Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text

by Chris Beckett

  But there was another knock on the door.

  It was Janet Richards.

  ‘Charles, I need to tell you that I’ve been in touch with your line manager, Roger Young,’ said the Executive Director. ‘It’s about this offer by Hassan to talk if we hand back the… um… slip. I do appreciate your reasons for not wanting to accede to this and Roger told me that the line you took was entirely consistent with your agency’s policy, so please don’t take this as criticism in any way, but I just felt we needed to do everything possible to find out about this “mischief” that Furnish and Hassan talked to you about. And if that means handing over some of this slip stuff, well I know it’s not ideal, but the upshot of my phone conversation with your Roger was that he agreed to authorise you to do so. In fact it’s his decision that you should do so. He said to ask you to give him a quick call to confirm this.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Um, I don’t want to rush you, but these two men have been in custody for several hours and Roger was telling me that they could well disappear at any moment if they swallowed seeds themselves when they were arrested. I think you told us that yourself, in fact. So perhaps you could make that call and then go straight down to the custody suite? I believe you took possession of the slip yourself, isn’t that right?’

  ‘Yes, it’s here in my bag.’

  ‘Dick Thomas has lined up a very experienced detective who will join you in interviewing Hassan. Could you just make that call please Mr Bowen?’

  ‘Okay,’ Charles said, very reluctantly. But just as he was picking up his phone, her phone rang.

  ‘Hello. Janet Richards… Oh. I see…’

  She turned back to him.

  ‘It seems we’re too late,’ she said curtly. ‘The custody sergeant reports that both Hassan and Furnish have disappeared. What a pity. I know you were following your own rules, but I do wish that…’

  She broke off.

  ‘The sergeant particularly asked if you could go down there to speak to him and the officers on duty there,’ she said. ‘I gather this has rather shaken them up.’

  ~*~

  The sergeant and two PCs were waiting for Charles with almost childlike eagerness. They showed him the empty cells and watched while he went into each of them and stood there, sniffing the air.

  The smell in them was unmistakable: that same burnt, electrical, ozone tang that he’d just been describing to Jazamine.

  ‘Yes, they’ve done a shift all right,’ Charles told them. ‘Don’t worry. There was absolutely nothing you or anyone could have done.’

  He looked round at the stunned faces of the sergeant and the two young officers, but found it hard to feel sorry for them. Information about shifters was readily available after all, in the papers, on TV, on the internet. Why didn’t people prepare themselves? Why did they persist in imagining they’d never encounter the phenomenon themselves?

  ‘A bit disturbing for you, yes?’ he grudgingly managed.

  ‘Nothing like this has ever happened to any of us,’ said the sergeant. ‘We’re rather freaked out by it, to be honest with you. I mean the doors were definitely locked. There’s no way they could have got out.’

  Charles turned back into the room and sniffed the hot, burnt smell. It wasn’t really the smell, though, that he was noticing. It was the feeling he’d talked about to Jazamine, the fizz, the unbearable longing, the sense of loss, the vertigo. It was as if a chasm had opened up in the floor and was pulling him towards it. As if some loved one had been snatched from him, snatched away so completely that he couldn’t even remember who it had been.

  ‘The doors were locked,’ he said. ‘I know it’s hard to get your head round this but, take it from me, the doors have got nothing to do with it.’

  The sergeant gaped at him.

  ‘I know, I know,’ Charles said. ‘It just doesn’t fit in with how we think the world works, does it?’

  ‘But there’s no way they could have got out,’ the sergeant repeated. ‘We left the doors locked until you arrived and the windows haven’t been touched.’

  ‘Listen to me, okay? Just listen to me. They didn’t get out. They didn’t move from this point in space. They just dropped into another timeline. Who knows? They may even have ended up in an identical police cell in exactly the same spot.’

  ‘So… Where are they then?’ one of the PCs asked.

  ‘Parallel universe.’

  The three policemen stared at him, as if they’d never heard of such a thing.

