OxCrimes

by Peter Florence

Felder reached under his coat and untied the strings that held the sack in place. He indicated the silverware with his chin.

  ‘I’ll take care of that lot. Now get a move on.’

  Knight appeared to be on the verge of saying something more, but he knew better than to argue with Felder, especially with the wreckage of the old woman bleeding away before him. Felder would take him to task for his little loss of control later, once they were safely away from here. Knight left the room, and Felder heard his heavy tread as he ascended the stairs. When he looked back at the old woman, she was smiling at him.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘For what?’

  She coughed, and a spray of red blood shot from between her lips.

  ‘For killing me.’

  Under the gaze of the old woman, Felder emptied the silverware into his sack. It was good stuff. He’d been a little worried that it might turn out to be only plate, although his eye, in that first short glance through the window, told him otherwise. The weight of it was considerable, but the sack was thick and strong, and had not let him down yet. His only concern now was to get it all to safety without being stopped by the police or the wardens, for there would be no way to explain away to the law a sack full of silverware.

  Felder had chosen to ignore the woman’s recent words to him. She’d taken a couple of blows to the head, and who knew how badly it had scrambled her thoughts? Once the cabinet was empty he made a cursory search of the shelves and drawers, but found only a few florins and half crowns wrapped in a handkerchief, and a gent’s gold pocket watch engraved with three initials and a date in 1912. He considered putting it in the sack as well, but then slipped it into his own jacket pocket for fear that it might be damaged amid the silverware. From upstairs he heard the sounds of Felder rummaging through wardrobes and drawers.

  Felder lit a cigarette and, through its smoke, viewed the patterns on the walls. During his search of the room he couldn’t help but notice the nature of the books on its shelves. None of them were titles that he recognised, not that Felder was much for literature, but most appeared to be books on science.

  ‘Were these your husband’s?’ he asked the woman. ‘A son, maybe?’

  The bright right eye fixed itself upon him.

  ‘Mine,’ she said.

  Felder raised an eyebrow. In his world, women didn’t read books on science. They hardly read anything at all. Like rumours of lost tribes in Africa, and monsters in Scottish lochs, Felder had heard of women scientists, but he had yet to meet one himself, and so remained uncertain of their actual existence.

  ‘You a scientist, then?’

  ‘Once.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘A physicist, although I have qualifications in chemistry too.’

  ‘What are you, then: Professor Lyall?’

  If she was surprised that he knew her name, she did not show it.

  ‘Doctor Lyall,’ she said.

  ‘Doctor Lyall the physicist. And all this’ – Felder gestured at the patterns on the wall – ‘is physics?’

  Lyall gave another cough, but there was only a little blood this time. Her breathing seemed to have eased somewhat. It might have been a sign that her condition was improving, but Felder doubted it. He suspected that it was her body relaxing into death. He wanted Knight to hurry up. Once they were away from the house, they’d find a telephone box and call for help. It might not be too late to save her.

  ‘Quantum physics,’ she said.

  ‘What’s that, then?’

  ‘The study of the universe at the smallest levels.’

  ‘Huh.’ Felder took another drag on his cigarette, and moved closer to the wall. ‘But what does it all mean?’

  He saw her almost smile.

  ‘You want science lessons from me?’

  ‘Maybe, or it could be that I just want to keep you talking, because if you’re talking then you’re awake, and alive. We’ll get help for you, I promise. It won’t be long now. But just try to keep talking.’

  ‘It’s too late for that.’

  ‘No. Tell me. Tell me about these quantum physics.’

  She took another sip of brandy.

  ‘There is a theory,’ said Lyall, ‘that there are an infinite number of possible existences, and each time we make a decision, one of those possible existences comes into being. But equally, alongside it may exist all other possible, or probable, existences too. It’s more complex than that, but I’m keeping it as simple as I can.’

  ‘Because you think I’m an idiot?’ He said it without rancour.

  ‘No, because I’m not even sure that I fully understand its implications myself.’

