TWICE
Page 21
Or was it really from Sean? And what would happen if I made it in there, read it?
And how was I supposed to get in?
I wiggled back round to the room’s closed doughnut panel. No way to budge it.
Except, when I fumbled round in the gloom I sensed what I hadn’t sensed in panels before: a kind of long metal strap or clasp like the embedded arm of an old record player reaching from the panel’s centre to its edge where it was tethered to something—something that felt like a combination lock set into the tunnel’s floor. I fiddled with this lock: six moveable cogs engraved with letters or numbers, letters or numbers it was still too dark for me to see.
But they were big enough for me to feel them. Numbers: zero to nine, that could be moved round, to do what?
Release the clasp of course. If you knew the combination. And if the clasp could be released then the panel could be opened, was the suggestion.
I felt them watching. I even felt—shamefully—the old Scritch desire to please by solving, to boost my score.
But if I did do what they wanted—what I felt they wanted: open the lock, move the panel—how was I supposed to know what the combination was?
Their challenge, not that I was interested in them or their challenges.
The numbers Alan stole.
The numbers I had no inkling of. But if they’d coded the combination with Alan’s numbers it would mean they already knew Alan’s numbers, in which case they wouldn’t need me to enter them. Right?
Fuck knew.
Idly I spun the cogs, felt the numbers. Then I arranged them: all ones, all zeros. In order: one two three four five. Reversed: five four three two one. The five and the six: five six five six five six.
A click and I felt the clasp rise and release. High fives all round for Chris and Don the wrinkled world king or what I was beginning to feel must be the committee, the team of humans, computers, robots, 3D printers watching me, real-time plotting this game for me.
Whoa, Chris. You’d really let them do this to me?
The void.
The eye.
I lifted the clasp, now free from its tethering at the doughnut’s edge but still connected to the central inner circle. I found the clasp now functioned as a kind of winch to unscrew this inner circle. I unscrewed, the circle came loose, I pulled it up, found a hot bulb attached beneath, clattered it down next to me on the tunnel floor. The bulb continued to shine—battery operated? I saw myself and my tunnel’s surrounds properly for the first time: tubes and wires and dust, the foam, my dirty hands and clothes.
I put my hand down into the empty centre of the doughnut, gripped and shunted aside the panel next to me in the tunnel, as I’d been taught. The hole beneath me was now big enough for me to enter the room below—by jumping down, I guessed, hoping for a soft landing, or by dangling from the ceiling which wasn’t that high, letting myself drop down. Then I could read my letter.
I had no intention of doing any of this. I was just exploring my options, the illusion of options.
I replaced everything, relocked the combination lock, crawled backwards down the tunnel to the Satanic room and further, retracing my steps, squinting and feeling to see if combination locks tethered other doughnut panels. I found they did, and that the same simple code unlocked each one I tried.
I crawled back to my so-called room and peeped down at the red envelope, now positioned on the bed a little differently, I felt. Not that I cared. No way I was going down to investigate any portion of their set-up.
I toyed with unscrewing the light again, to have a torch for my onwards journey. But that was too risky: I could be sensed from below, other variables. Plus now I knew: I could get a light any time I wanted, if all locks and panels operated similarly.
If they did.
I left ‘my’ room behind me, crawled on above new empty rooms till I came to a place where the tunnel split. The runways of pinpricks running at right angles, a fork in the path, as happened to Zita. You bore to the left each time, that’s how you found your way out, I remembered.
Your way out where? Into the sea?
Into the vast empty plains of the Steppe, in Zita: the borderland between the land of men and the land of beasts, where Zita’s father had friends who were lions.
Deal with that when it happens.
But what if I didn’t take left forks, disobeyed all scripts: theirs, Alan’s?
Desperate, tired, starving, angry: it made sense to me then to go random. Fuck the pre-plan, trying to listen for rainbow directions. Instead go wherever, try my luck, take my chances. Feel the twitch and flow.
