PENNY DREADNOUGHT: DESCARTES’ DEMON
flagship publication of
The Abominable Gentlemen
Copyright 2011 Jeffrey Rice
Published by the Abominable Gentlemen at Smashwords
"Falling Over" Copyright 2012 by James Everington.
"All the Pretty Yellow Flowers" Copyright 2012 by Aaron Polson.
"Ice Age" Copyright 2002 by Iain Rowan was first published in Nemonymous 2.
"A Face to Meet the Faces that You Meet" Copyright 2009 by Jeffrey Rice.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the Author, except where permitted by law. Contact: jalanrice@gmail.com
These are works of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Jeffrey Rice
Japan Apocalypse IMG_7312 by Thierry Ehrmann licensed Creative Commons 2.5
Falling Over by James Everington
All the Pretty Yellow Flowers Aaron Polson
Ice Age by Iain Rowan
A Face to Meet the Faces that You Meet by Alan Ryker
Doubt.
Imagine you are talking to someone at a party and you don’t know if they are telling the truth or lying. Something isn’t quite right about what they are saying, but you can’t put your finger on any obvious falsehood. Feeling uneasy, you want to leave them and talk to someone else, but you can’t just walk away. In some ways it is worse than if you knew they were lying—at least if you knew you could call them on it. It’s the doubt that puts you on edge.
What if you weren’t sure if the whole of reality was a lie?
The theme of this second collection of Penny Dreadnought is ‘epistemic doubt’. (When we agreed on this theme it made me proud to be one of the Abominable Gentleman, by the way. Any normal group of horror writers would have picked a nice obvious—and commercial—theme like romantically inclined vampires. But oh no, not us.) ‘Epistemic’ just means how we know things, and really there’s only one way—through our senses. Which can deceive us. Or be deceived.
Descartes mused along these lines once, wondering what he could know with absolute certainty. He imagined a demon with infinite powers, bent on deceiving him in every way. Everything he’d ever seen, or remembered seeing, might have been a manipulation of this demon rather than something real. Nothing was certain, everything was at doubt (except Descartes himself—if the demon was manipulating his very thoughts he still had to exist to have those thoughts—hence “I think therefore I am”). And how could such a thing be conclusively ruled out? Descartes was definitely an Abominable Gentleman.
Scary, no? And fertile soil from which to grow horror stories. Implicitly or explicitly, the stories in this volume of Penny Dreadnought make you question just what is real or not in their own particular fictional universes. And like the smiling but scary man talking to you at a party, they don’t give the game away either.
The modern equivalent of Descartes is to wonder if everything we’ve ever experienced isn’t the product of some Matrix-like computer program, rather than actually real. Although we don’t have the computer power to simulate a reality in such a way yet, there isn’t any theoretical reason why it couldn’t be done in the future. And if we can do it one day, we probably will. Many times in fact. Indeed some modern day descendents of Descartes have reasoned that, if there are likely to be more artificial realities than real ones, it is statistically likely that we are in one right now…
You aren’t in fact about to start reading the second issue of Penny Dreadnought at all, but just being tricked into thinking you are by a sadistic computer programmer or by Descartes’ demon.
But thank you for buying it, just the same.
- James Everington
Falling Over
by James Everington
Ever since Michelle has come back from hospital, I’ve not been sure that it’s really her.
By this I don’t mean that her personality has changed, that the shock of the fall has shaken her confidence, or left her tired and prone to staring into space (although both of these are in fact true); I literally mean that she went in but didn’t come out; that something has taken her place.
Which shows, given that another part of me knows that it certainly is her, that it is my own sanity that I should be questioning, my own identity rather than that of the girl I’ve fancied all term.
I am looking at her now; looking at her reflection in the window at least, for I am facing away from her. Is she aware that I am looking? Michelle is sitting at the table in our communal kitchen area; another girl called Grace is making her a cup of tea, and giving her looks of half-concern, half-admiration (Grace has always been somewhat under Michelle’s shadow). I am pretending to wash-up, half-heartedly scrubbing at the first plate from the stack, while studying Michelle’s reflection. It is superimposed over a bleached English sky, making her look paler than she really is.
