999

by Al Sarrantonio

  Merrick put a hand on Des’s arm. “Don’t let this get to you. It might be nothing. Maybe she was a real slow clotter and that’s why the knife’s still wet. Maybe this happened three hours ago, time enough for the water to go cold.”

  “You think maybe?” Hope and doubt struggled on Des’s face. “What the hell, maybe.” He blew out a breath. “I’ll see what labs has to say. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Yeah. I guess you had enough of crazy sons of bitches to last you a hfetime.”

  Merrick said nothing.

  “Sorry for laying this on you.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Say hello to Katie for me,” Des said.

  “You bet.” Merrick’s mood lightened a shade. Katie, his life now. At this hour, they should be drinking coffee in the den, talking about her day at the hospital. Then they’d head upstairs. …

  But he could not go home yet, not until he was sure.

  Merrick pulled to a stop, cut off his headlights and waited while the dust drifted past. Leaning across to the passenger seat, he scanned Zane’s place. The livestock-style gate clung with a tentacle of rusty chain to its post, blocking the driveway. No car, no lights on in the farmhouse, but that meant nothing.

  Merrick’s stomach knotted with tension. Pulling to the tilting shoulder, he shut off the engine, got out. The midnight air, heavy and still, was ideal for listening, cold enough to conduct the barest sound. Tuning out the soft tick of the cooling engine block, he detected a rustle in the field by the house and homed on it, eyes prickling as the weeds lightened in a red-tinged semblance of daylight. A raccoon reared up to peer back at him, then hurried away.

  He turned back to the house. With the darkness that had cloaked it bleached away, its shabbiness was depressingly apparent. Paint which would be a pale yellow in daylight curled from the porch posts. Masking tape meandered across the front window, patching a crack in the glass with naked indifference. In a few more weeks, the two big maples that flanked the front porch would leaf out to hide some of the flaws, but now the place looked desolate.

  “Come.”

  Zane’s voice, muffled. Merrick saw him then, a tall, gray shape floating into the rectangle of cracked window. Skirting the gate, he hiked up the grassy incline to the front porch, his chest tight with dread. Boards creaked under his feet, a final alarm system that could not be unplugged. Twanging screen door, and then the knob, cool, resisting. Merrick backed up a few steps. Zane gazed out at him, no expression on the smooth, dark face. He’d cropped his sable hair close as a panther’s pelt. His eyes were chips of jade.

  “I got a call tonight. A young woman dead in her bath. Her wrists were slit, a lot of blood missing. You?”

  “I don’t do that anymore. I take a little while they sleep. I want to kill them, but I don’t. We are the lions and they are the zebras, but they all wake up the next morning. Because I’m just like you, now. You saw to that.”

  Merrick took the lash without flinching, the scars already laid down by his own hand. How could right feel so wrong? He had let the logic trap him: only he could stop Zane, ergo if he did not, the blood was on his hands, too.

  So I buried my own son thirteen years ago to save a legion of strangers. Because they look like us. They blaze up and fade in the blink of an eye, yet wear our faces. And we theirs. Has Zane forgotten his own human mother?

  Merrick’s heart compressed. Five hundred years, her bones to dust, but he would never forget her. There she was in Zane, now, her dark beauty subtly reshaped into the face of a Bedouin sheik, forever young.

  “You got what you came for,” Zane said.

  In his mind, Merrick heard the same voice screaming, No don’t leave me, please. …

  But I did leave him.

  Merrick saw the cell in his mind, as he had forced himself to do each day: Zane, hunched over on his cot, pressed down by the endless, dark sameness, trapped there with no future, only his memories, all the hunts, the spraying blood. Had he seen them there in the dark— ghosts with torn throats and crimson chests, their lips mouthing silent rebukes?

  Had he prayed? Let me out and I’ll never kill again.

  And then a faint tremor combs the soles of his feet. Pressing his palms to the floor, he holds his breath, waiting for another, fearing delusion. The earth heaves, its dull rumble drowned out by a deafening crack as the concrete tears open from ceding to floor, showering him with grit. Heart pounding into his throat, he leaps to the wall and presses an eye to the fracture, blinking against the cascade of dirt, yelling in relief as he finds the jagged line of daylight, two inches, all he needs. …

  Merrick felt the shine of deliverance bathe his own eyes. A miracle. Was that you, God? Or the devil? Whoever caused that earthquake, I thank you. Another chance, for both of us.

