“Hello!” I cried. “Hello there. Wait for me!”
I moved forward, my attempt to run reduced by the darkness to an unsteady lurch. I crashed through the treacherous underbrush, stray twigs clawing at my hands and face. The figure stopped dead in its tracks, the torch beam wavering gently up and down. Its light was weak but my eyes had grown used to the darkness and were temporarily blinded. The figure took a step backwards, crackling the leaves underfoot. It seemed that it was as much afraid of me as I was of it.
“I’m lost,” I said. “Do you know the way out of here?”
I could hear its breathing, slow and heavy, as if it was about to expire. There was a rank odour, a smell like burning fat tinged with underarm sweat. I was by now convinced that the figure was a fugitive, a lone carjacker perhaps, or an immigrant without a work permit, someone on the run from the police. None of that mattered to me; all I cared about was getting out of the woods.
“I’m not going to report you,” I said. “I just want to find the road.” I grabbed at its sleeve, anxious in case the figure tried to bolt away from me. It was wearing padded mittens, and a padded anorak made from some shiny nylon-coated fabric that was difficult to get a grip on. My fingers tightened involuntarily about its wrist. The figure moaned, a low, inhuman sound that made me go cold all over. I knew I had made an awful mistake. I released the figure abruptly, pushing it backwards. As it flailed its arms to retain balance the torch beam darted upwards, lighting its face. Until that moment it had been shrouded in darkness, its features concealed by the large, loose hood of the nylon anorak. Now I saw something terrible: the thing’s face was disfigured in some way, quite literally de-formed, squeezed apart and then rammed back together again in a careless and hideous arrangement that bore as little resemblance to an ordinary human face as the face of a corpse in an advanced stage of decomposition. The skin was thickly corrugated, set into runnels as if burned by acid. The mouth, a lipless slit, was slanted heavily to one side, dividing the face’s lower portion in a raw diagonal slash. One of the eyes was sealed shut, smeared in its socket somehow like a clay eye inadvertently damaged by its sculptor’s careless thumb. The other eye shone brightly in the torchlight, gazing at me in what I instinctively knew was sorrow as much as fear. The eye was fringed with long lashes, and quite perfect. The creature standing before me was a woman.
I screamed, I could not help it, though it was more from shock than from fear. I knew that I was seeing one of the mutants Owen Andrews had spoken of, one of the worst victims of the army’s clumsy experiments with the time stasis. Andrews had called these creatures unfortunate, but his words had barely scratched the surface of the reality. In my traumatised state I could not grasp how this thing could survive, how it did not just stop, how the terrible damage inflicted allowed it still to go on living. The face was an apocalypse in flesh; it was impossible to know what further ravages had been unleashed upon the rest of her body and internal organs.
Her mental torment I could not bear to imagine.
My scream made her flinch, and she stumbled, dropping the torch. She dropped to her knees, sweeping her hands back and forth through the leaves in an effort to retrieve it. But either the padded mittens hampered her efforts or she no longer had proper control of her hands because it kept skidding out of her grasp. I saw my chance and made a lunge for it. Suddenly the torch was in my hand. The mutant girl howled, flinging herself at me as if she meant to topple me into the dirt.
I began to run. The girl picked herself up off the ground and began to follow. She was no longer crying, but I could hear her breathing, the raw panting gasp of it, and I felt sick with revulsion. The thought of having to fight her off, of having her ruined face pressed in close to mine as she battled me for the torch did a good deal to keep me moving. I knew the very fact of possessing the torch made me easy to follow, but there was no help for it. I pointed it ahead of me, panning the ground at my feet and lighting the way ahead the best that I could. The beam was weak, a feeble yellow, barely enough to see by. I kept expecting to bash into a tree or worse still to catch a foot in some pothole or crevice and twist my ankle and I have no doubt that one of these two things would have happened eventually.
