by Tom Johnstone
That Autumn brought spider webs that stuck to your face whenever you went outside. One warm Sunday, I was rooting around in the shed at the bottom of the garden. It was full of junk left by the previous tenants: two rusting lawn mowers and a fridge partly wrapped in a black bin bag, as if someone had half-heartedly tried to bag it to put out with the rubbish.
And there was the machine I found under a ragged, blue tarpaulin.
Dad said it must be some sort of printer, but it looked too old somehow. There didn’t seem to be a way to plug it into anything. There was a handle shrouded in cobwebs. Unlike the other things in there, it wasn’t all brown with rust. It was a sort of mottled grey, speckled with yellow and green flecks, like that stuff you see on old grave stones.
“Is that lichen, Dad?” I asked, trying to impress.
“Lichen, David,” he corrected me. I’d said ‘lit-chen’. He pronounced it ‘lie-ken’.
“What does it say on it?”
“Let’s see, shall we?”
He brushed the cobwebs away from the letters carved into the stony surface, scattering spiders and their spongy egg sacs all over the rotten floor of the shed.
“The Quickener,” he read. “Quickener,” he said again. “Quickens what?”
Above the thing’s slit mouth were smaller letters. His finger traced them. Dad’s pointing finger was long and sharp, but now it looked blurred by the bits of web sticking to it.
“Feed image in here,” he read slowly. “Then wait.”
“Look, Dad—those other carvings. What d’you think they mean?”
He frowned then, and said: “I’ve no idea, David.”
“Have you seen it before, Dad?”
“No. Never seen it.” His voice was curt.
He stared at the symbols for a bit longer, then said:
“Time for a tea break, I think, mate. All this dust is making me feel rather thirsty.”
The chumminess act usually meant there was something he didn’t want to talk about.
Over the tea and biscuits, I asked him: “D’you think Mum would like to see it—the Quickener?”
He paused in the act of dunking his digestive.
“No, mate.”
“Will she ever come out of her room?”
He put the half soggy biscuit down.
“People respond to grief in different ways, Son. Personally, I prefer to keep busy. Mum’s not like that.”
“Is that why I’m not allowed in there to see her.?”
He just nodded, then got on with whatever he did to keep himself busy.
I preferred to keep busy too.
So the following afternoon I sneaked into the shed after school with a photo of Emily, taken a month before she died. Dad was still at work. Mum was still in bed. I knew what to do. The Quickener told me. Carefully I fed the picture of my baby sister into the machine’s mouth, and waited. The mouth looked dark and wet as it sucked the paper in.
Nothing happened.
Eventually I got cold, hungry, tired of sitting in the damp, dusty shed, and went back inside.
I forgot about it until I awoke to the sound of crying.
Sometimes I thought I heard crying like this from Mum’s room, but the sounds were usually faint enough for me to convince myself I was imagining it.
Not this.
It was drifting into my bedroom through the open window, which looked out onto the garden. The warm, still, Indian summer weather had broken that evening, and the wind was bringing in the sound in waves, along with squally flurries of rain that pattered on the panes. It could have been a fox, I suppose. It had that strange, half-human, keening quality. But I knew it was a baby. I knew it was Emily. I peered out through the curtain, and saw the flickering, white line of torchlight in the thin slit left by the shed door in the darkness.
I noticed that Dad’s boots were not in their usual spot by the back door. I put my own boots on, and walked slowly out across the darkened garden towards the shed. The noise of crying was a rope guiding me through the wet, howling blackness. It was just the way Emily had screamed, in the days and nights before they took her tiny corpse away. I wondered if Mum was awake and listening to the noise.
“David,” he said, when I finally opened the ramshackle, wooden door, his voice hoarse.
But all I could see was Emily, or something that looked just like her, cradled in his arm. By now the screams had reached a fever pitch, enough to wake the dead: it seemed as if the shed’s flimsy panels were shaking with them.
