Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text

by Chris Beckett

Carl seized his moment.

  ‘I’ll tell you something mate,’ he said eagerly. ‘That was Tammy Pendant, that was. She’s only my fucking cousin, yeah? She’s only…’

  ‘Hey look,’ interrupted Derek. ‘It’s that skull geezer again.’

  ~*~

  A thin and cadaverous man had just walked in. He was skeletal, yet not skeletal in a way that suggested weakness. He was stripped down, lean, a parchment-like layer of yellow skin stretched tightly across his fierce skull, and every movement he made suggested immense physical power.

  ‘Who the fuck is he?’ Derek said.

  The man’s grey-blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail and he wore wraparound dark glasses, so all that could be seen of his eyes was a faint gleam as he surveyed the room coolly, taking in the scene at his leisure. It had happened a few times lately: he’d come in, he’d surveyed the room, and then he’d left again without speaking to anyone.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to mess with that guy,’ Shane said.

  The Old England was not a gentle place – a fight broke out there almost every night – but this stranger had a savage quality which all three of them recognised as being in a different league.

  ‘You’re not fucking kidding,’ said Derek. ‘I wouldn’t go near him.’

  ‘Fuck that!’ Carl said, abruptly standing up.

  He was twenty-five years old but had never held a job for more than a few weeks, never had a place of his own to live. He had lived on a couple of occasions in the flats of girlfriends – in both cases older women with mental health problems – but it had never lasted long and he had always returned in the end to his mother. He had no aim in life, no direction of travel, no coherent plan that reached further ahead than the next weekend. Yet there was still something inside him that yearned to break out of the confines in which he lived, and the message of nearly all the movies he had ever seen and all the dreamer games he had ever played was that changing things required decisive acts of courage.

  He’d also drunk four pints of beer and one whisky.

  ‘You’ve been in here a few times, mate,’ Carl said, tapping the cadaverous man on the shoulder, ‘but you never talk to no one. Who the fuck are you?’

  Watching from their fake thrones, Shane and Derek waited for the stranger to floor Carl on the spot, but the skull-faced man just gave a dry laugh.

  ‘I’m Laf, who the hell are you?’

  ‘I’m Carl. What kind of name is Laf for fuck’s sake?’

  The skull faced man smiled indulgently.

  ‘It’s short for Olaf. It’s a warrior’s name. I’m a warrior of Dunner.’

  Carl put on his very poor imitation of an American accent.

  ‘Warrior of Dunner, huh?’

  Laf laughed.

  ‘You don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, do you?’

  That actually wasn’t completely true. Carl had heard of Dunner, and knew that he had something to do with shifters, but he wasn’t exactly sure what Laf meant by ‘warrior of Dunner’ and didn’t want to hazard a guess, so he continued with his American impression anyway.

  ‘No I don’t, buddy,’ Carl drawled. ‘But I reckon you’re talking out of your ass.’

  This time Laf did not smile. His expression became distant and he looked away coldly, allowing his gaze to take in the young men round the pool table, and the chunky girls, and the four old drunks at the bar who came in every night and drank until they were ordered to leave. He finished his survey with a single contemptuous glance at fat Shane and tiny Derek giggling in their thrones, then turned back again to Carl.

  Carl was expecting violence. He expected a sudden punch for his insolence, or perhaps to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck, and he was squaring himself up in readiness, determined to give as good as he received. But Laf merely snorted.

  ‘This place is shit,’ he observed. ‘I’ve been here four or five times now and I’ve not yet seen one real man or one real woman here. Just sacks, just sad defeated little dreggie sacks of nothing.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Carl, who drank there nearly every night.

  Laf turned and looked at him, and Carl had the odd feeling that, from behind those dark glasses, those smouldering eyes were not just looking at his face but somehow probing right into his mind.

  ‘Having said that,’ Laf remarked, ‘I’ve had my eye on you and I reckon you’ve got at least a bit of fight left in you. A bit of fight in there somewhere, even though you don’t know it yourself. I mean you’re a complete dick, of course – anyone can see that – but you’re the first one who’s had the balls to actually come up to me. Not like those runty little friends of yours over there.’

