Touch

by Claire North

  “I read newspapers. I’m particularly fond of the celebrity tattlers, but even the tabloid press will give a few inches to a ship found drifting in the dark, blood on the floor, survivors weeping in a barricaded room. And as we have discussed before, it is easy – so very easy – for one of our nature to make a decision regarding the lives of others. You’ve tasted it. You know how it feels. Hecuba was inclined the same way. Families would slaughter each other, from the chambermaid to the master; only Hecuba killed those who threatened him, and you kill those who threaten the things you love, and you love everyone, don’t you, Kepler?”

  My teeth ground at the name, fingers rippled along the edge of the table.

  “He wore… a host,” I replied as Janus lifted her tiny coffee cup, little finger sticking out like an antenna. “His name was Will. He was my gofer, in the old days. Last time we met, we argued. He had this thing with his left leg, a muscle that cramped when twisted the wrong way. I don’t know the cause, wasn’t around long enough to get it checked out, but when it happened you could feel the tendons stand out beneath the bridge of your foot like they were going to pop right out from the skin. But he was a clean willing host in a city that wanted neither of us. He kept his nails trim and always carried mouthwash in a little bottle. He didn’t ask questions. He was… good company. Not very often you can say that. Then he was Galileo. And he had to die, so I killed him, three shots to the chest. It would be safer to put a bullet in his brain, but I had this picture in my head, of Will’s face, smashed up. Of his nose just exploding, of seeing his skull, of my – his – eyes staring, hanging out, and I should have put the bullets in his brain, but I didn’t.

  “Then I was the policeman and I took his pulse, and he didn’t have one and I thought that’s it, but the medics came and they started resuscitation and they failed. Of course they failed, but I imagine there must have been a moment. Perhaps a moment on the ambulance floor when a medic pushed down on his chest and what little blood there was left went through his arm and his skin touched the medic’s skin and… and I don’t know, because I wasn’t there – I was… someone else by then – but I can almost guarantee you that the medic who called time of death on my Will, if questioned today, would have absolutely no memory of it. None at all.”

  “And so Galileo lives.”

  “It would appear to be so.”

  “Just because he is of us,” she added sharply, “doesn’t make him our responsibility.” Even as she spoke the words, her shoulders uncurled, fingers relaxed over the end of her spoon. “Though he seems to have made us his.”

  “It’s not just Galileo.”

  She waited.

  “In Frankfurt Aquarius ran a medical trial. They were attempting to create a vaccine, to immunise people against us.”

  “Can that work?”

  “I don’t know. I doubt it. As it was, they didn’t get very far. Four of their researchers were murdered. A woman called Josephine Cebula did it. She was worn. Aquarius blamed me.”

  “Why you?”

  “I thought about that. Perhaps because I was convenient, because I showed up. But then I also thought about why they assumed that Josephine was somehow complicit in the act, instead of an unwilling host. I saw CCTV footage of her covered in blood, and to me it seemed obvious – blatant – that she was Galileo. That Galileo did the killing. But Aquarius blamed me, blamed her, and ordered us both killed. Host and ghost. That’s not how these things usually work.”

  “How did they die?”

  “Who?”

  “The people your skin… that Galileo… killed.”

  “Badly. Drowned. Stabbed. Mutilated; it varied.”

  “Why?”

  “Perhaps because they were developing a vaccine; perhaps that was a threat. But also…” I hesitated, drew in breath. Janus waited, a fork between two fingers, playing with it like a ball of string, watching. I ran my finger around the rim of my coffee cup, found I couldn’t meet Janus’ eye. “How did you become a ghost?”

  “Badly,” she replied.

  “Violently? When I… died – I think it’s fair to say that was the mechanism in my case – when I died, I held the ankle of the man who’d killed me. That was my first jump. I watched myself bleed to death and shook my frozen corpse, trying to get back in, but of course the flesh was dead and I lived, and the watchmen arrested me for my murder, which seemed, in a way, fair. It was, as you say, a bad beginning. I take it your origins were no less glamorous?”

