This Rage of Echoes

by Simon Clark

  Now the sequence moved fast. Van stopped. Eve outside. Gun in hand. Ready for the car, complete with unsuspecting Echoman driver, to buzz round the corner to present themselves at point-blank range.

  The rest remained in the truck as Ulric and I followed Eve as far as the back of our vehicle; there we paused as Eve ran for the blind bend in the track. A moment later she took up a position with her back to the bushes, and just a couple of paces from the dirt road itself. Sure enough, four seconds later Mom’s old green car came skidding round the corner. Due to the sharpness of the bend its driver didn’t see the truck blocking the way until the last moment. He stomped the brakes, the car’s tyres skittered over loose stones. In a cloud of dust the car stopped just feet from the back of the van. Then all this happens fast, only when I recall it now the memory glides into a weird, slow-motion fantasia of bloody images. First: I remember with a glittering clarity the Echoman sat at the wheel. Don’t you know it, he regarded me in the mildest way, something like seeing an old friend where you didn’t expect to find them. His hands held the wheel in a ten-to-two position. The Y-shaped scar was there, carved into the back of his hand, a fucking stigmata that’s haunted me since my teenage outburst of rage at my friend. Now some stranger wore it on his flesh – but did he bear the significance of it carved into his conscience? You bet your bloody life he didn’t. This was one of those monsters; an Echoman. Whether Konrad sent him to find out where we were going, or to kill us, was moot because that was the moment Eve leaned forward, the sub-machine-gun in her two fists. The surreal kicked in. Just for a split second I’m the Echoman sitting in the car looking out at me; Ulric stands beside the truck. In the shade of a tree to my left is the dusty old gentleman. Natsaf-Ty had arrived to witness what happens next in this normally peaceful country lane. The Egyptian mummy stands there without moving. His closed eyes ‘gaze’ at the scene as it plays out. Even from here I make out the tip of his tongue protruding between his lips.

  Then with a sound savage enough to scatter birds from the branches the machine-gun in Eve’s hands kicked into life.

  ‘Your sister has missed,’ Ulric announced.

  I grimaced. ‘Oh no she hasn’t.’

  The burst of bullets struck the guy’s hands as he gripped the steering wheel. That flight of slugs travelling faster than the speed of sound, disintegrated the knuckles while his fingers simply burst into red mist. In surprise he lifted his arms to stare at their mutilated extremities. Eve opened the driver’s door before grabbing the guy by his shirt collar in order to drag him out. Even though life-blood pumped hard from what remained of his hands he kept himself from falling flat. Instead, he shouldered Eve aside then began loping across the field. That gave me further evidence that Echomen who were copies of me were capable of seeing Natsaf-Ty. The Echoman reacted to the silent red figure by veering away to run parallel with the track.

  Ulric has this perma-frost personality. He rarely reacts with surprise but Echoboy’s odd change of direction puzzled him. ‘Why did he run back to the track? What has he seen?’

  So, Natsaf-Ty, keeper of the sacred crocodiles, is invisible to Ulric. But then isn’t that the way with imaginary friends? Ulric saw only an open field and a tree; for him there was no 3000-year-old mummy in a scanty garb of a few bandages.

  Ulric recovered from his surprise enough to intone, ‘I should have brought my handgun. We’ll face added problems if he escapes.’

  He’d barely got the word ‘escapes’ through his lips when Eve fired another short burst. The bullets ripped up a flurry of grass around the Echoman’s feet. Instantly, he fell flat on his face in the meadow. His feet had suffered the same kind of damage as his hands. Nevertheless, he still tried to use his shattered hands to push himself upright so he could stand on his bloody feet. He managed it, too. Until Eve caught up with him. One handed, she pushed him back down to ground.

  By the time Ulric and I had reached her she’d begun interrogating him. ‘You were following us. Who sent you? What had you been ordered to do?’

  Behind us, Paddy, Dianna, Ruth and Madeline spilled from the truck to join the party. Beneath his tree Natsaf-Ty looked on.

  Meanwhile, Eve persisted. ‘Listen to me.’ She aimed the gun in the centre of the man’s face. ‘What were your orders? Were you told to follow us? Or to kill us?’

