This Rage of Echoes Read online

  ‘My God,’ Eve breathed. ‘I wondered why they were so evenly spaced across the classroom; they’ve been nailed down.’

  In that rancid light I saw the figures; they either lay on the timber floor or they squatted there. If they lay, they cushioned a head with an arm. If they sat, they raised their knees so they could prop elbows there then cradle their heads in their palms. I didn’t see any faces. It was as if the weight of those faces exerted such a pull they couldn’t lift them from the floor or from their palms. What physically held the figures there were nails, big, grey six-inch nails as far as I could tell. To keep them positioned tidily in the room they’d been put in two rows of six. Then the Echomen had nailed them to the wooden floor, either through a foot or a hand or both. Nail heads protruded from the tops of feet and backs of hands like metallic tumours. Apart from flies buzzing round to grow fat on the dead specimens there was barely a sound. From somewhere I heard dripping – big, fat drops splashing on to a hard surface. I didn’t investigate further.

  ‘So these are copies of people?’ Eve’s eyes were large in the gloom.

  ‘They are,’ I agreed. ‘But don’t ask me where the original is. They might be dead.’

  The spectacle of the nailed men and women that remained frozen in the same position hypnotized Eve.

  ‘Hey.’ I spoke gently. ‘Eve. We’ve got all the evidence we need. It’s time to go to the police.’

  She swallowed. ‘But that means leaving them here. Look at that woman. They’ve nailed her to the floor by her face.’

  The metal spike had passed through her right cheek, exited the left, to be embedded in the floor timber. It looked as if she rested on her knees with the side of her head to the wood as if eavesdropping on the floor below – but down there the shrink-wrapped dead were silent as the grave (apart from the odd post-mortem gurgle of course). Shadow hid the creature’s face; dead or alive? You just couldn’t tell.

  ‘Mason’s right,’ Madeline said. ‘It’s time we got away from here.’

  As I put my arm around Eve to coax her in the direction of the nearest staircase I glanced along the hallway. Natsaf-Ty stood there. The motionless Egyptian mummy had that watchful appearance, even though his eyes were closed. The tip of the tongue protruded between the lips.

  What a time for it to happen. What a bloody, unbelievably awkward time. The head tilted slightly to one side. He’s studying me, I thought. He’s judging me. That’s when I began to understand the purpose of Natsaf-Ty’s visits. There was more to this old keeper of the sacred crocodiles than I thought. If repressed aspects of yourself – your inner-self, you understand – can manifest themselves in your doodles on newspapers, or in your choice of car, or clothes, or love partner, then that was the bloody awkward, yes, inconvenient moment that Natsaf-Ty’s relevance in my life became clear. The old mummy – bandaged loins, withered arms and all – had seemed like an imaginary companion from childhood. Yet he was more than that. My dusty friend was a projection of those parts of me that I repressed. I’d lived with my grandparents until my mother took me away from them, never to see them again. I, as a child didn’t think ‘Oh, that hurts. I don’t like what’s happening to me.’ Back then, I couldn’t understand this alien emotion. Like you flush something unpleasant in the toilet bowl, so I flushed this unpleasant reaction into the hidden sewer of my mind. Presto! Hey! That mixed around feeling flushed the pain I felt for myself; it flushed my empathy for others feeling pain. The shock of losing most of my family – a family I loved – trashed the ability to understand why I grieved, too. Natsaf-Ty is here to guide me through the obstacles of figuring out the way I feel, and to encourage me to say to myself ‘Yes, I was hurt and unhappy when we left my grandparents. I loved them. They did nothing wrong to us. So why did we cut them out of our lives?’ People like Freud have elegant academic modes for expressing the projection of repressed emotion. What did an eight year old know about that? So when I saw the mummy Natsaf-Ty, keeper of the sacred crocs, in his museum case, a little corner of my brain that kept itself busy trying to repair the emotional damage very wisely conjured Natsaf-Ty to me. A mummy who was, in fact, a father figure. He’d sit on his third step from the bottom, I at the top, and we’d talk in those post-midnight hours. His wisdom guided me. His loyalty sustained me. His gentle humour cracked me up – in a lovely way. Say what you like about that grey lump between your ears: it works the best miracles you’ve ever seen.

