Unhaunting The Hours

by Peter Sargent

  I reached a hand toward the bag.

  “Can I have it? It’s a piece of me.”

  Balder hesitated. Then he tossed it on my chest. “What the hell. It’s worthless to me.”

  Looking at it, I thought of the image I’d seen in the homeless shelter’s basement. In the end, there was only one man, and a phantom shape with something in its hands.

  I said, “You found me with an old man.”

  “Yeah. He was dead. Had been for a while.”

  “And the other one?”

  “There was no else.”

  I focused on the memory. The second one had been sleeping, with a hat pulled over his face. A green military cap. And beneath the brim, I’d seen a rust-colored beard. Then I thought of the bloody sweater.

  “The dead woman you told me about.” I said. “The one that gave you the matched DNA and the mismatched prints. Do you know who she was?”

  “Yeah.” He said, and produced that embarrassed grimace of his. “Yeah. I’m sorry about your friend, George.”

  I faded out. I heard Balder’s footsteps as he left.

  * * * *

  I startled awake, with spit on my chin. I looked down and saw the bugs migrating to my fingers. I grabbed my fingers with the other hand. They were strong and slender. They were also bruised, from the kids in the alley. And that mob agent who bought my DNA seemed to like them. Wait. What was I trying to say? In order to fix the price, that woman tested my mental skills. A lot of it had to do with spatial acuity; I figured that much out. I was good with thinking in spaces, but the only good it had done me was a bottom wage job handling a theater spot light – and an odd way of looking at the world. But she must’ve been looking for something.

  I scratched my hands; the red insects made them itch. Damn imaginary insects.

  “Okay, George. Concentrate. Why were you worth so much cash to them?”

  The night Mrs. Brown fell, the medic had said something strange. He’d said I was crazy to do what I did. I’d thought it was because I’d stayed with Mrs. Brown in the dark, but it was really because of what I’d done to her. I’d set her leg, and I hadn’t even thought of it, and the medic had said I was stupid but lucky. But what did it matter? The jimmy butchered her anyway. But think about that.

  “You’ve got to be kidding yourself, George. You can’t be serious.”

  Just think. Healing had said the butchery was a good job. No, he’d said it was a clean job. Would that imply surgical precision? My clone altered his own face. And all sorts of people with money needed surgeons in the back alley. It was even better if those surgeons were untraceable slave labor. I opened my fingers and closed them. I’d told Balder that my experience in Abdera had inoculated me from the bizarre. I hoped I was right.

  I found a pen in the bed stand drawer, next to a Gideon Bible, and I shoved my food to the side of my dinner tray. I drew a grid on the paper placemat, and labeled the days at the top. I drew my own schedule in the calendar, and then the days I’d seen my clone. My pen hovered over the squares. I knew it had something to do with Molly. The phone call. Somewhere, there was some part of the butcher that was me. Forget the police psych profilers; some things started making sense to me. Why else was he at the shelter the same day as Molly, but not on the day that Balder checked? What other day was that? Well, there was only one other option, given the days Molly worked and that Balder only knew it was a clone three days ago. Yes, this was the right way to go.

  I drew in what I knew of Molly’s schedule, from what I’d overheard and from the days I saw her at State U and the days I’d followed her. I took a guess that the clone followed me on the train other times, even if I hadn’t noticed him before. The intersection of my own crazy schedule and Molly’s regular one meant that there were few gaps. I checked my watch. There was only one gap today. Now it was a matter of where they both were. I paused and thought. All of this was a hell of leap, and what I was thinking now was even worse. But what of it? I had nothing to lose.

  * * * *

  I ignored the bugs and struggled from my bed. In the corner, I found my clothes and changed into them. I went to the door, but then I stopped and thought that maybe Balder had posted a guard. I looked back at the room. There was no one else there; this was a private room. Of course, there had to be a reason for that. I went to the window and looked down. I was only on the second floor, above a loading dock. There was a tall truck backed up to the dock, and a man closing the doors. I rushed back to my bed stand, grabbed the paper bag with my memories inside it, and stuffed it in my jeans pocket. Then I opened the window, just as the driver was starting the engine.

