by Shaun Allan
The price of that something, that righted wrong, was enormous. Collateral damage was never acceptable, was it? Was it better for the family members of those who would have died at the hands of a terminal waster to mourn siblings or parents or children who had been murdered, or those who had died in an accident? Were the earthquake survivors better for receiving the world wide aid that came with a seemingly random natural disaster, or would they have preferred to be the nameless remnants of bomb and missile attacks from insurgents, possibly making one of the secondary headlines on the 24 hour news channels or page sixteen of a lesser read broadsheet? Did the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the multitude?
I couldn't answer. I couldn't do or say anything. I was frozen in the moment, rooted by the revelation. If the owner of the arm had come through the door right then, I was sure he would have taken me for a shop mannequin, one that he could move and dress and style, and all for only £99.99. I wasn't right, I wasn't wrong, I just was. Flip and catch went the toss of the coin. Heads or tails. Good or evil. Whichever I was, I couldn't help feel that a greater good was being served. Even down to the boy in the car in the trees.
I'd never had that before. The whole reason I had ventured into the grasp of Dr. Connors was because I felt I needed to stop myself somehow. I needed to numb the pain I felt when it happened, the pain of everything that had gone before revisiting me, saying 'Hi', taking my hand and ripping my heart out. Yes, I'd come to prevent it reoccurring but, being the honest man I tried to profess to be, I'd come here for more selfish reasons. I had admitted to myself into the insane asylum to keep myself sane. The jury, those good men and true of whom I’ve mentioned on occasion, were still debating on whether I'd succeeded.
It probably wasn't going to be a unanimous vote.
I wiped away the tears that drenched my face, not knowing where they'd come from. Had I cried? Was it Caroline? No, she was still unconscious. Anyway - in fact anywho-be-do - the moment had passed. Beautiful, to me, and profound, epiphany had returned to reality, passing the baton on so smoothly I barely noticed. I had changed. I was changed. Why then, why there? Why the moment had come at that moment I had no idea, but it had and I was no longer 'Sin-sin-sirree, there's no place for thee,' I was Sin. Not a superhero but... but good. Yes. I'd plead my case to that jury and I'd convince them. I wasn't a big bad wolf, ready to eat the little piggies.
But, Dr. Connors, I was going to blow your house down.
I pushed. The door opened smoothly and silently and I passed through the same way. I hoped that a plan might evolve, my mind making decisions whilst I was otherwise engaged, but it appeared that my mind was busy doing other things. Sudoku or something. I had no sense of what I might do next, but that was fine. I didn't have a bowl of Frosties to ponder over. I would take one step and follow it with another and see where they took me.
I couldn't take Caroline back to her room. I wanted to, to keep her out of harm's way, but it was too far. The risk of discovery grew with every second passed and with every step taken. I had to keep her with me. The injection had ensured that she was away making daisy chains with the fairies so I had no fears of her waking and causing a scene. He weight, though, seemed to be growing in direct proportion to the risk and I needed to get somewhere out of the way quickly.
For the first time in so long, if ever, I wished I had the coin with me. The two pence piece that had turned my life upside down, and me along with it, and which I'd tried so many times to rid myself of. I knew, now, that it wasn't the source of the things I could do, but I longed to feel its comforting footprint in my palm.
Oh well.
The corridor I was in now was dimly lit from bulbs hidden in the suspended ceiling. It cast my shadow in three directions at once and I was worried that, even if I wasn't seen, my grey-black partners would be. The corridor bent in either direction, curving away sharply. To the left were the rooms and padded cells that contained the patients - caged animals that were only allowed out at feeding or play times. The right curve led to the administration wing, a collection of store rooms, offices and treatment theatres. Right was right.
