Feast and Famine

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

One time, we got to a place, convinced this was one of his clinics, but it was just vacant, the next tenants not even moved in, and we wondered if he knew we were onto him, or whether someone else had spooked him. By then it was just me and Steve and Sarah. Everyone else had given up hope.

  Even we three met less and less frequently, not helped by the fact that we didn’t have anything in common other than our disparate adversities, nor did we like each other much. Even though Steve and I were heading for the same clothes size, we looked at each other and saw just a barbed reminder of what we had lost, and Sarah… Sarah had at least one screaming fit of frustration every time we got together – at a waiter who got her order wrong, at a car that honked at her, at nobody and nothing. She was so haggard and sleep-starved that just about anything would set her off. Her as-of-then-ex-husband got custody of the kids, I think.

  A year went by. Then a couple of years. We emailed each other, met up maybe once every six months. The grim, unbearable courses of our lives seemed to have found their unchangeable ruts.

  Then Sarah hit the jackpot, by dint of turning on Breakfast TV. I suspect she probably screamed so loud the neighbours thought she was being murdered – perhaps to their profound relief. There he was: there was Doc Mellinger on the couch, talking to what’s-his-name and whoever-she-is the hosts about some health business or other. Oh, he was called Doctor Nathan Hall now, for sure, and his hair was gracefully silver. He wore glasses and his face was a different shape and less tanned and, not to put too fine a point on it, not the same face. I’ll admit I wasn’t sure, when I first saw the footage. Steve was a bit off about it, too. We went so far as to tell Sarah that she’d finally gone completely crazy, and no wonder if she’d not slept more than an hour a night for the last four years.

  But no, she told us to close our eyes and just listen.

  And we did, and it was him. Those same confident, reassuring tones were unmistakeable once the distracting features were taken out of the equation. We’d found our man after our long and mostly wholly misdirected search, and he was on the telly.

  If only he had thought to change his dulcet tones when he changed his face, but perhaps he liked the sound of his own voice too much. Perhaps it was vanity that was his undoing.

  Or would have been, if we’d undone him, but I’m coming to that.

  We did all we could to find out who Nathan Hall was, and we discovered that he was some big neuropsychology guy with a practice in Switzerland: brain surgery, cognitive therapy, awards, citations, photos of him with former heads of state at his villas, smiles and champagne all round. And it was internet stuff, and we looked at it, and each of us knew that we couldn’t know if any of it was really true. Had Doc Mellinger always been Nathan Hall all along, like the world’s most unimaginative secret identity. Or was Hall no more real than Mellinger had been? He could have been an immortal Nazi super-scientist for all we knew, who’d stored himself away in the Swiss Alps along with his stolen gold only to emerge now his diabolical plan was complete.

  We had no idea what that plan was, but it was plain that we had been a part of it.

  The only thing that was amply clear from just about every source on Hall was that he was stinking rich; really filthily, disgustingly, break-the-bank-at-Monte-Carlo rich. For years, it seemed, he had been operating some very select private clinics, publishing some select private Nobel-nominated papers, and amassing a select and private fortune from all the other very rich people he helped out in unspecified but medically cutting-edge ways. Now, it seemed, he was re-entering society, turning up on talk shows, giving interviews, writing newspaper columns. He had a book out. It was cut from the richest vein of pure psychobabble that man has ever mined and I could not understand a word of it. It had no bearing on our problems nor, probably, on anyone else’s in the history of mankind.

  But he had come out into the open, and we were ready.

  We were so ready we spent another two months bickering about what to do. Sarah wanted to go to the papers (and tell them what?) whilst Steve was all for sending a letter making some sort of blackmail threat (to do what?). I myself thought we should turn up at one of his public appearances, perhaps with placards (saying what? We couldn’t even agree on that.)

  We abandoned the placards, but we went. It was my idea to do that. My fault, then.

