Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things

by Richard Calder

  ‘It has to be like this. You know that, don’t you?’ Primavera’s cloak was like a designer shroud, the hood -lined with green satin - framing a lifeless face. ‘Desire is death. Living death.’

  She led me through the necropolis to where a coach-and-four waited. A much-decayed corpse in a surgical mask held the reins.

  ‘Dust to dust. Silicon to silicon. The bullies. The Hospitals. The men in white coats. The dolls.’

  We boarded. A crack of a whip. We galloped through the cemetery. Grim reapers, dismembered cherubs and other mementos mori gaped in at us as we hurtled past.

  Primavera drew close. The opacity of her eyes - dark, with green splinters of mutation - cleared, became mortal. With loneliness. With fear.

  ‘Night is falling.’ Her breath was cold against my cheek. ‘Stay with me. Share my grave. On and on we can ride. No escape for human, for doll. All is boundless and eternal. Like desire. Like death.’

  A hand, small, white and blue-veined, a child’s hand, settled between my thighs.

  The wheels clattered over rocks and bones.

  The light faded; the picture show dissolved. Primavera was waking. I crept into her arms.

  ‘What’s the time?’ she murmured.

  ‘I don’t know. My watch - ’ My watch was broken.

  As if she had been slapped, Primavera spun her head to one side, gasping with alarm. ‘Outside,’ she said, ‘it’s getting dark! Quick, untie me!’ I freed her lace-manacled hands. ‘I have to go home. I’m late. Mum thinks it’s bad enough as it is, having a doll for a daughter. I don’t want her to think I’m delinquent.’

  Shaking, she buttoned her blouse and brushed the dust from her gymslip. ‘I couldn’t help it,’ she said, her eyes moodily fastened on the green pentacle emblazoned over her breast. ‘It’s the poison.’ She put a hand on her belly. ‘Here. Inside. Sometimes—sometimes it hurts. I don’t want to be Lilim. I don’t. I want everything to be like—like before.’

  In England every girl is human; or was human, once. And Primavera was but a few months into her metamorphosis. Such a girl, like a chrysalis disturbed from sleep, may sometimes scratch at her cocoon, afraid. She knows that she is becoming that other, that vertigo of desire, that dead girl who shares her name.

  ‘You won’t tell, will you?’ she said. ‘If you tell...’

  ‘I won’t tell,’ I said. ‘I promise.’

  She knelt to kiss me. It was a ghost’s kiss, light, impalpable. ‘You mean that?’

  ‘I’m not like the others.’

  ‘Boy-slime.’ She laughed softly.

  ‘I mean it,’ I said. ‘Listen: it’s my birthday next week. I’m having a party. Why don’t you come?’

  ‘And whatever will your Mum and Dad say? A doll at their little boy’s party?’

  ‘Mum and Dad aren’t like that.’

  She frowned and cuffed me playfully across the nose. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But human boys have so birthdays. Not like us dolls. I don’t know if I should. She stood up. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Primavera,’ I said, ‘be my girlfriend.’

  ‘Stupid!’

  ‘I wouldn’t let them hurt you,’ I said. ‘Not again.’

  She walked towards the door, chewing thoughtfully on a strand of dishevelled hair. ‘I might come to your party. Your Mum and Dad sound nice. My Mum, well... Lilith’s your mother now, she says. She wouldn’t be seen dead with me. The older girls: they always say it’s the human bit left inside that hurts.’

  It would be a mercy when she became doll entire... I lay in the darkness, fingering the puncture wounds beneath my shirt, counting (as she had insisted) to six hundred and sixty-six (the shirt would have to be destroyed; it was red with sedition) before following her into the evening’s gloom. To be seen together at this hour... People talk so, Iggy, really they do. The sky was violet, shifting to black, and the ruins bordering the park’s savannah echoed to the hush of shadows. Primavera was gone, scurrying to meet her curfew. It was late—too late to be on the streets; with the sundown came the big kids, cocks of the militant boardwalks of the night. I trotted into the desolation of ordinariness that was north-east London’s suburbs.