  Felder was not an unintelligent man – poorly educated, yes, but not stupid. What he was hearing, though, seemed to him to be the stuff of fantasy stories: improbable, but fascinating nonetheless.

  ‘So you’re saying that, when I woke up this morning and decided to make a cup of tea, there was another version of me that just stayed in bed and snoozed for an hour?’

  ‘In theory. Or when you decided to break into my house, another version of you simply turned away, perhaps determined to live a better life.’

  Felder couldn’t help but laugh.

  ‘Are you trying to make me feel guilty?’

  ‘No. The fact that you asked the question suggests that you’re already well acquainted with guilt. You don’t need me to torment you further.’

  ‘You’re quite a woman, I’ll give you that.’

  Felder examined once again the pattern of lines on the wall.

  ‘So each of these forks represents a decision?’ said Felder.

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘It’s your life,’ he said, and there was a hint of wonder in his voice. ‘All of these lines, these forks and dead ends, they’re decisions you’ve made. You’ve mapped them out, all of them.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To understand.’

  ‘Understand what?’

  ‘Where I went wrong,’ she said. She took as deep a breath as she dared, readying herself for a longer speech. ‘Because some decisions, some actions, have greater ramifications than others, more damaging consequences. And I think, perhaps, that if they’re repeated often enough, the fabric of reality is altered. I call it “confluence”. If I’d lived long enough, I might even have published a paper on it.’

  ‘Confluence.’ Felder repeated the word, liking the sound even if he didn’t understand it. ‘But what kind of bad things could an old woman like you have done?’

  She frowned, and her voice rose slightly.

  ‘I don’t regard them as bad. Some might, but I don’t. Still, they had consequences that I could not have foreseen. Confluence occurs at extremes, and nothing is more extreme that the possibility that, by one’s actions, the nature of existence is altered. I did nothing wrong. I helped. But all paths fork, and some paths may lead into shadows. And things wait in the shadows.’

  ‘What are the red dots supposed to be?’ asked Felder.

  He received no answer. Turning, he saw that Dr Lyall had closed her eyes.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Hey.’

  He did not move, but watched as the breathing grew softer and softer before ceasing entirely. The cup of brandy fell from her hand and bounced on the tiles of the fireplace.

  And suddenly Felder noticed that he could no longer hear Knight moving above his head.

  The house had four rooms upstairs – a bathroom with a toilet but no tub, two bedrooms and a third room so small that Knight couldn’t quite figure out why it had been put in to begin with, since it was too small to take a bed and resembled more closely a telephone box than an actual inhabitable space. It was piled high with the detritus of the house: broken suitcases, old newspapers, the frame of a lady’s bicycle, and more books. Books also occupied much space in the two bedrooms, and even in the loo, but unlike in the living room downstairs, they stood in teetering columns on the floor, the better to
free up wall space for more of those infernal branching lines on the walls.

  Knight was still struggling to understand why he had attacked the old woman – not that it wasn’t beyond him to strike a lady, or even the odd girl who in no way resembled a lady at all, but it was the ferocity of his assault on her that surprised him. For a few seconds he had been overcome not only by an anger that burned like a wound, but also a deep and abiding sense of fear. The patterns on the walls alone could not have caused him to lose control of himself in that way. They were odd, and unsettling, but no more than that. Knight wondered if he might be coming down with something, but he had been fine until he and Felder had entered the house. There was a miasma to this place, he felt, as though the very air were polluted, even if it smelt no better or worse than any other house he knew in which an old woman was living – or slowly dying, depending on one’s point of view.