  All that passed through my mind – housed by that self-same grey lump – as I encouraged Eve to walk with me to the stairs.

  ‘We’ve done it,’ I told her. ‘Once the police come here we don’t even have to explain what’s happening; they can see for themselves.’

  ‘All this will be over and we’ll be safe.’ Madeline smiled.

  In the classroom a male figure stirred himself. A bottle of water stood against the wall beneath a poster of a temple ruin. His suffering had robbed him of his strength. The struggle to reach the bottle weakened him so much his chin dropped until his face hung downward. The image of broken humanity near to death, he could only manage to reach out that long arm toward the water bottle. Yet he could not close his fingers around it.

  I glanced along the hallway. Natsaf-Ty stood there. An immobile red statue clothed in the mysteries of the eternal. Imaginary friend, you reminded me of the pain I felt. Now I know that pain, I can understand the pain of that man dying of thirst in the classroom. That bottle of water – a liquid that could quench the fires in the man’s throat – I imagined its cooling wash of sweetness as if I drank deeply of it myself.

  ‘Just a second,’ I told Eve. Then I opened the door to the classroom. It wouldn’t delay us much if I handed the dying man some water.

  The instant I stepped into the room all those moribund figures appeared to come alive at once. Although they were nailed to the floor they moved in a single muscular jerk. Those who could turned their faces to me. They should have been strangers. What I saw were half-destroyed copies of my face. Not only that, I saw copies of Eve and my mother, too.

  I’d expected to see pathetic expressions and eyes that could barely open. When their eyelids snapped back they revealed a fiery glare. These creatures were angry. What’s more they were angry at me. The woman whose face had been nailed to the floor was nearest. Her hand flew out to grab me by the ankle.

  Madeline dragged me out through the door. ‘Come on, they’re waking up!’

  We raced for the nearest staircase. This wasn’t the one we’d used to ascend to the top floor. But it would be the quickest to the exit. As I ran I looked through the windows. Duplicates of Eve and I – tortured, broken, maimed duplicates moved as if a violent life-force had entered them. One by one they heaved at the nails that fixed their limbs to the floor.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Eve shouted, ‘they’re nailed down. They can’t get us.’

  ‘Don’t bank on it.’ Madeline jerked her head toward the doorway. ‘Look!’

  You’ve seen someone draw a thorn from a finger. Once it comes out it slips smoothly, yet with the relief comes the pain of the spike exiting the flesh. This had something of that resonance. The Echomen who were still alive had begun to exert their strength against the nails holding them down. They had this righteous anger on their faces as if Eve, Madeline and I had committed a cruel act upon them. They glared at us as we ran for the stairwell. At the same time they slowly, yet surely, pulled the nails from the floor timbers – even though the nails were still punched through their own hands or feet.

  We reached the stairs and had clattered down at least eight before we saw that more of their shrink-wrapped dead had been piled across the turn in the stairwell – whether it was intended as a barrier or simply a place to store them I don’t know. With the stairwell blocked, however, we had to go back.

  ‘Use the other stairs!’ I shouted; not that I needed to state the obvious: Eve and Madeline had already retraced their steps.

  But as we ran back along the hallway, bloody figures s
taggered from the classrooms.

  ‘Don’t stop!’ I yelled. ‘Don’t stop for anything!’

  chapter 24

  In this gloom, figures were a riot of grey faces, shadowy limbs, grasping hands. As the three of us surged along the hallway to the other staircase they shouted at us. In their angry, hurt voices they called, ‘Eve … Mason … Mason …’ Those voices came out of faces that were duplicates of our own – albeit ruined versions. A chaotic whirl of lips that were smeared with blood, bruised cheeks, ripped eyelids. When they raised their hands to grab us, some were still skewered by the six-inch nails that had tethered them to the classroom floor. A face slammed toward me. Even though I tried not to recognize whether it was a copy of me I saw the blaze of rage in its eye.

  ‘Mason—’ the Echoman hissed.

