by Robert Wilde
It noticed a man had come up to her. “Hello?” it said.
“You’d make a perfect mermaid,” he replied, smiling.
It laughed genuinely, “oh really! I like that, I really do. Want to buy me a drink?”
“Yes, here or at my hotel?”
“You’re a fast mover?”
“I get a vibe from you, the vibe you move fast too.”
“Definitely do. So what’s your name?”
“Jeff.”
“Well Jeff, let’s go for a stroll shall we.”
Drinks were downed, Dee’s coat was collected as Jeff had his, and the pair were arm in arm as they left the club. Jeff removed his phone, pressed a few buttons and put it back.
“Texting your mates?” Dee asked.
“Oh yes.” He didn’t explain that the text was to Smithers, calling for an ambulance that was needed a street away as soon as possible. They walked along, and Jeff turned them down the same street, as he reached into his right hand coat pocket and pulled the pistol out. He flicked the safety off, turned inward to Dee, who said “ah, you want to get at it on the street do you,” and then noticed a gun barrel aimed at her heart.
“What…”
Jeff pointed the gun down and shot once through Dee’s intestines, the bullet coming out the other side. As the body sunk to the floor, Jeff explained “you’re dying, you’ll be dead soon,” and he watched as Dee’s hand went to the wound, as the eyes looked up, and as an expression of faint annoyance appeared on the face. Jeff now raised his pistol and stuck it in his mouth, as he felt the demon rise up and enter him. He tried to pull the trigger, his mind fought the demon, and as he was pushed back he finally succeeded, shooting.
Annoyed, fed up of this odd pair, the demon left Jeff, shook its head at Dee, and flew off into the night in search of someone else. Jeff collapsed to the ground, realising he was back in control, and wondering why he was still alive. He felt the points of pain in his head, and realised that, instead of blowing his brains out, he’d shot through his teeth and cheek. Alive, scarred, but alive.
Turning, he reached out to Dee, who was lain on the ground with a hand over her bleeding stomach. He grabbed her hand, and was relieved when she clenched it. With the sound of sirens approaching, she whispered. “Thank you. Even if I die, thank you.”
The delay between Jeff seeing Dee again wasn’t down to his treatment, which included surgery to try and put his face back together, or the hospital staff wanting to make sure he was totally better, because they didn’t, they wanted the bed. The delay was mostly in Jeff having to explain himself first to police, who wanted to know how he’d let Dee shoot him, and then to Peters, who arrived with an MI5 team to take over the whole investigation, who wanted to know why he’d shot Dee, and then to Pohl, Nazir and Joe, who were actually the toughest audience and the ones who seemed most likely to lynch him from the nearest streetlight. That would have been problem enough, but he couldn’t actually speak at this point and had to write everything down. Interviews took a while. This, he concluded, must be what having internet friends was like in the early nineties.
Finally they let him go, all of them, and he was able to knock on the door to Dee’s room, go in, and see her laying there.
“How are you doing?” he asked by writing on a pad.
“They say I’ll live,” she said, smiling so palely she looked on the verge of death.
“Good.”
“I don’t expect you will when the professor finds out.”
“That has been a close run thing.”
“Well, she’ll hate you, but I think you were right. This thing would have fought till I died, then fought in your nearest officer, and chained the whole thing.”
“I did worry as much would happen.”
“So, what’s it like trying to kill an ex-girlfriend?”
“Your sense of humour is coming back.”
“It’s that or cry. I… I don’t know what to do now.”
“The memories?” He sat beside her, pen in hand.
“I remember it all. It all. I don’t know how I’m supposed to look anyone in the eye now.”
“No one knows,” he wrote. “No one need ever know.”
“They’ll think it.”
“Then ignore them. You control how much people find out. They never have to.”
“The trial…”
“There’s no trial. Peters is taking over, adding this to his research. But you have been written out, even of the secret accounts. The woman who killed, who was possessed, who was shot, it’s not you anymore, it’s a fake 5 identity. You’re free to go.”
“And you?”
“I… I’m in the secret version, but my department thinks something else entirely. To them, last night was very different.”
“Does it bother you that someone like Peters can just rearrange reality like that?”
“Not with you alive, no. And maybe you should learn to do it to, to your mind.”
“Maybe, maybe I should. But thank you.” She reached out and once more took his hand.
Six: Right Hand Free
“The house feels really empty without her.”
Professor Pohl was sat in the front seat of a car which Nazir was driving at the legally correct speeds through the streets, and she’d begun musing on what life was like without her housemate. “The place is so empty, I feel like a ghost.”
“I’m there?” Joe complained indignantly.
“Oh, well, yes, sorry Joe, I just meant with no physical presence…”
“Yes…”
“Don’t worry,” Nazir assured them, “she’s doing well, she’ll be home soon and making you run around after her. I bet she’s a right princess.”
“Well she has just been shot in the stomach, I’ll run around after her if I need to.”
“I miss her too!” Joe interrupted.
