Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text

by Chris Beckett

  ‘So what’s going on for you these days Carl?’ asked Burkitt as he picked up the kettle and went to the sink to fill it.

  ‘Is that milk and four sugars, by the way?’ he added. ‘Have I remembered that right?’

  Then he turned round smiling, rather pleased with himself for remembering those four sugars after all this time, and saw the gun in Carl’s hand.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I see’

  He gave a humourless little laugh.

  ‘All this hatred!’ he said, ‘I should be honoured I suppose.’

  ‘You what?’ said Carl.

  ‘Never mind, Carl,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  He put the kettle down slowly.

  ‘I’m guessing someone put you up to this, Carl? You were never much of a one for thinking things up yourself.’

  ‘Mind your own business.’

  Burkitt nodded and gave a small weary sigh.

  ‘Listen, Carl,’ he began again. ‘Listen. My wife died a while back. And my career sort of petered out, not that it was ever much of a career and not that I was ever much cop at my job – you probably know that better than most – but it did fill up my time and now… Well, what I’m trying to say is that I really don’t have a huge amount to live for.’

  He smiled.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. I get by all right. I potter around. I cut the grass. I rake up the leaves. I do the crossword. I watch TV. I look after my grandsons when my daughter is busy. So I’d be very pleased if you decided to let me live. But what I’m trying to say is that it’s all pretty much of a muchness. It doesn’t really make all that much difference to me personally if my life ends now or whether it goes on for another twenty years. Do you see what I mean? So if you really need to shoot me, well, be my guest!’

  Carl swallowed, holding the gun with two trembling hands.

  ‘But listen Carl,’ Cyril went on, ‘I don’t know who put you up to this but, you must admit, you are very easily led. You need to think very carefully about whether it’s really in your interests to shoot me.’

  He waited.

  ‘Don’t come no nearer, all right?’ warned Carl, pointing the trembling gun at Burkitt’s face.

  ‘I won’t, I won’t. But what do you have to say, Carl? What are your thoughts?’

  ‘Fuck off!’ Carl whimpered. ‘Just fuck off. I don’t need your fucking deskie shit! You’re doing my fucking head in.’

  ‘Well I’m worried for you, Carl,’ said Burkitt. ‘It may sound strange, but I am.’

  Unable to stand any more of this, Carl pulled the trigger.

  Burkitt winced, his face suddenly beaded with sweat, but nothing happened, because the safety catch was still on.

  ‘Come on, Carl. This isn’t you, is it? This really isn’t you. Just put the gun down.’

  Carl flung the gun to the floor.

  ‘Fuck off!’ he shouted. ‘Fuck off you stupid deskie bastard. Just leave me alone, all right? Why can’t you people never leave me alone?’

  He turned and fled, slamming the front door behind him with such force that some of the coloured glass came flying out, to shatter on the little brick path.

  But all of that happened in another world.

  It was sometime later that Jaz opened up her hand again.

  ‘Why don’t we take some now?’ she said.

  Charles had just pulled out from inside of her. He’d forgotten about the slip, but it seemed odd to him now that she’d been holding it in her hand all this time.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘No. Probably not. I mean it would be silly, wouldn’t it? Pointless, really. It wouldn’t solve anything and it would cause a lot of people a lot of grief.’

  ‘That’s to put it mildly,’ Charles said. ‘And most of all it would cause a lot of grief to us.’

  She nodded, but then she reached up and pulled his head down so his face was very close to hers.

  ‘But if you’d said yes,’ she whispered, ‘then I would have done it with you. I wouldn’t have been able to resist.’

  He pulled away from her at once, wishing that she wasn’t with him at all, let alone lying there beside him on his bed with his semen inside her body. His original instinct had been right, he thought. He should have called her and cancelled that first date. There was something dangerous about her, something greedy. She was always needling away. She was always pushing him, tempting him, daring him…

  And then, in a single moment, his mood changed. Why fight it? Why fight her? She was only speaking aloud what he himself secretly felt. Why not just fall? Why not let go and fall together?

