Alternative Dimension (13 page)

‘Anyway,’ he said gently. ‘You were telling me about the time you met a local girl.’

Darg’s eyes were still on Charlie, but there was no anger in their depths – just love.

‘Yes,’ he said, his voice soft. ‘She looked good enough to eat. So I ate her. Well, I started to but … God, how disgusting some people can be.’

He turned to face Max.

‘She had huge breasts. I started on the left one. It was nearest. But …’ He stopped and shuddered. ‘God, I can hardly think about it without puking. It was all bloody silicone. Bloody breast implants. Can you believe it? Revolting.’

Max shook his head in apparent disbelief at the depths to which some people could sink. Fucking horses and eating people was OK, but breast implants were clearly beyond the pale. On the other hand, it did confirm the sophistication of the AD programs that allowed avatars to experience these events as realities, and it did give him fresh material for the book.

‘You say this was a local girl?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Darg, digging his nails into a line of boils along his collar bone. ‘Her avatar was called Pixie Verity but her real name was Jessica Leonard. I was sick for a week.’

Max jumped to his feet.

‘Jessica fucking Leonard,’ he yelled. ‘The devious bitch.’

‘Yes,’ said Darg. ‘But wait till you hear what she wanted me to do when the wounds had healed …’

21 anything’s possible – part two

Max, his stomach already churning at the thought of what the new revelations might be and his mind racing with memories of Jessica Leonard, was relieved to see Caz coming along the path to join them. It would give him time to think. Caz’s manipulator was a nineteen-year-old student at a technical college in Seattle who found speaking to women difficult and took frequent refuge in AD. Once again, his avatar seemed somehow like a projection of his social awkwardness in ND. He was limping and there was a hole in the middle of his face. This provoked no comment from any of them. He’d always been anatomically suspect. The first time they’d met him he had strings attached (literally) and his original name was Pinocchio. He’d written a personal cellular regeneration sub-routine that made his avatar behave differently and all he’d say about his transition to Caz was that an alchemist had once cured him with wood therapy.

He waved a greeting at Max and Charlie and pointed at his leg. He was limping because there was no foot on the end of it.

‘Bloody sawmill again,’ he said.

‘I don’t know why you insist on going back there,’ said Max.

‘Nostalgia, really,’ said Caz. ‘The call of the wood.’

He saw Laura’s discarded scarf and limped across to pick it up. He sat on the grass and began wrapping it round the wound at the base of his shin. When he’d tucked in the trailing end, he stood again. A Jack Russell terrier which had been sniffing through the trees at the edge of the clearing wandered over to him, raised its leg and peed against him. It happened all the time and was just part of his affinity with wood and trees. When it had finished, the dog looked up at him and chuckled.

Its chuckle was cut short by a loud yell which startled it and sent it fleeing into the bushes again. Charlie glanced up from his book. Not in surprise. Nothing much surprised him. His life had been rich and varied and he’d spent so many days here with these people that none of their weird antics ever fazed him. But this time, what he saw galvanized him and brought him into stark wakefulness. It wasn’t Caz, with the blood-soaked scarf around his stump and reddish fluids oozing from the orifice between his eyes, nor was it the odd couple on the bench. Max, with his sandwiches, and Darg with his lumps of pale flesh, regularly had lunch there together. No, the vision which transfixed Charlie was striding out of the copse of birch trees.

He’d seen Laura many times before, but today she was wearing an outfit that would have graced the paddock at Royal Ascot. He quickly flicked through the pages of the book again. Yes, there it was. Page seventeen, an identical outfit, worn by the British ambassador to Washington at the ball to celebrate victory in Iraq. Over black pin-striped trousers by Giorgio Armani, she wore an Agnes B frock coat in the subtlest of raven blacks, shot through with dark imperial purple. Her dove grey Austin Reed waistcoat fitted snugly around her breasts, flattening them. Peeking between its front panels was a black Margaret Howell belt. And lying against the brilliant white of her Filippa K dress shirt was the most fastidiously correct cravat Charlie had ever seen, held immaculately in place with a diamond pin by Gucci. Charlie’s face broke into a rapturous smile. With creatures of such exquisite taste around, civilization would survive.