  ‘Jesus,’ the sergeant breathed, horrified.

  ‘There’s one thing I should warn you about. We don’t have any idea how slip works, but it’s more like a force field than a drug. You don’t have to take it to be affected by it and you can get weird side effects just from having been near a shifter, specially if you’ve been near him when he crosses over, or if you’ve had some sort of dealings with him. You can even get them just from having been near another person with some sort of connection to a shifter. We don’t know how, but I’ve seen it happen many times.’

  ‘Side effects? What like?’

  ‘Strange dreams, unfamiliar impulses, vivid images.’

  The three policemen stood there waiting for Charles to tell them that the antidote to these side effects was X, the helpline number was Y, the website that told you everything you needed to know was Z and could be found at www dot whatever. Whether fairly or not, this made him angry, but he was a conscientious professional and he managed to summon up a reasonably kind and reassuring tone.

  ‘Don’t worry. These things do pass. Just don’t expect to get much sleep tonight.’

  Chapter 5

  Then there were witnesses to the disappearance of Tammy Pendant to talk to, and Rita Fernandez from the Assessment Unit, and her boss Mr Johnson, and Tammy’s screechy friend Jolene. After he’d done with Jolene, Sarah Ripping the therapist was on the phone pressing him to hear her views, for she was a person who saw herself as having unique and important insights which everyone should hear. (‘I know Tammy, you see, Mr Bowen. The social workers are wonderful of course, but they are so busy. I think perhaps more than anyone else I’ve got a real sense of who she actually is…’) And then he had to go back to Janet Richards and her cabinet (minus Burkitt who’d returned to look after his grandson) who needed a précis of everything he’d found out so far. He was only a junior bureaucrat in a suit, but right now he was the only person who could give these people the slightest sense that these events were part of the normal world: knowable, understandable, controllable.

  It was nearly 11 o’clock at night when Charles finally got back to his flat but even then it was still far from being the end of his day. There were reams of information to collate and a long string of interviews to prepare for tomorrow: Mrs Ripping, the rest of the staff and residents at the assessment unit, the three witnesses to Tammy’s disappearance…

  Before he settled down in front of his computer Charles phoned Roger to give him another report on the day and brief him about the apparent extent of the problem on the Meadows Zone. Roger sounded as if he’d already gone to bed, but he managed to summon up a concerned and interested voice, and promised to try and get some additional help over in the morning.

  ‘I’ve pushed it right up to the Director, Charles, I really have. Trouble is, it’s been a crazy time on the conventional immigration side too: people coming in from Central Asia and Africa in droves right now, and plane loads of asylum seekers from America. We sometimes forget that are plenty of troubles just in this world, never mind all the others.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess. Anyway, listen, Roger, I do have a bone to pick with you. It would have been quite wrong to hand seeds over to that man Furnish and you shouldn’t have authorised it over my head. As it happens, he’d shifted before I could do the deal anyway, so I’ve still got the slip in my briefcase. But I want you to know that I felt very undermined.’

  Roger always tried to agree with everyone.

  ‘Don’t get me wr
ong, Charles, I didn’t want to do it, but the Richards woman had already got the backing of her senior people and I didn’t see the point in having a wrangle that we couldn’t ultimately win.’

  His tone brightened.

  ‘And if you’ve got a whole bag of seeds, that’s great. How many were in it?’

  ‘Two bags actually. I haven’t had time to count the seeds. Thirty? Forty?’

  ‘That’s brilliant. A good haul. A good day’s work. Now forget all about it and get some sleep!’

  It was a stupid thing to say. For one thing, Charles had a good hour and half’s work still ahead of him. For another, no one got a good night’s sleep after contact with shifters. Having only recently transferred from Heathrow, Roger couldn’t be blamed for having no personal experience of the collateral effects of slip. But he could read, damn it, he could listen, he could ask questions! It was his bloody job to know!

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Charles said, ‘I’m sure I’ll sleep like a baby.’

