Art: Siobhan McDonald
Content Note: Homophobic language, depictions of domestic abuse and chattel slavery
It’s only after John Fisher keeps Wyboston’s head underwater for the third time that Wyboston cracks.
“I can't tell you…” he wheezes.
Fisher makes to grab the wires around his wrists, to tip him forward again.
“But I can show you.” He’s gulping for air.
“No. Tell me.”
“I can't explain,” he pleads. The bruising around his mouth makes talking difficult. “I can only show you.”
“Show me, then.”
“I need to take you somewhere. The old clapboard church off the highway.”
“The Howling Church?”
He grunts, nods. “You heard it called that too. Untie me.”
“Karen?”
The hallway in their little house is uncharacteristically dark and silent. Fisher calls her name again, briefcase at his feet, cursing as he loosens his tie, tightening the knot in the process.
He flicks on the lights in the hall, stares up the stairwell as if something malevolent is waiting for him. Everything is as it should be in the bedroom, her nightgown under her pillow, her toothbrush in its stand in the bathroom, her case on top of the wardrobe. He doesn't know why he thought she packed her things and upped. It’s not as if he hit her again. Not really.
He considers the dark, silent kitchen, the pots up on the shelf, an incongruously cheerful cartoon character staring out from a cereal packet. The dark, silent kitchen where Karen should be frying his steak, but instead he’s got that damn cartoon tiger, its eyes following him…
He hurls the tumbler at it before he knows what he’s doing, watches the Frosted Flakes fall and scatter, watches the glass shatter against the tiles, as if it’s somebody else’s doing.
He sits in the overly air-conditioned anteroom in his shirtsleeves for an hour staring at the portraits of the Fuehrers: Hitler, Himmler, Doenitz. At the South Carolina Police Department’s carved eagle insignia. At its motto in German. When his name is called – as ‘Herr Fisher’ by a fat woman who follows up by calling him ‘John’, a combination of toadying to the regime and over-familiarity that makes his blood boil – he has difficulty in hiding his irritation. The police are sympathetic but wary. He gives the same details three times to three different people. He is told to wait forty-eight hours to file a missing persons report. Fisher thought that was only in movies.
“You called her parents?”
“Her father’s dead.”
“Her mother?”
“No.”
“Not dead, or you haven’t called.”
“Both. Karen’s not spoken to her in years.”
“Call her.”
“Like I say, Karen only has me.”
“Mr. Fisher. Please go home and call your wife’s mother.”
When he summons the courage, it comes as news to her. “How long has she been missing?”
“Two days.”
“Two days? Why didn't you call?”
“Because you haven't spoken in years. I”m calling now. Is she there, or isn't she?”
He puts the phone down.
When he next speaks to Calhoun and Lester, the officers assigned, the tone has changed.
“You sure she hasn't just left you?” Calhoun says, adjusting his tie. He’s the natty dresser.
“You not giving her what she needs, John?” Lester’s technique is to smile while he bullies you, so he thinks you don't notice. “You a fag, John?”
Calhoun follows Lester’s lead. “What did you do with her?”
So that’s it.
“People say you’ve got a temper. You got a temper, John?”
“If we find a body you’ll be charged.”
They think they’ve shaken Fisher. Only once do they come close, when a figure passes the frosted glass of their door dressed in a long black leather coat. The detectives exchange glances, and then smile grimly at Fisher in unison, the significance clear: one word from them and this all gets passed down the corridor, handed over to the SS.
Fisher knows he’s innocent, even if Calhoun and Lester’s focus is on proving otherwise. It’s down to Fisher to do what they won't: find Karen. His only clue, scrawled in a diary he didn't know she kept, in amongst libelous filth about him that bring grins to their faces: a name.
“What’s that mean?” Lester asks as Fisher watches them pore over their bedroom.
“Karen kept a diary?”
Lester pushes it closer to Fisher’s face. “Is it a person? A place? What? What does it mean? Her last entry, the day she went missing.”
Calhoun glances over the page, then at Lester, then at Fisher.
Fisher tells them he doesn't know because he doesn't. It’s clear as daylight the gumshoes don't believe him. He stares at the single word on that day’s entry, circled and underlined by Karen, his head shaking involuntarily, silently mouthing what’s on the page.
Wyboston.
There are five Wybostons in the county phonebook. It’s not a common name. A diner, an insurance broker, and three individuals.
Fisher hits the diner on the day and time shown in Karen’s diary, pressing her photo at people – “She had her hair shorter” – until the owner reminds him that, yes, he does mind him bothering his clientele. The coffee was all grounds, anyway. You can't get decent coffee since the War.
He discounts the insurance broker: anything financial would have shown up on the radar.
Next, he doorsteps the three local Wybostons figuring he’d catch a look when they saw her photo, heard her name.