  Derek and Shane visibly cringed as the skull-faced man glanced back across at them, but they needn’t have worried. He looked straight back at Carl, thought for a moment and then nodded.

  ‘Yup,’ he said. ‘I reckon I’m going to give you a go.’

  ‘What d’you mean? Give me a go at what?’

  Laf gave a taut smile.

  ‘I’d like to introduce you to some friends of mine,’ he said. ‘We may have a proposition to put to you.’

  ‘What about?’

  But the skull-faced man’s attention had already moved on.

  ‘You’ll find out presently,’ he said absently, ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘What? Where to? Now?’

  Without bothering to answer, Laf led the way out of the pub, walking with long quick strides.

  ‘Right,’ he said, when they were sitting inside a white Renault van out in the car park. ‘I don’t want you to see where we’re going, so you’ll have to wear these.’

  He handed Carl a pair of wraparound glasses similar to his own.

  ‘Before you put them on,’ Laf said, ‘get out your ID.’

  Carl got out the red-striped plastic card with its DSI identity chip which was necessary to exit the Thurston Meadows Zone.

  ‘You got any restriction orders on that?’ Laf asked.

  ‘Nope,’ Carl said, ‘not at the moment.’

  Laf nodded.

  ‘Okay, give me the card then and put on the glasses.’

  The glasses pressed up against Carl’s face like swimming goggles. They were completely opaque.

  ‘I feel like a fucking dick with these on.’

  Laf started the engine.

  ‘Well you are a dick. I’ve already told you that. But you’ll be even more of a dick than I thought if you even think of taking those off before I say so.’

  With that, the skeletal man pushed down the accelerator and threw the car at high speed across the Thurston Meadows Zone. They reached one of the Line checkpoints – Carl couldn’t tell which - and Carl heard Laf hand their ID cards up to the duty officer. Then they were off again, though this time at a slower pace: the police were fussier about speed limits outside the Zones.

  When the car stopped again, some twenty or thirty minutes later, all Carl could tell about the place they’d reached was that it was very quiet and that there were damp concrete walls around him. It could have been some disused industrial site or the communal hallway of one of any number of condemned blocks of flats. The silence was almost total, but the smallest sound was magnified by echoes.

  Some distance behind him, a sliding metal door clanked shut. Laf took him by the elbow and guided him forward, then Carl heard a key turn in a lock and the creak of another door swinging open in front of him.

  ‘You can take off the glasses now.’

  ~*~

  They were in a corridor with doors down both sides. One of the doors opened and there emerged from it a very big and very fat man with a kind pink face and long pale eyelashes, like those of a Jersey cow.

  ‘Hello there, mate! I’m Gunnar,’ the fat man said in a little mild high-pitched voice that seemed quite out of proportion to his size.

  ‘This is Carl,’ Laf told him. ‘A new recruit. A possible new recruit.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Carl me old mate,’ said Gunnar,
offering a small soft hand. ‘The more the merrier, mate. The more the merrier.’

  He led the way back into the room he had just emerged from. It was dim and damp like a cave, with a single orange light bulb hanging from the ceiling and large dark mirrors facing each other from each of the end walls. The rest of the wall space was plastered with lurid comic-book pictures of Nordic gods: muscle-bound Dunner with his hammer, Wod the sorcerer king with his one mad eye, and Frija, the goddess of sex and fertility, with her enormous breasts that perpetually oozed milk from their thick brown nipples.

  ‘This is Slug,’ Gunnar said, indicating a small dark figure with a ponytail huddled in one corner. From Gunnar’s tone Carl could tell that Slug was not a prestigious figure. ‘Slug, this is Carl.’

  Slug, sulkily smoking hashish in a home-made waterpipe, refused to acknowledge Carl’s presence. He just huddled himself up even tighter and turned away his face.

  ‘Don’t mind him, Carl mate,’ said Gunnar, chuckling good-naturedly in his small high voice. ‘He’s had a bad day. Know what I mean?’

  ‘The stupid plonker,’ said Laf. ‘He only let some little schoolgirl nick all his slip off him and then do a shift with the lot.’

