Aphelion

by Andy Frankham-Allen

  It seemed public phone boxes were becoming a thing of the past, something only those unwilling to change with the times would use. Fossils. Like him. He was barely into his forties, but he refused point blank to buy a mobile phone, or have one of those, what did they call them, oh yeah, one of those compacts. They seemed to cost a lot of money to do things he didn’t understand. Besides which, he always reasoned, if people wished to contact him they could always ring him at home. House phones had served people well since the late nineteenth century, so why this bizarre need to have every part of their lives subject to the intrusions of others? Bad enough those random companies could contact him in the privacy of his own home; he didn’t want to be intruded upon when he was out and about on his strolls. All this notwithstanding, public phone boxes were still about, and as they had been since time immemorial, they were still littered with calling cards from those offering sex services and the like. Personally he had never picked up one of those cards before; indeed he barely looked at them, preferring to focus his attention on the world outside the phone box whenever the need to use one took him. But, barely an hour ago, something pulled him towards a particular card.

  Discovering the Art of Astral Projection it said. For a moment, phone still to his ear, he had looked at the card, completely oblivious to what his mother was saying on the other end of the line. It was almost as if he were sinking under water. He was aware of his mother’s voice, but the words made no sense to him, the sounds simply reverberated around his ear. His attention was squarely on the card, which his hand tenderly pulled off the wall of the booth. He was careful not to damage the card, almost as if by doing so he would offend the person who had placed it there. He held it close to his eyes; the number at the bottom was in the smallest print he’d ever seen. Clearly the owner of the number wanted people to pay attention, not merely glance at the card like all those that offered the promise of sexual pleasuring of various parts of the body.

  He couldn’t recall if he’d actually bothered saying goodbye to his mother (He hoped he had—his mother would not have been happy if he’d simply hung up on her!), but next thing he recalled he was dialling the number on the card. He punched the numbers in, carefully rechecking the card with each individual number, just to make sure he didn’t get it wrong.

  The call was answered before the first ring had completed, as if whoever it was had been sitting, hand on the receiver, waiting. There was no hello, just the sound of steady breathing. He tried a hello himself, always believing politeness cost nothing, but he’d barely got “hell—” out before a very old voice issued out an address. Urgently he reached into his inner coat pocket and pulled out a pen. He scribbled the address down, and was about to double check the door number, having been caught off guard, when the line went dead.

  For a few seconds he remained as he was; phone receiver in one hand, the card in the other. Then it occurred to him. The address given was only a twenty-minute walk away.

  Now he waited for an answer, still no clearer on why he was doing this than he had been when he’d first peeled the card off the booth wall. He leaned in closer to the door, briefly wondering if perhaps the owner of that old voice had died in the twenty minutes since he’d given the address. After all, it had been a very old voice, and in his experience old people tended to die at the most inopportune times. But no, he could hear movement from beyond the door. He stepped back, not wanting to appear too eager.

  The door creaked open. Actually creaked, like in the old horror films that his mother had forced him to watch when he was a child—a millennia ago it seemed. Like he didn’t sit there shitting his pants through every single minute of the films. Now he felt like soiling his underwear again, but he clenched himself, both literally and figuratively. At first, even with the light coming from the street behind him, he could not see a single thing beyond the opened door, as if some hitherto unknown depth of darkness lived inside the house. His eyes adjusted and he saw the old man standing there, regarding him with baleful eyes.

  “Hello, Robert,” the old man said.

  *

  Robert followed the man down the hallway, which was actually little more than a narrow passage through the ground floor of the house. Along the right wall a staircase led up. A very threadbare carpet covered each step, full of burns and stains, the origins of which Robert didn’t much wish to think about. The whole house, which he eventually got to see in its entirety, carried with it a bearing of neglect, as if the old man merely existed in the house, not lived. There were signs that once upon a time the house had been lived in, but that time had long passed for whatever reason. Robert didn’t want to consider the reason; some things were best left unknown.

