But there was no time for musing, as Alex approached the guardrails outside the pool and looked around for an unlocked gate. He hopped a low fence near the far end and emerged from behind the lifeguard hut.
The pool looked deserted at first. Cool air hovered on its surface, and Alex was about to berate himself for being taken in by one of Crink’s stupid Pool Soc pranks, when he spotted two shadows on the bleachers on the far side of the pool.
Koosh’s voice cut across the water like a cannonade. “Hey broheim, why don’tcha walk yourself around this side of the party? We got some things to discuss, yeah?”
Alex approached, finding Crink sitting, eyes half closed and rolling in his head next to the Rasta from the arts festival stall. “I know you.”
“Alex! You’re here! You’ve got to meet my friend, Koosh!”
“Yeah, buddy, we’ve met. Are you okay?” Alex gave Koosh a quizzical look over the shoulder of his friend as he accepted his drunken hug. The Rastafarian simply grinned malevolently.
He sat Crink down on the bench, half to get a better look at him, and partly to stop him falling over and hurting himself. He was beyond messed up. His face was pale and clammy, lips drawn, dry and colourless. His head rolled as he tried to focus on his friend.
“Who the fuck are you, and what have you done with my friend?” Alex was furious, but he made no eye contact with the grinning man on the bleachers.
“Y’trying to be intimidating there, man? It’s adorable. Y’r friend’s fine, though. I bumped into him outside Cagney’s, that white-trash pub there by African Street. Bought him a couple drinks. Then a couple more drinks.”
“And?”
Koosh shifted up on the bench, prompting Alex to assume a defensive stance, ready to fight someone for the first time in his life. “Easy now. Wouldn’t wanna start something you’ll have to finish in the ER, son. I took the time to spice up your buddy’s last two drinks with a little MDMA, is all. Maybe some strychnine. Maybe one or two other things.”
Alex leapt at him, jamming his elbow into Koosh’s throat. “I’ll fucking kill you, you mother fu—”
With fluid and deliberate intent, Koosh’s boot collided with Alex’s crotch, sending him, crumpled, onto the bench below. As he crashed downwards, he felt Koosh’s body shift out from under him, his boots thudding rapidly over to where Crink sat, swaying on his bench.
“No!” Alex coughed, a dull, cross-eyed pain shooting through his body. The air left his lungs too fast and, in an instant, it felt like he was about to die. Koosh’s arm came up under Crink’s shoulder, hoisting him to his feet. He drew a huge steel bowie knife from a pouch at his side. Without seeming to move at all, it was instantly at the throat of Alex’s best friend.
Koosh continued, not even breathing hard, “Yeah, funny thing about my little cocktails, the ladies love them. They leave a sister relaxed, carefree and...willing to do things.”
“You son of a bitch.” Alex coughed.
“Aweh, mi roots. Why would you wanna be talking like that to the brother with the knife?”
Alex pulled himself up on the bench, his vision a maze of colours, as he struggled for breath.
Koosh was business-like. “Dangerous, being out here alone. Campus police can’t stop, you know? I hear there are all sorts of questionable characters roaming these parts at night.”
Crink mumbled something from behind Koosh’s arm then slumped.
Koosh pulled him to his feet and chuckled. “You know what’s funny, man? How alike the two of you are, you and my little Murgatroyd over here. Aside from your whole Christ thing.”
“Christ?”
“Well, I guess the little inbred can’t be the only one with no idea what’s going on. Then again, maybe everyone needs to ignore the signs, if they want to get out of this alive.”
Alex breathed deeply. “What do you want from me, you circus freak?”
“The same thing everyone wants from the hero, my man. Entertainment. I want you to trade. Yourself for your friend. There are machinations going on here that you can’t even grasp right now, Alex. So much shit, resting on your tiny pigsty of a life. Come with me, Alex. We can drop your little buddy at home. He’ll wake up with a sore head, and no recollection of this.”
Alex chortled, snapping his mouth closed in shock. He hadn’t planned to laugh. It just happened that way. He decided to roll with it. “See now, I’d go with you, Mr Koosh sir, but my mommy taught me never to negotiate with Rastafarian terrorists. It’s just a little rule I have. No hard feelings.”
