“They’ve closed a lot of motorways as well,” said Shaun, lowering the paper. “People are kicking off because a lot of the closures are nowhere near the statue, but the government are saying they don’t know what it might suddenly do, and if it got onto a busy motorway the consequences would be blah blah blah. So much is unknown at this stage, that’s the problem.”
“Can I turn on the TV?” I asked, wanting to get a visual update before I left.
“Mm, be my guest,” he said, and lifted the paper again. “What time you off?” he asked, slightly more airily and casually than necessary. My time as a welcome guest was clearly up, and I didn’t blame him. He wasn’t being nasty; he was just hungover and wanting to be alone, whilst doing a poor job of hiding it. He’d offered me a bed for the night, and his obligation to me was over. Plus, I deserved infinitely worse than a thinly veiled request to go.
“I’ll just have this and be off, mate,” I said, raising the mug that was about to contain some tea. “And listen, thanks again for putting me up. Big deal to me, that.”
“Our pleasure. What have you got sorted for tonight?” Subtle meaning: once was enough, I’d like my living room back.
“Oh, I’ve had a text off a mate, he’s got a spare room going permanently, so that’ll do for the foreseeable future,” I lied, forcing a smile and clicking the TV on. He looked more relieved than he probably realised, and gave me a thumbs-up. The ad break finished on the screen, and the live feed came back. The news shouldn’t even have been on then, but the breaking news tracker bar that was scrolling across the screen gave me the impression that it wasn’t going off any time soon. Blanket coverage. The picture showed the Stone Man making its way through a well-to-do looking estate, walking along a street at an angle that would take it through a nearby house. It was surrounded now (presumably due to being in an urban area) by a squad of armed soldiers, keeping pace with it in a circle that stayed around six feet away from it on all sides. Moving slowly behind them was a jeep. I didn’t really take in any of this properly at the time though, as the moment that my eyes fell on the Stone Man, the top of my head felt like someone had poured cold water all over it and I became very, very awake.
It was as if something inside had just screamed THERE, and connected with the image onscreen. I felt a pull inside me, not a physical pull but just a kind of … urge. I was picking something up, there was no doubt about it. My fingertips and toes felt slightly numb, and my heart raced, both with shock and something else, that other force, as if I was having a mild panic attack. It was a physical and mental connection.
Wide eyed, I looked at Shaun. He was still reading the paper, unfazed. I managed to get my breath, and speak.
“Shaun?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Just … are you seeing this?” I needed him to look too. I had to check. He turned, lazily, and looked at the screen. He stared at it for a second or two, blinked, then turned back to his paper.
“Yeah,” he said. “Once you’ve seen it go through a few buildings and flatten a few cars, the appeal wanes a bit.”
So it was just me. I was the one who’d passed out, I was the one who’d had a fit, and now I was the one who was connecting with it. But why me? Why not Shaun, or Laura, or even her sainted sister? Sure, I’d effectively been at ground zero with this thing, but I didn’t think that was it; or at least not that alone, considering Laura’s too-much-of-a-coincidence theory. Distance couldn’t be a factor; Sarah had had the same symptoms as her sister, and there was a distance of fifty miles between them.
Something in the body, then? In the brain? As I continued to stare at the Stone Man on the TV, not even realising that I was holding one hand slightly out towards it, an idea occurred to me.
“Shaun? Did you ever get a bang on the head or anything?” There was silence from Shaun, and he stiffened slightly as he considered the question. I’d really phrased it quite badly, I realised. “Sorry, that sounded bad. Thinking about last night, I mean. Ever had any knocks, any operations?”
“No, mate,” said Shaun, quite tersely, still not looking round. He was being such a grumpy bastard this morning that if I didn’t know he had a hangover, I’d be convinced that he knew I’d fucked his wife. I had another question, one slightly more impertinent, but seeing as I didn’t plan on seeing him again anyway, I didn’t really have much to lose.
“Okay, any kind of brain abnormality in the family? Parkinson’s, depression, schizophrenia, ADHD, anything like that?”
