By Micky Spargo
O, I HEARD her before I saw her. Her footsteps outside the door. The knocks. The glass rattling in its frame.
Sweat trickled down my spine.
I’d gone over it in my mind so many times, now it was finally happening.
When she knocked again, I patted down my tie as damp patches froze under my arms.
The chair screeched like roadkill as I pushed it back when I stood up.
When she knocked again, I opened my mouth, watching the handle twist around, slow, and sure. The little dent in its brass bubble turning. And when the latch sprung, the door swung wide.
And there she stood, like a statue, set against the mint green backdrop of the stairwell, looking like a museum piece, one made from liquid jet, hidden in a dusty alcove.
Her head tilting up, she looked at me through a beaded veil of black, her cerise coloured lips staying closed as her eyes met mine.
‘Mister Carter?’ she said.
I nodded, swallowing on a parched throat, seeing the envelope in her hand. Her other gripped a black clutch bag.
‘Please,’ I said, sweeping my arm wide over my desk. ‘Come in.’
After closing the door, she glided across the floor like a swan gliding over the mirrored surface of a lake. You don’t see how.
Hobbling around the desk, I felt about as elegant as a Clydesdale in serious need of a new horseshoe or two and pulled out a hard backed chair.
‘Please, take a seat,’ I said.
She sat with an elegance difficult to describe, still holding the envelope, and placed her clutch bag on the desk.
‘Can I get you anything,’ I asked, ‘a coffee perhaps?’
‘No thank you, Mister Carter. I won’t be staying long. But thank you all the same.’
I wanted to slap my hands together.
‘Excuse the mess or… lack of facilities, Mrs. Andresen.’
‘Don’t worry, Mister Carter, I’m not here to comment on the décor,’ she said.
She glanced at the bare concrete walls.
‘Right,’ I said, sitting down and rolling my chair close to the desk.
She looked at me through her glittering black veil, her ice grey eyes never leaving mine.
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ she asked.
Before I could say sure, she opened her purse and pulled out a pack of Slims.
‘Okay,’ I said.
I opened the solitary drawer my desk had and reached in for an old tin ashtray full of butts. I tipped them into the drawer and placed it on the desk.
Lifting her veil, she lit her cigarette with a chunky lighter, an antique thing covered in scrollwork, pewter by the looks of it, then dropped it back into her purse.
She pulled the pin out her hat, removed her hat and the veil from her face, and for the first time I got a good look at her. Aquiline nose. Egyptian eyes. Lips fuller than her sixty years might dictate as natural for a woman her age.
She placed her hat by the side of the ashtray then drew on her cigarette.
‘You received my letter?’ she said, crossing her legs.
‘Yes.’
‘In that case you know what this is all about.’
She tilted forward and slid the envelope across the desk at me.
I looked at it. My fists sweaty. But I didn’t want to seem too eager. And neither did I want to take my eyes from her.
She stared at me, drew in more smoke, and siphoned it into air.
Reaching into the drawer again, cigarette butts and all, I scrambled around for my cheque book, found it, and dropped it on the desk.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘business first. No names. My client has already paid me, so now I pay you—’
I was breathing too fast.
‘There is no business, Mister Carter,’ she said, stiff backed, tapping her cigarette into the ashtray.
‘Sorry?’
‘I don’t want your money.’
She leaned back, stiffer backed than before.
‘I don’t want anything to do with it,’ she said. ‘I feel bad enough passing it on to you. And taking remuneration for it would mean my keeping a connection with it. I don’t want that. I want rid of it.’
I let the cover of my cheque book flop back like the wing of a dead duck.
I couldn’t think of anything to say, except. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like coffee?’
‘No.’
She took a puff then another.
‘Can I ask why you don’t want anything for it?’ I asked. ‘I mean my client is paying a very large sum for it.’
‘That thing killed my husband, Mister Carter,’ she said. And it ruined my life at the same time. If I had the nerve, I would have destroyed it years ago. Instead, I hid it in a vault in the basement. A shrine to my husband if you will.’
‘Then do you mind if I…?’ I asked, reaching out for the envelope.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Wait until I’m gone.’
‘Then how do I know it’s even in there?’ I said, flopping back.
‘What have you got to lose if it isn’t?’ she said. ‘It’s not as if I’m taking any money for it, after all.’
