Seeing the Wires

by Patrick Thompson

  A dog barked somewhere. I’d noticed that a dog always barked somewhere at this time of night. The railway lines passed through a deep entrenchment. I wondered who’d put it there. Who’d have a job like digging trenches? I was heading for better things. We passed through a short tunnel. We hadn’t got a torch. The first time, we’d been worried about the tunnel. It was less than a hundred yards long, and dead straight. You could see light at the other end, unless you were going through it at night. Then it was very dark and quite frightening.

  I’d decided we couldn’t take a torch. It would be too obvious. It’d be visible for miles. The castle overlooked the railway lines. We didn’t want a rival gang of satanists or cultists getting involved.

  In the tunnel, it was darker and colder. The wind blew straight through. Most of the railway sleepers had gone, and the ones that were left tripped you.

  ‘Bollocks,’ Jack said. ‘Dropped the bastard.’

  He fumbled about in the dark. Something scuttled towards us and stopped. Jack found the sack and we went on. The railway lines led into a wide area of open sand bounded by black trees. The sand was of the wrong consistency. It was loose on the top and difficult to walk in. It was packed solid and soaking wet underneath and it was difficult to bury things in. The railway tracks led halfway across it and then stopped, next to nothing. Perhaps there had been buildings here at one time. Perhaps there once was a pork scratchings factory, full of pigs with eczema. We stood at the end of the line. There were some sticks by the end of the rails, which we’d left there previously. They were three feet long and solid. They weren’t much use for digging. We used them for digging.

  After the first burial, Jack had wanted to bring a shovel. ‘Why not take a spade? I mean we’re digging holes.’

  ‘We can’t carry a spade. What if we got caught with it? What would we tell people it was for?’

  He wiped his hands on his jeans, which didn’t make anything cleaner. ‘What if we get caught with a bag of fingers? “Sorry officer, they’re spares. I like to carry some with me in case I lose one.”’

  He held out his arms, hands close together.

  ‘That’s a point,’ I admitted.

  ‘A point? If we were caught carrying a spade we could say, been gardening. Been to work on the building site. Leant it to a mate and I’m taking it home. What’s this constable going to think? Oh yes, carrying a spade, must have been out burying bodies? Course he fucking isn’t.’

  ‘It’s written. We take nothing with us. We use what we find.’

  ‘Oh well, fair enough. It is fucking written. Where is it written?’

  ‘On the parchment.’

  ‘And can I see this parchment?’

  ‘You’ll see it when the time is right.’

  ‘Oh good. I was worried about that. Because I wouldn’t want to see it when the time was wrong … Is that a dog?’

  ‘Shadow.’

  ‘Looks like a dog.’

  ‘It’s a dog’s shadow, then. A dog left it here. Happier now?’

  ‘Oh yeah, fucking delighted. Ghost dogs on the railway tracks.’

  ‘I think Andrew Eldritch has that line under copyright.’

  ‘Yeah, well he can fuck off.’ Jack picked up a stick and began to dig with it. I took a stick and joined him. The shadow edged closer. Jack was right. It was a small dog, dark brown and fat. It eyed the sack Jack had put on the floor.

  ‘Here, fetch,’ said Jack, throwing his stick. The dog ran after it. ‘There’s a good shadow. Always nice to see an obedient shadow. Some of them are right buggers.’

  ‘You were right,’ I said, ‘it was a dog. I admit it. No need to gloat.’

  ‘I’m not doing it because I need to. I do it because I like it.’

  ‘You do it because you rarely get the chance.’

  The dog returned, dragging the stick. It looked at the sack and sidled closer.

  ‘Who wants a bone then?’ asked Jack. ‘Who wants a little finger bone? Well, you can’t. These bones have to be buried. It is written.’

  I kicked the dog. It yipped and ran off.

  ‘Nice one,’ said Jack.

  ‘You could have kicked me. I was the one pissing you off.’

  Sometimes he’s almost perceptive. To prove it, I kicked him.

