625 - I didn’t know anyone who used it but I’d seen enough documentaries to know what it looked like. It wasn’t illegal, few population limiters are these days, but it wasn’t exactly socially acceptable either. Again, few population limiters are. even if 625 doesn’t kill you, they say long term use is like having a food mixer stuck in the brain. I was starting to see how that analogy had come about.
“How long’ve you been on that stuff?” I asked. It was, of course, highly illegal. Like I cared.
“Been on something most of my life,” she said, shrugging. “Gets me through. Cures the fuck.”
“The what?”
“The fuck. The mindfuck. This…” She gestured around the whole room. At the piles of papers and boxes, the pictures, the TVs. All of it. “It does my head in.”
“So why bother with it?” I asked. “This was your dad’s thing and it is what it is, with or without you. Bin it. Walk away.”
She laughed. “Walk away? Are you serious?” She shook her head. “When my dad came for me I was twenty-five and I’d been on smack for over three years. He got me off it. I love him for that. Then, when they killed him, I had to go round his place and pick up his stuff. Most of it’s here.”
She looked sad, remembering. “So you, y’know, you pick up a page to see what it is. What it says. And you put it down again. But your brain won’t put it down because you read something odd. Something that makes no sense. It’s like you read a wasp into your brain and then it’s buzzing around in there. So I read some more. And some more. Then it really starts fucking with you. Wasps everywhere. Buzzing. He went here and hid stuff there, but if he went there how come the stuff was found there? Who’s real and who’s not? Which came first? It’s chickens and eggs. Chickens and eggs. All of it. When they tried to kill me I came out here. Shack was already here, built on the site of an older shack, but it was long since abandoned. So I hid. But then, of course, there ain’t nothing to do once you’re out here but read even more of this shit, is there? Day in, day out. You start looking for things on the TV or in the news. Collecting more bits and more bits, trying to finish the puzzle.”
She paced the room, frantically pointing out random items. “But every time you get close, the puzzle gets bigger, like it has no end. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? It runs in circles. All of it. It has no end. Alison dies and then she’s born, then she comes back to see her mum and lets her mum get raped so that she can be born but has to kill herself first. I know her as a young girl but my dad already met her all grown up. And there’s more Alisons out there, I know there is. There’s Alison objects and Alison events and Alison people, all running round in cosy little circles we can’t even see.”
She hammered her temple with her fingertip, repeatedly. “And all the time these wasps are in there, buzzing around in your brain. My dad left this for me to deal with. He fucked my brain all over again and do you know what.? I hate him for that… So I traded the smack for the 625. It puts the wasps to sleep and helps me focus.”
My eyes narrowed. One thing had stood out. “Who tried to kill you?” I asked.
“Same people as tried to kill you, I reckon.” She shrugged. “I mean, not literally or nothing. Mine was, like, thirty years ago - a guy called Grier - but they’re all pipers getting paid by the same rat-infested freaks somewhere down the line, ain’t they? My dad was on to something, and he knew stuff. Bad stuff. All this stuff. So they killed him. But, see, that leaves a new mess and I guess a part of that mess was me, ‘cos maybe I know something too, so they had to clean me up as well. I didn’t know nothing. Not back then. And I wish I didn’t know noting now, but I do. Can’t erase a memory can you, no matter how hard you try? And they tried.” She laughed. “Besides, take a look at me, Mr. Strauss. I know I’m a mess, but you know what…? I’ll get cleaned up when I’m good and ready. Not before. But they’re going to keep coming after me. The only time this stops is when I know more than they do. When I can make this all work out.”
That said, I still wasn’t sure what she meant. “Make what work out?”
“This…” she walked around the room, flicking papers and toppling books. “This! All of it. Because what you see, when you read it all, is that things have to happen. And they have to happen in an order. A set order. You can’t change what happens and you can’t change the order, but they’ve got to happen. Got to. So maybe, just maybe, I have to make sure they happen..? Yeah? You see?”
“Would they not just happen anyway?” I said, skeptically. “If you decided to just… do nothing?”
