Stories for Chip (40 page)

“Dan?”

Her voice was shaky, but came out more or less like a real voice. He turned from the screen. “Megan? What's up?”

She checked herself. The faintest whisper of the sharks slithering over the asylum's detritus at the very edge of hearing. No bodies on the ground. Residue, that's all it was. The residue of a dream.

“Nothing. I fell asleep for a while there. Dreamed about sodding sharks again.” She tried a laugh. “I'm OK, a bit stiff is all. Anything on the sensors yet?”

“There's regular pulse event the same as the one we had at the castle last month. Nothing else obvious. Are you sure you're OK? You look a bit wiped out. Maybe you should go back to sleep.”

Megan's pulse fluttered.

“No, I'm fine, honest. I'm wide awake now.”

Tentatively, she wiggled her fingers. The results were promising. She couldn't quite bring herself to stand up, but Dan surprised her by getting up and coming over to her. He crouched down, in the same spot where—but there were no remains there now, no sign that anything had happened.

He reached out one long finger and stroked her damp hair back from her face. The touch sent her blood pressure soaring once again. He rested his hands on her legs and sighed.

“What's this about?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Does it have to be about anything?” one of his hands stroked absently up and down the outside of her thigh. She could barely feel it through the heavy wool of her overcoat, and yet every pass sent tremors through her that threatened to become cramps.

“You look so tired, that's all. I feel bad for dragging you out here and keeping you up all night. I know you have a lot to deal with at the moment.”

“Nothing I haven't been dealing with for years already, Dan.”

He took one of her hands in his, turned it over and kissed her palm.

“I've been alone,” he said softly. There was a note in his voice she'd never heard before. “That is, I've been lonely. I mean—I mean it would be lonely here without you.”

His eyes were lost in the shadow of his hood, leaving his mouth as the only focus of her attention. Something about his teeth made her shiver, and for a second she caught herself listening for shark bellies slithering in the dirt. She pushed back his hood to expose his face fully. His eyes crinkled as he smiled. God, he was beautiful.

“You want this, don't you?” his intonation was somewhere between a question and a statement of fact. All Megan could do was nod. He pushed himself forward, weight pressing through his arms and down onto her thighs, and pressed his lips to hers. His tongue pushed into her mouth and this time she heard it for certain, the whisper of unseen things moving in the building, rubbery flesh over rotting leaves, communicating with one another through strange scents and the poetry of half-light. Peeling wallpaper shivered like leaves in a breeze she couldn't feel. Her arms froze at her sides again and her neck stiffened. She tried to push his tongue away and close her mouth, but her pushes were without force, without effect. He probed deeper, his weight pressing against her chest now. When he finally pulled back and looked at her, the laughter in his eyes had gone; they were onyx marbles set in skin the texture of linoleum. Merciless.

He pulled her hips forward and knelt between her knees. She was entirely paralyzed again, but for her heart, which beat furiously, filling her ears with the rushing of her own blood, mixing her blood with the whispering song of her fear. And mixed with the fear was lust. She
did
want this. Her lips, as soon as his left them, felt the grief of loss, the agony of unfulfilled desire.

“Do you fear it?” asked Dan, whom she was no longer sure was Dan at all.

She nodded.

“You won't break,” he said, through teeth as sharp as knives, “even if you bleed. You're not a china doll. You're meat, just like the rest of us. You want me at arm's length so you can imagine I'm perfect, don't you? So we won't break one another? But I'm meat, and you can cut meat and you can make it die but we all die in the end. You have to touch something in your life, and you have to risk watching it die. Everything dies. Look.”

He stood up and pulled off his anorak, and his sweater with the University logo on it, and his blue T-shirt. Then he bunched the skin at his waist between his fingers, and pulled. A seam opened from his throat to his navel and he peeled the skin back to reveal the musculature beneath, and the soft glistening organs.

“People are just walking steak and liver, same as cattle. I—we suffer. Does that stop us needing one another?”

Black eyes bored into her.

He undid his belt buckle.

