Existence is Elsewhen

by John Gribbin

  “Look at that!” Sophie pointed to the screen where Robert James had once been. Replacing him were clips of police cornering a young man, taken from somebody’s camera phone. The quality was slightly hazy and voices were muffled but Sophie could still make out what was happening. A young man had been trapped in a corner of an alley.

  Or what used to be a young man.

  Sophie felt her top lip curl up at the sight of him… it? The man was crouching next to some wheelie bins, a stance that was petrified and defensive. As the camera zoomed in, Sophie could see his fingers were flexed and that was the first sign of abnormality that told her this wasn’t just some idiot criminal being chased down by the police.

  His nails were long, curved and pointed. Sharp, needle-like tips that looked ready to slit open somebody’s throat. He only had four fingers on each hand, swollen at the tips and held up to show the palms which looked lumpy and padded.

  Like paws, Sophie thought. Are they actually…?

  “Bloody hell. That ain’t right,” Eloise said, her nose wrinkling up.

  As the camera zoomed in further, most of the man’s face was covered in grey fur and Sophie could see the glaring yellow-green hue of his eyes and the pupils that had turned into black slits. When the man pulled his lips up he revealed thin, delicate fangs. His jaw opened wide and a short hiss followed before he started to yowl. A yowl that reminded Sophie of her cat at home, who would make that exact sound if he saw another feline in his territory. Low and sounding like a long ‘noooooooooo’.

  Hearing that sound coming from a human sent chills down Sophie’s spine.

  “Has he gone through surgery to look like that?” Eloise wondered aloud.

  “I dunno,” Sophie mumbled. She took another sip of her beer, making her head continue to tingle and buzz. She sat back in her chair, drooping as her mind turned fuzzy and she struggled to make her thoughts clear.

  Robert James came back on to the television.

  “You cannot deny this. There are cases around the world. These are not surgically enhanced people. There is no Doctor Moreau-style plastic surgery trend. People are actually turning into animals.”

  The sight of that man-cat-thing had turned her skin cold. Something was definitely not right, but the words that poured out of Robert James sounded utterly ridiculous. Sophie found herself laughing. Whether she actually found it hysterical or was responding nervously, she wasn’t sure. But it had to be nonsense. People couldn’t turn into animals.

  She giggled again and, when her friends turned to her, she pointed at the television.

  “People are turning into animals,” she said, then chuckled.

  Maddie was the only one in their group who wasn’t laughing with her. She glanced up at the television report and bit her lower lip.

  “Don’t you think it’s weird?” she asked. “There are so many cases of people turning violent and feral.”

  “Yeah. It’s London,” Eloise said, smirking.

  “No. This is all over. Do you remember those mermaid carcasses they found on a beach in Norway last month?”

  Their only male friend, Jay, sighed and set his drink down. “Maddie, seriously? It was all a hoax.”

  “Or what if people had actually turned into human-fish hybrid things?” she asked them.

  A silence dropped around their table. Awkward glances shared between Sophie and Eloise before Jay was the first to break by snorting into his drink. He reached over to pat Maddie on the head. Three, slow pats before she batted his hand away with a snarl. Sophie nearly spat out her mouthful of beer all over the table. Maddie had actually bared her teeth and growled at Jay.

  “Did you just snarl at him?” she asked, cackling loudly with laughter.

  “She’s one of them!” Eloise shrieked, standing up and pointing at her friend.

  Maddie scowled but shrank further into her seat as people turned to stare at the commotion. “Sod off,” she muttered.

  “You haven’t been sprouting a tail lately?” Sophie asked with a grin on her face.

  Her friend huffed through her nose. “You’re all bell-ends.”

  “I always saw you as an ickle Yorkshire terrier. All yappy and trying to be fierce but you’re really just amusing and cute,” Jay said.

  “And, again, you’re a bell-end. If you all don’t want to believe me then fine. Don’t. But it’s happening right under our noses and we’re all too stupid or blind to see it. People are changing into these beast folk because we act like it. It’s devolution.”

  Maddie gestured to the glasses on the table. “This is one of the keys to the change starting.”

