Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text

by Chris Beckett

  And as he lay there, straining to recover the particular mood, or feeling, or flavour, of that little fragment of a life being led in another universe, a second fragment came to him.

  ~*~

  ‘I had it the wrong way round,’ the other Charles murmured.

  He hadn’t reached the station yet. He was still on the train with a little way to go, looking out of the window at birch trees and bracken and sandy heath.

  ‘It wasn’t the part of me that was trying to get out that was the problem. It was the part of me that was trying to hold it in.’

  He looked at his watch. The station was only five minutes away now. There’d be a short taxi ride after that, and then he’d be there.

  ~*~

  But where? Charles – the Charles in the dark beside Jazamine - was still trying to work that out when another memory came pushing up into his conscious mind. It wasn’t a switch this time. It wasn’t even from long ago. It was a straightforward memory of something he himself had done only a few hours previously, but somehow managed to push out of his mind, like the seeds in the sock drawer.

  ~*~

  Jaz had commented on how long the meeting had gone on, but in fact it had ended punctually. He’d been late because he hadn’t come straight back. After leaving that hotel in the city centre, he’d driven all the way out to Britannia House and the office which his section would very soon be leaving.

  The place had been empty and he’d crossed the open plan office in almost complete darkness. Reaching his little Perspex cubicle, he’d turned on his desk lamp and his computer and then opened up the national database which Special Cases Units across the country had gradually built up over the last few years from interviews with shifters. On the Perspex screens around him, superimposed over empty desks and blank computer monitors, his own ghostly reflections stooped over their own ghostly keyboards.

  When he’d finished copying the database, he’d opened a newspaper archive that his section used for reference purposes, so as to be able to compare the accounts shifters gave of other timelines with this one, and to try and identify the points of divergence. This too he’d copied, and his ghostly reflections did the same.

  Then he’d gone to the ‘Chart’, the tentative classification of the different timelines which the section had begun to assemble, which showed the putative branching off points of the different universes from the one that he then inhabited. It was a kind of tree, a rough map of Igga. Only when he’d finished copying that and had slipped the data stick into his briefcase – a flagrant contravention of the Official Secrets Act which could easily get him ten years in prison – did he shut down the computer and head for home.

  Chapter 17

  In the white-tiled room, a police officer called Marley tossed down the morning’s edition of The Daily Mail.

  ‘Seen this, Carl?’

  The headline read ‘HE’S NO SON OF MINE’ and below it was a picture of Carl’s mother, teeth in and sober, with an expression of tragic indignation on her face.

  Carl pushed the paper away wearily. Two different prison officers had already gleefully shown it to him. It had been the same a week ago when Shane Wheeler had made himself £5,000 by providing another newspaper with the pretext to print a story called ‘THE MONSTER I CALLED MY FRIEND.’ Carl had once been an obscure outsider even in the marginal world of Thurston Meadows, but now everyone in Britain knew his name.

  ‘Got a cigarette, mate?’

  He had lost two stone in weight and had a long half-healed gash on his face from an attack by another prisoner with a piece of glass.

  ‘A cigarette, Carl? Well, if you’re a very good boy you may get one later. We’ll have to see.’

  Marley was sitting across the desk with another detective called Kadinsky. Behind them stood a tall, grey, posh-looking man Carl hadn’t met before.

  ‘Let’s talk about Burkitt, Carl,’ said the tall man. ‘He was once your social worker but you say you’ve never been to his house?’

  ‘No, like I keep saying, mate, I don’t even know where he lived. Why would I? The deskies don’t tell you that sort of thing. I don’t think they’re even allowed to.’

  ‘You’re absolutely sure that you’ve never been to his house?’ the tall man persisted.

  ‘No, I never been there. What’s the point of asking me over and over again?’

  ‘Well, you’ve changed your story before now, Carl, over the Steven McIntosh case.’

  ‘Slug, you mean? I told you that wasn’t me.’

  Marley sighed.

  ‘I know you told us that, but what James here is saying is that you originally told us you didn’t know anything about it, and then you changed your mind.’