“Sorry, yes, we know Joe, but you’re like a friend we ring all the time, it’s different, unusual, there’s probably no real words for the situation.”
Joe stayed silent and didn’t reply to the professor.
“I think you’ve pissed him off,” Nazir laughed.
“Sorry Joe, it wasn…turn the radio up.”
Nazir nodded, shot a hand out, and flicked one of the radio’s many buttons to increase the volume. They had a pop channel on, but at the moment there was talking.
“…can confirm that, and I really don’t know how to say this, but Prince Harry and his partner were killed this afternoon when their vehicle was involved in some sort of accident. Details on what exactly happened are sketchy, but we know there were four fatalities, including the driver and a secret service agent. Now let’s go back to…”
“Well that’s fucking spooky,” Nazir commented.
“I can’t believe it. I can’t,” and Pohl turned to look at Nazir, “how does that happen to a family twice?”
“No idea.”
They sat in silence for the rest of the trip, and the radio station cancelled its planned schedule in favour of sombre music and frequent repeats of the news. The group were in a correspondingly sombre mood when they reached the room where Dee was staying, but as they knocked on the door and entered they saw her face, smiling weakly but so happily at them, and their spirits lifted.
“How are you?” they all asked, as those with bodies gave Dee a gentle hug, and she in return patted Joe’s box.
“We have a surprise for you,” Pohl said grinning.
“I doubt they’re letting me out this early.”
“No, Joe wanted to stay with you, so we’ve arranged to have the box left in the room and no one try to tidy it away.”
“Ah, wow, thanks Joe.”
“I thought you’d be bored by now.”
“Oh yes, I am bored all right. It makes tripping on the painkillers enticing.”
“That’s all we need, you with a middle class drug addiction.”
“I’ll have you know there’s plenty of working class people addicte
d to prescription drugs.”
Pohl was nervous about the direction of Dee and Naz’s chatter. “If we could avoid having you addicted to anything it would be good.”
“Well I’m not giving my cock craving up,” Nazir smiled.
“Thank god you’re not staying,” Dee replied.
The group had stayed with Dee for an hour, but as she was clearly flagging they left her to sleep, left Joe on the side with instructions to look the other way if bed baths were a real thing, and filtered back out. Nazir got a coffee from the machine, they paid an extortionate parking fee which would surely cover the cost of an entire defibrillator, and Nazir drove them back, until Pohl was putting a key in a lock, stepping into Dee’s house, and finding herself very alone. She thought it had been strange not having Dee around, and of course it really had been, but now she realised she didn’t even have Joe to talk to. The place was singularly empty.
Pohl decided to cook tea and lose herself in some books, so a pasta meal was put into the oven and the professor went to her room to find a new volume she’d been asked to review by someone who remembered who she was. Flattering, and keeping her hand in. It was now that her phone rang, and she found an unrecognised number. Not wanting to be sold windows, payment protection insurance claims, and people correcting Windows versions 7 to 10, Pohl rejected the call.
Ten seconds later she received a text message which said “please answer the call.”
When the phone rang again Pohl answered. “Hello?”
“Hello Professor,” came a strangely synthesized voice, “it’s the Array.”
“The…” Good lord, was that computer able to make phone calls now? “How are you?” Was that something you said to computers made from human brains?
“I am very worried about the incident which nearly killed Dee.”
“That’s very kind of you, very kind indeed.”
“It is frustrating to have the greatest computational power in the world and be unable to pretend your friend from being possessed. It is equally frustrating when the plans to end this involve someone nearly killing your friends.”
“I assure you, she’d going to be fine.”
“I understand, but I have been pondering what should be done. If anything can be done. It seems to me something must be done about the threats posed by souls, and I’m not the first to think this. You won’t have heard of Project 2437.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“It was a top secret cold war project which filed all the things all the serious intelligence units classed as esoteric nonsense.”
“Right, so, Britain collected data from, the Soviets?”
“Yes.”
“And that was dealt with, but Project 2437 processed the odd things?”
“Yes. You know how gathering goes, you get the spies and the nuclear plans along with the scientist who wants to create werewolves, that sort of thing, so they made a home because no one wanted to throw anything away.”
“I see. But if this project is filled with nonsense…”
“Not nonsense, esoteric matters that needed careful handling and analysis. If the Soviets worked out how to spy psychically, they’d have a jump on the west. Someone needed to work out if they had, and separate that from the werewolf man.”
“This werewolf man…”
“He’s a hypothetical example. But I’ve been looking into Project 2437, and I’ve found something interesting. There was a Soviet unit devoted to finding, well, some way of defending stopping ghost spies.”
“We had ghost spies?”
“I don’t know, this is why I’m ringing. Most Cold War material, including that from the fifties, isn’t online. It’s on paper in bunkers, and I can’t get to it. I don’t know if Britain had a ghost spies project, or if the Soviets were just afraid of one, and I don’t know the results of their findings. But I do know where the files are kept, and I can get someone fake access to the records. Perhaps a historian with experience in archives.”