  II

  I showed him the parchment a week later, in his bedroom. His mother was in the bathroom, singing. Among other things. I didn’t want to think about Jack’s mother in the bath or anywhere else. It wasn’t that she was ugly or fat. She was, but that wasn’t it. She was his mother.

  ‘Sit on the bed. And turn the light down.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s an old parchment. It’s been in the dark a long time.’

  ‘I know how it feels. Will I be able to touch it?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s valuable. It’s a scrap of the past. Now, sit still.’

  I let him see the wallet the parchment stays in. I opened it so that he could see the folded parchment in its plastic cover.

  ‘Oh, wow,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘Woo. It’s a piece of paper, folded up. It could be a page from the Herald. We’re murdering people because of that, are we?’

  ‘It’s a parchment,’ I told him. ‘It tells us what must be done. And we aren’t murdering people. We are converting them into a different type of energy. We are using their underlying potential.’

  ‘Oh excellent, we’re doing them some good. I’ll have to remember that when we’re in court.’

  ‘We’re going to live very long lives if we get this right.’

  I wasn’t sure about that. I knew what the ritual was for, but I wasn’t sure if it would work on both of us. Perhaps it’d affect someone else altogether. That’s the trouble with magic. It’s about as reliable as a builder’s estimate.

  ‘Terrific. What are we going to do?’ Jack said. ‘What’s the procedure for living a very long time? Do we have to pretend to be our own children so that people don’t get suspicious? Do we have to get the opposite of Grecian 2000 and make ourselves go grey? Do we have to give our houses to ourselves every fifty years? It’s going to be tricky.’

  ‘Granted, dying would be easier. But it’s not often thought of as the best option.’

  ‘No, it’s usually thought of as the only option.’

  ‘Yes, well this time it isn’t.’

  He watched me put the parchment in my pocket. There was a silence. We’d started to have silences. We were spending a lot of time together, mostly in the dark. We were at the far end of adolescence. I wondered whether Jack was a virgin. I presumed he was. In Dudley there are girls who’ll shag anything for a bag of chips and a kind word, and they aren’t too fussy about the kind word. That wouldn’t do it for Jack. He’d want a big romance, I thought. We sat on the bed. I wondered what he was thinking about. He’d had his eyes on me while I was putting the parchment away. He’d watched my legs. I was wondering what he was thinking.

  I didn’t want him getting fixated on me. He needed to find a girlfriend. Perhaps I could persuade someone.

  If he’d just get the hang of soap it’d help.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Jack, looking at the floor. His floor was covered with piles of magazines – a collection made up of ones about motorbikes, airguns, and a stack of those magazines for men that men buy in case there’s some real porn inside – and assorted dead clothes.

  Jack’s mother isn’t big on tidying. She understands what the word means, but she doesn’t know how to apply it to the world. Jack’s father isn’t the father he used to have. His first father left with someone else, as they do. The latest father has a motorbike and no road sense. Jack will outlive him even if the ritual doesn’t work. Jack had lived alone with his mother for a long time. They’d reverted to her maiden name, Ives. When Jack hit adolescence she started dating. Carbon dating, to judge by her looks. She didn’t marry the new fathers. She just got drunk with them for a few weeks and then cried when they failed to stay.

  I t
ried to time my visits to avoid those stages of her relationships. It wasn’t easy. They were the longest and loudest stages. In some of the relationships, they were the only stages.

  I wondered about Jack. He’d lived alone with his mother for many years. There hadn’t been a father figure. Statistically, he was likely to display feminine traits. Statistically, he was likely to develop strange fixations.

  I didn’t think he was developing feminine traits. His bedroom looked anything but feminine. A woman would have cleaned it, or thrown in lit matches and hoped for the best.

  Strange fixations were another matter. I moved slightly away from him. I didn’t want my apprentice getting a crush on me. There’s this idea that crushes stop when adolescence does, and it isn’t the case. It’s just that you can put them in context. You’ve been there before and you know the way through. Jack put his feet on the bed.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him.

  ‘There’s something down there,’ he said. ‘I saw something.’