  He stopped at the kitchen doorway, situated at the rear of the house, and looked around. Neglect was putting it mildly. Filthy pots and pans littered the sideboards; plates with bits of food welded to them, and cups lying on their sides, the starch staining the insides so intensely it was as if it had become part of the natural colouring of the china. The stove itself was, unsurprisingly, old and rusted, except for one single square of the hob which gleamed against the rest of the dirty metal. This, Robert guessed, was the single part of the cooker still in use. After all, as bad as he looked, the old man clearly still ate something to sustain himself.

  Then there was the old man.

  Robert watched him sit at a small table, pushed against one wall. Papers and empty food tins littered the floor around it. He seemed to be broken. Not in a metaphorical sense, but actually physically broken. His entire shape looked as if every single bone in his body had, at one point or another, been snapped out of place and left to reset on its own. The result was a man who walked like a marionette without strings, coming to realise that it could in fact walk unaided, albeit in a fashion that barely resembled a normal human. His face was also one of brokenness; bruise upon bruise, an open welt above one eye, a nose that had seen better days. For a second Robert was reminded of the pictures newspapers liked to print from time to time, reminding people who were trying to enjoy their lives of the bitter and twisted nature of the world in which they lived. Grannies battered in their own homes, granddads beaten senseless while getting money from an ATM in town. Yes, that’s how this old man’s face looked, like someone had really been to town on it.

  “How do you know my name?” Robert asked finally, no longer able to stand the eerie silence that pervaded the house. And it truly was silent. Lifeless.

  “You touched my card,” the old man replied, his voice like dried leaves. To him the answer was an obvious one. Robert wanted to argue this, tell the old man that that was no answer. It explained nothing. “You want me to teach you how to project yourself beyond your body?”

  Did he? Robert wasn’t so sure. He still wasn’t even sure why he was here; what had compelled him to pick up the card, to call the number, and to visit the house? And he sure as hell wasn’t sure why he would want to take a trip out of his body. So he shrugged. “Suppose so,” he said.

  “Good. Close your eyes.”

  Robert blinked. “That’s it? No build up? Just ‘close your eyes’? I thought I had to go into a trance or something. Imagine myself lifting up, pulling away, looking down at my body.”

  “Ah.” The old man smiled at Robert, but his rheumy eyes contained the same balefulness. “Do you think that will help? Are you some kind of expert now?” he asked, his voice becoming more forceful with every word.

  “Well…” Robert swallowed. Hard. “No, of course not, but I saw something about it on Most Haunted the other week and Yvette said…”

  The old man sighed. “Robert. Just. Close…Your…Eyes.”

  Robert did so. He didn’t know what the old man was expecting as a result, but nothing happened. Apart from Robert becoming aware of the smells in the house. Rank, acrid; the smell of the dead. He went to open an eye—just the one, mind, to get a quick peek to see what the old man was up to—but no sooner had he thought about opening that eye than he felt so
mething grab hold of him.

  Not his body. Oh no, because at that moment it occurred to him that he wasn’t his body. That was merely a shell, a vessel in which he moved, became a part of the substantial world. He was something else entirely. And it was that something else that was being grabbed, pulled, yanked out of the body with such force that he could not resist. Not that he would have known how to. Until a second ago he didn’t even realise he was this something else.

  There was his body, slumped against the grimy wall of the old man’s kitchen, now vacant of its owner. He was above it, floating in the ether, a spectral mass of conscience looking down on a limited form that had once constrained him.

  Wait; why was he thinking such things? He was Robert Hoard of East Acton; a nobody, sure, just a small man going about his own business. Aspirations nil; a shelf filler in a local supermarket, and slave to his mother. Still. After forty years.

  “Because, Robert, on the astral plane everyone is high and mighty.”

  Robert tried to look around, find the source of the voice, but he couldn’t. Look that is; he had no eyes with which to look. He knew the voice, though, even out here on the “astral plane.” It was the old man.