I swung my desk chair a few inches left, a few inches right, then back dead centre.
My eyebrows arched.
‘True,’ I said.
‘And my letter,’ she said. ‘What we agreed. I hope you kept your part of the bargain.’
I nodded.
Destroy it, she’d said. Do not let anyone else see this.
I’d lied.
I’d kept it for insurance. It seemed like a clever idea at the time.
It fascinated me. So much so I couldn’t stop looking at it. Time and again just holding it in my hands made me feel good. My imagination ran riot every time I did, seeing stars. It was a rush every time I touched it.
I should have burned it.
‘You play a pretty tight game, Mrs. Andresen,’ I said.
‘I’m not playing games, Mister Carter.’
‘So, you won’t mind if I take a peek?’
‘Only after I’m gone. Then you can look at it all you like. It was a hard decision for me to make, handing it over to you like this. I hope you understand.’
My eyes flicked down to the envelope.
‘Are you the only one who definitely knows of its existence?’ I asked.
She sighed.
‘A lot of people are convinced that it does, Mister Carter, otherwise your client wouldn’t have sent you out to look for it, now, would he?’
‘I guess not.’
‘Most only need to believe it exists,’ she said. ‘Unfortunately, those who do end up as insane rejects who vanish from mankind. The fact is, Mister Carter, few people know it exists. Does that answer your question?’
‘But to be clear, you’ve never looked at it yourself?’
‘No.’
After taking one last drag on her cigarette, she poked it out in the ashtray.
‘And I never wanted to,’ she said. ‘Not after what it did to my husband.’
‘Mrs. Andresen, then how do I know?’
‘You don’t, Mister Carter.’
At that she picked up her hat, put it on, picked up the pin by its big black bead and stabbed it in.
‘I didn’t have the courage to do what you should, Mister Carter. Destroy that thing before it destroys you.’
‘Now,’ I almost laughed, but not because I found what she’d just said funny. ‘That does sounds melodramatic.’
And as soon as I’d said it, I felt as if a bulletproof door had been slammed in my face.
‘Don’t confuse fantasy with fact, Mister Carter. That thing kills people.’
She stood up and rolled the black beaded veil in front of her face.
‘Good day, Mister Carter. I hope that you stay safe now that you have it.’
Grabbing her purse, she clutched it in both hands close to her waist, turned and left.
It happened so fast that I didn’t even have a chance to open the door for her, and sat watching as it closed with a click, listening to her footsteps echoing down the concrete stairwell, footsteps fading until there were none.
And I waited. But for what reason Christ only knows.
‘What now?’
Look inside the envelope, dummy.
‘But what if it isn’t there? What if it’s a fake. A joke? She said she hadn’t clapped eyes on it.’
So how did she know it’s in there?
I rubbed my hands on my thighs. My sweat was turning to glue.
I stared at the thing, the envelope, lying there, then the ashtray, at her buckled cigarette, then over my shoulder at the window.
I needed coffee. I was burning up fast and running on air. My metabolism had jumped ten notches, and I needed octane.
Don’t die on me now, Sean.
Reaching into my top pocket I pulled out a pack of Marlboro, slid one out and tapped the end on the side of the box like a real pro.
I’d gone a whole week without. I’d kept a pack close to my heart to prove to myself how in control I was. My resolve was unbreakable.
Until that thing appeared on my desk.
‘Well… So much for the self-imposed prohibition nonsense.’
Preparation is everything.
I lit up. Inhaled deep and blew the smoke in a stream high over the desk.
Do it!
I lurched for it, my hands in a dive, then stopped and let them hover over it, trying to sense the thing it contained through the air.
Open it.
My fingers landed on the envelope, pressing through the paper, feeling something small, square, and flat.
History or bunk, sensation, or hoax, it didn’t matter. Someone was paying a high price for it, and that did.
And that’s when I found out, what a rush it is to possess something everyone wants, but no one else can have.
My fingers slipped under the flap of the envelope, and I reached inside.
I didn’t know what to expect. An electric tingle. Something on touching it. But there was nothing as I gripped it under my fingernails and dragged it out into the open.
Face down I left the old black and white Polaroid on the desk before I dared turn it over.
And when I did, I grinned, took a long deep drag on my cigarette, and blew smoke into the face of a man from another world.
