Cuckoo

by Richard Wright

  Remembering the feel of his tongue stroking Alex’s, he felt his gorge rise and began to pace. Faster and faster he walked, between two of the brick pillars which supported the ceiling, slapping each with the palm of his hand as he reached it and turned.

  Not gay. Normal. Heterosexual. Not gay. Screaming in his head, he sent his thoughts to heaven. I am not gay!

  True, said a small voice within him. But what about Richard Jameson?

  He stopped short.

  Like in the bathroom. Like with the cigarette.

  Oh God, what had they done to him?

  Tremors began an assault on his limbs, and he was forced to sit on the bottom step again. Richard Jameson was gay. It was a programmed impulse that had kissed Alex, and realising it made him feel relieved in ways that shamed him. But could he be sure that the Jameson personality had receded in full? There was no way to know. Thinking back on the evening when he had smoked his first cigarette, he knew he had been himself when he sucked sweet smoke. Yes, the impulse was Jameson, but the mind which followed it was his. In the same way, while he was himself at that moment, he could not be sure that the desire for Alex had faded.

  He thought about his wife, about sex he had enjoyed with her. Today the memories were different, dislocated and unenticing. He turned his head to look at her. Met her gaze.

  Her eyes mocked him. She had seen. She had watched. What was she now thinking? That this queer, this freak, had thought to convince her that she was his wife? Was she disgusted? Appalled? Amused? Looking into the deep blue of her soul, he realised that she now saw something fundamentally beneath her. An insectile, alien, crawling thing.

  A torrent of rage blossomed in him. I’m straight, he told himself. As muscles tensed and his anger bloomed, he realised he had an erection again.

  Oh, she would see.

  Making no attempt to mask his intention, he walked across to her, his penis an obvious bulge in the fabric of his trousers.

  He would show her. Demonstrate.

  Jennifer was smiling now. It’s all right, the smile seemed to say, because I know you can’t do it. Her smile flickered slightly. I’m not your type. Greg felt his penis twitch as his trousers pressed it.

  She would find out.

  As he passed Georgina’s sleeping bag he realised she was awake. Her curious eyes met his as she rose from the bag. Panicked, Greg turned back to Jennifer. Was it his imagination, or was she chuckling under her breath?

  Georgina put a gentle hand on his elbow. “Babe…”

  He grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her back against the pillar they had slept beneath. Kissing her, he slid his hands up to her long hair. She was still for a single, shocked moment, then slung her own arms down to his buttocks and kissed back. Pulling her against him, she noticed the pressure of his erection and freed a hand to touch him. He gasped.

  Breaking the kiss, Georgina looked at him. “Where?” Her voice was husky. Heart hammering, he looked at Jennifer. She was watching, still smiling.

  “Here,” he said. Georgina shot a sideways glance at his wife, then smiled and nodded. With surprising force, she turned both of them around so it was he who had his back to the pillar. As she kissed him her fingers slid down to his trousers, drawing down the zip, reaching inside. She touched flesh, stroking. He moaned again, then she was no longer kissing him, her head was sinking, she was on her knees. Pulling his penis free from his trousers, she engulfed him in a single moist motion. Again he gasped, and her rhythm began.

  Now. Now he would look. Now she would understand. He turned to Jennifer, and was lost in her eyes. Her smile was now a grin. Greg was confused, finding it hard to think as he slipped in and out of Georgina’s mouth. Her tongue flicked him and he closed his eyes at the stab of pleasure.

  When he opened them again Jennifer no longer met his eyes. Her laughing stare was down now, and Greg followed the look.

  Georgina had gone bald.

  No, that wasn’t it. She had not gone bald at all. She had…

  Changed?

  Into the creature. His mind shrieked. His skinless, putrid tormentor had him in its mouth.

  His first instinct was to grab the now rapidly bobbing head and force it off. But as his hands came up to clutch the fleshy skull, they skidded and slipped across the slime of exposed meat. Blood vessels burst, and his hands were suddenly slick with fluids from the creature. As he screamed with revulsion, his body shrieked pleasure and came.