  Robert tried to speak, but shock of shocks he didn’t know how. He had only ever spoken with his physical voice. A—what? Astral voice? Yes. An astral voice was new to him and he had no idea how to use it.

  “You’ll work it out. You shall be here for a while. And you’ll discover that although you are literally high out here, you are far from mighty. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m just going to borrow your body for a while.”

  Mind? Of course he minded. But what could he possibly do to stop the old man? There was nothing he could do because he was nothing. Just thought, intangible and hanging uselessly in the ether.

  His mind was all over the place. Perhaps he was having a mind panic? That’s what happened when you panicked after all; your mind goes all over the place, not able to focus on any one thing. Instead it was in little bits; here, there and everywhere. Analysing the wrong things, going down the wrong paths, and not paying attention to the immediate issue. If that was so, then yes, Robert was having a mind panic attack.

  He was everywhere in the house at once. In the skanky bedroom in which the old man used to sleep, back when he did sleep, which was probably before the days when he used the room as a dumping ground for more trash. At the same time he was in the lounge, which unsurprisingly contained a very ancient TV, a huge wooden box with the smallest screen, the kind Robert had seen in pictures from the late ’50s, and, of course, the now anticipated mess and general look of abandonment. All over the house it was the same; a place where someone used to live, probably with some contentment, but now that happiness had moved, replaced by apathy that was verging on clinical disassociation. The old man simply did not view this house as a home any more, but a prison unworthy of respect. Walls that kept him from the world beyond.

  Robert wondered where that had come from. Somehow, deep down, he knew he was right, that the man truly believed this was his prison.

  What was it Douglas Adams had once written? Don’t Panic! Possibly the best advice in the world. Panic was not something Robert tended to do a lot, after all, his mother pretty much controlled most of his life so he had little space in which to lose it.

  His mind was rambling. He had to focus.

  The old man had talked of borrowing Robert’s body, and considering the state of the old man’s body, Robert wasn’t sure he much liked the idea of that. God knew what state his own would be in when he got it back.

  It was the thought of that, more than anything else, that gave him his focus back. He was back in the kitchen, once again looking at the scene from above. His body started to stir. At first it was just the fingers, twitching as if he were dreaming. Only it was not he, this was for sure. He was still up near the ceiling, an abstract collection of thoughts with no form to affect anything.

  However…

  A thought occurred to him. Surely if the old man could somehow transfer to his body, then Robert could do the same. All he had to do was get in the old man’s body first, rouse it, and then tie up his own body. Perhaps a few threats, a bit of minor damage, and the old man would vacate. Robert mentally shrugged. At this point he had little else to lose.

  Shutting his astral eyes, an act that didn’t actually block anything out, but merely allowed him to focus inwards, he pictured what it would be like to be in the old man’s body. Frail, full of aches and unwanted spasms. No longer able to digest the foods he liked so much. No more fatty burgers, excess amounts of pop. Just a carefully controlled diet and…

  Oh my god!

  He was there. Within a split second of being in that old, disgusting, body Robert knew he wanted to be anywhere but. There were thoughts, images, not of his making. There was no doubt in his mind—if, indeed, he even could claim to have his own mind while inside the body of this disgusting thing!—that he had not lived the life he was now being exposed to. His life had been dull, yes, boring beyond words, but at least it had been safe, free of such sin as this!

  The man, Bernard Jacob Rubin, had been such a good fellow in his younger years. Always there for his family and his friends. This house had welcomed many a person over the years; no one was turned away from his happy home. His wife would busy herself in the kitchen preparing food and drinks for their guests while he entertained them with stories—for Bernard was a storyteller of the finest order. People were always telling him to write them down, but he never truly believed in himself. Then one day they took in a young woman, Georgia, the daughter of Frank and Julie Nettles, very dear friends of his wife and he. Georgia was something of a trouble maker, but Bernard saw the light in the seventeen-year-old. Alas, it seemed Bernard saw too much, and a lot more than the young woman saw in herself. Soon Bernard was lured to the teen’s bedroom and…

  “No!” Robert shouted, and expelled himself from the old man’s body with haste.

