This Rage of Echoes, Page 3

  My eyes were burning. ‘I’m sorry I ignored you for so long. Remember how I used to come down here and we’d sit on the stairs and talk every night?’

  He gazed at me with the closed eyes. His face was expressionless.

  ‘Why won’t you speak to me now?’ I asked, feeling as miserable as anyone could do. ‘I know you must be offended because I ignored you, but I need you to speak to me now.’

  He looked down at the Y-shaped wound in the flesh. He stared at it so intently I found my gaze drawn to it, too. A crimson Y that resembled a forking road on the skin. One road leads to the left, one to the right. In life and love, which road would you choose?

  Tyres drummed the road. Daylight spread across the surrounding fields. The truck had turned off the main highway on to a narrow lane. Not that I’d noticed. I’d been so wrapped up in the past. I found I was still looking down at the back of my right hand as I rested the palm on my knee. The Y scar was still there. As plain as if I’d used a blood-red pen to draw it there. Apart from that scar my hands were unmarked, not like the trucker’s with the dragons tattooed on the back of each one. I glanced across as he drove to the sounds of Elvis’s angelic voice singing, ‘glory, glory hallelujah’. I saw the dragons had vanished from the trucker’s hands. Instead, there was a red scar on the back of his right hand in the shape of a Y.

  chapter 4

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I told the trucker.

  ‘A slash?’

  I nodded.

  ‘The lane’s too narrow to stop right here.’ He applied more weight on the accelerator with his cowboy boot. The engine roared. Bushes at either side of the truck blurred green, low-hanging branches clumped against the roof. His hands shoved and tugged at the big wheel. Just half an hour ago there were tattooed dragons there, I swear it. Now they’d gone. On the back of his right hand that Y-shaped scar, and such a vivid, blazing red I couldn’t have missed it first time round.

  When I’d first climbed into the truck after hitching a ride, I put the guy’s age – this Elvis look-alike – at forty-five. Now in the light of day he struck me as being closer to thirty-five. Somehow the sideburns didn’t seem so noticeable now. The fifties’ bouffant had been replaced by a fringe that looked a lot like mine. His hair wasn’t dyed black after all; it was naturally dark. Like mine. Meanwhile, the trucker blinked as he drove as if he’d been dazzled. He rubbed his eyes then noticed the backs of his hands. He frowned as if trying to fish something from his head that he’d forgotten.

  ‘I really need to go,’ I told him.

  ‘There’s no stopping here.’ He pulled on the horn cord. The thing cried out like a monster in pain. ‘You’re going to have to wait.’

  ‘Don’t think I can.’ I grimaced. ‘I was drinking a lot last night. Brewer’s revenge.’ I tried to make light of it, but all I wanted at that moment was for him to stop so I could jump from the truck and run. Because I knew for sure the trucker was going Echo on me. He was starting to sound like I sound. I had the same mannerism of pushing the side of my mouth with my thumb when I get tense. He was doing it. I was doing it. That hand with the flaming red Y on the back of it: it was a stigmata on both our hands.

  ‘Like Elvis?’ I tried to be conversational.

  He shrugged. ‘He’s not terrible, I guess.’

  ‘I really need to go now.’

  ‘Can’t stop here. We’ll get rear-ended.’

  ‘You’ve got a lot of Elvis CDs?’

  ‘I just haven’t got round to changing them.’

  ‘It’s embarrassing,’ I smiled, trying to make light of it, ‘but if I don’t go in the next five seconds you’re going to have wet upholstery.’

  He flashed a grin at me. Didn’t he have blue eyes five minutes ago?

  Then we both said the same thing at once. ‘Brewer’s revenge.’ Our thumbs pushed at the side of our mouths despite the smiles.

  ‘Really,’ I said. ‘It’s hurting.’

  ‘God should’ve used more cloth when he cut our bladders,’ he said. That’s the kind of the thing I say after too much grog, I told myself. ‘What’s your favourite kind of grog then?’ he asked.

  Grog? Only I used the word ‘grog’ in those mental conversations with myself. Grog and ale.