Koosh’s eyes went cold as he hoisted Crink up to his feet again. “I understand that. You’re a smart guy. Big university education. Lots of good advice from Mommy and Daddy. But you know,” Koosh snarled, “you also learn a lot living the life I have. So many ways to get the things you want.”
“Why are you doing this? Why not just come after me?”
Crink’s kidnapper laughed cruelly at Alex from behind his friend’s shoulder. “There are so many ways to skin a cat, Alex, man, and this one is just so much fun! The boss, he wants you in a certain mindset—he got big plans for you, hero. Me? I’m just here to raise hell.”
Alex didn’t see the knife descend from Crink’s neck, the axe-sized blade shearing straight through his friend’s jeans, just over his femoral artery. Crink let out a suddenly sober scream, though, clearly having only just noticed what was going on. The two men exploded into a struggling flurry of desperation, sneaker squeaks and shouting. Alex took two steps towards them before everything resolved back into a standoff, Koosh with his arm around his friend’s throat again. “Yeah. After a couple hundred years of being around, you learn some nifty tricks from some terrible people.”
“Dude,” Crink said, a tremor in his voice, as he struggled slightly against his attacker’s face. “What is Koosh doing?”
Alex looked into his friend’s frightened eyes, his hands out and shaking, the blade now back at his exposed neck.“Koosh isn’t going to do anything, dude. Just relax.”
“Well, what’s it going to be, messiah boy?”
Alex breathed, frightened and grim. “All right! All right, I’ll come with you, just...don’t hurt him.”
Koosh smiled and slowly lowered the bowie knife. Crink stumbled forward, sinking quickly to his knees, mumbling as his friend crossed the space between them, towards the man with the knife.
In the unreal spotlights of the Great Field, what happened next seemed to pass in an instant. Sheila Kingston came bounding up the south-side hill from the parking lot and cleared the rear wall in one incredible lunge, descending the bleacher seats on the other side two at a time. She came down from behind Koosh in a thudding blur, bouncing off her heel at the ground level to take him out at the knees with a rugby tackle.
Alex stood at the pool’s edge with his mouth open for a second longer than he should have, snapping back into action as Sheila screamed from the scramble of bodies on the ground near him, “Grab Crink and run, you idiot!”
In the dark, he could hear them fighting on the poolside as he ran over to his friend. His movements were pure instinct, ricocheting off the orders of the woman wrestling his attacker on the ground. Reaching under Crink’s armpit, he pulled him to his feet. “Hey, Alex. What’re you doing here?”
“No time to explain. Just walk.”
“What about Sheila?”
Alex turned back to the struggle behind them as the two stumbled along the pool edge together. His eyes widened as he saw a flash of metal in the night, a scream grating against the dead air. “Sheila!”
“Go!” There was a man’s scream next, and she rolled quickly off Koosh, sprinted towards Crink and Alex, grabbed another arm and hoisted a drugged shoulder onto her own. As they hobbled off past the lifeguard hut, Alex turned one last time. Koosh was writhing on the cement paving, screaming at the sky, the handle from a pair of bloody scissors jutting from his side.
“You bitch! You’ll be dead before all of them! You think you’ve stopped thi
s? You’re already on your way out, you fucking idiot!”
The three of them left him there, cursing in a pool of blood, as a death veil fell silently over Alex van der Haar’s world.
11. Out On a Hotplate
“What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck!”
Sheila shushed Alex as the two left through the rusted rear gate of an old, very small cabin about thirty minutes outside of Grahamstown, an hour later. They’d just dropped Crink off in a bed in a cabin he’d never been to before, with a note, and a bottle of ibuprofen for if he woke before they got back. They crunched down the gravel driveway, freewheeling quietly out in Sheila’s car under the flickering streetlight.
“Sheila. There’s shit you’re not telling me, and, tonight? That shit nearly got my friend killed!”
She seemed distracted and underwhelmed by the evening’s trauma as she looked down determinedly at her own shoes. “I know.”