“Say you need it.”

She thought of her mother, wasted to a skeleton, limbs shot with phantom pain and real spasms, confined to a hospice bed for years, and the light leeching away from her smile and the words leaking away from her mind, and she found herself surrounded. Fluorescent light flooded the room, shining down from strips fitted to a high, ornamented ceiling. The sofa by the wall was upright and cushioned. Two more sofas and several huddles of armchairs were arranged to give views out of the six bay windows. Everywhere, there were people. Sick, dying, broken people.

None of them were looking at her and Dan, but she felt their emotions pressing up to her like a tide, like the jellyfish carried by that tide, slapping into her mind and trailing their stinging sorrow across it. Abandoned people. Trapped people. Alone with only the phantoms their own minds had created.

“Say you need it.”

Images and sensations overwhelmed her; needles reaching for her naked skin, cuffs around her wrists, bitter medicines, unrecognized faces, voices in her ears telling her she was a bad, bad person;
Gerry is a bad person
; she mouthed it helplessly, knowing that it didn't belong to her, and that it did.

“Say it, Megan.”

She couldn't speak. Her tongue was swollen and the poison coursed in her veins, veins she was acutely aware of, carrying envenomed blood around her body. Meat, yes meat, but mind too, and the mind was all too brittle. The Dan-thing was lying to her. But she needed it even more, knowing that.

When he—it—unzipped its fly she wasn't surprised to see something there that wasn't pink, but gray.

Its teeth ripped through her clothes and into her body. She saw fins sliding inside her, the powerful tail slapping against her legs as it drove further in. Dan was holding her by the shoulders and looking at her.

“
I
won't let
you
go, Megan. Wherever you go, I'll be with you.” Jaws lined with tiny arrowheads closed around soft flesh deep inside her, and she felt blood soaking her thighs.

Her fingertips flexed with remembered feeling. Without moving, they traced the hard curves of a porcelain figurine. The waves of a mane, the cool planes of belly and flanks, the slender legs.

“Won't let you go.”

Three days after the unicorn had failed to fly, Megan's mother had collapsed. The diagnosis had taken another month to come in, and by that time Megan was quite sure it was her fault. She kissed Larha's perfect curves with her mind.

She let go.

“With respect to magnetic fields, researchers are proposing that perhaps some aspect of these fields have “experience-inducing properties”—even more so if observers have shown a degree of increased neuronal hypersensitivity and susceptibility to these fields. The general hypothesis from this is that such Experience Inducing Fields (EIFs) could be present at reputedly haunted locations and may well underlie a number of reports ranging from nebulous and ambiguous sensations to extreme and complex hallucinations.”

“Ow,” she said, stretching and rubbing at the sore spot on her back. A dull cramp radiated through her sacrum and into her abdomen.

Dan turned from the laptop and gave her a half smile. “Morning, gorgeous. You've been out for hours.”

“Have I? My back hurts.”

“I'm not surprised. These chairs weren't meant for kipping in.”

“I had this dream. I was swimming in the sea and there were these sharks after me. It was pretty scary.”

“Did they catch you?”

“No—I don't know. Loads of other stuff happened I think, but all I remember at the end is I was standing on the beach looking up at the moon, only it wasn't the moon. It was the Earth. Are there any sandwiches left?”

“Half a ham one; I saved it for you.”

“Gosh, thanks, I'm honored.”

She stood up gingerly. Her legs were half-dead from being in the chair. Dan picked up the sandwich from the trestle table and handed it to her. Their fingers brushed together as she took it from him, and the wobble in her legs grew momentarily worse. He turned back to the screen and pointed at the lines of scrolling data. She controlled the wobble, but still felt slightly strange.

“There's definitely something here,” Dan said. “The readings from the active sensor are far more complex than the ones from the baseline sensor. There are three spikes of activity, here, here, and here.”