In the end I was saved by the soldiers. I climbed a shallow rise, tearing my hands painfully on brambles in the process, and then I was in the open. I could sense rather than see that there were no more trees around me, and I guessed I had reached the edge of a woodland meadow. I shone the torch frantically about me, trying to work out which was the best way to go. Suddenly there were more lights, broad and penetrating beams of white radiance, strafing the ground and dazzling my eyes. They were approaching from the side at a full-on run.
“Halt!” someone screamed. “Get down.”
I threw myself to the ground, covering my head instinctively with my arms. A stampede seemed to pass over and around me. Then there was more shouting, a single wild cry that I knew was the girl, and then a burst of gunfire. I covered my ears, cowering against the ground, and the next minute I was being dragged upright, pulled back down the rise and into the trees. My mind froze and went entirely blank. I felt certain that I would die within the next few seconds. Someone shoved me from behind and I almost fell. The crisscrossing beams of powerful torches showed me a half-dozen men with blackened faces and wearing combat fatigues. The girl’s body lay face down on the ground; a dark irregular stain was spreading across the back of the padded anorak. One of the soldiers kicked her, flipping her on to her side with the toe of his boot. The anorak shifted slightly, revealing a portion of the clothing beneath, a tattered woollen smock over filthy jeans.
Now with her face turned away from me she looked like any other dead girl. I felt my guts heave. I thought if I couldn’t be sick I would choke, but I was terrified to be sick in case these men shot me for it.
“Frigging disgusting,” said one of the men. I had the confused impression that he was referring to my weak stomach, then realised he was talking about the girl. “What do you think would happen if they started breeding?”
“Shut up, Weegie,” said another. The tone of authority in his voice left no doubt that he was in charge. Then he turned to me. “What the fuck are you doing out here?”
My throat gave a dry click, and I felt once more the gagging reflex, but in the end I was able to answer.
“I came off the road,” I said. “I got lost.”
“ID?”
For a second I panicked, thinking I had lost my wallet somewhere or even left it behind at Andrews’s place, but miraculously when I reached into my jacket pocket it was there. I handed it over in silence. The officer flicked through it briefly, letting his eyes rest for a moment upon my photograph and national insurance number, then amazingly handed it back.
“Bloody civvies,” he said. “Do you want to get mistaken for one of these?” He nodded down at the girl’s lifeless body. I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak.
“You’ll have to come with us. It’s for your own protection. I suggest you get moving.” He nodded to the man he had called Weegie, who grabbed me by the upper arm and pushed me into line behind the others. I stumbled a couple of times, but with the soldiers’ powerful search beams to see by the going was actually much easier. Now that it seemed they were not going to kill me or at least not immediately my panic had subsided somewhat. I thought back to the night before, when I had lain comfortably in bed contemplating my forthcoming visit to Andrews and the state of my political morals. It seemed impossible that a mere twenty-four hours could alter my life so completely. I felt inclined to agree with the officer: I had been bloody stupid.
We marched through the forest for about an hour. I was exhausted by then, my mind empty of anything but the desire to stop moving and lie down. At last there were lights, shining to meet us through the trees. The forest ended suddenly at a barbed wire perimeter fence, and I realised we had arrived outside the hospital.
I was too tired to be afraid. I was marched through
a set of iron gates then led along a green-tiled corridor that smelled faintly of damp clothes and disinfectant. Unbelievably it reminded me of school. I caught glimpses of a kit store, and a rec room, where soldiers sprawled on bunks watching a televised boxing match. At the end of the corridor a short flight of concrete steps led down to what was clearly a cell block. The officer-in-charge nudged open one of the mesh-strengthened doors and gestured me inside.
“I’d get some kip, if I were you. I’d bring you some grub, only the mess will have shut up shop, so you’ll have to hang on till morning.”
I stepped through the door, which was immediately banged shut behind me. I heard the sound of a key being turned in the lock and then the soldier’s footsteps trudging back up the stairs. Then there was silence. I stood where I was for a moment, wondering if anything else would happen. The room I was in was small, although curiously it still had the wallpaper and curtains left behind from the time before the soldiers had taken over. The way the wainscoting and ceiling architrave had been divided made it clear that the cell had been partitioned off from a much larger room, possibly the doctors’ lounge. There was a bed pushed up against one wall, a metal-framed cot of the kind that is usual in hospitals. In the corner was a bucket and basin, crudely screened from the rest of the room by a section of cotton sheeting strung from a pole. The windows behind their curtains were barred from the outside.
