Mad Gods & Englishmen
Shamus Maxwell
Eventually the train arrived at an open air station next to a skyscraper. There was nothing else in the vicinity but green grass on a level plain stretching to the horizon, which was closer than it should have been. I got down from the train and walked up to the skyscraper. I thought: “Yes.”
I went inside and walked directly up to the security guard and told him I was there to kill someone. He asked who and I said I didn’t know yet. He pursed his lips and sucked in air. I clarified, quickly, that although I didn’t know who it was I was there to kill, I would know them when I saw them. In other words, it wasn’t as if any old person would do. I was there to assassinate a particular individual whose identity hadn’t been revealed to me yet. He asked me if I had known and temporarily forgotten or if I’d never known in the first place. I said I thought it was the latter.
He thought about this for a while. I wasn’t worried about which way he would break. I had friendly feelings towards the security guard, and he had friendly feelings towards me. I felt that when this was all over, we might get a drink together, or perhaps wrap ourselves up into a little ball and roll around for a while.
“Okay,” he said finally, and gestured towards the elevators.
I didn’t know which button to press so I waited at ground level until someone else got on. Eventually a woman in a business suit arrived and pressed the button for floor 29. She saw me when she got in but it wasn’t until after we’d set off in the direction of the sky that she noticed I hadn’t pressed a button of my own. This made her understandably nervous. I considered telling her that she wasn’t the one I was here to kill (in that moment I knew it was a man, English, middle-aged, overweight, name of David Sutter), but as this wouldn’t have made her feel any better I remained silent. I followed her out of the elevator at floor 29, which she didn’t like, but there was nothing I could do about that.
There was a knife in my pocket. I dodged into the bathroom to my right so I could take a look at it. It was a fold-out, not a switchblade but the kind you have to pull out deliberately and set in position. I tested the edge and it was sharp. I would have preferred a gun with a silencer and couldn’t understand why I didn’t have one. I put away the knife and looked for a urinal. There weren’t any, which led me to the conclusion that I was in the ladies’ bathroom. I went into a stall and came out about a minute later, feeling somewhat better.
“Well,” I said to myself, “I guess this is it.”
I went out of the bathroom and headed left. To my right were glass-walled meeting rooms, one after another, all of them with wall-to-wall windows to the outside. Beyond those windows was nothing but blue sky and clouds. To my left was a wall peppered with doors to storage cupboards, bathrooms, plumbing cabinets, and that sort of thing. I reached the end of the corridor, which was the corner of the building, and turned left. The next meeting room along was small and had two people in it. One of them I recognised as the middle-aged, overweight, harmless-looking Englishman who was my target. The other was the woman with whom I had ridden the elevator.
There was no help for it but to go in and make my move. David Sutter looked up as I came in. He seemed to understand who I was, or rather why I was there. He got very frightened and started trying to bargain with me, asking me to wait and listen, listen, wait, he had something important to tell me. I said I was sorry, which I was, and pulled out my knife. It was no longer a knife, but a pistol with a silencer. It felt familiar in my hand.
“Wait!” said the man, “You don’t know what—”
I squeezed the trigger twice and both slugs went into David Sutter’s chest. He stumbled backwards against the table and wheezed. I shot him once more in the head. He collapsed onto the floor. I shot him in the back two more times.
I looked up. The woman was staring at me. She was afraid in a diffuse sort of way but did not appear to be surprised at what had just occurred. I wondered if I was supposed to plug her too. Her general attitude indicated that she was in on the job in some way, but that didn’t necessarily mean I wasn’t supposed to kill her.
I suddenly got a very strong feeling that someone was being double-crossed. The only question was, was it me, or her, or both of us? If I shot the woman, I might prevent the cross against me; or by doing so, I might be fulfilling the cross against her. On the other hand, shooting her might be part of the cross against me. It was difficult to know what to do, and things were made much worse by the fact that it was at that precise moment I realised I was no longer dreaming.
Of course: the tiny train, the lack of other buildings around the skyscraper, the weird conversation with the security guard, the sudden conversion of my knife into a gun with a silencer attached – none of those had been ‘real’. The events leading up to my killing David Sutter could not have happened precisely as I remembered them. But probably I had got some kind of train here. Probably this building did stand out from its surroundings, if only to me. And almost certainly I had spoken to the security guard, though not to tell him I was here to commit murder.
