by Shaun Allan
I smiled. It had been a long time.
There was a body. There was a wreck. There was death. But hey, there was also the chance that I might be able to find a pub and have a few neat vodkas. "Yippee-ki-yay, you mothers," as Bruce Willis might say.
I blotted the crash out. What could I do, that I hadn't already done? Come on. I'd rid the world of an idiot driver, one that had gotten away with running down a young girl? Was the world a better place? Was it sweeter smelling and fresher? No. Not to my nose anyway. Not to my senses. Not to my heart. He was an idiot. His idiocy had resulted in the death of a girl. Who was I, though, to dictate that he should die? I didn't wear a great black hooded cloak and swing a scythe like Tiger Woods does a nine iron, or my old mate Tony tries to. I don't live on a cloud, have a long white beard and lightning shooting from my fingertips, having to be careful if I wanted to pick my nose. I was just me, Sin, a mortal more mere than most.
But anywho-be-doo. Hi-ho, it's off to wherever I go.
The light was fading and the distinct lack of any street lighting meant it was becoming much darker than I was used to. I hadn't thought enough time could have passed since I left the hospital for the day to be leaning towards night. I knew I'd been walking for a while, but I had nothing to track the hours by. Watches weren't allowed - yes, you could possibly hang yourself with the strap if your shoelace happened to snap, and I didn't have Tonto's skills in telling the time by the position of the sun or the song of a cricket. If I didn't have my Pulsar or my mobile phone, an hour could last five minutes or be about five days long. It meant the few years I'd spent in Dr. Connors care had lasted about six millennia. Even so, I would have guessed that only a couple or three hours had loped by since I'd blown apart that gull. Even in September it doesn't begin to get dark until around seven-ish. The clouds, my Reaper's cloak made real, were dragging across the sky, as if they were readying themselves to wipe us all out, although that was perhaps wishful thinking. The sun had disappeared, either behind the cloak or beneath the horizon I didn't know. Still, it didn't feel that late. It didn't feel like I'd been walking seven hours instead of two.
I wasn't hungry, nor was I tired. My legs weren't heavier than a mobster's hit, concrete shoes and all, and there were no stitches in time to save nine digging their wee ways into my side. So why was it getting darker than Dr. Connors' mood the time Bender Benny told him he (Dr. Connors) was the crazy one and everyone else was saner than a rattlesnake on ecstasy? I didn't quite get the rattlesnake analogy, but sometimes Bender Benny talked a lot of sense. Mr. Shrink-o-matic 2010 didn't appear to think so though, and had made sure Benny had realised the error of his ways.
We didn't see the Bender for a few days after that. It might have been about a week. He was quieter.
I figured that, if I could have been plonked on a beach somewhere when I'd intended on ending up in the belly of the dragon, I could, I supposed, equally have been plonked a few hours later. Maybe teleportation included a slight risk of time travel. Perhaps it was the equivalent of turbulence on an aeroplane flight. No oxygen masks were there to drop in the case of an emergency, and no air stewardesses were on hand to show you the wheres and whyfors of a life jacket. If you hit a cosmic air pocket on your teleporting way from one place to another, maybe you hiccupped a few hours into the future. Hey, if we're walking in the realm of Star Trek, why not add in a dash of Doctor Who for good measure?
I was new to this. Even I didn't entirely believe, deep inside, that I could teleport. Even I still thought I hadn't done exactly what I had done. It was all madness. Maybe I was in my padded cell, strapped up tighter than Scrooge and doped up to Alpha Centauri. Maybe none of this was real and I was a pigment of Bender Benny's emancipation.
But the death told me it was real enough. All the souls, torn from their bodies like giblets from a chicken, en-masse screamed at me that it was real enough.
Still. Time travel, on top of everything else, was just a step too far over the border into Crazytown, population 1. I'd just been wandering for longer than I'd thought. Time flies by when you're having fun, or causing youngsters to plough their cars into the trunk of a tree. Apparently time is relative. Who's relative, I don't know. Does time, his cousins, his mum and dad and the dog gather around the table for Christmas dinner, ready to tuck into too much turkey and pigs-in-blankets? Which one refuses to wear the paper crown from the cracker, that's what I wanted to know.