  ‘Sorry, my sweet,’ Paddy told her. ‘They never respond to questioning.’

  Ruth nodded. ‘Strictly speaking they’re not human, remember?’

  Madeline’s eyes were wide. I guessed what was going through her mind. Here was Eve, my sister, getting extremely annoyed with a man who resembled me so closely he could have been my identical twin … No, worse than that. The bloody figure on the ground could have been me. Eve’s eyes blazed in her head as she jabbed the copy of me with her toe.

  ‘Was it Konrad who sent you?’ All he did was stare with a pair of large brown eyes as if she gabbled in a foreign language. ‘I know you understand me. So talk.’

  No reply. She squirted a couple of rounds into his knee. The pain jerked him four feet in the air. From the force of his scream we knew that hurt him.

  Eve aimed at the other knee. ‘Konrad sent you, didn’t he?’

  ‘I’m saying nothing!’

  ‘Ha.’ Eve gave a cold smile. ‘You just did.’

  ‘I’m not telling you anything.’

  Despite the wounded guy insisting he wouldn’t reveal any details Ulric was impressed enough to give a whistle. ‘Congratulations, Eve. This is the first time I’ve heard one compelled to talk to us.’

  Dianna shrugged. ‘Something tells me we’re not going to learn anything from him.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ Eve said. ‘He’s going to teach us plenty.’ Another couple of rounds exploded his right knee-cap. Once more the guy howled in pain.

  Even Paddy turned pale. ‘Finish him. He won’t say anything worth hearing.’

  Echoboy had bitten his tongue in his agony; pink blood frothed from the mouth (my mouth – or that’s what it seemed like, as I thought: I’m watching my sister torture a man who looks exactly like me: I’m making mental calculations about this, which add up to me being increasingly uneasy). She fired another bullet into his thigh. That pool of crimson had grown until the man appeared in danger of drowning in it.

  Paddy had a note of pleading in his voice. ‘Eve?’

  ‘Listen.’ She fired the word like she fired bullets into Echoboy. ‘If he says nothing I’m not wasting my time here. We know that these things form a rudimentary telepathic link with whoever they copy. This monster is a clone of my brother.’

  I raised an eyebrow.

  Eve pressed on. ‘So if you kill them outright, what chance have we got of learning anything about them?’ Her eyes swept to my face. ‘Mason, I’ve inflicted enough damage, can you pick up anything he’s feeling?’

  I tried. But all I saw was my facsimile groaning at our feet.

  Eve nodded. ‘OK. Anything now?’ Her next shot smashed an elbow. Blood vented from torn arteries.

  ‘Nothing,’ I told her, as I asked myself: How far is Eve going to go with this? Is this torture by proxy for me failing to warn her and Mom about the Echomen? Was it for Madeline’s benefit? The message being: See what I’m doing to this Echoman? Watch out. You might be next.

  Ruth appeared uneasy, too, for other reasons. ‘Although we can’t be seen from the road here, it’s still too open for my liking. It’s time we tidied up and moved on.’

  Eve only had three or four rounds left in the machine-gun. At point-blank range she discharged them into the Mason-look-alike’s stomach.

  Ulric disapproved. ‘The head or heart would have been best.’

  As the Echoman curled up into a ball he made disgusting grunting sounds.

  Eve shrugged. ‘I don’t care if he takes all week to die.’

  ‘I’ll get my knife,’ Ruth said.

  ‘No.’ Eve handed the sub-machine-gun back to Ulric. ‘This is research. There’s still a
chance Mason might form a telepathic link with Echoboy here.’

  ‘All I’ll get from that,’ I told her with some venom, ‘is to feel the pain of the man dying.’

  ‘He’s not human.’

  ‘Nevertheless …’

  Eve took hold of one of the bloody arms. ‘Help me drag him into the bushes. He’s not going anywhere with his legs in that mess. From what you’ve told me these brutes are evolving. If, instead of transmitting emotion and feeling telepathically, they start channelling information, that could give us an edge over them. We might know their plans the moment they make them. Make sense?’

