“G’day,” Spider said to her, amiably enough.
She looked up, saw him, and stopped cold, genuinely surprised to see him — anyone — there. “Who the hell are you?”
Spider was gratified to see she was astonished. Someone had found her. How could anyone possibly have found her?
Spider, close enough now to take in the details of the scene, to appreciate the pattern on the blanket, to note the brand name on the petrol can — expensive! — and even to see the camera feed on the screen of her laptop — that was a very nice laptop she was prepared to abandon out here in the middle of nowhere, wished he could afford gear like this. This was a new laptop, state-of-the-art right now, easily three thousand dollars, more or less, and she was going to leave it behind. He knew she was crazy, but that was just crazy!
“My name’s Spider,” he said, sticking his hand out for her to shake. She declined, and kept about her preparations, checking the camera’s focus and framing, going back and forth to make sure everything was just so, obsessively, Spider thought, as if composition actually mattered when you were making your very own snuff movie. “I’m a friend.”
“How’d you find me?” she said, not looking at him, doing her best to ignore him as much as she could, but also not being particularly rude or hostile. In her mind nothing was going to stop her doing what she was going to do, so a guy like this, this grey-haired, bearded man who had that look about him of a man who had been fat and who had then lost a lot of weight in a hurry, a man who looked tired and worn out, who had a lot on his mind, wasn’t about to change that.
“Asked around. Showed a photo of you around town. Talked to the local constabulary…” He didn’t tell her that the constabulary in question were six years in the future from now. He had been right: the Southern Cross police had a file on Sky Rutherford’s suicide. So much of the circumstances of it were so strange that they had mounted an investigation, discovered she was making a snuff movie of her own suicide, and had contacted James to tell him. Spider shook his head, trying to imagine the scene.
“Did James send you?”
“No, actually. He didn’t. This is my idea.”
“Your idea? How do you even know what I’m planning? I haven’t told a soul about this.”
“Time travel, Sky. Think about it.”
She laughed. “Ooooh, you’ve time travelled back from the Future—” She emphasized the capital-F in “Future”. “To save me! Good luck with that.” She rummaged in a folder of printed documents in the back of her nearby SUV, and came back to the camera bearing a folded sheet of paper.
“That would be the letter you’ll be reading?”
“This?” she asked, waving it before him. “You know about this?”
“I’ve seen the movie. Several times.”
Unfazed, she said, “You’re not worried about paradoxes and all that bullshit?”
“The universe takes care of everything. I wanted to ask you about that letter, though. If you don’t mind.”
She was a little amused, not even close to seeing Spider as a threat to her plans. “Ask away! I’ve got nothing to hide from a man who’s seen my movie.”
“No mention of your daughter.”
This stopped her. “I beg your pardon?” She stopped and looked at him, astonished again, but this time actually disturbed, like he’d struck her with a huge fish. At last, he could see, he’d made some impact on her.
“Your daughter. Electra. Lovely girl. Tried to kill me a while ago. Did a damn good job of it, too. I was in surgery for almost twenty-four hours. Touch and go.”
“Excuse me,” she said, frowning, puzzled, but wary, no longer the unstoppable force of nature she had been. “I believe you have the wrong person here.”
“No,” he said, reaching into an inside pocket of his jacket, and pulling out a sheaf of large-format photo prints. “I believe I have exactly the right person. Here, see what you think, you’re the photographer, right? Sorry about any composition issues…” He handed the pictures across to her.
Sky took one look at the top one — showing Electra submerged, but for her knees, in the tub, her unfathomable black eyes barely visible in the dark water — and laughed, and handed them back. “Nice try, but no banana.”
He went to the next one in the series, this one showing James, butchered, on the marital bed. “Do you know this man?”
She laughed again, but not as much, and with a tone of doubt. “You are kidding. How’d you set these up? Who did the blood? It’s very good.”
“Your daughter was so destroyed by what you’re doing here that she ended up killing James. He had been planning to kill her, himself. He told me he planned to do it later that night. They’d had years, Sky, of keeping the secret of how they killed Clea Fassbinder — ah, you recognize the name — yes, all of this stems from that. And what you’re doing now just adds to the fun for all the family.”
She took the photos from him, and went and sat on the open tailgate of her SUV, out of the setting sun, flipping through them, at first quickly, taking it all in, then slowly, looking deep into each one, the way he had stared deep into her video.
Spider said, “I’ve also got video, by the way.”
By the time she put the photos down next to her, and looked at him again, the sun had dropped below the horizon. Night was settling over the desert. Stars appeared, one at a time, hard and bright. A faint breeze stirred the red dust. It was quiet. Sky had said nothing to him. It was worrying. At any moment he expected her to put down the photos and tell him to fuck off and then go about her original plan, though perhaps now with an improvised message for poor troubled Electra. His repaired heart was booming hard, so loud he was sure Sky would hear it. At last, weak electric light from inside her car casting shadows across her face, she looked up at him, now a different woman, with different, human eyes. “My daughter did this?”
“I can show you the scar, where she got me,” he said, starting to unbutton his shirt.
