Nightmare Magazine Issue 25, Women Destroy Horror! Special Issue

by Nightmare Magazine

  At the time, I remember wanting to ask her, in light of news about the latest famine, if she was really sure about that last.

  • • • •

  Okay, Future Me, this may be the last message you get from the you that was.

  Jesse has been in the flat for almost a week and a half. We used some tanning stuff to darken my skin, dyed my hair an even darker brown, and introduced me to Mrs. Chodari as his nephew Rickey, who’s been over here as an exchange student in Liverpool, now here to help out with Auntie Jools. As near as I can tell, she bought it. Maybe it’s the American accent or the change in wardrobe. In any case, if we fooled her, it’s safe for me to go out. Good thing, because I’m going nuts cooped up in the flat. This body is restless; it’s used to a lot more movement.

  Today, we’re going up to the hospital to see “me.” The doctor phoned Jesse to tell him that “I” finally woke up last night, and it was pretty much the shitstorm I thought it would be.

  I listened in as the doctor told Jesse that his sister is very disoriented and seems to believe she is somebody else entirely; they have no idea why. This isn’t how trauma usually manifests, but the brain is a funny organ; you can never be completely certain about what might happen, and no two people are ever affected in the same way.

  “It could be that your sister is refusing to accept her deficits,” the doctor said. She sounded like a really nice person.

  Jesse asked what the deficits were.

  “We’re not really sure,” the doctor said. “She can’t walk as yet—when the nurses got her on her feet, her knees gave out, and she has some trouble talking. She asked a nurse for a mirror and then got so hysterical when she saw her reflection that we had to sedate her. She also complained of being castrated, although that’s probably just the catheter bothering her. We’re going to send her for a brain scan this morning, so perhaps we’ll have more to tell you by the time you come up this afternoon.”

  “Wow,” I said after he hung up. “Maybe we’d better go now. Before ‘I’ get worse.”

  “They might let me in but probably not you,” he said.

  Then I had an inspiration. “Maybe I shouldn’t go as your nephew. Maybe I should masquerade as a porter or a janitor, sneak in, and put the necklace on her. Problem solved.”

  “Isn’t that how you got into this fix in the first place?” Jesse reminded me of what I’d told about switching back and forth during the robbery.

  “Oh, right. Well, this time, I’ll tell him what’s going on. And he’ll be looking right at himself.”

  “I’d rather you were with me. Then we can both talk to him and I can keep him from undoing everything. Or re-doing everything. Or re-undoing everything. If you really want to go through with this.”

  “Don’t start that again,” I said. “I thought I explained it to you.”

  “Yeah, and actually, I get it,” Jesse said. “I don’t remember much about the times we swapped except that it felt wrong and I couldn’t wait to swap back. Maybe because I felt castrated.”

  Men.

  • • • •

  Okay, this next part you could probably have seen coming even if you weren’t Future Me. I don’t know why I didn’t.

  I think I felt it happen on the way over in the cab. All of a sudden, I felt incredibly nauseated, like I’d been punched in the stomach, but without the physical blow. I thought it might have been the damned speed humps in the road. They put them on a lot of side streets in London to keep the traffic slow. Cabbies take these routes to avoid congestion on the main roads, but you end up having this awful ride where they accelerate for ten seconds, then suddenly slow down and bounce over the humps, accelerate again, then suddenly slow down, bounce, over and over, ad literal nauseam.

  Anyway, when we got to the hospital, the doctor was sorry to tell us that Jesse’s sister had had a hysterical episode where she ripped out her IV while trying to escape. But she forgot about the catheter (oh, ugh). She fell down and hit her head. She didn’t even hit it that hard, but after the previous injuries, it was just too much. She’s in a coma again, and the doctor says we shouldn’t expect her to come out of it.

  I am so screwed.

  • • • •

  We sit with “me” for a while and then go down to the cafeteria on the second floor, where Jesse starts talking about looking up death notices from fifteen to twenty years ago in the county where he lives, for kids who died in infancy or toddlerhood. Then he can send away for a birth certificate, which he can use to get a US passport. For me.

