I was coming out of the entrance when the shot rang out. To be honest it didn’t ring like a bell, it was a thin sound like breaking ice, like the release of bubbles of nitrogen gas in the synovial fluid between my knuckles when I crack them. I have learned a lot about biology since I began attending the institute. But I was still unfamiliar with gunshots. I frowned, not knowing why my left side felt so much heavier than usual, and I paused.
The murderer could have hit me again, I was a static target, but he was of a timid disposition, I guess, because he was already running away. I heard his feet pounding the icy slabs of a nearby alleyway, diminishing into vague silence. But when I turned to face the direction the shot had come from, I finally understood what had happened. Ronald was dying.
The bullet had struck him in the chest and his heart was damaged. That is why he was slumping and dragging me down. I had to lean the opposite way to remain upright. He said, “I’m tired. Lay me down on the ground, I want to sleep forever,” and then he coughed up blood.
I compromised and sat on one of the steps leading to the institute doors. He remained coherent until the end, but he didn’t say too much. I wanted to ask him to cling on to life, to resist the dimming of the light and all that sort of thing, not just for his own sake but for mine too. He said, “Arnold, just find out who did it, and why, and swear vengeance on them.”
Well, it’s easy to swear, to make a vow concerning anything, but we rarely have the means to follow through. We scheme retaliation just to make ourselves feel a little better, it doesn’t help. But Ronald was serious, dead serious, dead, it was clear I would be driven by a terrible obligation from now on, and I made up my mind to accept it fully. So I replied:
“I’ll get them, I promise, but it won’t be simple. I don’t have any clues. Do you have enemies I don’t know about?”
“How could you not know about them, Arnold? You are me, and I am you. I did nothing wrong, offended nobody.”
His voice was weak, he sputtered as he spoke. Those were the words that I truly thought he’d said. He had given me a mystery. Once again I wanted to tell him to hold on, but he had already let go. His body trembled once then was still. I seemed to feel his soul brush my cheek as it came out of him and flew off, but maybe it was a belated snowflake from a passing cloud. Most of the snowdrifts had melted in the afternoon, the few that remained didn’t shine in the moonlight but resembled surgically removed tumours of a vast size. They were grubby and compressed by their own weight.
I said to myself and to him, because we were the same, “Rest well, brother, and don’t trouble your mind anymore. I’m going to drag you back inside. There will be answers eventually. They might take time to come, sure, but any puzzle can be solved with determination.”
With a tortuous effort I climbed the remaining steps to the doors, dragging my cooling burden, and pushed my way through into the corridor beyond. Then I tried standing and lurching along. The noise I made alerted one of the wardens and he came to assist me. He took me to a room with a chair, sat me down, then he hurried off to fetch a researcher.
It was Doctor Wallace who turned up. His first words were, “Back again? I feel honoured,” but then he realised something was wrong. He came to my side, looked me over and said, “Damn.”
“An attempted assassination, I don’t know why.”
My voice was feeble now.
He stepped back into the corridor, called for assistance. Men in white coats came, many of whom I didn’t recognise, and somebody gave me brandy to sip. I think it was laced with a sedative.
“We’ll have to summon the police. But first we need to cut him away from you. An emergency procedure.”
I shook my head, finding a new strength from deep within. I said, “No, that is something I won’t allow. Ronald stays with me. I have a task to complete and I want him there when it’s done.”
“Don’t be a fool, Arnold. If we don’t perform the amputations, you will be infected with gangrene in just a few days. You can’t hobble around attached to a rotting corpse. This is an ethical issue as well as a medical obligation. What sort of a doctor would I be if I didn’t take immediate action? We’ll rush you into the operating theatre and save you.”
I smiled but my smile was a rictus grin. Doctor Wallace recoiled when he saw it, and he was a hardened specialist, difficult to intimidate. I spoke with all the robust wisdom of my existence, a life spent outside the casual normality of society, toughened by constant mockery and the horrified reactions of people in the streets. I began nodding too.
“We are twins and more than twins. Arnold and Ronald, anagrams of each other, avatars of the same individual. He stays with me until I find his killer. He is my conscience, I won’t abandon him. Don’t call the police, not yet. Just give me a chance to find the culprit.”
Doctor Wallace threw up his hands in resignation. He knew how stubborn I could be. And there was another thing: he owed me a lot. Every week I allowed him to examine me, test me. I provided the raw data for the scientific papers he wrote and published in the most respected journals. I had made his reputation, I was his ticket to fame and glory.