Charlatan, hoaxer or plain self-deluded, George Adamski, ‘professor’ to his followers, met a ‘man from another world’ in the Catskill Mountain, Northern California, on November 15th, 1952.
That man was Orthon.
Adamski coauthored a best seller. Twenty thousand in hardback, stamping him onto the map of weird and wonderful forever. His photographs of flying saucers were first printed in Fate Magazine, which brought him to the attention his publishers.
The only other person to have seen Orthon was Lou Zinsstag, Adamski’s secretary. It was Adamski, of Polish and Egyptian descent, who let her glimpse this photograph.
No copies had been made. And no one knew what happened to it after he died in 1962.
Until now.
I was careful only to touch the edges in case the sweat from my fingers damaged the emulsion. It was already faded, greyer and whiter than black and white. But the image was clear enough.
A young man in profile, fair hair cut short, twenty four, twenty five. But he looked like any other human to me. His eyes were Asiatic, though thinner and wider than normal. His nose slimmer. His jawline longer than you might expect. Still, if you met him on the street, there was nothing about him that screamed he was from another planet.
It was a hoax. It had to be. A few bucks had been paid to some Joe Schmuck. His picture had been taken. Rumour and legend did the rest.
My buyer was wasting his money.
Still, no one ever come forward and claimed, That’s me. I’m the guy in the picture. Then again, since the picture was never made public, what was there to come forward for?
It didn’t matter. The Turin shroud is a fake. It doesn’t make it worthless. It’s priceless.
Well, this old polaroid picture isn’t the Turin shroud, and the guy in it isn’t Jesus Christ either. But it is worth something. Even if only for the legend behind it.
It’s a funny thing about not seeing something you’re convinced exists. It grows in your mind, until it turns into an unbearable mystery, blooming like a wet crystal of gentian violet, staining every neuron in its path.
When I thought, No copies, something jerked inside me like I’d been stung.
Here I was in possession of the most sought after piece of underground mumbo jumbo memorabilia there ever was, and it was the only one of its kind.
I dropped it back in the envelope, safe, secure. Out of sight out of mind. And after I dropped it inside, I swear to God I had to peek just to make sure it really was in there.
It was.
Thoughts crashed in at me and away again before I could make sense of them. Spikes of orange and violet tattooing the truth all over my brain.
I needed prints made. Ten, say. But no negatives.
This was already tricky.
I didn’t want to let the thing out of my sight.
I could take it to a developer, have reproductions made from the original. But that would mean letting go of it, even for a little while.
Not good.
What if something happened to it? What if it got lost, destroyed, and my take on it gone with it?
Already I could see some lethal concoction spilling over the emulsion and the image of Orthon slithering off. Along with my percentage.
And what if some geek stole it?
A dangerous geek.
But why would anyone do that? It’s only an old photograph for Christ’s sake. Nothing on it says Orthon, Man from Another World. Who would know?
Those creeps are everywhere.
It didn’t matter. I couldn’t trust letting it out of my sight.
I was shaking.
I had to keep it safe.
Okay, so how many knew I had it? Mrs. Andresen for one and me made two. Only two. And she wasn’t about to talk.
Or had she?
I went over to the coffee pot on the filing cabinet. I pulled open the top drawer, yanked out a mug, but couldn’t stop my eyes swinging over to that envelope on the desk.
I turned my back on it for a second.
What about the door?
I had visions of a wild eyed maniac bursting in through the wall. Axe in one hand. Mission statement in the other.
But no one knows it’s here.
Except for the ads, the small print, the web pages. Jesus, half the planet knows I was looking for it.
Looking for it, but they don’t know you have it. Secrets and lies.
‘Give me a break. No one wants it except me, and it hasn’t cost me zilch so far. I don’t even know if it’s the right one.’
It’s a fake!
‘What difference does that make!’
I’ll scan it. Stick it on the computer. Fire it into hyperspace and firewall the damn thing from here to Mars. Shield it from key loggers and malware, spyware, snoopers, and hackers. From all those creepy little guys.
They’ll figure it out, Sean. They’ll know you’re hiding something.
Christ, even the Pentagon can’t keep hackers out. Look at Gary McKinnon.
You can’t do it. You can’t upload it. You can’t even digitalize it.