I relieved myself in the bucket then lay down on the bed. It bowed heavily under my weight, the springs weary from decades of use. The room was lit by a single bulb, a bald, enervating glare that I supposed would be left burning all night, although when I tentatively pressed a switch by the bed the light went out. In contrast with the alien blackness of the forest I found the darkness of the room gave me a feeling of being protected. I lay under the threadbare blanket, listening to the silence and wondering what was going to happen to me. I was a prisoner, but what was I being imprisoned for? If it was a simple matter of breaking the curfew then I could expect a hefty fine and perhaps three months behind bars, as well as the wholly undesirable possibility of finding myself under continued surveillance. This could lead to all sorts of problems at work, not just for me but for my colleagues. Certainly it was no laughing matter, but it was at least a situation with navigable parameters. The thing was, I knew my situation was not that simple. I had witnessed a murder, the gunning down in cold blood of a defenceless and vulnerable woman. The frightful injuries that had been inflicted upon her before that hardly served to make things less complicated.
There was also the fact of my visit to Owen Andrews, a troublemaker who by his own admission had been repeatedly in conflict with the state.
What if all things considered it seemed simpler just to get rid of me? Now that Miranda was dead there would be few who cared enough to risk asking questions. Dora might ask, she might even look for me, but in the end she would weigh up the cost of the truth about a dead man and the price of her own safety and Ray’s and find the balance wanting. I did not blame her for it.
Asking questions was out of fashion in our day and age.
I wondered if they would simply shoot me, or if perhaps they would use me in one of their time travel experiments. I presumed the latter. To shoot me would be a waste of valuable resources.
I thought of the mutant girl in the forest, twisted and bent by her exposure to the time stasis almost beyond the bounds of her humanity. I still found it difficult to contemplate her isolation, the loneliness and horror she must have suffered at the moment of her realisation of what had been done to her. It came to me that there were fates worse than shooting. I even wondered if her death at the hands of the soldiers had been for the best.
All at once the darkness of the room seemed oppressive rather than soothing. I put the light back on and got up from the bed. I paced about my cell, examining the barred window and testing the door handle, wondering if I might discover some means of escape but for all its ramshackleness the room was still a prison. I placed my ear against the door and listened, straining for any sound that might give a clue as to what was happening in the rest of the hospital but there was nothing, just a deep, eerie silence that suggested I was completely alone there. I knew this had to be nonsense: I had seen the rec room, the soldiers on their bunks watching television and playing cards. I supposed the cell had been soundproofed somehow. The thought was not exactly comforting.
In the end I decided the only thing for it was to take advantage of the silence and get some rest. Now that my life was not being directly threatened I found I was ravenously hungry—it was hours since the meal at Andrews’s house—but there was nothing I could do about that. I drank some water instead from the tap in the corner. It had a peaty taste and was unpleasantly tepid but it helped to put something at least inside my stomach. After drinking I lay back down on the bed and covered myself with the blanket. I thought I would lie there awake for hours but I fell asleep in less than five minutes.
At some point during the night I was woken by the sound of shouting and running footsteps but no one came to my door and I decided I must have dreamed it. I closed my eyes, hovering on the boundary between sleep and waking, a citizen of both nations but unable to settle permanently in either. I saw sleep as an immense blue forest that I was afraid to enter in case I never found the way out again. Then I woke with a start to bright sunlight, and realised I had been asleep all along.
My watch had stopped, but from the position of the sun in the sky I could tell it was already mid-morning, getting on towards midday even. It struck me as curious to say the least that I had been allowed to sleep so long. Surely by now whoever was in charge here would have wanted me either interrogated or—out of their way? The second strange thing was the sun itself, its insistent presence. The day before had been overcast with the promise of rain, a typical day in late March. The sky that was now on the other side of the barred window was spotless, the heady azure of June or July.