As for the knife, it had been a gun all along, but I hadn’t seen it that way.
“What are you waiting for?” hissed the woman. “Get out of here!”
I looked at her, trying to remember if I’d seen her before she got on the elevator; in a dark room with men in suits sitting around a conference table while I hovered in the air above a speakerphone surrounded by black candles, for instance.
“Come on,” I said, and motioned her towards the door.
She objected to what she called my change of plan. She said she was supposed to stay here and raise the alarm once I was out of sight. I told her the plan had changed. She didn’t agree. I gave her the choice of coming with me or dying on the spot. She chose the first option.
I kept the gun jammed in the small of her back, unprofessionally close to keep it hidden. If she had been a ninja she could have taken it away from me, but either she wasn’t or she was playing a very deep game.
The downstairs lobby was full of people now. I tried to spot the security guard, but there were too many bodies in the way. Despite my friendly feelings towards him and my sense that he felt the same way about me, I was obscurely relieved that he was not visible. I nudged the woman forward, decided that I did not, after all, want to see the security guard right now, or be seen by him. I nudged the woman into a small crowd that was heading for the exit.
She hissed at me that if I shot her now there would be multiple witnesses and I would never get away. If she had been sure of that, she would simply have made a break for it, but she wanted to give me a chance to make a counter argument. I explained that the more witnesses there were the less likely it was anyone would see or do anything. She must have latched onto the certainty in my voice, or maybe I just phrased it in a convincing manner. Anyway she didn’t speak again until we were outside, when she said: “What now?”
I was busy looking at my surroundings. We were in a city. There were tall buildings everywhere, although the skyscraper we had just exited was the tallest in the vicinity. I couldn’t see a train station anywhere.
“Now we go to the safe house,” I said.
“Where’s that?”
“You tell me.”
“But I don’t know.”
“In that case I don’t need you,” I replied, speaking as if to myself. The implication was clear. The woman began to panic. I was afraid she would start squawking for help.
“Listen,” I said. I looked into her eyes. “I was told to bump you off in the conference room. But I got a feeling I was next, so I held off. I was hoping maybe we could help each other.”
“Wait… how do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“I haven’t got time for this,” I said. “I need a cab. I need a safe house.”
“Well, we could… hang on.”
She hailed a cab. We got in and she gave an address that sounded suburban. We didn’t talk during the journey. I was afraid this would make things awkward when the cabbie struck up a conversation, but it didn’t. I learned a lot about his three kids and their mother, most of it heartwarming. Traffic was light and we were in the suburbs in half an hour, and pulling up outside a detached modernist house ten minutes later. Some of the walls were glass from floor to ceiling, and the others had big windows. As you probably know, from the point of view of someone who is worried about getting shot, glass has the disadvantage of being see-through. Nevertheless, the house seemed a stupid place for an ambush. It wasn’t just me who would be visible inside, but anything that was done to me, and whoever was doing it.
The woman unlocked the door and led me into the front hall. We stood around for a while. She seemed to be expecting me to plug her. I put the gun away and said:
“You need to ask me some questions.”
She either misheard or misunderstood me and began telling me about her end of the deal, how Black-Magic Martin had wanted Sutter out of the way, how she had felt she had no choice but to go along with it. She said she had always liked David and had wanted to warn him but had been too scared. Black-Magic Martin, as his moniker suggested, was not an ordinary man. He gave her the creeps. Like Sutter, he was English, but whereas Sutter had been nice and gentlemanly in an old-fashioned sort of way, Martin was the evil kind of English: cold, imperious, inhuman. He had ways of doing things, or of getting things done, that nobody understood, and sometimes things happened that suited his agenda even when he had had no way of bringing them about.
I took all this in. While her chatter did not seem irrelevant to our situation, it wasn’t what I needed. Finally she did ask me a question, though it wasn’t a particularly good one.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’d like to drink some water,” I replied.
She eagerly led me to the kitchen and poured me a glass from the faucet. I drained it in one long pull. I sat down on a stool at the breakfast bar. It wasn’t comfortable, but now I’d sat on it I didn’t want to make myself look silly by getting up again. I wished the woman would take off her coat. I took off mine. She watched me like I was making semaphore signals for which she hadn’t received appropriate training.