‘I can’t do anything with it.’
Besides, the heat of the scanner might melt the damn thing and turn it into fudge.
I put the coffee down on the desk and lit another cigarette.
Think.
I have it and nobody else does. That’s the difference.
And I could lose it.
Or get killed for it.
‘Shut up!’
I inhaled the smoke deeper. The ashtray was overflowing with butts.
I calmed down. I felt better. I stubbed out my cigarette and lit another.
Besides, who’s even heard of Adamski?
‘Well, since his flying saucer photographs adorn the walls of every nut on the planet, not to mention enthusiast, I’d say half the world.’
I poured more coffee.
‘I could stick it in a vault. It might be safe there. But then what about me? What if someone finds out I have the damn thing?’
Deny it.
‘Only that’ll make it sound as if I have something to hide, which I have.’
Tell them it’s worthless, then.
‘Same goes.’
Go public.
‘And lose everything I’ve worked for? What about the book? My book? Dead and buried before it has a chance to be born. No photograph no story.’
Don’t hand it over. Don’t give it to the buyer. Burn it. Give him his money back. Keep the money.
‘Right.’
And there I was one flight up in the only office space I could afford, inside a disused paper mill on the edge of town. It was Alcatraz stuck on an island of dust and scrub stretching out for miles around.
‘I should have paid her for it. Insisted. A token. A transaction of some kind.’
It was something she’d blocked. Stopping the natural flow of things. She’d cut the cord that binds and walked away.
‘Yeah, well, it had nothing to do with money. By the look of her she didn’t need any. And by not taking the money she had demolished the road between her and it.’
That hadn’t been in the story when I’d gone over it in my mind before we met.
The passing over the money had been the main thing. I would have felt a sense of right to the picture if she had taken the cheque.
But it’s not yours to own for Christ’s sake!
‘Get lost!’
A blow to the head almost knocked me senseless before realizing my own fist had punched me.
Pull yourself together, man.
I straightened my tie, sat, and leaned my elbows on the desk.
If I gave the buyer his money back, along with the picture, he might think I was giving him a fake and not the real thing. That I was holding onto the real one and keeping it for a higher price. And if he had that much money to waste on a phony picture, he had enough to clean me off the face of the earth.
Whichever way I looked at it I was in danger.
Too bad.
‘I need the money.’
Hand over the picture and grab the cash. Don’t look a gift alien in the mouth.
‘Who’s looking?’
Okay, so I have it, the photograph, and all is well. I have the final piece of the jigsaw. I have Orthon in profile. The guy who played a central part in one of the biggest hoaxes of the twentieth century. All I need to do now is publish the book about finding it and be damned.
Give the buyer his money back.
‘No!’
Keep it.
‘Fuck!’
I looked at the window, at the grime streaking the glass, and the yellowed paper stuck to the outside bleeding pink in the setting sun.
When a breeze flicked the bottom corner of the paper, it reminded me of a dragonfly I’d seen as a kid caught in a spider’s web. I’d leaned in close, blew on its wing, and watched as it refracted the colours of the rainbow. When its leg twitched a spider rushed out of nowhere and devoured it.
I was still warm and fuzzy about that childhood memory when the window smashed.
Skin prickling, I slammed my back against the wall to the side of it.
Sliding along I peered outside, but there was nothing out there but shadows clawing over the rocks towards me.
Maybe a bird had lost its way. Maybe it had seen its reflection in the glass and gone on the attack.
And maybe you’re nuts.
Heart pounding, I pushed away from the wall realizing how isolated I was out there.
I was ready to bolt for the door and run.
Until I heard it.
The size of a softball, it was stuck to the wall high in the corner. A round lump of glistening black feathers, squeezing and pulsating as if it was trying to free itself from the cracked plaster.
It dropped and squelched to the floor. Its oily feathers stretching and splaying like fingers as its wings unfurled. Only this thing had more than two wings.
When it tumbled back on itself, its wings slithered around until I glimpsed a tiny human eye, and teeth embedded in grey sodden fur and nail clippings.
It shot into the air and catapulted over my head, forcing me to duck down low. Heart hammering, I spun around to see the thing stuck to the opposite wall before it lost its grip and slopped to the floor again.
Its eye blinked wide as its tiny tongue licked over its tiny teeth.
