Aphelion (7 page)

Not just any woman though. It was Iracema….

It was she who Duncan had been so racist to, and now here they were…in bed.
Together!

Corey swallowed. He heard a sound behind him and turned.

Behind was the window, and before that window…Corey was unsurprised to see the Silhouette. He wanted to speak, to ask something, but he didn’t wish to disturb the sleeping forms until he knew for sure.

The Silhouette nodded. For a moment Corey wondered what it was nodding at, then he realised. It was an answer to his unspoken question.

His heart hardening, Corey turned to face the bed.

He had no idea how he was going to handle this, but he knew he had to do something. He opened his mouth to speak, but the words came from the Silhouette. The words sent a shiver down him. Not because of what was said, but because of the voice. He had heard it before, of course, but now he knew whose voice it was.

His own.

“This ends now, Duncan Leman.”

Corey heard the movement behind him, but he did not dare to look. Just the knowledge that the Silhouette had his voice was enough—to actually see himself was not something Corey was ready for. But the choice was soon taken out of his hands. The Silhouette came into his line of sight. First as a dark shape on the periphery of his vision and then before him, as it neared the bed.

Corey felt his breath being stolen away from him. He stood there, immobile. Able only to watch. As the Silhouette approached the bed, the shadow fell off it—
him.
As the shadow fell, dripping away like watered-down oil, Corey took in the appearance of his doppelganger. There was something almost clinical about the suit he wore. It was a dull grey affair, straight slacks, and a body-hugging top, with a short but tight-looking collar. Corey swallowed when he got his first full look at his double’s face. If he had passed the man in the street, Corey was sure he’d probably have never noticed the similarity, since the Silhouette’s face was a lot harsher than his own. It was his face, but at the same time it wasn’t. The full Frakes-style beard only helped to highlight the differences. Sunken eye sockets, containing the orbs of pure white that he had seen before, and a nose that had clearly been broken on several occasions.

His observation of his distorted self was interrupted by movement from the bed. His head snapped around, in time to see Duncan struggle into a sitting position. As soon as Duncan’s eyes alighted on the Silhouette his mouth fell open. Amidst the fear, Corey also saw recognition in Duncan’s eyes.

“No, you’re not dreaming this time, Duncan Leman.”

Duncan moved his mouth to speak, but no words came. In a way, Corey found that oddly reassuring, knowing that it wasn’t only him who had trouble getting words out in the presence of his doppelganger.

“You knew this time would come,” the Silhouette continued. “The scales of justice are tilting, and not in your favour, Duncan Leman.”

Corey looked over at his double again. For the first time in ages, a laugh erupted from his mouth, which caused the Silhouette to look at him. Corey resisted the urge to flinch, but once more the nervous laugh came out. The Silhouette frowned.

“You have no need to fear me, Corey Jordan. Only he does,” he said in a cold voice, gesturing to Duncan with one hand which, Corey noticed, was deeply scarred.

“But,” Corey began, with a deep swallow, “you’re…”

“You?” The Silhouette nodded his head slowly. “Yes. As one of our favourite writers might have said, I am you, seen through a mirror darkly.”

As explanations went that was of no help to Corey at all. He shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Understanding later. Action now.” The Silhouette resumed his attention on Duncan, who was still sitting in his bed, silently watching the exchange between the two Coreys. Iracema had yet to stir. A small mercy Corey was thankful for. “Stand up, Duncan Leman. Face your fate with dignity.”

Duncan looked around wildly, and shook his head. Finally he found his voice, but when it came it was pitiful. “No,” he said barely in a whisper.

The Silhouette raised a hand, and pointed a finger at Duncan. “Stand.”

Corey watched as, clearly despite himself, Duncan removed himself from the bed, revealing his nakedness to Corey. It wasn’t the actual sight of his lumpy naked body that repulsed Corey, so much as the thought that that nakedness was once embracing Iracema.
His Iracema!

“Yes, Corey Jordan. Such righteous rage is needed.”