We remained silent for a little while, then she said: “What do you think we should do?”
Apparently we were a team now. I told her to ask me who I was. She did. I couldn’t think of an answer. I was less upset than I had expected. The lack of response made me realise I needed to take a more gradual approach to the problem.
“You probably would have been safe if you’d stayed in the meeting room like you were told,” I said. “Now you’ve gone off piste they won’t trust you. They might have you killed. It depends on how good you are at talking your way out of things. Seems to me you’re not very practised at it.”
“Wait, do you mean… this is your fault?”
“I’m not sure. I had a feeling I was meant to plug you after I took out Mr Sutter, but I wasn’t sure. I also had the idea that you’d been told to raise the alarm before I got to the lobby so I could be intercepted and killed.” The look on her face when I said this might have been confirmation of my theory, or merely surprise.
“But, don’t you know? I mean, how can you not know if they told you to kill me or not?”
Of course, she wasn’t thinking about me, but only herself.
I explained to her how it was that I didn’t know. I told her about the tiny train, the isolated skyscraper in a grassy plain, the conversation with the security guard, and the knife that became a familiar gun just when I needed it. I explained that I hadn’t properly woken up until Sutter was dead. She took all this in and finally sat down, pulling out a chair from the kitchen table. It looked a lot more comfortable than my stool.
“You must have been drugged,” she said. I shook my head. “But then, what happened?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping that if you asked me questions, I might answer them and find out things.”
“How can you answer if you don’t know?”
“It was just an idea. I don’t feel drugged. I haven’t got medical amnesia. I thought maybe the part of me that knows would answer and I would hear it.”
“Oh, oh, I see!” declared the woman. “Let’s try again. Who are you?”
I shook my head.
“Okay, where did you come from this morning?”
I shook my head again, but more slowly this time.
“Who hired you?”
I came up blank, except for a strong feeling that the word “hired” was completely inappropriate. I sighed.
“What were you supposed to do after the job?”
Again, nothing. I got up and started pacing around the kitchen.
“Maybe they did something to your brain,” said the woman. “Something physical, I mean. Like cutting parts of it off from other parts.”
That sounded like something to me, but it still wasn’t right.
“Why is he called Black-Magic Martin?” I asked. For now, I had given up on the idea of the woman asking me the questions.
“Because of what I told you before,” she replied. “Things always fall his way and nobody can understand how he makes it happen.”
“But do you think he practises black magic?”
“Oh… I don’t think so. I mean, I’ve never seen him cast a spell.”
“Maybe you have,” I replied. “Maybe the last spell you saw him cast was a memory spell that caused you to forget.”
The woman looked helpless.
“I suppose… it’s possible,” she said. “I mean, he’s certainly an odd fish. And he is English.”
“So what?”
“So, I don’t know. It’s an old country.”
I laughed. It sounded like a dog barking.
“To you Americans, England is a misty land of fairies, knights and wizards,” I told her.
She frowned. “But you’re American, aren’t you?” she said. It was my turn to frown.
“No,” I replied after a brief pause.
“Well then, where are you from?”
I stopped my pacing, arrested by a sudden feeling of vertigo. I was rocking back and forth. I could hear myself laughing. I caught a glimpse of the woman’s face. She was terrified. My laughter redoubled. I found myself on the floor, the woman bending down over me. I checked my pocket. Either I hadn’t been out long enough for her to try anything, or it simply hadn’t occurred to her to take my gun. I made a mental note that no matter what, I would not kill her.
“Are you okay?” she asked. I nodded, hitting the back of my head on the floor on the backswing. I got up and joined her at the kitchen table. She asked: “What happened?”
“You tell me,” I replied.
“You went crazy. Your face was all twisted and rigid.”
“Was I laughing?”
“You were sort of screaming. It didn’t sound like laughter to me. Do you remember what you were thinking?”
I closed my eyes. “I felt… that you were like a child to me… No, like an insect. Something very small and brief and vulnerable. And I saw something.”
“What?”
“I can’t describe it. It’s literally indescribable. I can’t even remember it. I know what it was, but there’s no way to wrap my mind around it. It’s just not possible.”
“If you had to describe it, what words would you use?”
My lips opened and shut a few times without making any sound, then finally a word came out: “Void.”
