by Kim Newman
Vanessa was no bloody help, as usual. Then the picture changed. The pygmies were gone, and below the airship was a soft desert of fine, white sand. Susan allowed the ship to drift down, and relaxed as the bulk settled into the receptive, motherly ground. She thought she’d pass out, but the pain kept her going. Concentrating on her shoulder, she pinched off the nerves and cut out the agony. Looking at it objectively, the shark had made a clean job of it. There was a knob of bone in the abused meat. Susan closed her eyes, and imagined her arm as it had once been. She started with the bones – good thing she had taken those anatomy courses – and laid on muscle, flesh and skin. She let blood in, and flexed the fingers. She opened her eyes, and surveyed her handiwork. It was a good arm. The only problem was that it wasn’t hers. It might have been the pirate’s – there was a three-breasted mermaid tattooed on it – and it only just fit her shoulder. She could fix that later. Like her leg.
She stood up, balancing on her foot. She slipped off the coronet, and let the airship go dead. The back-up cabin lights kicked in. Vanessa lay still. Susan turned her heroine over, and looked into the painted face of a dummy. Vanessa Vail was fully articulated and tremendously detailed, but in no sense alive.
‘Very clever, Daine,’ she said. ‘Good tricks.’
The background changed again. She was back in the abandoned warehouse.
‘Getting bored with the game?’
She was in her own shape.
‘Nice try, but I know unreality when I feel it.’
Her body changed. Her neck grew long and boneless, and was suddenly unable to hold up her heavy head. Her torso itched as it puffed up like a flightless bird’s, and her legs dwindled and divided into a clump of Cthulhoid tentacles. Inside, her organs twined about each other unnaturally, her bones softened and grew functionless knobs that breached her skin. She tried to move, but her brain hadn’t yet got used to its new home. Her head hit the concrete, and she couldn’t lift it. She was dragged down by her skull like an old-fashioned prisoner shackled to an iron ball. Something dangerous-sounding padded on soft feet into the warehouse and prowled around outside her field of vision, panting hungrily. She tried to move her newly issued body, but couldn’t get the hang of it.
She imagined a steel splint inside her giraffe neck, and felt the pain as it appeared inside her unfamiliar flesh. Around the split she created vertebrae and a simple ball-and-socket joint. Now she could raise her head like a crane. She constructed an elementary andrew skeleton inside the useless body Daine had given her, and pushed a set of wire and wheel-worked legs through her tentacles. Under her loose skin, she spread a network of interlocking durium plates. She stood up, and grew herself four waldoes, claw-and-grip-tipped mechanical arms that responded to the living nerves she wormed through the metal.
Looking down from a height of ten or twelve feet, she saw an old friend, the MGM lion.
‘Hello, Leo.’
It gave its familiar fanfare roar.
‘There, kitty-kitty-kitty.’
It pounced. She extruded a three-foot, honed-steel spike from the rubber palm of a suction waldo and held it out so the big cat would kebab itself.
She had forgotten that the great, grey beast was stone.
The clash shook her, and the spike snapped off. Her entire metal skeleton was jolted, shocking the still-fresh flesh it was embedded in. The lion fell in a heap, and she got a steel knee on top of it. Leaning down, she took its head between her pincers and squeezed. Meanwhile, she got a grip on it with her mind, and concentrated.
Chalk. It was chalk.
The lion exploded in a puff of white dust. She stood up and stamped on the still-living creature. It fell apart, its roar echoing behind it.
In a gesture of triumph, she brushed the chalk off her pulpy chest. The metal fingers abraded the feathers, but she ignored the pain.
‘There,’ she shouted, pluming liquid flame from one claw, ‘you’re not the only one who can make changes!’
Her body came back, but was still shot through with her cybernetic additions. Her brain burst as the neck-shaft speared through it and exploded from the top of her head. She wondered if she could think with what was left of her grey matter. Her arms flew to pieces amid the workings of the waldoes, and below the waist, a skirt of skin, blood, flesh and splintered bone hung around the leg mechanisms.