I went right, crawled on, found new forks leading left, leading right, leading up. I took them or not, as I fancied. No one came for me, nothing stopped me, no Cwyd, no click, no hum, no sense of instructions getting beamed in from anywhere. I climbed up, squeezed through, followed pinprick runways, felt locks and panels, peeped into peepholes or not, saw endless empty hotel cabins, cabins with nothing at all in them, cabins half done-up. I brushed past thick cobwebs, as if no one had been through in ages, in contrast to the clean tunnels I’d come from down below. I was lost in a maze defying orders and it felt good. Head up, wait for natural light. That was my only plan. At one point I came upon three fresh Vengeance Street / cabin-bathroom combos. One of the Vengeance Streets was pristine but the other two were mashed-up in different ways that looked like my prior handiwork. The cabin-bathrooms seemed strewn with my stuff, as I’d left them. In one the mirror, TV and laptop were smashed just as I’d smashed them.
As if I really was on a backstage tour, behind the magic, had wound up in places I wasn’t supposed to be, as if what was happening beneath me wasn’t the seamless shunting of containers so that exactly what they wanted me to see next was delivered on-demand to my next peephole as I meandered, me versus their machine.
My body hurt by now, especially my arms and shoulders. My knees and elbows were rubbed raw. I decided moving up was the priority, taking any pathway that opened above my head. Even if it cost me my last strength to hoist myself up I had to do it. How many levels down could a ship’s hold be?
If this was a ship.
It still swayed.
I made my way up, glutting myself with their cyberdust, stopping to rest when I had to, eventually coming to a new sort of level where the rooms were done up differently, as posh hospital rooms, medical paraphernalia. Not exactly ‘Barrow General’ but something similar. Perhaps I’d find a nurse or pensioner to help me. But there were no people in these rooms.
Or none at any rate till I came to one that did have someone in it, someone attached by tubes and bags etcetera to the bed, their eyes bandaged, lying on their back there naked facing up at me.
Someone who was Chris.
31
Or someone who was Sean, or supposed to be Sean, fake Chris. Because the thing down there right below me tangled in a sheet and lit bright for me to see more easily had a stump. And the thick beige bandage wrapped round the eyes. And the dip in the head—the head and face were shaved. A healing big scar on the calf. Other healing wounds, where he’d slashed himself, on his face and arms. Even, I could see via the magnified peephole—as though it had been set up for me to see it—the faintest outline of my own teeth marks on his left hand where I’d drawn blood when he’d kidnapped me from my flat so many moons ago.
It seemed.
I lay with my eye to the peephole, felt my heart thud, watched him from above. The fake, splayed for inspection. The real fake? The real stump Chris who’d come for me, dragged me into this, pretending? Who’d cut me in the lake, lain next to me in the burrow, told me about the world, shown me dragons, cared for me on our boat? The Sean I’d shopped? Was the thing on the bed under me Sean or was it another of them or something else cut to look like Sean? Was it Chris cut to look like Sean? Or a robot or a print-out, a bit of hardened foam with Vengeance Street wounds?
It slept. Its chest rose. It sniffed. It moved, the sheet moved. I saw the
meaty circumcised cock.
I lay there. Big laughs in the control room, the pleasure of their cunning. Stepping it up, me trapped in big plots.
Grag Medusa. The eye.
I’d come here at random, what if I’d really outfoxed them, found what I oughtn’t to: real Sean in his prison? The glimmer of possibility, had to be, right? Couldn’t be one hundred per cent impossible.
Certainly could, real Sean would have said. The only other person I see in this whole set-up and it’s him? Laid out like that for me to inspect, on a platter? Say cheese for the cams. Don’t fall for it.
Why? What could they want from this?
To get me to open the panel, get in there.
To do what? Rustle him out, blind Sean?
Why?