‘Hello, Sean,’ it squeaked.
Breathing hard I grabbed the envelope, ran out and slammed the door behind me, trapping the thing inside.
There was a thud at the door, and another.
‘You can’t escape from me, Sean,’ it said. ‘Open the door, you evil lying swine!’
I held the door closed with both hands. It shook with every thud.
‘Open the door!’
(Thud)
‘Open it!’
(Thud thud thud)
I struggled to push the key in the lock.
(Thudthudthud)
The door handle twisted around in my sweaty hand. And no matter how tight my grip, it still turned, until the latch clicked, gave way, and the door jerked open an inch.
I yanked it closed again.
‘I’m gonna infest your brains. I’m going to suck your lying eyeballs out.’
(Thud)
I clanked the key around in the lock. Sweat stung my eye. And when the doorknob was almost ripped out of my hand again, I dropped the key. The muscles in my forearm felt as if they were about to burst as I held the doorknob and slammed the door shut and picked up the keys.
‘Give up. Bastard!’
‘Never!’
Door locked I lurched down the stairs three at a time.
Running to the car, I jumped in and raced off in a cloud of dust and gravel.
Too much coffee. Not enough sleep. Hallucinating, I reasoned as I poked a cigarette into my mouth, my hands shaking as I raced at a red horizon.
I dropped the envelope on the table, poured a neat Rebel Yell, and went for a book on the shelf.
Flying Saucers Have Landed by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski.
I pulled out Andresen’s letter from inside the front cover. The letter she had insisted I destroy. Satisfied it was still there I stuffed it back inside the dust jacket and dumped the book back on the shelf.
The telephone rang.
It had to be the buyer.
I took a breath, held it for a second and let it out slowly and reached for the receiver.
It stopped ringing when I touched it.
Forget it.
I flopped back on the sofa.
I switched on the lamp and picked up the envelope. The picture slipped out and bounced onto the coffee table.
Something was wrong.
I slid off the sofa and hunkered down. Peering across the table top I could see that the emulsion had blown.
The image was sticking out.
It had gone from flat to three D with a dirty line traced around Orthon’s head.
I sat back on my haunches; slugged bourbon then dragged the back of my hand over my mouth.
I thought it was blood.
I shuffled over to the lamp and held my hand under the lightshade.
There was a red smear covered my knuckles.
I stood up and staggered to the bathroom.
The over light hissed and clicked as I edged my way to the rusted mirror.
Don’t look at the eyes, Sean.
But before I could look at my reflection there was a thump at the front door. The flat was such a cheap dump I didn’t bother with security much. There was no point. I had nothing to steal. A burglar would have been doing me a favour.
Burglars don’t pound at the door, either.
‘Open up!’ a guy shouted.
I scrambled back into the front room on my hands and knees and grabbed the photograph.
A bullet ricocheted off the lock and embedded itself in the floor two inches from my hand.
After that it was pure instinct.
I’m surprised I remembered my jacket, never mind my wallet, as I clambered out the kitchen window.
I lived with rats and cockroaches behind dumpsters in backstreets for three months. Even the homeless were suspicious of me.
I didn’t trust them either. Any one of them could have been in disguise.
I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of the picture. If they caught me with it, I was a dead man. If they caught me without it, I was a dead man.
So, I did the next best thing.
I vanished.
I changed bank accounts. Changed my name. Obtained a forged passport and made my way around the world.
What I didn’t realize was how cold a desert gets at night.
I remember sitting with my back against a rock. I hadn’t eaten in days.
I was so numb I couldn’t even feel pain.
‘So, I had to run,’ I said. ‘You see that, don’t you? I had to get away.’
‘What were you doing out in the middle of the Californian desert anyway?’ he asked, scribbling notes on a yellow pad.
‘I was heading for Desert Centre, California.’
‘Why?’ he asked, peering at me over his half-moon specs from the other side of the table.
‘Guess,’ I said.
‘I’m all out of guesswork,’ he said, hunched over his notes on me again.
‘I was going for a walk.’
‘You were lucky,’ he said, leaning back. ‘Another few hours, and you would have died of hypothermia.’
His belt was having a hard time holding back his gut. The buttons on his shirt weren’t doing too well either. Every time he shifted his weight his chair creaked as if its legs were about to collapse.