  Leaving aside the fact that I’m not sure this is even possible—would they really send someone’s birth certificate to any random person who asks?—not to mention how we’d explain a US citizen living in a foreign country without ever having had a passport in the first place as well as a hundred other things I haven’t thought of, I cannot imagine why he thinks I would give up and go home in this body.

  “If you—your own body—isn’t expected to live . . .” Jesse looks pained.

  “All the more reason I’ve got to switch back,” I say.

  Jesse’s eyes practically bug out. “Are you crazy? Do you really have a death wish?”

  “No, I don’t. But if that kid dies in my body, we don’t know what’ll happen.”

  “I do,” Jesse says staunchly. “Karmic justice.”

  “Karmic justice? Let’s see—the kid’s troubles will all be over, but I’ll have to re-do my late adolescence, go back to university to get a degree in shit I already know, and pee standing up for as long as I live. Yeah, that would serve me right.”

  Jesse gives me a look. “Hey, a lot of people would think it’s a pretty good deal.”

  “Yeah?” I give him my own look. “Are all of them guys?”

  He dips his head a little sheepishly. “Being a guy is not so bad.”

  “Maybe in twenty years I’d finally get used to it, but you can get used to hanging. It wouldn’t mean you liked it. I’m not a guy. And most importantly, I’m not this guy.”

  “Okay, can you sit down?” Jesse says. I keep getting up and pacing back and forth. This body goes running. To keep in shape for all those quick getaways, I guess.

  I force myself to sit down again. “You know what Grandma said about never exchanging with anyone else.”

  Jesse nods reluctantly. “I figured it was to make sure it stayed in the family.”

  “It’s more than that,” I tell him. “She said it always goes to twins, remember? Twins exchanging aren’t as unnatural, especially identical twins, who have the same DNA.”

  “Not to be Captain Obvious but we’re not identical,” Jesse says, frowning.

  “That’s why it was uncomfortable for us. You felt castrated. I felt—” I shake my head. “I don’t want to talk about it. Shit.” Just thinking about having a penis wakes the damned thing up.

  “Yes but is this really so bad that you’d rather die?” Jesse asks me. “Because those are your options—this, or die in a coma.”

  “Those are my options if I don’t switch back,” I tell him. “This body doesn’t like me. It doesn’t want me. And if I don’t get things straightened out soon, it’s going to reject me. And then my troubles will all be over.”

  Now my brother looks terrified. “What do you mean?”

  I thump my breastbone with one fist. “I’ve got this feeling of impending doom. Right here.”

  “You know that’s low potassium. You need a banana. I saw a fruit bowl—” He starts to get up and I pull him down again.

  “It’s not low potassium, it’s a completely different sensation. It’s more like—like if I were in an interrogation room at the police station waiting for them to come in and tell me my prints are a match on the murder weapon.”

  Jesse takes a breath. “That’s pretty neurotic.”

  “I’m in someone else’s body, I think I’m entitled.”

  He takes another breath. “Suppose we swap? Right now.”

  I swivel on my chair and bend
over for a few moments. Jesse wants to know what’s wrong. “The idea of being in a second wrong body makes me want to be sick.”

  “Okay, okay,” Jesse sighs. “I just can’t stand the idea that this little bastard gets to live his life while you—”

  “While I die?” I say when he can’t. “Maybe I won’t if I’m back where I belong.”

  My brother’s expression goes from hopeful to skeptical, back to hopeful and back to skeptical, several times. “I don’t know if that would be enough to bring you out of a coma,” he says after a bit. “I mean, there’s physical damage to your brain.”

  “The brain is a strange and wonderful organ,” I say. “Once I’m back, it could turn around.”

  “And you’re willing to take that chance?” my brother says.

  “Yes. I am.”