  He put down the phone.

  All around him, in his many mirrors, images of himself stretched back and back through reflected and re-reflected worlds.

  ~*~

  When, just after one o’clock in the morning, Charles finally finished work, the sudden absence of a task exposed an alarming emptiness inside of him, as if his busyness up to that point had been a kind of screen. Not knowing where to put himself or what to do, he walked through to the bathroom and had a shower, then into the bedroom, then back into the living room, then into the kitchen. He ate some cold meat from the fridge. He put the kettle on to boil. He took the seeds out of his briefcase and sat down at the table to count them, then changed his mind and stuffed them away again.

  As he stood up he caught his own eye in a mirror. He looked hastily away again but not hastily enough, because a voice spoke in his head, as clearly as if Hassan the shifter was standing there in front of him.

  ‘You should try them. They’ll give you all the benefits of suicide and none of the drawbacks.’

  He tried to feel indignant. What made that time-tramp think that Charles needed the ‘benefits of suicide’? What made him think he knew who Charles was? But the indignation was synthetic and the answer was so straightforward that it could be given in a single word: slip. Slip let you see inside other people. Slip let you experience their feelings and their thoughts, breaking down the barriers between minds as well as the barriers between worlds. And Charles’ unease at Hassan’s suggestion, the fact that it still haunted him, only served to confirm that the shifter had indeed seen something that was really there.

  Actually ‘unease’ was putting it very mildly. His heart was pounding. His hands were clammy with sweat. He could have chosen to call this fear, he could have chosen to call it excitement, but there was no doubt that he was very agitated indeed. All around him copies of himself stood waiting in the unreachable worlds of his mirrors, and in the reflections of his mirrors, and in the reflections of the reflections, waiting to see what he’d do next.

  ‘Well why not?’ he suddenly heard himself mutter, as if there was no more consequence in swallowing slip than there was in tasting a different flavour of crisp. ‘Why not just try one?’

  He answered himself through gritted teeth.

  ‘Because I don’t want one. Is that a good enough reason?’

  ~*~

  All night his mind divided in the darkness, divided and divided and divided like bacteria multiplying in a Petri dish. Vivid images loomed; his mirrors became corridors to other worlds; his own voice spoke words that he hadn’t chosen and didn’t expect to say.

  ‘The Vikings are coming!’ he heard himself call out, as he ran through those dim and empty corridors. ‘They’re landing everywhere, and they’re all along the horizon too!’

  He came to a high pinnacle above an ocean. The water seethed with fish and octopuses and jellyfish and manatees and seals. Wayne Furnish and Jacob Hassan stood on a headland in the distance, and, far below him, Janet Richards and her management team were sitting round a table on a dark little beach, drawing up an action plan while the waves lapped round their feet. A few yards away from them Cyril Burkitt was building sandcastles all by himself, with bare feet and rolled-up trousers, and a knotted handkerchief on his head.

  This wasn’t a dream. He was wide awake. His eyes were open. He could see the shadowy room around him, dimly illuminated by the streetlights outside. He could see the dark absences on the walls that were his mirrors, and he knew there weren’t really corridors beyond them. But the visions still kept coming and, along with the visions, came the switches, the flashbacks to events he had never experienced, the fragments of other people’s memories.

  He was Tammy, hungry and cold in a Bristol where no one knew her, thinking about Jolene back in the Unit, and the fish fingers they’d have for tea there, and the warm little room she could have been sleeping in now, with her pornopop posters on the walls...

  He was Joseph Hassan outside some late night club, looking for someone with a bit of fizz…

  He was Cyril Burkitt waking up in the night in the double bed where he slept alone…

  Why Burkitt? Charles wondered. He’s not a shifter. But before he could think about that, something else happened, something that was perhaps a switch and perhaps not. Jazamine was present in the room.

  ‘I could love you, Charles,’ she whispered, holding out her hand, ‘I could really love you.’

  He sat bolt upright with a cry.

