Ray Wood: Schrödinger's Gun

—Kitty Rivers—

—Vincent Quine—

—a blunt-nosed pocket pistol underneath a staircase—

My thoughts ran through the same tired grooves. Who shot Johnny Rivers? Was his death simply a part of the grim business of Chicago—a hit put out by a rival gang and executed by a thug who’d killed before and gotten away with it—or was it a crime of the heart, an act of revenge by the woman he had pushed too far?

I think I started dreaming. Vincent Quine oozed past me, stretching and distorting like he was in a house of mirrors. Kitty Rivers showed me her bruised cheek and started crying, turning into Sarah when I tried to comfort her. For a moment I saw all of Chicago as a mist of endless possibilities. Bullets flew from guns, hit, missed, ricocheted; bodies fell, crumpled, folded, flew, sank, rolled, were discovered or kept secret; revenge was or wasn’t or was almost taken. A million stories hovered in the smoke.

I woke to the sound of a door slamming shut.

It took me a moment to work out which reality I was in. West 23rd Street was chill and bleak and someone had just got out of a car. It was too dark to see them clearly. They opened the trapdoor to the basement and disappeared inside.

I followed, reaching into my pocket. My gun was freezing to the touch. I trod stealthily over to the trapdoor and crouched beside it. The light had been switched on inside, but at this angle I could see almost nothing of the room below. I stood up and stepped over to the stairs.

Apart from Johnny’s body having been cleared away, the crime scene was exactly as I had left it. Distillery equipment glinted dully in the half-light. When I reached the bottom of the steps I drew my gun from my coat and stepped forwards, squinting furiously as my eyes adjusted. I heard a scuff behind me and spun around.

“Chicago Police,” I said to the shadow underneath the stairs. “Step out slowly, hands on your head.”

The figure moved into the light.

My heisen roared. It was impossible. What I was looking at was impossible. I felt my gun drift downwards as my arms lost strength.

They stood there, overlapping, like two different movies projected onto the same screen; a fault line between two universes. A perfect quantum tightrope. I was looking at the cat inside the box, alive and dead at the same time, and I had seconds left to choose which possibility remained when the lid came off. I couldn’t speak. For a moment, two versions of myself stood inside of each other, our hearts beating different rhythms.

The figure that had stepped out from the shadows was both Vincent Quine and Kitty Rivers.

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Copyright © 2015 by Ray Wood

Art copyright © 2015 by Richie Pope