“They might,” she said. And she was off again like a fox from a trap. “Might not. The might is OK, you see. That’s good. It all happens, like it should. But the might not? See, that’s not so good. No-one knows what happens if the might not wins. Do we change history? No, because we can’t. That’s what they say isn’t it, Mr. Strauss? ‘Can’t change history, just become part of it.’ So if the ‘might not’ kicks in, and we can’t change anything, then what happens then? Cosmic boom? The whole world fucked? Reality fucked? Us… fucked? You see? Yeah, you see!” I didn’t. “So I got to make make it all happen. Because if I don’t make it happen then it doesn’t happen, or it happens wrong. Then what? Eh? Then dear old Dad don’t come for me and I’m still shooting dirty needles in a shit-hole in Seattle, getting a baby kicked out of me when I’ve been raped too many times? You think I want that? Yeah? Or maybe I don’t even have no dad? What do you think about that, smarty pants? Because if there’s no dad then there’s no me, is there? Then what would you say to me? Nothing! Because then I ain’t here telling you all this. But I am here, aren’t I, so I have to make it all happen. Your friend Alison knew that. She let her mom get raped so she happened. She knew you gotta do the tough stuff to survive. She knew it. You got to make it happen for yourself. And if she could do it, then so can I.”
Shit, I thought. She was junkie who’d been trying to piece this whole thing together for thirty years. There was no wonder she was losing it. Just thinking about Alison’s trip in isolation made my brain want to explode.
“So that’s why you wanted to see me?” I asked. “Tomorrow?”
She nodded vigorously, as though she sensed I was finally getting it. She sensed wrong. “At the café, yes. That’s why. Because you’re part of it too. You help me to make it happen, Mr. Strauss! You do! I worked that out when I saw what I saw. Because, you see… you see… I’m not the key. Not any more… You are. So I can stop. I can give it all to you.”
Let’s be honest: I didn’t want it.
“And how much 625 had you veined when you had this little revelation?” I asked, sarcastically. That said, I was actually being serious.
She didn’t answer. Instead she just threw me a really angry and disappointed look, as though I’d not tidied my room in weeks.
“OK,” I said eventually. “So what did you see? What it is that tells you that I’m any part of this?”
She walked over to one of the many piles of paper and, without even pausing to look through them, she pulled out a clutch of pictures. Again, they had been exactly where she had known they would be. Organised chaos. Like her brain, but organised.
She came back to me and laid them on what I presumed was a coffee table playing hide and seek. I say that because I couldn’t actually see the table itself, heaving as it was under a weight of books. It’s only looking back that I recall she placed it directly over a paperback called ‘Witchfinders: A Seventeenth Century English Tragedy’.
I could only see the top image and, at first, I just looked. It was very grainy, a close up of a flattened palm holding a crucifix. OK, a cross sans the man himself, but still technically a crucifix. I didn’t really know the difference, if indeed there was one. The thing was, it could have been any cross; there was certainly nothing special about it. Nothing that stood out to me. As Victoria had alluded whilst we were outside, it was indeed possible to make out some very faint engraved text in the centre.
“I
had no VCR,” she said, manically. (Who the fuck used VCRs any more anyway? Who even uses that name?) “Got myself one now. Hard driven thing. Digital.” She pointed to a dated looking black box with even more dated looking buttons across the front. “I hit a button and it tapes what’s on the screen. I have to tell it which screen though. Made that mistake too many times. Taping shit I don’t want.”
“And..?” I asked.
“And so I couldn’t get this on the hard driver thing. Didn’t have it then. Got it now. So I had to use my camera when they had it on the screen. Can’t wind back. Can’t turn back the clock. That’s what they all say, isn’t it?”
“It’s just a wooden cross,” I said. “I’m sure there are thousands of them the world over.”
Sure, the beads which surrounded it made it reminiscent of the cross I had made for Rachael but, to me, that was pretty much where any similarities began and ended.
