The Stone Man - A Science Fiction Thriller (11 page)

“Work’s closed. Apparently, lots of places are. Some government team taking samples of the surrounding area, so lots of roads in town are blocked off for the day. Kettle’s just boiled, help yourself.” A very, very cruel and dark part of my mind offered up the line
I already have, son,
but I buried that straight back, as deep as I could. I could barely even look at the man. The only reason I was still there was that I thought it looked somehow worse to disappear without a word, and dammit, I was hungry again. As I took the kettle out of its bracket, I fumbled for something to say. My mind quickly latched onto a subject I was actually interested in.

“Anything on the news about the statue?” I asked, eyeing the boxes of cereal lined up on the side and deciding which I was going to go for.

“It’s just passed Derby,” said the man whose wife I’d fucked the night before, looking up. “There’s still been more deaths, believe it or not. People who deliberately avoided evacuation, even though they were in the firing line. I guess it’s because it’s so damn slow; some people are just thinking it’ll be all right. Weird, really. When it’s just one thing, and so easily avoided, if you know it’s coming … you’d think it would be the easiest thing in the world to prevent any more loss of life. The people killed at the start, the biggest amount, they had no idea. But I guess when it’s just this one, slow thing, people get complacent. I dunno. People are stupid,” he finished, sipping his tea.

“No disagreement there,” I replied, with a painfully forced chuckle. He hadn’t even said anything funny, and I was trying too hard. Staying longer had been a bad idea and my head was starting to annoy me. It was like my hairs were trying to gently pull themselves out at the root. I scratched at my scalp, wrinkling my nose and gritting my teeth. I had more immediate concerns as well, like calling the insurance company and finding out what the hell I could claim, if anything. Plus I had to find somewhere for that night, and more importantly, for the future. There would be a lot of other people on the market today, other residents of my block that would need to rent immediately, and it was … what? I looked at the clock: 10:13 a.m. I was behind already, no doubt.
Fuck it
, I thought. I’d get something to eat on the go.

“They’ve closed a lot of motorways as well,” said Shaun, lowering the paper. “People are kicking off because a lot of the closures are nowhere near the statue, but the government are saying they don’t know what it might suddenly do, and if it got onto a busy motorway the consequences would be blah blah blah. So much is unknown at this stage, that’s the problem.”

“Can I turn on the TV?” I asked, wanting to get a visual update before I left.

“Mm, be my guest,” he said, and lifted the paper again. “What time you off?” he asked, slightly more airily and casually than necessary. My time as a welcome guest was clearly up, and I didn’t blame him. He wasn’t being nasty; he was just hungover and wanting to be alone, whilst doing a poor job of hiding it. He’d offered me a bed for the night, and his obligation to me was over. Plus, I deserved infinitely worse than a thinly veiled request to go.

“I’ll just have this and be off, mate,” I said, raising the mug that was about to contain some tea. “And listen, thanks again for putting me up. Big deal to me, that.”

“Our pleasure. What have you got sorted for tonight?” Subtle meaning:
once was enough, I’d like my living room back.

“Oh, I’ve had a text off a mate, he’s got a spare room going permanently, so that’ll do for the foreseeable future,” I lied, forcing a smile and clicking the TV on. He looked more relieved than he probably realised, and gave me a thumbs-up. The ad break finished on the screen, and the live feed came back. The news shouldn’t even have been on then, but the breaking news tracker bar that was scrolling across the screen gave me the impression that it wasn’t going off any time soon. Blanket coverage. The picture showed the Stone Man making its way through a well-to-do looking estate, walking along a street at an angle that would take it through a nearby house. It was surrounded now (presumably due to being in an urban area) by a squad of armed soldiers, keeping pace with it in a circle that stayed around six feet away from it on all sides. Moving slowly behind them was a jeep. I didn’t really take in any of this properly at the time though, as the moment that my eyes fell on the Stone Man, the top of my head felt like someone had poured cold water all over it and I became very, very awake.

It was as if something inside had just screamed
THERE
, and connected with the image onscreen. I felt a pull inside me, not a physical pull but just a kind of … urge. I was picking something up, there was no doubt about it. My fingertips and toes felt slightly numb, and my heart raced, both with shock and something else, that other force, as if I was having a mild panic attack. It was a physical and mental connection.

Wide eyed, I looked at Shaun. He was still reading the paper, unfazed. I managed to get my breath, and speak.

“Shaun?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Just … are you seeing this?” I needed him to look too. I had to check. He turned, lazily, and looked at the screen. He stared at it for a second or two, blinked, then turned back to his paper.

“Yeah,” he said. “Once you’ve seen it go through a few buildings and flatten a few cars, the appeal wanes a bit.”

So it was just me. I was the one who’d passed out, I was the one who’d had a fit, and now I was the one who was connecting with it. But why me? Why not Shaun, or Laura, or even her sainted sister? Sure, I’d effectively been at ground zero with this thing, but I didn’t think that was it; or at least not that alone, considering Laura’s too-much-of-a-coincidence theory. Distance couldn’t be a factor; Sarah had had the same symptoms as her sister, and there was a distance of fifty miles between them.

Something in the body, then? In the brain? As I continued to stare at the Stone Man on the TV, not even realising that I was holding one hand slightly out towards it, an idea occurred to me.

“Shaun? Did you ever get a bang on the head or anything?” There was silence from Shaun, and he stiffened slightly as he considered the question. I’d really phrased it quite badly, I realised. “Sorry, that sounded bad. Thinking about last night, I mean. Ever had any knocks, any operations?”