The halls of residence are disturbingly quiet, for we three are almost the only ones on this floor—it is the holidays and most of the students have gone home. For reasons I won’t go into some of us have nowhere else to go, and so we stay. There is a becalmed atmosphere; any radios or TVs switched on seem too loud on their old settings. There a few others scattered on the floors above us, but although we hear signs of their existence a certain lethargy prevents us from seeking them out. Instead we sit together in this kitchen (although during term-time we are hardly all best friends). The only other person on this floor is called Christophe; I don’t know where Christophe is. Looking out the window at the lifeless campus I imagine we are lost at sea, everyone else having been saved but us. A plane silently crosses the sky, glinting in a sunlight which doesn’t reach us down here, but I make no attempt to wave for rescue. Behind me, the song on the radio cracks up with static, as if we really were adrift.
Michelle is dressed in jeans and a familiar baggy jumper that she always wears when there are no guys around whom she wants to impress. She says she knows it is too large but it is soft and comforting; it was a present from her sister. Her hair is tied back—she normally has a habit, Michelle, of playing with her hair, unconsciously twisting a lock around her fingers. In a completely characteristic gesture she raises her hand to do this, then lets it drop because her hair is back, all without noticing. She says something to Grace and her eyes do that thing of hers where she blinks in rapid succession, then focuses on you again as if seeing you for the first time. Despite her proclaimed tiredness her voice is as precise as always—she never ‘umms’ or ‘ahs’ but remains silent until she has figured out what to say. Which doesn’t normally take her long. Her accent is somewhat plummy (which I find sexy, with her) although her background is similar to mine: nothing special.
I hear the noise of car motors, distant from a road I cannot see. They are coming home from work again, and I am so out of synch with their daily rhythm that I am surprised it is so late already. I only got up a few hours ago, and my day is yet to come.
Michelle does that thing with her eyes again as she thanks Grace for the tea, and Grace smiles back somewhat nervously. This interaction between the two of them is in keeping with everything I’ve seen previously; it isn’t just Michelle’s appearance and body-language that are manifestly the same as before, but everyone else’s perception of her, their relationship to her. So why do I think that it’s not her?
Maybe it is the bandage around her head like some kind of bandana. She doesn’t need it, it is to hide stitches rather than to protect the wound or staunch bleeding. She doesn’t want anyone to see the (five) stitches in her head—which is reasonable enough—more importantly it is in character. Nevertheless her bandage does make her look different, almost surreal: she looks like a disaster survivor, a terrorist victim interviewed on TV, while she sits at our table drinking tea and moaning about coursework (she is writing her final year dissertation on ‘The Geo-Politics of Oil’ or some-such and she has to revise it almost every news broadcast). The white bandage makes her face seem too pale, as if she hasn’t recovered lost blood. It seems to shade into the skin of her forehead.
But I know, it isn’t the bandage. I would still feel the same suspicion if it wasn’t there, still have the same nagging feeling that she is an impostor, a chameleon, an impersonator. That I have no evidence to back up this theory (and indeed much that refutes it) doesn’t make my feeling go away; it makes it stronger, it convinces me how clever she, it, is. I must be going mad, I must have read Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers one too many times. Except I have never read it, and this is no sci-fi: it isn’t her.
“Hey,” Michelle says to me. “You’re very quiet. Aren’t you glad I’m back?”
I look at the plane, not at her. I try to see it for what it is: 400 people sitting strapped in, reading, sleeping, talking, farting… But I can’t keep that image in my head at the same time as watching the silver dart of the plane. Even its pollution looks otherworldly; beautiful.
But Michelle is still waiting for an answer. I mustn’t let on that I suspect. After all, it was me that found her.
***
I was in Christophe’s room at the time. The girls were elsewhere, watching some traffic camera TV show, so we had retreated to drink beer and listen to the radio—a neutral choice since neither of us liked each other’s CDs. It was supposedly night outside, but the on-campus lighting made it hard to tell. Every fourth or fifth light had a CCTV camera fitted—a hangover from some campus crime-wave that had never really abated, just become the accepted norm. Christophe had left his curtains open, and so every so often you’d see one of those cameras rotate, an unnerving reminder of the human hand behind the lens. Or is it just software? It worries me, when you see them move; I know I would have more of a sense of humour if I was adjusted, rather than this itchy feeling of being watched.