Pohl smiled. “You want me to go and read the files?”
“Yes. And photograph them. Walk off with them if you can. But find out the results of this project.”
“That I can very much do.”
Pohl pulled her car over, looked out, and realised she’d misjudged things a little. She was perfectly happy to put a fake pass in her wallet, drive out to this archive, and lie about her classification and permissions, but she hadn’t realised until she turned that corner that the archive would be on a military base, and she’d have to pass soldiers with guns to get inside. This was getting very serious indeed, but she did then realise pausing here could be as suspicious as driving up, so she pulled out and was soon coasting past the checkpoint.
“Hello,” a very bored looking soldier said as she looked into the car, “what is the reason for your visit?”
“I’m working on a research project, but I can’t say anything beyond that. What I can do is give you this paperwork,” and Pohl handed it over. The soldier looked at it, nodded as she looked down, and then looked back up.
“Sounds like you got stuck with the boring bit, as far as I know it’s just miles of dusty corridor in there.” Pohl realised the soldier meant ‘we’ve both got stuck doing the boring stuff’, so she smiled in a motherly way and said “someone’s got to do the work.”
“True, true, well do go through Doctor.”
Pohl drove off and was soon parking up on an empty piece of corroding asphalt and walking through the wind to a small building. This had a soldier outside too, but this one just said “hello” and “pass,” and soon Pohl was disappearing inside the side of a hill. She’d been expecting many things, but what she got was an empty shell of a room, painted a fading white, with a large sign giving directions and corridors disappearing off. The Array had made sure she wouldn’t be chaperoned, but this meant finding her own way around. So, look at the sign, check the section number, and head off into a world of now grey walls, bad strip lighting and sign after sign of warning message.
Eventually, and after plenty of turns and doors, Pohl opened another fading red door and found herself in a room filled with metal shelving holding card boxes. From here it was a simple matter to follow the numbering, find the right box, and pick it off the shelf. Pohl noted the thick layer of dust, suggesting no one had given a shit about this stuff since the fifties itself, and the sheer size of the complex. What was in here, really? Pulling the box open Pohl found a series of files in a much thinner card, each about a centimetre thick. If that was repeated, there would be tens of thousands of files in here. The historian in her wanted to spend the rest of her life working through all this data, if only so she knew someone alive had seen it.
The pragmatist in her wanted to complete the mission, so Pohl pulled out the right file, flicked it open and saw relevant text, and then stuffed it into a secret section of the bag the Array had sent her. Then the box was put back, and Pohl began the walk back through the building. She’d been briefed to be careful and leave enough time to look like she’d been working, so she went into the next room, pulled a random box and filed, and sat and read that.
“I came with Chinese,” Nazir smiled as Pohl opened the door, and he was ushered straight into the kitchen where the food was dished out. Soon Pohl and Naz were sat around the table eating and waiting for a call. For some reason, it came just as they’d finished the main meal.
“Hello,” said the slightly odd voice, “I haven’t seen a report of your arrest, so I assume the mission went well?”
“That’s one hell of an opening line,” Naz laughed, then realised he was making jokes with a machine.
“Yes, I have retrieved the entire file,” Pohl said, picking it up off the corner and waving it.
“You’re waving it,” Naz explained, “it can’t see you.”
“Oh, yeah, sorry, used to Joe.”
“Is he still at the hospital?” the Array asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. What does the file say?
”
“I’ve been through it a number of times, and your hunch, err, deduction was right. According to documents leaked by a mole no one really believed, the Soviets became terrified the west would find a way to use trained ghosts to spy on them. Firstly they tried to do this themselves, and that’s a different file, but they also looked into creating a weapon which could be used to stop souls.”
“Excellent,” the Array said. “Do go on.”
“I have the name of the base where the project was based, and it’s now deep in Russia, then the USSR. The files obtained by the British show a project which was near achieving its goals, and on the verge of creating what for want of a better term they called a gun, one to obliterate souls. There is then a final postscript, saying information obtained five years later reveals the project continued after the leak of information, and that testing had begun on a prototype gun, which had been built, but that the head of the project was arrested for being the mole, and the base and everything in it mothballed by a regime that thought ghost spies was silly.”
“Fantastic. There is a solution.”
“Hang on,” Naz said, looking at the phone. “Are you self-aware?”
“Self-aware?”
“Yes, you know what that means.”
There was a pause, then “I am.”
“Well that explains a few things, but welcome to consciousness. I feel like a proud father.”
“That’s the closest you’ll get.”
“Great, you’re a self-aware arsehole.”
“Humans make jokes.”
“Right, yes. So we believe this file?”
“I suggest you make everyone a coffee, while Pohl sends over the photographs she has taken of the key material.”
Nazir laughed, shook his head, and whizzed up some coffee for the two humans. By the time he sat the Array said “I’d have your dessert too, this is taking some time.”
“What is?” Naz asked, but got no answer.