  Down I went, hitting the roof with a thud, and sliding across the top as the truck lurched forward. I managed to grab hold of a ladder and I jumped off as the truck stopped before turning onto the main road.

  My entire body was bruised, my eyes were half blind, and I was covered in insects – but what the hell? I lurched down the grass strip by the side of the road.

  I knew where I had to go and what I wanted to do, but first I had to get someone’s permission. I wasn’t sure what compelled me, but in a few minutes I found myself on the chapel steps. The door was covered in graffiti. It said, “The Berm Butcher Worships Here.” I went inside, and found the reflective floor shattered along the center aisle. I picked my way among the broken pieces and walked up to the altar. Father Don was there, applying glue to a piece of Saint John’s wooden nose, and fitting it back where it belonged. I called to him, and he turned and stumbled in my direction. I told him to stop, and I climbed up to meet him.

  “You really don’t know a thing.” He said. “Do you? There was a police officer here, and he said he wanted to warn me. He’d found out that you had a clone.”

  The father wobbled to the altar top and braced himself against it, knocking the communion pitcher off and sending it crashing down the aisle.

  He said, “Well, he told me you were just as good as a killer, because your clone was the killer they’ve been talking about in the news. He said it was only a matter of time before you did the same thing.”

  “Healing did all this?” I gestured at the damage.

  “A group of maybe five or seven teenagers broke in after the cop left. I think they were doped. They did all this. They caught me in my study.” He let out a long sigh, and shook his head. He seemed near tears, and shrunken despite his towering size. “They took my book, George. They took my book and they tore it up and burned some.”

  He faltered, and then he fell. I tried to catch him, but it was no good. I kneeled down to where he sat on the floor.

  “Father, I’m sorry.” I said. “The cop, it was this guy from my old colony. His name was Healing, and he attacked me the other day. And he must’ve put these kids up to it. The police have been watching me, father, and Healing must’ve known where to find a couple of kids who wouldn’t’ mind harassing me. Or you – sorry.”

  The father laid a hand on me and said, “I’m sorry, you always asked me if you could read the book. But I wanted to finish the first draft before I gave it to you. You see, it was about all my doubt. I had so many reasons I couldn’t believe what I had all my life. You understand; you of all people. But I couldn’t exactly show it to you until I was sure I was right, could I?”

  “No.” I paused. “This time, I‘m really going to do something.”

  * * * *

  I stopped before the glass sliding doors. I was hunched over, considering what I was about to do. Then I rushed forward, the doors parted, and I entered the brilliant, clean light. I surveyed the array of shelves before me, and it seemed a daunting task. Then I glanced around me, at the people wheeling their groceries around the isles. I looked for the man I’d seen before, the one with the tiny tattoo on his arm, but he wasn’t there. No matter, the butcher was here. I knew it. Of course, this would’ve been one of the places that Balder checked, but if the mob ran this place, they would’ve known Balder was coming. I weaved through the isles, and then
I turned the corner into the breads isle, and I saw Molly. I jumped back and crouched in the previous row. Okay, my hunch was right. Now I just had to find him.

  I looped through the middle isles, and now I was really feeling a burning in my joints. People stared at me as I went, and then they changed. They grew red hair and their faces sunk in. They leered at me just as my twin had done that day on the train. They were planning a way to capture me. And Major Tuck came back for an encore. He cranked it, and I shuffled with one eye closed, and I veered to one side, hit a stack of soup cans and sent them tumbling to the floor. The shoppers stared me down from under their green cap brims, and I spun around the corner. There was a kid there with the store’s logo on his shirt.

  “Hey!” he shouted.

  I slammed my back into a rack of tortilla chips, keeling and pressing my temples. I spun and grabbed a jar of salsa and flung it at the kid. But I lobbed it short, and it shattered at the kid’s feet, painting his pants with chunks of tomato. He looked surprised, but undaunted, so I hauled more jars off the shelf and heaved them in any direction, like some kind of demented bowler. The clerk ran back down the aisle, and grabbed a red phone that was hanging on a post. I made it out of the isle, and heard the security call on the PA moments later.