Growing evidence suggests that crucial EIFs are characterized primarily by their complexity rather than overall field strength/amplitude. Only small windows of frequencies seem to have potent consequences for neural activity and anomalous consciousness, and these can generally be described as being within the spectrum of the human brain. The low-amplitude, low-frequency, complex nature of these fields seems important in order for them to be integrated into, and alter, the overall current perceptual gestalt.

The feeling of strangeness passed, and work took over.

When they'd packed the equipment into Dan's rusty Escort and set off down the road through the woods, dawn was still hours away. In a service station café somewhere off the M6, Dan gave her the background on the hospice.

“It was closed down 16 years ago, as you know. The main reason it was closed was because the people who came here mostly seemed to get worse instead of better. Oh, I should tell you—it wasn't a hotel, until late on; it was a country house, and then a sanatorium, and then a hospice. Quite a history.” He waved his fork and a bit of egg slid off and onto the tabletop. “So of course it took them a long time to work it out because that's always been pretty normal for mental hospitals. You know, deterioration. Specifically, people with hallucinatory symptoms reported more severe symptoms than they'd come in with, and people with no hallucinations—depressives, what-have-you—started to experience them. What makes it interesting is that the staff sometimes saw things too. The place got a reputation as being haunted by the ghosts of earlier inmates.”

Megan huddled down into her overcoat and made “I'm listening” noises. Dan took a sip of coffee and rattled on.

“So then they closed the sanatorium and opened it as a care hospice, but things didn't quiet down much. Finally it was turned into a hotel and health spa. The survey data's skewed though, I expect, ‘cause most of the responses we got were from folk who stayed in the spa. Didn't last long. People went away disturbed. The reports cover all sorts of things; night terrors, children crying, figures walking through walls, unaccountable sense of dread, all the usual stuff. Nearly half the people who filled the survey out said they still have haunt-type experiences quite frequently since having one here, even when they're not in a common haunt location.” He looked delighted.

“Mm-hm?”

“Yeah, and that's way above average. I was thinking about what you said about all the factors not being accounted for.”

“Really? I said something worth thinking about?”

Dan raised his eyebrows at her playfully. A cold shiver ran up Megan's spine. Damn, he really was something. So much for getting tired of looking at him. She sighed.

“Well, it does happen from time to time. Anyway, it struck me that you could almost make a case for there being something there. It follows on from a paper I was reading last night; remind me to email you the reference. But listen, if the gestalt of your consciousness exists in an EMF, maybe other kinds of EMF are inhabited by other kinds of consciousness. It's a stretch, but it's an interesting idea. Or there could be some interaction between the place and the person, such that traces of one are exchanged with traces of the other.”

“You don't really believe that.”

“Of course not. Hey, I was up all night, while you were snoring prettily in your chair. I had to entertain myself somehow.”

“Sorry,” said Megan.

“Don't be,” said Dan. “You needed your sleep. How is your mum, anyway?”

◊

She looked away from him, and instead carefully inspected the plate in front of her that had lately held an omelette and chips. As she did every waking moment, without even thinking, Megan forced her feelings down and away into the corners and corridors of her mind. She'd had years of practice at it.

“About the same. You know how it is; it mostly doesn't change from day to day.”

Her stomach cramped again and for a second she thought she heard whispering at the very edge of her hearing. Some vague feeling gnawed at her, something she didn't want to think about. She looked at Dan's fingers curled around the white china mug. An image of it shattering in his hand flashed across her retinas. On an impulse she didn't recognize as her own, she reached across the table and touched his wrist.

“Actually, it's been pretty rough lately. They—I think she's kind of given up on it all. Life, that is. You know, I could use some decompression time. We could—would you like to go out for a drink tonight?” She smiled, felt it come out lopsided. Tremors shook her. Dan set down the mug and twined his fingers into hers, and his eyes crinkled as he smiled back.

I won't let you go.
Something screamed and tore inside Megan, and a multitude of voices with a single face—her own face—darkly rejoiced. Every nerve was alive.
The captivity and the freedom of the meat.
The trapdoor of death was still a
door
. She ran her tongue across her teeth, enjoying their sharpness.