Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text (12 page)

He was about to mention the thing about Tammy being his cousin, but changed his mind.

‘The very same,’ said Laf. ‘She’d only persuaded him to let her hold his slip while he gave her one.’

He laughed.

‘That’ll teach you, Slug,’ he jeered at the Scotsman. ‘That will teach you for being a dirty little perv.’

‘Now now, Laf,’ remonstrated Gunnar, but the skull-faced man was in full swing.

‘I’ll tell you what, Slug,’ he chortled, ‘that has got to be one of the most expensive shags in history. How many seeds did you have there? Forty, fifty?’

But then the door opened again and another man came in.

~*~

‘Good evening,’ said the newcomer in a quiet, educated voice. ‘I hope this isn’t discord I’m hearing in our little community?’

‘Erik, mate,’ said Gunnar. ‘This is the new recruit that Laf has brought in. You know? Like we agreed? His name is Carl.’

‘Carl, eh? Good. That’s a fine old Saxon name!’

Erik was a man of about forty, quite slight, wearing half-moon glasses and a badly pressed brown suit. He could have been a schoolmaster, or perhaps a bank manager down on his luck. He shook Carl’s hand warmly.

‘Welcome Carl! I’m glad you could make it.’

Carl looked at Laf and mouthed, ‘Who the
fuck
?’’

Laf frowned back warningly.

‘A word of advice, Carl,’ said Erik pleasantly, still holding Carl’s hand. ‘Laf has chosen to let you into our little secret. We do that from time to time, because, well, we’re
missionaries
in a way. But if you were to reveal our secret to anyone else without our permission, I personally will kill you. And I must stress I mean that quite literally. I will kill you myself, and I will do so in the manner prescribed for sacrifices to the All-Father. With a noose and a spear.’

He laughed pleasantly as he finally released Carl’s hand.

‘Now, Slug,’ he said, addressing the huddled figure in the corner without even looking at him, ‘perhaps you’d like to fetch drinks for Carl and the rest of us and provide him with whatever his preference is in pharmaceuticals.’

Slug scrambled hastily to his feet.

~*~

Carl could not believe the gear they had up there. They let him snort and smoke and swallow pills until the walls wobbled like jelly and the ceiling pulsated above his head as if it was alive. And when at last Erik began to speak to him, it seemed to Carl as if they were at opposite ends of an enormous echoing hall.

‘How much do you know about Dunner, Carl?’ Erik asked him.

‘Um, not much,’ said Carl, who was lying flat out on the floor. His own voice sounded strangely remote, as if he too were somewhere far away. He began to giggle and had to struggle to control himself. ‘I mean I know he’s got a hammer and… Well, that’s it to be honest. Not being funny or nothing.’

‘Well your ignorance is regrettable,’ said Erik, ‘but it’s hardly unusual. People have rather forgotten Dunner over the years. But he used to be
big
around here once: Dunner, or Thor as some call him. In fact the housing estate you come from is actually
named
after him, though I doubt very much if that was even known by those who chose the name. Thurston
means
Thor’s town, just as Thursday means Thor’s day.’

‘Yeah, and Wednesday’s named after Dunner’s father,’ added Laf.

‘That’s right,’ said Erik. ‘It’s named after the all-father: Odin’s day, or Woden’s day.
Wod’s
day as we’d say now.’

‘Yeah?’ said Carl in that giant hall with its jelly walls, trying not to start giggling again.

‘“Yeah” indeed.’ Erik repeated Carl’s colloquialism in quote-marks, like a pedantic schoolmaster. ‘“Yeah” indeed. Dunner is the god of thunder and the strongest of all the gods. Your ancestors would have worshipped him. I don’t know if you know this, but they would have sacrificed to him too, killing both animals and human beings in his temple, spilling their blood in his honour. So you can see they took him very seriously indeed.’

‘You got a toilet here?’ Carl asked. ‘Only I’m fucking bursting for a piss.’

‘Outside this door, mate,’ said Gunnar, ‘and at the end of the corridor.’

‘I do apologise in advance,’ Erik purred, ‘for the rather basic arrangements’

~*~

Carl struggled to his feet, forced himself to focus so that he could locate the door, and moved unsteadily towards it.