  Jay gawped at Sophie and Eloise. “Uh-oh. And this is my fourth drink.” He snorted, lifting three fingers up and took another swig of his beer. Beside him, Maddie shook her head and sighed.

  “The decadent life is the key to the devolution of the human race,” she said. “As we give in to animalistic instincts of alcohol, drugs, sex and violence, we start the degeneration in ourselves.”

  “You sound like that Robert James wanker,” Sophie said.

  Maddie rolled her eyes, her nostrils flared, and Sophie noticed she had begun to drum her fingers against the table. Sophie imagined steam pouring out of her friend’s ears in a cartoon-style rage that she was so close to falling into. Sophie bit her lip to stop herself giggling at the image. Maddie was seconds away from flipping out and she didn’t want to be the final straw in her growing fury.

  Maddie clicked her tongue and grabbed her bag.

  “I’ve seen it,” she said. “My neighbour. I was coming back from work and he ran past me on the stairs. You should have seen him, it wasn’t normal! He had all these fangs and there was blood on his face. And he had these ridged looking scales.” She shuddered. “That and the greenish skin, he looked like a crocodile. When I got to my floor his door was open and his girlfriend had been eaten. He’d done that. Can you explain that?”

  “Freak had surgery. And he’s also a psychotic cannibal,” Jay said.

  “Is everyone having surgery these days? You really think this is just a sick trend? He looked completely human that morning.”

  Again, silence had fallen around their table as Maddie stared at every one of them for more answers, more sarcastic comebacks or jokes. Sophie glanced at Eloise and Jay who sat back, lips pressed tightly shut.

  After a few seconds, he stood up. “I need a fag,” he muttered and headed straight for the exit.

  “I need the bathroom,” Sophie said, standing. She swayed, almost tripping over her own feet. Her hands gripped the back of her chair as she tried to balance herself but the room had started to spin now that she was on her feet. Her body felt light, head buzzing and there was now a loud ringing in her ears.

  She stumbled through the crowds, trying to walk carefully around people. Yet she still found herself leaning left and right as she staggered, hearing a cry of protest and swearing. What she thought was graceful dodging was actually violent pushing. She created a path through the groups, using her body to crash into strangers and shove them aside, not realising what she was doing until she saw the scowling face of an angry man leering down at her.

  “Drunk bitch,” he snarled.

  Sophie flipped her middle finger, ignoring the shocked gasps she got in response. A bit of a dramatic reaction considering the language she could have chosen to use. If they had been horrified by a finger, those words would have sent them into a coma.

  “Don’t be so fucking old-fashioned,” she slurred as she trudged away.

  She used both her hands to push the bathroom door open, tumbling forward and falling into a girl who was walking out at the same time.

  “The fuck?” the girl growled, knocking Sophie in the shoulder as she passed. Swaying, Sophie frowned. She was convinced that girl had snarled when she stumbled into her. A real, rumbling snarl.

  And she was sure she had seen a glacial colour to the girl’s eyes. The bright colour of blue ice. It was an eye colour she had never seen
on anyone before, only ever in a husky.

  An animal.

  Don’t start, she thought to herself, chuckling as she made her way to the sink. Maddie was welcome to be the paranoid one. The friend who believed in conspiracies and theories of the doomed future of humanity. That wasn’t Sophie and she scoffed to herself, shaking her head over Maddie’s idiotic belief in these rumours. Rumours that only belonged in the pages of a Gothic novel. Completely fictional. Nothing like The Island of Doctor Moreau or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde could ever happen in real life.

  She touched her arms and neck with cold water, sighing at the temporary cool down it gave her. She cupped her hands, letting the water fill up in her palms before she splashed it against her neck. Her skin felt hot to the touch. She was burning up again, feeling sweat gather quickly on her forehead and on the back of her neck.

  Yeah. I’ve caught a bug, she thought.

  She sighed as she tapped the water against her neck, gazing at her reflection to check the state of her make-up. Mascara gloop and her eyeliner had gathered in the corners of her eyes and had become messy, black sludge. She peered closer at her reflection, using a finger to gently wipe away the gunk of her make-up. Her nose was almost touching the mirror as she prodded at the corner of her eyes.