  We picketed the place, all three of us. When Hall’s limo drove out, we shouted angrily at it: “Give us it back!” and other dismally unspecific things like that. Afterwards, we went for a meal, and I watched Steve slobbering through a hamburger whilst Sarah’s head nodded over a linguini, and I had… I can’t remember what I had. It didn’t make much of an impression.

  We had not made the impact on Doctor Hall that we had hoped. At the time, it looked as though we had made none whatsoever. The prospect of turning up wherever Hall was scheduled to appear, like the saddest groupies in the world, did not enthuse us. On the very point of our notional revenge, I swear we were ready to give up.

  Then Steve was contacted by the journalist.

  It turned out that a lot of people were interested in Doctor Nathan Hall and, although most of those people worked for glossy magazines and wanted to do features on his interior décor, there were a few who had suffered the odd raised eyebrow when this reclusive doctor from Switzerland suddenly turned up and began hosting TV specials on the history of art. One such hack had spotted the three of us making our dejected stand and decided that a few questions couldn’t hurt.

  Steve told him everything. Then he called Sarah and myself, and so did we. We had lost track, by that point, of just how ridiculous the whole idea was: that some different-looking guy with a different name had stuck some electrodes on us and violated us in ways that the dictionary doesn’t even have words for. It was worse than an alien abduction story. I have no idea why the journalist even gave us the time of day, let alone twenty minutes each of his phone bill.

  When would the story appear? Soon, we were told, and the hack named a relatively lowbrow tabloid, but you can’t have everything.

  It never did. The scoop was never scooped, nor was the front page held in any fashion. At some point in the process, though, somewhere across the world, alarm bells started to ring within Doctor Hall-Mellinger’s intricate network of knowing all the rich people including, one assumes, the newspaper tycoons. I received a visit. We all did.

  I remember stumbling out of bed because someone was banging on my door. I got there more by luck than judgment, wearing a dirty T-shirt and the day-before-yesterday’s Y-fronts, and got a police ID in the face and a lot of shouting, and a dozen strapping men invited themselves in and took all of my computers and everything resembling a phone. When I demanded to know what was going on, they read me some rights. They might have been my rights. I was still too morning-headed to know.

  Next thing, I was in their car, heading off to the station. About half an hour later I woke up enough to realise that, unless we were going to Scotland Yard in actual Scotland, there wasn’t a police station in my immediate future, and the ID I had been virtually punched with was no more genuine than Doc Mellinger had been.

  We had finally made ourselves just enough of a nuisance.

  I protested. They showed me a gun. I subsided.

  They took me to some government-installation-looking place where I was shoved onto a helicopter. I told them I was scared of flying. The gun argument was raised again, which lost none of its persuasiveness with repetition.

  I showed them. I may not have much enjoyed my dinner the previous evening, but by God I painted the inside of the copter with it. Nobody enjoyed that flight, I can tell you. You take your revenges where you can, including involuntary gastric ones.

  It was a long flight and we stopped twice – both times to clean the interior as much as anything – and, at the last, we were flying over mountainous territory, alpine you might say, and there before us was the lair of Doctor Hall-Mellinger.

  I’d say it was a castle. It was, it really was a c
astle that would have made Doctor Frankenstein green with envy. The villas that he sublet out to world leaders were mere mobile homes in comparison. This was what Hall reserved for himself.

  The helipad was outside the castle proper but inside the gated compound, where the good doctor apparently lived all alone except for the legion of servants, the armed guards and the entire research team in its underground laboratory complex. He was a man of simple tastes, which were catered for by colossal behind the scenes complexity. As I was frogmarched to the cells, I found myself thinking: what do you get for the man who has everything. Here, surely, was that man, and yet he had come into my life and kicked it over, ruined it with such exacting personal precision. I couldn’t guess what that meant, why he would possibly have cared. It felt almost a privilege to have such a vastly wealthy man take the time out of his busy schedule to so comprehensively and inexplicably screw me over.