The toilet at the end of the cold concrete corridor wasn’t hard to spot. The door was wide open and another naked light bulb revealed a chemical WC standing on a bare concrete floor. But as Carl headed towards it he became aware of a strange blue glow coming from a room next to the one he had just come from. Its door had been left just slightly ajar. Curious, Carl looked round to check no one was watching him, then pushed it open.

Inside, from floor to ceiling, small lights flickered and electronic devices hummed. There was a bank of what looked like CCTV screens on one side of the room and, below them, a single large monitor across which numbers streamed so quickly that they were hardly more than a blur. But it was an object at the far end of the room that caught his attention. A tall cylinder, about two metres high and resembling a gigantic hourglass, was the source of the pure blue light that illuminated the whole room. The light came from the lower chamber of the hourglass and was especially intense at the narrow neck, from which it shot upwards every few seconds into the upper chamber in narrow filaments that twisted and turned and quickly faded, to be followed by another burst of brilliant energy.

He heard a voice raised in the other room. Laf was goading Slug again, barking out his harsh derisive laughter. It was followed by Erik’s soothing purr

I shouldn’t be seeing this,
Carl thought.
I wasn’t meant to see this.

But he found it hard to turn away. The beautiful blue light and the constant movement inside the hourglass were strangely fascinating. They seemed to stir up something inside him, a powerful feeling, a sweet sad longing. He felt he could have stayed there for hours or even days, just watching. But he really didn’t want to be found in here and he knew that the others would notice if he didn’t return soon, so, after a few seconds, he made himself turn towards the door.

As he did so, he noticed something odd about the bank of screens. He had once worked for a few weeks as a security guard (it was the longest job he had ever had), and he knew that every screen in a bank of this kind would normally show a different scene, a different part of the property under surveillance. Here, though, on every single screen, there was a blue image of the room where the screens themselves were located, the room he was in, each one from the exact same angle. But here was the truly strange thing: the room and the camera angle might be identical in each one of those screens, but the image of Carl was not. In one screen he was facing the camera. In another he was looking at the shining cylinder. In a third he wasn’t there at all, but then came tottering unsteadily through the door.

Carl thought at first that there was just some sort of time delay going on here – perhaps, for some reason, each screen was showing a different part of the last few minutes? – but then he noticed a screen in which he was already leaving the room.

‘Oh shit,’ muttered Carl.

The beautiful blue light kept pouring up and up and up through the narrow neck of the giant hourglass

~*~

‘Do you think about the universe at all, Carl?’ Erik asked, when Carl returned to the room with the gods and mirrors and had settle back down onto the floor.

‘You mean… as in, like, the sun goes round the earth?’ Carl offered. ‘And stars and that?’

Erik gave a pleasant laugh.

‘That’s it, Carl, you’ve got it in one. “Stars and that.” Very succinctly put. You have a most distinctive rhetorical style, if I may say so. “Stars and that” indeed. But listen and I’ll tell you something. The whole of this universe of stars and space is just one tiny twig in an enormous tree, one single tiny twig. And every second, every fraction of a second, it’s branching and dividing, creating new worlds that proceed, from that moment on, to take their own quite separate courses.’

Carl laughed at first but then broke off because he suddenly found that he could
see
the very thing that Erik was describing to him, the world dividing and dividing and dividing again. It didn’t look much like a tree to him, though, more like millions of black worms in the dark that kept on splitting in two and splitting in two and splitting in two.
Like viruses or something
, he thought, vaguely remembering some film he’d once seen, some video in a biology class at school.

‘There are millions of other Earths,’ Erik said, ‘millions of Englands, millions of Thurston Meadows Zones. And Laf and Gunnar and I, we don’t come from this one.’

‘Nor me neither,’ said Slug in the background.

‘Nor Slug either,’ agreed Erik kindly, ‘nor Slug either. As you will no doubt already have guessed, we’re shifters, Carl. We come from other worlds and, anytime we want to, we can
go
to other worlds as well. Which means that we can do whatever we want here in this world –
whatever
we want – for no one is ever ever going to catch us. And
that
, of course, is why we are so
very
dangerous to cross.’

Lying on the floor with his eyes shut, Carl heard Erik moving about, somewhere out there in the remote region of space that was the room.

‘Have a look at these, Carl.’