“Like shit you know. When that dude busted out his knife and put it to Crink’s neck...man, I have never been that scared. He was going to fucking do it too. Four months ago, my life was fucking normal, and tonight, some buffalo soldier tried to kill my best friend. Also, how many fucking houses do you currently own or squat in? What is this place?”
“I know, Alex. It’s fucked up. I don’t know what to say. Three, by the way—houses. Janice’s cousin’s lawyer let me stay here and water his hydrangeas until he gets back in three weeks.”
“Because of me, Sheila! He was there because of—”
“Look, I fucking know, Alex!” she yelled. “I know, I know, your friend nearly died, and I know you had to come out in the middle of the night from your girlfriend’s warm bed and get your feet muddy with me. Poor you, I fucking get it. What do you want me to do about it, though?”
Alex said nothing.
“What do you want me to say, Alex?” She sighed.“I kept things from you. I told you the world you know is a giant lie, and everyone you love is dead, and I felt like that might’ve been enough for you to hear for one day, okay? How the fuck was I supposed to know an Imprint would fucking attack you less than twenty-four hours later?”
“An Imprint?”
Sheila nodded, pulled a cigarette from her jacket pocket, and lit up. She breathed in for what seemed like years. “Yeah.” She exhaled after holding onto it like gold. “Koosh, back there? He’s something outside of the reality network, but not like you. He was still born from it. He’s a hole in the world. He exists because he somehow burned himself into the fabric of this imaginary existence. He isn’t here, not like you. He exists, but he’s not limited by the rules of the network.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means he’s a fucking ghost, man. Yes, they’re real, try to contain your earth-shattering disillusionment. No blinky eraser death for him, he’s just here. He and others like him became etched into the energy of the world at some point, and now he’s just negative space.”
She walked around to the driver’s door and climbed in, prompting Alex to do the same on the passenger side. “They’re allowed this privilege because they can block out the reality of what’s happened. They know it, but they won’t admit it to themselves. They just can’t let go. They choose not to acknowledge the truth, and, in doing so, they stay behind forever.”
She started the car and headed out towards the Settlers Monument. “They’re special, that should be obvious, and some of them even have other abilities. Sometimes, they become ghosts in their mothers’ wombs, settling into the mist before they’re even born. Like a television screen with a picture that shines too brightly, or for too long, they leave this image behind, permanent and frozen.”
They pulled up alongside the cannon on the walls of the ancient fort, the Christmas light blanket of Grahamstown spread out in front of them. Winter was a frigid bundle of frozen ass in this little town. The wind, it killed.
“The trade-off,” she continued, “obviously, is to never directly acknowledge the world for what it is. It needs to be kept in your periphery, like the image of an ex-girlfriend or that weird dream you had about your aunt that one time. No one tells them this, though there are those who could. They just understand it, intrinsically.”
Her eyes became lost in the luminescence of the city ahead of her. “They choose solitary lives, living as if nothing’s happened. Existing, if you want to call it that, beyond their time here.”
“You mean ‘our’ time, don’t you?”
Sheila broke eye contact with the horizon, looking first down into her lap, then over to Alex, vulnerable and wet-eyed, as she nodded. “How did you figure it out?”
“The stuff about powers. You knew about Frank—you could read him. You couldn’t have known all that stuff otherwise. Honestly, aside from the flying, it’s the only reason I believe anything you say about all this. Nobody could have known that.”
She looked out again. “I know. In this state of denial, people like Koosh...and me, can live to be thousands of years old. We’ll develop amazing powers, see the world dozens of times. But we’ll still die, just like anyone else, if we come to that same cosmic realisation and let our bodies do what they ache to do.”
“Well...that’s bull...that’s bullshit. I mean, no, like...no, all this stuff is bullshit and absolutely crazy,” he said, seeming to phase out, then attempt to collect himself, his gaze darting back and forth as he turned something new and shocking over in his mind.“If you’re like, one of these Imprints or whatever, and you’ve just spent the last day wrecking my life with all this new information...you’d what, start disappearing, by now?