  ‘What, a patch of clean floor? Perhaps you could move some old socks there. If they aren’t moving by themselves.’

  ‘Something is moving by itself.’

  ‘Oh?’ I looked down. There was nothing there that I could see, but then there could have been anything hiding amid the debris.

  ‘There,’ said Jack. Something scuttled under a magazine. I didn’t see it clearly, but it looked too big to be an insect and too small to be anything else.

  It had a lot of legs. It looked like the woodlouse I’d raised from the dead. I put my legs on the bed. I wasn’t keen on insects.

  ‘It’s that thing,’ Jack said. ‘The one you killed then brought back. It’s followed us.’

  ‘It was a woodlouse, not a homing pigeon. Keep things in perspective, Jack. This is a different thing.’

  ‘So how come you’ve got your feet on the furniture?’

  ‘I know it’s a different thing. I don’t know whether it’s a friendly different thing or not. It might sting or something.’

  I tried to spot the insect. Given its size, it was good at hiding.

  ‘If you had a clean floor we might be able to see it,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want to see it,’ said Jack. ‘I’ve seen enough of it. If there are parts of it I haven’t seen that’s fine with me. What’s it here for?’

  ‘Perhaps it wants to read about airguns.’

  ‘It’s probably looking for you, mate. You’re the one that resurrects woodlice. It probably wants you to put it in touch with its mother.’

  ‘I’ll put it in touch with its maker if I catch it.’

  The insect emerged from under a discarded shirt several feet from where we’d last seen it. It looked to be part woodlouse and part cockroach. It had a touch of something else about it. Rottweiler, maybe.

  It had mossy growths growing on its carapace and seemed less symmetrical than most insects. I couldn’t count its legs. It waved long antennae in the air then moved towards us.

  Jack hadn’t spotted it.

  ‘It’s down here,’ I told him. ‘It’s coming this way.’

  He looked at the insect.

  ‘You’ve given us a plague of insects,’ he said. ‘Nice one.’

  ‘What do you mean, a plague? There’s only one.’

  ‘How many do you want? One is enough. It’s a plague of fucking beetle and it’s your fault, so you sort it out.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Tread on it.’

  ‘These are new shoes.’

  ‘All the better, they’ll still be solid. Go on, flatten the fucker.’

  Jack had backed to the wall. The insect was heading directly for the bed, or as directly as it could with all the junk on the floor. It stopped to examine an abandoned plate and then moved on. It reached the point where it would have been under the bed if it kept crawling. It stopped.

  It chittered.

  ‘Oh fuck, it’s that thing,’ said Jack. ‘I fucking knew it. You’ve brought it back from the dead and now it’s after us.’

  ‘It’s about an inch long, how bad can it be?’

  The magazine the insect had first vanished under caught my eye. There was something wrong with the cover. There were insects on it. Several of them. Big ones. They looked similar to the one that was standing by the bed.

  ‘How many offspring do woodlice have?’ I asked.

  ‘Why?’ asked Jack. He hadn’t seen yet.

  ‘Idle speculation,’ I said. I thought about the woodlouse I’d resurrected. Sometimes woodlice had eggs gathered under their shells. They carried them about until they hatched, like good parents. I hadn’t checked the underside of the sacrificial woodlouse. It hadn’t seemed important at the time.

  I wondered whether I might have caused some collateral damage.

  A large faded poster of Raquel Welch wearing what looked like the skins of two small rabbits was on the far wall. It was moving. Thin feelers felt the air around it. Flat leggy bodies emerged from behind it.

  ‘Jack?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How many insects does it take to make a plague of insects?’

  ‘One. I’ve told you that.’

  ‘Right. In that case we’ve got plagues of insects. There are more of them.’

  ‘More than what?’

  ‘More than ten. They’re all over that wall.’

  Jack looked. ‘Oh fuck,’ he said. He turned pale and hauled his legs close to his body. He looked at the ceiling. I looked up too. There was nothing up there.