“And you say your wife, what? Came here? Called me?”
“Somebody called Wyboston. That’s all I know.”
“We've family up Fiveways.”
“Or it may be a place.”
Christopher Wyboston leans on his stick – from his age Fisher guesses at war wounds – and hands back Karen’s photo from behind the screen door. “Sorry. But good luck.”
As he’s walking back to his car, crossing at a junction, wondering how far to cast the net, he sees her, taking her seat and staring through the teardrop window at the Greyhound’s rear. She is one of the last passengers and the bus is already pulling away, sliding past, Karen just staring out the window. Her gaze washes over her husband, through him. She registers no surprise or shock, as if he’s just another sidewalk stranger.
Karen may not have showed any astonishment, but Fisher’s feet stick fast, his eyes bulge, and his jaw drops. Any rate, that’s how it feels.
He runs after its receding rear, the bus going through the gears and belching cloying oily smoke. Breathless and defeated, his arms sag. Then he remembers his car is just a block behind.
Ten minutes later he catches sight of the Greyhound, a dozen or so vehicles ahead, at a junction as it turns out into traffic. It dawns on Fisher it’s not going to stop before the next town.
He leans on the horn, willing the lights to change. Other drivers glance his way, confused at commotion without cause. Swinging from his lane, he clips a fender. Shouting – all of it directed at him – but he’s not listening. Automotive flesh wound, not worth stopping over.
He pushes into traffic. Horns blare. Brakes squeal. He hasn't lost the bus.
He overtakes one, two, three cars, swinging out against oncoming traffic. Lights flash from on-coming vehicles, anger flares from the horns of those behind. But Fisher wants it more.
Luck takes another two vehicles out, ponderously turning off the highway as he leans on the horn to scurry them along. He sweeps past a flatbed and then he’s behind the bus, that wall of burnished aluminum with high-set glazing, that gum-smiling advert kid bearing down at him like the Mitchell rear-gunner he once was. He pulls out to get ahead and swerves straight back to the sound of a Mack’s air-horn, its banshee wail changing as the rig sweeps past.
Dry-mouthed, he tries again, finding the road ahead clear. Dropping down a gear the car shakes, strains, screams, but he’s sliding past the bus, past baffled faces turning to watch.
Out in farmland now, fenced fields, scattered trees, houses and barns built off the highway in the same style. Narrow scrub verges with drainage ditches a yard or two out. No margin for error. Two hundred yards ahead a timber-framed station-wagon wallows out from a farm track and on to the highway, heading straight at him.
It must have seen him, Fisher reasons.
It keeps on coming.
Fisher is alongside the bus driver.
The station-wagon keeps on looming.
The Greyhound driver is glaring at Fisher, panicked, angry, incredulous.
Fisher pulls in. Horns blare. He senses rather than sees the station wagon veer, swerve, mount the verge and then fishtail back on to the blacktop. All his focus is on the grille of the bus, the maker’s name, in his rear-view mirror.
He brakes.
The bus blares its horn, tries to pull past.
The dull thud-crunch of metal on metal, of vehicle on vehicle, of bus on car, smacks the air from Fisher’s lungs. The next thing he remembers is standing at the back of the bus shouting at Karen who stares back at him, mouth agape, eyes confused and terrified, wanting the seat to swallow her up. He knows he’s shouting but he can't hear the words. He’s pushing the bus driver, a wiry Black man with salt and pepper hair, back towards his seat as he shouts.
It’s then he sees the blood, a lot of blood, dripping from his forehead on to the bus floor.
It stops him dead.
He feels curious, hot and cold and clammy. There’s a taste in his mouth like he’s been licking battery contacts.
He thinks he’s going to throw up.
He passes out instead.
It takes a great effort to convince the police who arrest him that they should be talking to their colleagues investigating Karen’s disappearance. He’s left in an interview room, cold walls painted sallow yellow, high windows with wire-reinforced opaque glass. Just a table, three chairs and Fisher, his head in bandages straight out of a monster movie. He sits and waits, finding it hard to think of reasons not to throw the chairs against the windows.
Calhoun enters, scanning notes in a manila file. Lester follows, wearing a sports jacket. They’re halfway through a joke, something about a wristwatch. Fisher is like a distraction to them.
“That was Karen on that bus,” Fisher begins, but Calhoun stops him.
“Does your wife speak Serbo-Croat?”
Fisher looks at him like he’s gone nuts.
“We had to get a translator. And only after we found out what she was speaking. The woman on the bus speaks Serbo-Croat. And practically no English. She’s not Karen.”
“That was Karen,” Fisher protests, but quietly, his head shaking with disbelief.
“You know what a doppelganger is?” asks Lester.
“Is he in line to be Fuehrer?”
“No, it’s your double. And maybe that woman was Karen’s double. But it wasn’t Karen.”