We were talking, Christophe and I, about the future, a vague but compulsive topic that has much occupied the paranoid parts of my mind recently. After all, there are just over two terms left, and then this degree course that I took as a stopgap measure (not knowing what else to do with my life) will be over. Barring catastrophe, I will achieve an honourable result in a course that leaves me fit for no job, except to teach similar courses. Of course, the lecturers would argue that employability is not the be all and end all of knowledge, and I would agree. But I still have no idea what to do with my life, and this thought makes me feel both desperate and apathetic—looking ahead, my life just disappears into a black-hole in nine months time, unknown and unobservable to anyone outside the periphery, including myself.
Christophe however, has it all sorted out. Or rather, his dad has—Christophe’s father is high-up in some faceless corporation, one whose actions would no doubt be stained and corrupt with oil, if I could be bothered to look them up. And so Christophe has all the money he needs—he is a student but he has savings; he has shares for fuck’s sake. He already has contacts among his dad’s friends in the city, which will guarantee him a foot on the rung of a very tall ladder when he graduates. So Christophe doesn’t want to talk about the future, or its attendant worries in my mind. Christophe wants to talk about girls.
“You know Grace likes you,” he says, opening another beer.
“Fuck does she,” I say. “She likes Michelle.” Christophe laughs because it’s true, sometimes the way Grace admires Michelle borders on infatuation: the way she follows her around, copies what she does, always harmonizes… But I doubt she actually fancies her.
Does she fancy me? It would be typical if she does—since the holidays started we have all been spending too much time together in these deserted halls, isolated by their perceived emptiness and the grey winter outside (I have started to feel an odd unease stepping outside, a sense of vague uncertainty and lack of purpose. It is cold out there, but not as cold as it should be this time of year). And in our isolation we have played out our little micro-dramas of lust in different combinations: I want to sleep with Michelle; Christophe wanted to sleep with Michelle and then wanted to sleep with Grace; Grace wants to sleep with Michelle (maybe) and me. God knows who Michelle wants to sleep with.
“Seriously,” Christophe says, still on about the Grace thing.
“She isn’t my type,” I say, and she isn’t—not because of the way she looks or the way she is, but because the one clear idea I have of my future is that I want Michelle to be in it. Never mind that the Michelle-future is a pipedream, whereas a Grace-future might just possibly work out. I want Michelle in the same way I want things from the brightest, gaudiest adverts. “What’s Michelle going to do when she finishes?” I ask. “Has she said anything to you?”
“Nope—she’s a loser too,” Christophe says. Once Christophe has put you into one of his little mental boxes there is no easy way out, and I am frightened by the fact that he will no doubt attain a position of real power in this country, and yet he barely seems to know he’s born. He imagines he is slumming it with us sometimes, I feel, treating us as equals when at best we will be employees of people like him in the next world. It’s like an unconscious caste system in his head. But one that others share, and maybe they are right and maybe I am a loser, for I have yet to summon the energy to even go and see the university careers adviser. I have yet to work out what I would actually say.
Upstairs on the floor above us there is the sound of movement—other stowaways on this abandoned ship of ours. The radio takes a break from music for a brief, rushed news bulletin—the presenter sounds like she just wants to rattle through the headlines as quickly as possible (and admittedly they would be scary if you stopped to think about them). Only the traffic report is lingered over—all gridlock and overturned chemical lorries.
“Bloody fucking hippies,” Christophe says, apropos of an environmental protest march that is alleged to be blocking traffic. “Talk about shutting the door after the horse has bolted!” Do I have the right to feel angry with him when I am not there; have not contributed?
I get up to go to the bathroom. I’m halfway down the corridor when I hear a faint sound, almost a tapping sound. It is on the other side of the door that leads to the stairwells to the other floors. It gives me pause, for it doesn’t sound like one of the girls—when you live with people for awhile you can identify them by the sounds of their footsteps or whatever, but this sound is different. Is it the sound of something moving, something alive… is it trying to keep quiet?
Somewhat nervously I open the door and Michelle falls through. She had obviously been sprawled against it, at the bottom of the stairs; the sound I heard was her fingers scratching against the wood. There is blood spreading down her face from a wound to her head—so much of it and so bright that it looks like a bad special-effect to me, not something I am inclined to believe in. Her eyes are closed; I can see her lips moving. For a moment the shock is so great that I almost fall myself.