“What?”
“I’m just asking.” There was a long pause, and he stared at me with his brow knotted. I didn’t know if he was thinking about the question, or deciding whether or not to kick me out. This was not the day to be asking Shaun questions. Fuck him, I thought. Disgraceful, I know, given what I’d done, but I didn’t have time for that.
“I’m dyslexic, but I don’t consider than an abnormality. It’s fairly common, you know. And I wouldn’t have met Laura if she wasn’t, too.”
“Laura’s dyslexic?”
“Yes. We met at an adult English lit class, if you must know. We both wanted to catch up on stuff we couldn’t appreciate when we were younger.” He continued to stare at me, then went back to his paper. He let out a sigh, and rubbed his forehead. “Sorry, I’m being snappy. Just tired … feeling delicate. Shouldn’t have drunk wine, it always puts me in a bad mood. Sorry, sorry.”
“No, no, it’s fine,” I said, “I shouldn’t be peppering you with questions when you’re hungover.” He responded with a slight flick of his hand, and a bob of his head; no worries. I didn’t get to ask my next question (is the sister dyslexic too?) but I’d bet my last buck that she was, as dyslexia occurring in more than one sibling is common.
I wasn’t going to tell Shaun this, but I thought I was onto something, and what he’d just told me had lent my new theory a lot of credibility as far as I was concerned. I’m not dyslexic, and never have been, but thinking about my own situation had started me on a line of enquiry. You see, when I was twenty-five years old I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.
You might not know, but Asperger’s is a mild form of autism, so mild that generally you wouldn’t really know unless someone told you … but you might notice that something was a little off. It’s defined as having a lack of social awareness (sentences are literally interpreted and nuance is unnoticed) a lack of empathy, and often a reduced ability to take pleasure in what should be pleasurable activity. We’re generally clumsier, and can be obsessive over particular things. We’re supposed to like routine, but that one doesn’t apply to me. Mine is very mild, but either way, I have it. I’ve worked over the years on various techniques so I can function better in ‘normal’ society (don’t stand too close to people, don’t reveal too-personal details or ask too-personal questions, and learn which situations do and don’t warrant such conversation, learn appropriate and expected behaviours, be aware that you might be boring someone and talking too much) but it doesn’t change the way I think. These days, I just generally avoid conversation with strangers full stop. In my adult life, it’s turned into quite a bitter view of other people; I tend to see them as insincere, indirect, and guarded. I used to get upset by not quite understanding the way they work, but now I hold their ‘knowledge’ in contempt; the things you ‘just don’t do’ and the things you ‘just do’, in my eyes, are the actions of sheep. Act the way you feel, not the way you’re expected to. Say what you mean. But apparently I’m the weird one. Anyway, it’s probably the reason that my circle of friends has always been small and selective, and why most of my past relationships had been difficult; I read often in online forums about other Asperger’s people who were married with kids and so on (it’s actually very common) but I don’t work that way. It’s not who I am.
I’d accepted it anyway, and was fine with it. Their ways were not my ways, and even though I knew I was the one that had the ‘problem’, I thought that the way I viewed the world was one hundred percent correct. I sti
ll do. Regardless, Asperger’s isn’t the sort of thing you open conversations with. What would be the point?
My theory, as regards to my condition and the Stone Man, was that perhaps it was something to do with having your brain wired slightly differently. Shaun and Laura were dyslexic, so they were getting a jolt, although it was less the second time. I had Asperger’s, so I was getting a different, and more powerful one; although the second time, it hadn’t rendered me totally unconscious and merely caused me to have a fit. But I didn’t think other people with Asperger’s around the country were having the same experience as me. By the time the Stone Man ‘came to life’, there had been a few hundred people standing around it; I thought that the odds of someone else in that crowd having Asperger’s and being so close to it for a sustained period of time were surely pretty slim.