“Yesterday, actually, yeah.”
Alex started speaking, then stopped. This was impossible. She had to be lying. Someone else? Another person’s whole life on the line because of him? How could any of this be happening? Looking over at her, though, he could see an earnestness that made lies impossible. She also, he’d noticed for the first time during the past day, started to look pale and translucent. What looked like a soft flash of electricity ran faintly up the length of her neck. He let his shoulders fall into a catastrophic slouch. He had failed somebody else. “You’re...dying?”
“Look, Alex,” she said, sounding irritated. “There’s a lot I haven’t told you yet, because there’s honestly just no time left anymore. I mean, there are Rastafarian assassins attacking you and your buddies with knives. Your friends and lecturers are disappearing. I don’t know. What do you care what happens to me anyway?”
This was all his fault. “Sheila.”
Her right hand drifted off the steering wheel, landing coldly on his as she drew a deep breath. Alex couldn’t take his eyes off of her—was this what dying looked like? How was she so calm? “It comes on slow, pork chop. This whole...thing I’m doing. It’s a tough bit of fate to break, so it takes a while to fade out. But there’s no escaping it, once you’ve broken the golden rule. The truth comes out, and it’s like a chain reaction. Imprints, when we stop living, we stop living by increments. Fading out slowly, like a torch losing power in the dark. They...we...become overtaken by what we call ‘cave degeneration’.”
He had done this. It was his fault. “Plato references. Ugh, fuck you guys.” He had done this, to her—to all of them. What the hell was he going to do?
Sheila smiled weakly in the dark. “I am dying, yes, Alex.”
He turned away from her, shutting his eyes, as if to trap more of this awful bad luck behind them, where it wouldn’t hurt anybody. “You’re serious. I hate that you’re serious. There has to be something we can do for you. Are you kidding me? Why isn’t there a punchline he—”
“Alex, stop asking me if this is a joke! It’s not. Nobody is fucking with you, all right? I did what I had to do, for you—for everyone!”
“But now you’re dying.”
“I made a sacrifice, because someone like you, with as much responsibility as you have, deserves to know what he’s being roped into. You’re an Anchor, Alex. That’s spec
tacular, but also so dangerous. It’s not fair, to give someone this kind of life, and not help them through it. I just... I wanted to do something...for you.”
The two sat in silence for the next few minutes, adrift in a soup of the unspoken. “I’m clueless as to why Koosh would attack you like this. But I know it’s bad, not just for you and me, but for everyone. And it, I mean, you—you are more important here. You’re bigger than all of us.”
“So, you’ve got no idea why this is happening?”
“No.” She furrowed her brow, took another deep breath and shook her head, biting her lip at the problem as if it were sitting across from her. “No, I have no fucking idea. That’s the one thing I just don’t understand about all of this.”
“Sheila. I don’t know what would have happened tonight if I’d had to go with that Koosh guy. I just—” He turned to her. “I’m really struggling to get over what’s happening...to you...now. I mean...”
She took a drag on her cigarette, adding a brief, intense and red glowing dot to the sea of yellow specks framing her. “Yeah, imagine how I feel.”
“You’re seriously just going to...stop? Like...like what happened to Ruth?”
“Well, I’m glad to hear you don’t think I’m lying about her anymore.”
He smiled. This seemed to rile her up. Her next words snapped forth like elastic bands flying from an outstretched finger, loud and painful.“What else am I supposed to do, Alex, Goddammit? What do you want me to do?” She shook her hair out unexpectedly, and became loud again in an instant of rage that completely disarmed Alex. They were too far into it to turn back now, and a look of resolve crossed her angry face. She threw down her cigarette and stomped her foot at him, right there in her spot in the driver’s seat.
The car shook, and she yelled, unashamed and furious. “What am I to you?”
Nothing came from questions like this, not in the real world. After five minutes of silence, Alex and Sheila agreed to head back into the smallholding and get some rest. Alex slept in the living room, on the floor. He left his mind to drift as he lay back on the air mattress and stared off into the moonlit thatched roof.
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