  ‘All right then,’ Charles said, ‘let’s do it!’

  But that was in another world too.

  Burkitt didn’t look scared, or angry – just tired.

  ‘All this hatred!’ he said. ‘I should be honoured really I suppose.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Never mind, Carl. Don’t worry about it.’

  He put the kettle down slowly.

  ‘Someone put you up to this, I suppose, Carl? You were never much of a one for thinking things up for yourself.’

  ‘Mind your own business.’

  Burkitt sighed.

  ‘Listen Carl,’ he began again. ‘Listen. My wife died a while back. And then my career sort of petered out, not that it was ever much of a career but it filled up my time. I keep myself amused, I potter about at this and that, but the truth is I really don’t have a huge amount to live for.’

  He smiled.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong. I get by all right. I watch TV. I look after my grandsons when my daughter is busy. But it’s all pretty much of a muchness really and it doesn’t make much difference to me if my life ends now or in another twenty years. If you really need to shoot me, well, be my guest!’

  Carl remembered about the safety catch.

  ‘Shit,’ he muttered to himself, fumbling it off.

  Cyril winced.

  ‘Now listen Carl,’ he said, ‘you need to be very careful and you need to think carefully about what you do next. I don’t know who put you up to this but you are very easily led. Ask yourself: is it really in your interests to shoot me?’

  ‘Don’t come no nearer, all right?’ Carl said. ‘I’m not messing around!’

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t. But what I don’t get is this Carl. I’m pretty sure you actually quite like me. You certainly seemed pretty pleased to see me when we met the other day in Clifton.’

  ‘I don’t give a fucking shit.’

  ‘You do though, Carl. You do give a shit. You’re basically rather a kind person. I honestly think that you hate the idea of shooting another human being. Some people take a positive pleasure in things like that, but you’re definitely not that type at all. In fact I reckon you hate the idea of killing me so much that you refuse to let yourself even think about it. And that, unfortunately, is what makes it possible.’

  Over Burkitt’s shoulder, Carl caught sight of himself in a mirror that hung on the wall. He knew he didn’t look like a killer.

  Burkitt ran his hand over his face.

  ‘Put the safety catch back on, Carl, and put the gun down on the side there.’

  ‘Shit,’ muttered Carl. ‘Fucking shit.’

  But he did as he was asked.

  ‘That is brave Carl,’ Cyril said. ‘That really is very brave.’

  ‘No it ain’t. No it fucking ain’t.’

  Tears sprang suddenly into Carl’s eyes, his kind, gentle eyes with their long fair lashes.

  ‘Well I won’t never see that Valour-Hall now will I? I can forget that for a start.’

  Cyril’s eyes also had tears in them and he was beginning to shake all over.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean by that Carl, but as far as I’m concerned you’ve shown yourself to be very brave indeed.’

  ‘No I haven’t. And anyway I’ve fucking killed a man for them already. Or near en
ough killed one, anyway. That Scotch geezer, Slug. I saw them string him up and shove a fucking spear through him and I didn’t do nothing. I was too fucking scared.’

  Cyril drew breath.

  ‘All right Carl,’ he said. ‘Let’s take our time here. Let’s take our time. We really need to slow down a bit.’

  But that, once again, was in another world.

  Jaz opened her hand.

  ‘Perhaps it’d be best if you put them away again.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I wonder how many there will be next time you look?’ she said.

  ‘God knows. But you’re my witness. There are twelve here now.’

  ‘Yes, but if more appear, how am I going to know whether they appeared by themselves or whether you pinched them from somewhere?’

  He held the envelope open for her while she tipped the seeds back inside.

  ‘I can’t believe you just nicked them like that,’ she said. ‘I mean you were such a stickler for the rules when I met you that time in the Meadows office. My God, you were even worried about whether it would be okay to meet me outside work! And then you just go and steal these.’

  Charles didn’t say anything straight away.