“You mean like empty space?”
“Space. Void… distance. Angles. No, not angles… twisted… twisting back on itself, like… I’m sorry, but I don’t want to think about it anymore.”
“Is it very terrible?”
“Yes. No… It hurt.”
“The void hurt you?”
“Not the void. It was… here. Being here, instead of… bigger. I’m too small. It’s not about size though, but maybe density, or… oh, my head! Do you have aspirin?”
After taking some painkillers I lay down on the woman’s bed and handed her the gun. She took it wrong, holding it like it was a misshapen flower-pot.
“Why are you giving me this? What’s going on?”
I shook my head. It hurt.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” I replied. “All I know is, Black-Magic Martin will more than likely send men to take us out before we can cause any more trouble. If they come while I’m asleep, use the gun to defend yourself.”
“How can you sleep at a time like this? I can’t use a gun!”
“I’ve got to sleep,” I explained. “It’s going to happen anyway, so I should get started as soon as possible. As for the gun, you’re right: it won’t give you much of a chance. But it’s better than nothing. There are twelve bullets left. You can fire off a couple of practice shots in the garden if it makes you feel better.” I was arrested by a sudden, very urgent thought. It hurt my brain, overloading the meat, but I had to express it before I fell asleep. “If… there’s one… who looks like me… shoot him first! Shoot him until… Don’t worry about the others, until…”
“Do you think they’ll come soon?”
“Yes. But must sleep.”
“I’m afraid!”
“Sooner to sleep… sooner to… awaken.”
I stared out of the window. We were travelling through postcard-friendly countryside. The sun was shining on the hills in the distance. I strained my vision. Every now and then, I thought maybe I had caught a glimpse of the sea. Whenever that happened I felt a terrible pang in my heart.
The train began to slow down. I could see a house, all glass and modernist angles. There were men getting out of two cars out front. They fanned out to surround the building. There was nothing else in sight, just green fields stretching into the distant haze. The train went into the house and stopped in the bedroom where a frightened woman was crumpled on the floor. My carriage came to rest in the middle of the bed. I got out and stood beside the woman. She looked up at me with relief blazing in her eyes. She leapt to her feet and hugged me. She shoved a knife into my hand. I looked through the walls and saw someone get off the rearmost carriage of the train outside. He was a little unsteady on his feet, like maybe his shoes didn’t fit properly. He was dressed as the security guard from the skyscraper. Maybe he was the security guard from the skyscraper. But that tiny fragment of the past no longer mattered.
I looked down at the woman and said: “They’re here.”
“What do they want?”
“To kill you and put me back on the train.”
The woman blinked and decided to ignore the things she didn’t understand.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
“Here,” I said, shoving the knife back into her hands. “I don’t need it. Call the police and tell them your house is under attack then go to the window and start shooting at the others.”
She didn’t understand, but she nodded anyway. I kissed her on the forehead to stimulate her neurons then ran through the house and out the front door.
The men who weren’t like me fired their guns in my direction. I wasn’t concerned about them. I only had eyes for the security guard. He frowned, as if he half recognised me. I went at him like a bullet. He pulled a knife out of his pocket and lowered his centre of gravity. The concept of gravity made me laugh. My mouth opened and showed him some of what was inside me, enough to make him hesitate. I used the extra time to close in and pin his arms to his sides. The knife blade grazed my thigh and opened another hole in me, a real one. It was only a tiny rent, but it was enough to get the process started. We struggled against each other. Because I was determined, because I knew what I wanted, and because I had gained some unexpected flexibility through the process of deflation, I managed to turn the knife blade into my opponent’s flesh. It was a quick, clean stab. He popped like a balloon.
Deflating slowly, I turned my wrath on the woman’s enemies. The knife was a gun in my hand. I made holes in them and blood leaked out, more from some than others, but in all cases enough to quiet them down. I was more than half gone by then. I began to walk unsteadily back towards the house. The woman screamed when she saw me coming. I stopped where I was and used the last of my rapidly diminishing lung capacity to thank her.
Child, insect, bacterium: without you, we would still be on that tiny train. Let none say the gods cannot feel gratitude, though it may be fleeting. Worry not, for we shall pay Black-Magic Martin a visit before we return to the void, and he will not be glad to see us.
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