  “I wish I could talk you out of it.” He slumps, looking unhappy. “Remember all the things the doctor told me? You’re risking a lot more than just memory loss. The personality changes can be pretty serious. It’s not just anger issues—people with serious head injuries often come out with poor impulse control. They do things that they wouldn’t have done before—”

  “You said already. I have to put this right,” I say. “Grandma would back me up on that. Look, Jesse, we agreed I should take custody of the necklace after you and Tracey had the boys to avoid any weird incidents with them. This happened to me. It’s my life so it’s my decision. Now, have another cup of coffee while I finish this last message to Future Me.”

  • • • •

  It worked!

  Less than twenty-four hours after I was back in my own body, I woke up. I was pretty foggy for the first couple of days and there was a little memory loss, but only a very little. If I hadn’t written to Future Me, who is now Current Me—or, as I like to call me, me—I wouldn’t have remembered how I’d gotten into Mrs. Chodari’s flat. But I remember everything else.

  Jesse said the kid ran off immediately. I really wish I could have been around to see his face the first time he looked in a mirror and saw the makeover I gave him.

  My brother wanted to stay for another week at least, but I told him not to. In the past three and a half days, I’ve improved a lot, and they said they’d take me out of intensive care by the end of the week, which means my friends can visit. I told Jesse, “you get hardly any vacation time in America and if you use it all up on me, there’ll be nothing left for Tracey and the boys.” That finally persuaded him and he got a flight home yesterday.

  Then I put the necklace in a box of tissues and settled down to bide my time. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long for the nurse that evening. The nurse, I mean, the good-looking one who’s so rude. I asked her for something to help me sleep. That stuff knocks me right out so she was only too happy to oblige—one less pesty patient pressing the call button. After she injected it into my IV, I begged her for one more teeny favor—please put my necklace on me, it’s an heirloom from my grandmother, it means so much, blah, blah, blah. I wasn’t sure she would—she’s so rude. If it didn’t work, I was planning to try again tomorrow. But I guess I caught her in a weak moment and the medicine kicked in so quickly, she barely had time to look surprised before her eyes fell shut. It was so easy, I can’t help feeling a little guilty.

  Okay, more than a little. It was a dirty trick no matter how rude she is. By the time she wakes up, I’ll be in France, and from there, I’m thinking Australia, or possibly New Zealand—it looks gorgeous in The Lord of the Rings movies. As I’m no longer in possession of the necklace, I’m free—no more homesick/addicted/OCD/being-in-the-wrong-body blues for me! I figured that particular detail out when we were kids, but I never said anything to Jesse and I guess he never noticed.

  Of course, when “I” wake up and start claiming to be somebody else, the hospital will call my brother again and tell him his sister’s taken another turn for the worse, and he’ll know. But I doubt Jesse can afford another trip to London, and of course, he’ll never be able to tell them the truth. After I decide where I’m going to settle down, maybe I’ll contact him and tell him how I managed to run off with someone else’s body after all. I’ll tell him how rude the nurse was. Maybe he’ll still think the kid deserved this more than she did. But if he ever ends up in an intensive-care ward, he’ll understand.

  Or maybe he’ll feel I’ve betrayed Grandma by getting rid of the necklace. Grandma obviously took the whole caretaker-of-the-necklace thing very seriously. But then, she had someone she didn’t mind exchanging with—Jesse and I didn’t. For Grandma and her twin, the necklace was magic; when it passed to us, it became a hazard. So the hell with it. I didn’t ask for the responsibility of an exchanger, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life worrying about someone stealing it from me or trying to find a pair of twins to pass it on to. I mean, I don’t plan to have kids and I know Jesse’s stopping at two. So what was I supposed to do, wander the earth with a lantern looking for a pair of honest clones? Forget it. All that stuff about it only passing to twins is bullshit. Identical or not, one of them gets stuck with the burden and one is free. So I don’t think it matters if it’s some singleton’s problem. She is so screwed. And I’m not. At last.

  And what the hell—you have to have some brains to be a nurse. If she’s smart enough for that, she can figure something out.