I did begin to feel tired then. The energy drained from my body like a lightbulb being switched off. I was suddenly knackered and the thought of taking any more steps was so daunting, I'd have rather kissed a pissed off Rottweiler. I stopped and stood there, looking at nothing in particular, feeling... feeling floppy. I just couldn't be bothered. I didn't know how far I had to go, mainly because I had no idea where I was going. A house could chance across my path, but would I stop there? What if I did? What then? Would someone open the door, a big old farmer or a young, vulnerable farmer's wife?
"Hey there," I'd say. "I wonder if you could help me. You see, I've just escaped from a lunatic asylum..."
Would the resident reach for a gun to shoot me? Would it be a phone to call the police? Perhaps it would help if I mentioned how, precisely, I'd managed my escape.
"I teleported out," I'd tell them. "It's a simple trick of matter transference. You should try it; it'd save you a fortune in taxi fares."
Perhaps not.
It did occur to me, as it would have had to, that I could use my new found talents of spaceshifting (as opposed to shapeshifting which, to my knowledge, was beyond my abilities) to get myself somewhere else. The problem was, of course, that I might well end up back in the mental home. Or on a beach in Outer Mongolia, if they have any beaches. Or even sitting in a furnace with a great walloping flame up my backside. Right now even my original plan of action had become a plan of inaction. Suddenly death, my own anyway, was something I didn't fancy trying out. Death was a bright spangly pair of purple trousers that I wouldn't be seen... dead... in. I didn't want anyone else to die because of me, but I wasn't keen anymore on biting the big apple myself.
Call me selfish if you like, I don't mind, but not shellfish. Well, maybe a bit crabby.
As such, with my possible destination being either the inside of a white dwarf star or sitting on Dr. Connors knee while he ate his supper, I decided to keep on walking, exhausted or not. Thunder rumbled, fairly closely. The clouds were chanting their song of attack and I was right in the firing line. Maybe walking would do in preference to getting wet.
Off to my left, to the side of a freshly ploughed field, was a small copse of trees. They were obviously an artificial planting, the trunks marching in even ranks across neatly trimmed grass. All were of the same make, model and serial number, but not being a botanist I wasn't sure which. Maybe willows or something. They weren't oaks or elms, I knew that much. They could have been baby redwoods, waiting to become fully grown so a car could drive through their bases, but I doubted it. It didn't matter anyway, though I did briefly think I should take better notice of the world I seemed hell bent on destroying. Whether willow, redwood or bonsai, they were enough to offer me shelter from the coming storm, and if they didn't want to offer, I'd certainly take. The sky had turned angry and I didn't want its temper taken out on little old me, thank you very much.
The first spatterings of rain were throwing themselves at me as I left the road and, by the time I had reached the cover of the first branches, the spatterings had become an onslaught as each drop did its very best to hit me. They weren't bothered which part of me they made a target, any would do, but I felt like John Cleese accidentally saying Jehovah in the Life of Brian. A good stoning had taken place, albeit with water instead of rock, and I was battered and served up with chips and mushy peas.
So much for not getting wet.
Wiping the rain from my face with my sleeve I looked around for a nice comfy tree to sit against. It looked like I was going to be here for a while, so I figured I may as
well get myself settled. The branches and leaves above me served their purpose in protecting me from the rain well enough for me to remain soaked and not to progress to drenched, not passing go and not collecting £200 - which was a bit of a pain because I could have done with the money. Vodkas don’t buy themselves. One tree looked to be not quite as knotty and knobbly as its neighbours so that's where I parked my behind. It wasn't exactly the most comfortable place I'd ever rested, but it would have to do. I contemplated removing my wet clothing, but without a radiator handy to dry them on I decided my own body heat was the nearest I'd get. Besides, I wasn't sure whether I'd be colder with them on or off, so I chose wet and clothed rather than cold and nude.