She has obviously fallen down the stairs, and I completely ignore all the advice they give you about people whose back might be broken—I try to move her, cradling her and lifting her up so that she is half-sitting, half-leaning against me. She is half-awake, woozy.
Michelle’s eyes flutter as they struggle to open; when they do she seems pleased to see me, in a vague sort of way—I can’t help the thought that it would be like this if we woke up together some morning: the slow coming to consciousness, the hazy pleasure of recognition… But my cries have alerted the others and suddenly they are both here—Christophe is calmly calling for an ambulance on his mobile; Grace is standing ineffectual, her face drained of what little colour it had. She is wringing her hands like it is her fault, like it has happened to her. But it is not Grace that I feel angry with but Christophe, for he is competently doing the things that I should have done.
Then Michelle’s grip tightens on me and I panic for a second, for the way she is holding me is suddenly desperate, clingy. But she is just trying to pull herself up to speak to me. I try to calm her, to tell her whatever she wants to say can wait, but she is insistent. Her breath is hot against my ear as she whispers into it, her voice husky like a seduction…
But I couldn’t tell what she said.
I couldn’t work it out, and now I have the nagging feeling that I have missed something important. I am sure she was herself then, Michelle, for that moment at least, with the same conviction that I feel that the person drinking tea in our communal kitchen isn’t someone I know. But she has just asked me if I am glad to have her back, and I say of course I am. I wish you’d never left, I say, and Michelle’s reflection smiles, slightly confused.
***
I leave the kitchen and find Christophe in the communal TV room, which is of course deserted. The whole room is a throwback to last century—all students have TVs in their rooms now. The TV here looks old-fashioned, redundant technology. The colours look off; the ratios are all wrong. Christophe has a large TV and no end of gadgets in his room, but here he is sprawled out across the sofa, as if enjoying the perversity of being alone in such a large room. He is watching 24hr news, and from the empty beer cans by his feet I can tell he must have watched the same looped bulletins over and over, which can’t be healthy. The sky framed in the window is darkening towards grey, and the planes are now only identifiable by their blinking lights.
I sit down next to him, practically on his legs until he reluctantly makes room. I know better than to ask for any of his beer.
“Listen,” I say. “I need to talk to you. It’s Michelle. Have you noticed…” I pull back on my words, on their insanity. How can I voice my concerns, when I know they must be ill-founded? But I need to tell someone, if only for them to laugh at me, to confirm I am a loon.
“It’s Michelle,” I say again, talking over the TV financials. “She’s different… I mean she doesn’t look different but she just is… different.” I am aware that my words aren’t quite satisfactory for what I have to express, but can find no others.
“Hallelujah,” Christophe says. “It’s about time.” He looks bored, unconcerned, still watching TV. I am somewhat taken aback, for this isn’t the reaction I expected.
“Huh?” I say. “You mean… You’ve noticed it too?”
“Course,” he says, then swears as static cloaks the screen for a second. “Months ago.”
Months ago—but that’s not right, that is before she went to hospital; before she fell. I don’t say this, but Christophe sees me looking at him.
“When I stopped fancying her!” he says loudly. “And now you don’t fancy her either, because now there’s you and Grace.” He grins evilly. “Of course she seems different, now you’re not blinded by her, after all these months, now you’ve got your head out of her arse.”
“No, that’s not it…”
But Christophe is half-drunk and insistent. He seems intent on the idea that me and Grace should get together. I realise it’s pointless to continue to talk to him, but I need to bring the conversation back to some kind of normality before I can leave. So I ask him when he stopped fancying Michelle…
“Well I still…,” he begins, blinking as if making an internal adjustment. “But she’ll never amount to anything mate! Not with all her… views. Getting in the way.” Just then his mobile rings, and I am glad. I don’t know why I am angry—because Michelle was being criticised, or because I know he was levelling some of the same criticism at me. But he is wrong—my ‘views’, such as they are, seem flimsy and ill-founded, unable to guide me. They don’t stop me buying things I don’t need, just make me uneasy afterwards.
Christophe leaves the room to take his call—he takes a number of such calls, secretive, but not like he doesn’t trust us. Just like there are certain things that you don’t talk about in front of children.