His head hurts. His throat feels dry. He wants to sleep. He wants everything to stop. He doesn't protest, but deep, deep down he knows it was Karen.
“Odd thing,” Calhoun adds, with a curious note to his voice, “She thinks it’s 1986. And,” as if it couldn't get odder, “she says America won the war, and Ronald Reagan is president. She’s under observation.”
Lester laughs. “I”d ask her where we went wrong, but I can't speak the language.”
It was only after he’s bailed and released and is cradling a jigger of whiskey in his cold kitchen, that he remembers the blindingly obvious. This Serbo-Croat so-called doppelganger: she was wearing Karen’s dress. Christopher Wyboston lived just a short walk away from the bus stop where the woman had caught the Greyhound. It was too much of a coincidence.
Through the screen door Fisher sees Christopher Wyboston’s face telegraph his train of thought. First, irritation: it’s late. Then confusion: Fisher looks familiar, but the dressing around his head obfuscates. He takes a moment to place him. Realization is followed swiftly by sour regret at having shown himself, and an understanding that the game is up. That leaves fear.
That does it for Fisher. That’s confirmation. He pulls the screen door open and shoulders his way through the front door, bundles Wyboston down to his own cellar. He doesn't care who’s seen him or who else is at home. They’ll be dealt with.
Fisher drives. Wyboston sits in the back. His wrists wired to the window-winder, he’s no threat.
Wyboston directs them to the derelict church, with its peeling shingled sides, in a wood of willowy trees. The Howling Church. Fisher knows it by sight and reputation but would have missed the hidden turning, particularly in the dark. It’s a modest structure, like a model of a church rather than the real thing; a spire that’s little more than a dozen or so tapered planks joined like a child’s teepee, a space for a window missing its glass. It would have been bright white once, but now the paint’s all faded and crumbling, becoming as one with the trees. Nobody would know the church was there unless shown. Or the road, come to that. A hundred yards off the highway and they could have been a hundred miles from other people. Twice Fisher had to get out to pull fallen branches away.
They pull up as close to the building as possible.
“In there,” Wyboston says flatly, resigned.
“What is?”
“I need to show you.”
“Karen came here?”
“Yes.”
“Just you and her?”
“Yes.”
“Is she in there?”
“No.”
“Then what are you showing me?”
He glares at Fisher, his way of telling him to just go and look at whatever it is.
Fisher snips the wires and, stickless, Wyboston lurches to the steps. By the way he doesn't need to test them for strength, that he knows where to tread, it’s obvious he’s been here before. Unguided, Fisher fears his foot going straight through rotten wood at any moment.
“Slaves built this,” Wyboston says. He leads the way, pushing open doors on hinges that need oiling. Fisher’s eyes adjust. He shivers. There’s a smell of damp.
Inside are a dozen rows of pews either side of an aisle, angled in to focus on the raised platform. Where a pulpit would normally be, there’s a vertical shape instead, like a house door, just standing on its own, covered with a cloth. The one aberration, the one out-of-place object. Wyboston nods towards it.
Fisher sweeps the covering aside. Underneath stands a mirror, the height and width of a man, like in a tailor’s shop. Except any respecting tailor wouldn't want one in that condition: faded and chipped, the silver behind the glass foxed.
Wyboston slumps into a pew, staring at Fisher through near-closed eyes, his energy drained. “It’s called the King of China’s Mirror,” he says, as if that explains everything.
Fisher waits for more.
“There was a philosopher called Leibnitz in the seventeenth century. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He said, suppose there was some way you could become the King of China. Because there was – is – no King of China. But, in his thought experiment, it’s not that you become the King of China. It’s as if there’s always been a king, with memories of growing up as a prince, not some sadistic asshole…”
Fisher makes a move.
“You’re gonna kill me anyway,” Wyboston spits.
“So, there’s now a King of China? What’s this got to do with Karen?”
“Leibnitz’s point was that the situation’s exactly the same as if you had ceased to exist and a King of China had just magicked into the world.”
Is he mocking me? Fisher thinks. After all he’s put him through, has Wyboston led him here as some cosmic joke? “Do you get to be king or not?”
“Leibnitz’s argument was that you’re you, all the hopes and dreams and memories that make you you. It’s a physical thing. You can't just be unplugged and slotted into another body. The King of China is the King of China, and you are you. He thought there could be no King of China’s mirror. He was wrong. There it is.” Wyboston sits back, spent.
Fisher is confused. “So what?”
“It’s called philosophy,” Wyboston says airily. “I wouldn't expect you to understand.”
“And Karen?”
Wyboston considers the mirror warily. “They call this church the Howling Church. It is full of spirits. Souls detached from their bodies, who only now exist in the ether.”