Conjoined twins aren’t really so rare in this world, but I was very unusual, two bodies fused together side by side but with three working legs. That middle leg was shared equally by Ronald and myself, we both controlled it, we had to be synchronised to make it work.
And now it belonged only to me and it was awkward, difficult to operate, a hindrance rather than a benefit. But I would learn, I would practice and become the useless thing’s master, it would propel me towards my destiny. I would find the assassin and keep my promise to my brother. I shook myself. The sedative in the brandy was fuddling my mind.
Doctor Wallace said, “I will give you a day.”
His frown was a seal on the deal, I knew he wouldn’t change his mind, his sense of honour was too evolved. The other medics cleared out, only two others remained, Hopkins and Gruber. I recognised them, blinked at them, they smiled back, looking concerned at the same time. Wallace was superior to them in rank and renown. They wouldn’t protest.
Hopkins said, “But you need to rest, that’s the important thing. You ought to sleep before trying to walk.”
Gruber added, “Take more brandy.”
I lurched to my feet. Ronald slumped on my left side. I had to lean a little to the right to counterbalance him. I stamped forward. My right leg was fine, it held firm, the knee bent correctly. But the shared leg was like an ache, stiff one moment, spongy the next, dead but alive with prickles and burns. I clenched my fists and my mind, refusing to be defeated. I staggered to the end of the room. I leaned against the wall, turned myself and walked back, picking up speed as my confidence increased. Then I said:
“I need nothing. There are no problems at all.”
Wallace exhaled noisily.
Hopkins and Gruber exchanged glances. What did I know about this pair? Hopkins was a microbiologist, growing germs on Petri dishes and killing them with new types of mould. Gruber worked in a lab at the rear of the building and I had no clear idea what his area of expertise was. My interaction with them had been minimal. Hopkins dealt with protoplasm and Gruber with what precisely? Something that sounded similar but I couldn’t remember the word. Wallace was my contact, he was the only one I cared about, despite the fact he had stuck me with syringes, bathed me in X-Rays. That was his job, the deal I had signed up for, my contribution to science.
I turned to face the door. “I’m going out now. I don’t intend to waste time. Don’t try to stop me.” Then I added, “Stop us.” That was more effective, to let them think I hadn’t accepted the death of my brother yet. They parted to allow me through. But Wallace called:
“At least let me remove the bullet first.”
“What’s the point?”
“It might work its way through his system and enter yours. Arnold, this is very reckless of you. I suggest—”
I laughed a dry laugh, cutting and brutal. He fell silent. Doctor Wallace is a good person, so reasonable deep down that he can be manipulated with relative ease. I passed out of the door. He followed me into the corridor and to the main entrance but he didn’t press too close to me. I went down the steps to the street, my gait erratic, my brother swinging at my side, unbalancing me. But I kept my wits about me and descended safely.
Wallace tried one last time to dissuade me from the course of action that I had chosen. He coughed and said:
“Arnold, just one day. Seriously. Do you know what will happen to Ronald as the hours pass? He’s dead. He will start to decay, you know this, but maybe it is news to you how the process will unfold. Like this, I’ll tell you. His blood has stopped circulating, it is clotting fast and it will gravitate into his legs as long as you remain upright, thicker than gruel. His muscles will stiffen and his guts and torso will bloat. He will smell bad.”
“The whole business stinks already,” I said.
“Arnold, I am serious. Please consider the matter. It gets more unpleasant. The tissues will liquefy and the skin will blacken and insects will be attracted to the stench and lay eggs in the rotting flesh. Do you know what adipocere is? It’s a waxy substance formed by the hydrolysis of fat. Putrefaction isn’t symmetrical and Ronald might end up as a formless patchwork of slimy segments and a firm but crumbling crust of fatty acids.”
Just the same tone of voice as if we were in a lecture theatre. I waited until he had finished, then I raised my hand in a farewell gesture, lurched off into the cold night. He must have lingered in the entrance because I didn’t hear the main doors close. I propelled myself to the mouth of the alley. This is where the shot had come from, where I had heard footsteps. The assassin had fled down here. I would investigate, search for clues.
I will reveal a secret to you now, one that even Ronald didn’t know, which is that I had often fantasised about solving crimes. I daydreamed about a career as a detective, a private sleuth, clever, calm and collected. At night I would lie awake on our uncomfortable bed while Ronald snored next to me and think of myself as a genius, a puzzle solver.
