Dark Matter (26 page)

Rasputin turned to look again at the
stricken man in the bed. How long had he been here, like this? Walsham’s
provided some kind of palliative care, that much he had decided. The kind that
cost a lot but delivered privacy and a kind of dignity.

He scanned the photos again, examining Mrs.
Thorpe. She had an easy elegance about her. No doubt the family tree had deep
roots in money that went beyond any need of Alexander’s professional wealth.
Did she put her son here?

He thought back to when the woman in the
foyer had searched her computer for a record of his name. The log of visits
appeared, clear as day, intact in his mind’s eye. In it, the name that figured
most was a
F. Worthington
. It recurred in great slates of Worthingtons,
pockmarked by names he didn’t recognise, and one that he did: A. Thorpe.

But F. Worthington intrigued him more. He
scrolled to the record of the last visit under that name, and took a moment to
realise it had been that very morning. Perhaps F. Worthington smoked, and it
was he or she who had left ash in the tray and the ghost of smoke in the air.
He was struck by the intuition that F. Worthington was the woman smiling out of
so many of the photos. Perhaps she was divorced and remarried, or widowed and
had reverted to her maiden name—no, the first, he decided; this woman would not
orphan her sons, at least, not this one. Yes, she came, daily he realised. He
imagined her lighting up and reading from a book to her bedridden son. A
faithful mother.

He turned his concentration to the other
name. What did Alexander think of his brother? He visited him. But why? To
grieve? To gloat?

Rasputin looked at the mask strapped like a
muzzle over the prone man. He could see the shadow of condensation through the
translucent, ribbed plastic of the tube, a lifeline to the atmosphere and its
billions of tons of oxygen—oxygen as useless to this man as to a stranded fish
but for the pump forcing it into his lungs.

At that thought another association struck
him: the mask reminded him of a scuba diver. The modern equivalent of a
Diving
Bell
...

And then two things happened
simultaneously. Rasputin realised that, according to the visit log, the last
three by Alexander occurred straight after he had met with Rasputin. And
Joachim opened his eyes.

Rasputin caught the faint movement in his
peripheral vision, just beyond his tight circle of focus on the mask. He
started backwards with intaken breath, startled as if a tarantula had crept
from the man’s ear. He would have caught himself before falling in a previous
life, but hampered by the sluggish response of his leg, he fell, splayed over
the chair, which collapsed onto its back. The carpet mercifully deadened the
sound of its fall.

The eyes—brilliant blue, not grey like his
brother’s—trained on Rasputin. But Joachim made no other move or sound.

The last piece of the puzzle slotted home,
and Rasputin cursed himself for an idiot. Joachim was buried alive in his own
skin.
Maladie de l’emmure vivant. Eingeschlossensein.
Perhaps Alexander
had seen a patient named Reginald Palmer, but he
certainly
had a patient
now suffering from the very disease he feared for Rasputin: his own brother.

And still the eyes stared. A blink, then
another. Two blue jewels, spheres of complexity having the appearance of
simplicity, alike shipwrecked, stranded in the ruin of the vessel that had once
carried them in a world that was a never-ending visual banquet.

Emotions clashed in Rasputin. He was
engulfed by fear and pity. The being before him was a monster; he was a child;
he was neither. Rasputin lacked categories for the thing in the bed.

Then Joachim began to glow, and Rasputin’s
thoughts clutched again at
monster
. Joachim’s face effused a red aura
that spread slowly, enveloping his whole body. His trunk and legs shone through
the sheet as though X-rayed. Light gathered at his extremities. A feeler of
solid red light began coiling off the tip of his nose, as though it were a
smouldering wick. Soon a forest of ribbons of light were twisting up from his
body, and meeting with the roof were baffled and began to writhe and clot
together into clouds like storm heads at sunset.

He sat frozen, straddling the fallen chair.
Joachim seemed unaware of his own transformation. The blue eyes simply gazed at
him, while they let loose geysers of blue, which turned to mauve as they wound
up into the red haze.