And yet there was something not quite right about her, and it wasn’t just that her face was red and blotchy from crying. My father could see the confusion and unease in my face. He rocked the baby until it was quiet, then then explained:
“It’s not Emily.” He paused, sighed. “It’s a copy, mate. I might as well tell you now . . . I tried making a few myself, just after she died. This machine’s some sort of weird 3D printer, but it can print things that are alive from 2D images. Or things that were alive . . .”
He must have done the same as I did, then covered the machine up again under the ragged, blue tarpaulin, left it to the spiders’ webs, pretended not to know what it was when I found it, said he’d never seen it before.
“I’m sorry,” he added. “I should have told you the truth from the start.”
He’d lied to me. I’d suspected it from the way he’d been acting when we’d discovered it, but I still remember the empty feeling of disappointment in the pit of my stomach now this was confirmed. It was one thing avoiding certain subjects, leaving certain things unsaid, but this level of deception from him was a new one on me.
“I knew what you’d been up to,” he continued, “when I saw the photo was missing.”
He pulled the soggy photo from the machine’s maw, wiping sticky fluids off it from it with the back of his coat sleeve.
Even now, I still wonder if he meant me to find it.
“Still,” he continued, picking up the baby, “you’ve done a better job than I did. You’ve obviously got a way with this machine, mate. This is the best one yet. Mum might not even notice the difference.”
He was rocking the baby, calming her, shushing her cries. Basking in the rare glow of his approval, my disappointment temporarily forgotten, I asked:
“What do you mean, Dad?”
“Let’s take ‘Emily’ to see Mum, and I’ll show you.”
I beamed at him. I could tell I’d passed some sort of test, by operating the printer or ‘Quickener’ or whatever it was, or perhaps by hiding my upset at his dishonesty.
“You mean I can go inside Mum’s room now?”
“I think you’re old enough now, Son. Here, you hold her.”
The baby’s alien, black eyes gazed up at me, just like in the photograph.
I was nervous as he led me up the stairs to the door that had been closed to me for a year. What did he mean ‘old enough’? The wind was making Mum’s bedroom door rattle in the frame now, and it might have been its moaning that I could hear from behind it.
I don’t know what I expected to see. But I hadn’t expected to see one cot, let alone three.
“Hello, David,” said Mum, holding something I at first took for an oddly-shaped hot water bottle tucked under her coverlet.
She looked so much older than I remembered. But then I hadn’t seen her for a year.
“David’s brought someone to see you, Mary. We might be needing another cot.”
Only two out of the three cots were occupied, and only one of the creatures inside could be making the mewling I could no longer pretend was the wind or my imagination. The face that had a mouth was kind of lop-sided, as if it was built out of poorly lined-up tiers like a many layered wedding cake that had gone wrong. The other one didn’t have a mouth or even a face. It was just a pair of legs really. Beyond these it dissolved into a jumble of fleshy spaghetti, a pink 3D version of the angry, black scribbles I used to draw.
But the third cot was empty.
“Sorry, mate, I should have warned you about this,” said Dad, studying my reaction. “Some of the copies I made must have been corrupted or something.”
He directed my eyes with his look to where the ‘hot water bottle’ was writhing under Mum’s coverlet. I could just make out a stringy scrap of mouth sucking at her, making rubbery sounds. Her eyes were closed with what looked to me at the time like dreamy bliss, though I now think it might have been exhaustion.
She smiled and listened to Dad explaining how clever I’d been to get the machine working. But when she opened her eyes and looked from the copy I’d made to the glitched versions she’d been nursing all these months, her smile looked more and more thin and wan with every passing minute.
Tom Johnstone’s fiction has appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including the Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Black Books of Horror, Brighton—The Graphic Novel, Wicked Women, and Strange Tales V, Supernatural Tales, and Shroud Magazine. In addition he co-edited the British Fantasy Award-nominated austerity-themed anthology Horror Uncut: Tales of Social Insecurity and Economic Unease with the late Joel Lane. He lives with his partner and two children in Brighton, where he works as a gardener for the local authority. Find out more about Johnstone’s fiction at: www.tomjohnstone.wordpress.com.