simply nothing I can tell you at this stage. This block is a complete disaster area right now. No witnesses, no prints. Nothing on the goddamn cameras, sorry. From what the detectives are telling me, Chuck and a guard named Frik van Onselen left through a fokken side entrance to the facility, sorry, approximately two and a half hours after taking another night guard’s magnetic pass strip.”
“How in God’s name did they steal a badge? Aren’t those things checked in whenever a guard clicks out after—”
“He’s dead, Glen,” came the simple answer. “Fifteen minutes ago, we found the body of Andries van Beuren, a night watchman on the adjacent cell unit. He was stripped and left in the eastern shower block with the water running.”
“Jesus Christ, Dale.”
“My thoughts exactly. Judge Kriegler,” Dale resumed, slipping back into the proper register.“I’m going to go down to D block and lend a hand with this whole mess, but before I go, you oughta know one last thing. The guard who helped Daedalus escape? Obviously we’re not ruling out payoffs as to how he got him out of here. As of right now, everyone on his route is being brought in for questioning and, well, they’re all suspects. But Van Onselen’s not a concern any more, your worship. It seems the pair made it eight kays from the boundary gates on foot. They were in sight of the main road, maybe a kay or so away, before Daedalus murdered him. Detectives just found the body. He had a, um...he had a pencil nub jammed into his neck.”
Dale broke the transmission, and, after a few more minutes, the shocked courtroom disbanded. Stunned staff resumed the day’s scheduled appearances, as regional police forces began to mobilise in pursuit of the escaped murderer.
–
“Wait, Alex, you need to hear this.”
“What I need to hear is Ruth. You, I’ve heard quite enough of for one day.”
Alex slammed the heavy wooden door behind him as Sheila slumped against the wall in the main passage, her cigarette half burned through in her left hand. He was gone. He refused to believe her. What else could she have done but tell him? Tell him and just hope he could possibly understand? From her spot on the passage floor, she grabbed a handful of junk mail from the table and thumbed angrily through three envelopes before tossing them in frustration.
She balled her fist, surprised to find her grip loose, weak. Her fingers felt tired, slackened and infantile. She held her hand out in front of her face. A thin trail of electricity pulsed through her veins, tracing a highway map across skin that was already looking pale and translucent. It was happening. All too fast, she was beginning to slip.
She frowned at her own hand and sighed. “Well, I
guess I knew this was coming.”
Sheila clambered to her feet so she could run outside after Alex. She shouldered her way out the front door and through the rusty garden swinger, coming out onto the pavement in time to see Alex rounding the corner at the end of her block. His fists were clenched as he stomped through the cooling late-day heat.
A red Alfa Romeo took the corner a second after him, disappearing from an opposite angle down the small street. The driver was middle-class, maybe twenty-five, twenty-six years old, sporting an Afro and a rat’s ass of a beard. He could have been from around town. Rhodes students tended not to live in the suburbs unless they were rich or had family there. He was looking into his lap, his eyes a million miles away from the road.
The clipped screech of tyres came as if through a Vaseline fog, inevitable as Sheila sprinted around the corner, expecting tragedy and finding a miracle.
There Alex was, straight as a plank and terrified, casting a shadow on the street below him. The breeze in his air, his hands out to his sides as if to stabilise himself, but really doing nothing of any use. A miracle.
Alex van der Haar was flying—eight feet in the air, perfectly poised. Still, shocked, stiff and unmoving, as if he were still on the ground below. Only he was afloat. Fixed, the miracle he was being held up by nails in the sky, directly above where the Alfa driver had stopped his car in shock.
Frozen in time.
The three of them stayed perfectly still for what seemed like years. Alex turned his head towards her, his eyes wide and terrified.
A miracle. Anchors didn’t fly. This couldn’t be real.
His mouth hung open, and his legs swung wildly in the air. She screamed, “Alex!” and ran at him, the air already thick around her sluggish legs. “Oh shit” were the last words he heard out of her mouth before he passed out, and plummeted back onto the ground below.
C.