Other colours began to mingle with the red,
and Rasputin realised that it wasn’t only Joachim bleeding his aura into the
room. Everything was. Every object, living or not, was giving up its colour
into the mix. The room was a watercolour sinking beneath a wave, each colour
relinquishing its fixity in one object, sharing it with all others. The room
was becoming an impressionist image of itself.

Then an odour assaulted him: ozone from a
lightning-rent sky. Then another, liquorice so strong a smell it was a taste.
Smells strobed him like lights, tugged at him like a fitful breeze.

Pain finally pried him from the floor. It
stabbed him somewhere in his brain, made him gasp and stagger to his feet. It
struck again and again, each time in a new place, a percussionist with roving
hand. It struck in the corner of his right eye, where the upper and lower lid
met, drew to a point and pressed inwards—his tear duct felt punctured by heavy
gauge fence wire. It slid through his ocular cavity like a skewer through fat
as it was fed in, and punctured his cortex, before curling down in an arc. He
could feel the full length of it, a heavy, cold line of fire carving a channel
in his grey matter.

He wanted to say, “I’m having a seizure,”
but his lower jaw was locked onto the upper as though there had never been an
opening there.

He lunged off the floor, cramps pulsing
through his muscles from head to foot, and landed a glancing blow on the wall
above Joachim’s head. The emergency button clacked against the wall with the
impact, and Rasputin passed out.

...his eyelids opened a crack. Light burned
in darkness, stark white on black, sunrise on a planet without atmosphere. He
felt his mind gather up the sense of his body, gather nerves as a loom gathers
skeins of wool. He listened in on those nerve pathways for word from the field,
blinded by the fog of war, anxious. He heard a sound like an approaching rain
front on tin rooves and the nerve endings writhed in his grasp. He was aware
enough to sense another seizure coming. Before it struck, he let go the frail
grasp on his body, nerve-endings snaking from his hand lest they whip him, and
fell back into blackness.

Radio Rasputin came back on the air. Hidden
in the dark beneath his eyelids, he heard Dee speaking.

“—so why isn’t someone doing something?”

Voice of an
unfamiliar woman: “Please try to calm down. We’re—”

Break in transmission.

“—need to kill these rolling blackouts. He’s
not California. He’s not even in the First World.” Thorpe.

“But he only just presented. You want to—”
Another woman.

“I don’t
want
to. I need to. His
brain will pull itself apart if I don’t operate.”

The word
operate
was neural
adrenaline. At the cost of sudden intimacy with every one of his aching
muscles, he gained control. He forced his eyes open. Shock registered on the
face of the nurse with whom Thorpe was arguing. Thorpe saw it and turned to
Rasputin.

“Quickly now. Do you remember our
discussion?”

Speech was impossible. He grunted just to
connect with the man.

“You are being hit by waves of
self-reinforcing seizures. I must operate to provide a cut-out, break the
circuit.” He glanced at the nurse. “Do I have permission—”

Rasputin found voice, cut over him. “I see
now. You and me. Not so different.” Thorpe, anxious as he was for Rasputin’s
answer, bent nearer, confusion on his features. “Your brother. My sister. We
just want an answer.” Rasputin’s hand stumbled across his sheet like a deranged
spider, seeking Thorpe’s, which rested, fingers splayed on the edge of the bed.
“It hurts, doesn’t it.”

But then he was gone again as all
frequencies were hit by a blanket jam, and
Rasputin
became a synonym for
pain.

He rode a bubble, heading for the surface.
Its payload: his consciousness and just one word, a simple word.

It hit the surface and popped. His eyes
opened and it was as though someone had thrown the light switch.

Jordy, Dee and Thorpe looked at him as one.
They spoke over each other.

“Monk, what—”

“Please, just keep your eyes—”

“Focus, Rasputin.” Thorpe won out. “Give me
permission to insert the probe.”

Rasputin hunted through a fog for Thorpe,
shrieked—and miraculously delivered the precious payload: “Yes.”