Something stirred in the darkest corner of the room. Corey glanced over, and a black shape, a shadow, emerged from the corner, moving close to him. Without meaning to, he opened his hand and the shadow drifted onto his palm. His fist tightened around something hard. Corey looked down, and saw the black club he was holding.

“No, no,” Duncan said, sniffing away like a scared child.

Corey stepped forward, fully aware of what he had to do. Scum like Duncan Leman were not allowed to continue. Stealing Iracema from him, the racist attacks, everything about Duncan was wrong. Duncan staggered back against the wall, his whole body shaking.

“And now your dream comes true, Duncan Leman,” the Silhouette said.

“Please no. I’m sorry. I didn’t…”

“Don’t you dare, Dunc! I always knew you were scum,” Corey said, raising the club in the air. “I just never realised how much.” And, with a sadistic pleasure he never knew he could possess, Corey proceeded to strike Duncan with the club. Again and again and again….

*

It was sometime later when Corey stopped, his rage having drained away. He looked at the pulpy mess that had once been Duncan Leman, and he stepped back, the club falling out of his hand. He felt satisfied, yet at the same time disgusted with himself. He knew that, without a doubt, the world was a better place without people like Duncan, but he still felt sickened by the violence he was able to dish out.

He turned to the Silhouette. Explanations later, he had said. Well, it was later, and Corey was sure he deserved some answers now.

The Silhouette was gone. Corey looked around the room frantically, and as his eyes came to rest on the bed they widened in horror. There was no one else in the bed, and no sign that there ever had been. His throat went dry.

He rubbed his fingers together, feeling the warmness between them. He glanced down, and noticed the dark red substance that covered his hand. Blood. The exact same blood that covered the corpse on the floor before him.

“Oh god,” Corey breathed, as realisation dawned.

One Mistake

He looked down at the card in his hand; the rather shaky card. No, that wasn’t true. Cards, being inanimate objects, didn’t shake by themselves. It was his hand that was shaking, the nerves threatening to get the better of him. Clasping his wrist, he attempted to steady the offending hand, and focussed once more on the address scribbled on the back of the card. He had to admit his handwriting was pretty shit, really, and hard to read at the best of times. And writing while nervous helped his script none. Still, he was familiar with his own writing enough to be able to decipher the address, and looked up from the card at the small house before him.

No doubt about it. The address was the same.

But did he really want to do this?

His legs started moving, one foot down, then the other, taking him towards the house. He stopped at the front door, and his knuckles rapped loudly on the cracked wood. He waited. And as he waited he thought. Why was he here, and why in the hell had he even bothered calling the number on the card?

It seemed public phone boxes were becoming a thing of the past, something only those unwilling to change with the times would use. Fossils. Like him. He was barely into his forties, but he refused point blank to buy a mobile phone, or have one of those, what did they call them, oh yeah, one of those
compacts
. They seemed to cost a lot of money to do things he didn’t understand. Besides which, he always reasoned, if people wished to contact him they could always ring him at home. House phones had served people well since the late nineteenth century, so why this bizarre need to have every part of their lives subject to the intrusions of others? Bad enough those random companies could contact him in the privacy of his own home; he didn’t want to be intruded upon when he was out and about on his strolls. All this notwithstanding, public phone boxes were still about, and as they had been since time immemorial, they were still littered with calling cards from those offering sex services and the like. Personally he had never picked up one of those cards before; indeed he barely looked at them, preferring to focus his attention on the world outside the phone box whenever the need to use one took him. But, barely an hour ago, something
pulled
him towards a particular card.

Discovering the Art of Astral Projection
it said. For a moment, phone still to his ear, he had looked at the card, completely oblivious to what his mother was saying on the other end of the line. It was almost as if he were sinking under water. He was aware of his mother’s voice, but the words made no sense to him, the sounds simply reverberated around his ear. His attention was squarely on the card, which his hand tenderly pulled off the wall of the booth. He was careful not to damage the card, almost as if by doing so he would offend the person who had placed it there. He held it close to his eyes; the number at the bottom was in the smallest print he’d ever seen. Clearly the owner of the number wanted people to pay attention, not merely glance at the card like all those that offered the promise of sexual pleasuring of various parts of the body.