  The cells were thankfully not the castle’s originals: they were modern, with cameras and alarms and automatic doors. I spent a day there. I was not fed: nil by mouth for 24 hours. It wasn’t such a hardship. At least I had the chance to wash myself and change into the fashionable orange jumpsuit they provided for me, because nobody wants to meet their nemesis wearing vomit-stained underwear.

  Morning, and they came for me, the guards with their assault rifles. It really did feel like I was James Bond, or Batman rather than just the fat man, or the man formerly known as fat. They were professionals, and they took such exaggerated care with me that I began to wonder whether Doc Mellinger had implanted subconscious Ninjutsu mastery in me when he robbed me of my ability to enjoy a good meal. I still wouldn’t have counted it a good trade. It’s not as if being a ninja makes you happy four or five times a day, after all. No wonder ninjas always look a bit dour in the films.

  I smelled bacon, done a la greasy spoon, just the way I used to like it. Breakfast was served.

  The dining room was big enough for a basketball court if you took the table out. There were tapestries and oil paintings and gilded wooden fripperies all over, and one of the windows had stained glass. Everything was exquisite, when it wasn’t bijou or elegant. I felt as if, just by setting foot in there, I lowered the value of the room by a few thousand Swiss francs.

  Steve and Sarah were already sitting at the table, each with a couple of armed guards hovering behind them like particularly aggressive waiters, and I quietly went over and took the only other seat at this end that had a place laid. We didn’t look at each other. Maybe Iron Man Steve, as was, could have body-mass-indexed all the guards to death with one flex of his mighty thews, but those thews were just saggy these days. It wasn’t that he’d let himself go: he’d been pushed.

  There were two places laid at the far end of the table, I saw. Frankenstein and the monster, perhaps? Dracula and Bride?

  Then he walked in, dressed casually in a silk robe that would probably cost more than Venezuela on the open market: Doctor Mellinger; Doctor Nathan Hall; Doctor Whoever.

  “My friends, Stephen, Ben, Sarah,” he announced in that wonderful voice of his, “thank you so much for agreeing to be my guests.” And he was doing it again, speaking to us with such insuperable sincerity that we almost believed him, were almost convinced that the armed guards were only present because there had been some rumour of tigers at large in the grounds.

  “Forgive the lack of notice of your invitation,” he went on, “but I felt that we should meet at once to resolve your grievances. I do like to oversee and regulate all aspects of my work personally and to ensure that random elements do not have the chance to upset the careful order that I have built for myself. I’m sure you understand.”

  Put like that, we almost did. It was Steve who broke our collective silence.

  “But what have you done?” he demanded hoarsely. “I don’t understand. What did you do to us? Why would you do such a thing?” His tone was pleading, as if even then he was begging the doctor to just put everything right, and then we’d all go home.

  Our host smiled indulgently. “Why? For the very best of reasons, Stephen. I suppose I should give you some grand speech about the betterment of humankind and the advancement of science and medical terminology, that would mean very little to you. Really, though, it’s very simple, and for a reason that you will be able to appreciate. You’re a family man, aren’t you?”

  I hadn’t known it of him, but Steve nodded.

  At that, perhaps by some invisible signal, the girl entered. She was very young, maybe four, five at most, and there was a governess-type hovering in the background to keep an eye on her, but little madam walked up to her place at the table and sat there, grown up as you please, smiling up at the doctor with all the warmth and love that a human face is capable of. I could just see faint marks at her temples where the electrodes had gone.

  She was beautiful, she really was.

  “Good morning, Papa,” she said brightly.

  “Good morning, my dear. Look, we have guests for breakfast. This is Stephen, and this is Sarah, and this gentleman is Ben.”

  And she said good morning to each of us, using our names with the same pleasant familiarity as the doctor, and we mumbled our responses in return.

  His expression, gazing on her, was inexpressibly proud, a man who has the world in his hands, and someone to give it to who is worthy of the gift.

  “We all want what’s best for them, don’t we?” he said fondly to us. “Who would not, if the opportunity presented itself? The very best of everything.”