  ‘So to get this absolutely straight,’ the tall man said. ‘You’ve never been to Burkitt’s house?’

  ‘No, mate.’

  ‘And you don’t know where it is?’

  ‘No, I’ve got no idea.’

  ‘You’re absolutely sure about that?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fucking sure. How many times have I got to…’

  ‘You see Carl,’ purred the tall man, ‘we have some new information that we need you to comment on.’

  Carl’s mouth was suddenly very dry. Marley smiled grimly.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Like how do you explain the fact that forensics have picked up one of your hairs at Mr Burkitt’s house?’

  ‘Or that, stuck to the unappetising goo at the bottom of your mother’s dustbin,’ the tall man said, ‘we found the torn and scrumpled corner of Mr Burkitt’s visiting card?’

  Carl was trembling.

  ‘How should I fucking know? It must have been Erik, trying to fucking frame me.’

  ‘That would have been very clever of him. He’d also have had to copy your shoeprints onto the floor of Mr Burkitt’s house, and your fingerprints onto the door handle. And then of course there’s the record we have of you crossing the Thurston Meadows Line in a van about an hour before the murder took place, along with two men who we now know to have been shifters. Not to mention the two sightings by the residents of Canterbury Close of a man answering to your description.’

  Carl pressed his face into his hands and rocked slowly in his seat.

  ‘I didn’t mean to do it,’ he said at last, his mouth so dry that he could hardly form the words. ‘They made me. They didn’t give me no choice.’

  He felt as if millions of people were watching him, staring in at him through their TV screens from living rooms up and down Britain. They were shaking their heads, they were clucking their tongues, they were calling him heartless, cowardly and cruel. He tried to think of one single person who would say anything different and the only one he could think of was the man he’d shot.

  ‘You’re basically rather a kind person,’ he remembered Cyril Burkitt saying. ‘You hate the idea of killing me so much that you refuse to even let yourself think about it. And unfortunately that’s what makes it possible.’

  ‘Mr Burkitt understood,’ Carl muttered.

  ‘He understood what?’ asked the tall man.

  ‘He understood why I did it.’

  ‘So you did shoot him, Carl?’ the tall men asked coldly. ‘That’s what you’re now saying? Can you please just confirm for the tape that yet again you are changing your story and admitting to the murder of your former social worker?’

  ‘Yeah I did shoot him, mate, but… but you’ve got to understand I didn’t want to do it. I liked the old geezer. But they made me. Even he understood that.’

  ‘No one makes you do a murder…’ began Marley, but the tall man raised a hand to get him to stop.

  ‘Who made you do it, Carl?’ he asked, standing close to Carl and leaning down into his face. The stench of his halitosis seemed only to emphasise the extent of his contempt. ‘Who made you do it? Don’t just say Erik. Don’t just talk about a bunker and some kind of lava lamp. Believe me, it’s in your interest to tell us more, and you’ll be coming back to this room, day after day a
fter day, until you’ve told us everything you know.’

  ~*~

  Charles was in the back of a silver car with a swooping hawk logo, whooping and wailing through the Bristol streets at 70 mph. A new shifter had been picked up in Thurston Meadows, something needed to be done about it, and Charles and his two colleagues were the ‘something’. They were the SIS. They were the people charged with taking slip out of circulation, tracking down shifter activity, and rooting out the alien cults that proliferated, like mushrooms in some dark cellar, in the hidden worlds of the Social Inclusion Zones. And, since one of their most important functions was to be seen to be attending to these things, they were expected to follow up these calls as loudly and conspicuously as possible.

  The driver, a former military policeman, was well aware of this requirement and he played his part to the full, providing brake-screeching corners and noisy bursts of acceleration as they rushed across the city. As a matter fact, he was absolutely loving it, and so was the burly nurse beside him in mirror glasses, who’d been transferred to the SIS from a hospital for the criminally insane. Both men maintained an elaborately nonchalant poise as the traffic scurried out of their way, their limbs loose, their expressions so casual as to be almost bored.