She screamed, and dissolved the machinery with a thought. Like an invertebrate, she writhed on the floor, trapped in the ruin of her own body.
She was in the open air again, with turf below her, feeling the power moving in the earth.
‘I will not submit,’ she told herself. ‘I am Susan Bishopric and no other. I know my body. I know my mind. I will not be altered. I will not be broken.’
Deep in the solid mass beneath her, she heard the laughter. The laughter of demons or a god.
She tried to regroup her scattered brain tissue, pulling back pieces of her mind before they were lost for ever. Much of her memory was fading: She fought to keep it. She clung to the raft of her identity as the hurricanes and tidal waves lashed her.
The laughter turned to music. ‘When That I Was But a Little Tiny Boy’.
‘I am Susan Bishopric.’
A voice inside the music crooned. ‘…with a heigh ho, the wind and the rain…’
‘Susan.’
The song wasn’t in the ground, it was inside her head, growing louder, taking up more precious space in her sundered mind. She felt herself shrinking.
‘Susaaaa…’
She forgot things. Her middle name, her mother’s face, the titles of her Dreams, her Household password, her favourite recipes. They came out in the wash.
‘Suze…’
‘A foolish thing was but a toy.’
Was she a pirate? Or an office girl mixed up in a murder? Or an adventuress called Vanessa Something?
‘Su…’
* * *
The music didn’t hurt now. It was soothing. As the song finished, she heard record hiss, comfortingly welcoming her into the Nothing.
‘For the rain it raineth every day.’
‘Sssssssss…
20
I needed a drink. Several, one on top of the other. I wasn’t sure there were enough drinks in the City for what I had in mind, but, as the man said, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? There were bars up and down every street. I worked my way through them. I had time to establish a routine. I’d take a stool, stack up coins as high as they’d go, and have the barman bring me a two-bit shot every couple of minutes, removing the price himself, until the tower was gone. Then I’d hit the next place. I never ran out of change, or thirst.
The decor was different in every bar – there were chrome-plated Metropolis joints with dancing robotrixes, and sawdust-on-the-floor Western saloons with gunfights and can-can girls – but the faces were the same. The same crew of sorry drunks, getting riotous, getting miserable, getting maudlin. There was even the same poker game going on in the back room, a game I couldn’t get in on but which I could glimpse every time the same barmaid took refills through.
He first tried to talk to me in an English pub. He had a bowler hat, mustachios and a loud check waistcoat.
‘Excuse me, guv,’ he began.
I finished my fourpenny pint, pushed through the pearly kings and queens, and made it to the door. Some bloated tart was attacking the piano, and a throng of costermongers were singing ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’. I had heard rumours that Jack the Ripper was about in the night, but that didn’t stop me launching into the fog.
He turned up again in a small-town truck stop, clean-shaven and with an airman’s jacket showing fleece through rips in the leather. I was bellied up to the bar with the crowd of bobby-soxers and crewcuts. He put a hand on me, and I peeled it off.
Three heavy truckers, mouths full of burger and fries, looked at us, sensing a fight.
‘Tunney,’ he said.
‘Don’t know the man.’
/> I left again, before I could get to the chow I had ordered. Food was taking a poor second on my diet sheet this evening.
In the Hollywood Canteen, where GIs and gobs were served by real live movie stars, he was in uniform. South-of-the-Border, where peons in ponchos drank flaming tequila, he wore a blinding white tropical suit. In the Juke Box Joint, he had a zoot suit with Karloffian shoulders and a watch chain dangling between his knees. He stopped trying to harass me, but he was always there.
I drank shots. Every time I upended a glass, I could feel the blast on the roof of my mouth, and hoped it was seeping through into my brain.
‘Sam,’ I asked a bartender. They were all called Sam. ‘Sam, have you ever been in love?’
‘No, sir,’ said Sam. ‘I been a bartender all my life.’
Had I ever been in love? I remembered a name – Lola – but there was no face to go with it.
‘Lissa.’ It was him again. ‘The name is Lissa.’
I told him to get out of my head.