She put a hand up. “No, it’s…” She was lost for words for a long moment. “I believe you. The look on your face. You’re not lying. You’ve seen… all this, haven’t you?”
“You believe me?”
She had the photos in hand again, going from one to the next, shaking her head, her lips pursed tight. “I do, but… I always wondered about her, she was an odd kid. We had a cat, once, Fifi. Pedigree. Persian. The most gorgeous cat.” She stared off into the western sky, saying nothing, then went on, her voice lower, quiet, not looking at him. “We could never prove that she’d done it, but we never got her any more pets. It was…”
“In your letter,” Spider said, leaning against the back of the car, “you tell James that it’s his hand setting you alight, that you’re only doing what you’re doing because he made you do it.”
She stared at him, uncomfortable, nowhere to hide, fidgeting with the letter, and started reading it back. “Yeah,” she said, weak, her resolve shattered.
“My point, Sky, is that what you’re doing, what you intended doing, you’re basically setting your daughter on fire. She will go forth from seeing this movie of yours, and she will become what she becomes. She’ll kill James. She’ll do her damndest to kill me. And of course, she’ll kill herself. And it will be just as if you did those things. You’ll be killing your daughter. Do you see that?”
She said nothing for a long time. She looked again and again at the photos, particularly the ones showing Electra dead, submerged.
When Spider was able to sit down next to her on the tailgate of her car, and put his arm around her, and hold her while she got as close to crying as she would ever get, he said to her, at last, “You know, Sky, most people, in your situation, they’d get a divorce.”
“I wanted to make him…”
“Go home. Call your lawyer. Do the grown-up thing.”
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She shot him a look, and pulled away slightly. “The grown-up thing?”
“Yes. Grow up. Sure, he had a stupid affair with the shiny woman from the future, so exotic, so fascinating, so much more interesting than his mere wife. Yes, he lied to you and betrayed you, and pretty much destroyed your family. I do not excuse that. All I’m suggesting is that you, at least, do the mature thing. Ditch him. Take the house. Have yourself a cheap and sleazy affair and make him insanely jealous. Just don’t do this,” he said, indicating the camera and the blanket and the can of petrol. “He’s not worth it.”
“But—”
Spider produced a business card. “Here. This woman’s the best. I did some research, asked around, and lots of people recommended her. Phone her up.”
She took the card. “Denise Ganley,” she said, looking at it, sagging against him, shaking her head. “I think I’ve heard of her.”
“Take him for everything,” he said.
“I had it all planned out,” she said, staring at her set-up.
“It was really something to see.”
There was a long pause. She said, “You wouldn’t…”
He popped his watchtop open, rummaged through the jumble of files he had in there, and brought it up. “You ready for this? It’s pretty strong stuff.”
She looked at him, and in her dark eyes he saw her true strangeness, a quality he had often seen in Molly’s eyes when she was working on something, preoccupied with it. She said, smiling a little, keen to see her own handiwork, “Wouldn’t miss it.”
He shuddered, and hit play.
Epilogue
It was Spider’s first day back at work — six years after talking Sky Rutherford out of killing herself, and five months after just barely surviving Electra Rutherford’s attempt to kill him. That both of these things happened, at least in his memory, did not bother him greatly. Probably, he thought, they should. Timelines sprouted hither and yon from every decision point: everything that might happen did happen, somewhere and somewhen. He understood that, at least in theory.
In practice, of course, things were different. These days, Spider had come to realize during his convalescence, Sky Rutherford was a quietly famous director of independent films. She had done well out of divorcing James Rutherford. James, on the other hand, had not done so well. Spider had a brand new memory of James telling him four years ago that he wanted to take Holy Orders, become a priest, or possibly a monk, and he’d taken off for Rome. Two years ago, and without a word of contact in the intervening time, Spider heard through the grapevine that James had been murdered late one night in a Naples park known to be a haunt of gay male prostitutes. The shock of discovering this new memory, as Spider lay in his hospital bed recovering from surgery, was terrible. This, he told himself, is your doing, Spider. You told Sky to divorce him. It was a hard thing to accept.
The Rutherfords’ daughter, Electra, had done no better, he learned. She had been found dead of a drug overdose with her boyfriend, “The Beat,” in what police regarded as a lovers’ suicide pact, shortly after the Rutherfords’ divorce was finalized.
When Spider talked to Iris about Electra’s attack on him, she looked blank for a moment, then informed him that the attack was “unsolved”, and her Major Crime Squad were still looking into it. “Reluctantly,” she added. The only description of his attacker, taken from a bored taxi driver across the road that night, was vague to the point of useless. To Spider, though, the description sounded only too familiar: it sounded like Dickhead McMahon’s robot personal assistant, the same assistant who appeared to have had a crack at his original Future Self that night at Mrs. Ng’s.
All of which was fascinating, of course, but Spider was quite sure it had been Electra who’d tried to kill him. That she and Dickhead’s assistant looked a little alike had never occurred to him previously, but the more he thought about it, getting more confused by the moment, the more it haunted him.