‘You’re the doc,’ I said. ‘You would know.’
He raised a grey eyebrow and shrugged.
‘I did my stint at medical school,’ he said. ‘Even renowned psychiatrists like me have to go through that shit first.’
‘Really?’
‘Really,’ repeated Doc Parrot, all beak and no mouth. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘there’s been an application for your extradition. It seems you stole a lot of money.’
Yeah, really? I wanted to yell.
I could see I was getting nowhere. Nowhere I wanted to go.
‘I wasn’t stealing it,’ I said. ‘I was using it.’
‘What’s the difference?’ he yawned.
Pencil like a flagpole he poked it up and down in the air a few times without looking at me.
‘Go on,’ he went on. ‘My ears might have turned to cloth with all of this cock and bull crap you’re telling me, but I’m paid to listen.’
The bouncer at the door stood with his musclebound arms folded in front of his double D pecs. I couldn’t see his eyes for the mirrored sunglasses. He had a strong slow pulse in his neck.
I wondered if I could jump across the table and wrap my hands around the doc’s fat neck before I was gunned down.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘the buyer didn’t want the money. He wanted the picture. Andresen didn’t want the money. She wanted rid of it.’
‘Either way it belongs to him or her, but not you. Why did you steal it?’
‘I told you!’
Too sharp.
I rubbed the back of my neck. Sweat smeared through the stubble of the razor cut they’d given me (procedure—lice or ticks, lime disease, quarantine, green money virus, whatever. They threw everything at me at the same time they threw me under an ice cold Dieldrin shower).
The doc sighed.
‘A lunatic story about flying saucers,’ he read his notes. ‘And a spaceman from the nineteen fifties. Am I right?’
A lopsided sneer tugged up one side of his no lip mouth.
‘I thought you were a psychiatrist,’ I said.
‘I am. And lunatics still exist,’ he said, pen scribbling, head shaking (tut tut tut I don’t know) as his eyebrows scaled the heights of his forehead for that intellectual bagged fog forebrain of his. ‘And no matter what kind of fairy tale definitions we use to categorize your kind, even in this enlightened day and age, you are all still nut bags. So, about this flying saucer.’
‘It’s true!’
I slammed my hands on the table and jumped to my feet.
‘If you get out of your chair one more time,’ the good doctor said, grinning at me over his spectacles, ‘it’ll be another injection. A stronger one this time. And they will keep getting stronger until you cooperate. Now. Sit. Down.’
I sat. I obeyed. What else could I do? There were no windows. The only door was made of steel, complete with a tumbler lock on it—all numbers, no key. There was also the bruiser in the corner clutching his oversized popgun.
‘Good. So, Desert Centre. What happened then?’ the doctor asked.
‘It came down from the sky.’ I sighed, shuffling the empty coffee carton across the table, when what I really wanted to do was shove it in his face.
‘The spaceman came down from the sky?’ he said.
‘No, the ship did.’
‘And what time was this?’
‘Eleven in the morning. The sky was clear blue when it first appeared.’
I was resigned to rote. Monosyllabic if I could get away with it.
‘It floated down from out of nowhere,’ he said, tapping his pencil at the pad.
‘Look, I’ve told you a billion times.’
‘What did it look like?’
‘A bubble.’
‘A bubble?’
‘Yes, a bubble.’
Up straight—my chair hits wall. And Tommy Gunn in the corner grips his machinegun tighter.
‘Sit!’
I sat.
‘I thought you said it was a flying saucer,’ the doc said.
‘It was a bubble of light, for Christ’s sake, when I first saw it coming down.’
‘Out of a clear blue sky. So, you say. Go on. Tell me what this gigantic soap bubble look like.’
‘Like a flying saucer.’
‘We’ve got your mother here,’ the good doctor said, straightening his crooked bowtie.
‘My mother’s dead,’ I said. ‘She died giving birth to me.’
His eyebrows shot up. It was something else to pin me down on his butterfly board of nutcases. Category—Guilt.
‘Mrs. Andresen?’ he said to the open door.
And in she glided. All black beaded veil and tear brimming ice blue eyes.
‘Sean,’ she said, ‘that picture was of your father, remember? I took the photograph before you were born.’
‘Who the hell are you?’ I yelled.