As for the dyslexic crowd, I don’t know if enough of them would ever be in one place at once for them to notice that their attacks were simultaneous. At six o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, the only place I can think of where there’d be a large enough gathering for there to be several dyslexics coincidentally gathered at the same time (what is it, one person in seven is dyslexic or something?) would be a pub, and even then you probably wouldn’t notice—at least not whilst you were suddenly feeling sick and needing to sit down—that someone else on the other side of the pub was feeling sick too. If they’d collapsed like me, sure, there’d be an uproar all around the place that everyone would notice, but if all they’d had was a bit of a funny turn? Shaun had said it’d be all over social media if everyone in a pub had an attack at once, but only two or three people in an entire building? I think only their mates would notice them, and would be unaware of it happening to anyone else.
Regardless, if my theories were right, I was unique, and that meant I was picking up on something in a way that no one else was, or would. Whatever the cause, the effects of it had downgraded the second time, and any after-effects seemed to range from nothing to a minor sensation; Shaun now wasn’t getting anything at all, and mine had been reduced to a low-level buzz in the head, except for when I looked at the Stone Man onscreen. Maybe the more dramatic hits were some kind of initial side effect, a result of connecting to whatever it was just for the first few times. Perhaps it was like drinking the local water on holiday, with the first few drinks giving you the shits before you built up a resistance. Either way, we now seemed to be more conditioned to the effect of the Stone Man.
I had to sit down for a second, genuinely shaken by these possibilities. I thought I was definitely in the right ballpark, if nothing else. I wanted to blurt it all out to Shaun, but not only was he not in the mood, I didn’t think he would have bought it anyway. He just wasn’t the open-minded type.
That sense of urgency, that physical tug, was still ticking away, even though I was no longer looking at the screen. It wasn’t anything to do with visual input, then; something to do with mental focus? Maybe seeing it, and thus giving it my full attention, had strengthened the connection in some way, and now I was thinking about nothing else, keeping the connection strong. No faces this time, though.
I took a deep breath, and began to concentrate as hard as I could on thoughts of the Stone Man, remembering being close to it. I remembered its rough surface and colour, seeing it begin to walk, feeling the deep thuds it created with every step. I tried to relax (difficult with my heart pounding the way it was) and closed my eyes. Shaun didn’t notice a thing, still deep in the paper and probably assuming that I was just taking my time drinking my tea. Slowly, I felt the buzz increase in my scalp and fingers, felt that pull in my head grow … but still no face, not this time. But that pull … a pull towards where?
I leapt out of my seat as I had the revelation, spilling my tea and causing Shaun to jump in surprise.
“Jesus, you scared the crap out of m—” he started but I whirled round to him, cutting him off.
“Shaun, I need a road atlas. D’you have one? It’s important.”
He stared at me for a second, cocking his head with an ‘Are you kidding me?’ expression, but then decided questioning it would only keep me hanging around longer.
“Yes, Andy. Yes, I have a road atlas. I have a road atlas for sudden, jumping around emergencies just like this. Drawer on the left, over there. If you decide you want something else, if it’s just possible you could avoid scaring the shit out of me first, that’d be great.” I didn’t reply, and was already making my way to the drawer. My revelation hadn’t been where the pull was drawing me towards, but what I thought the pull might be. It wasn’t telling me where I was supposed to go … but I thought I was picking up wherever the Stone Man was supposed to go. And if connection to the signal, or whatever it was, was just a matter of focus …
I was making a leap, but I didn’t think it was that much of one. I could feel that the pull had a direction, so it surely had to have a source, or a goal. My mind was racing, not stopping to analyse what was going on (extremely rare for me, a sensation that I would have enjoyed if not for being so immersed in what I was doing) as I pulled out the atlas, noticing it was several years out of date. That didn’t matter for what I had in mind. I carried it back to the table and spread it open, turning to the front few pages, where the overview image of the UK was laid out. I took out my iPhone, and swiped across to the compass app, planning to use it for probably the first time ever. I waited until it found north, and turned the map so its northward point matched the same direction as the compass.