“No, mate,” said Shaun, quite tersely, still not looking round. He was being such a grumpy bastard this morning that if I didn’t know he had a hangover, I’d be convinced that he knew I’d fucked his wife. I had another question, one slightly more impertinent, but seeing as I didn’t plan on seeing him again anyway, I didn’t really have much to lose.

“Okay, any kind of brain abnormality in the family? Parkinson’s, depression, schizophrenia, ADHD, anything like that?”

“What?”

“I’m just asking.” There was a long pause, and he stared at me with his brow knotted. I didn’t know if he was thinking about the question, or deciding whether or not to kick me out. This was not the day to be asking Shaun questions.
Fuck him
, I thought. Disgraceful, I know, given what I’d done, but I didn’t have time for that.

“I’m dyslexic, but I don’t consider than an
abnormality
. It’s fairly common, you know. And I wouldn’t have met Laura if she wasn’t, too.”

“Laura’s dyslexic?”

“Yes. We met at an adult English lit class, if you must know. We both wanted to catch up on stuff we couldn’t appreciate when we were younger.” He continued to stare at me, then went back to his paper. He let out a sigh, and rubbed his forehead. “Sorry, I’m being snappy. Just tired … feeling delicate. Shouldn’t have drunk wine, it always puts me in a bad mood. Sorry, sorry.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” I said, “I shouldn’t be peppering you with questions when you’re hungover.” He responded with a slight flick of his hand, and a bob of his head; no worries. I didn’t get to ask my next question (
is
the sister dyslexic too
?) but I’d bet my last buck that she was, as dyslexia occurring in more than one sibling is common.

I wasn’t going to tell Shaun this, but I thought I was onto something, and what he’d just told me had lent my new theory a lot of credibility as far as I was concerned. I’m not dyslexic, and never have been, but thinking about my own situation had started me on a line of enquiry. You see, when I was twenty-five years old I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.

You might not know, but Asperger’s is a mild form of autism, so mild that generally you wouldn’t really know unless someone told you … but you might notice that something was a little
off
. It’s defined as having a lack of social awareness (sentences are literally interpreted and nuance is unnoticed) a lack of empathy, and often a reduced ability to take pleasure in what should be pleasurable activity. We’re generally clumsier, and can be obsessive over particular things. We’re supposed to like routine, but that one doesn’t apply to me. Mine is very mild, but either way, I have it. I’ve worked over the years on various techniques so I can function better in ‘normal’ society (don’t stand too close to people, don’t reveal too-personal details or ask too-personal questions, and learn which situations do and don’t warrant such conversation, learn appropriate and expected behaviours, be aware that you might be boring someone and talking too much) but it doesn’t change the way I think. These days, I just generally avoid conversation with strangers full stop. In my adult life, it’s turned into quite a bitter view of other people; I tend to see them as insincere, indirect, and guarded. I used to get upset by not quite understanding the way they work, but now I hold their ‘knowledge’ in contempt; the things you ‘just don’t do’ and the things you ‘just do’, in my eyes, are the actions of sheep. Act the way you feel, not the way you’re expected to. Say what you mean. But apparently
I’m
the weird one. Anyway, it’s probably the reason that my circle of friends has always been small and selective, and why most of my past relationships had been difficult; I read often in online forums about other Asperger’s people who were married with kids and so on (it’s actually very common) but I don’t work that way. It’s not who I am.

I’d accepted it anyway, and was fine with it.
Their
ways were not my ways, and even though I knew I was the one that had the ‘problem’, I thought that the way I viewed the world was one hundred percent correct. I still do. Regardless, Asperger’s isn’t the sort of thing you open conversations with. What would be the point?

My theory, as regards to my condition and the Stone Man, was that perhaps it was something to do with having your brain wired slightly differently. Shaun and Laura were dyslexic, so they were getting a jolt, although it was less the second time. I had Asperger’s, so I was getting a different, and more powerful one; although the second time, it hadn’t rendered me totally unconscious and merely caused me to have a fit. But I didn’t think other people with Asperger’s around the country were having the same experience as me. By the time the Stone Man ‘came to life’, there had been a few hundred people standing around it; I thought that the odds of someone else in that crowd having Asperger’s
and
being so close to it for a sustained period of time were surely pretty slim.

As for the dyslexic crowd, I don’t know if enough of them would ever be in one place at once for them to notice that their attacks were simultaneous. At six o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, the only place I can think of where there’d be a large enough gathering for there to be several dyslexics coincidentally gathered at the same time (what is it, one person in seven is dyslexic or something?) would be a pub, and even then you probably wouldn’t notice—at least not whilst you were suddenly feeling sick and needing to sit down—that someone else on the other side of the pub was feeling sick too. If they’d collapsed like me, sure, there’d be an uproar all around the place that everyone would notice, but if all they’d had was a bit of a funny turn? Shaun had said it’d be all over social media if everyone in a pub had an attack at once, but only two or three people in an entire building? I think only their mates would notice them, and would be unaware of it happening to anyone else.

Regardless, if my theories were right, I was unique, and that meant I was picking up on something in a way that no one else was, or would. Whatever the cause, the effects of it had downgraded the second time, and any after-effects seemed to range from nothing to a minor sensation; Shaun now wasn’t getting anything at all, and mine had been reduced to a low-level buzz in the head, except for when I looked at the Stone Man onscreen. Maybe the more dramatic hits were some kind of
initial
side effect, a result of connecting to whatever it was just for the first few times. Perhaps it was like drinking the local water on holiday, with the first few drinks giving you the shits before you built up a resistance. Either way, we now seemed to be more conditioned to the effect of the Stone Man.