by J G Alva
Ben stared at Sarah, and then at the scripture on the wall. Oh fuck. A religious fanatic. Great.
“Cosy. Think it means anything?”
“I’m…not sure.” She turned to him. “Does Jeffrey Aldershot have any kids, other than the daughter that was found downstairs?”
“Not that we know of. You think it might be some kind of bastard child, getting his revenge on the father who abandoned him?”
Sarah shrugged. She went back to staring at the writing on the wall, as did he. Ugly writing. Ugly words.
“Is that what your Psychology degree is telling you?” He asked lightly.
He could feel Sarah’s eyes on him then.
“I would have told you,” Sarah said haughtily, “but I thought it would be more prudent to keep the fact that I am an inexperienced university graduate to myself.”
He nodded. Fair enough. He felt he’d probably deserved that bit of whiplash from her tongue.
Ben stared at Aldershot’s body. There was a dark patch on the back of his neck, trauma from the bludgeoning that had paralysed him, and made him easy to kill. The fact that there was bruising meant that he had not been killed outright though. It was the stabbing to the face that had killed Jeffrey Aldershot, as it had his wife: both had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage from having their brains poked with what it would now appear was a screwdriver. Everyone else was betting on a hammer for the initial attack weapon. This guy was a regular B & Q.
From the hall, someone called his name.
Ben turned around.
Sarah was no longer in the bedroom with him. Damn it.
He went out into the hall.
“Sarah?”
“In here.”
The study was more of a cubbyhole than a room of any real dimensions. The bookcases on either side only helped to decrease the already limited space. The writing desk under the window further impaired any movement.
Sarah was pulling file folders from the bookshelves and flicking through them.
“What was he? A writer?” Ben asked.
“Of sorts,” Sarah said.
On the table was an old fashioned Underwood, battered, tired, covered in a thin layer of dust.
“Listen to this,” Sarah said, reading from one of the files, “”through our dependence on technology, we have come to trust objects to define us. Nature, in all its wild tumultuousness, has come to be bought, boxed, brutalised and broken in a world no longer allowed to flourish beyond the confines of a grid, or a straight line. We impose order on a fundamental chaos, not from a sense of progress or harmony, but because we cannot understand it. Delighted by our own inventiveness, we marvel at our ability to produce light from nothing, to wave flickering images in front of our eyes to simulate motion. How long before we begin to simulate life? How long before all that remains of a once wild and incredibly variegated natural world is only seen as a series of flickering images from a box that produces nothing but the simulation of what existed? We stand on a threshold. We separate ourselves from our natural heritage by a series of screens, each more opaque than the last. And in this we seek to end our own humanity, because to separate us from nature is to separate all of us from each other. How long before communication is held not through the connection of living things, but through an interface? How long before we all live alone, in boxes, staring out at a world we have made barren from indifference?”” She turned to him, an eyebrow raised. “Not exactly Tolstoy,” she said.
“What was he, a fanatic?” Ben asked, pulling a face. He reached for the other bookshelf. Here too were more manuscripts, all bound with string, some dusty with age and disuse.
“They’re all the same,” Sarah said. “They’re all essays on humanity’s dislocation from nature. And our reliance on technology.”
“I bet he was fun at Christmas,” Ben muttered.
“Ben,” Sarah said, and her tone made him turn. There was a strange look on her face. “I know who he is.”
Ben frowned.
“What-“
“I recognise the style.” She held up one of the bound essay books. “And this one here, I recognise it. It was one of the cold case files we reviewed in the Crime Investigations Development Program. I think…I think Jeffrey Aldershot is the Sunday Times Bomber.”
Ben looked around at the study, at the typewriter, at the litany of madness on the shelves.
“Oh shit,” he said.
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