  A servant turned up then with little Miss’s breakfast. Bacon, of course. A single rasher because, after all, she had all the restraint in the world. No overindulgence for the doctor’s little girl, any more than she would ever get lost, or have trouble sleeping, or get her sums wrong at school. She was going to live a charmed life. Everyone would love her. Doors would open for her. She would never be unhappy and she would succeed in everything she put her mind to.

  I watched her eat her bacon, cutting it into tiny pieces. I saw the little tears at the corners of her eyes, the sheer heavenly joy she experienced with every mouthful, savouring the rich flavour. I knew how that felt. I knew exactly how that had felt.

  “Isn’t she perfect?” said the doctor tenderly. And, you know, she was. She really was.

  * * *

  Open submissions for themed anthologies can be a gift. In this case, the brief from Siren’s Call for their Now I Lay Me Down To Reap anthology was for stories where precious things are stolen from the protagonist. I went in with the idea that I wanted the object of the theft to be something as weird as possible, and got this story out of it. Without the submission brief I would surely never have written something so odd. It also gave me a chance to write something light-hearted, although with this one, as with ‘2144 And All That’, the humour is rather bleak.

  The Dissipation Club

  This is a story about my friend Walther Cohen. He and I work a business together, or rather it’s his business, and I pitch in. People call on Walther Cohen when there’s no other agency that fits, and where the rules don’t apply. Someone once described him as a ghost-hunter. Actually what they said was ‘shabby little ghostbuster’ but that’s what they meant.

  We do ghosts. Walther does. We do what comes, and what gets his interest. More oftern than not it’s timewasters, nutters, people who think they’re being haunted. People who would give their right arm to have something interesting happen to them. Most of the time it’s bunkum. And most of the rest of the time Walther just gets on with it. He sits people round a table, or he potters about with ouija boards and geiger counters and a whole host of kit he’s inherited or bought up or invented. On occasion he’ll call me, when he has a feeling. Walther’s all kinds of intuition, and when he gets a certain shiver about a case, he gives me a shout, and I take the week off from minding doors to come help out. That’s me.

  This is a special case. You should know that from the start. We’re no pushovers, Walther and me. A m
onth before this case there was a thing in the Southampton sewers that was taking tramps from the street and eating them, and we went into those same sewers with chalk and compasses and holy water and sorted it out. I’ve seen a lot, and what I’ve seen’s nothing to what Walther’s seen.

  This is the case. This is the one that meant more than all the others, and pushed us too far. This is the one I said I’d never write down.

  *

  Walther Cohen wears white suits and a white trilby and looks like Son of Man from Del Monte. I, in my best monkey suit, look like an ape. There are few places we look right together, and the office of James Vanderfell wasn’t one of them by a long shot.

  You might have heard of Mr Vanderfell, if you’re into shares and money-stuff. If you haven’t, he’s an American, a businessman, owns shares in everything up to and including the Pope, the way he told it. Not the sort of person Walther and I normally deal with. I didn’t know where to put myself. Vanderfell’s office wasn’t really his office, but he owned most of the company whose office it was, or that’s what I reckoned. He was one of those artificial-looking people. He was tanned, his hair was grey, his face was stern and lined, and all of it had been precisely done to him to make him look right as the successful businessman. His appearance was probably worth more than Walther, me and the office together.

  He didn’t like the look of us much either, even though I’d come in my suit. Walther was in his whites, of course, and had put his white trilby on Vanderfell’s desk without asking. He took a seat without asking, too, and I stood behind it like a butler. Walther doesn’t make friends easily and, unless he likes you, soon makes it clear that he doesn’t really care what you think of him. It’s got the spit beaten out of him three or four times since I’ve known him, including once inside. He leaned back in the chair, and was obviously considering putting his feet on the desk, when the Big Man finally spoke.

  “You must be Cohen,” said Vanderfell. “You’re awful forward for a man who hasn’t been hired yet.”