Speaking of Dickhead McMahon, Megalomaniac Tyrant of the Far Future, one of the first items of correspondence Malaria handed him on his first day back at work was from his absent employer. And Dickhead was indeed absent. His wife Sarah phoned Spider at work one day, wanting to know if he, Spider, knew where Dickhead had gone. He didn’t know what to tell her, the poor woman. Malaria told him Dickhead had not called, had not visited, had not sent any of his annoying memos and reports and forms that needed filling out all the time. Indeed, government fraud investigators were actively trying to find him. It seemed the Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait business was in deep financial trouble. There was talk of receivership, administrators, bankruptcy, and worse still to come. Dickhead was wanted on charges of embezzlement, fraud, tax evasion, and much else.
Charlie and Malaria asked Spider, on that first day back, if they were going to lose their jobs because of “stupid bloody Dickhead”. He said he hoped not. The fact was the time machine repair business was robust: there was no shortage of business. Turnover was good. It was just a question of figuring out where all the money was going. Forensic accountants were trying to sort out the mess. It might take years — but then, once they’d concluded their investigation, located the money, and with a bit of luck Dickhead himself, they planned to time travel back to when Dickhead was still around, and arrest him.
So, Spider thought as morning tea time approached, about this letter from Dickhead. It was highly unusual to receive an actual printed letter, on letterhead, from the likes of Dickhead. He was so in love with email, and phone calls, that the weight, the formality, of an actual letter filled Spider with deep foreboding. He turned it over and over in his hands. Expensive paper. Felt heavy, like there was more than one sheet of paper inside. He didn’t want to open it. Malaria offered him a reviving coffee, if that might help. She also asked if that might be his, “You’re fired!” letter.
“Hope not,” he said, but had his doubts.
Spider was, in fact, surprised to find Dickhead still, apparently, alive somewhere. He thought for sure the bastard would go all the way with his Jim Jones/Jonestown tribute and kill himself. But then, of course, he would miss out on the Final Secret of the Cosmos, wouldn’t he? Spider was sure it all made sense to Dickhead, regardless.
Then, while he was still thinking about whether he wanted to open Dickhead’s letter, his phone went off. It was Molly.
“Hi, Moll, what’s up?”
“Al, I can’t log in to the toilet again.”
“Can you wait ’til I get off at six?”
“Yeah,” she said, a bit sullen, and went away. Spider was happy to help her. As far as Molly was concerned, her entire experience aboard Dickhead’s flagship, including the torture, had never happened. In her memory she returned from Bangkok that day, and Spider picked her up, as previously arranged. He drove her back to her place, dropped her off, offered to help with her bags, she said “no, thanks,” and that was that, other than pestering him to fix things, mow the lawn, work on her home network, and so forth. More recently, Molly had started experiencing strange nightmares, filled with hellish imagery. She tried to articulate these feelings and images through her sculpture. From the way these HyperFlesh creations were posed, Spider could not help but notice, they were enduring the torture Molly herself, at least in this timeline, had not experienced, and did not remember. When he asked her why she was producing works like these — works that gave him the horrors — she said she wasn’t sure, but it felt “cathartic”, she said, to do them, like she was working through something. It also turned out she’d developed an unexpected case of arthritis in her shoulders, neck and spine. Spider could see in the stiff way she moved, sometimes, that it hurt, but said nothing, and did his best to provide positive, constructive feedback to her about her work. Already, she told him, there were “nibbles” — sales leads — from as far away as New York, London, and St. Petersburg. She was going places, he thought, and was pl
eased, in an abstractly guilty way. He still remembered what had happened to her as a result of his choices, just as he still remembered Sky Rutherford on fire.
Which brought him back, at last, to Dickhead’s letter. Made out to Mr. A. Webb, Head Technician, Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait, Inverness Road, Malaga WA. There was nothing else for it, he thought. He was going to have to read it. He tore it open, peered inside — one sheet of heavy paper, lots of text, single-spaced, practically edge to edge. Subtle as ever, that was Dickhead, he thought.
The sending address was: “Timeship Victory, End of Time”
“Dear Spider,” it began. “Heard you were doing it a bit tough, thought I’d stop by to see how you were bearing up, and say a big hello! HELLO! (ha-ha)”
Spider sighed, a sour feeling collecting in his stomach, and read on.
“Very pleased to hear your lovely wife Molly is back to her former charming self. Please convey to her my best regards. It would be delightful to catch up with you two crazy lovebirds and have a drink or two. There’s much to discuss! Things up here at this end of the universe are coming along a treat, just like I said they would, like clockwork, Spider, like clockwork!”
“I’ve got a really bad feeling about this,” Spider said to himself, worried about reading further.
“For one thing,” Dickhead went on, “We’ve finally smashed the last surviving stragglers from the Masada. I think they chose the name of their ship a little too well, you mark my words, Spider! Without your esteemed and wily future self to lead them, they collapsed in a heap. Couldn’t organize themselves out of a wet paper bag! (ha-ha) So that’s the end of them, and good riddance. They never saw what I could see, Spider. They never understood about the Final Secret. They thought I was kidding myself, oh yes they did, they really did. They told me I was delusional! Now who’s laughing, eh, Spider?”
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