  He hovered there, once again mind without form, only this time he felt contaminated. He had seen what happened and wanted to shut it out, but he could not. Even as he pulled out of Bernard’s shell the scene had continued, the events speeding up like some fast-forwarded film, taking Robert right up to the moment where Bernard had opened the door to him less than a half-hour ago.

  Robert was revolted. The hatred, the self-loathing. Once again, though, it was not truly him feeling this. These emotions, intense, eating away at the core, came from the old man. Bernard.

  Robert now understood, but he was helpless to prevent what was going to happen.

  Robert’s body was on its feet, animated by the presence of Bernard. He reached beneath the table, rummaged through the trash, and pulled out a steel pipe. He looked up, and Robert was shocked at the lack of feeling on his own face. It was as if Bernard was beyond being able to express the guilt that had eaten at him every single day for the last twenty years.

  “You see, Robert, this is what I must do. Penance for my sin… Never in my life have I ever thought of touching, even looking at, another woman. I had my wife, what did I need other women for? We let this Georgia in, did our best to help her and she…” Bernard shook Robert’s head. “Yes, she was legal, but she was the daughter of a friend, someone I took in. People tell me she led me on, but…” Even now, the words were beyond him. Helpless to act, all Robert could do was listen to what Bernard had to say. That it came in Robert’s own voice disturbed him greatly, even more than what he had seen of Bernard’s life. “It was this body,” Bernard continued, pointing at the old body lying on the dirty floor, “that gave in, allowed itself to be led down the dark path of indiscretion. And it must pay, as I have paid by losing everything.”

  Robert knew of what Bernard spoke. His friends, his family, even his wife, who had promised to stick by him unto death, had turned on him. Not even wishing to hear his side of the story. Since that time he had been alone… Just Bernard and his guilt.

  Robert
wanted to speak, tell Bernard that it was not his fault. He had seen the life Bernard had lived, watched as the teenager manipulated things, twisted everything. Bernard never stood a chance.

  Robert knew from his brief tour of Bernard’s memory that he was the latest in a long line of people who Bernard had lured to his house, to borrow their bodies, use them as tools of his punishment.

  In his whole life, Robert had never wanted to block anything out as much as he did this. And he knew, whatever the outcome of this night, his safe life was gone for good. And so he watched—what else could he do?—as Bernard raised the pipe and began beating down on his own, vacant, body…

  *

  Time passed, as it was wont to do, and Robert could do nothing but wait. Float around the house, explore every nook and cranny, anything to keep himself occupied and out of the kitchen. Away from the beaten pulp of Bernard’s body.

  Robert had watched, horrified by the pure viciousness of Bernard’s assault, raining down blow after blow with the steel pipe. Eventually, after what seemed like hours but was probably only twenty minutes, Bernard had stopped, turning away from the body, paying it no further mind. He had gone to the sink, and washed the blood off the pipe and Robert’s hands, before returning the pipe to its hiding place amongst the rubbish beneath the table.

  “I will be back,” Bernard had said, looking up. “Make yourself at home. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he added.

  Robert was struck by the lack of feeling in Bernard’s voice. He could only pretend to understand how much the self-hatred ate its way inside Bernard; even with the snapshot view of Bernard’s life, Robert could not truly comprehend living with such darkness for twenty years. Bernard had left, walking out of the house in Robert’s skin as if he’d only borrowed a jumper.

  Robert was left to float around uselessly. Exploring the house was no adventure; it was disgusting and vile. For someone to think so little about themselves, that they’d allow their home to get in such a state… It sickened Robert, who lived in a tidy house, sure he didn’t have a world-shaping life, but he had a good life, one of self-respect. Looking around, he wondered just what would need to happen in his life for it to sink to the level of Bernard’s.