That’s when the good doctor and his white coat wide boys, rushed me and slapped duct tape on my mouth.
All I could do was glare at him and her talking to each other as if I weren’t there. And she dabs her eyes with the silk monogrammed handkerchief he’d whipped out of his top pocket.
‘I’m sorry about this, doctor,’ she simpered. ‘But he’s been this way for years. We tried to shield him. But in the end,’ she raised her hands in a gesture of futility, ‘it was impossible. Paranoid schizophrenia, you see? He doesn’t even know who he is himself most of the time. The poor boy, all those things about aliens and flying saucers, I thought he would grow out of it. Instead, he kept getting worse and, oh—’
And there she broke down.
I would have clapped for her amateur dramatics, but they strapped my arms to the chair.
The doctor held her hand.
‘Mrs. Andresen,’ he said, ‘we don’t want any trouble. I can see you’ve had a trying time of it as it is. Neither of us wants to be embroiled in a legal case, now do we?’
Eyelids fluttering, she looked up at him.
‘You’re very understanding, doctor,’ she said, smiling.
‘The extradition is easy to deal with,’ he said, sitting back and looking at me. ‘He’s obviously insane. He’s not going anywhere. And as for a court case, well—’
‘How can I be of assistance?’ Mrs. Andresen perked up.
‘I can sign over his mental incompetence to you,’ the doctor said, ‘and you can take over his finances. All legal and above board. Since the poor boy is obviously psychotic, he can’t manage his own affairs. It’s only right.’
Her hand went up to the invisible Hope Diamond around her neck. She smiled, sniffed, and dabbed the silk handkerchief at her nose for effect.
That made me mad. So, mad I thought my eyes were going to pop. They almost did when they rammed the cold steel prongs of a taser into my neck.
‘As far as the money he stole,’ the doctor said, ‘you could hand it over to its rightful owner. But then again, as no one knows this poor deluded young man is here for treatment, that, and the fact that he is in no fit state to speak for himself, what you decide to do with it is up to you.’
She looked at me, simpering through her veil.
‘I understand, doctor,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what possessed him to do it. Charging for an old photograph of his own poor sweet, dead father.’
What a bitch.
‘It’s a sickness, Mrs. Andresen,’ the doctor sympathised, patting her veiny hand. ‘One that unfortunately makes everyone’s life, especially those who love and care for him, an unbearable hell. I’m sure the extradition charges will be dropped when I write my report. And we have all the facilities here to make sure society is kept safe, and to give this poor young man all the proper treatment he so obviously needs at the same time.’
‘Killing two birds with one stone?’ Andresen smiled.
‘Ex–actly.’
She looked at me and sniffed back an invisible tear.
‘Thank you, doctor,’ she said.
Twelve years it took me to find a way out of that maximum security cracker palace. It took me ten hours to get back home. And nothing was going to stop me from proving my sanity.
My axe tore through the wood.
Before I knew it a couple of heavies were on me. Kicking and screaming they stuffed my arms into sleeves without cuffs and pulled the straps tight.
‘You made it back, then,’ Mrs. Andresen said, sitting behind my desk. ‘How many years has it been?’
‘Forever,’ I said.
‘I think you owe this man an apology,’ she said.
I looked over at my filing cabinet.
‘How are you feeling?’ the doctor said.
I struggled inside the straitjacket.
‘This is kidnapping,’ I said.
‘I call it justice,’ she said.
‘And you stole my money,’ the doctor said.
‘You were the buyer all along?’ I said. I couldn’t believe it.
He smirked. ‘And finally, the penny clonks to the bottom of the waterless wishing well. Took you long enough to work it out.’
‘And you killed five people getting here,’ she said to me, lighting up a cheroot.
‘What did you expect?’ I said.
‘And it wasn’t always easy clearing the path to let you get back here either. You should thank me,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘You don’t think it was that easy to evade the police, do you? Of course, scrambling the wires of communication, never mind erasing your records, helped.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We wanted you back here, that’s what I’m talking about,’ she said. ‘Don’t you get it? It was all planned from the very beginning. We put you in there because we had to change things about you here a bit, and then we got you back out again. Voila!’
‘You’re insane,’ I said.
She stood up.
‘And you are a mass murderer.’