  A glimmer of amber flickered in her iris.

  She jumped back, blinking furiously. Her reflection looked stunned, eyes widened and lips parted to gawp at herself.

  “No,” she muttered, peering closer again.

  No. Nothing. Nothing was wrong. Her eyes looked back at her, brown and almond shape. Completely normal. It must have been the light.

  She laughed. Giggling over her brief panic but that laughter faded. She had noticed something else now.

  Her long, black hair had been hiding most of her neck but she could see the start of her collarbone after she had flipped her hair back over her shoulders. The skin looked raised.

  And green?

  Sophie held her head up, tilting to the left so she could catch the light to see her neck better. With her free hand, she stretched the skin, pulling and tugging to examine the strange discolouration and texture she had developed suddenly. Her finger brushed against the lumpy skin and the heat of the pub no longer bothered her. Her heart felt like it was ready to leap out of her mouth. Or burst out of her chest since it was beating that frantically. Her body felt dipped in ice.

  The lump was smooth to touch.

  And it wasn’t a lump.

  She bit her lip, trying to fight against the whimpering and sobs she needed to make. She wanted to close her eyes and turn away but her body, her eyes, were fixed on the reflection in front of her. All she could do was shake and stare at those things. Those horrible, green things that were appearing, even as she watched. The skin shifted, turning green at first before rising up, forming a pattern she had seen on her aunt’s python. When she lifted her left hand, she knew what the customers had been gasping at. The patterns were forming at a rapid pace across the back of her hand and neck, the green quickly becoming more and more luminous.

  Scales.

  She was developing scales.

  The Writer Did It!

  by

  Ira Nayman

  In his past lives, Ira Nayman was, among other things: a cave painter whose art was not appreciated in his lifetime; several nameless peasants who died before their 20th birthday during the Dark Ages; a toenail fungus specialist in the court of Louis XIV; and Alan Turing’s scullery maid.

  In his current incarnation, Ira is the creator of Les Pages aux Folles, a Web site of political and social satire that is over 10 years old (that’s positively Paleolithic in Internet years!). Five collections of Alternate Reality News Service (ARNS) stories which originally appeared on the Web site have been self-published in print. Ira has produced the pilot for a radio series based on stories from the first two ARNS books; “The Weight of Information, Episode One” can be heard on YouTube.

  Ira has also written a series of stories that take place in a universe where matter at all levels of organization has become conscious. They feature Antonio Van der Whall, object psychologist.

  Ira’s Web Goddess tells him he should make more of the fact that he won the 2010 Jonathan Swift Satire Writing Contest. So, Ira won the 2010 Jonathan Swift Satire Writing Contest. In another life (but still within this incarnation) Ira has a Masters degree in Media Studies from The New School for Social Research which was conducted entirely online. He also has a PhD in Communications from McGill University. Ira taught New Media part-time at Ryerson University for five years.

  Whoever created the Karmic wheel has a lot to answer for...

  “Wuhl holy jumpin’ cats, then!” Missy Mulholland, The Shootin’ Sweetheart of Sandler’s Gulch, exclaimed, “No offense meant.” Missy looked at the six foot tall orange and grey tabby in the gold brocade bathrobe sitting at the desk to her left; it waved a paw and purred genially, as if to say, “None taken.” Relieved, Missy continued: “If ah was of a mind ta kill someone, I’d do it the proper way: shootin’ ’em in the back with mah sixshooters! Kin you see me killin’ anybody by stuffin’ a big ol’ carp down their throat? ’Tain’t mah style!”

  I had to admit, Missy made a good point. And to be honest, I was hoping that she wasn’t the murderer. She was small, with rough features and tangled blonde hair – my Bubbe would have asked me what I was thinking, falling for a shiksa from out west, but these were different times. Better times. Times when strong women were –

  “I would imagine that changing one’s modus operandi would be a way of diverting suspicion away from oneself,” intoned Rich Uncle Moneybags, who sat on her other side. He was so short he was the only person in the room who was completely at ease sitting in the small desk/chair combinations that were available to everybody; in fact, there were times when I could have sworn the thick stogie he was constantly puffing away on was bigger then he was! The man seemed made up entirely of circles, but he looked smart in a tuxedo, top hat and monocle. Smart if you discount the fact that Rich Uncle Moneybags’ white moustache looked like he had mugged a mop, I mean.