  ‘People say German beer’s the best in the world, but I prefer—’

  ‘Belgian.’ He sounded the horn. ‘Me too. Belgian has flavour. German beer’s got the purity but doesn’t have the depth of taste.’

  The trucker had gone Echo on me, there’s no doubting that. Where did the name Echo come from? The gang back at the house always used it for those people who began to convert into copies of us spontaneously. At first I thought of them as Shampires. A variant of vampire of course. Shampire – the sham part meaning inferior copy; the pire bit suggesting that as vampires rob their unwilling victims of their blood so the Shampire stole our identity. The bottom line is: I am me. But at that moment the Elvis-ish trucker was becoming me also.

  Biological copies happen all the time in nature. After all, aren’t identical twins genetic copies of one another? OK, that happens in the womb. But if you didn’t know for a fact that identical twins exist (because you’ve seen them with your own eyes, haven’t you?) would you believe that such a thing was possible? And at that moment this stranger was becoming my twin. Only it wasn’t occurring in a womb but in this cab that smelt of spearmint with a leather-clad effigy of The King dancing to the rhythm of the speeding truck. And all the time tree branches hammered like the fists of crazy people trying to batter their way in.

  I need to urinate, I told myself. I really need to go. There’s that pain in the pit of my stomach. That insistent pain; the pent-up sensation of pressure that needs release. Urgent, annoying, intrusive: this is what it feels like when you’re bursting for a whiz. OK, I didn’t really want to go to the bathroom, but this guy beside me had turned into an Echoman – an echo of me. His hands were like mine (complete with scar); his hair resembled the hair I saw in the mirror every morning. Just like me he preferred Belgian beer to German (though if I’d discussed the merits of Germanic and Flemish brew last night he’d have stared at me blankly). He pushed the side of his mouth with his thumb when perplexed. So, sure as Elvis is the King, he must be feeling the same as me.

  Need to go … need to go … need to go … I pushed the words through my head with memories of being on a bus, or in a supermarket queue with that bursting need to reach a lavatory.

  ‘It’s getting to hurt now,’ I said. ‘Can you pull over?’

  ‘All this talking of “going” has made me need a piss, too,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘I’ll stop as soon as there’s a place.’ He chuckled. ‘Brewer’s revenge.’ Even though he laughed as he pushed the side of his mouth with his thumb, thoughts troubled him. Although he was clearly becoming an Echoman he hadn’t realized it yet. He grunted. ‘You know driving a truck beats driving a car? You’re so high above the road. It’s like looking out from the top of a house. It gives you a sense of security.’

  Echomen favour height. Often they launch their attacks from trees. I could see this one was for the first time marvelling at how high the truck driver is above other traffic. Truckers are the titans of the road. They look only their own kind in the eye. They gaze down on everyone else from their Olympian altitudes.

  I grimaced. ‘Please. You don’t know how bad this feels right now. It’ll only take a minute.’

  The man smiled. ‘Here’ll do fine.’

  Airbrakes hissed as he pulled over on to gravel beside the road.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ I told him, but I only had one thought. That was: run!

  After bringing the machine to a stop he turned to me with a knowing smile. ‘You know, I think we’ve got a lot in common, you and I.’

  I opened the door. ‘I’ll just be a minute.’

  ‘You’re not thinking of running away from me, are you?’

  ‘No. I really need this ride.’

  Before I had chance to climb
out he leaned sideways and cupped his hand behind the back of my neck.

  And did I tell you that Echomen don’t want those whom they duplicate to live? Before he could put both hands round my neck I yanked the plastic Elvis from the dashboard and slammed into his face. Its metal dance spring scratched his cheek. After letting fly with a blistering curse, he swung a blow at me. Instead of pulling away, which would have given him ample room to swing his right hook I lunged at him. With my heel pressed against the dashboard I could use the strength in my legs to keep pushing him hard against his door with my shoulder. The lock of the driver’s door popped and out he tumbled into the road. His head struck the blacktop first with his legs trailing behind out of the cab. The six-foot drop knocked the sense out of him for a few seconds. And somehow in the struggle the handbrake had been knocked out of the locked position. As he lay there in the road, his face twisted in pain, gasping for air, the truck slowly moved forward. I was above him, looking right down into his eyes as the huge tyres crunched road grit. The wheels kept on turning as those at the back of the tractor unit smoothly crept over his hips to crush the man beneath the waist. As he howled, his hands shot up to the underside of the three-ton vehicle. For entire moments he pushed upwards as if he truly believed he could lift the metal monster, and stop it squeezing the life out of him.