Then he was falling again, having let go of
the air that buoyed him. He sank, a dead weight.

But not into oblivion. He fell into the eye—but
the eye as he had never seen it. Ripples roamed its surface, and where they
passed it fluxed and erupted into liquescent vortexes, which grew and shrank
and were absorbed again only to burst forth in another place. All over its sky
was wracked by a storm of lightning. Great many-fingered slivers of light burst
forth and travelled its breadth in a blink.

He cowered at its centre. The transparent
sphere encasing him was a lens not a shield. He was a bug, and a million
far-flung suns vied to burn him beneath the ray of their gaze.

With effort he raised his head. The
memories nearest, half-seen in the chaos, were blurred, and to look at them
turned his stomach. They quivered in the midst of the storm. He clasped his
head with his hands, wishing they were big enough to encase his whole skull. He
bent his knees to sink farther, willing an implosion. But something frustrated
it, tugged at his attention, wouldn’t let him fold.

One memory, a brilliant red dwarf in a mad
sky, burned with singular clarity. It was as though the eye had given up all
attempt to render any other memory clear for the sake of that one.

Rasputin pulled at it with what shreds of
will lay in his power. He drew it on a cord that felt too thin to hold—it was a
shark on light gauge line, and he feared any moment the line would snap and the
shark turn on him.

The blazing anomaly drew near, filling his
vision, and blossomed. He saw Thorpe’s office. But something was off. There had
to be a spanner in the machine, because there was not one Thorpe sitting across
the desk from him but two. Two Thorpe’s moved and talked in almost the same
space, almost. But each vied for corporeality in turn, becoming a ghost of the
other, like moving images of doubly-exposed film.

He realised the eye had taken two distinct
memories—his first visit to Thorpe’s office, and his last—and smashed them
together. Each memory was eater and eaten. It was stellar warfare. No wonder
they burned red.

As each replica of Thorpe became opaque,
his voice strengthened as though carried on a wind. The fading Thorpe likewise
quietened before rising again as the wind swung to his quarter.

It took Rasputin’s overwrought senses a
moment to realise the scenes playing out were looping. As one worked forward,
the other was reversed, returned to its beginning. He strained to understand
what the Thorpes were saying before complete unconsciousness took him.

And then he heard.

One Thorpe, at the peak of clarity, and
with hungry eyes, saying, “...be sure to avoid the fate of Mr. Palmer.”

Then, as that Thorpe was wound back, the
other swelled. His back to Rasputin, he poured a drink, turned, and said: “Top
shelf, or so I’m told.”

They wove again, now swelling, now
diminishing, in counterpoint:

“...be sure to avoid the fate of Mr.
Palmer.”

“Top shelf, or so I’m told.”

...be sure to avoid the fate of Mr.
Palmer.

Top shelf, or so I’m told.

...avoid the fate of Mr. Palmer.

Top shelf...

Rasputin’s attention lanced behind the twin
apparitions, no longer listening. He looked, and saw, behind a perpetual motion
machine whose ball-bearings beat spastically in the wrinkled, spiralling fabric
of time-space, the sidebar from which Thorpe had served the drink. Rasputin
waited for that Thorpe to rewind, to return the drink to the bottle. He passed,
causing the hair on Rasputin’s neck to stand. He gripped the bottle, let it
suck the glass dry, and replaced it.

The bottle containing the amber liquid
Thorpe had decanted stood like a glass skyscraper in a miniature glass city.
Something glimmered in it, like a naked flame seen through a far-off window,
two-thirds up its side, where the liquid’s level rested. Rasputin strained
forward to see it. The quavering light was coming from where the liquid’s
meniscus curved up to cling to the glass. It clung in two places, quivering
between them. Now one, now another. And its motion caused the incident light to
shift and sparkle. It had clung at one height at Rasputin’s first visit, and
another for his second. But the difference was not enough to account for even a
sip of drink. Something had been added to the liquid. Something small.
Something from another kind of shelf entirely.