I knew it was impossible, but the vagueness and confusion of mind that so often accompanies a sudden waking suggested to me that I had been forgotten, left locked in this room for weeks, that no one was coming now, ever.
I leapt from the bed, relieved myself once again in the stinking bucket, then crossed to the door, prepared to rattle it and shout until someone came. I seized the handle, twisting it sharply downwards.
The door opened smoothly and silently in my hand.
I eased it open a crack and peered out into the corridor. I was prepared for a burst of shouting or even of gunfire, but there was nothing, just the silence of my room, magnified in some queer sense by the largeness of the space it now flowed into. There was nothing in the corridor, just a single plastic chair, as if once, many days before, someone had stood guard there but had long since become bored or assigned to other duties and wandered away. The doors to the other cells stood closed. I stepped out into the corridor, my footsteps echoing on the bare cement floor. I tried the door to the room next to mine, and like mine it swung open easily. I was afraid of what I might find on the other side, but what I found in fact was nothing at all. The bed had been stripped of all its furnishings, including the mattress. There was a slops bucket but it was empty and perfectly dry. Beside it stood a pile of old newspapers. I glanced down at the one on top. The headline story, about Clive Billings losing his seat in a by-election in Harrogate, did not make sense. The paper was brittled and yellow from sun exposure and dated two years previously. I could remember the by-election to which it referred—who could not? It was the by-election that effectively made Billings prime minister—but it had happened more than two decades ago, just as I was about to enter university. Billings had taken the seat with a huge majority.
Looking at the headline made me feel odd, and the idea of actually touching the paper made me feel queasy, off-kilter in a way I could not properly explain. I felt that touching the newspaper would connect me to it as an object, that I would somehow be ratifying the version of reality it was presenting
to me, a reality I knew full well had never happened. It would be as if I were somehow negating my own existence.
I left the room quickly, passing up the short stone staircase into the rest of the hospital. The place was empty, not derelict yet but certainly abandoned. The soldiers’ rec room was stacked with refuse, dismantled beds and plastic chairs like the one I had seen in the corridor. There were signs everywhere of encroaching damp and roof leakage, peeling wallpaper and buckled linoleum. One more winter without proper attention and the place would sink inexorably into decay.
The main doors had been boarded over but after hunting around for a while I found a side entrance and made my escape. The hospital grounds were a wilderness, the paths choked with weeds and many of the smaller outbuildings partially hidden by stands of rampaging bramble and giant hogweed. Beyond the perimeter wall the trees loomed, whispering together with the passing of the breeze. In spite of the emptiness of the place and the fact that I was plainly alone there I felt exposed, watched, as if the trees themselves were spying on me.
The army checkpoint at the entrance had disappeared and the place was unguarded but the high gates were chained shut and it took me some time to find an exit. The perimeter wall was too high to climb without assistance, and I was just starting to think about going in search of a ladder when I discovered a rent in the small section of chain link fencing that blocked off the access to the service alleyway at the side of the building. The torn wire snagged at my clothes, and in spite of everything I smiled to myself, thinking how the breach was most likely the work of schoolchildren for whom this place now as then would be a realm of dares and bribes, of dangers both imaginary and real. I felt glad that they had broken through, that some of them at least had been braver and bolder than I.
I came out of the alleyway and wandered down to the main road. I tried to look nonchalant, not wanting to draw attention to my soiled clothes and general unkemptness. There was a bus stop by the hospital gates, just as before, and after only ten minutes of waiting a bus drew up to it. I got on, swiping my Oyster card. The sensor responded with its usual bleep. The driver did not look at me twice. I noticed with a start that she was black; I could not remember the last time I had seen a black face in any position of public service in this country. The bus was full of soldiers, their London accents blending noisily together as they exchanged ribald jokes and squabbled over newspapers and cigarettes. They were white and black and Asian, as racially mixed as the cowed hordes of deportees in the television broadcasts of my adolescence. I stared at them, barely understanding what I was seeing.
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition Page 52