  Missy was offended. “You take that back about my modest oper…brandy, mister, or we’ll be exchangin’ more’n words!” Her frilled arms slowly inched towards her gunbelt.

  The Samurai standing behind her (Samurai don’t sit. It’s a thing with them – don’t ask) grunted and spoke sixteenth century Japanese. Fortunately, I had done some work in the part of Anytown where…those people lived, and I had picked up enough Subtitlese to be able to follow what he was saying. The gist was that a true warrior does not disguise his actions in order to evade detection. A true warrior is proud of the work he does. Every second sentence out of Feng Chi’s mouth had something to do with true warriors. My shrink, Melinda Gottlieb, would have said that he was compensating for something. I don’t generally argue with people in shiny black body armour who carry swords that are almost as big as I am, though, so I saved the thought for my next session.

  I raised a hand to stop the discussion. “Oy, why do you people want to give me such tsuris? Nobody is going to be killed, here,” I commanded. “I asked you to come tonight because you’re all suspects in the murder of Desmond Concannen, gentleman inventor.” I could physically describe the dead man, but I hadn’t heard of him before his estate had asked me to investigate his murder, and when you’ve seen one urn full of ashes… To be honest, I had been on the case for several days and, although I had many suspects, I had run out of leads; a good friend of mine, Hercule Marple, had suggested I gather the suspects together in one room and shake them up to see what came loose. Did I have a better idea? Naah. So, I went with that. “Nobody murders anybody when you’ve gathered all the suspects in one room! It just don’t work that way!”

  “Well, thank goodness for that,” said Jules Flippe-Flappy, the beanpole of a man with a long face and oversized ears, who sat on the far left of the group of suspects facing me. Ain’t no easy way to say thi
s, so I’ll just come out with it, already: Flippe-Flappy was black. And white. He had no colour at all. “Because…Death. Death. Death./Nobody wants to smell your stinking breath/On the backs of their necks./Especially when they’re having –”

  Oh, yeah. And he frequently broke into song for no apparent reason. He was good, I’ll give him that: you could practically hear the orchestra playing behind him. Still. I held up a hand – I must have been a children’s crossing guard in another life – and he immediately stopped.

  Mister Giggles, the alien cat thing, purred and looked languidly at Missy. We all understood this to mean, “Well, you do have a strong motive for killing Mister Concannen. After all, he knocked up your sister and then abandoned her.” Everybody in the room got the sense that Mister Giggles couldn’t see why such an action would be a bad thing and thought Missy was overreacting.

  “I ain’t the only one,” Missy sneered. “That dang gentleman inventor done invented hisself a gizmo that made it possible to travel to distant planets. Seems ta me your planet was one of the ones we done made it to, Mister Giggles. Only, we killed alla you cat people – yer the only one whut done survived. I imagine that’s a right powerful motive to kill a man.”

  Mister Giggles waved a paw in her direction and made a low growling noise in the back of his throat, causing the table to gently vibrate. “Did that happen over four hours ago? Honestly, I can’t be bothered to purrsue anything that happened more than four hours ago!”

  Feng Chi grunted. Twice. Then, he pounded his open hand with his fist for emphasis. Then, he grunted again. He either said, “The true warrior does not allow the destruction of his civilization to go unavenged!” or “The duck charger screams out to be sacrificed at Stonehenge!” Gimme a break, here: my Subtitlese is a bit rusty, and he spoke fast. Real fast. If I had to guess, though, I would say it was the first one.

  The cat creature licked one of its paws and slicked back the fur on the top of its head. Then, it languidly purred: “I wouldn’t be so quick with accusations, if I were you. Or, have you forgotten the Electric Samurai?” I don’t mean Mister Giggles spoke in English with a purring voice. I mean: he purred and we understood what he meant. I don’t know, it must have something to do with pheromones or something.