He couldn’t recall if he’d actually bothered saying goodbye to his mother (He hoped he had—his mother would not have been happy if he’d simply hung up on her!), but next thing he recalled he was dialling the number on the card. He punched the numbers in, carefully rechecking the card with each individual number, just to make sure he didn’t get it wrong.

The call was answered before the first ring had completed, as if whoever it was had been sitting, hand on the receiver, waiting. There was no hello, just the sound of steady breathing. He tried a hello himself, always believing politeness cost nothing, but he’d barely got “hell—” out before a very old voice issued out an address. Urgently he reached into his inner coat pocket and pulled out a pen. He scribbled the address down, and was about to double check the door number, having been caught off guard, when the line went dead.

For a few seconds he remained as he was; phone receiver in one hand, the card in the other. Then it occurred to him. The address given was only a twenty-minute walk away.

Now he waited for an answer, still no clearer on why he was doing this than he had been when he’d first peeled the card off the booth wall. He leaned in closer to the door, briefly wondering if perhaps the owner of that old voice had died in the twenty minutes since he’d given the address. After all, it had been a
very
old voice, and in his experience old people tended to die at the most inopportune times. But no, he could hear movement from beyond the door. He stepped back, not wanting to appear too eager.

The door creaked open. Actually creaked, like in the old horror films that his mother had forced him to watch when he was a child—a millennia ago it seemed. Like he didn’t sit there shitting his pants through every single minute of the films. Now he felt like soiling his underwear again, but he clenched himself, both literally and figuratively. At first, even with the light coming from the street behind him, he could not see a single thing beyond the opened door, as if some hitherto unknown depth of darkness lived inside the house. His eyes adjusted and he saw the old man standing there, regarding him with baleful eyes.

“Hello, Robert,” the old man said.

*

Robert followed the man down the hallway, which was actually little more than a narrow passage through the ground floor of the house. Along the right wall a staircase led up. A very threadbare carpet covered each step, full of burns and stains, the origins of which Robert didn’t much wish to think about. The whole house, which he eventually got to see in its entirety, carried with it a bearing of neglect, as if the old man merely existed in the house, not lived. There were signs that once upon a time the house had been lived in, but that time had long passed for whatever reason. Robert didn’t want to consider the reason; some things were best left unknown.

He stopped at the kitchen doorway, situated at the rear of the house, and looked around. Neglect was putting it mildly. Filthy pots and pans littered the sideboards; plates with bits of food welded to them, and cups lying on their sides, the starch staining the insides so intensely it was as if it had become part of the natural colouring of the china. The stove itself was, unsurprisingly, old and rusted, except for one single square of the hob which gleamed against the rest of the dirty metal. This, Robert guessed, was the single part of the cooker still in use. After all, as bad as he looked, the old man clearly still ate something to sustain himself.

Then there was the old man.

Robert watched him sit at a small table, pushed against one wall. Papers and empty food tins littered the floor around it. He seemed to be broken. Not in a metaphorical sense, but actually
physically
broken. His entire shape looked as if every single bone in his body had, at one point or another, been snapped out of place and left to reset on its own. The result was a man who walked like a marionette without strings, coming to realise that it could in fact walk unaided, albeit in a fashion that barely resembled a normal human. His face was also one of brokenness; bruise upon bruise, an open welt above one eye, a nose that had seen better days. For a second Robert was reminded of the pictures newspapers liked to print from time to time, reminding people who were trying to enjoy their lives of the bitter and twisted nature of the world in which they lived. Grannies battered in their own homes, granddads beaten senseless while getting money from an ATM in town. Yes, that’s how this old man’s face looked, like someone had really been to town on it.