  I know nothing about trucks. Nevertheless, I managed to drag the handbrake back into the locked position to stop the wheels mashing his stomach and chest. That done, I leapt out of the cab. The lane here was quiet – apart from the man’s howls, that is. The trucker turned Echoman must have planned it like this. He intended to find a quiet place to stop, then kill me as the transformation took place – from HE to ME.

  The rest of my gang killed Echomen like you or I would use a piece of tissue to crush a bothersome fly against a window. I’d never killed one before. I hadn’t yet. This had been an accident. The guy had fallen under the wheels of his wagon. Besides he wasn’t dead yet. A lot of liquid, some of it scarlet in colour, ran out from between his legs where the five foot tyres had crunched his body to paste, but he was still noisily alive. And he was begging me to save him. His eyes locked on to mine; one of his arms reached out to me, as if he was a child who’d fallen into a hole and cried to his father to simply lift him out. The man had three tons resting on him. What could I do to save him? Then, why should I save him? He’d kill me the first chance he had.

  I glanced round. The sun was above the horizon. Flanking the lane were trees. Nobody would have seen the accident yet. There was a knife in my bag. The gang always cut away the Echoman’s face to see which one of us he resembled. This was hardly a tricky problem here. The same scar that adorned the back of my hand now blazed a brilliant red from the back of his. A short while ago he looked every day of his forty-five years. Now, even though he vented blood from his mouth he didn’t appear over thirty. He no longer resembled Elvis Presley. And although he wasn’t ME yet, he was on the road to ME, figuratively speaking. Literally speaking, he lay on the road and howled with a lusty strength, even though his hips and pelvis must now resemble cake crumbs. I reached into the cab to get my bag. This wouldn’t be easy – it would be bloody and messy, I’d have to cut his throat to shut him up – but I should maintain the practises observed by my gang. The man’s turned Echo so he must die. That’s rule number one. Two, we observe the results of the process and make a written record; therefore, when he stops squirming, I have to cut away the face to reveal the new features forming beneath the old skin.

  When I got close, he grabbed my ankle. I kicked his hand away. He lay flat on his back with the tyre depressing the pit of his belly and he screamed so loud my ears hurt. Quickly, I pulled out the knife then crouched down on the road just above his thrashing skull. At the second attempt I got my hand under his chin then pulled it back to force his throat to rise, a mound of speckled skin that revealed razor burn (just the same as mine) and forty-eight hours of stubble.

  ‘No … please. Don’t do this. Get help. For God’s sake, please get help.’ He spoke remarkably clearly for someone with three tons of steel riding his nuts.

  I leaned forward so I could rest the blade’s cutting edge just below his Adam’s apple. When you slice someone’s throat open, do you saw the blade like cutting bread for a sandwich? Or would it be better to exert a firm downward pressure as if halving a block of cheese? The man stopped screaming. With his bloodied teeth gritted together he stared at me with huge eyes that were full of pleading and sheer out and out terror.

  Then came one of those moments that people speak about, only you don’t really know what it’s like until it happens to you. A sense of someone staring at me made my skin itch all over. The road was still deserted. Apart from my own respiration, and that of the Echoman’s, all I could hear was the morning breeze stirring the leaves. There wasn’t even any birdsong. I checked out the trees behind me. And, don’t you just know it? There he was again. Natsaf-Ty, keeper of the sacred crocodiles, watching me from the forest. I was in sunlight, he in deep shadow, so it was difficult to make him out clearly. The shadows appeared to mutate there. Even so, I sensed him watching me through those closed eyelids. His head was slightly to one side as if somehow he listened to my thoughts. I let go of the guy’s head as I stood up; his skull clunked on the blacktop. Quickly I scooped up my bag from the road and slipped the knife inside. I couldn’t kill the man if Natsaf-Ty was watching. OK, even if the mummy is a product of my imagination it brought back all those memories of late night conversations on the stairs. Though the individual beneath the wheel was an Echoman, I couldn’t slit his throat in front of Natsaf-Ty. It would be like using the F-word in church.