That’s right, a crimefighter of astounding ability. And turning my head to gaze at my brother, I would toy with the notion that he was the supreme villain, a master of crime, my deadly opponent. We would set traps for each other, play lethal games, taunt each other and lay false trails. We would engage in cerebral warfare, full of mutual respect as well as hostility, new versions of Holmes and Moriarty, forced to act in one body.
But Ronald in real life was a gentle soul, kinder than I was, far less likely to be a criminal mastermind than almost anyone. My fantasy was absurd. Yet here I was, a detective at long last, pushing myself into the darkness of a chilly alley, working on his behalf as well as my own. Part of the daydream had come true, and that’s always the way, isn’t it? Our visions come to pass but never in the precise way we imagine them.
I was a sleuth but the real villain was unknown. His motive was a mystery and his whereabouts impossible to determine. But that’s the fundamental reason detectives exist. And now I had full control over the shared leg, my balance was improving all the time. Just like riding a bicycle, having a dead brother attached to your side by tangled nerves and decaying flesh, stiffened muscles, veins and arteries full of sluggish blood like cold magma. It takes practice, that’s all. Into the alley mouth I went, a swallowed morsel plunging into the throat of my own despair. I was strong, I kept going.
It was dark here, almost completely lightless, a very narrow alley indeed. I slipped once or twice on a patch of unmelted ice, I lurched first against the wall on my right side, feeling the scrape of decaying bricks, then against the wall of the institute on my left side, Ronald’s side, feeling nothing of the texture of that windowless barrier, but hearing a faint clang. I had knocked against an unseen door, made from steel and sealed tight. I straightened myself, groping onwards, and abruptly I reached a dead end.
The alley went nowhere. This fact baffled me. I turned and made my slow way back, but I only went a few paces before I saw the break in the brick wall, now on my left side, Ronald’s side again. I had somehow missed it earlier. Half the height of the wall was gone, broken down, leaving a narrow passage, a tight squeeze. There was a small pile of bricks at the base. This is where the assassin had made his escape, through here.
I followed with great difficulty. I had to ease myself sideways into the gap and struggle against panic, scraping my elbows, and fearing we would be stuck permanently, entombed like the accidental pharaohs of a freak Egypt. This was too fanciful a thought, unworthy of me, an insult to my brother. As I gritted my teeth and stretched my body, I suddenly burst through, emerging on the far side in a cascade of powdered bricks.
The wall was old, it hadn’t been repaired for decades. We sprawled, limbs flung out, my knees in pain. I tasted bitter weeds. Raising my head, I saw that I was in a wasteland, one of those curiously neglected parts of the city that exist because no one thinks it worthwhile to construct anything new. There had been warehouses long ago, the foundations were still visible in the starlight. It had an awfully lonely atmosphere, this zone, but it was still better than the constricted darkness of the alley. I muttered:
“Ronald, we have arrived on the outskirts of the answer. Your killer came this way, he fled through the rusty maze of collapsed roofs and twisted girders, and we will track him to his lair.”
It was too theatrical, that little speech, but Ronald wouldn’t mock me for it, and that’s all that mattered. I knew his mind, his nature, I had felt his soul brush my cheek on its way to the next world. I pushed myself to my feet and stumbled over rotten joists and other obstacles hidden in the undergrowth. Down below in the distance, the lights of the city blazed. Wooden fences sagged at the limits of the wasteland. Beyond them was an overpass on which traffic rumbled. I studied the ground for clues, marks that would indicate that the assassin had hurried this way, but I saw nothing unusual.
How would I know what I was looking for anyway? I wasn’t a professional tracker, I was just a man. My mission was futile. I must acknowledge defeat and return to the institute, ask Doctor Wallace to surgically sever the fibres that held me enmeshed with my brother, give me the chance to live an independent life. I wasn’t even confident an operation was feasible. I felt that I would die under the scalpel, end up as nothing more than data for his next scientific paper, a footnote in half a dozen medical textbooks.
But there was no need to abandon hope yet. A proper effort had to be made first. That’s always the best way, the only acceptable course to take, as midnight agitated distant city clocks into hurling echoes into the air. I listened sadly to the chimes, issued by churches in the old quarter, where the buildings were elegant and the centuries had mummified.