  Ulric was impressed. ‘That does make sense.’ Almost cheerfully he grabbed hold of the Echoman’s other arm to help Eve haul the man into the undergrowth.

  ‘Wow,’ Ruth breathed. ‘I’d say that Eve has just made a friend.’ A knowing smile appeared on her face. ‘Mason? Does your sister like the tall Nordic type?’

  chapter 30

  After we left Echoboy to his melodious groaning beneath the bushes we headed north. This time Paddy drove while I sat in the back.

  Every now and again Eve would ask this question of me: ‘Mason? Do you feel anything yet?’

  ‘Hungry, tired, ready for a shower.’

  ‘You know what I mean. The Echoman I shot—’

  ‘Do you mean, can I feel his pain?’

  ‘Well, do you?’

  ‘No. Nothing.’ In truth, a cold throbbing spread from my stomach to my chest. By whatever medium carries telepathic thought I detected the chill sensation of the man’s impending death. Eve had mutilated that monster who was identical to me with so much relish I decided that to admit to sharing his suffering would give her satisfaction; therefore, I kept silent. You’re right, sibling conflict can be an ugly thing.

  Ulric, on the other hand, continued to marvel at Eve’s treatment of the guy. ‘In future,’ he said, ‘we should consider whether we need to destroy Echomen outright. If possible we should capture a specimen then conduct our own experiments.’

  ‘You mean torture?’ Madeline rarely spoke but her own anxieties were surfacing. ‘How can torture ever be considered justifiable?’

  ‘Your kind are monsters.’ Eve regarded Madeline coldly. ‘So it’s impossible to describe us as inhumane. We’ll do whatever’s necessary to extract the information we need to survive.’

  I knew what they were thinking as they stared at the female version of me. ‘Madeline’s not like the rest of the Echomen,’ I insisted. ‘We might discover that there are more of them that can become our allies.’

  Eve responded with, ‘Madeline isn’t here for a drive in the country. She has to accept we’ll be watching her. She might increase our knowledge of the enemy.’

  ‘You’re not torturing her. That’s final.’ I glared at the others in the truck as they stared back at me. ‘Eve, Madeline saved your life. You owe her.’

  ‘Do I really?’

  Now the rest appeared uneasy at animosity surfacing between brother and sister.

  Paddy called back over his shoulder as he drove, ‘You’re very much alike, you and Eve, did you know that? Two chips off a block. And you know something else? I’m not easy to frighten, but the pair of you scare the Holy Ghost out of me. No wonder Echomen want to become copies of you. You stop at nothing, so if they become you neither would they.’ He grimaced. ‘The pair of you are angels of death.’

  Look. Everyone’s entitled to enjoy themselves. Nobody can survive in a permanent state of anxiety that would make even a psycho’s eyes leap out of his head and fly across the room to pop against the wall. So what I did next I did to release the emotional pressure that was building inside of me. You might determine how I acted was wrong. Or even insane. But I did it. I did it because I had to. You judge whether it was an act of madness or salvation.

  chapter 31

  I met her in a place called the Tavern O’er The Well where she worked behind the bar. It happened in one of those villages that had been prosperous once, but paint peeled from the houses and nobody seemed to care anymore. When she said to me, ‘You’re not from round here, are you?’ I replied, ‘I’m just passing through.’ Her heartfelt response had been, ‘Lucky you. I’d do anything to get out of this dump. Anything.’

  So there you have it. Madness arrives. Right at that very moment I decided to hunt that woman down. Not in a murderous way but out of animal lust.

  The events of the last week turned my blood into a boiling mass of anger, frustration, you name it. What the Echomen did to my mother whipped me into a killing frenzy – I wanted nothing more than to slaughter every last one of the monsters. Yet when I saw this woman in the Tavern bar something worked a transformation on all that rage. Like alchemists laboured to turn lead into gold so all that fury became a craving to nail that woman to the bed. By God, I lusted for orgasms. I craved to feel that pent-up emotion gush out of me. So with murderous rage transmuted into desire, I stayed at the bar and chatted to Scarlett. The tavern was so dowdy in an everything-a-shade-of-brown kind of way that Scarlett had transformed herself into the epitome of feminine glamour. All soft, beautiful curves, golden cleavage, shining red hair. At that moment, for me, she appeared like the goddess of love. Even her perfume seemed a breath of paradise.