‘Oi, fuckface,’ shouted Laura, striding across to stand beside Caz. ‘I’m talking to you.’

Caz looked up at her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Whatever it is I’ve done, I’m sorry.’

‘That’s no fucking good, is it?’ yelled Laura. ‘That’s a fucking Ralph Lauren scarf. I mean, if it had been Tommy fucking Hilfiger or something, I could understand it, but Ralph fucking Lauren. Jesus Christ.’

She dragged the scarf from him. He screamed and his various juices flowed even more copiously.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ said Laura. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

Caz simply held his footless leg towards her then pointed to where his nose should have been.

In her everyday life, Laura regularly dealt with the various overflows from both ends of her kids as well as their frequent cuts and abrasions. Her days in the dentist’s surgery had also inured her to most secretions. With great care, she took off her frock coat, folded it and lay it over the back of the bench.

‘Fuck off, Donut,’ said Darg.

Laura grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked his head back.

‘Call me that once more and I’ll cut your balls off.’

‘Oh shit, not again,’ said Darg.

‘Yeah, and this time, I’ll eat ’em. Bastard.’

As Max and Darg walked over to look more closely at Caz’s stump, Laura strode back into the birch copse and soon reappeared carrying a bundle of kindling and some branches. Very quickly, she piled it near Caz and clicked her lighter into the bunches of paper she’d rolled under the pile. The kindling was dry and the fire took very quickly.

All the time, Charlie watched her in admiration.

‘May I say what a pleasure it is to see you?’ he said at one point, his cultured tones as mellow as dark chocolate.

‘No. Fuck off,’ said Laura.

Charlie sighed. She really was his ideal woman.

As he watched Darg prodding the stump and licking his fingers, Norman/Max made a mental note to download the haemoglobin variant of the software graphics. Laura wandered around collecting the other things she needed for her medical intervention and, when the branches had all been reduced to white hot embers, she came to stand beside them.

‘OK you two,’ she said. ‘I need your help.’

‘Fuck off,’ said Darg.

‘Want your balls chewed?’ she screamed.

‘Want your tits cut off?’ yelled her brother.

If Max was going to get his book, he’d have to try to keep the two of them, if not sweet, at least alive.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s give her a hand.’

When they were close together like this, Max could see the resemblance the two manipulators had created between the siblings. Admittedly, Darg’s sores were less attractive than Laura’s but the basic structure under the weeping skin was identical.

‘Right,’ said Laura, ‘one on each side. Take a shoulder each and lift him.’

Max and Darg bent to heave Caz up between them. The fresh blood was beginning to make Darg feel peckish.

‘And you,’ said Laura, pointing at Caz, ‘Keep your good leg well out of the way. I can’t stand the smell of dog’s piss.’

She bent down and grabbed the end of a square, thickish piece of wood which was sticking out of the fire. She pulled it free and was pleased to see how white it glowed as the little breeze fanned across it.

‘What that wound needs is cauterizing,’ she said and, without hesitation, pushed the glowing end of the wood against the bottom of Caz’s stump.

He screamed and fainted. (It hadn’t hurt, of course, but his manipulator was fastidious about preserving the realism of the AD experience.) The smell of roasting flesh made Darg even hungrier. Laura looked closely at the stump, prodded the hot wood into two or three more places, then stood back and said, ‘OK, you can let go of him now.’

Gratefully, Max and Darg let their bundle fall to the ground, the hot end of the wood still sticking to his leg. Charlie looked across at Caz and suddenly felt a nausea creeping through him. Darg wandered back to the bench, sat down and immediately leapt back up as the bench tilted under him. He stepped away and looked to see what had happened. To his and Max’s astonishment, the bench had only three legs. Where the front left one had been there was now just a ragged stump.

‘Fuck, Donut,’ said Darg.

‘Good idea,’ said Charlie, who was trying to suppress the feeling of sickness but still watching Laura as she pulled her coat back on.

‘In your dreams, twat,’ said Laura.

‘The bench,’ said Darg. ‘You pulled its bloody leg off. Just to close up that wound.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Laura.

Charlie noticed a piece of cake which had appeared beside the tree against which he was leaning.

‘Whose is this?’ he asked.

