Other Voices, Other Tombs Read online

  Except now there were suddenly so many, many more of us than usual, and we were all doing our level best to murder each other.

  The worst stuff I heard, the very worst...that was all after, from people I swapped junk, food and stories with. Which makes sense. During, we were apart, trapped in our own little slices of frenzy, our very specific orbits; right after, we clung together just to keep everything—everyone—else out. Just a day and a half, two at the most, and suddenly we were cut off like we hadn’t been for decades: no coms, no radio, no TV, no energy, no phones, no Internet. What else could we do but sit in the dark and tell stories? Confess to each other, and hope for absolution?

  #

  So, anyhow: there’s this guy, and his wife is pregnant, like out to here—maybe nine months, maybe a bit more. They’re going to get an ultrasound, to see if they have to induce. And in the time he parks his car, the time it takes him to get out and go ‘round to her side, she starts screaming; falls out when he opens her door, right onto the street, like she’s having a fit. He manages to get her up and walk her inside. And when they go to put the gel on her, her stomach is all jiggling around, stretching violently like it’s going to tear open, bruises appearing from the inside. They can’t even get a look, have to sedate her and go in for a caesarian, quick as humanly possible.

  But when they open her up, what they discover is that she’d left the house with one baby, then all of a sudden, she had two—they’d duped, right inside of her. After which they attacked each other, like dupes do; stuck in there, all dark and close, it must’ve been like waking into hell. And one of them killed the other, but the dead one gave as good as it got, so the one who won didn’t live for long, either.

  The mother, when she saw all that, she just went insane. Killed herself, before she even had to dupe.

  The father too, eventually, poor bastard.

  #

  That was how it started for me, like that was how it ended, for them. And at the time, when I heard about it—I thought they were lucky, sort of. Luckier, I mean. Because at least they were out of it, right? They had that, if nothing else. At the very least, they wouldn’t have to see whatever fresh new horror came along next.

  Not like the rest of us.

  #

  One member of our enclave told a story of something that had happened to his brother—or was it his roommate? Anyway. Our guy had been walking along the Bloor Street viaduct with the other guy when the Split hit, and the dupe-fight ended with one of those lottery-win flukes: one of them threw the other off the bridge into the Don River...except, according to Our Guy, the Other Guy's dupe was still alive. Our Guy says he could see the dupe still flailing about in the water as the current bore him downstream, before he vanished; Other Guy was too injured at that point to try pursuing, so Our Guy brought him back home and patched him up as best he could. And then, still understanding nothing, he'd asked: Should we, like...try to find that guy? And Other Guy said, Fuck no. I see him again I'm gonna kill him. Which was surreal enough, said Our Guy, but what made it even weirder was that Other Guy was a big ass pacifist. Hadn't ever raised a hand to anyone in his life before that day.

  Weirdest of all, though, said Our Guy, looking round the fire to each of us, was...I understood what he meant. I hadn't even duped yet. But just thinking about it made me so, so...angry. Like puke-your-guts-out pissed off. Like finding out your kid's a crack dealer, or your wife's been fucking your best friend, except even worse. Something that's just—not supposed to happen. You know what I mean, right?

  We all did.

  #

  Humans are amazingly adaptable creatures, which seemed like more of a compliment before I realized, post-Split, it was an equally apt descriptor for rats. But—astonishing as I found it—the government did have disaster recovery plans in place, for scenarios as destructive if not as weird.

  A day or so after Toronto stopped working, emergency military units rolled in, burning the gasoline reserves they must have had squirrelled away somewhere, setting up camps and sending round jeeps with megaphones and instructions. Communicating via radio, they corralled survivors, dis-tributed emergency rations, cleared travel routes, counted and named the dead. I spent a few weeks sleeping on a cot in the John Innes Community Centre gymnasium. Never had any trouble getting to sleep, either, despite knowing full well I probably wouldn't get my anxiety meds back for months if not years. Might be true after all, I remember thinking as I drifted off one night; once you know the absolute worst actually has happened, you really can relax.

  Or maybe my blood sugar was just bottoming out. The disaster rations kept us from starving, but nobody ever had quite enough. Which described pretty much everything else in those weeks, for that matter. Enough power for critical functions, from careful, intermittent generator use, but nothing that broke the silence of phones, TVs, iPads. Enough water to quell thirst, never enough to get clean. Enough routine to hold back panic, never enough to feel safe.

  Enough recovery to promise hope. Never quite enough to convince.

  #

  We were all surprised, when telling our stories later, to realize just how many cultures had a word for it. The ka, in Egyptian myth. A witch's fetch. Vardøger, etiänen, dopplegänger, Ankou. “Twin strangers,” social media called it; Artem said there'd even been a website, Twinstrangers.net, where you could upload a photo and use facial recognition software to search for your own double. We laughed at that, tiredly, until Artem made the mistake of trying for more laughter. Maybe that's where the Dupes came from, eh? The harbingers got onto the Web, went all high-tech mass production. He pounded his knee and guffawed but stopped when he saw none of us smiling.