I might not have had a plan, but I did have a destination. The office of our illustrious leader. I wondered if there'd be an escape route from his office - a wardrobe with a secret passage at the back that led, if you stepped through, to the Seven Hills, our own version of Narnia. Chances were that it didn't. Joy had still not reappeared either, so she wasn't there to open a mystical portal for me to exit through. My own teleportation, on the other hand, didn't seem too far beyond my capabilities. Something had changed about me. The suspicion had begun with the bully in the street and his girlfriend. The rage built but I kept it on a leash, like a Rottweiler straining to attack a passing granny. In the nursery I had stopped Jersey from his desecration of Caroline and she had suffered, I hoped anyway, just a bloody nose in the back-draft. I didn't believe for one second I could control this, but I had an idea that it was no longer entirely uncontrolled.
I walked as quickly as I could, passing doors that I knew would be locked. Store Room 1. Store Room 2. Locker Room 1. Ladies Locker Room. Doors with similarly inventive names. I tested the locks on none of them. What would be the point? I only wanted one particular door and, before very long, that was the door I stood before.
Of course it was locked and, in lieu of a coin, I wished for a wand so I could cast a Potter-style spell. UNLOCKIARMUS! I didn't have a wand, obviously, because magic didn't really exist, did it? I didn't even have a toothpick to wave about. A splinter wouldn't have been any good either. Magic was the fantasy of those who wished for more than that which they had. The desire for a greater power than that which turned on the TV magically at the press of a button on a remote control. Did I believe? I think I could be classed, based on my life story, as a convert. At the least an agnostic. Who was to say, in a world of teleportation, death by thought and infra red controllers, that you really couldn't wish upon a star?
The door was locked and I had no way to get inside. I swore at myself and Caroline. I ignored my self-deprecation and she didn’t even hear it. Then I actually looked at the lock and had to stifle a laugh.
It was keypad entry. A combination lock with the numbers 0 to 9 and the letters A to D. A star, which was really an asterisk, and a hash were thrown in for good measure. It's strange how you can look at something once and see one thing, then look again and see something completely different. At first glance, with the weight of Caroline and the thrill of the chase rattling my heart in my head, this door was an impenetrable blockade, purely because of that locked lock. I hadn’t thought about the code when I’d come this way with Joy, and I realised that it was nothing more than a temporary barrier - a brief respite and a chance to take a breath.
I'd been here so often with the doctor, for 'informal interviews and chats', that I'd seen him unlock his office many times. Tap-tap, tap-tap. A monotone beep accompanied each finger press to avoid recognition of the numbers selected, but a good few times I had been in a direct line of sight to the keypad itself. Dr. Connors was a brain. He actually was. Though Barry Coombs might ally himself with my tormentor, he was easily outclassed. Connors was, genuinely, a brain. Very intelligent and clearly cunning. But he was also as arrogant as Coombs. He thought he knew it all. He thought, especially in his line of work, he had people sussed. The populace would assume, Dr. Connors being so clever, that his entry code would be something equally clever. It wouldn't be his date of birth. His wouldn't be his credit card PIN number. It wouldn't be the number of times he'd been kissed, which wouldn't reach four figures anyway. No, it would be something that no-one would think of. Something random and insightful. Which was why he chose none of those things.
I smiled, bizarrely under the circumstances, and pressed 1-2-3-4. There was a soft click and I let myself into the office.
* * * *
Chapter Twenty
There were no lights on inside but, luckily, my friendly neighbourhood gods were still smi
ling down on me and, on this side of the building, Sister Moon, looking big and looking blue, had joined the audience. There was getting to be a bit of a group up there and some enterprising person could make quite a packet with a refreshments stand, or one of those boxes you put round your neck that had Cornettos and hot dogs piled high for equally piled high prices. Maybe a burger van would pull up selling tea, coffee and muddy liquid that passed as hot chocolate to wash down the pseudo-meat cheeseburgers. The light of so many spectators reflecting off the certificates adorning the walls allowed me to move towards the desk with ease. I hesitated, forever, at the chair that faced it. The chair Jeremy had been in as he faced his interrogator and his killer. Choice, as was usual, was not my friend and I had to put Caroline down somewhere. I wasn't going to just dump her on the floor, so the chair it was. As I stepped towards it, I thought I could still smell Jeremy, but it could quite easily have been death. Or Death. Maybe they all used the same deodorant or eau de lavatory. I wondered if, like the bodaches of Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas books, my friends were hovering in the shadows waiting for what was to come, drooling in anticipation. Fate, her fickle finger raised ready to pick the nose of my life and wipe it on her dress. Mr. Grimm, the Reaper, with his scythe rocking back and forth in his hand like a pendulum counting the seconds down to my doom. Or were the shadows clear and I was in this all on my own?