  I punched out hard, knocking it down. Madeline fought her way through. Eve used the knife; my God, was she good with it. The sharp edge slit open more than one face, I can tell you. When a mass of hands erupted from the shadows to catch hold of Eve I ripped them from her, breaking the monsters’ fingers in the process (and noticing the Y-shaped scar – that old wound I wore as trademark on my own hand). We pushed on by those classrooms that were filled not only with the stench of captive versions of us but that sick yellow glow that had been as feeble as these creatures until our presence roused them into this frenzy of anger.

  ‘Mason!’

  ‘Eve!’

  The insistent calling grew louder. Were they trying to kill us? Were they trying to make us stay? Was this an alien expression of affection? For the life of me I didn’t know. All I craved was: OUT. To get away from these classrooms that had turned into hell on earth. Images of fresh air, open spaces, blue skies nearly drove me crazy. I yelled at these smashed clones with nailed limbs and tortured bodies to get the fuck away from us. If they blocked our escape route I smashed a way through with my fists. I punched heads, I stomped over bodies that were too broken to walk. Eve and Madeline followed. When Echomen held them back I grabbed my sister or Madeline then bodily dragged them along with me (after grabbing an Echoboy or an Echogirl by the hair then smashing their face against a wall that might carry a poster of Stalin or Castro).

  ‘Out of our way!’ I ploughed through them. A geriatric version of me with yellow eyes, white hair and no teeth lunged forward, his Y-shaped scar visible on his hand as he tried to gouge my face. I shoved him so hard he collapsed under more Echomen streaming out of a classroom.

  Eve slipped on to the floor.

  ‘I’ve got you.’ I lifted her to her feet. Eve’s face looked into mine; hers possessed a frame of ratty hair with a rash of oozing zits that turned her right eyelid into a mash of strawberry reds. She was smiling. My fist exploded her face.

  ‘Mason, get down the stairs,’ the real Eve shouted, as she pushed by the replica of herself that I’d just punched.

  Madeline, finding her way blocked by the bloody copy that still smiled as she swayed there, gripped hold of the creature’s hair then dragged her forward so she toppled over the steel banister. The thing that resembled a ruined version of Eve tumbled through the air to strike the concrete steps twenty feet below with the sound of raw steak being slapped on to a plate.

  Even in the heat of that classroom war zone Eve’s glance at Madeline was a telling one. You wish that had been the real me, don’t you? You bitch….

  The blue sky glowed every bit as beautifully as I expected. The air fresher. The grass greener. We gasped with relief as we stood in the lush field and sucked sweet air into our lungs. Inside the classroom block it had been a nightmare of stink, chaotic motion, a kind of inferno of anger and violence. Outside the classroom was peace.

  I shoved the screen shut to stop the Echomen climbing out after us. Madeline snapped a sturdy branch from a tree, then, together, we rammed it beneath a firmly fixed section of security mesh in such a way it held shut its loose neighbour.

  ‘It won’t hold them for long,’ Madeline panted.

  ‘It’ll be enough.’ I pulled Eve by the hand. ‘C’mon! Back to the car.’

  We raced through the long grass. All around us were more shuttered classroom blocks. What atrocities did those walls conceal? Skulls peeled of skin, nailed genitals, faces dipped in molten metal – imagination fed images into my brain that I didn’t want to see. After the gloom of being indoors we shielded our eyes against the dazzling sun as we ran back to where we’d left the car by the main school building.

  ‘Anyone hurt?’ I asked, as we sped through the deserted complex.

  Madeline shook her head.

  Too busy making plans to answer, Eve panted, ‘We’ve got them. Drive into Tanshelf … we’ll tell the police. They’ll be all over this place inside the hour!’

  When we reached the car, as it sat there in the sunlight amid an ocean of bushes, we saw that it was occupied. Eve drew the knife; the sun splashed against its blade in silent explosions of silver.

  In the front of the car sat two men. One was easy to identify: me. Or at least a version of me. The other was a middle-aged man with white hair. In the back sat a version of our mother.

  ‘Same one that came this morning,’ Eve grunted. ‘See the bruising on the face. I did that.’ My sister sounded so matter-of-fact it was chilling. I did a double-take just in case I’d hauled one of the clones out of the classroom block by mistake. No, that was Eve all right. The real Eve. Anger burned in her eye at the sight of that second-rate copy of our mother. The copy of me in the driving seat smiled out through the open window.