  The Rainham Road was littered with tomb-robbers' castoffs: sunburst clocks, prints from Woolworth's, plaster knick-knacks and smashed aquaria—the unwanted booty of forgotten, vulgar lives. I began to sprint (the sounds of distant parties restating the dangers of the dark); out there, amongst the remains of England's beached Leviathan, things prinked, prowled and preyed, boy-things, and girl-things. I crossed the A125, and paused to catch my breath. Beyond a strip of marshland the towers of the Mardyke estate, honeycombed with light, cast an emulsive sheen across the benighted city. (Evidence of other habitation came from far, far away where the lurid glow of Dagenham Hospital rose above the horizon.) There were other communities; one in Upminster, I'd heard. But I had never seen them. I knew only the area bounded by school and the marshes (though Dad had once taken me to see the Thames). Travel was taboo; it spread plague.

  I crawled beneath razor-wire, ran, paused, massaged my side, ran again. The dry sedge whistled about my feet. Soon, I had reached the snaggletoothed root of Solaris Mansions. I dawdled, bracing myself for the long climb, the inevitable scolding from Dad. Gazing down the street, my eyes settled upon the Bobinski residence; five floors up, it was signposted by a neon intensity that seemed to bum away all competition. Was she already abed, singing herself a vampire lullaby? Did she touch herself as I visited her dreams? My eyelids drooped; the light was chromaticized by the fine denier of my lashes, and rainbows arced across the boondocks of my world, filling it with love’s spectrum. The marshland, flat and monotonous, was irradiated: dykes, sluice-gates, windmills; the nauseous replication of looted semis; and beyond the marshes, beyond the lonely conurbations of Essex and Surrey, Middlesex and Kent, beyond the fairy ring of interdiction, England itself was surely radiant, its shires—where moneymen telecommuted to and from the world—dreaming bright dreams of long ago and a girl named Britannia. A stillness descended, a stillness quite unlike the bleak quiet I was accustomed to, and all dissolved into a tearhil, multihued mist. I had become a prism of desire! Primavera and I would transform everything. Where her light could not reach, and where I could not see, even the shadows, I knew, would have lusher gradations, more purposeful depths.

  Later, when Mum came to kiss me goodnight, I asked her to tell me a story of when she was little, a story of the forests and of the village where she grew up, a story of the Carpathian mountains.

  ‘Is it true,’ I said, after she had finished, ‘what they say about dolls: that they’re the daughters of Lilith, Adam’s first wife? That Lilith steals human children and puts her own in their place?’

  ‘It’s just a fairy tale, Ignatz. Like the ones I tell you. Tales of the golem, the wandering Jew, the vampire.’

  ‘But the dolls—they are vampires.’

  ‘Not real ones.’ She smiled and stroked my hair. ‘Dolls are not devils. Such things do not exist. They’re just little girls. Little girls who are very ill. You must pity them, Ignatz. The world is cruel.’

  Primavera never came to my party, but we often met in secret. Throughout that summer she would come to the roof of my tower block and stay until after dark. ‘I don’t care about Mum any more,’ she’d say. On the roof I had set up a telescope, and we would gaze at the stars, or try to spot an escaping doll caught like a moth in the city perimeter’s searchlights. And we would play our game, and afterwards we would both say we were sorry, until the night came when we no longer cared to make apologies, to ourselves, each other, or the world.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Black Spring

  With four marines to act as my pall bearers (the Mickey still mummifying my joints) I was taken to an elevator, dropped three, four, five floors, and carried, in a mockery of pomp, through the embassy’s cable-wormy bowels. My cortège, on entering a gymnasium, came to rest. After leaning me against some wall bars at forty-five d
egrees (my rigidity uncompromised), the marines solemnly departed. Jack Morgenstern was pumping iron. We were alone.

  ‘How’s the voice?’ he said. ‘I thought we might talk.’ The daily exertions of the American corps diplomatique had left the gym with a residual stench of humanity; I heaved. ‘That’s good. That shows the drug’s wearing off.’ He dropped his weights and moved to a rowing machine. ‘But your friend—you’ll understand we’re going to have to keep her secured, even if her girdle is killing her.’ He began to whistle the chorus of the ‘Eton Boating Song’. ‘I guess you could call me an Anglophile; it’s a fine thing our two countries are enjoying warmer relations.’ He paused to wipe his hands and tighten his bandana. ‘I’ll tell you straight: Her Majesty’s government wants you back. Both of you.’

  I went to speak, but my mouth seemed filled with marbles.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Morgenstern, hovering in midstroke.