  I tumbled forward, making good speed now that the adrenaline had kicked in. I saw a flower shop at the end of the isle. I made it there before anyone saw me, and I grabbed the door. It hissed, and a blast of moist air hit me. When the door resealed its air lock, the room was silent. I was alone inside, among giant pots shrouded in gold foil. I gasped and leaned on the counter. I half expected the clone to emerge from the seedling incubator, wrapped in a bloody smock and wielding a monstrous pair of gardener’s shears, and intoning in a low voice: “Can I help you?” But that’s not how it happened.

  I felt breathing on my neck. I raised my head and saw him staring down at me. He was wearing the smock, but it was covered in dirt rather than blood. And instead of a murder weapon, he carried a tiny clay pot with green sprouts. He’d concealed the lower part of his face in bandages. The light glinted off a tiny ring behind his ear, a Cipher port like my own. Then he spoke.

  “You are him, aren’t you?”

  His voice was almost a cough. He sounded very old now, perhaps decades older than me. He was dying of old age. But his eyes considered me with a sort of lost wonder. At first I thought he might’ve been hopped up on Spectrum, but then I realized that his mind was probably frozen in a sort of demented childhood. He’d probably dreamed of the moment he’d finally get his hands on me, and now he wasn’t quite sure if it was real. I knew that feeling.

  I looked over the wall, where I saw a lever attached to a box. I pointed at it.

  “The alarm?” I said.

  “Huh?”

  I leaped halfway onto the counter; just enough to grasp the handle. Fire suppressant rained down on us. Outside, it drenched every inch of the store in great white sheets. People rushed from all directions while the kid with the salsa-covered pants, and about a dozen other employees, attempted to organize the evacuation. Beyond the windows, I saw cop flashers.

  “The flowers!” shouted my twin.

  He gathered the pots and secured them in the incubator. Then he froze, as if I’d pressed some hidden pause button. He held a pot in one crooked arm, the flowers and his crazy hair wilting and dripping with the acrid-smelling suppressant fluid. His eyes were fixed on a spot out there, and when I looked I saw it was Molly, pressing into the crowd. I inhaled and braced myself, and lunged at him. Then he flipped me over – he was stronger than I would’ve guessed – and he put a boot on my chest, right where I’d gotten it before. That made three times this week. I decided that this time I wouldn’t struggle, and I’d just watch for the right moment. I couldn’t fight this guy, but I knew I could fool him. I tilted my head to the side and closed my eyes to a slit.

  He dragged me across the floor, the fire suppressant spurting in my face. He pulled me into the incubator, where it wasn’t raining. He released me and put his foot on my neck, and rattled a box attached to the wall. A rack of plants jumped and came loose from the rest. The butcher grabbed it and pulled it aside and dragged me through the opening that it had covered.

  I opened my eyes fully. The room inside was dark, but I could see a computer rack blinking in a corner. Neural connector cables hung off it, and I knew it was a client machine for the Cipher. Then there was a blinding light ahead, and plastic sheets hanging from the ceiling. I could turn my head just enough to see a large metal table and racks of knives. The butcher heaved me up and dropped me on the table; the cold metal hurt like hell. I closed my eyes again. I moved my fingers just enough to feel the table’s surface. There were grooves on the side. I realized that the butcher wasn’t a surgeon at all. The mob had made him into a coroner, and I was lying on an autopsy table. The grooves were there to catch my bodily fluids when he opened me. But this was good, I thought. There was a bright side to all this.

  I risked opening my eyes to a slit again. His back was turned to me. He took a syringe off a cart, and he poked it through the top of a glass jar. It was too far away to read, but I didn’t need too. When he turned around, I swung my feet and hit him square in the nuts. He keeled and I propelled myself off the table with just enough force to knock him over. His tray fell over, spilling utensils on the floor. I ignored the pain shooting up and down my spine, and I grabbed the butcher’s hand, the one that held the syringe. In the struggle, it stuck in him in the neck and I tried to push the plunger. But he knocked it from my hands. He reached his arm around, but now he couldn’t move his head to see me. So I lurched forward and put my knees on his arms and grabbed his red hair and banged his head into the ground. That dazed him just long enough for me to grab a surgical knife from the floor and slit his shirt from the neck down. I couldn’t make it all the way down without getting off his arms, but what I cut away was just enough to reveal the IV nub. I leaned over and grabbed the syringe and pushed the plunger all the way down. I stood up, falling backwards and crashing into the table. I propped myself up on it.