  ‘Nice car,’ he said. ‘Had it long?’ The mutilated cheek told me this version of me was the one and the same that I’d injured with the belt buckle just before escaping the cell. The wound hadn’t even begun to heal. In fact, it looked worse. It had become an open mouth of a wound with a grey ring of dead flesh around it, then encircling that a halo of bruising. From the injury oozed a greenish mucus.

  Instead of answering his question about the car I greeted him with, ‘Looks like gangrene. I’ll be a happy man if it is.’

  ‘Mason, you mustn’t get into a conversation with him,’ Madeline warned.

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t.’

  The man in the car who wore my face, although one with a wound the size of an egg yolk, pushed his thumb against the side of his mouth – my habit when thinking, and it displayed the same Y-shaped scar on his hand. ‘Any right thinking person hates it when a volcano erupts and people get killed, but can you stop it happening? No you can’t. All you can do is deal with the aftermath the best you can.’

  I growled, ‘Get out of the car.’

  He ignored me. ‘Imagine what’s happening here is a volcano erupting. Five hundred years ago not a man on earth would have been able to explain what a volcano is or what geological forces are involved in it spewing out lava, or chucking out all that ash and poison gas.’ A trickle of mucus rolled out of the puncture wound on his cheek to creep down his jaw. ‘You can’t explain what’s happening to me anymore than the fifteenth-century king in his castle could render a scientific explanation of how volcanoes erupt. You, Mason Konrad, don’t know the mechanics of how I turned into you. Or how people have been transformed into your mother and sister. Don’t look at me like that, Mason, I know you’ve seen my zoo in your old classrooms.’ The clone of me smiled back at the clone of the woman who bore me. ‘We’re dealing with the aftermath of a biological eruption. Dormant genes have just gone Kerrump, and we’re working hard to clean up the mess in order to continue with life the best we can. I mean, the last thing I want – or you want – is for anyone to get hurt here.’

  Eve stepped forward with the knife. ‘You killed our mother, you bastard.’

  ‘Now you’ve raised that …’ – the man glanced back over his shoulder – ‘… over to you, Mom.’

  The woman who resembled my mother leaned sideways so she could rest her elbow on the car door. ‘The offer still stands. Leave us alone and I’ll come back home with you. I’ll be your m
other. Things will be just like they were before. No one will ever know what happened.’

  ‘Get out of the car!’ Eve yelled. ‘I’m going to cut that face off! You don’t deserve to wear it!’

  ‘Big brother,’ the man said, ‘exert some sibling authority here. We don’t want anyone to suffer.’

  ‘That didn’t stop you making us suffer in your jail.’ Anger flared inside of me. That face … I wanted to stick my finger in the wound in his cheek then rip it open. Even as the mental image flared my cheek began to itch in the same place as the wound on his face.

  Eve advanced on the car, the knife at the ready. ‘I didn’t tell you this, Mason, because things were bad enough, but they tortured Mom.’

  ‘I didn’t touch her.’

  ‘Not physical torture. This thing sitting in our car told Mom that he’d cut me to pieces in front of her if she didn’t tell him what he wanted to know.’

  ‘Look, let’s not be unpleasant to one another.’ The man spoke reasonably as if smoothing over a spat between old friends. ‘All I wanted to know was how you did it?’

  The woman with Mom’s face wheedled, ‘We can be a family again. I’ll be your Mom.’

  ‘Not interested,’ Eve said.

  The man with the hole in his cheek held my gaze. ‘Did you hear what I said, Mason Konrad? How did you smuggle him into the cell?’

  I glanced at Madeline. If she had any idea what I was thinking she knew I’d attack him. The second man, the one with white hair, merely watched impassively.

  Mason Konrad, second edition, my face, my habits, my scar, continued his line of questioning, ‘In the cell you had a visitor. A figure. I’m certain the pair of you know each other. But what is it? How can a human being move through solid walls to reach you?’

  ‘What’s he talking about?’ Eve shook her head, puzzled. ‘What figure?’

  ‘Don’t worry about him, Eve.’ Suddenly I experienced a sense of exultation. ‘That visitor is an old friend of ours. He’s going to destroy these monsters.’ I pointed at the man in the car. ‘Including you.’