“It’s out of place,” Victoria said, cryptically. “Wrong place, wrong time. All wrong. Very, very wrong.” I looked away from the image and back to her, seeking an explanation. In typical Victoria style, given that she was back on a mission, she didn’t disappoint. “I was watching the box,” she said, “and I saw the programme. It was just… on.” She pointed to one of the older TVs. “I nearly missed it. Manningtree, they said. England.”
She rearranged the pictures so that the one on the top was now an image of a hole at the side of a forest, a mini-mountain of mud piled by its side. The hole was almost perfectly round, as though it were somehow being held in place by something which ran its length but, in the overgrown field which surrounded it, little was visible inside. I presumed the mud had come from within during excavation. Three people were standing around the hole; one peering within whilst two others worked with spades. It did not look dissimilar to the images I had seen on the TV earlier; a scruffy group of experts knee deep in mud. Same show, I figured, different location. “They found this well,” she explained, excitedly, “and, in it were lots of bodies. About twenty of them. Old bodies. They did that carbon dating thing on them and they reckon they could be as early as 1630 or 1640. You know? When they were dropped down there.”
“Why were twenty bodies dropped down a well?” I asked.
“Might have been twenty. Might not. I forget. People they didn’t like,” she explained. “Roundheads, bad people, witches, people who got the plague. That’s what they said on the programme. It was one of the archeological programmes: ‘Time Dig’ or some such. They get three days. Or five. Maybe two. It’s not important. So they drop cameras down and check out these bones and one of them, a woman they reckon, seems to be clutching this cross. Like she died clutching it. I mean, it’s hard to tell ’cos she’s just bone now and she’s been crushed by mud, but that’s what they reckon. Eventually, they get the bones out, and the cross and they get to testing. The bones are just bones. Dead people. Nothing special there, but the cross… that’s special. That’s, y’know, odd…”
“Odd how?”
“Sequoia wood!” She said, nodding knowingly. As if she was saying ‘See? See?’.
I didn’t see.
“They don’t have Sequoia wood in England. OK, they maybe do now, a bit, but not much and not then. No, not then. And they certainly don’t have California Sequoia wood, which is what that cross is. They’ve only just discovered California but they’ve not even been inland. Not yet. Not really. They’ve not even called it California yet so how can it even be California Sequoia? But it is. That’s what they called it.” Yeah, like that made sense. I ignored it. “So how did they manage to find Sequoia wood in the well? How? It shouldn’t be there. Of course, they all starting talking, because they’re experts and shit. Ha! They say about how maybe some early traveller ventured inland, grabbing a piece of wood and bringing it home. Then he makes a cross. Then he he puts it on someone he doesn’t even like and tosses them down a well. But that’s silly, isn’t it? It makes no sense.”
“No? So what does make sense?” I sipped my coffee.
“That’s your Rachael.”
I almost spat the coffee back out, laughing. Then, almost as quickly, stopped. “That’s not funny,” I said. I meant it.
“Tell me that’s not your cross,” Victoria said. “Because I think that’s your cross and, if it is, then you made it. You should know it. Shouldn’t you? Tell me you didn’t make it…?”
“I didn’t make it,” I said.
She moved the picture toward me like a dog trying to feed a pup. “Look at it,” she said. “Closely!” She sounded desperate.
I looked closer at the image, grainy as it was. It was a bad photograph of bad reception on a bad TV screen. Hell, short of seeing if an antique shop could load me a fax machine and having the damn thing faxed over, there were very few ways to make it any harder to distinguish. So instead, I just closed my eyes…
I was at home, the wood laid out on the chopping block in the kitchen. Pretty much the only time I ever used that chopping block. I think I once chopped an onion for Rachel but really I was just showing off. The chunk of Sequoia was a big, uneasy piece that Big Red had not seen fit to give up easily to a rank amateur armed with little more than a big knife. It was about eight inches in two dimensions and about an inch deep, though nowhere near square. It was more a trapezoid shape, desperately rough-edged and had a huge chunk of bark still attached. Little by little I had got it down to the approximate size I wanted. It wasn’t perfect, like I say I was no expert, but I did have sandpaper. Then, with a mini-saw (given that I had no real requirement to ever buy a laser cutter at that point and a saw seemed more in keeping anyway) I began to cut out the basic shape of the cross; refining as I went. And it went well, save for one bit. As I had cut down from the top to create one of the cross beams, the wood at the bottom had cracked and peeled away - just as blunt tools are prone to do to quote my know-it-all-better-than-you-do father. It had pulled a deep sliver away from the body of the cross, ruining the perfectly flat surface I’d been desperately trying to achieve.