  At the Thurston Meadows Line, heavily armed paratroopers opened the barrier as the car approached and waved it through. The nurse gave a loose, lazy wave of thanks, and the paras waved back in like manner: tough, laconic heroes at the front line of a conflict between light and darkness, acknowledging their common purpose. Then the military policeman stepped on the accelerator again and the silver car leapt forward with a roar and a cloud of smoke, shooting past the field hospital that had been set up on the corner of Meadow Way and Asphodel Avenue, zipping round a column of armoured cars parked along Buttercup Drove and rushing headlong towards the new watchtowers at the entrance to the Central Square.

  ‘Another day, another fucking Zone,’ observed the nurse with a theatrical sigh.

  Meanwhile a warm sun was shining, clouds of cherry blossom were bursting forth and new green flesh was unfolding itself everywhere into the creamy air. Indifferent to the agitation in the human world, the planet had been spinning through space, just as it always did, and spring had come round again. It had come round here and in countless other worlds, in each one according to a minutely different pattern, so that if all the parallel worlds could be brought together, there would be no separate leaves or blades of grass but only a green haze.

  ~*~

  A little cringing creature was weeping in the corner of a cell. His name was Damian and he said he was seventeen years old.

  ‘I haven’t swallowed nothing, mate!’ he sobbed. ‘You’ve got to believe me, man, I haven’t fucking swallowed nothing! I used my last slip getting here! Don’t shove nothing down my throat mate please, please, I’m fucking begging you.’

  ‘There’s an easy way of doing this and there’s a hard way, Damian,’ said the military policeman.

  ‘We need him on a table face down,’ the nurse told an excited audience of half-a-dozen policemen and paratroopers. ‘We need his head well below his stomach.’

  ‘Best use the table in the interview room there,’ called out the DSI custody sergeant.

  ‘And I’ll need this bucket half-filled with water.’

  A policeman hurried to oblige.

  ‘Please!’ shrieked Damian. ‘Please! I ain’t got no fucking slip in me! Why don’t you fucking believe me?’

  But they all got hold of him and dragged him through to the interview room , where the nurse opened up his black bag with a little flourish, put on his plastic gloves and broke open one of his sterilised packs of gastric lavage tubes, funnels, and wedges for forcing open reluctant mouths.

  ‘Come on Damian, let’s get this over with,’ said the Custody Sergeant as they forced the boy onto the table.

  Damian kicked and lashed out, tearing one policeman’s shirt and scratching a para’s cheek. The para’s comrades laughed loudly.

  ‘I’ll talk!’ the boy screamed. ‘I’ll tell you anything you want! Just don’t fucking pump me out all right?’

  ‘You will talk, mate,’ agreed the military policeman. ‘You’ll tell us everything we want to know. But that’ll be after the stomach pump.’

  ‘Hold his head still,’ instructed the nurse, pinching Damian’s nose tight with a coarse, well-practised movement, so that Damian had no choice but to open his mouth in order to breathe.

  ‘That’s the way. Now twist it slightly to this side.’

  Like a vet working some recalcitrant ruminant, the nurse rammed a rubber wedge between Damian’s teeth, then shoved in the pre-lubricated tube and forced it unceremoniously up the boy’s throat. Damian gagged and retched as if he was drowning.

  ‘It’d be a whole lot less unpleasant, mate, if you’d only keep still,’ said the military policeman, who was holding Damian’s right arm up his back in a brutal half-nelson.

  The nurse attached a funnel to the top end of the tube and asked one of the paras to hold it up while he poured in the water, to which he’d added a powerful emetic.

  ‘Right,’ said the nurse, pulling the tube out, ‘now force his head down over the bucket and keep out of the line of fire.’

  The boy vomited explosively. The ten men holding him down greeted this with loud cheers and much hilarity, along with raucous exclamations of disgust from those who’d got sick splashed over their clothes. Smiling grimly, the nurse plunged his gloved hand into the mess in the bucket and held up a little sphere that smouldered with a cold blue fire.