Reluctantly, Carl opened his eyes. The light seemed almost too bright to bear, but he made out the silhouette of Erik against one of the mirrors and behind him, dimly, a series of reflections of Erik, each one holding out a bag. In the bag, in each of the bags, there were small blue glowing things. It seemed to him that Erik was holding a bag of stars, plucked away from their roots.

‘These are seeds,’ Erik said. ‘This is slip. A very short word for what is undoubtedly the single biggest leap forward that our species has ever made.’

He laughed.

‘Does it surprise you to hear me say that? Well consider the other alternatives. The discovery of metallurgy? Pah! What is metal but glorified stone? Space flight? A trifle! Where can
that
take you except another wretched little corner of this wretched little slither of space-time? Information technology? At best a useful tool, at worst a grievous distraction. But slip, my dear Carl, is something else entirely. It bridges the illusory boundary between mind and matter, between body and soul, between one mind and another. It unravels time, it brings us into the presence of the archetypal sentiences that we, in our crude human way, call gods. And also of course, and most famously, it enables us to travel from one world to another. Think of that Carl. Think of that. Every single one of these little glowing things could take you to another world. Every single one.’

Carl nodded. He noticed that the seeds were the exact same blue as the light of the strange hourglass in the other room.

‘Yeah,’ piped up Slug, ‘and you know what we’re using them for? We’re looking for Dunner’s worlds.’

Laf laughed.

‘Who’s this
we
, ratface? Who’s this
we
? You’re the clown who let a fifteen-year-old nick all his seeds off of him, remember? How exactly do
you
plan to get
anywhere
?’

‘Now, now Laf,’ said Erik soothingly. ‘Don’t mock the afflicted.’

He turned his attention back to Carl.

‘Do you know what our friend here means by Dunner’s worlds Carl?’ he asked.

‘Not really.’

‘They are worlds where the god Dunner rules,’ Erik said. ‘Worlds where the sham of so-called enlightened civilization has either been torn down, or never existed in the first place.’

Gunnar gave his mild little high-pitched laugh.

‘I expect Carl’s thinking he’d like to know a bit about what it’s actually like there, Erik,’ he said. ‘Am I right, Carl? Am I right, my old mate?’

‘Yeah, go on then. What’s it like?’

Carl had his eyes closed again and was watching those black worms splitting and writhing in the dark. He wasn’t deceived by Gunnar’s mild manner.
That fat bastard could beat me to a fucking pulp
, was his appraisal of the situation.
He’d beat me to a pulp, and talk to me all kind and gentle and regretful while he was doing it.
You learnt to read such things, drinking in the Old England.

‘Tell him, Erik,’ Gunnar said. ‘He don’t know what we’re talking about.’

‘I was just about to, Gunnar,’ said Erik tartly.

He clearly did
not
like to be told what to do. But he turned to Carl, and resumed his kind and friendly tone.

‘Does the word
civilisation
mean anything to you Carl? Or
democracy
? Or
human rights?
’

‘You
what
?’

Erik and Laf and Gunner all laughed. Even Slug sniggered grudgingly in his corner. Carl hadn’t meant to make a joke, but he felt nevertheless that he’d said something clever, and was immensely pleased with himself.

‘They don’t mean shit to me!’ he said in his fake American accent, hoping to repeat his triumph. To his great satisfaction, they all laughed again.

‘Of course they don’t, Carl,’ Erik said kindly. ‘Of course they don’t. And do you know why?’

‘Because I don’t give a monkey’s ass,’ shouted Carl, trying for that rare third laugh.

But they were tired of the joke now and no one even smiled.

‘The reason civilisation doesn’t mean anything to you, Carl,’ Erik resumed after a moment’s silence, ‘is that civilisation isn’t there for your benefit. You’re not
part
of civilisation. Civilisation is for the others out there across the Line. It’s
their
civilisation. And they don’t care what you think, and they don’t care about what you can and can’t do. They’ve given you a dreg estate to live in, a
Social Inclusion Zone,’
(he spat out the words). ‘They’ve given you the Department of Social Inclusion to look after you, and what they ask of you in return is that you leave them alone. Just take the benefits and the subsidised housing and the pub and the dreamer store, and then keep out of their way: that’s their earnest request of you. Just let them get on with their civilisation in peace.’