  “Stabbed. In the stomach. Bled out. Jumped into the nurse who was trying to push my guts back in.”

  “Aurangzeb was hit by a car.”

  “Aurangzeb was an idiot.”

  “Kuanyin had ergot poisoning.”

  “She never told me that – that I can believe.”

  “The point is, our origins tend to be… traumatic.”

  “How is this relevant?”

  “Consider an organisation like Aquarius, any organisation of that ilk – there are plenty to choose from. It kills ghosts for whatever reason. But no matter how many you destroy, we keep occurring, popping up like dandelions between the cracks. Perhaps you realise that there is a pattern in our origins; perhaps you conclude that violence, terror, pain, whatever – these are our creators. Aquarius can hardly eliminate violence, but not every murder in an alley creates one of our kind, not every ergot poisoning or death on a bedroom floor. There must be conditions above and beyond those presently observed. I’ve been a doctor now and then, and even I know that to vaccinate against a virus first you must understand the thing itself. You must know how it functions, how it replicates. In Frankfurt they may have been attempting to make a vaccine, certainly. But first they need to understand what it is they’re vaccinating against, understand what we are.”

  “You propose that the vaccination programme could have been creating ghosts as well as destroying us?”

  “I suggest that there is a mechanism in the human brain which can trigger a jump in a tiny minority of people at a time of trauma. Identify that, and perhaps you can prevent it manifesting. Perhaps you can kill us before we are born – genetic genocide. Perhaps you could do so much.”

  Silence.

  Then, “Why Galileo? Why Frankfurt, four people dead?”

  I pinched my fingertips together, bit my lip. “Permit me a different question. Why were the murders so brutal? You and I, we were created in a moment of violence, of brute force. Milli Vra, Santa Rosa, mass murders, fear, trauma, why? Perhaps because every few years Galileo looks in the mirror and realises that the face staring back doesn’t love itself. Perhaps he tries to cut that look out of the mirror, and in doing so… creates a situation. Or perhaps he looks in the mirror and sees something beautiful which will eventually die, and Galileo wants the perfect things to last for ever, and you and I, if we are careful, will last for ever. Perhaps Galileo wants to create ghosts. If that’s the case, he too needs the same thing Aquarius does – to understand us. A trial to investigate vaccination can be permitted to go just far enough to discover the mechanism of our creation, but not too far. Not so far that it can actually inoculate against our existence. Just far enough.”

  “This is still supposition.”

  “Absolutely. But then we must add more evidence to this. If we suggest that Galileo, far from being ignorant of the Frankfurt trial, is in some manner aware of it, even manipulating it, then we can say that he is fairly well embedded in Aquarius. Embedded in the very organisation that is meant to destroy him. A series of murders in Frankfurt should have been blamed on him, and were instead put at my door. A host who any ghost would have worn – Josephine – was worn by me, and instead of ordering just my death, hers is ordered too. Clearing up loose ends, maybe. Or maybe more. Maybe we could call that jealousy. And who’s sent to kill me? A man by the name of Nathan Coyle – a man with more cause to hate Galileo than he could ever find to despise me. Finally there’s the Galileo file itself, which passes straight through incompetence and out the other
side into lies. Plain and simple lies. Aquarius is protecting the single most violent member of our kind. Why?”

  A half-laugh passed Janus’ lips, humourless as a crocodile’s wheeze. “Aquarius believed they were running a programme to destroy us, whereas Galileo was using the programme to create us. Absolutely marvellous.”

  “Mostly marvellous,” I corrected. “But Josephine died.”

  Her smile was still there, frozen and distracted, smiling at a thing that had no humour. “You always were overattached to your skins. I’m surprised you don’t have… a little sympathy for what Galileo has done.”