It was one part of the city I rarely ventured into, where the aroma of strong coffee drifted down the cobbled streets, past theatre entrances, over quaint stone bridges, the quarter where men with more money and fewer worries idled away the long hours of their evenings. A place where you could buy excitement or the peace of release in the gala gardens.
I didn’t feel the killer would have taken refuge there. It just didn’t feel too plausible to me. I hadn’t glimpsed his face but there had been something furtive about his actions, a quality the very opposite of sophisticated. The echoes of the chimes decayed to nothing and I returned my focus to my predicament. Unseen rodents scurried into tangled grass.
“We have all night,” I told myself, as I stumbled down the incline towards the perimeter of the wasteland.
The fence was remarkably flimsy, easy to push over. Now I was in private property, the overgrown garden of an abandoned house. This suburb had quietly experienced an economic death a generation ago. The back door was wide open, the hinges having rusted away.
I passed through the house, which was completely empty inside, unbolted and opened the sturdier front door, emerging onto a deserted street. The silence was unsettling or restful, I couldn’t decide which. The streetlamps lacked bulbs, all the fittings had been looted.
I navigated with the aid of starlight on frost, turned a corner and progressed down another street. I was heading into the heart of the city but choosing a route that would avoid casual contact with citizens. Ronald was a liability as well as a brother, a livewire, a dead twin. But it’s not so easy to make quips when you are grieving. My mantra: keep going. More corners, more streets, a few houses that seemed to be occupied now. Then under the overpass, among wrecked cars and constellations of shattered glass.
I smelled the river and made my way towards it. I think I had forgotten my intention to track the assassin. I had given up a task unsuited to my abilities. But I was compelled to move, toe stumble, lurch, stagger, speeding up and slowing down, tripping over the uneven surfaces on which I travelled. Something drove me that wasn’t rational, simply the urge to be a scalar force, with magnitude but no fixed direction. I knew how Wallace would describe me. A loose cannon, he would say, stuffed with an orb of putrid emotions and wounded flesh rather than a stone or iron cannonball, rolling on the pitching deck of the vessel of his own misfortune, a self-pitying monster.
The path that followed the river snaked me deep into the city and served to keep me safe from the scrutiny of pedestrians. It was too lonely and rough here to entice walkers in the deep night.
The active city, the contemporary metropolis, pulsed on both sides, hidden by the trees and the thickness of their gloom. It was a world of steel and glass, a forest of tall buildings, office blocks, bridges. The roads were busy, the citizens always in a hurry. That commercial nexus had little connection to the artery that I was moving along like a mutated blood vessel. It was still throbbing, cooling after a day of frantic business, and I felt the pulsation, the exclusion, a reminder of my status as a pariah, a freak.
I passed one sleeping tramp, a bundle of rags that might have been another further along, but no one awake, nobody who called to me, approached me. The solitude was welcome but painful.
I seemed to sense the migration of souls, a fluttering upwards, parcels of mist ascending, only seen from the corners of my eyes. Since Ronald’s death I had acquired the ability to glimpse ghosts, that’s what it felt like. I shuddered, I resisted the urge to run, to slip and roll and drown in the murky water, dragged under by my manifested mirror image. The wisps streamed into the sky, racing each other, an inverted blizzard.
The river widened, I heard the lapping of gentle waves ahead. I walked for another ten minutes, then I reached the sea, the rotting boardwalks and elevated platforms of an old amusement park, a little frequented area that had once been filled with visitors, a facility that had been crammed with laughter and games, carousels and roller coasters, toffee apples, candy floss, and carnival sideshows, including the sorts of sideshows in which people like me were displayed for the amusement of an astounded public.
But I had no resentment, none at all. All those humiliations, if that is what they really were, had gone out of fashion before my birth. The place sagged, it seemed ready to sink into the mud of the shoreline. The collapsed roller coaster was like the skeleton of a dinosaur in a bankrupt museum. Rotting seaweed and damp sand softened my footfalls.
I said with a smile, “Ronald, we have arrived,” and I answered the question he hadn’t even asked: “That’s right, the funfair, our destination. Fun is never fair and you know this, dear brother.”
I wanted to sit and contemplate the tide.
But first I wandered over the decaying planks of an unstable pier. A barrier had been erected to block trespassers: it had rotted away. Nothing prevented me from lurching to the end of the structure. I found the shell of an arcade, the sea spitting froth at me through narrow gaps in the boards below. Pinball machines lay on their sides, ruptured. A booth caught my eye, still intact, standing upright in the darkest corner of the room.
