Guy Adams - The Clown Service

They both drank their vodka, Krishnin’s hand shaking with excitement as he poured them one more.

‘In this case,’ Sünner continued, ‘it is not so easy to deactivate them. The word is written through their entire being. It cannot simply be torn out.’

‘Deactivate them?’ asked Krishnin, taking a mouthful of vodka. ‘Why would we ever want to do that?’

Jamie and I were still in the back of the van, or whatever mirror-image took its place here in the other plane. I sat up, consciously keeping the sensation of Jamie’s hand in mine even though we now appeared not to be touching each other, and shuffled towards the door. I reached out to open it, the handle feeling distant in my grip, as if I wasn’t quite touching it. Squeezing hard, I turned the catch, pushed open the door and swung my legs out.

The street around us had all the life of a postcard. A two-dimensional world that I was somehow sat in. There was utter silence until Jamie spoke.

‘We should take a minute,’ he said. His voice was quiet. I couldn’t tell whether he was speaking so delicately because he was acclimatising or because he was scared. When all around you is so still, so reflective, it’s hard to be the thing that breaks that peace. We had woken up in Library World.

‘It’s important to get the hang of the place before you go wandering,’ Jamie continued. ‘I picture it as if I’m a diver, regulating my breathing before dropping down into the water. Of course, part of it is remembering that here I’m not drunk.’

‘Why do you think that’s necessary?’ I asked. ‘The drink, I mean.’

He shrugged. ‘After all this time it might not be, but since when did life get so hilarious you can afford to cut back on the fun stuff? I’ve always been a bit of a control freak; the booze helps me let go of that, to just go for it. This is all about throwing yourself into the void. I’ve always needed a little liquid help to do that.’

‘And you don’t feel drunk now?’

‘Not really. You know how when you get wasted there’s always a quiet voice hovering above it all – the one that suggests that maybe it’s time to call a taxi, to put that drink back down, to stop looking at that boy on the dance floor as if he’s the most beautiful thing in the world and you’ll die if you don’t have him?’

‘Not exactly, but I get your point.’

‘That’s what I am now, the sane voice riding above the madness. The one who might just get you home if you stop dancing and drinking for long enough to hear it.’

I looked up into the flat sky as a large shadow passed overhead. It was shapeless, shifting and rippling above the clouds, an indefinable thing. I wondered if it was hunting.

‘What do you think this place is?’ I asked.

‘There are lots of theories. Some people consider it the headspace of the world, a collective dream, the noosphere. Thought given form. They say that that’s why the place is so hostile – this is where the fears go, this is the dream of a world gone mad. Reality painted by a fractured, shared subconscious.’

‘I think I’d have to be drunk just to say that, let alone believe it.’

‘To be honest it’s what I always believed. But if what Gavrill says is right, then we are also somewhere physical. Which suggests the other popular theory – that we’re in a Ghost Universe.’

‘That sounds much more sensible…’ I was beginning to wish I had never asked.

‘Are you familiar with the concept of parallel universes? That every decision we make causes a divergence? The future is a massive network of potentials, winnowed down as we make our moves, turn left or right, take that job or quit, have that cup of coffee or not. Every time we make a decision, the alternative route – the option we dismissed – drifts away as a possible future no longer inhabited. That is a Ghost Universe, the road not taken. Some people theorise that Ghost Universes prove time travel may be possible – they’re the safety valve of causality, spare realities that absorb the impact of shifting probabilities.’

I thought about Derek Lime and his machine. He had talked about similar concepts. The machine had allowed us to view the possibilities inherent in the past. If it had stayed on too long, that fluidity of time could have become modified, the infinite possible futures found in the stones of that warehouse thrown into flux until one timeline, inevitably a different one, was settled on. The whole of history would change around it. Could it be that I was now sitting in one of the casual by-products of that process? A Ghost Universe contaminating reality like chemical effluent ejected into the sea from a processing plant?

‘Maybe it’s a combination of the two,’ I suggested. ‘We’re not physically here after all. This…’ I gestured around us, ‘is just an extension of our minds.’

‘Maybe,’ he agreed, bending down to pick up a stone from the road, ‘but we still have some physicality. After all, we aren’t floating through the floor and we can touch things.’

‘But the sensation is numb. It’s not complete. In this place, when I touch you, it’s like you’re not quite solid.’

‘Yeah, we can interact with things on the higher plane but it doesn’t come as naturally.’ He threw the stone to me. I tried to catch it, but it slipped through my fingers.

‘You have to concentrate,’ said Jamie. ‘Simple physical interaction takes effort.’

This was another possible problem I had not considered. How much use were we going to be here? Would we have enough of a solid presence to fight Krishnin?

‘Ready to move?’ I asked.

‘Sure.’

We stood up and slowly worked our way out of the side street and onto the main promenade.

Suddenly, Jamie gripped my arm. I looked down to where his hand, so insubstantial in this world, pinched at the sleeve of my jacket. I could barely feel it.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Look…’ he whispered.

I turned my head to try to see what had startled him.

‘Keep still…’ he cautioned.

I detected movement to our right, something swirling along the walkway.

As it came closer I was able to discern more of its shape, or at least the shape it clung to. At its core it appeared to be a man and his dog, nothing remotely threatening. As it moved it blurred and stretched, like an image that was being digitally altered. Waves of colour rippled from it as it flowed towards us. It was as if the binding lines of the man and dog weren’t enough for the information they contained; distorted colour and texture bleeding into the air and thrashing back and forth.

It stopped a couple of feet away. The dog portion lifted its muzzle to the air as if to catch a scent. Its head was a mess of after-images and the inhalation of its breath echoed. I felt Jamie’s grip tighten, desperately hoping I would neither move nor make a sound. I didn’t need the warning. I remembered what Shining had told me about this place – that you didn’t want to draw the attention of the things that lived here.

The dog’s head split to reveal a pink maw that contained more teeth than it could possibly hold. A low growl crept through the air around us, like a recording rather than a live event, something added on to this reality in post-production. The falseness of the sound made it all the more threatening, as if it was only an approximation of the danger that faced us, a translation of something our minds could not otherwise perceive.

The dog’s owner had little face to speak of, the features too blurred to be resolved into anything you could recognise. A bystander snatched in an old photograph, a smudge of pink skin and dark hair that would live on in the old image as a ghost of a real man. Its head divided in the same way as the dog’s, a random assortment of teeth, from fat yellow rectangles to insubstantial stubs, all moving as if on a conveyor belt. The growling sound came again. It sensed something was near. I could only imagine what it would do if it found us, what those teeth would feel like as they burrowed into this essence of ours that existed here.