  Malevolent, powerful, it rose before him. Crying with terror and nausea, Greg saw his own semen dripping from its raw, fleshy lips.

  “I have tasted you,” it said in a deep baritone far removed from Georgina’s. “I claim you.”

  Greg could not reply. In grim parody of what stood before him saliva dripped from his own mouth. Unable to resist as the creature grabbed his throat with one powerful hand, he was lifted from the floor. He could no longer even breathe.

  “And now the truth,” it said. “You are Richard Jameson, a wealthy homosexual bachelor who lives alone. You have a brother, a mother, a father. None of what you have known is true.”

  There may or may not have been more, but Greg’s brain chose that moment to shut down.

  He awoke, cold and alone. Taking a deep breath, he winced as the bruises on his throat shifted with the flex of his muscles. His limp penis still dangled from the fly of his trousers. Remembering where it had explored, he turned and was sick.

  It took a while for him to gather the will to move. More comfortable, safer, to lie there staring at his own vomit, letting the vapour sting his eyes and throat.

  Eventually though, he sat up. He did not know who might greet his awakening. Was Jennifer there, or had the creature reclaimed her? Had Alex returned? Perhaps he would see the creature itself, waiting only for him to recover before continuing the torment.

  He had not expected to be alone. Glancing about him, he saw that the basement was empty. Jennifer was gone, scraps of denim and tape marking where she had sat. The creature had left too. Alex had not returned.

  Greg had never felt so lonely in his life.

  Stumbling to his feet, he wandered through the cavernous cellar like a lost child. Nothing. No one. If it were not for the remains of Jennifer’s bindings, it could all have been a dream. A sick, twisted nightmare.

  He began to climb the stairs, pausing halfway up to place his desecrated penis back within his trousers. Would he ever have sex again without thinking of that one, filthy orgasm?

  He continued the climb.

  At the top was the proof that all had been reality. Pinned to the door was a letter addressed to Richard Jameson. Hesitant, he pulled it down and held it to his chest for a long, silent moment.

  He had to know.

  Opening it as though it contained a bomb, he discovered that this was very much the case. An extremely subtle bomb.

  Dear Richard,

  You have no wife. You have no lover. These have not been taken from you so much as they were loaned to you for a short time.

  Do not think that we are finished, you and I. This is far from the case. For now, however, you have your freedom. Alex will become the sixth victim culled from London. His unwelcome return as you passed out made it necessary that we deal with him. I have snacked on you. I shall feast on him. But the banquet is not over. Live your life, whichever one you prefer, but know that you hold the truth in your hands. There shall come an accounting between us, for you are the seventh, and we shall not leave until you fulfil your destiny.

  Suffer.

  Yours,

  Gregory Summers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  COGNISANCE

  Greg shambled through the streets of the city for three hours, tired, dishevelled, and confused. Dark, black thoughts whipped him, hurt him, raged at him. The decisions he made were at once sheer horror, and tranquil reassurance. Stopping outside a post office, he stared at his own reflection in the window.

  Richard Jameson?

  The truth,
he thought, left hand still grasping the letter, is in here. I smoke. I commit sexual acts with other men. My histories are the photographs lining the bedroom wall of the apartment which is also mine. Every lie is truth. All truths are lies.

  Georgina. The creature. One and the same. Had that always been so? It had to be considered, and the implications were enormous. George had confirmed that he was Greg Summers, but if she was the creature then that had only been another means of prolonging his suffering.

  Not Gregory. Never Gregory. Who was he? Being able to name himself was not enough. His memory had not miraculously returned on reading the note. He still carried the fraudulent Summers in his head. Accepting that he was homosexual, for example, was impossible when what he recalled was a lifetime of lusting after women.