As gently as I could, I lowered Caroline down. The seat had groaned under Jeremy’s weight, but she posed no threat to its stability. I hoped, by the end of all this, she didn't suffer the same fate as its previous resident.
First things always seemed to need to come first so, firstly, I needed to see. I had to take this chance to find out what Dr. Connors had done to me. And to see if I could use that to my advantage. As I sat at his desk I noticed something I hadn't seen before. Next to the perfectly ordered pencils was a new object. It was a clear cube of plastic or resin. Possibly even crystal. It was empty except for a single coin. A two pence piece. He'd turned it into a paperweight. I didn't know whether to laugh to be angry. It was laughable, but it also seemed a sacrilege. My coin was an object of such power. Not innately of course, as it could easily, I'm sure, have been a pound or a brick or a Big Mac. But it had woken me, the me inside that had been dormant for so long. The me that had so tempted and enticed Dr. Connors. To turn it into a desk ornament was... wrong.
I lifted it up and could practically feel the coin struggling to be free from its prison and return to my hands.
Sighing, I replaced the paperweight on the desk and moved my attention to the computer. I put my hand on the mouse and clicked. The monitor sprang into life, a taunting, teasing life. A 'you got this far, but you ain't getting no further' life. A rectangular dialog box. The username, Connors_H, already filled in and the cursor flashing beneath in the field that asked for Password.
This I hadn't seen before. This I had no idea of. I could try random words, his name again, the name of the dog he'd had as a boy (he'd called it Dog - it was less of a waste of thought apparently, even at ten years old) but I didn't know if it was three strikes and you're out. Three wrong turns and all the videos and documents would be lost to me forever. My hands hovered over the keyboard, wanting to press something - anything. I looked at the keys, hoping they'd leap out crying 'Press me! Press me!' I looked at the screen and the coin and even at Caroline for inspiration.
Caroline looked right back at me.
There was something odd about her face. Something unfocussed as if she were one of those 3D images, red and green pictures slightly offset that needed silly square glasses to fool the brain into seeing them jump from the page or screen. She was smiling at me, a blurred double smile that made her look like Batman's Joker, but a smile still. I wanted to rub my eyes. Perhaps tiredness or stress was affecting them. The trials and tribulations of sleeping in forests and killing in nurseries. I didn't though. My hands stayed where they were, hovering, waiting.
"Hey, Sin."
You'd think I'd be surprised. I, myself, would have thought I'd be surprised. I wasn't though. Not even slightly. I’d been immunised by a constant diet of big budget movies. And endless stream of Exorcist rip-offs or Grudge sequels. I didn't want to be showered in the projectile vomit of a demon possessed girl but, even with that, I wouldn't have been surprised. If it had just been me, my own talents, then yes, I'd be taken aback. Teleportation and a perverted sort of murder by decree were not normal, not by any means, but they were there. They were real. I couldn't deny the things I'd done even though they weren't rational, but they were real. Hollywood, in her many forms, had lured me from a young age, and she'd taken me in, and, in effect, numbed me to the magical. CGI could fold a world in on itself or turn a person blue. It could get you used to the idea of dead people talking through living. I wished Joy were here to explain this one. Not that she would.
"Hi, Jeremy," I replied.
"You're not surprised?" he asked.
I realised Caroline's mouth wasn't moving. Her eyes, on closer inspection, were still closed. She hadn't moved. If I'd laid her on the floor, Jeremy would still be sitting right where he was now. In the chair.
"No," I told him. "Not really."
"I am," he said. He didn’t sound sad, in fact he seemed chirpy, his smile genuine. "I didn't expect to wake up dead. Saying that, being dead, I didn't expect to wake up at all!"