  The one that was looking up at the bed chittered. Answering chitters came from various places around the room. The insects that had crawled from behind the poster dropped to the floor one by one.

  ‘They can’t climb very well,’ I said. ‘Their legs are all wrong. They can’t get up here.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Jack. ‘Excellent news. We can stay on the bed. They get the rest of the room. Nice one. The first time you get something to work, it fucks my room up.’

  ‘We’re safe up here,’ I said. ‘We can flatten them one at a time. It’s not a problem.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t be. It’s not your room.’

  ‘We can deal with them,’ I told him. I took off a shoe and tested it for weight. It felt solid. I looked at the first insect. It seemed to be looking back at me, but it was difficult to tell. It had compound eyes and it seemed to be looking everywhere.

  ‘Let’s see how solid they are,’ I said, leaning over. I raised the shoe.

  A crack appeared along the back of the insect. Its carapace split into two and opened. It emitted a nasty little noise and unfurled a pair of transparent, veined wings.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ I said, and flattened it with the shoe. I raised the shoe.

  It wasn’t going to be chittering again, that was for sure. It had turned into a greenish paste.

  A low sound came from all around the room. It didn’t sound very cheerful. I’d never heard angry insects before. Now I could hear a lot of them all at once.

  That’s the trouble with magic. It can make angry insects.

  The sound rose around us.

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ asked Jack.

  ‘I think they’re upset.’

  The sound stopped. The insects stopped moving. I saw the carapaces of two split and open. I watched them unfurl their wings.

  ‘Upset?’ asked Jack. ‘You’re sure they can’t get up here?’

  A buzzing filled the room. It sounded like hornets. A pioneering insect left the floor, held up by a blur of whirring wings.

  ‘Not absolutely sure,’ I said, priming my shoe. ‘Not one hundred per cent sure.’

  Another couple of insects flew from the floor. They were no steadier in the air than they had been on their legs. I knew that woodlice couldn’t fly.

  The last of them rose from the floor. There seemed to be a lot of them hanging in the air between us and the door. They looked large and numerous. Perhaps they’d been eating old socks.

  A c
hittering joined the humming. It rose to a peak.

  I wondered why Jack wasn’t complaining. I risked a quick look away from the insects. Jack was huddled on the bed, arms around his legs. He had the thousand-yard stare of a combat veteran.

  The chittering stopped. I looked back at the insects and saw them just before they landed on us.

  Jack let out a girlish screech and flew from the bed. I dropped my shoe. I felt something slide down my collar. I hauled off my top.

  A series of sharp pains let me know that the insects were unfriendly. They’d invaded my clothes. I couldn’t even see them. I undid my belt and removed my trousers. I threw them to the floor and jumped on them. Anything still in there wasn’t getting out in one piece. I watched Jack doing the same thing, dragging his clothes off and dancing on them, stamping the life out of whatever was in there.

  His underwear was dirtier than I’d imagined.

  The bedroom door opened. The chittering and buzzing stopped. Jack’s mother entered the room, wearing a towel and a grim expression. She looked at us.

  ‘What have you two been doing?’ she asked. ‘It sounded like there was an orgy going on.’

  She looked at us again. It struck me that most of our clothes were on the floor. Jack was only wearing his underpants. I wasn’t wearing much more than that myself.

  I had cleaner pants, but I didn’t think that was going to count in my favour.

  ‘There were insects,’ Jack said. ‘All over us.’

  There was no sign of the insects. I found my shoe and picked it up. A mess of greenish fluid and cracked chitin covered half of the sole. I showed it to Jack’s mother. She looked at it.

  ‘Insects?’ she asked. I nodded.

  ‘Big ones,’ said Jack. ‘Foreign ones. Mexican cockroaches. I’ve read about them. That’s what it was.’

  ‘Mexican cockroaches? Spanish fly, more like,’ said his mother. She gave us a look of disgust and closed the bedroom door.

  III

  That’s the trouble with magic. Unexpected things happen.

  Sometimes you need to change plans unexpectedly. It’s a cutthroat business. You have to be ready to adapt.