I moved backwards away from the peephole, back to the panel. I felt for the lock. But this lock was different from all the others: a long thin heavy metal cylinder not embedded in the floor but lying loose next to me, a small metal ‘U’ at its end attaching it to the panel’s clasp. This cylinder felt old, heavy, made of something not steel, notched with age and events—or made to feel notched—warm and buttery. I wanted to say it was made of silver, old silver, that was the feeling, composed of many moveable wheels of numbers: smooth-moving, newly-oiled. The whole thing, when you felt it, was moveable, like a well-used Rubik’s Cube. Many more than five wheels on here. I tried my old five/six code, nothing happened. I tried it six five—still no joy. Idly, I spun the numbers, they moved smoothly, were designed to line up to a groove at the top.
What was it?
What did they want me to think it was?
An old lock, I wasn’t educated enough to know how old: Babylonian? Medieval? Hand-crafted, made to feel hand-crafted.
Printed yesterday.
I crawled back to the peephole. Their game of the panels, to train me up, for this next level. If I wanted Sean I’d have to crack this code.
The numbers.
If I wanted Sean.
If that was Sean.
Why was he sleeping with bright lights on?
Was he sleeping? Was he waiting?
And who was Sean, after all?
I didn’t know Sean, I only knew Chris and Sean-pretending-to-be-Chris. The only thing I knew for sure about Sean, real Sean, eyeless real Sean, was that he was a fake, a liar.
Who maybe had good cause.
I wanted to laugh
I knocked on the tunnel floor: the five and the six.
Below me he twitched, jerked up, put his hands to his head.
He moved like a human, not like a robot.
Their robots would move like humans.
Neither of us moved for a moment. He sat upright on his bed. I lay above him at my peephole. I knocked it again.
He put his bandaged face up towards me at the ceiling. He mouthed ‘no’, perhaps he said it out loud, I couldn’t hear him. He lay back on his bed, curled up into a ball, pulled the sheet over him.
Ignore. Crawl on. Find natural light.
In any case I couldn’t open the panel to his cell, not with the fancy padlock and the ten bands of numbers I didn’t know. I could break it perhaps, the small metal ‘U’ at the end, if I had a tool. I crawled away from the peephole, back to the cylinder and this ‘U’, peered at it in the gloom. It was thin, I could perhaps prise it open, with some sharp instrument, from the heebie jeebie room? If that wasn’t foam-printed, if the instruments in there were hard and real. Maybe that was the purpose of that room: not to scare me but to arm me. If I could find my way back down to that room so many floors below—in this live computer game I was trapped in—then perhaps I’d find something helpful.
If I could find my way.
Or something here among the wires?
Real Sean would have found some tool, he was resourceful, as well as a liar.
His whirring rod.
My brain hurt.
Idly I spun the cylinder wheels again. Like some toy, oddly satisfying.
Something clicked.
One side of the ‘U’-shaped hook opened up, letting me pull the cylinder from the clasp, untether the clasp from the floor of the tunnel so I could pull the strap up and see it worked like all other panels: you wound it round to open the central hole.
These things worked smoothly, made no noise.
I stopped unscrewing the hole in the middle of the doughnut panel. I lay there with my head in my hands. I didn’t want the cylinder to have opened. I didn’t want to open up the central hole, I didn’t want to shunt the panel aside. I didn’t want to get to ‘Sean’, I didn’t want anything to happen, I just wanted to get out of there.
To where?
Into the sea to drown?
I crawled forwards back to the peephole, gazed down again at him balled up in the bed under the sheet.
I crawled back to the panel, looked at the cylinder, the opened hook, the random sequence of symbols I’d spun that had opened the hook so coincidentally, had seemed to open the hook. And then I screamed cos the central doughnut hole was rising up, unscrewing of its own accord, light from below entering my tunnel, the clasp spinning, getting pushed up into the tunnel with me, by a hand now gripping the inner hole of the remaining doughnut panel: a hand with a stumped index finger, a hand now grabbing my wrist.
32
I lay there in the tunnel in the ceiling, my wrist gripped by the hand with the stump, the lightbulb from its room pushed up into the tunnel next to me, lighting my dust and cables, my faded teeth marks on the flesh. I looked down. There, next to the hand under the hole, glaring up at me, the bandage now pushed up over its forehead, was an eye. Greeny-brown, gold-flecked: Chris’s eye, Sean’s eye as was, that Sean had gouged out in the cupboard. An instance of their clone eye and a mouth, Sean / Chris’s mouth, which opened to hiss in an American accent:
‘Who are you?’