I looked at the forest around me. It was nice. Now nice is a word I don't like to use too much - thanks, pretty much, to my old English teacher. I remember he banned us from using it in essays once because it was so insipid and overused. This is nice, that's nice, they're nice, I'm nice, you're nice, mice are twice as nice. Using it in conjunction with other words was fine and double dandy, but on it's own, it wasn't nice at all. The forest, however, was nice. It was pleasant. Not insipid by any means, but restful. Even with the raindrops drumming along to their rock-steady-beat, peace seemed to reign beneath the blanket of leaves.
It was nice. Sorry Mr. Staniforth, but it was.
There weren't any birds whistling or whooping, but I did hear the odd scurry of a squirrel or rabbit hidden nearby. I didn't really know where they'd be hiding, as the ground between the trees was covered in a thick but neat carpet of grass, as if it had been a football pitch a couple of days ago and someone had accidentally dropped the trees here and hadn't got round to picking them up. But they scampered thither and to, keeping their distance from me and from the downpour beyond. I didn't mind them staying away from me. I wasn't in the mood for company, and trying to hold a conversation with a squirrel was something I was too tired to bother trying. They can be skittish creatures and tend to have a short attention span, so any chat is liable to dip and dive from subject to subject faster than I could make a banoffee pie disappear. Rabbits are different but just as hard to please. They simply look at you with blank faces, making it obvious that, no matter how riveting your conversation might be, they just wanted to know where you kept the carrots. I couldn't blame them. My stomach was starting to growl so a carrot or two, while not banoffee pie, would have been quite welcome.
I wondered if anything was happening anywhere else. By that I meant did the Grim Reaper owe me any thanks for chucking a few more shredded souls his way. I thought not. I'd know. I wondered if the boy in the car had been missed yet. Or had he been found. I wondered if I'd get some sleep. Then I slept.
Do you remember your dreams? I didn’t. Not very often anyway. Sometimes, if I woke in the early hours then drifted back off to sleep again, I'd have snatches of a dream still clinging to me when I awoke properly. Occasionally those snatches would be full episodes and I'd recall them for a few hours or so before they would fade. Usually, though, I didn’t. Sleep is a coma that only the insistent blaring of an alarm or the not too gentle shaking of a burly hospital orderly can rouse me from. And if I still retained glimpses from a dream, I rarely believed it to be my subconscious trying to communicate some hidden message to me. I'd like to, really. It would be good to have your brain ticking over problems while you're out for the count, supplying you with the answers in the form of little soap operas ready for when you wake up. I'd like the human brain to be capable of stuff like that. Perhaps it is, Who knows? In my case, though, it didn’t happen, or if it did, my subconscious kept the solutions to itself. Maybe my dilemmas were too much for me to handle and I didn’t realise it? Or maybe there aren't any actual solutions. My inner demons wouldn’t stay inner enough for me to resolve them. They had a habit of escaping every so often and people died. I always wished I could dream more - or at least remember them. That would mean that things were getting better. That would mean the Reaper was doing his own dirty work.
"Hey, Sin," said Joy.
* * * *
Chapter Four
I looked up. The trunk was obviously not as smooth as it had first appeared. Knots as big as fists were digging their knuckles into my back and no amount of squirming on my part could ease the discomfort. Even so, I didn't bother standing or moving away. I supposed I could have lain on the ground, but I knew I'd have felt exposed. With my back against the bark, as much as the bark tried to put me off, at least I felt I had some protection. Protection from what, I didn't know. I was fairly sure that, if I didn't know where I was then Dr. Connors and the rest of the 'sane' world wouldn't know either. That was unless they'd subcutaneously implanted a tracking chip somewhere on my body and satellites were currently spinning across the sky, homing in on my location so the hounds could come a-calling.
Oh my, wee doggy, what big teeth you have!
All the better to tear you limb from juicy limb!
"Always one for melodramatics, eh?" Joy commented. Her voice was like warm chocolate, velvety and smooth and, no doubt, high in calories.
"Oh," I said, smiling, "you know me. Why make a molehill out of a mountain?"
Joy was standing in front of me, looking much the same as the last time I'd seen her. Her hair was just past her shoulders, brown with blonde streaks that were not-so-fresh out of the bottle. Her eyes sparkled their usual green, smiling even when her mouth frowned. She seemed taller than I remembered, but then I was slouched against a tree that was doing its best to make sure I never stood straight again, and she was...