But it hadn’t pulled away neatly. These things never do. No, it had pulled a wide sliver, perhaps 4 or 5mm wide that had taken the shape of a lightning bolt. Short of making the cross much, much thinner to get rid of it, the best I could do was to just sand around it and leave it be. So I did. It was handmade piece anyway. Did it really matter if it looked like one?
I looked again at the picture, closely. Sure it was crap, and sure it was grainy; too grainy to see what was written on the surface. But what you could see, if you looked as closely as I did, was what appeared to be a shadow at the very edge of the right-hand cross beam. Except it wasn’t a shadow, was it? Not when you looked closely. It was a dark recess. Somewhere that had not been sanded smooth and somewhere that had accumulated mud, not only in the recess itself but also deep into the grain. It was stained. It was shaped like a…
I looked at Victoria. She was smiling a little too wide for my liking.
“This is impossible,” I said. I thought for a moment but whatever it was that I expected to change, didn’t. “It’s… impossible.”
“Is it?” Victoria asked, her smiling turning into an all-knowing one. “Hey, Mister, you sent Alison back. Yes? To see my dad. You sent her back? And she made it. We know she made it because my dad told me. She killed your boss last week, remember? Your Klein fella? She planted his death. So if Alison made it, then why not Rachael? Why not, Mr. Smarty pants? Why is it suddenly impossible?” She looked at me seriously, like I should listen good. “I’ll tell you how it’s impossible… It’s not, that’s how!”
I was thinking again; things I didn’t want to think. Rachael was dead. I knew that. But, if this was true - and that was one hell of a big if - then she had been alive beyond the point that I had thought that she had died. Suddenly what Victoria had said earlier made some kind of sense. Another Rachael. Another time. ‘If you could see that Rachael… now… you would, wouldn’t you?’
I couldn’t even begin to an
swer that.
“I’m not convinced,” I said. “I mean, yes, it looks like the cross I gave Rachael, a bit, but even you have to admit it’s a crap picture and the one I gave her wasn’t even engraved. There’s no way to tell. And the 1600s..? That makes no sense. Why the hell would she go there? Why would anyone go there?”
Victoria laughed. “You think she had a choice? Do you? Do you? Either she’s been thrown back during the explosion or it’s been her only way to avoid it? I don’t know, do you? Either way, do you think she’s been spending time programming buttons or dials or computers or whatever you have in these places? No. She’s gone wherever it sent her. She had no choice. But she went. You know she went.” She shrugged. “Question is, Bucko, what are you going to do about it?”
I shrugged and pursed my lips. “Sorry, I’m not buying it.”
She looked shocked. A little angry. “But you have to. You have to.”
I shook my head. It hurt: from a funeral, a car crash, an attempted assassination, a near miss with a ten-tonne bus, a long drive, a ditching of my car, an even longer walk (chronologically speaking), her brain-melting enthusiasm for crap and… above all of that… the death… yes, the death… of the woman I loved.
“I don’t have to do anything,” I said. “Nothing. I can just walk out of here and get on with my life. My life without Rachael, my life without you, my life without any of this…” I too gestured around the room.
“Can you, though?” she asked. “Really? Can you? First, you seem to have forgotten that people are trying to kill you. Kill. You. Dead. You sent Alison back, you idiot, so you’re a part of this mess right up until the point that you’re not. They won’t stop. You know it. You know it. Secondly, what if..? What if I’m right? You’d want to know for sure, wouldn’t you? I mean, even if you did nothing, you’d still want to know, right? So you’re either gonna go to bed and lie awake wondering about this night after night or you’re gonna go to bed and wake up dead. Neither one of those is good, is it? Not really.”
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