  ‘I know,’ he said eventually. ‘And it was less than twenty-four hours later that I took them. So you can see what a bad influence you’ve been on me.’

  ‘I’m a bad influence on you? I’m not having that! Look what you’ve got in your hand, Charles!’

  ‘I was only joking, Jaz.’

  ‘You might have pretended you were joking, but you really meant it. All I can say is look at what you’ve just shown me, and then ask yourself who is leading who astray here?’

  ~*~

  ‘Shit,’ Carl muttered, suddenly remembering about the safety catch and fumbling it into the off position.

  Burkitt winced.

  ‘Listen Carl, you need to think very carefully indeed about what you’re going to do next. I don’t know who put you up to this but you are very easily led. Ask yourself if it’s really in your interests to shoot me? Because once you’ve done it you won’t be able to…’

  ‘Don’t come no nearer, all right? Don’t come no nearer! I’m not pissing about!’

  ‘I won’t come nearer. Don’t worry. I’ve no intention of coming nearer. But will you think about my question?’

  Carl gave a groan.

  ‘Fuck off!’ he yelled. ‘Just fuck off all right? I don’t want none of your fucking deskie shit! Just leave me alone all right? Why can’t you people never leave me alone?’

  ‘Carl, I don’t want to upset you in any way but can I just…?’

  Carl pulled the trigger.

  He wasn’t prepared for the recoil. He wasn’t prepared for the way that Burkitt hurtled back against the worktop behind him and then slumped to the floor with his limbs sticking out at random angles like a doll that’s been thrown across a room. He wasn’t prepared for the blood that, in one single instant, had splattered the ceiling, the worktop and two side walls. He wasn’t prepared for the way that a person could be alive and talking to you one minute and the next not even have a head, only a kind of obscene cup, like the empty shell of a boiled egg, from which blood kept spurting for several seconds in thick rhythmic gouts.

  Carl tried to persuade himself that this wasn’t real, that it was happening in another world, that he would soon return to his own. He tried to persuade himself that he did in fact inhabit one of the other worlds that he had glimpsed in those last moments before he fired: the world where he threw away the gun, the world where Cyril persuaded him to put it down…

  But it was no good. This had happened, this had happened here, and the existence of other timelines made no difference at all to that simple fact. Here Cyril had no head. Here Cyril’s brains were splattered over the wall. Here one of Cyril’s eyes was dangling obscenely from a thread. Carl vomited profusely but he couldn’t vomit out the past. He couldn’t vomit his own soul free from the body that had pointed the gun and pulled the trigger.

  And, what was more, the only people he could turn to now were the ones who’d put him up to this in the first place. The only place where he could hope to hide from the consequences of this killing was a place where he’d have to kill again.

  Chapter 14

  At five thirty in the afternoon on the day after Cyril Burkitt died, Charles went down to the Gloucester Road to pick up some groceries. The sky was already dark and it was raining. It had been raining heavily all day. Water filled the gutters and gurgled down into the drains and the underground rivers. Water glittered in the electric lights. Water streamed down the windscreens of cars and was flung aside by their wipers in great cold dollops, while drivers in office suits inside stared out dumbly as if there were no other option but this twice daily crawl, encased in tons of metal, listening to the chit-chat of the radio.

  ‘Shifters… time cheats… crackdown…’ were words they were hearing over and over again in those metal boxes of theirs, as the news bulletins rolled round and round. A day after Cyril Burkitt’s murder, another DSI officer had been shot in an Inclusion Zone outside Bath. Everyone agreed it was shifters behind these crimes, and everyone agreed that this was a new phase, for up to now it had just been dreggies getting killed but now it was deskies as well. For these office workers crawling home along the Gloucester Road, the threat was creeping slowly closer. Something was going to have to be done.