  Shuddering, he remembered the night at the Ramkin Hotel. It had handcuffed him to the bed, made him helpless. He had allowed it to. He’d been thrilled at the moist attentions it lavished on him.

  Enough.

  Where did Jennifer feature in things? She had goaded him into the perverse sexuality of the morning, he was certain of that. Was she the creature’s plaything? A partner? He remembered confronting the thing in the study of the house he had thought he owned. We it had said. Now he knew who it had referred to.

  A nasal voice at his side punched a pathway through his thoughts.

  “Sir, I’m sorry, but if you don’t intend to buy anything could you please move on?” There was a note of embarrassment in the voice. Greg turned to see a pained looking Asian man in the doorway of the post office. Looking down at himself, he saw the point. He was a wreck.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.” A look of relief spread over the shopkeeper’s face as he realised that this particular tramp was going to cause him no problems.

  Greg checked his pockets. Though he had no money left, his credit cards and keys were still on him. With a kind of sad resolve, he began walking to the only place he could go.

  It was early afternoon when he reached Alex’s apartment. He had not expected an answer to his pressing of the buzzer, having come only to retrieve his hire car, but he checked anyway, hoping that he was wrong. Dismissing the implications of the closed door and silent speaker, he walked across to the car.

  It was a matter of a half-hour drive before he arrived at Richard Jameson’s flat. His flat. Not all was as he had left it. On stepping through the door, an insistent beeping caught his attention. An answer-phone was secreted somewhere in the room. Tired beyond belief, Greg began to search for it.

  Finding the machine took only a few weary moments of real time, but his mind found this sufficient for a host of resigned acceptances. Alex was gone, a morsel for the thing to snack on, and it was his fault. He had rejected Alex that morning, forcing him away and leaving him vulnerable. It was he who had led his friend into Georgina’s arms, his tormentor, the thing. With a sickening start, he realised that Alex was the only real friend the temporary man called Summers had ever made.

  Later would come the agony of guilt, the need to act, and the attempt to save the innocent man he had pulled down in his own death-throes. Alex Carlisle was not alone.

  Before Greg could find Alex though, he first had to find somebody else. Someone important.

  Richard Jameson.

  It won’t be like dying, he told himself, it will be like rebirth. He would be the same person, the same elementary identity, when he brought Richard to the fore. They could not have changed him so fundamentally that he was an entirely new being. Thinking hard, he tried to recall how it had felt when Jameson climbed from the bath some days ago. There had been no sudden difference in self. It had been a smooth transition from one self to the other. Surface details - the smoking, the sexual preferences (a thought to make him shudder) - would alter, but surely he would remain the same essential man?

  Or would he? Was personal experience the foundation of personality? If that were true then Greg really was condemning himself to death. Although a maze of falsehoods, the details of his life were substantially different from what he knew of Richard. The coffee scald, as just one example, still bred a small angry knot each time it was recalled from his litter-site memory. For Jameson, it would be nothing but a worthless fantasy.

  Greg wanted to keep the scald, needed the precious death of his mother to stay with him, longed for his wife to belong to him again. Moving forward would mean giving all that up. He wanted to keep the raw wounds of his youth, but only if he could look on them from the anaesthetic peace of his life with Jennifer. He knew that couldn’t happen. Jennifer – his Jennifer, the woman in his mind – did not exist, had never been. All that existed was the face on which the creature had based her, the pawn Greg had held captive in the basement of the Ramkin Hotel. She never would be, never could be, the woman he craved.

  There were no tears on accepting that, just grim recognition. During the blank three hours when he had walked through London streets, he had thought other dread thoughts. It was the ending of his life that had preoccupied him.

  Gregory Summers was worth nothing. Why continue? Why go on? With nothing left to live for, suicide was the last pure option he could consider. A final, decisive action that would belong solely to Greg. The only true stamp he could make on the world was to embrace a proud death.