  Jagged gears of longing twisted in his throat. He pictured Zane using the transfusion packs, taking just a little, leaving them their lives—or deaths?

  Had the woman in the apartment tonight chosen for herself?

  Maybe.

  Suicide. A slow clotter, that was all.

  Yes.

  He put his palm against the glass.

  Beyond it, the green gaze softened.

  For a moment, Merrick could see his son again, and then Zane faded back into the red shadows of the empty room.

  Michael Marshall Smith

  THE BOOK OF IRRATIONAL NUMBERS

  Michael Marshall Smith has quickly established himself as both a horror writer and the author of future-thrillers such as One of Us and Spares. The movie people are after him (watch out!), but hopefully they wont take him away from us, or from the production of his singularly weird and chilling fiction.

  Watch this guy: he may he one of those writers who gets real big real fast.

  If so, like I said, I hope it doesn’t stop him from turning out work like “The Book of Irrational Numbers.” You’ll recognize the story type pretty quickly—but it’s the execution, and the unique study of the protagonist’s mind-set, that make this tale so effective.

  A nice Cean page. Page three. 3 × 3 = 9. hence 0. The beginning. When I start a new notebook I never use the first piece of paper, because you know it’s going to get scuffed up. I always leave both sides of that one blank, and start writing on the second piece of paper, where it will be protected from dirt. It’s usually hobbies that I use notebooks for. I feel like writing a different type of thing now. Don’t really know how to go about it. Blah blah blah words words words. Letters must add up to something, but I’m not sure what. Writing something down makes it feel like yesterday’s news. Almost nothing actually is yesterday’s news, though. Most of it is still going on. Today was a reasonable day like most others. I was due to paint a house just on the other side of town and I got most of the prepping done in the morning but then it started to rain, so I had to leave it be.

  142 = 196. 8.562 = 73.2736.

  Roanoke is a funny place to live. Not quite in the middle of nowhere, close by the Blue Ridge Mountains. Of Virginia. Never seen a lonesome pine around here: there’s billions of them. I quite like it though. There’s plenty of work. People always need things done to their houses. There’s not much else to do, and you’ve got a hell of a job finding anywhere to eat or drink in the evening, especially on Sundays. The only place is Macados, a burger bar in the center of town. Lots of high schoolers, though that’s okay. They’re not so rich that they’re obnoxious. Most of them are pretty good kids. Basically it’s a town with a couple of malls, a small airport. In winter you can go driving up in the mountains, find secret places. I drove back from Richmond once along the Ridge and passed all these little homesteads. People looked up at me like they’d never seen a car before. The land that time forgot.

  Virtually the most important thing I have ever discovered is the idea of digital roots. To find the digital root of a number, the aim is to reduce it to a single digit. You achieve this by adding up all its existing digits: 943521,
for example, adds up to 9 + 4 + 3 + 5 + 2 + 1 =24. This, of course, still has two digits, so you add them together 2 + 4 = 6. The digital root of 943521, therefore, is 6. What is interesting, however, is that to speed up this process you can simply cast out the 9s. If there’s a 9 in the number, or any of the digits add up to 9, you can ignore them. In 943521, therefore, you ignore the 9, and also ignore the 4 and 5, which add up to 9. This leaves you with 3 + 2 + 1, which gives you 6. The same answer.

  I ended up here completely by chance. I don’t know, can’t chart the steps, which brought me this way. I don’t know. I don’t remember anything in particular, but then maybe it could have been something so small that I wouldn’t have thought it was important enough. I can remember some books some conversations some dreams some things I saw. But nothing spectacular. No major blows to the head.

  You look for what makes sense.

  Susan the new girl who works in the bookstore is lovely. She’s got a great smile and she always looks so cheerful and as if she knows something funny is going to happen sooner or later. And she’s prime. I guess it’s a vacation job or something. She noticed my accent straightaway. I think she thinks it’s cool. I hope so.