  Ryuji, who'd been a physics student, had a different idea. The Many-Worlds theory says every decision creates a separate universe, he'd explained in his soft voice, as we went from apartment to apartment in an empty condo building, looking for cans of food. I think perhaps someone at CERN ran the SuperCollider too hard and broke down the barrier between us and another of these universes, probably the very closest one. The violence is the result of the mind trying to exist simultaneously in separate overlapping realities and resolving the conflict the only way it can—by eliminating it. That's why it's only people who Split, not objects or animals. We're the only ones who make choices.

  So, if we ran this collider thing in reverse, could we stop it happening? I'd asked, mostly to keep him talking. I was pretty sure Ryuji didn't return the way I felt at all, but I still liked being near him, listening to him. But the question had backfired, wiping the smile off his face.

  I don't think it works that way, Aditi, he'd finally said, looking at nothing in particular. And shut up after that except for absent little grunts, until we were back in the group's squat.

  He made the mistake of going out alone on his next scavenging run. When we found him a week later, most of the meat had been carved off him.

  #

  You may have guessed the next part from the fact I said “stop it happening,” i.e., present tense.

  Within a week it was obvious the Split was still going on, just much less frequently—maybe one person in a hundred, every three or four days or so. After the first few times, people started trying to jump in and restrain the dupers, which only got both of them to turn on the interlopers and as often as not racked up four or five corpses instead of just one. Finally, the soldiers worked out a protocol where they'd haul the dupers apart while a doctor sedated them both into oblivion, then drag them off somewhere to do...something. Fix them, experiment on them—grind one of them up for more food, for all we knew; it was fresh protein literally out of nowhere for free, after all. The only certainty was no one ever saw them again, except for the officers in charge, and they weren't talking.

  But somebody must have found some way to do something about it. Electroshock therapy, the right drug cocktail, or just keep dupers far enough apart for long enough. Because the day it all went to shit for the second time, that day in the John Inn
es gym, I was paying attention. I saw when some of the soldiers suddenly turned on the rest of them, opening up with their guns; I hid under a table, watching for a few seconds before Artem grabbed me and hauled me away.

  I'm still pretty sure I was the first to realize that the men shouting orders on each side of that battle had the same face.

  #

  The most horrible part—or what part of me thinks should be the horrible part, anyway—is that the world's actually gotten more beautiful, to me anyway. More peaceful. Not just physically, with green sweeping over everything, the end of engine noise, hydrocarbon stink and contrails in the sky, but almost spiritually, somehow. Like the planet's undergone the same vast unclenching I've felt inside me, at the realization I'd been off my meds for weeks and hadn't missed them. And the knotted tension I've felt as long as I could remember—the constant ache of trying to figure out what a stranger's politeness does or doesn't hide, the gnawing fear that at any moment I'll let my social mask slip and suddenly wind up once more outcast, hated, ridiculed, for no reason I've ever been able to understand...that's finally dissipated. For good.

  Apocalypse as psychotherapy: effective, but expensive, I've joked to the others. Everybody laughed, especially Artem. But sometimes I think it might not be a joke. Sometimes I ask myself how someone can be—not happy, exactly, but relaxed, in what have to be humanity's last days. Content, even. Is it just all the problems of life going away? No more carbon footprints, no more taxes, flame wars or credit card debt, no more asshole bosses?

  Or...does something else happen, in the Split? Does part of us—maybe the part we've always wanted to kill—die in that fight, with whichever half loses?

  I'd like to think that, sometimes. That somehow, I'm better for what I've gone through. But it's easier in the afternoon and evening, when I've forgotten the dreams. When I can forget that I'm only alive because I was able to kill a version of myself...a version which might be back, if I Split again. Which might remember losing, for all I know, and fight that much harder—

  —no, not if. When. When I Split again.

  This is how it goes, these days.

  #

  We've been talking about trying to head south, especially since it's going to be a lot harder here once winter comes. I walked down to the Lakeshore the other day and wondered how many boats there must be abandoned, both on this side of the harbour and on the Islands. At least one's got to have enough room for eight people. None of us have ever sailed before, but we've had to learn to do harder things.

  The sun on the lake water was beautiful. You can drink it now, if you boil it first.

  Getting enough food down to the harbour while evading the other scavenger groups will be hard. Especially since, to some of them, we'll be the food. And if luck goes against us and one of us Splits while we're on the water, that could get us all killed if the fight does enough damage. But we'll figure something out.

  Or we won't. I couldn't have said anything like that so calmly, before. But when you finally grasp that you can't count on anything, you either worry about everything or you worry about nothing, and I've already tried one of those.

  I think I'm going to stop recording now.

  #

  This is how it goes. Stand by.

  THE END

  Formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published two collections of short work (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart), two chap-books of speculative poetry (Bent Under Night and Dust Radio), a Weird Western trilogy (the Hexslinger series—A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns and A Tree of Bones), a story-cycle (We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven) and a stand-alone novel (Experimental Film, which won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst award for Best Adult Novel). Most are available from ChiZine Publications. She has two new story collections from Trepidatio (Spectral Evidence, nominated for a Bram Stoker Award, and Drawn Up From Deep Places, nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award), one upcoming from Cemetery Dance (Dark Is Better), and a poetry collection from Aqueduct Press (Invocabulary, nominated for a Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association Elgin Award).