It was a genie machine, an automaton in a glass cage. Antiquated, peeling, grotesque, the figure was a wooden puppet sitting behind a crystal ball, a pearly orb like a dead man’s eye magnified, just like one of Ronald’s eyes. I lingered, I found myself reaching into my pocket for a coin, and finding one unexpectedly. I pushed it into the slot, expecting nothing. I blinked as the apparatus swallowed the coin and groaned into motion.
The turbaned sage in the cage came to life, creaking and squeaking. As the mouth of the puppet opened, I shook my head. The wooden tongue clattered and I heard words. The speech of the figure was distinct and intelligible but it didn’t issue from the puppet itself. It came from a flared tube on the roof of the cage. I listened, drinking the inhuman sounds like a lost explorer in a desert lapping the bed of an evaporated oasis pool.
The voice said, “I am the Urban Turban, the sage, the teller of fortunes, the seer, the predictor, the prophet.”
I waited as it paused and then continued, “I am the prognosticator, the truth teller, sadhu, fakir and magus.”
“Who killed my brother? Who was it?”
The puppet turned to look at me: the wooden eyes swivelled, fixed me with a disturbing stare, sightless pupils converging on a point between my own eyes. I resisted the urge to turn and leave. The penny arcade boomed as waves struck the pilings of the pier below us.
The puppet bent forward and peered deep into the crystal ball. I could see the reflection of its face in the nacreous surface of the sphere. I asked myself if this experience was a product of delirium, a fever occasioned by my proximity to a corpse. The puppet jerked.
“The bullet was poisoned,” it declared.
“What do you mean?”
“Your brother is decaying faster than he should. The bullet was coated with a toxic substance. The assassin wasn’t experienced, he doubted his ability to aim accurately. He couldn’t be certain he would inflict a fatal wound, nor did he care which one of you he shot.”
I felt weak, I wanted to sink to my knees, but I had to remain upright, keep the shared leg under my control. These atrocious words had told me everything I needed to know. The mystery was solved, it had hardly been a mystery at all. I realised how blind I had been, how naive. The puppet smiled sadly at me, paint flaking from its golden lips.
The wooden eyelids closed with an audible clap, opened again, waited for a few moments before repeating the process. The puppet was blinking at me, it wanted to give me sufficient time to formulate a response. My mind was a whirl of simple truths spun into a vortex of complex power. A killer with easy access to poisons, to chemicals that worked havoc in the human body. The answer was obvious. But I blurted out:
“How can an automaton know so much? How can a puppet in a box be so wise? What is your secret?”
“I am not mechanical, I am not organic. I am a spirit, the soul of a sailor. I died at sea long ago, my ghost drifted on the wind. I was free, ready to find the empty vessel that would receive me. Buffeted by eddies of air, I was delighted to skim the crests of the waves. But I needed a new home, an empty vessel, the sanctuary of solid boundaries.”
“Is that what happens to dead people?”
“Yes, it is. The empty vessel for most released spirits is the universe itself, the vastness beyond the atmosphere of this planet, intergalactic space, limitless and cascading with peculiar energies. Most ghosts rise up and keep rising. That is their desire and their destiny.”
“Not yours? You found sanctuary here?”
“I passed over the fairground, over the penny arcade on the sagging pier, I was beginning to ascend, to rise in a gentle gradient. There was a storm, clouds clashed and lightning ripped the sky. A bolt struck the arcade, passed through a skylight, connected with the glass cage. The puppet inside moved, electrocuted, cogwheels turning and burning.”
“And you were drawn to it? Sucked in?”
“Irresistibly. The voltage was high. I altered my direction, rushed into the cage. My spirit fused with the mechanism and I waited for a customer. I waited in silence. The electric current was responsible. Then you came. Time is short for you. I can tell you this. Men and women die. Their souls depart their bodies and seek new vessels in which to experience the afterlife. Desirable vessels. But voltage confuses them, disrupts the natural process, the supernatural cycle. The bullet was poisoned. That is all.”
His head drooped, his mouth closed, the speaking tube fell silent, and even the crystal ball lost its lustre. I delved in my pocket for another coin but found nothing. I attempted to turn but Ronald’s foot had glued itself to the floor. Fluid was leaking from his pores. His decay was accelerating. I wrenched him free of this appalling adhesive, stumbled out of the arcade, back along the pier. I knew exactly what I was obliged to do.
