Ian Hocking - Déjà Vu

‘There is another way. Out of here, turn left. There’s an interior fire door that opens onto a corridor. Go up the stairs. You realise I must call the police.’

‘Of course,’ Ute said. She did not lower the stun gun. ‘Please do not follow me. This is for your own safety. Evacuate the shop.’

‘What’s going to happen?’

‘Evacuate the shop.’

She walked backwards from the room. In the tiny corridor, there was nobody. She checked on Sabine. Still there.

Ute turned and ran through the fire door, closing it behind her. The corridor was empty. At one end was the door with the lock that she had superglued before entering the shop. She checked its handle. Immovable.

Her one problem was the connecting door. It had a push-down bar on both sides. She had to act quickly.

She removed her shoes and walked up the stairs.

There was an interior door on the first landing. The handle turned. It was a cheap door with a cardboard filling that could not be barricaded.

For a second time, she stepped inside.

The empty office space was huge. The air was stuffy with sunlight. There were sheets of paper, old mugs, filing cabinets, chairs and sheets of plastic.

In the centre were scores of mannequins. Faces blank. Gender-neutral bodies naked and dusty. They hadn’t moved.

Immediately to her left was a walled office. It had an open doorway but no windows. Nearby was the fire-escape that she had padlocked earlier that morning. She came closer. She felt dust on her bare feet. She heard snores.

Inside, it was dull and hot. She counted six sleeping men. They were lying, two half-dressed, four naked, overlapping by foot and hand. Ute had once been afraid of these men. Now she was disgusted. There was a syringe-littered table in one corner. In another, a television and a games console. There was a duvet in the centre. The stench of sweat and semen was nauseating. She did not care who they were. She did not care why they lived this way.

Ute took the can of lighter fluid from her bag. She squirted it onto the duvet. It was a good feeling. She was pissing on these men. Next, she took a match and flicked it into the centre. The duvet erupted. Benthic smoke poured outward in a carpet, making for the door. She did not hurry to withdraw her stun gun. Humans cannot smell while they are asleep. She had checked.

She saw the moustached man who had led her from the club. He was middle-aged and balding, but Ute had always preferred older men. He had drugged her Martini. Later, he had injected her with something as she crouched to re-tie her shoe — scopolamine and morphine, a doctor had told her later. Life had become hazy and slow. Her resistance had fallen away. For passers-by she was a drunk. The man waved them on with a laugh.

She fired the gun. Two darts flew out and embedded in his thigh muscle. They connected to the stun gun with strong, insulated cables. The darts had barbs. They could not be extracted without ripping. There was a second trigger to activate the charge. Quickly, she fired darts into all of the men.

She pulled the trigger.

The bodies twitched and rolled.

She remembered that, at the conclusion of the ordeal, the moustached man had injected her again. He had put an avuncular arm across her shoulders and led her to the Rhine. One last injection: the rest of the syringe. A gentle push and she fell.

Callused arms had found her in that cold, empty hell, and heaved her onto a barge. Shouted words in a language she did not understand. Wiped hair and muck from her mouth. Shone light in her eyes. Injected her.

She pulled the trigger again. This time the groans were louder, angrier. Eyes sought her. They were monstrous but pathetic. She realised that they would never be as strong as her. She had returned. Her revenge knew no bounds.

She pulled the trigger a third time. Bodies convulsed. The smoke grew soupy. One of the men tugged at a barb in his chest. Ute watched the flesh draw to a peak. It would not rip. Finally, the man collapsed in the smoke.

The duvets burned blue-green. She watched the flame.

Someone grabbed her ankle and Ute screamed. She pulled the trigger again and the hand tensed. It fell and lay flaccid on her foot.

With each pull of the trigger, she imagined herself raping them, firing into them, inching them towards the edge of an abyss with each dirty push.

‘This,’ she shouted, ‘is what it feels like when you’re fucked.’

Behind the burning duvets, a woman rose. She wore only her underwear and a T-shirt. She shimmered through Ute’s tears.

Ute cursed her stupidity. She reached forward to help the victim from the room. She would have a straightforward escape through the door to the staircase and, from there, through the perfume shop to freedom.

The woman grabbed Ute’s throat and pushed hard. Ute dropped the stun gun and they broke through the door. In sudden daylight, the woman’s eyes seemed more animal than human. A cat’s eyes. The eyes were familiar; she had been present at Ute’s rape. She had looked on.

Ute tripped but the woman followed her down. They slid over the floor. Rolled once. Ute felt the world darken. Above them, the ceiling was on fire. Plastic embers began to fall. Still the world darkened.

They knocked into the mannequins. The dolls were heavy and one struck the woman’s forehead. Her grip relaxed momentarily. Ute took a breath before it was re-established. She had come here to kill her attackers. She would not be satisfied with all but one of them.

Inside her shoulder bag, she found the canister of lighter fluid. She jammed the can into her attacker’s mouth and twisted savagely. The thin metal tore and Ute pulled it free. She did not wait. She sawed at her throat with the metal’s edge. The skin opened. The woman’s grip relaxed and her cat eyes glazed. She bucked and slithered away. Ute grabbed her ankle. The woman yelled. She jammed the cold ball of her foot into Ute’s throat.

The pain stopped time. When finally she moved, she could see only the expressionless mannequins and their hard, plastic fingers. They seemed to mob her. They were dead and they wanted her dead too. From the gaps between one mannequin and the next, there issued only smoke, not air. She screamed.

The nightmare inside the nightmare.

She pushed against something. It was the lid of a coffin. Cracks appeared. The darkness was no longer absolute. She saw her simple funeral clothes in the bloody light. She understood that she was in the furnace of a crematorium. No , she thought. This memory is false. I survived the fire. She drew breath to scream again. She would escape her coffin now, oh yes, into a fire that might let her linger, let her relish the last few moments of life with a height of sensation she had never known. The crackling flames. Smoke. Distant organ music. The murmur of David Proctor thanking the priest for a lovely service. Saskia would have wanted it that way.

No. It didn’t end like this. It can’t end like this.

Saskia.

The hawk that returned.

Snick.

Ute opened her eyes. The gun had misfired, and she let it slip, dead, to the ground. Memories crowded her. She remembered her first kiss. It had been on tiptoe behind the local supermarket. She saw the face of her best friend at school, Katrin, and some fellow schoolchildren, and the faces of her foster parents. Spending hours learning to hula hoop. A school trip to France. Dinner for One on New Year’s Eve. Her foster mother’s name was Fride. They had lived in Cologne. Her Uncle Manni had once saved her from drowning. He had died within the year from skin cancer.

A whole life returned to her. Ute Schmidt’s ghostly passenger—the digital Saskia Brandt—was gone.