‘And you were never fair to her in your Dreams. Just because you crumb up your marriage doesn’t give you a right to recreate Lissa as Cruella de Ville in high heels. You were lucky she was too tired to sue.’
He sat down on the next stool. Now he wore ordinary street clothes and a hat. He had Sam bring him a drink, but didn’t touch it.
‘Richie Quick, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’ I was tired of people I didn’t know knowing me. ‘Wanna make anything of it?’
‘No, no, nothing like that. I’m just a fellow pilgrim. Tell me, uh, Richie, what’s your earliest memory?’
Baby stuff, I guessed. Mother’s knee. Playing ball.
I thought, but nothing came. A black curtain hung in my mind. I looked at him, not really wanting help, but appreciating it when it came.
‘Remember getting off the bus?’
‘Of course, hundreds of times…’
He was playing the patient teacher. ‘No, only once. Earlier this evening.’
‘Yeah.’ That made some sort of sense. The bus station in the rain. ‘I’d been out of town. On a case.’
‘What case?’
‘I… I can’t remember.’
‘That’s right. Give the guy a drink, he can’t remember.’
‘But I can remember lots of other things. I’m not an amnesiac.’
‘Tell me what you remember, then.’
‘My name, where my office is, my toughest cases. I had a wife once, and she got me into trouble… I think I had to kill her…’
‘I think if you apply your thoughts a little, you’ll find that you only have the memory of those memories. That’s a fine distinction, but it makes a big difference.’
I was getting annoyed. My head hurt, with a deep, agonising throbbing in back of my forehead and extra-special bonus pains behind my eyes.
‘What are you, a psychoanalyst?’
‘No, just a layman.’ He moved his glass around on the bar, making an Olympic symbol with overlapping condensation rings. ‘And what about Tom Tunney?’
‘I know that name.’ There was even a face to go with it. ‘Is it a clue?’
His face crinkled up in a smile. ‘You could say that. A clue. Very good. Tom Tunney is you.’
‘Yeah, and who might you be, mister?’
‘Lots of people. I tried being John Carradine earlier this evening, but it didn’t get me anywhere. Maybe you remember that?’
‘Carradine, sure. The crazy guy. Swashbuckler type. Saved my neck a couple of times, then bought it.’
‘A supporting character.’
His face elongated for a second, and was moustached. Carradine looked at me from behind it then sank back again.
‘That’s a good trick.’
‘What do you remember about John Carradine? Something that made him different? Different from the rest of these zombies? No offence, Sam. Just different?’
My head was splitting open now, black diamonds forcing themselves through from the inside. In my mind, I saw Carradine get his, the swordfight, the bullets, the blood.
‘His blood. It was…’
I tried to get my mind around something intangible. I couldn’t complete my sentence. Eventually, he helped me.
‘What you mean is it wasn’t black.’
That was like saying the night wasn’t dark, the rain wasn’t wet, the Mayor wasn’t crooked. It didn’t make sense. But it was the truth. He pulled a penknife out of his pocket and opened it. He cut his left forefinger across, and dunked it in his drink. He stirred, and colour bloomed in the whisky.
‘Red.’
The ribbons of blood spiralled together, and the liquid went completely red. He took his finger out and sucked it.
‘Yes, do you remember red? You once bled red as well. Maybe you will again.’
‘Red.’
Suddenly, Richie Quick didn’t seem so real. Maybe he was just someone I’d dreamed up. No, Dreamed up.
‘Bloody silly name, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Richie Quick.’
Another life crept out of my memory. A life in an unimaginable world. A life for Tom Tunney.
‘I’m Tunney.’
‘Good, very good.’
‘And you’re… You bleed red.’
‘Well, that was just for effect. Actually…’
He held up his cut finger. Yellow fluid leaked out. Metal gleamed beneath the plastek.
‘You’re an andrew.’
‘In the City, isn’t everyone, in one way or another? But yes, I’m an andrew. You can call me Dana Andrew.’
I got it. He was pleased I got it. We smiled at each other.
‘Do you remember why you’re here now?’