The others didn’t bother to reply. He took a bite and immediately began to feel better. Max was looking at Caz and trying to work out the strange connection there appeared to be between his misfortunes and the crippled bench. He went across and shook him. Caz sat up, moaning.

‘What do you know about this bench?’ asked Max.

‘Nothing,’ groaned Caz and, to Max’s surprise, the hole in his face closed a little.

‘Are you sure?’ said Max.

‘I’m positive,’ said Caz. ‘I know absolutely nothing about it. I’m just a visitor. A tourist.’

Each word he spoke made more flesh gather around the orifice and, to his and Max’s amazement, it began to form into a vestigial nose. Caz crossed his eyes and looked at it and a smile broke out on his face.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘That’s it. That’s what the alchemist told me. The Pinocchio Fusion.’

‘What?’ said Max.

Caz just shook his head and said, ‘Darg is the most attractive person I’ve ever seen.’

In a flash, his entire nose was restored as if by magic. Just another AD miracle.

A woman appeared on the path leading into the clearing. This was absurd, the place had never been so crowded. She was tall, her face was the mediocre side of pretty, and she had the biggest breasts Max had ever seen. She was also very, very pregnant. Norman stared at her, noticed the label ‘Pixie Verity’.

‘My God,’ he said. ‘Jessica? Jessica Leonard?’

Pixie said nothing.

‘It’s me, Norman McAllister.’

Still nothing from Pixie. Then she took two more steps forward.

‘Hello, Max,’ she said. ‘Hello Biscuit. We need to talk.’

Norman couldn’t take his eyes from her breasts and was about to ask if Max could feel them – for old times’ sake – when they heard the rustling noise again and saw the air near the bench shimmering. The portal reappeared and the voice from within it said ‘Next stop, Hemming Way’. It turned slowly and stopped as it faced toward Max standing by the bench.

‘Ah, the old man and the seat,’ it said.

‘Who are you?’ said Max.

‘You’ll have to speak up,’ said the voice. ‘I’m deaf in the afternoon.’

‘Smart-arsed prick,’ shouted Darg, and he threw a piece of flesh he’d just finished chewing right into the mouth of the spinning disc.

‘A moveable feast,’ said the voice. ‘This gets better and better.’

Caz groaned. Suddenly, the golden shimmering parted a little and a hand appeared and reached down to touch his ankle. He gave a yelp but they were all amazed to see the wood of the charred bench leg begin to grow into his flesh. In less than a minute, Caz was whole again.

As he scratched his new leg and smiled, they heard a different voice from the vortex.

‘When she was sixty, my grandmother decided to get fit,’ it said. ‘She started walking five miles a day. She’s ninety-three now, and we don’t know where the hell she is.’

‘Kate?’ said Max.

It was all moving too quickly for him. If he wanted to rescue his book deal, he’d need to make sense of the whole thing and stop these events kaleidoscoping around him. Plot twists such as this would alienate the most patient reader. On the other hand, that’s why they were all there – not to alienate readers but to create art, which isn’t the same thing at all.

22 anything’s possible – part three

Max’s mind was whirling. He closed his eyes tight and shook his head. When he opened them again, the clearing was empty.

‘Thank God,’ he said out loud. ‘It was all just a dream.’

‘No it fucking wasn’t,’ yelled Darg, appearing from behind a tree and zipping up his fly.

One by one, the others re-emerged, adjusting their dress in similar ways. The air of the forest had a new tinge of ammonia to it.

‘OK,’ said Max. ‘We must find a library.’

‘What for?’ asked Darg.

‘Elementary, my dear Darg. This is another of our charming mysteries and, like all the others, it calls for a resolution, so we must gather all the suspects in the library. I shall interrogate you one by one and tease out the significance of this truly abominable story.’

They heard a rustling from behind the oak tree against which Charlie was sitting and the Jack Russell nosed its way back into the clearing, stopped and looked at them. It went to Caz, sniffed at his new leg, shook its head, went to pee against Charlie’s tree, then loped off, with its familiar chuckle.

Almost immediately, Kate’s voice was heard again.

‘There was this Swedish Dachshund,’ she said.

‘Someone should help her out,’ said Max.

‘I’m not going near the fucking thing,’ said Laura. ‘It sucks you in and out like some cosmic blow-job.’