  ~*~

  There was a shop on Gloucester Road which sold nothing but mirrors and lights. Its front was narrow and unimpressive, but it went back a long way and the mirrors themselves enhanced and multiplied the sense of great spaces unfolding inside a small container, just as the mirrors did in Charles’ flat, but on a much more impressive scale. Charles had bought several of his mirrors in that shop, but he often went into it just for the spectacle and, for some reason, he felt like doing that right now. He spent ten minutes or so wandering through the corridors of mirrors and glittery lights, admiring the many different shapes and frames, with the endlessly recursive copies of himself stretching away on each side all the while, disappearing down other corridors that were beyond his reach. The proprietor let him be. Knowing from past experience not to ask Charles what he wanted or to try and sell him things, he sat reading the local paper in a musty little alcove, like a spider in the centre of a web, smelling of cigarette smoke and cider.

  Charles hadn’t bought a mirror for some time, and he decided to treat himself to a small one that took his fancy. It was perfectly round and very slightly convex, with a delicate, art nouveau-type frame.

  ‘Forty pounds, sir. Thank you. Still raining out there by the look of it.’

  As Charles headed for the door, another man came in. He was lightly built and scholarly-looking and he wore a tousled brown suit and half-moon glasses. As soon as he saw this man, Charles had a sensation of falling, a really acute sensation, powerful enough to make him grab involuntarily at the air. Within a second he had wrestled himself back under control again but the man had certainly noticed his reaction, and seemed neither surprised nor bewildered. He looked directly into Charles’ eyes with a tiny smile. And then he sniffed. Just slightly, just perceptibly he dilated his nostrils to sample the air.

  This man is a shifter, Charles realised at once, and he returned the man’s gaze, looking defiantly back at him until they’d passed one another. He sensed an immense intelligence there and an enormous reservoir of bitterness and rage. This was a shifter all right, and a very powerful one. But what could Charles do? He couldn’t very well arrest a total stranger just because he gave him a strange feeling in a mirror shop.

  And then, as often happened with Charles, he had sudden shift of mood.

  What does it matter anyway? he asked himself as he stepped out into the darkness and the rain. Who cares? If the world burned it burned. If it bled it bled. The world would arise again fresh and clean from the bones and the ashes. It would be good to strip away the comfortable paddin
g of civilisation and allow life to break out again in the raw, it would be good if the underground rivers flooded and the waters emerged once more under the sky, and that was exactly what the warriors of Wod and Dunner would bring about. They’d replace dreary rationalism and the last priggish remnants of Christianity with a pantheon of brawling, boozing, fornicating gods. They’d fight the world until it either submitted to them, or fought back against them with such ferocity that it became exactly like them anyway. Wod couldn’t lose!

  Exhilarated by these strange and unfamiliar thoughts, Charles turned the mirror this way and that in his hands. New perspectives appeared: new roads striking off at different angles, new sky under the ground, new ground above the sky. Even his own face, in shadow and surrounded by bright electric signs, seemed remote and mysterious. And when he finally lowered the mirror, he saw that someone had sprayed new graffiti on the arch of the railway bridge above him in day-glo pink.

  ENDLESS WORLDS!

  Icy shivers of delight ran up Charles’ spine and a cold splinter seemed to shift inside his heart and move still deeper in. He felt himself released! He felt that he didn’t need to care about anything or anyone any more. He could play in his hall of mirrors for ever now, he could play with his machines, he could play with the blue light, he could give himself over completely to the beautiful blue light as it came streaming up into space and time from the depths of Mimir’s Well…

  ‘BRISTOL SOCIAL WORKER SHOT!’

  It was a headline in front of the newsagent’s shop across the road that brought him back. These had not been his own thoughts! He had been taken over. The man in the shop had somehow entered his mind, or bent it towards his, or connected with some hidden part. Charles had been looking out at the world through the man’s eyes and not his own.

  He turned and rushed back into the shop with such haste that the mirror slipped from his hands and smashed into narrow blade-like shards on the shining paving slabs. He ran back and forth through the corridors of the shop, the tunnels of mirrors, but the stranger had gone. He met nothing but his own reflection, and reflections of his own reflection, and reflections of reflections of reflections…