I sit and watch TV and try to relax. The beer has been left and now I help myself, gulping quickly even though it is better than the own-brand supermarket piss I am used to. I channel-hop but nothing on any of the stations suits my mood. After I have flipped round twice I feel somewhat numb. I make an effort to get up before I settle into an acceptance of something I don’t even want to watch. It is night outside by now, but the sky still seems the wrong colour; just like the ones on this brute of a TV.
I still need to talk to someone—Grace it is then. I will just need to get her alone, away from Michelle… away from the thing that isn’t Michelle I mean—I must remember to keep that distinction clear in my mind, or things will only get confusing. She still has that smile that sends tremors through me: the only sensations that have seemed unmediated recently. I must be wary, now that I know the truth about her, or recognise some of the lies at least.
I leave the TV room and see Christophe, quoting numbers down his mobile. He looks up at me and I realise if I go straight to find Grace he’ll believe his little theories. So I pretend to head to my room instead; but Michelle finds me first.
***
“Thank Christ for that,” she says. “I finally managed to shake her off.” For a moment I have no idea who she means, not with the confusing distinction of two Michelles in mind—who has thrown off whom? But then I realise she means Grace, and I shrug sympathetically.
“Ever since I got back she’s been following me,” Michelle says. She unconsciously raise a hand to touch her bandage (like she used to with her hair).
“She means well,” I say. “And she’s lonely. I mean, not just lonely because everyone else has left. Proper lonely.”
“I know but why me?” Michelle says. “Why do these people always fixate on me? I was thinking about this in hospital, and I decided I don’t need it. Thinking about a lot of things actually. I figured some stuff out.”
Her words unnerve me, perhaps because this little speech is the first time Michelle’s double hasn’t sounded like the real thing; the first time her words haven’t tallied with my memories. She seems genuinely annoyed as she speaks and I imagine a vein underneath her bandage, pulsing, like something independently alive.
“Like what other things?” I say, thinking: the hospital was where it happened, so maybe that’s where the clues lie. And I think, why didn’t we go and visit her, why couldn’t we escape these shipwrecked halls of residence even once, and go and see our friend in hospital? I have not thought this before, and I feel a chill, as if the conspiracy that I am caught up in is also one that I am unwittingly responsible for.
“Oh the future,” Michelle says, “things people have said.” Her tone is vague but the look on her face isn’t—she stares me straight in the eye. Things I have said? What have I ever said?
Michelle reaches out and takes my hand.
And I look down and think: there was a tan-line on your finger before. All summer you wore that plastic toy ring that some boy won for you at the fair, some guy we never even met but was obviously important to you, because despite the fact that you tried to laugh off the ring as plastic kitsch, and pass off your wearing of it as ironic, you keep pushing it up your finger because you were afraid it might slip off. And then one day it was gone, and the tan you’d got from your days outside in the sun was in contrast to the white that remained underneath. And that tan-line hadn’t yet faded, despite trips to the sun-bed when your student budget would allow it. But now when I look down at your hand it’s not there, not just faded but gone, your skin one-tone. As if you had been created afresh. Created anew from the original design, minus any blemishes that occurred later…
But even as I am thinking all this, even as I realise this is the first real proof—physical evidence—that these events and their significance aren’t all in my head—even as I am thinking this I am allowing Michelle to take my hand, and somewhat shyly lead me down the corridor to her room. She is still talking about some of the realisations she had in hospital after her blow to the head, but I am not listening because my heart is giddy. As Michelle fumbles the key one-handed into the lock, I look away and realise Grace is standing at the top of the corridor, watching us…
Grace, I think. I was on my way to find Grace. And not just because I wanted to explore my conspiracy with her, but because I am lonely; proper lonely. But Grace seems such a long way away at the other end of the corridor, and I am not sure which of us the look of accusation in her eyes is directed at anyway. She could just as well be mad with Michelle as me. My head is somewhat fuzzy from Christophe’s beer, and Michelle is talking about the future to me, and she isn’t even drunk (she isn’t allowed alcohol because of the pills) and I look away from Grace and allow Michelle to lead me into her bedroom; allow this even as I look at the hand that pulls mine again, and become convinced that this isn’t Michelle at all, and that I might actually be in danger.