My journey in reverse was more tortuous, slower, mentally painful. The flesh of Ronald was undergoing a rapid transformation. The night was nearly over, the stars were fading. My brother was melting, features distorting into an abstraction, his nose came loose and dribbled down his face, his fingers were charred, burned by some catalyst of malice. His leg stiffened, relaxed, warped itself until his damaged foot was pointing backwards. The rot would infect me before long. A cruel dissolution.
I wondered if I would reach my destination. It seemed too difficult, too far. Each step was a trudge through the sludge of congealing despair. The sailor who was a ghost who was a puppet had given me strength to endure, to press myself into the future, to strain myself through the sieve of reality, my desires dividing and extruding themselves into worms of glutinous determination. I was furious, truculent, muculent and desperate.
A grisly hybrid of tenacious death and feeble life, I reached the river path and shambled rather than ambled along the uneven surface. I passed one of the sleeping tramps, and his soul rose from his slumped form as I did so, whisking itself away over the treetops. The sadness of this city, the casual deaths, always a new tragedy in some neglected corner. I hoped his soul would enjoy the space of the empty vessel it had chosen.
Back through the abandoned suburb, always upwards, into the wasteland, no less menacing as the sun rose in the east and illuminated the ruins, twisted metal and splintered wood, the brambles and weeds, the loops of barbed wire, powdered bricks. I had to rest, despite my reluctance, drawing in great racking sobs of tainted air, and leaning against a girder that speared from the shattered concrete at a low angle. The Urban Turban, that fairground phantom, boomed his metallic tube voice in my mind:
“Most ghosts rise up and keep rising.”
But not Ronald. He had brushed my cheek and was hurtling sideways. He was being pulled by a force, I had no doubt. Just as the sailor had been dragged into the glass cage, into the puppet.
My brother was a kind individual but kindness is no protection against the plots and schemes of manipulators.
I recalled his words. “I did nothing wrong, offended nobody,” he had said, but I wondered if I had misheard, if he had actually said, “offended a nobody,” and now I remembered an incident.
Just a casual laugh he had once uttered, something trivial beyond measure but significant enough to a malevolent personality, to a maladjusted mind. Our trivialities frequently condemn us.
I forced myself to stand straight, to continue my journey over that hideous patch of forgotten terrain, towards the broken wall, through the chasm of sharp bricks, into the alley. My breathing was erratic, my vision flecked with flashes of black light. I was in the alley now. I reached the steel door on the wall of the institute and rattled the handle.
The door was still firmly locked, as I had suspected it would be. I swayed to the mouth of the alley, turned, approached the steps to the main doors of the building, mounted them slowly.
It was early in the morning but the institute was already at work. I passed through the entrance into the corridor beyond and kept going. I headed for the back room, the most obscure lab in the establishment. I had never been inside it but I guessed where it was located. Hopkins worked with protoplasm and now I knew what Gruber worked with.
The word was dredged up from the slimy seabed of my subconscious. He worked with ectoplasm. He was a researcher into death and souls. A mediocre scientist who had stumbled on a discovery that would give him the renown he craved. I faltered, righted myself.
Wallace came out of a room, alerted by the commotion I was making with my heavy gait. He said, “Arnold, so you came back? For the operation. I knew you would see sense. I knew—”
Then he fell silent as I barged past him. The look of distaste on his face as my brother smeared him with putrefying flesh was extraordinary. Another door opened further along and Hopkins came out, a Petri dish in one hand, eyebrows knitted like duelling swords. Perhaps he was going to block my way but took a closer look at me, changed his mind, retreated into his room, slamming the door tight, bolting it from the inside.
I had reached the end of the corridor. The door that confronted me was low and grubby. The lighting in this part of the institute was weaker. This was where the low funded experiments were conducted. I assumed it would be locked but I guess Gruber had been distracted that morning. He wasn’t a professional hitman but just a grasper, a parasite. The handle turned, I entered, shut the door behind me, gazed at him in his lab coat.
He stammered as he spoke, his cool words ruined by the erratic rhythm. He wanted me to know that he wasn’t disconcerted by my arrival. He had rehearsed every eventuality. I was doomed.
He cleared his throat, tried again, and this time his voice was steady. “The poison is spreading from your brother to you. It’s a chemical I use in my work. That’s why I didn’t care which of you I hit. To get one would be to get you both. It’s for the sake of knowledge.”