  Comfortable Gods

  Michael Wehunt

  As late as the third day, he was still her husband, almost entirely. They should have been at the beach by Sunday. Instead Karen sat with her knees folded up on one of the sagging twin beds, dog-earing a magazine with a black headache. The air conditioning unit rattled. The heavy curtains were wide open, and she wouldn’t quite get up and shut away the awful waning light.

  She called Den again and threw the phone back on the bedspread when it went to voicemail. The last message she’d left had been concerned enough. She was tired and sick from worry’s little teeth.

  Teeth. Den was somewhere because of his toothache. Yesterday he told her he’d bought some ointment to smear in his mouth. This had been promising after a long gray mood of a Sunday. A handful of Advil and he’d slept half of both days, keeping them here in this waiting room of a town. She nagged him not to smoke any cigarettes with a tooth problem and at last wore him down. And he’d been twitchy between naps, caged, like he wanted to get up and pace.

  This morning, finally, he’d searched listings on his phone and found a dentist three exits up the highway. He made an appointment and groaned his way into some clothes.

  He’d always been oddly vain about his face: he dyed the gray from his receding hair, bought miracle face cream, and his teeth had one too many cleanings a year. It made less sense as the gravity of age began to pull at him. He’d gone up two shirt sizes to hide his soft belly. But he was welcome to his overweening: Karen indulged him in everything and had never reached the end of her indulgence. He had, almost from first sight so long ago, been her home.

  But ten hours was a long time for him to be gone. Even if he’d needed emergency dental surgery, something serious, she would have heard about it. She got up at last and closed the curtains, more out of spite than discomfort. The suite fell into instant gloom. She switched on two of the three lamps, but the room looked even sicklier in fake light. The bulbs were too high a wattage, too yellow and feverish. Ghosts of old stains haunted the walls. An elderly TV sat on a glum little dresser next to a one-cup coffeemaker with a tar pit baked into the bottom of its pot. The two twin beds. A smell in the wallpaper, faint, of a mended arm after the cast is taken off.

  The 40 Winks Comfort Lodge sat cramped and stiff about fifty yards from the road, like a saltine box on its side. A mostly empty parking lot, weedy, then the building of forgettable industrial gray and off-white brick. The motel was not quite squalid. It was simply dull, like everything around it, even the trees.

  Den had pressed a hand to his jaw and taken the exit without warning. “We need to stop off for the night,” he told her. “I’m tired and this toothache is a bitch.” It was the first Karen had heard of a toothache. They’d passed a La Quinta right off the exit ramp, but Den had puffed up and said, “If we’re going to slum it, we can’t stay in a brand name place.” Why did they have to slum it? And where in hell was he that he couldn’t call?

  She stepped outside onto the concrete walkway, leaned on the railing. The only view was more concrete and asphalt and a heat shimmer above every car. Past seven now and still hot and humid.

  She didn’t even know what town they were in. It was an interstate pimple on the face of an oily map, and no one she knew would stick around past a quick night. A town like this only needed a name for people like the owner of this motel, and whoever actually went to these strip malls that made her think of flypaper. There was only one of the strips within sight, at least, and it seemed to have died two decades before. Cargo vans and cars—almost none of them new—scuttled across her vision. It was easy to imagine most states as too many of these pockmarked towns hunched behind billboards. Tanks full of rubber-banded lobsters. Just like me, she thought, and giggled to herself
. The laugh, the thought of how judgmental she was being, calmed her a little as she looked down the lot to the left.

  There were two eighteen-wheelers parked like a quotation mark beyond the corner of the building. Den’s wagon appeared alongside them and swerved into the aisle toward her. She watched as he angled the car into a slot right in front of their room. He sat behind the wheel for a long moment, the mirrored surfaces of his sunglasses tilted down to the right. Finally, he took them off and tossed them aside.

  “Were you behind the motel?” she asked as he got out and stood by the car door, looking back the way he’d come.

  “What, hon?” He still didn’t look at her.

  “Why were you behind the motel?” Her hands were gripping the rail hard enough to hurt.

  “Behind?”

  “I just saw you come around from the back.” A chill crawled over her, shocking under the sweat on her skin.

  “Well, just checking it out.” He turned to her and his face was drawn; the pitiless sun made his hair look even thinner. She saw smeared circles of dirt on the knees of his pants. His eyes wouldn’t stay completely still.

  “You found a dentist?” She almost added back there but stopped herself just in time. “What did they say?”

  “Oh, got a shot. Got an infected guy back here.” He tapped his left cheek. “Antibiotics.”

  “That’s terrible, Den. I was worried sick!” His expression didn’t change at this, and she heard her voice weaken into that old indulgence. “You should come lie down a while. I’ll get everything ready to leave.”

  He frowned. “Well, doctor says to not do any driving tonight. Painkillers.” His fingers made a gun and fired it into his jaw.

  “Oh. Okay. Half our vacation’s gone almost, Den.” Her face flushed at the complaint; she pulled her shirt away from her belly and tried to make a breeze for herself in the immobile air. “You do realize that?”