Charlie’s heart beat faster at her words. He finished the last mouthful of cake, got up, went to the vortex, stepped through and disappeared. Simultaneously, a fresh light shimmered around Caz and he too vanished.

Before they had time to react, Charlie had popped back out, dragging Kate with him. The shimmering gave a final flash and dissipated in the still air, leaving a single scrap of paper floating to the ground.

‘I was at the superstore this morning,’ said Kate. ‘There was a special deal. Five boxes of tampons for just one pound fifty. I asked the manager ‘Is that really the deal?’ He said ‘Yep. Five for one-fifty. No strings attached.’

‘I should have eaten her when I had the chance,’ snarled Darg.

Max picked up the piece of paper. It carried two verses:

The bench will mark the hallowed spot.
Yours to have and to have not.
To join the ranks of the immortal
Each life must pass through this bright portal.
The avalanching flesh will panic
And seek to blend with inorganic.
The Real will spin which way it chooses
As with the Virtual it fuses.
 

‘Of course,’ said Max. ‘The Alchemist.’

He smiled and decided that the clearing could double as a library.

‘After all,’ he said, ‘Nature, with all her bounties and munificence, uses the flora and fauna of her woodlands to offer lessons and knowledge inaccessible to …’

‘Shut the fuck up,’ said Laura, using her tailored sleeve to wipe some ooze from her upper lip.

Max unfolded his final sandwich, propped up the bench with a small branch, and sat on it.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ asked Laura.

Pixie looked around.

‘Yeah. That guy who was here, how come his nose and leg grew back?’ she said.

‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ said Charlie, with a smile.

‘Yes,’ said Max, with a wink at Charlie. ‘I think it is.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ yelled Darg.

‘You’ll see,’ said Max.

‘Oh, Biscuit. Our baby kicked,’ said Pixie.

They all looked at her. She stood with her hands holding her swelling abdomen, a beatific smile on her face. Madonna and child.

‘Awwww,’ said Kate. ‘You’re so lucky. All I ever had in my womb was a bullet. It was back in 2007 …’

‘Later, Kate,’ said Max.

He tapped his hand on the bench.

‘Remember when The Alchemist brought this?’ he said. ‘This is what that verse is about. A hallowed spot, a place we can become immortal.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Darg.

‘No,’ said Max. ‘Think about it. D’you know anybody who’s died here?’

‘I know somebody who’s going to,’ said Darg, his temples beginning to throb again.

‘No. It doesn’t happen,’ said Max. ‘The bench is a sort of symbol of what we are. We’re immortal here. To have and have not – that’s us here, now. We’ve got all this, but we haven’t really. We can’t keep it. We always have to leave it and get back to doing whatever it is we do. This bench is magic. In fact, I think it’s made of the same wood that The Alchemist used to make Caz when he was Pinocchio.’

‘What a load of crap,’ said Darg, scratching his boils.

‘Yeah. Bullshit,’ echoed his sister.

‘Think about it,’ said Max. ‘Remember how the bench leg grew into Caz’s flesh?’

‘So?’ said Darg.

‘He’s got a wooden leg,’ said Max. ‘Organic and inorganic fusing.’

‘And?’ said Laura.

‘Who else d’you know who has a wooden leg?’

The truth dawned on all but Darg simultaneously.

‘I dunno. Who?’ said Darg.

‘Fucking Charlie, you twat,’ said Laura.

She looked with renewed interest at Charlie, noting the elegance of his dress and, more especially, the thick shaft of his artificial leg.

‘So … you’re saying …’

‘Yes, dickhead. Caz is Charlie and Charlie’s Caz.’

‘But they can’t be. They were both here earlier – at the same time.’

‘Temporal anomaly,’ said Max. ‘Something to do with that vortex thing. There’s just one person responsible for all this.’

‘Who?’ they all said.

Max stood up and began to pace up and down in silent reflection.

‘Listen, fuckface. If you don’t stop pacing up and down in silent reflection, I’ll kick your balls in,’ said Laura.

Max nodded and sat down again.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘You know the wood that The Alchemist used to make Caz? And to make the bench?’

‘Yes,’ said Laura.

‘Well, where did it come from?’