  Gerry was on the phone again earlier this evening, hassling everyone about what we’re doing for the Millennium. Max is getting all hot and bothered about it too. Who cares? Everybody thinks that the year 2000 is going to be the big one. It’s not. We’re already there. It’s already started. Cast out the 9s, and see how it is so. Last year was 1998. 1 + 9 + 9 + 8 = 27, and 2 + 7 (or ignore the 9s and just add 1 and 8) = 9; cast it out. Zero, in other words. 1998 is ground zero or the end of things, a nothing year in modulo 9. 1999, on the other hand, has a digital root of 1. 1999 is year 1; 2000 roots down to 2. 2000 isn’t the start of anything, it’s after it has already begun. Millenniums don’t mean anything to real people. Their lives revolve around much smaller circles. You strip things down. If you can’t reduce a number down any further, then it means something. Otherwise it’s just addition.

  Got the Macillsons’ house painted today. Did some work inside for them too, fixing up stuff. Think their neighbor might need some work done too. So it goes, luckily.

  It’s very much like something breaks. When it’s done, you go through this hell. Like grief. At first the units are minutes, and then hours. Weeks, months. Cycles of guilt and grief and sometimes glee. Once you’ve been through it once, it’s different. The first time you’re culpable, there’s no getting away from it. Afterwards it’s different. All the structures, once so hard, become fluid forever, like a bag full of broken glass in treacle. When you push your hand in, it’s sweet and sharp together.

  People are nice to me, but that just makes me feel sad and guilty, because I know I’m not very nice. It’s really painful. I have good friends, and I always have a laugh with the guys at the store where I buy my materials. Susan at the bookstore waves now when she sees me go by. I don’t deserve it. I want to be nice. It’s important to me. I was nice once, I think, and bits of me still are. I used to drive miles, for example, every weekend, to see someone. I had it in me then, the capacity for being good. I still do. Bits of me seem not to be touched by it all. But they’re no help, either, and you have to wonder where the energy, the motivation and glee come from. Doesn’t any of it come from that part of me, the part I like? It must do: or if not, why is it so powerless? It must be very weak to be unable to do anything, in which case it’s obviously not so blameless after all. It’s all very well being that little flinchy man, sitting up in a high tower of the castle, behind a locked door, wanting no part of it. Weak, afraid; rational at the heart of the irrational. Rationality is weak; it has no moment, contributes to no interesting sums. All it does is cringe.

  The weather was colder again today. I don’t feel hunted, exactly. It’s as if someone is reaching out of the dark towards me, as if the opaque brown fog is beginning to bulge as someone pushes against it from the outside. Think this is going to be a cold winter.

  Seventeen is the last year of being young. I remember when I was a kid, about fourteen, I guess, thinking how weird it would feel to be older. I could just about understand the ages of sixteen and seventeen. Eighteen seemed one of those ages like twenty-one where it’s not so much an age as a legal marker. A boundary line. You don’t think, Oh, it’s going to be like so-and-such being eighteen, you just think about the things that aren’t going to be illegal anymore. Nineteen, though. That seemed really old. Being nineteen was grown up and over the wall. Of course it doesn’t seem that way now. But it did then. Now I realize that 19 is 1 and 9, and 1 + 9 = 10 and 1 + 0 = 1. The first year of being old. 1 + 8 is 9, a ground zero year.

  You have to watch everything very carefully.

  I think about people waiting for birthday cards, Christmas cards. A phone call which isn’t going to come. Mothers, mainly. I wish I could say it made a big difference, but it doesn’t.

  Squaring numbers is very easy. You just take the number and multiply it by itself. Anybody can do that. It’s an easy road to travel, like time in the usual direction.