I stood up straight, feeling excited, hopeful, and a bit stupid at best. I’d been wrong about everybody getting the signal, and it was very possible that I was wrong about this too, but I didn’t think so … not now I could feel the connection like this. It just seemed to make sense.
I closed my eyes again (just as I saw Shaun regarding me suspiciously from the other end of the table) and tried the same focusing trick that I’d used a few moments ago. That electricity in my fingers and scalp intensified, and my heart rate picked up; it was like a first date, that fluttery combination of the mental and physical, but colder, more clinical. Goose bumps broke out on my forearms. It’s working, it’s fucking working!
Opening my eyes, and still trying to keep the connection strong, I held my hand out over the map, more excited than I’d ever been in my entire life. This was the stuff of magic, and I was doing it. I couldn’t fathom the truth of that, couldn’t begin to comprehend it, and perhaps it was a good job that I didn’t; I would have stayed sitting there all day, stunned by it and not getting to the bottom of what was going on. As it was, I managed to stay focused on the actual job in hand.
Where had Shaun said the Stone Man was? Just past Derby; I held my palm over the corresponding area of the map, trying to link the visual with the mental. It’s there, I told myself. This is the whole country, laid out on the table before you, and the Stone Man is right there. You’re looking at it from above, and you can feel the same pull that it does. It’s going north; you know that. But where? How far? Where is it going? Follow the signal. Find the source.
Shaun started to speak, but I shushed him. Right now, I couldn’t care less about pissing him off; this was desperately important. I was full of electricity, and he did not matter. I heard him put his paper down, but he didn’t move. He was not a man that would challenge another, even in his own home.
Slowly, something began to happen. The sensation in my fingertips began to fill my hand, now flowing up past my wrist, my elbow, up to my shoulder. The pull became more physical, stronger, drawing me, and in my mind’s eye I saw the Stone Man walking on the map, the map that became lush and three dimensional as the flat blue of colour representing the sea began to churn and flow, the grass covering England blowing in a breeze as the Stone Man made its way north and my mind created a frighteningly vivid picture. It was like watching a film. My body leant forward, pulled towards the map, and the electricity reached my shoulder and the arm attached to it began to travel upwards.
My heart was hammering even harder in my chest, my amazement increasing my excitement as my eyes widened and bulged, but I managed to keep focus; I was locked into something else, and the feed felt so strong that it was almost impossible to lose. It was in me. I watched my hand travel, looking possessed—which, in a way, it was—moving upwards along the map, watching it pass Sheffield … and then stop. Dead.
I looked at the area my hand covered; the distance was huge, but I knew the Stone Man was moving in a straight line. Unless there was a sudden detour, I could narrow down its movement horizontally, at least. At some point under my palm (an area that covered, at this scale, hundreds of miles) the Stone Man would apparently stop, but that wasn’t good enough, wasn’t precise enough. In a panic now, worried that I might somehow lose it suddenly, I flipped to the index at the back and found Sheffield, trying to maintain the connection’s current level of strength in my mind, even though the visual aid was temporarily gone. I flipped over to the Sheffield page, but I could feel the intensity of the mysterious input begin to drop back down to where it was before, even when I moved my hand up and down across that area.
Over the next few minutes, in a near panic, I tried different pages that showed close-up versions of the areas along the line that my hand had drawn, but I couldn’t get any more of a handle on the signal. I even went back to the original UK map page, and after a minute or two, once I’d achieved the same effect as before—the map coming alive in my mind as I saw the Stone Man’s avatar stomping its way across the UK—I tried using my finger instead of my palm, hoping the smaller area of my fingertip would give me a more accurate result and whittle the options down. It didn’t work; all I found was that the Stone Man’s goal was somewhere in or near to Sheffield, my finger simply wavering up and down around the same area that my palm had previously covered. Whatever I was picking up, it couldn’t give me a more accurate reading at this point; perhaps distance was also a factor. Well, that didn’t matter. I, too, would now be going north for certain, and I’d find out firsthand if being any closer made a difference.
The Stone Man - A Science Fiction Thriller Page 9