  ‘No slip in you, mate? Are you quite sure about that?’

  Damian retched twice more. Then, when there was nothing inside him to come out, the military policeman took him by the ear and yanked his face round, sharply enough to hurt.

  ‘Now you’re going to talk to me, my friend. Now you’re going to talk to me and Mr Bowen here. And this time, Damian my friend, you are going to tell us the truth. Do I make myself clear?’

  Charles had met many more shifters over the years than either the nurse or the military policeman, and he could tell from the outset that the boy wouldn’t have any important information and wasn’t a member of any sort of organised shifter community. He was just a teenager trying to escape from his own life.

  But the military policeman wasn’t interested in such things. He saw his job, more than anything, as a performance and was playing the part he felt he’d been assigned, according to the rules and conventions that TV had taught him. All shifters were an enemy against whom he was engaged in heroic struggle, and this was true even if the shifter in question was a malnourished little 17-year-boy who had committed no crime that anyone knew of.

  ‘You are going to talk, my friend,’ he told Damian. ‘You’re going to tell us where you came from, who you came with, and who you know here in the Meadows. Do you understand?’

  ‘I don’t know no one here,’ the boy wailed.

  ‘Not an acceptable answer,’ the policeman said, and slapped him round the face.

  Charles insisted that they take a break.

  ‘What in Christ’s name do you think you’re fucking playing at, Rick?’ he said in the corridor. ‘He’s not holding anything back! Can you really not see that? He’s just some little nobody who’s got a few seeds from somewhere and thought he’d give them a try.’

  The policeman heard Charles out with undisguised contempt.

  ‘With all due respect, mate, you’re still back in the days when this was seen as some kind of immigration problem. Wake up, Charlie boy! Wake up and smell the coffee! We’re past that now. We’re long past it. This is an invasion, my friend, and you’d better get used to it. This is a fucking war.’

  ~*~

  The man in the rumpled suit pulled his car over and climbed out into the spring sunshine. He was in an area of abandoned quarries that had become a wood. A tractor was coming towards him down the narrow road, and the young driver waved his thanks to Erik
for getting out of the way. Waving affably back, Erik took some cigarettes from his jacket pocket, put one in his mouth, and fumbled for his lighter.

  ‘Spring at last!’ he called out as the tractor rolled past, gesturing round with a smile at the sunlight and the fresh green leaves.

  But as soon as the tractor driver was out of sight, Erik snatched the unlit cigarette from his mouth, reversed a few yards at high speed, and turned off onto a rough track that led up into one of the quarries. There was a doorway there, a concrete-framed opening into a man-made cliff that couldn’t be seen from the road. Its metal garage door looked as if it had rusted shut long ago, but it clanked open when Erik tapped a number into his phone.

  Once inside, he took out a key, unlocked the inner door of the bunker, and made his way to his laboratory with quick, impatient steps.

  ‘A new phase,’ he whispered to himself.

  Blue lightning burst into the upper chamber of the hourglass, as if the thing had heard him and was giving its assent.

  Erik tapped some instructions into a keyboard. Straight away, the light flared up once again with a new power and brilliance, and on every side the screens began to stream with images and data, moving too quickly to be read. Even the room itself seemed to quiver and tremble, like the skin of a soap bubble.

  But Erik paid no attention to all of this. Hunching over the keyboard, he continued to type with his small pale fingers. He was reaching out across the hills and towns of Western England, and sideways into the tree of time, seeking for yet more ruptured souls to draw in towards himself.

  ~*~

  ‘Imagine a city,’ Charles said, ‘in which each street had a separate police force, each of which operated on its own without communicating with any of the others, so that a criminal wanting to avoid arrest could simply walk to a neighbouring street. Well, that’s roughly how we’re working now. We know there are agencies like ours in parallel worlds. We even know some of their names. But if we really want to understand this shifter phenomenon, do something about it, and stop the Zone people being scapegoated just because they’re more vulnerable than most folk to the offer of an escape, then we need to start crossing the Tree ourselves and beginning to actively collaborate with those other agencies.’