  “No. No sympathy. Some… inkling of comprehension for why. We move through skins. Today I am Sebastian. I have an iPod, a book, some clothes, these shoes, I am this face that I see in the mirror, and tomorrow I am… someone else, and I do not have any of the above. Today I have… you, in a sense. It may not be an association that either of us enjoys, but it is… a link. Something about which I can say, ‘Yesterday this was so and tomorrow it shall be the same,’ and that is something. Perhaps something good, in that it exists at all. Galileo… looks to make something – something that lasts, something that he did, regardless of who he was at its creation. So perhaps I can understand, but no, that is not the same as sympathy.”

  A bill was placed on the table.

  I remembered that I was Janus’ son and paid.

  Sebastian didn’t carry much cash. Here today, gone tomorrow.

  Janus watched. “How did Galileo do it?” she asked. “How did he get so deep into Aquarius?”

  I laughed.

  Didn’t know where the sound came from.

  Sebastian Puis had a good laugh: it came right up through his belly, pushed his shoulders back. I liked it. It was the first thing about this body I admired.

  “I think it was me,” I said. “I think I made it happen.”

  Chapter 66

  “Are you the estate agent?”

  Do you like what you see?

  “Are you the estate agent?” she’d said, and I’d looked up from my desk, and she was young, pampered and not at all herself.

  Never mind the question on her lips; never mind her presence at my door.

  This was Edinburgh in 1983, and no one dressed so well or spoke so fair. I leaned back and pictured her how she might truly be: a smaller meeker woman dressed in a shapeless old coat, her thick brogue tempered perhaps by a difficult upbringing that left her doubting her own mental and physical self-worth. Or maybe she was as her host had found her – heels a danger to tarmac, pointed and red, a skirt that barely covered her shapely behind, two hundred pounds of cotton and silk clinging to her breast, two thousand pounds of gold hanging about her neck. There were some – a few – who had the confidence to march around the city dressed in such a guise, but even the most vainglorious of self-admirers baulked at doing so casually.

  “Are you the estate agent?” she said again, impatience rising in her tone, so I said yes.

  “I need a man.”

  I resisted the obvious and gestured to the chair opposite my desk, won’t you please, may I give…

  She was too busy for courtesy. “Young, strong – a complete medical history. That’s the important part. I want cardiogram, blood tests, lung capacity test, allergies. Do you think you can do me someone ex-military?”

  I could certainly look into it. Would madam be looking for a short-term or long-term habitation?

  “Short. Doesn’t matter about family history. And blond. I like blond. But not curly hair. And not too hairy on the back either. OK if he uses oils and shaves, but I don’t want hairy when I collect.”

  Any particular needs more than an ex-military blond non-hairy physical hulk of a man with clean medical history and a penchant for razors?

  She thought about it, then said, “It’d help if he has a boat.”

  “A boat?”

  “Something nice. A yacht. Seagoing.”

  “I can certainly investigate, Miss…”

  She seemed to see me for the first time. “What?”

  “What should I call you, Miss…?”

  She stared down at herself as if surprised by both the question and her gender. Then her gaze returned to me, startled and clear. “Why the fuck should I know? Does it fucking matter?”

  “I am an estate agent, the only one operating in this area. I have many clients, and considering how rapidly their appearances may change from meeting to meeting, I like to keep some sort of coherent client list for future reference.”

  “A name?”

  “If you would.”

  She thought about it and smiled. “Call me Tasha. No – call me Tulia. I think I suit Tulia better.” Then the smile was gone, and the memories which it stirred sank beneath the choppy waters of the present. “Now get me someone beautiful.”

  My commission for the job was fifty thousand pounds.

  I found her Eddie Pearce, an ex-marine with a love of sailing. With the muscles beneath his neck he could have broken doors down; with the end of his finger he looked like he could lift my desk.

  I said, do you like what you see?

  Tasha – or perhaps Tulia – clapped her hands together with delight, exclaiming, “He’s beautiful! He’s so beautiful! Oh I want him!”

  Can I ask what for?