  Nevertheless, his looting of the rooms had not proved unproductive. In the main bedroom he discovered an assortment of jewellery, most of it gold, including an ornate pendant studded with rubies and diamonds, and a tin box which, when opened using the blade of his knife, was found to contain over two hundred pounds in notes, and a small roll of gold sovereigns. Knight immediately liberated two of the sovereigns and stashed them in the lining of his coat. He was aware of Felder’s plan to hand over to Billy Hill most of the proceeds of the night, and largely approved of it, but that didn’t require him to abandon common sense entirely. The possibility existed that Hill might simply relieve them of their offerings and throw them back on the street, perhaps with a beating to remind them of the extent of their delusion if they thought they could buy their way into his favour. If nothing else, the sovereigns would ease the pain of rejection, both physical and metaphorical, and provide him with some security if he chose to abandon Felder in the aftermath. And if Billy Hill accepted them, well, then all to the good: the sovereigns would form the basis of greater wealth to come.

  Knight was just storing the jewellery and the rest of the money in his various pockets when he heard footsteps on the bare boards outside the bedroom door. Felder, he thought at first, but the steps were too light, and Felder would have known better than to approach him without warning in a strange house. Knight turned just in time to see what appeared to be a small child’s bare left foot and leg disappear from sight, as though the child had been watching him and now feared being caught. A boy, Knight thought. But where could the child have been hiding? There was nowhere to conceal oneself in the downstairs rooms, and Knight had searched this floor thoroughly. Could the boy somehow have secreted himself among the rubbish in the tiny spare room? It was possible, but unlikely, not unless he had actively conspired to bury himself beneath the books, bags and cases.

  Then it came to him: the cellar. They had checked it, and found it locked, but Knight could not recall seeing a key. Perhaps the boy had spotted them as they entered the house and, in fear, slipped into the cellar and locked the door behind him. Yes, that was it. There could be no other explanation. Somehow the boy had managed to get past Felder and come upstairs, although Knight wondered why he had not instead left the house and gone to seek help. But who could understand the thought processes of a frightened child?

  By now Knight was already in pursuit. He wrenched open the bedroom door, stepped into the upstairs landing, and stopped.

  It was no longer the same house. The landing was dark, the walls entirely unadorned except for patches of faded wallpaper that hung stubbornly to the plaster, hints of funeral lilies beckoning to Knight in the dimness. He could see no inked lines, no initialled dots. The landing was still partially lit by candles, but it was now part of a much larger structure, and Knight counted at least eight doors before it ended at a flight of stairs. One of those doors, halfway along on the right, was slowly closing before Knight’s eyes.

  ‘Felder?’ he called. ‘Felder, can you hear me?’

  But there was no reply.

  Knight reached into one of his pockets and once again withdrew his knife. It was of Japanese manufacture, and was among his most prized possessions, as well as being one of the few items he had taken from his childhood home before fleeing it for the mainland. He kept it keen, and even to touch its blade carelessly was to risk the kind of wound that would require stitches to heal. Opening the old woman’s lock box had not left even a scratch on the steel. Holding it in his hand gave Knight some small sense of reassurance, even as his mind struggled to comprehend how he could enter a room in one house and apparently emerge from it into another house entirely.

  ‘Felder!’

  This time his cry elicited some response. It came in the form of a childish giggle, and then a hushing sound. Not just one child, then. Two, at least.

  Knight moved silently along the landing, testing the doors as he went. All appeared to be locked, all except that door on the right, which stood slightly ajar. As he drew nearer to it he heard the sound of running from behind it, as of children moving farther into its reaches. The footfalls echoed slightly before they faded away, as though the room beyond was very long, and its ceiling very high.

  Knight stood before the door. He reached out his left hand and pushed. The door opened without a noise. Ahead of him was a wall inset with a series of large windows, although he could see nothing through them because of the blackout curtains. Below the windows stood a line of children’s cots, all apparently unoccupied. Knight stepped into the room and saw more cots lined up against the wall opposite the windows. A single lamp on a nightstand by the door provided the sole illumination. Knight counted twelve cots on either side and then, as his eyes grew more accustomed to the dark, still more stretching away into the darkness. He could not even begin to guess the size of the room, nor the height of its ceilings, which were taller than the ceilings of the landing outside.