He paused, took a deep breath, continued, “All I had to do was wait for you to emerge from the entrance, take my shot, hurry down the alley and re-enter the institute through the steel door. That’s an emergency exit that’s hardly ever used. It suited my purpose admirably.”
I took one step forward. He backed off, grinning unconvincingly, and stood behind a table on which a flask glowed faintly. It was connected to electrodes. I saw a fluttering deep behind the glass. I knew my brother’s ghost was inside this prison. I knew it was the empty vessel that had diverted his soul from the liberty of infinity, from the intergalactic gardens of death. I spoke to Gruber, in a voice that filled the room to bursting.
“But why? What was the purpose?”
He scratched his head almost manically and said, “I needed results. Look at you! I didn’t know what kind of ghost or ghosts you had inside. One or two? It was even possible you shared a mutated soul. I had to find out, you had to die. I had to collect whatever came out. It was one ghost, unsullied, pure. This in itself is useful research! I won’t be stopped by your petty considerations, your paltry self-regard. Time to liberate your ghost too! You can join him in the jar, brothers reunited in an electric afterlife!”
I was dying anyway, but he didn’t mean that. There was a gun in his grasp, absurdly small in his big hand, a Colt Model 1903 Pocket Hammerless, lethal at this range but almost comical in appearance. His aim wavered but my stomach, chest and head were always covered. I took another step closer and he licked his lips, flared his nostrils, growled.
He said, “I have discovered that the electrification of an empty vessel gives it a psychic allure that attracts loose souls. But it’s the allure that matters, not the voltage itself. That will be the subject of my next paper. It will make me famous and I will be respected at last.”
“The allure,” I said, and then I added, “At last,” and I took another step in his direction, another step closer to the flask. He stretched his arm even further with the pistol at the end of it.
“He laughed at me once, he mocked me.”
“Deservedly,” I said.
“Time to get it over with, to do the deed.”
He squeezed the trigger.
The sound echoed from the walls. By chance the bullet tore into one side of my heart. My blood pressure dropped instantly, my vision blurred, I felt my soul tugging at the nerves and sinews that bound it tight. These cords loosened and the prisoner was set free.
Gruber shrieked with unholy glee.
Then his laughter underwent a transformation, performing a glissando slide down the scale of human emotions, turning from mirth into terror. My ghost had left my own body, it was seeking an empty vessel. The universe itself dragged it one way, the electrified flask another, but there was a third force, a vessel empty and more alluring than either.
My soul entered the body of my dead brother. Arnold became Ronald. The corpse jerked, its lips falling from its mouth with the sudden movement. Glassy eyes perceived Gruber dimly. I was on the other side now, in both senses. Could I adjust to my new situation?
My brother was the empty vessel.
I staggered forwards, shedding chunks of flesh, leaning to my left in order to remain upright, to counteract Arnold’s dead weight. I steadied myself on the table and the flask trembled.
Gruber was fumbling with his gun.
I reached him before he could find his courage again. I pressed him into a corner with my double weight.
I lifted my rotting arm, green slime pouring from the elbow, and forced my fist into his mouth. He gurgled. My fist expanded, turning into a viscous fluid, a wedge of thick ooze. This fluid poured down his throat, saturated his nostrils. I kept pushing my arm and it vanished into him, melting, deliquescing, steaming as it did so, filling the room with sickly green vapour. His eyes were wider than eyes should ever be. They bulged but I was merciless. The light in them faded, then I felt his soul leave him.
It rose into the air, almost touched the ceiling, but the pull of the flask was too great as the cables hummed. His ghost veered, accelerated towards the glass and passed through into the jar.
He was alone in there with my brother’s ghost.
I nodded once, collapsed.
Sprawled over Gruber’s body, my soul left my brother’s body, which had dissolved too much to be a vessel for anything. There was no indecision at all. I flung myself at the flask, found myself inside it, comforted by the electricity, a confined paradise for brothers.
Wallace and Hopkins didn’t enter the room for another hour. They weren’t able to summon up the courage until then. They found a flask with three flickers of pale light inside it, but the bodies on the floor were their main concern. They summoned the police. The flask was forgotten, eventually removed and put into storage. And no one ever asked what two of the flickers were doing to the third that struggled between them.
Originally published in Nightmare Abbey, Issue 9.