It was tumbling through the black curtain. The Conscription notice, the girl with the taser (Julienne? Julietta?), Dartmoor, Princetown Prison, Governor Trefusis, Helena Groome, the man in his tank, the Dreaming.
‘To kill Daine. To wake him up.’
‘So what are you doing in a subsidiary personality, getting drunk?’
‘Daine’s dead. I saw him die.’
‘And you fell for that old trick.’
I hadn’t had a shot in minutes. Sam had lined up three for me.
‘Dana, who are you? Who are you really?’
‘I’m someone you’ve known every day of your life, but never thought of as a Someone.’
‘?’
‘We’re in Daine’s Dream now, but Daine’s Dream country is in my Dream continent, my Dream universe.’
The credit dropped.
‘Yggdrasil.’
‘The World Tree,’ he said, downing his drink, ‘that’s me.’
21
Sssssssssss!
‘Ssss isss for Ssssussann,’ someone said.
She woke up on cobblestones, surrounded by a rich fog. She hurt, but all her limbs were at her disposal. They wouldn’t work properly, but she managed to flip herself over and sit up. She was wearing a long dress, torn and wet, with a tight bodice.
‘Ssssussann,’ said the snake-tongued shadow in the fog.
They were under a gaslight. The shadow was cloaked, like the one who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men, and wore a tall hat. An open doctor’s bag stood beside his feet.
Susan got a wall behind her back and braced herself against it, edging upwards, feet pushing against the cobbles. She turned her head away from the hissing shadow and pressed her cheek to the wall.
WANTED, shrieked a poster, INFORMATION LEADING TO THE ARREST OF THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERER.
A barrel organ sounded somewhere in the distance. ‘She Was Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage.’ The music pulled at her.
Out there in the fog, Mickey Rooney was shouting, with an appalling cockney accent. ‘H’extra, h’extra, Jeck the Rippah Stroikes Agayne!’
She tried to cry out, but only a low gurgle came from her throat. She realised it had been cut. The sound that had woken her up had been the sound of a knife passing through her windpipe.
The shadow
stepped forwards again. The knife shone in his gloved hand. His bearded face was monstrous in the gaslight. She recognised a toff from the West End, John Yeovil. A bad one.
‘It’s John,’ he said, ‘but you can call me Jack!’
The knife went in again, into her stomach, her bowels, her breasts. She smelled his foul breath up close, and the stink of her own insides. She fell, and was sitting in a spreading pool of blood.
He opened her guts and worked away inside her, pulling at her organs. All the while, he cackled like an actor in a bad melodrama. He was Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street; he was Spring-Heel’d Jack, the Terror of London; he was Sir Percival Glyde, the Spine-Snapping Baronet; he was the Wicked Squire who did for poor Maria Marten in the Red Bam; he was Varney the Vampyre, Wagner the Wehr-Wolf, jaunty Jekyll and madman Hyde, the Oxton Creeper, the Coughing Horror, the Face at the Window…
She didn’t feel anything until he leaned forwards and kissed her. He tasted foul, and there was fire in her ruptured belly. With a surge of hatred, she bit down on his tongue…
…and felt pain burst in his own mouth. He spat blood and saliva on the abused woman, and plunged his hands into her again…
The killing frenzy was on him now. He was his own real self again, the own real self they all were. Those hypocrite clergymen, leader writers, Members of Parliament, East End missionaries. Stuffed shirts and waxen women. He was the fellow they all hardly dared Dream they were. He exulted in the communion of blood and water.
He knew he would have to work fast. There were already police whistles sounding in the distance. And Rathbone would be on the case, with his bloodhound and magnifying glass.
Then disgust flooded through him. He was sick to his stomach. His arms, his front, his trousers, his shoes were covered in blood. ‘Ssssussann,’ he said, wondering why the name meant so much to him.
‘Ssssussann,’ she said, transforming inside bloody clothes, becoming herself.
There was a dead man on the cobblestones, horrendously mutilated.
The starch in her collar had gone limp with the soaking. Her sleeves and trouserlegs were too long for her. She had to roll them up. She cinched his belt.