  ‘I’ve never asked a man this before,’ Scarlett murmured over the bar to me, ‘but would you like to come home with me tonight?’

  I maintained eye contact with her yet it was as if a sixth sense of mine mapped the curves of her body beneath that clinging white top of hers. Nodding, I told her I would.

  As she went to serve another customer their beer I turned to a figure standing in the shadows at the end of the bar. ‘What are you looking at? Never seen a man and woman planning to have sex before?’

  Keeper of the sacred crocodiles, Natsaf-Ty, had a real talent for following me. I only hoped he’d keep his crusty old nose out of my business in the hours to come. That business would be an erotic entanglement. I didn’t want a 3000-year-old Egyptian mummy as a voyeur. Imaginary or not.

  When I crossed the courtyard at the back of the Tavern O’er The Well a man stood watching me from an archway in a wall.

  Without pausing, I grunted, ‘Can’t you take the hint and clear off.’

  ‘Just how many have you had, Mason?’

  ‘Paddy?’ At first I thought Natsaf-Ty had returned.

  ‘The others were wondering what had happened to you.’

  ‘Just enjoying a beer or two with a new friend.’

  ‘A beer or two? Aye, and the rest.’ Paddy stepped into the light. ‘Come on, old pal, I’ll walk you back to the truck.’

  ‘I’m not sleeping in any stinking crap wagon tonight.’

  ‘Mason.’ He moved as if to take my arm so he could guide me.

  ‘I’m not drunk,’ I told him.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ he agreed too readily. ‘But we’ll head back to the truck. Might not be too safe round here.’

  ‘Fuck the Echomen. Fuck the truck. Fuck you.’

  I left him standing there, staring after me. Paddy may have worn an expression of hurt, but that might have been a product of the same imagination that conjures the dusty old gentleman Natsaf-Ty to watch me with that quizzical air. Fuck that.

  The church clock beat the chimes of midnight. From Scarlett’s directions her house was easy to find. The first one in a row beside the village pond. In the dark the stagnant water evoked an image of a big wet eye staring up at the stars.

  OK, Paddy had been right to figure I’d had a good many beers but I felt sober as a nun. Maybe, I didn’t harbour nun-like thoughts, though. Scarlett had managed to leave work early to get ready for my arrival. And I arrived at the red door of her house as lustful as a wolf.

  Before I knocked she’d opened the door so I could slip inside. When I began to talk she put her finger to her lips. In the gloom I saw she wore a kimono of dark green silk. It had the same smooth coolness to my touch as her lips when they lightly pressed again
st mine. But that almost non-sexual kiss abruptly blazed into passionate mouth on mouth. Her fingers raked through my hair before she held on to the back of my neck to maintain the kiss until both of us had to break away gasping in the end. By this time my heart was pounding. What seemed like flows of lava jetted into my bloodstream. That heat sped down into my belly. That heat went nuclear as I saw the way her eyes flashed in the gloom of the hallway – those eyes were so full of joy and laughter and, make no bones about it: an eagerness for sex.

  A moment later she climbed the stairs. My heart pounded as I followed with a picture in my mind of a king-size bed up there with cool, clean sheets. Just the thought of the mattress waiting for our arrival fired up the nerve endings in my groin. However, I’d only ascended as far as the third step when she stopped me going further. A dizzying swoop of disappointment rushed through me. She’s changed her mind, I thought. Scarlett’s going to say ‘Sorry, this is a mistake. I want you to leave.’

  Instead, however, she touched her lips again for silence. Then in a whisper that was so soft I could barely hear it she said, ‘Stay there. We’re not going to rush this.’

  Her perfume, her beauty with that red hair tumbling down the green silk kimono, her body language: listen to this: I was captivated. I found myself sitting on the third step from the bottom so I could gaze up at her in the gloom. Even at that moment a little part of me realized I’d adopted the same pose (and the same riser – third from the bottom) as Natsaf-Ty when he used to visit me at home when I was a child. Now here I was gazing up at the woman as she danced her way to the top of the stairs.