  Roads. I remember that time, back in England, when I drove up to Cambridge from London on the M11 motorway. If there’s any bad weather anywhere in the world, it’ll be on the M11. I’m telling you. It feels as if the road has been built to make the worst of it. There are high stretches, where strong winds seem to grab hold of the car and drag it towards other lanes; average stretches, where rain seems to sheet into the windscreen almost parallel to the ground; and then there are the dips. Especially just outside Cambridge there are long low patches, where fog collects and sits in a clump like porridge in a bowl. I used to have a girlfriend who lived there. For a year, in fact over a year, I used to drive up the M11 every weekend. I saw it in spring, summer, autumn, winter—and regardless, the weather there was worse than anywhere else. One night in October I drove down the slipway onto the motorway and found myself completely enveloped in fog. For the next ten miles visibility wasn’t even as far as the end of the hood of the car. I couldn’t see a damned thing. I couldn’t see my own headlights, never mind anyone else’s. I drove slower and slower and slower. I knew that after the next junction the road gradually got a little higher, pulled itself out of the trough all around the town. I kept waiting for the junction. Nothing passed me, and I saw no other cars, no headlights on the other side of the carriageway, no taillights on my own. After a long time I passed the first exit. Usually the fog lifted then. On that night it stayed exactly the same. Just as thick, just as deadening, just as much like driving slowly through the middle of a monstrous snowdrift that reached up to the sky. There was no sound, except for the hum of the engine. I’d turned the radio off, to avoid distraction. I couldn’t see a thing outside the car, except for slow swirls within the mist. I’d been going for about thirty-five or forty minutes when I started to feel uneasy, and after another ten I was beginning to get really nervous. I knew the M11 like the back of my hand, and a message was starting to persistently knock on the back of my mind, where the autopilot sits and keeps an eye on things. Isn’t it about time, it was saying, that we passed another exit? In normal conditions, I would pass the first exit about ten minutes into the journey, and the second at the half hour mark. This night was far from normal, and I was driving much slower than usual. But it was now at least fifty minutes since I’d passed the first exit. I couldn’t have gone by the second without noticing: the massive exit signs by the side of the road were just about the only thing which I had been able to see at the beginning of the journey. So where was the second? I drove for another ten minutes. Still no cars on my side of the road, and no headlights on the other. I drove on for five further minutes, picking the speed up slightly. I was just a little … concerned. Ten minutes later a shape finally loomed out of the fog, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The journey was halfway over, and I’d seen the second exit. As I lit a cigarette, finally able to spare some concentration from the road, I thought for a moment. How long would i
t have taken for me to have started panicking? How long would I have had to wait before too long became far too long, before I’d started to feel in my heart of hearts that something had gone wrong, that the exit had disappeared and I was crawling along an endless fog-buried road into nothingness, the real world left behind?

  Someone is after me now. Definitely. I know they are. It’s an odd position to be in. Everyone else will always side with the hunter. Which I’m not. Some people in my position call themselves that, but it’s pure vaingloriousness. I assume he’s a policeman. He doesn’t know who I am yet, but he’s there. I’m not even sure how I know this. I’m not sure how I know a lot of things. Maybe I’m noticing little signs without really realizing what they are. I don’t really know what to do about him. I’m not going to give myself up, or give myself away if I can help it, but—maybe he could even be my friend. He must understand some of it, which would help. I don’t understand. That’s part of it. I don’t understand why I can’t just be nice. You read books and a lot of people are just 1, 2, 3 … “these are the reasons why.” An easy addition. I’m not, as far as I can remember. I don’t have the excuse. I’ve got a fair number of friends, and they come round or I go see them and we hang out, but it’s like the whole thing’s in two dimensions. It’s like a painted glass window—one stone, and it’s going to fall apart. I’m just not nice, and it makes me sad, because some people are nice to me and I want to be nice, but can’t. Not anymore. Once is enough, too much. It taints your life.

  I was in the bookstore again today, bought some books and had a cup of coffee. I had a chat with Susan again too. The place wasn’t very busy. I told her a couple of digital root tricks. Like … take any number (say, 4201); add the digits (4 + 2 + 0+1 =7); take the sum away from the original number (4201 – 7 = 4194)—and the result will always have a digital root of 9. Or … take any number (say, 94213); scramble the digits in any order you like (32941, for instance); and subtract the smaller number from the bigger (94213 – 32941 = 61272). Guess what—digital root of 9 again. Those 9s, they get around. She thought the tricks were pretty cool. We got talking about symmetrical numbers, and how they don’t come along in years very often. 1991; 2002; 2112; 2222. When I got home I realized something. If you look at the digital roots, the sequence goes 1 + (9 + 9) + 1 = 2; in the same way 2002 = 4; 2112 = 6; 2222 = 8. The even numbers. Then 2332 gives you 1, 2442 gives you 3, 2552 gives you 5, and 2662 gives you 7. The odd numbers. Which is kind of interesting. Maybe.