"You should meet my sister," I said. It felt odd. I was talking to the ghost of my dead friend, whom I'd witnessed being killed. I'd mourned him, however briefly, and part of my current course of action was the avenging of his death. I wasn't sad. Right then, I wasn't angry either. I was chatting to my friend, and I was smiling myself.
"I have," he replied. "She said to tell you 'hi'."
Way to wipe the smile off my face.
"You've met Joy? She said 'hi'?"
"Well, I've met her, but she didn't say 'hi'. She didn't say much of anything really. She just mentioned that you might need a hand."
I might need a hand? Was the afterlife some kind of Grand Central Station with everyone milling around waiting for their train into the Great Beyond? Was the Hereafter a pub where the souls of the dead met up for cocktails or the odd pint, the walls resplendent with random photos and those branded towels they laid out to soak up the spills, the bar complete with a bust of Queen Victoria? I could ask but I wouldn't be answered, so I didn't bother.
"Oh?"
"Yes. She said you might need my help, so here I am. Somehow. You're different to the rest, Sin. You were a friend."
I was pleased he thought of me the same way I did of him.
"I am dead, aren't I?"
The question shocked me. How could you not know? You wouldn't be going to work. Jeremy Kyle wouldn't be on daytime television, sorting the lives of the normal people; you and me and the queen makes three. Whether you sat around on clouds or walked along streets of gold, it still wouldn't be the same as life, would it? Surely you didn't just pass over into a complete replica of how it was before you died, including gone off milk in the fridge, car crash TV and bowel evacuations. Surely, please, you didn't need to keep stocked up on the Andrex, did you?
I could answer his question though. I wasn't one of the greater dead (was there a lesser dead?) so I wasn't held by the same rules, the same forced obtuseness. I could never do those cryptic crosswords in the papers anyway. My mind didn't work in the weird directions that were required to work out nine across, ‘Man using mashie and spoon going round’. So I told him.
"Yes, my friend. You are dead. Connors did it."
"I thought so," he said. He still smiled, but the corners of his mouth, roughly overlapping Caroline's, dipped a little. "I thought I remembered being in here with him, but it's vague."
You should see your face, I thought.
"He was very interested in you, wasn't he? I read your file. Even tossed the coin. Was it all real? At one time I'd have said it was rubbish. The Institute was the right place for you. But you always seemed s
o... sane." He laughed. "It's hard to deny anything now, seeing as I'm sitting here talking to you!"
I could have told him no. I'm a patient in an insane asylum. I was rambling, of course. How could it be real?
"Yes," I said. "It was. It is."
"Well, Sin. You need to stop him. He's not a good man. Not at all."
So true.
"I will," I told him. "I just need to get on here. Connors used me, and I would guess he found out things about me. I need to find them out too."
"You need to find out about yourself?"
"I do, yes."
"Well you need the password then."
"I do," I said. "Yes..."
"I know it," Jeremy said, his smile back to full radiance. "I don't know really how, but I do know it. It's capital P, a, s, s..."
"... w, o, r, d?"
"That's it."
Typical. As obviously random as his office code number. The arrogance of genius. Tappity-tap-tap and Enter. The screen changed. I expected a bespoke window greeting me, one with multiple menus and commands that I'd have to navigate before I found what I was looking for. I was wrong. A simple, light blue background with standard icons along the left hand side and the word 'Start' at the bottom. Excellent. Windows, folders and files. Just how I liked it.
"Thanks, Jezzer. I appreciate that."
"I'd say anytime, Sin," he laughed. "But I don't think it's that simple."
I had no idea how simple it was. My sister had appeared, disappeared, reappeared and abandoned... I mean disappeared again. That could have been choice, order or just 'cos. I didn't, and probably at no time would, know.
"Probably not, mate, but I appreciate it anyway."
"I know, Sin. I know. Anyway," he paused, his head cocked to the side, making him look like a wardrobe malfunction from the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. They say two heads are better than one, but I doubted they meant when one was a ghost and the other asleep. "I think I have to go."