  ‘What? You mean Tammy Pendant?’ said Carl. ‘You mean this is the geezer who was after her with the bat?’

  He was about to mention the thing about Tammy being his cousin, but changed his mind.

  ‘The very same,’ said Laf. ‘She’d only persuaded him to let her hold his slip while he gave her one.’

  He laughed.

  ‘That’ll teach you, Slug,’ he jeered at the Scotsman. ‘That will teach you for being a dirty little perv.’

  ‘Now now, Laf,’ remonstrated Gunnar, but the skull-faced man was in full swing.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, Slug,’ he chortled, ‘that has got to be one of the most expensive shags in history. How many seeds did you have there? Forty, fifty?’

  But then the door opened again and another man came in.

  ~*~

  ‘Good evening,’ said the newcomer in a quiet, educated voice. ‘I hope this isn’t discord I’m hearing in our little community?’

  ‘Erik, mate,’ said Gunnar. ‘This is the new recruit that Laf has brought in. You know? Like we agreed? His name is Carl.’

  ‘Carl, eh? Good. That’s a fine old Saxon name!’

  Erik was a man of about forty, quite slight, wearing half-moon glasses and a badly pressed brown suit. He could have been a schoolmaster, or perhaps a bank manager down on his luck. He shook Carl’s hand warmly.

  ‘Welcome Carl! I’m glad you could make it.’

  Carl looked at Laf and mouthed, ‘Who the fuck?’’

  Laf frowned back warningly.

  ‘A word of advice, Carl,’ said Erik pleasantly, still holding Carl’s hand. ‘Laf has chosen to let you into our little secret. We do that from time to time, because, well, we’re missionaries in a way. But if you were to reveal our secret to anyone else without our permission, I personally will kill you. And I must stress I mean that quite literally. I will kill you myself, and I will do so in the manner prescribed for sacrifices to the All-Father. With a noose and a spear.’

  He laughed pleasantly as he finally released Carl’s hand.

  ‘Now, Slug,’ he said, addressing the huddled figure in the corner without even looking at him, ‘perhaps you’d like to fetch drinks for Carl and the rest of us and provide him with whatever his preference is in pharmaceuticals.’

  Slug scrambled hastily to his feet.

  ~*~

  Carl could not believe the gear they had up there. They let him snort and smoke and swallow pills until the walls wobbled like jelly and the ceiling pulsated above his head as if it was alive. And when at last Erik began to speak to him, it seemed to Carl as if they were at opposite ends of an enormous echoing hall.

  ‘How much do you know about Dunner, Carl?’ Erik asked him.

  ‘Um, not much,’ said Carl, who was lying flat out on the floor. His own voice sounded strangely remote, as if he too were somewhere far away. He began to giggle and had to struggle to control himself. ‘I mean I know he’s got a hammer and… Well, that’s it to be honest. Not being funny or nothing.’

  ‘Well your ignorance is regrettable,’ said Erik, ‘but it’s hardly unusual. People have rather forgotten Dunner over the years. But he used to be big around here once: Dunner, or Thor as some call him. In fact the housing estate you come from is actually named after him, though I doubt very much if that was even known by those who chose the name. Thurston means Thor’s town, just as Thursday means Thor’s day.’

  ‘Yeah, and Wednesday’s named after Dunner’s father,’ added Laf.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Erik. ‘It’s named after the all-father: Odin’s day, or Woden’s day. Wod’s day as we’d say now.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Carl in that giant hall with its jelly walls, trying not to start giggling again.

  ‘“Yeah” indeed.’ Erik repeated Carl’s colloquialism in quote-marks, like a pedantic schoolmaster. ‘“Yeah” indeed. Dunner is the god of thunder and the strongest of all the gods. Your ancestors would have worshipped him. I don’t know if you know this, but they would have sacrificed to him too, killing both animals and human beings in his temple, spilling their blood in his honour. So you can see they took him very seriously indeed.’

  ‘You got a toilet here?’ Carl asked. ‘Only I’m fucking bursting for a piss.’