  ‘The Human Front...’ I managed, before the marbles began to choke me.

  He sighed. ‘Don’t think we’re happy about any of this. But the President happens to believe that the Human

  Front are the only people who can control the plague. And I’m inclined to agree with him. It’s not as if we expect the HF to put the Great back in to Britain, but it’s a chance for us to make up lost ground, regain some influence in Europe. The Human Front may be bastards, Zwakh, but they’re our bastards.’

  ‘The slab,’ I spat out, ‘Primavera will go to the slab.’ ‘Didn’t you hear? I said we’re not happy. Not that you two don’t deserve the worst.’ He passed the finishing line and hung over his oars, his Hash House sweatshirt sodden. The lights went up on his show of temperance. ‘You’re monsters. Animals. You’re...’ The English language faltered before our seemingly limitless depravity. He rose and walked to a vaulting horse on which lay a manila file. ‘Ignatz Zwakh,' he began to read, ‘born 2056...’

  ‘Kito,’ I interrupted. ‘Why did she betray us?’

  ‘We’ve been monitoring you and the girl for weeks,’ he said, eyes still on the file. ‘Ever since the English approached us through their representatives at the Swiss Embassy. Then you suddenly high-tailed it out of here. So we asked Kito if she could get you back. We didn’t want any official Thai involvement.’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘We have in our arsenal,’ he said, ‘greater aphrodisiacs. And darker persuasions. Let’s just say Kito’s a clever lady. Or machine.’ He waved his hand through the air. ‘Whatever she is, she’s an accomplished liar. I can respect that. Lies have a beauty all of their own. Their own life, their own symmetry. Kito sure knew how to do the number on you. Now let’s see how you rate on selfpreservation.’ He ran his finger along a line of type. ‘Born 2056. In London. To Slovak émigrés. Tell me, why the hell didn’t your family get the hell out of London before the interdiction came into effect?’

  ‘Nobody wanted us.’

  ‘We’re a nation of immigrants ourselves. It’s hard to believe you couldn’t—’

  ‘Why are we having this conversation? Why don’t you just put us on the spaceplane and have done with it?’ ‘The Orient Express doesn’t leave until tomorrow. Besides, my government wants to satisfy itself on a few points. For instance...’ He put the file down and walked over to me. ‘Who, or what, is Titania?’

  I felt pain in my lower back; I had begun to sag. ‘Limbering up, eh? A boy your age should soon—’

  ‘I don’t know anything about Titania.’

  ‘Let me tell you what we know.’ He drew up a stool and sat down. ‘Remember our conversation in the restaurant? Nobody gets out of London. That’s the HF’s official party line. But you and I know different. You’re not the only kids to have escaped. Dolls have turned up all over England. Scotland. Wales. Mainland Europe, too. Though I guess you’re the only runaways to have got this far. Someone, or something, is getting them out. Now we believe the Human Front can stabilize things in London, but not over the country as a whole. They’re going to need US help.’

  ‘You call mass murder stabilizing?’

  ‘I told you,’ he said, his face haggard with a lifetime of trimming to the times, ‘we’re not happy about this. Now our intelligence indicates that there’s something in London organizing these escapes. Something powerful enough to penetrate the interdiction. We think that something is a Big Sister: one of the original Cartier automatons.’

  ‘They were all destroyed,’ I said, too hastily.

  ‘I think not. Tell me how you escaped, Zwakh.’

  I rolled my eyes to the ceiling.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I'm not going to make you talk, but they sure will back in England. You realize that, don’t you? It’s better we know than them. We can act as intermediaries. We can plea-bargain.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘The girl,’ he said. ‘We could help her. I guess she didn’t mean to kill. You know what we can say? We can say she didn’t want to spread the doll-plague. So she cleaned up after each meal. Real hygienic. She never really wanted to murder anyone. After all, Lilim don’t kill; it goes against their programming. We can say it was that bitch Kito who—’

  ‘She enjoys it,’ I said. ‘You were right the first time: we’re monsters. Animals.’