... She was dead.
"You're dead," I said, matter of factly.
"You're not looking so good yourself, mister," she said. "At least I can make a clean job of it, not like some I could mention."
I assumed, by that little comment, that she meant me. Joy had a habit of, where I'd make jokes, she'd make jibes. Usually it was all in good humour, just a different slice of the funny pie to the one I tended to munch, but I couldn't always tell if she was being serious or not. She looked fairly stern right at that moment.
"Hey," I defended, "I tried. It's not my fault I didn't end up where I wanted."
It sounded like I was sulking - a petulant child with my bottom lip dragging the floor. I knew Joy was only teasing, but I couldn't help it. Perhaps I was just pissed off with myself. Perhaps I was just pissed off with the world.
"Anyway," I said, picking my lip off the floor in case it got dirty. "You're dead. You don't have an opinion."
"Who are you to say what I can and can't have?" she huffed. "You're still, even after that mightily pathetic attempt to do otherwise, alive. You don't know the first thing about being dead, so I suggest you keep you’re opinions to yourself, thank you very much."
"Sorry," I said, dropping my lip again. I was angry enough at myself, not least because a seagull and boy were gone thanks to me. Having my own sister picking on me was a shiver past too much.
"Sin," she said, the melted chocolate back in her voice, "Get a sense of humour."
I looked up at her again. She winked and I realised what I should have known anyway - she was teasing.
"So," I said. "Death hasn't dulled your edge then?"
"Not a bit," she replied. She stepped to my side and sank down to the ground beside me. Her movements were as fluid as if she'd poured herself. I imagined the whole cast of the Royal Ballet performing Swan Lake, or some other famous ballet dancing show thing (I wasn't up on my classical dance) pirouetting through her body. Grace would have been an appropriate name for her, but then so would Sarcky Cow.
"Death," she continued, "isn't really as bad as it's made out to be. Granted I can't enjoy a Big Mac anymore, but at least I don't have to buy tampons either."
"What a lovely thought," I said. I would have assumed that being deceased would have more going for it, or against it, than the simple pleasures of fast food and periods. Not that I'd have thought a woman’s monthlies was exactly a pleasure, but you get the point. Not
that Big Macs and large fries are necessarily a pleasure either, for that matter.
"Indeed," said Joy. "Now do you want to get that lazy arse moving or are you going to stay moping here for the rest of your miserable life?" She poked me in the shoulder, quite sharply actually.
"Ouch," I complained.
"Sin, when did you become such a wuss? Has having that nice Dr. Connors looking after you all this time turned you into a big baby?"
I wouldn't have called Dr. Connors care 'looking after me', nor would I have called it 'care', but I didn't think I had to point that out to my sister. I'm sure I wasn't still the handsome hunk that had checked himself into the institute. Granted, I'm sure I wasn't a handsome hunk at all, but if I looked rough back then, I'd certainly be on the dark side of shabby now. Joy, on the other hand, was glowing. I don't mean in that aural angel kind of way, but rather in that healthy holiday in the sun three times a year, gym three times a week and cleanse three times a day kind of way. More radiant than... I don't know... a radiator. A white one. With a light shining on it. Or something.
"Death's been good for you," I commented, changing the subject. A weird thing to say, perhaps, but I was talking to my dead sister, so I figured it was ok.
"I wouldn't say that," she said. "I've a devil of a time trying to get my roots done."
So there I was. Unsuccessful at suicide, hiding in a forest, talking to the ghost of my suicide-successful sister. It had been a busy day. I'd escaped a mental home, killed a bird and a boy and I still had time to watch Eastenders and maybe grab a bite to eat. Chit-chat with Joy was pleasant and totally irrelevant. I was confused.
"This is a strange dream."
Joy smiled. The dimples in her cheeks made her look, as ever, like a mix of cute and sultry, carrying her smile up to her eyes.
"Who says you're dreaming?" she asked.
How did I know she was going to say that? I felt like I was in the middle of a horror movie, where I knew I shouldn't go down into the cellar - especially with the light not working - but I was going to go anyway.