  It had been close. With each bus that passed, each bridge he crossed, the imperative had been there. At certain times in his life, the life he had never lived, he had thought of how easy it would be to kill himself. Fleeting, insane moments when he had looked at oncoming traffic and imagined how simple it would be to just step onto the road and end his life. Those were transitory lunacies, to be grinned at ruefully as he continued down the street. That day, for the first time in his fictional existence, he did not have the host of reasons that would prevent him from fulfilling the insanity. Walking around, seeing a potential for death in the most innocuous locations, he had been in more danger than any orchestrations of the creature had placed him in.

  At last, looking over the railing of a pedestrian bridge spanning a motorway he could not name, the reason not to let himself tumble had kneed him savagely in the common sense. Hanging there - the hard metal of the barrier pressing his hips, the strong breeze wanting so badly to help him drift forwards - he heard a single word whisper from the back of his mind. It was his own voice, yet it was not. It was his own mind, yet it was not. Brushing lightly over his thoughts, the whispered word was three silent syllables. Murderer.

  Spasming back from the railing, he had looked round in horror. Nobody else was there, the voice had indeed originated from his own head, springing forth to remind him that this body was not his to throw away.

  He knew precisely who the real owner of the voice was.

  Kill himself? Certainly, for what other route lay open to him?

  Kill Richard Jameson? By what right? If he were to jump now, to sail down to the rushing metallic river below, then the last act of his life would not be the noble end of Gregory Summers. He would go to his grave as the man who murdered Richard Jameson.

  So he had decided his course of action. Greg Summers was fated to end, but his final struggle would not be the selfish, self-pitying act he had contemplated that morning. When he died, it would matter. Greg Summers would not have lived his short, fiery life for nothing. He would die the man who had given his life to save Richard Jameson.

  He found the answering machine on the same shelf as the telephone, concealed behind the books ranked there. Jameson had read those books, maybe enjoyed them, but he could recall nothing at all about their content. He promised he would. Jameson would be free again. He pressed the button to replay the messages on the machine.

  Beep. “Richard? Richard, pick up the phone. Rich? Shit.” Click. Stewart, probably worried about his brother after the restaurant episode. Alas, Richard had stepped out of the building, please try again later.

  Beep. “Mr Jameson? Sally. Could you call me at the office, or maybe my mobile? There are s
ome documents need your signature, and the Interventionist has been asking to see you. Hope everything’s okay. Speak to you soon.” Click. Sally? A secretary perhaps, or a personal assistant of some sort.

  Beep. “Jesus Richie, will you please phone me back? I’m worried sick here. Are you all right? Are you ill? What the fuck happened at De Marco’s? Come on, I need to talk to you.” Click. Stewart again. The poor man must be worried to death.

  Beep. “Richard, it’s your mother. Oh, you know I hate these machines. I’ve just talked to Stewart, he seems a bit worried about you. Is something wrong, honey? Phone me back, let me know you’re all right. Love you.” Click. Not his mother, he reminded himself. Perhaps she had borne the body in which Greg stood, but his birth had been unnatural and unasked for. He owed this woman nothing beyond the safe return of her son.

  With a final click, the answer-phone switched itself off and the tape began to rewind. Greg found the whirring soothing. In a half-trance he realised he had just flicked through a handful of audio snapshots depicting the life of Richard Jameson. Yet not one voice had stirred a memory in him. Of Stewart he recalled only the brief, disastrous meeting in the restaurant, and the saga of the soaring red ball. Sally was faceless to him, as was the entire world of the company Richard seemed to have built. Regarding the mother, he wondered if an adopted child might feel this way about their real parents. In every sense they lived a happy, normal life believing themselves to be the true son or daughter of a particular couple. Then suddenly they make the world-altering discovery and everything changes. Did they share his curiosity, his desire to meet the biological entity who had spawned him? He was intrigued, but not enough to intrude on her life. From his viewpoint, his mother had been dead for sixteen long years, his father dying just five years after that. He was used to being without family, it was Richard who owned these snapshots. He hoped he would be able to return them.