‘We’re restoring a balance of nature,’ she said, sitting down. ‘When one of us lands here, one of you must disappear. It’s not nice where we come from, but then again, that depends on your point of view. And we like it here. So we’re staying.
‘There’s so much culture on this planet. So much resentment and hate on a scale never dreamed of where we come from. Here you have wine and war, love, and hate, on a global scale. There’s so much… tension all the time. On this planet you can be a dictator and cause untold misery and get away with it. Or make millions for being a brainless idiot if you look good and smile a lot at a camera. Brilliant!’
‘We don’t have anything like it back home,’ the doctor said, lighting his pipe. ‘No no, it’s perfect utopia there. No disease. No dysfunction. Nothing to be put right. Never anything goes wrong. You will hate it there. If you don’t die of boredom first, you’ll cut your throat instead. That’s why we left, and why we’re sending you there.’
‘You should have destroyed the letter,’ Mrs. Andresen said. ‘If you had you wouldn’t be in the mess that you’re in now. Temptation is the first link in the chain. The letter was a vector. Burning it would have destroyed the monoclonal antibodies impregnated into the paper. Tiny signals bored through your skin every time you touched it. By keeping it, you let us know we were onto the right type. Easy to manipulate, weak and needy at the same time. You were perfect.
‘It was easy to track you after that. Of course, you were also being changed by it, slowly infected and transformed. But you had to keep touching it, didn’t you, Mr Carter? Like a drug.’
‘And all because of a photograph,’ the doctor said. ‘And by the way, it was fun seeing the look in your face every time those electric shocks went through your brain. I almost couldn’t stop myself from flicking the switch one time too many.’
I was loaded into the back of a van. Dumped on the metal floor so I could feel every bump on the way. It was hours before it stopped, and the doors flew open again.
It was night. The desert air was freezing. The starlight was clear, as were the shadows and silhouettes. An arm flew down at me with a fist on the end of it wrapped around a syringe, stabbing it into my thigh. The muscle was torn apart when the plunger hammered home.
They grabbed my legs and dragged, smashing my head on the ground.
I was hauled to my feet, and there, between these tiny little hills, was that bubble of light again. Only this time looked as if it was made from bottle green glass.
The craft tilted as he climbed down from it and stepped around the side.
Mrs. Andresen lit a cigarette and waved.
‘Oh, yoohoo, Orthon!’ she called out to him. ‘This is Sean. Sean, this is Orthon. Sean used to be a human.’
Orthon bowed to her and kissed her hand. He hadn’t aged in sixty plus years.
They tore my clothes off and stuffed me into a shiny one piece silver suit complete with ox blood coloured shoes, the likes of which you have never seen.
Orthon changed before my eyes as he lifted the camera and ordered me to smile.
‘A Box Brownie camera,’ he said. ‘Same as the original.’
He held up a picture.
‘This is one we took earlier,’ he said.
I stared at it. I looked twenty four, with a high forehead and an extended jawline. I wouldn’t have looked out of place walking down the street, on their planet anyway.
‘Interplanetary trafficking,’ Mrs. Andresen said. ‘Don’t you love it?’
I was about to be dragged toward the saucer when she called out. ‘Wait!’
She skipped over, cigarette in hand.
Opening her black patent purse, she took out a No Smoking decal. Peeling the paper off the back she stuck it on my shoulder. ‘Welcome to the no fun zone,’ she said, wrinkling up her nose in delight.
I was strapped down inside the craft.
‘There can be a bit of a jolt when it takes off,’ she called through the doorway as it slid closed.
And I couldn’t care less anyway seeing as I was so drugged up out of my eyeballs. I didn’t even realize where I was until I looked out one of the portholes and saw Mrs. Andresen waving farewell with Orthon by her side.
The funny thing is he looked like the guy in the picture in the forged passport I’d used.
Still, some people would pay a high price to experience this kind of thing.
Everything went dark outside. Then there was nothing but stars.
But what good is money when you’re stuck in utopia, and you can have anything you want without paying for it?
I wondered how long the boredom would take to set in. How long before I didn’t want to move, to walk. How long it would take before I was praying for war or a famine for excitement?
How long would it take to forget how good it was to be part of a species constantly pushing itself towards the edge of Armageddon?
How long before the seduction of perfect peace overwhelmed me, and I forgot that I used to be human?
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