“Ghosts?” Fisher’s mind is going like two bareknuckle boxers, one trying to work through the logic of mirrors and detached souls, the other pummeling its face in, screaming what the fuck’s this got to do with Karen?
“That’s one name we have for them. I don't know how the mirror came to exist or how old it is. Or by what magic it works. But it allows your soul to slip free into another body and one of the lost souls here to take yours. You become somebody else. You keep your memories and character – your soul, but in another’s body, in another era, perhaps even in another place. This is not the only mirror. That is the howling that gives this church its name. The loose souls – the ghosts, to use your word – fighting for your body. Your soul joins them and fights for its own body. I’ve heard it. Frightful. Brief, but frightful.”
Fisher considers the mirror, considers the man. “Did you make all this horseshit up on the drive up, or just since we got in here?”
Wyboston’s suddenly petulant, like a child. “Your wife came to me for help. To get away from you. She was panicked. I think its patently obvious why. I didn't wholly believe what she said about you. Now, I think she left a lot out.”
“And you’re saying she went through the looking-glass, and this Serbo-Croat, this Slav, went the other way?”
“Yes… No. Your wife could be anywhere, any time. Alternative future. Alternative past. She may still be in the ether, fighting for a body, or she may have emerged through another mirror in another place. She’s not necessarily in the body of the woman whose soul now occupies her body.”
Fisher can't contain himself any longer and explodes with laughter. Under the bandages it makes his head hurt. “Have you heard yourself?”
He’s more determined than ever that Christopher Wyboston should die, bloodily and slowly, regardless of whether he reveals what happened to Karen. “Even if this were true – which it isn't – why would anybody do this?”
“Because their situation is so desperate, they would do anything to escape.” His eyes meet Fisher’s. “Like your wife.”
That does it. Fisher steps towards him, determined that if he can kill him with one blow, he will.
“You don't believe me?” Wyboston glances at the floor, at the silvery light angling in through the glassless window-frame, at the shadows. “It’s almost time.”
“Time?” Fisher mocks him to continue.
“When the moonlight strikes the glass…”
“And that’s when…”
“Yes. Anybody stood before it…”
Laughing at him, Fisher mimes a vanishing, puff of smoke and all. “And you’re asking for the chance to escape, is that it?” he asks. “Prove this horseshit is gospel by playing Alice and going down the rabbit hole?”
Wyboston shakes his head, looks at Fisher like he hasn't been listening. “Not me. It has a greater power than anything you can imagine,” he says with fear in his voice.
The moonlight is glinting on the old gilt frame. In a moment it will hit the glass itself. This will be good, Fisher chuckles to himself. He’ll stand before it and prove it’s nothing but a lousy mirror. Then he’ll smash it and slice Wyboston open with its shards. He’ll wrap his hands with a handkerchief to save cutting himself and slash and stab. Across his arms and face. He’ll take his fingers…
He covers his ears, the screaming taking him by surprise, like a punch to the gut when you think you’re alone. It’s not Wyboston. It’s not anyone here. It’s everywhere and nowhere, a hollow shrieking, screeching that drops you to your haunches.
When he rises, it’s cold. The July heat has gone. The moonlight is now on the opposite side of the glass. How did that happen?
He spins round. No Wyboston. The church is all wrong. The same church, but different. The smell of smoke. Rough hessian mats for knees. A pile of bibles on a shelf. Hymn numbers hanging, white on black.
In the distance, a commotion. Dogs. Men shouting. Coming closer.
He looks down.
His hands are black. Small.
His breathing is shallow and scared.
He’s wearing a thin shift of grey cotton.
His feet are naked. Small feet.
He looks in the mirror, the same mirror but pristine and clear.
He leans in. His face, wide-eyed. Thin, underfed. Lank hair hanging to his shoulders.
He moves his hands, but they are not his hands. He feels them touching his cheek, but it is not his cheek.
The door bursts open. Men with flaming torches enter, their faces twisted in the flickering light. The muzzles of dogs push between their legs, their growling suddenly loud.
One steps forward. Fisher can't quite believe what he is wearing: a frock coat, necktie and derby hat. He hands his brand to a man behind him, strolls towards the small Black girl that Fisher now is, grinning. He unbuckles his belt and pulls it – slap, slap, slap – through his beltloops.
One of the lynch mob in the shadows laughs, a malicious cackle, anticipating what he knows is about to come.
The man is almost upon Fisher. Fisher instinctively winces. He knows this newcomer has power over him.
“Nancy, you’re going to pay this time. Upon my word, you’re going to pay. My dogs will eat well tonight.”
* * *
Robert Bagnall was born in Bedford, England, in 1970. He has written for the BBC, national newspapers, and government ministers. His sci-fi thriller 2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth, and anthology 24 0s & a 2, which collects 24 of his sixty-odd published stories, are both available from online shops. He can be contacted via his blog at meschera.blogspot.com.