  © 2014 by Pat Cadigan.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Pat Cadigan has won the Locus Award three times, the Arthur C. Clarke Award twice for her novels Synners and Fools, and the Hugo Award for her novelette, “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi.” While her novels are all science-fiction, she has also written two nonfiction movie books and several media tie-ins, and her short fiction runs the gamut from lighthearted fantasy to hard-edged horror. A former Kansas City resident, she lives in gritty, urban North London with her husband, the Original Chris Fowler.

  The Inside and the Outside

  Katherine Crighton

  There’s a bear on the other side of the lake.

  It’s a small lake, more of a pond, a mirror mouth with teeth made of reflected trees that line the banks up to the water’s edge. I can see the trees on the other side, green undergrowth and checkerboarding shadows, but I can see no further than a foot within at most. We’re camping right near the narrow end, an easy distance for an animal, but the ranger didn’t say we couldn’t, and our leaders didn’t say we shouldn’t, so around the campfire we don’t say anything at all.

  I don’t really know the other girls except in passing. Names and faces, what comes of country living, and so we’re mostly strangers. There aren’t a lot of other scouts our age in the northern portion of the state, so we few have been placed together to make a troop that hardly ever meets. This is one of the rare social times, to remind us of who we are. So: A camping trip. A hike. A tent in the woods, by the lake at night.

  We hadn’t talked much around the fire. Chores to do and leaders to turn away from, well-meaning women always out for a chance to have a talk with you, could you come over here for a second, or do you want to go for a walk? My old leader, I don’t remember when, pulled me aside once and said, Teeth? Or tooth or smoke or smell or words like that, more or different, her fingers a muzzle on my jaw as she watched me for answers that I couldn’t give. My mouth stayed closed, my teeth suddenly aligned and my face all twisted wrong because of it.

  Here there were leaders, chaperones; standing away, whispering together as they watched us with lowered lids. So we sat around the fire, ate our too-quick dinner and watched the salamander coals, hunched dry-faced toward the flames while the night air cooled our backs. We could wait to do our talking.

  There are six of us in the tent. The fire is out, smothered with dirt, and our tin plates dipped in bleach water to wipe away the scent of meat. A hundred feet away, roped too high for any bear to reach, the rest of our provisions are suspended from a tree. Little things we do to protect ourselves. Everybody has their little things.

  Storie
s live in tents. On TV I see girls waving their flashlights under their chins while they sit circled on their bedroom floors, safe inside their clean and faultless houses—but that’s not how it really works. Put us together in the nighttime, in the woods, a thin polyester between us and whatever’s lost outside, the cold ground beneath, the lake too close, the fire put out, and the bear on the other side of the lake—that’s when we stay awake, the flashlights on, angled poorly and the shadows wrong, while we wait until we feel safe enough to sleep.

  And while we wait, we talk. And while we talk, the woods talk too. I don’t know who else can hear it.

  I’m sitting on my sleeping bag, the tent door pressed up against my back, zipper flicking between my fingertips. My bag is older than the others’, with marks on it that don’t show in the haphazard light. I can taste the ground chuck from our recent dinner, nestled in the crooks of my mouth. Food enough to feed five thousand, kept safe from the brush and spit and waste a cleaning would have made. No one thinks about these things—the hunger that will come, the comfort of a scrap found hidden between one tooth and the next. How do so many keep their mouths so empty?

  Shauna is saying that she keeps hearing something outside, and can anyone else hear it? Because it’s seriously freaking her out, oh my god. It’s the wind, the lapping lake, the sound of six strangers shifting in a space. But it’s not just that. There’s a thrill; I can feel it too. The leaders are sleeping, their tent dark and distant. We’re alone, where the wild things are. How much could the tent bend inward against a grasping claw? How many of us could escape if only one of us was taken? The question never asked, of course: Who’s the weak one that would be caught? We all shift closer to the center, and I smile, teeth bared, almost happy.