Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

There were no more watchers because everyone was a watcher. Everybody around her was an enemy to be dodged and fled from.

But there were no voices. Yet.

In her mind’s eye she saw Rachel’s body flung this way and that by the shots, her face crimson and almost accusing as her eyes met Nina’s for the last time.

She’d killed them both. She should have stayed away.

Nina slowed, the ragged breath sawing in her throat, and gazed about. Somehow she’d arrived at the Mall, the most congested place she could have picked. On her left was the Pavilion. She and the quartet had performed there many times.

Strolling toward her, coffee cup in hand, was a uniformed cop.

Nina did a back and forth shuffle that would have been comical in a slapstick movie: preparing to run one second, then starting toward the cop, then taking fright again. An authority figure, a public symbol of law and order and safety. She ought to feel reassured by his presence.

But the men at the door had been federal agents, or at least had been carrying ID that suggested they were.

The cop was looking straight at her. Grinning.

Nina took a step backwards, then another.

The hand on her elbow made her yelp. Close to her ear a woman’s voice said: ‘Whoah there. Steady.’

Nina stared round, saw that she’d backed into another cop. The first one had been grinning at her, his partner, not at Nina.

‘You okay, miss?’

The male cop had reached her. Although the female one had backed off a little, Nina felt crowded, hemmed in.

She realised she was staring stupidly from one to the other.

‘Fine.’ Had she said it? She wasn’t sure, so she repeated it, shouting too loudly this time. A couple of passersby glanced over.

The woman cop was running a careful eye over her. Nina didn’t like that. ‘You look sick, honey.’

Nina became aware suddenly of the hair slicked to her face with sweat, the shirt clinging to her armpits. She hefted the violin case, feeling it slipping, and immediately the cops were on guard, hands if not quite on their holsters then hovering in the vicinity.

They think I might have a machine gun in here , she thought, and rammed down an impulse to laugh.

Once more her eyes darted from one face to the other. The woman cop looked sympathetic and a little concerned. The guy’s expression was more sceptical, as though he thought he was up against yet another student strung out on speed or acid on a school night while hardworking people like himself were trying to earn a crust. She was dimly aware that the more she glanced from one to the other, the crazier — or guiltier — she appeared.

Suddenly she had it: a way she could get help of a sort from them if they weren’t in league with the men who’d come to the apartment and killed her friends.

‘Apartment eight, first floor, Allentown Heights,’ she blurted. ‘Adams Street. Two people are dead there. My friends. They live there. They did, anyhow. Some men killed them.’

Nina took a step back, colliding off another passerby who grunted at her. The cops were staring at her and at each other.

If they were with the men who’d done it, she’d have given nothing away. If they weren’t, they might check it out just in case.

And she realised her mistake. The cops would already have been called by the neighbours who’d heard the gunfire in the apartment. They’d be on their way, or there already, turning the place into a crime scene.

All Nina had done was make herself a suspect.

She turned and plunged into the jostling, scuffling crowd once more, trailing the cops’ confused shouts behind her.

*

Nina ran on, with no destination in mind, wanting only to be alone.

She’d been different, or at least had first realised she was different, at the age of around twelve or thirteen. It wasn’t long after her first period, when all kinds of weird stuff started happening to her: she grew, she spread out, she had bizarre and exciting dreams and thoughts.

And the voices had begun. Two of them, a man’s and a woman’s, both strangers. Sometimes they occurred together, sometimes one or the other on its own. Sometimes they spoke to her, but more often they spoke about her, again either to one another or as though commenting on her like a narrator at the beginning of a movie.

She assumed this was a normal part of puberty, and when she and a bunch of girlfriends at high school had been sitting around discussing boys and periods, she’d mentioned it. The others had stared at her, laughed at first, then edged away: not immediately but gradually, over weeks, until she was alone.

She didn’t speak to her grandmother about it. The family doctor was friendly and caring, and a woman herself, but although Nina booked an appointment with her she chickened out at the last moment and said to the doctor’s kind gaze that she was suffering cramps, which was true enough.

The first person she told was, in the end, her grandmother. But that was later, when she was eighteen and getting ready for college, and could take care of herself. Her grandma was horrified, not by what Nina was telling her but because Nina hadn’t told her before. She assured her grandma that the voices came only when she was stressed, like around exam time; that she could cope with them now that she’d learned they couldn’t hurt her; and that she didn’t need meds. In fact, she was only telling her grandma to prove to herself how confident she felt about having them under control.

But the voices, she came to realise, were only the latest manifestation of the problem. The Watchers had been there earlier. From when she was ten, possibly even before. They’d been at the dark crack of her door in the middle of the night, when the house was in darkness. She’d huddled against the headboard of her bed, the duvet crammed up against her mouth to stifle her screams, while the watcher, or watchers, had stood beyond the doorway in the blackness, staring at her. She’d never seen them, never heard or smelled them. But they’d been there, so vividly that she had told her mother about them.

Her mother had looked grave and had listened carefully, then had gone off to find her dad. When she came back, she held Nina close and whispered against her hair: ‘There’s nobody out there, baby. I’ve checked. I’ve checked with your father.’

It was only later that she realised what an odd comment that was. I’ve checked with your father. But of course, later she had the advantage of hindsight.

And now she had proof that there was indeed somebody out here. More than one person.

They were coming for her. And they were prepared to kill to get to her.

*

She’d been running for a half hour at least, doing crazy loops, seeing familiar landmarks repeat themselves around her. By now the intensity of the crowds around her had diminished: they were no longer staring at her but seemed instead to be deliberately, smirkingly avoiding looking at her. Nowhere did she encounter a man in a suit bearing down on her, or a uniformed cohort boxing her in.

She found herself in control enough to be able to take an inventory. She had her clothes: jeans, T-shirt, jacket (which she’d kept on at Rachel’s apartment — Rachel had offered to take it for her but she’d felt protected in it to some extent, as though swaddled). She had her violin, its weight on her back reassuring as ever. And — thank God — she had her wallet. Nina didn’t use a handbag, to her friends’ amusement. She kept her wallet in her hip pocket at all times, believing it to be less vulnerable to robbers than if it were in a bag perched on her arm. Nor did she own a cell phone. They made it too difficult to be alone.

Other things were in her favour: she was physically intact, if shaken. The drop from the window hadn’t hobbled her as it might have. The voices hadn’t started up — yet — so that distraction wasn’t a problem. And she had the entire rest of the continental United States outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, in which to lose herself.