  What for? What kind of question is that? I want him because he’s him! I want him because everything about him is enviable, everything about his body is handsome and toned, everything about his life is sensational. I want him because he sails with his face turned to the wind, because he has women who love him, men who adore him, strangers who look up when he walks by. I want him because I’m bored and he’s something new. I want him because he’s beautiful. Don’t you understand? Don’t you love him?

  Yes, I said. I understand.

  “But do you love him?” she demanded.

  “Not yet. But perhaps I could.”

  She smiled at this, wrapping her arms about her chest as if to contain the jubilation welling up inside. “I love him already,” she breathed. “I know he’s going to love me too.”

  Two nights later she was on his yacht sailing out through the Firth of Forth towards grey seas and open horizons.

  Four days after that the yacht was found drifting by a Dundee fisherman and his crew. When interviewed, he looked as if he had swallowed his own raw fish, which yet wriggled and writhed inside him. He spoke in the softest whisper of the things he had seen, and reported himself grateful, so very grateful, that at the moment his hand had brushed the skin of the one living thing inside he himself had passed out, to remember no more until waking on the shore.

  Knowing I did not want to look, and knowing I had no choice, I read the autopsy report on Eddie Pearce. What acts, what violence, what violations that the mind could devise had perforated what little remained of his flesh, the deed prolonged over two days of suffering below the decks of his own vessel. Yet, the coroner concluded, somehow through all this there must have been at least an element of consent, for though his body was tortured with every constriction it could bear, still incredibly it had inflicted equal violation, equal pain upon the woman found barely conscious in the cabin besides his corpse, whose final words, as the fisherman pulled her up on to the deck, were a half-whispered

  Do you like what you see?

  Three days later my Edinburgh office was cleared, and I was

  someone else, standing on a railway platform.

  Two days after that a document was sent anonymously to an organisation operating out of Geneva. It listed various accounts held across the globe. The most recent payment made had been to an estate agent in Edinburgh, for the sum of fifty thousand pounds, though if anyone bothered to look, they would find no record that the estate agent had existed at all.

  Janus said you ratted out Galileo.

  I said yes.

  Good. Takes guts.

  I said I sold him out to Aquarius. They weren’t Aquarius then, just killers with a cause. A
quarius was who they became. I gave them everything they needed to track him, by his monies, by the accounts he used when he was some other skin.

  I said that’s why he tried to kill me in Miami

  why so many skins died.

  I thought I was helping Aquarius kill Galileo.

  All I did was help him on his way.

  Chapter 67

  We walked back to the hotel in silence.

  Alone, I lay down on the bed, flicked through my useless wallet, turned on the TV, swept through the channels one way, then back the other. Politics from Brussels, football from Marseille, beautiful cops from America, dangerous robbers from Russia, concerned journalists before the hulk of another burned-out-building-in-do-you-know-where?

  I wondered if Sebastian Puis would have cared.

  His face in the mirror looked like it was capable of guilt by remote control, but like most of the emotions his gently bristling chin expressed, he probably would have got over it quickly enough.

  Hotel toothpaste is grainy and leaves a prickling aftertaste.

  I turned the lights down and listened to stories of recession, development, light local tales of gap-toothed children excelling in a wildlife drawing competition and old women uniting against dog fouling, and as my mind began to drift, the newsreader cleared her throat and returned to the story of the moment, which, in among all the other moments, I’d somehow missed.

  Two images, more fluent than the words.

  A windswept reporter, shivering against the dead-night cold. She stood before the floodlights of the Brandenburg Gate, police behind and camera crews all around.

  A shot – not from film itself, but of a film running on a computer screen, softly out of focus.

  I listened to the story, and, hotel dressing gown pulled tight, padded down to the foyer. The girl behind the counter was sleepy, the computer by the lift was unattended. It took no time to find and a while to load. The YouTube video that was the centre of this breaking news was six hours old, had been pulled and re-released, pulled and re-released, and on its fifteenth reincarnation was at three hundred and forty-seven thousand one hundred and twelve hits and climbing.