Who was I? I wanted to laugh. Instead I screamed.
‘Stop screaming. Who are you?’ pushing its eye up closer, letting go of my wrist and grabbing my ear, pulling me down to its hole by my ear so our eyes were this close with only the hole between us.
‘I’m Nim,’ I said, my mouth twisted and pushed against the tunnel floor, my ear pinched, half-ripped off. ‘Who are you?’
‘Fuck you,’ it said, moving its face back, spitting up at my cheek, still gripping my ear. ‘Fuck you. It won’t work.’
‘Chris? Sean?’ I said very softly, my face covered with his spit, my yanked ear in unbelievable pain. Was this them catching me, punishing me? ‘Sean?’ I said, because he seemed to be being Sean except with healed eyes. Sean the resourceful violent liar. ‘It’s me. Nim. I promise. Stop. You’re hurting me.’ Playing to the script, for now.
The mouth laughed. The eye stared at me, the eye I’d seen him pulp. The accent was American now, he’d only been talking British before to fool me, pass himself off as Chris. And sometimes that accent had slipped.
But he couldn’t be Sean. He was cut to look like Sean, had to be, with those perfect eyes. A third instance, pretending to be Sean?
A third instance pulling my ear off who could be anything.
Cos whoever he was, he wasn’t Chris, so I didn’t know him.
Except maybe he was Chris, masquerading as Sean, for some reason, how creepy. Chris, slashed and stumped, pulling my ear, gone real violent, nothing to do with the Chris I’d grown up with.
And wouldn’t they be the same after all, the same relentless DNA?
‘What are you doing up there?’ he hissed.
‘I escaped,’ I said, almost passed out from pain.
‘You escaped?’ He laughed again, yanked hard. ‘You escaped them? So how come they’re not here, how come they haven’t stopped you? No one escapes them. Screaming your head off escaped on their ship?’
‘Maybe they can’t hear me, see me up here? Stop it. I don’t know. Maybe you’re them?’
‘I’m them? They can’t see you?’ He laughed again. ‘Fuck you,’ spitting at me once
more. ‘Well they can sure see me. Hello,’ still yanking my ear but spinning round wildly to talk to his room, standing on a chair, I could now see, in order to reach the hole and me in the ceiling. ‘Fuck you.’ Then back to me: ‘Have you come to kill me?’
He lifted his legs off the chair and hung from me, swinging from the ceiling by my tearing ear.
‘You’re tearing my ear off.’
‘Good. What are you, what have they done to you? This won’t work,’ he said wildly to the room.
‘I’m me,’ I whispered, crying from pain. ‘I’m me.’ Why fix his eyes? If they wanted me thinking for sure that this was Sean then he should be blind.
‘How come you’re here? Why aren’t they here? You can’t escape them’
‘Alan showed me,’ I said. ‘Maybe they are here. Maybe they’re coming.’
He pulled harder, clawing his stump into my ear hole for better purchase, to stop slipping, then put his legs back on the chair in thankful release when it felt he might slip off.
Less weight but still gripped to me, moving closer, putting his eye and hissing mouth right up next to me at the hole, bits of blood from my hot ringing torn ear staining him, staring right into my eye, looking inside me, to see if I was me. It seemed.
‘How did you open the ceiling?’
‘There’s a lock, I opened it.’
‘A lock?’
‘A combination lock. You put in numbers.’
He froze for a moment. ‘What numbers?’ yanking my poor ear again.
‘For fuck’s sake! I don’t know! Random numbers, yours was different to the other ones.’
‘Different to what? What numbers?’
‘I don’t know! I can’t remember, it was random, any old numbers.’
‘What old numbers?’
‘I don’t know what fucking numbers, I don’t know the numbers, how many fucking times do I have to tell you all?’
‘You entered a number and a lock opened? What have you done? Show me the lock. Don’t show me anything. You’re a trap. How have you been programmed?’