  The windows drew his attention again. Yes, there was blackness beyond them, but surely that meant the curtains had been hung outside the windows. He approached them, the knife still clutched firmly in his right hand. He glimpsed his reflection in the glass, marooned in the darkness like a spectre of himself. He touched his fingers to the pane. It was painfully cold, although the room itself was tolerably warm. And what he felt, as his reflected self stared back at him, and his fingertips grew numb, was that the blackness beyond the window was not caused by drapes, or natural dark, but by a kind of nothingness given form, as though all the stars had been plucked from the night sky and hidden away, and the house was floating in the void. Knight was overcome by a sense of terrible loneliness, of a hopelessness that only oblivion could assuage. Hypnotised by the vacuum, he understood that a man might stand here and allow the emptiness beyond to drain him slowly and methodically, leaving only a husk that would, in time, fall to the floor and crumble slowly like the desiccated form of an insect sucked dry by a spider.

  Knight heard movement far above his head: a soft scuttling. He began to tremble. He feared that, in envisaging a spider and his prey, the great room had taken the image and given it substance. Slowly he raised his face to the ceiling. The lamp by the door grew brighter, its light spreading outwards and upwards, until it was reflected at last in a multitude of black eyes like flecks of obsidian embedded in the plaster. Knight saw movement too, pale, naked forms intermingling, clinging to the ceiling with fat, truncated limbs; and now descending along the walls, crawling like insects, their gaze fixed on Knight.

  They were infants, hundreds of them, each no more than a few months old and each alive yet not alive, their bodies mottled slightly with corruption. Knight stared at them as they came, flowing down the walls. Behind him, and unseen, a small hand reached out and touched a finger softly to the back of his neck. He felt a sting, a spider’s kiss. The blade fell from his hand and he followed it, dropping to his knees as the pain spread through his system. He collapsed on his right side, his eyes open, unable to move, to speak, even to blink. They came to him, hands reaching for his nose, his mouth, his eyes, exploring, testing, m
ore and more of them, until he was lost beneath them and died in stillness among creatures that basked in the novelty of his fading warmth, and wept when it was gone.

  Felder went to the door of the living room and called Knight’s name. When no answer came, he stepped into the hall. The stairs to the bedroom were still there, but they now ended in blackness, with nothing beyond them. Where once had stood a front door, now was only a wall upon which hung a long mirror. The kitchen, too, was gone, and another mirror had taken its place, so that Felder stood trapped between infinite versions of himself. He looked back at the body of the old woman, but that too was now changed – or, the thought struck him, unchanged, for her face was unmarked, and she was merely sleeping. She moved in her dreams, the chair creaking, her mouth emitting a small snore, but she did wake, and no Knight appeared to pummel her with his fists. Only as the door began to close in front of Felder did she open her eyes, but he could not tell if she saw him or simply dreamed him before she was lost to his sight. He heard a key turn in the lock as, in the mirrors, all reflections disappeared, and the wall before him began to crack. He watched the cracks advance – forking, diverging, progressing, ending – and saw the ink dry against the plaster as the pattern of his life was drawn for him.

  And as one door was locked, so another was opened. He heard the cellar door creak, and the sound of light footsteps descending. Felder did not rail. He did not fight, or scream. He simply followed the sound.

  Knight was in the cellar. He sat slumped in a chair, his head back, his eyes, now ruins in their sockets, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. The walls of the cellar were lined with jars, none of them empty.

  They won’t like it.

  On a workbench rested a bag, and beside it a set of clean, bright surgical instruments. Felder saw unmarked potions in bottles, and powders and pills ready for use. He looked again at the jars, and at what they contained, floating in preservative. He had heard of women like Dr Lyall. Young unmarried girls with reputations to protect, wives who could not explain away a new child when their husbands were fighting in foreign fields, mothers with bodies so worn that another baby would kill them, all came to Dr Lyall or others of her kind, and they did what the doctors would not. Felder had never considered the price that might have to be paid, the burden to be carried. She had marked them all on her wall, the red dots of her visitations.