  The butcher’s eyes were still open, his body twisted into an unnatural shape. He was still breathing. His stuff was the usual stuff, and not the juice Healing had put in me. My clone had meant to cut me open alive, paralyzed and without anesthetic. His eyes looked terrified.

  I said, “Don’t worry, buddy. I’m not the same as you.”

  Then I remembered the paper bag in my pocket. I pulled it out, unraveled it, and dropped the little memory chip in my hand. I knelt down and stuck it in the butcher’s socket. I had a feeling I knew exactly what that figure had been, the one I’d seen moving through the static in those moments before my dreams recalled my own memories back to me. It had looked like a phantom because it hadn’t belonged to me; it had belonged to him. Healing had attempted to retrieve my memories from the Cipher, and there were some parts of our identities that it couldn’t untangle. In that moment where I watched my clone’s eyes close, as his mind merged with the chip, I had to wonder how long he’d been out there in the ether. How many times had we both been plugged into the Abdera network? How many times did we each think we were alone, but couldn’t shake the feeling of another’s presence? I watched him for a while. I heard Balder’s voice in the distance. I thought about what Balder had said, about how “our mutual friend” must have quite a story to tell. The image I’d seen, only darkly, was frightening enough. I couldn’t image what my clone was now reliving.

  * * * *

  They put me in Halestead, an institution for the criminally insane. It was only a few blocks from my home. After a week, they called me into the interview room. I sat there for ten minutes, in a plastic chair that resembled the ones in the lecture rooms back at the university. Outside I heard the water behind the Berm, rushing and unrelenting. Then Balder entered; the evening sun behind the blinds painted stripes across his face. He sat at the little table, across from me.

  “I’m
sorry I didn’t come sooner.” He said. “I got the judge to put you in here.”

  I said nothing.

  He said, “What did you want? To go to trial? I don’t think that would work out in your favor. Now that you’re in here, we have a chance of getting you out again.”

  “What are you after?”

  “I thought you might like to know that we caught Healing. He was working in an animal shelter in Miami. He always liked animals; they calmed him down. Anyway, you probably already guessed that he’d been monitoring you through the surveillance network and the investigative database. That’s how he was able to follow you, and that’s how he knew the details of my investigation. That’s how he knew you had a clone. I want you to know that his activities were illegal, and that I didn’t know of them.”

  “You want to clear your conscience?”

  He didn’t say anything, and I let him stew in it. In the time I’d been in here, I’d figured some things out. First thing was, Balder had been using me and still intended to use me. Second, Healing had used me too, but for a different reason. The butcher had been a part of Abdera. Healing needed to believe that I was a killer, just like my clone. Of course, now I knew that it was never so simple as pointing to genes or Abdera or childhood trauma and saying that was the thing that turned a man into a killer. But they each played a part in how I and my clone turned out. Like I said, damn the police psych profilers. I could figure this out on my own. But it’s funny how, after swallowing all the Abdera doctrine on finding one’s inner self and liberating it from the confines of the physical body, Healing had reverted to believing that my genes made me a killer. He did what it took to save his faith, and what a sacrifice that must have been.

  Balder said, “We’ve opened a file on Abdera. This is a dangerous business, because it’s a recognized religion, do you follow? And most of the colonies are probably legit.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “We think the mob’s been setting up its own colonies. It’s been using the Cipher for mind control.”

  I nodded. Well, gosh.

  Balder said, “I’d figured you’d be a key asset, or you would’ve been had you let me handle things. You see, I hear that few people can resist the Cipher’s song when they plug in – but like you said, you’re immune now.”