  ‘We’ll find out about Titania sooner or later,’ he said. ‘I thought I might save you a little grief, that’s all.’ He clapped his hands and sprang to his feet. ‘That’s it then. For now. Operation Black Spring has become something of a hobbyhorse. I just can’t let go of it.’ He chuckled as my body sagged a few more inches. ‘Jesus, boy, you look uncomfortable.’ He manoeuvred me into a ninety-degree upright. ‘You know, when I joined the foreign service I genuinely felt I might be able to do something to make the world a better place. Seems a long time ago now. The aube du millénaire. Lord, those were times. My wife and I spent our honeymoon in Europe. When I think of what Europe’s going through now...’

  ‘Primavera enjoys killing,’ I said. ‘How about you? You dine at The Londoner often? What do you do when you’re not sending little girls to their deaths?’

  ‘I don’t need no lecture from a hired assassin, Zwakh. Maybe we’ll talk some more later. In fact I’m sure of it. When you’ve had time to think. And while you’re thinking, remember what I said about aphrodisiacs. And persuasions. Remember we have your little friend. Your little stash. No one has to die. Wise up. I can help you.’

  He called the guard.

  I rejoined Primavera in our lovers’ tomb. A marine resumed position by the door, stony-faced as a piece of mortuary furniture.

  Escape, escape, I thought. Always that unrelenting need: to make plans, to run, to lie, to cheat. Sometimes you had to fight, too. (I didn't like that; I was no good at it; fighting was Primavera’s department.) Why couldn’t they give it a rest? I tried to concentrate, but unsolicited images kept interposing themselves between my thoughts. Jack Morgenstern in Kito’s penthouse; and Kito, looking untypically flustered, toying nervously with the titanium chain about her neck, her bracelets of spent uranium.

  ‘Kito tricked me,’ Primavera announced inside my brain. I cried out.

  ‘Try to get some sleep, sir,’ said the marine.

  ‘Did you hear that, Iggy? Shit, I didn’t know I could do that.’

  I gripped the sides of the couch; relaxed. I had lived with Primavera too long to be panicked by her quantum magic, however unprecedented its manifestation. ‘Primavera?’

  ‘Uh-huh?’ Hey. I could mindspeak to her too. Clever, these Cartier dolls.

  ‘They’re sending us back to London,’ I said in a dead man’s whisper. ‘Satisfied?’—I twisted the knife—‘You should be. This is where all your little games end.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Iggy.’ There were tears in her thoughts.

  ‘Can you move?’

  ‘Can’t feel a thing. If I could just get these cast-iron pants off, then—’

  ‘I can move a little. Any ideas?’

  ‘You keep still. If I can get into
your brain I can get into GI Joe’s.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Just close your eyes. Pretend to be asleep.’

  Primavera, signing off, left my head crackling with an anxious static. After a few minutes I heard the creak of a chair and a surreptitious shuffle of footsteps. Peeping through half-shuttered eyes, I watched the guard kneel before Primavera’s couch, take a securicard from his wallet, and enter it into the gleaming zone that swaddled her waist and loins. The contraption released its grip, and the guard laid it circumspectly upon the floor. Breathing heavily, he let a hand slip beneath the wisp of black lace that barely covered her pubis. There was a snapping of teeth; a gasp. The guard pulled back his hand and stared at it, hurt and puzzled. The top of his middle finger was missing. Small pathetic noises gave notice of his scream. Before he could summon it to his lips, Primavera delivered a jack-hammer of a left hook, and he somersaulted across the room in a graceless confusion of arms and legs.

  ‘My first telepathic seduction,’ said Primavera, tearing off her muzzle. ‘Talk about allure!’ The marine lay in a corner imitating a trampled insect. I gave him ten out of ten.

  Primavera rolled off her couch and stood up unsteadily, slim adolescent legs wobbling like a newly-born colt’s. I was staring at the dead marine.

  ‘You know I don’t let anyone inside my pants except you, Iggy.’

  ‘Just get us out of here.’

  ‘Well, pardon me. So sorry. I keep forgetting how sensitive you are.’

  She put her ear to the wall; then, removing an evening glove, glided her hand over the plaster, and... Disappointment seized her face; whatever was supposed to have happened—events in the quantum world finding no interface with the classical—hadn’t. She kicked the ‘chastity belt’ across the floor.

  ‘Magic dust. That thing was full of tin microbes; there must be some left inside me.’ She gripped her abdomen. ‘Yeah, I can feel them: lots of little nanobots. They’re fucking up my matrix.’ Again, she put her ear to the wall.