  ‘Outside this door, mate,’ said Gunnar, ‘and at the end of the corridor.’

  ‘I do apologise in advance,’ Erik purred, ‘for the rather basic arrangements’

  ~*~

  Carl struggled to his feet, forced himself to focus so that he could locate the door, and moved unsteadily towards it.

  The toilet at the end of the cold concrete corridor wasn’t hard to spot. The door was wide open and another naked light bulb revealed a chemical WC standing on a bare concrete floor. But as Carl headed towards it he became aware of a strange blue glow coming from a room next to the one he had just come from. Its door had been left just slightly ajar. Curious, Carl looked round to check no one was watching him, then pushed it open.

  Inside, from floor to ceiling, small lights flickered and electronic devices hummed. There was a bank of what looked like CCTV screens on one side of the room and, below them, a single large monitor across which numbers streamed so quickly that they were hardly more than a blur. But it was an object at the far end of the room that caught his attention. A tall cylinder, about two metres high and resembling a gigantic hourglass, was the source of the pure blue light that illuminated the whole room. The light came from the lower chamber of the hourglass and was especially intense at the narrow neck, from which it shot upwards every few seconds into the upper chamber in narrow filaments that twisted and turned and quickly faded, to be followed by another burst of brilliant energy.

  He heard a voice raised in the other room. Laf was goading Slug again, barking out his harsh derisive laughter. It was followed by Erik’s soothing purr

  I shouldn’t be seeing this, Carl thought. I wasn’t meant to see this.

  But he found it hard to turn away. The beautiful blue light and the constant movement inside the hourglass were strangely fascinating. They seemed to stir up something inside him, a powerful feeling, a sweet sad longing. He felt he could have stayed there for hours or even days, just watching. But he really didn’t want to be found in here and he knew that the others would notice if he didn’t return soon, so, after a few seconds, he made himself turn towards the door.

  As he did so, he noticed something odd about the bank of screens. He had once worked for a few weeks as a security guard (it was the longest job he had ever had), and he knew that every screen in a bank of this kind would normally show a different scene, a different part of the property under surveillance. Here, though, on every single screen, there was a blue image of the room where the screens themselves were located, the room he was in, each one fr
om the exact same angle. But here was the truly strange thing: the room and the camera angle might be identical in each one of those screens, but the image of Carl was not. In one screen he was facing the camera. In another he was looking at the shining cylinder. In a third he wasn’t there at all, but then came tottering unsteadily through the door.

  Carl thought at first that there was just some sort of time delay going on here – perhaps, for some reason, each screen was showing a different part of the last few minutes? – but then he noticed a screen in which he was already leaving the room.

  ‘Oh shit,’ muttered Carl.

  The beautiful blue light kept pouring up and up and up through the narrow neck of the giant hourglass

  ~*~

  ‘Do you think about the universe at all, Carl?’ Erik asked, when Carl returned to the room with the gods and mirrors and had settle back down onto the floor.

  ‘You mean… as in, like, the sun goes round the earth?’ Carl offered. ‘And stars and that?’

  Erik gave a pleasant laugh.

  ‘That’s it, Carl, you’ve got it in one. “Stars and that.” Very succinctly put. You have a most distinctive rhetorical style, if I may say so. “Stars and that” indeed. But listen and I’ll tell you something. The whole of this universe of stars and space is just one tiny twig in an enormous tree, one single tiny twig. And every second, every fraction of a second, it’s branching and dividing, creating new worlds that proceed, from that moment on, to take their own quite separate courses.’

  Carl laughed at first but then broke off because he suddenly found that he could see the very thing that Erik was describing to him, the world dividing and dividing and dividing again. It didn’t look much like a tree to him, though, more like millions of black worms in the dark that kept on splitting in two and splitting in two and splitting in two. Like viruses or something, he thought, vaguely remembering some film he’d once seen, some video in a biology class at school.

  ‘There are millions of other Earths,’ Erik said, ‘millions of Englands, millions of Thurston Meadows Zones. And Laf and Gunnar and I, we don’t come from this one.’

  ‘Nor me neither,’ said Slug in the background.