‘Some fucking tree or other,’ said Darg.

‘But where was the tree?’

‘No idea.’

‘Yes you do. Caz and the bench were made of wood from the Black Forest.’

‘So what?’

‘Earlier today,’ said Charlie, ‘I felt sick. It was when you cauterised Caz’s wound. That chunk of cake just appeared beside me. I ate it and felt better.’

‘What the fuck’s that got to do with it?’

‘It was Black Forest Gateau,’ said Max triumphantly. ‘It restored him. But …’ he went on before anyone could interrupt him, ‘who put it there?’

‘The fucking tooth fairy. How should I know?’ said Darg.

‘No, no,’ said Max, excited at the revelations he was making. ‘There’s one clue which none of you seems to have picked up. Remember the Sherlock Holmes story “Silver Blaze”?’

‘Oh God, yes,’ said Darg, to everyone’s surprise. ‘It was about a beautiful racehorse. That was its name. Silver Blaze.’

‘Yes,’ said Max. ‘And you remember how Holmes drew attention to what he called “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”?’

‘No,’ said Darg, who’d only read the bits about the horse.

‘Well, what was curious was that dog did nothing. It didn’t bark.’

‘And what’s that got to do with us?’ asked Laura.

‘Think back,’ said Max, enjoying his role of Poirot/Holmes/(but not Miss Marple). ‘That little Jack Russell that keeps coming here to pee then, just as it trots away …’ He paused for effect, but hurried on as Laura moved threateningly towards him. ‘… it chuckles,’ he ended, with the triumphal tone he’d used before.

They all looked at him.

‘Dogs don’t chuckle,’ he said, ‘unless …’

Again he paused; again Laura moved.

‘… unless they’re part dog, part human,’ he concluded. ‘This whole thing has been about The Alchemist’s experiments. He tried fusing the parts of things and people, he made a human out of a tree. He brought together the worlds of organic and inorganic things, he made the virtual and the real the same.’

‘So the person behind all this is that fucking dog?’ said Laura.

‘Yes. The dog is The Alchemist. It was the dog who put the cake beside Charlie.’

‘I have a suggestion,’ said Charlie.

‘What?’ said Max.

Charlie stood and went to stand beside Pixie.

‘I presume you want your baby to have a father,’ he said.

Pixie lowered her eyes, shot a quick, shy glance at Darg and whispered ‘yes’.

‘And, after what Max said about immortality, we obviously can’t have any funerals.’

‘So?’ said Darg.

‘But we can have three weddings,’ he said, with a quick, shy glance at Laura.

They all looked at one another.

‘What time is it?’ asked Laura.

‘Ten past four,’ said Max.

‘Same here,’ said Pixie and Charlie.

‘Ten past five,’ said Darg.

‘Just past three a.m.,’ said Kate.

‘Have we got time to do it now?’ asked Charlie.

After some cursory discussion, they all decided they had plenty of time as long as it didn’t involve a priest or anyone else. They pulled the bench to the centre of the clearing to act as a pagan altar and took turns to officiate at a triple ceremony that united Darg and Pixie, Kate and Max and Charlie and Laura. When it was over, they all sat down and talked about their futures together.

Darg, Pixie, Kate and Max decided, in their different ways, to continue The Alchemist’s experiments in mingling human and animal characteristics. Darg and Pixie would open some stables and a stud farm in which Darg would be a willing and frequent participant. Not for him the crude technique of artificial insemination; his intervention would be more direct and personal and lead to a string of racehorses with equine athleticism, beauty and power but with the cunning and ruthlessness of their sire. They would also, unusually, be carnivores.

As for Kate and Max, on the days when Max was busy at his graphics, completing the story of the twins, Kate would take the Jack Russell for a walk in the woods and they’d … play. Donut and Charlie chose to be more conventional: she would open a gentlemen’s outfitters while Charlie trained the horses from Darg’s farm.

In his flat in Manchester, Norman stretched and yawned. He looked around the clearing at his friends.

‘Have to go now, he said. ‘See you all tomorrow.’

There was a chorus of ‘Bye, take care,’ and Max logged off.

At work the following morning, his boss asked him if he’d mind changing to the Manchester-Edinburgh train.

‘Anything’s possible,’ said Max.