  Instead, I ran across the road towards the shadow figure. Something was happening inside my own head if an Egyptian mummy kept popping up. If I asked Natsaf-Ty why he was there – regardless of whether he was extruded from my imagination or not – then maybe some deep-seated psychological conundrum would be answered and dried out old Natsaf-Ty would return to whatever knot of neurons inside my noodle from whence he came. The moment I entered the cluster of trees I saw he’d vanished again.

  Nevertheless, I tried. ‘Natsaf-Ty. I saw you. What do you want? Are you trying to tell me something? I know you saw what I was going to do to that man on the road. But we’re all in danger now. Only it’s a danger that nobody can understand, or believe is a real threat unless they experience it for themselves.’ A bird fluttered in the branches overhead. Leaves spiralled down. ‘I don’t want to kill, but for people like me we don’t have a choice. We’re trying to find a way to prove to the rest of the world that something bad is happening. Even we can’t explain it. It’s like an invasion, but we don’t think it’s coming from outside. It might have been inside of us all along. Listen. Won’t you come back so I can talk to you?’

  In the shadows were more shadows and gloomy tree trunks. It was like night-time in there. I took another dozen steps into the forest. Then I heard the sound of a vehicle braking hard on the road. Doors slammed. Running feet, shouting voices. So the trucker had been found. And Natsaf-Ty warned me just in time somebody was coming.

  Softly, I whispered into the shadows, ‘Thanks, for the heads-up, old buddy. If you hadn’t been here they’d have caught me red-handed.’

  The road wasn’t the place to be right now. Instead, I headed deeper into the forest, well away from the police when they arrived ten minutes later with the ambulance. And there’s something else about Echomen I haven’t explained. Sure they begin to resemble us, they adopt our mannerisms, they feel what we feel. That’s why I used the trick of remembering the discomfort of a full bladder to encourage the trucker to make that bathroom stop. But it’s a two-way street. Whatever magic or telepathy that drives it is a mystery to me, yet, as I weaved through those trees I felt what the truck driver felt. A dull pain roved through the pit of my stomach like a creature chewing on my bowel. If I closed my eyes for too long I saw what he saw; from his point of view as he lay on t
he road, looking up at the men and women from the emergency services who tried to help him. Snatches of conversation ghosted through my head.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ says a man in uniform, ‘we’ll soon have you out of there.’

  A woman smiles down in that caring way of a professional who has seen it all before. ‘What’s your name, sir? Can you tell me your name?’ Then another surge of pain that doubles me – the real me. ‘Quickly! We’re losing him!’ My/his eyes look down at his/my stomach as blood erupts from a torn artery.

  Then the phantom words, images and feelings stopped and I know he’s dead.

  chapter 5

  Question: Is an empty wallet heavier than a full one? Stupid question, right? The answer’s obvious: the wallet that is bereft of banknotes is the heaviest. At least it seems like that. You’re aware of the cash-less wallet riding for free in your pocket, doing no work, and enjoying a pointless existence.

  After leaving the dead Echoman to be shovelled from the pavement by the police, I walked through the forest until I saw a town in a valley. There, I found a railway station, bought a railway ticket, leaving just enough money for coffee and a donut for breakfast on the platform as I waited for the train home. I guess whoever made the donut knew he was going to be fired because he must have emptied a whole drum of cinnamon into the mix. The first bite of the donut set my mouth on fire. In a hurry to spit out the revolting mouthful I set the coffee down on a seat. The paper cup fell sideways. A moment later I was left with an inedible snack and my breakfast beverage forming a steaming pool on the concrete. Great. Just great.