  ‘No!’

  Sweat was pouring from his skin.

  She opened up her hand and offered him a glowing seed.

  ~*~

  Towards dawn Charles saw again through Tammy’s eyes that bleak field with the cold wind and the darkening steel grey sky. The image was so clear that he could make out the individual stems of yellow grass, the separate stones, the lumps of earth. In the distance was a razor wire perimeter fence with cranes and bulldozers parked alongside it, and Charles knew – he didn’t know how – that the meadow was a building site, and that they were about to build a new Inclusion Zone.

  Then his alarm bleeped. He jumped out of bed. And, as he did so, the universe split into three.

  He could see it quite clearly, three tunnels stretching away into his mirrors, each containing the same familiar furnishings, the same clothes draped over the back of a chair, the same Charles. In one universe Charles – call him Charles one-trillion-and-one – ran straight to the seeds and swallowed one before he had time to change his mind. He didn’t really know why he was doing it. He had some vague notion about going after Tammy Pendant, but perhaps the real reason was that, in that single moment, it was easier to act and be done with it, than to have the thought nagging away in his mind.

  In a second universe Charles one-trillion-and-two was a stern frontier guard who would allow nothing to pass any part of the boundary that he’d set himself to defend.

  ‘I will phone Jazamine from the office today and cancel the drink,’ Charles one-trillion-and-two decided.

  There were good reasons, after all, for the advisory guidelines about not socialising with people involved in investigations, and it was so much easier in any case to say no to all the things you wanted, than to try and pick and choose between them.

  But in a third universe, Charles one-trillion-and-three made a different choice again.

  ‘No. No seeds,’ he told his many reflections. ‘But I will see Jazamine. She’s quite right. Boundaries are important, but they’re not the only important thing.’

  And then he did a very odd thing. He went into his tiny living room, opened the two plastic bags of seeds (which no one had yet counted) and removed five seeds from each of them, closing up the two bags afterwards and replacing them in his briefcase. The ten seeds he’d now stolen he placed into an envelope which he folded over, took into his bedroom and tucked away at the bottom of his sock drawer, right at the back, beneath the odd socks which he never used but never got round to throwing away. He had no i
dea why he did this, and this fact alone made it very easy for him to act and then forget about it, since his action had no connection with anything in his conscious mind.

  He closed the sock drawer. He went through to the kitchen and made coffee. He forced down some toast. He went down into the street – it was a crisp October morning – and drove to Britannia House.

  Chapter 6

  All eight of the desks in the Special Cases Unit were empty. Fran had ended up having to stay the night at the boarding school down in Dorset. (It turned out that the place was riddled with slip: ‘Endless worlds!’ had been scratched over the brick archway of the main school gate, pupils carried seeds as status symbols…)

  ‘Brilliant job yesterday Charles, brilliant!’ said Roger, emerging from his Perspex box. He was wearing his sincerest and most empathic frown to signal his heartfelt gratitude and his recognition of the impossible task that Charles had taken on.

  Charles handed over the two bags of seeds.

  ‘Excellent!’ Roger said. ‘That’s the biggest haul we’ve had for weeks.’

  Charles nodded. He was very pleased to have taken so much slip out of circulation, and this was the case even though he’d reduced the size of the haul by keeping ten back for himself, and even though he’d come very close to using them not much more than an hour ago. These complications were in a separate compartment, a compartment which no one else need see, and which he himself could easily overlook in the bright light of day.

  ‘I’m going back to Thurston Meadows now,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot more to do.’

  ‘That’s good of you. I really appreciate it.’

  ‘But if there are any more shifters to interview I’m not going to do it, all right? I didn’t sleep all last night because of the fizz in my head.’

  ‘I know you’re under a lot of stress Charles and I…’

  ‘It’s not just stress Roger. Fizz is something else. You need to get your head round that, if you’re going to run this section. You really do. I’ll follow up on yesterday’s investigation but I can’t deal with any new cases.’