being inside your mind is the best thing I have ever experienced
Fairy lights and glowing snowmen mark the waypoints up Guywood Lane, then right on Marsden Road past a crippled bungalow. The wind tugs at your rucksack. Your shoes are a little too slight for this job. You feel sharp and watery. You feel old, and very young. Under the black sky, your mind has dislodged – if only by one half of an inch – from its usual resting place. The air is singing.
Silhouettes line the hilltop. They are behind the last row of semi-detacheds, standing over their attic extensions; dark grey on cyroluminous black. They are tree branches forking almost logically; runic, and they’re striving, hissing in the wind like breaking waves. Cloud cover buries the stars. As if the night were some strange tunnel.
Onward. Curving the highest bend; five steps for every geiger click. In passing, you survey the houses. Eyeballing out of habit. Occupancy clung on downhill, because of council intervention on the main roads. Up here it has haemorrhaged. There’s minimal fortification. Where residents persist, decorations are out. Their lights are on. You can see into all four corners of the occasional living room. Teal. Minimal white. Hazy pink. Hunting lodge, which is your cup of tea. Others have opened to the elements. And there’s the sound of whipping and twisting blended in the howling, singing air – it’s jacks and georges in various states of decay.
You pause. Your first pause tonight. One slow inward breath. Then you turn to gaze downhill. Southeast. A shredded crosshatch of lights contour the landscape up to what must be Marple, then outward along the string-bead highways. Larger, corporate buildings reflect strange colours on remnant floodwater. Of course the Tangshutt Canteen is pincushioned with headlights –meaning good cover for your work tonight, because a delivery from one of the portal farms must be arriving. There’s even a train moving slowly down the Hope Valley line. Watching it crawl recalls the mute trickle of scree at the back of your mother’s garden, before she began hopping you from home to home. The little daisies growing through crackles in the concrete. Traipsing rabbits. You shake off the memories; not easily. Then you pull out your Home Office contractor phone – basic, disconnected, and in any case thoroughly enshittified by your US handlers – to review the assignment.
12 Nell Lane by Amen Corner. Reports indicate anthropoid. Woman.
You recheck your map screenshot. Nearly there now. You flick out your Parasite device. No messages. VPN running. Location scrambled. Nobody can afford enough staff to check or chase you, but still.
You catch a figure backlit in a window over the road. Against your better judgement, you steal a glance and hold it. She’s a granny in a white wool jumper. She’s watching you. Or perhaps she has also found pause to take in the black night. Perhaps, even through double glazing, she can taste the wind as you do. The unearthly howling.
You invent a story of how she clung here despite everything, just for the morning view. Coffee in the attic extension window, surveying her ruinous vista in gold. You know the story comforts you because it imagines how you would like to live, and transposes those priorities into another. It’s narcissism. You curse yourself quietly and try to think less – to return to the deep feeling the dark suburb instills in you.
Onward, along the main hilltop strip. Santa and his reindeer glimmer on a rooftop overhead. And on the next: five windswept penguins. And more red green rainbow lights planted in the immediate gardens. A small citadel. Residents, clustering? Or one zealot parent colonising empty lawns? What a strange time to be a child.
Hard to imagine watching the civil war from the window of a pastel blue bedroom. Who cried for milk when the Cheshire Line broke? Who packed their stiff plastic rucksack full of cotton to follow daddy on the last flight to Dubai? People at Parasite talk sometimes about the Gulf convoys, in the context of torpedoing them. The various ‘Little Londons’ are another punching bag. You get it. You are not a hand-wringer anymore.
“The one percent never go through the portals.” You say it now and then. You hear it most days. You know it’s the echo of an older rallying cry. It’s becoming a cliche. Another, more modern favourite: “For rent: infinite space.”
Amen Corner is laid out with wreaths and flowers and the noticeboard has burst its banks. You don’t recognise the faces pinned here. On most of the printouts, the ink has streaked to blend the disparate aspects of each face downward. A minority enjoying airtight lamination are preserved and human but nobody looks familiar to you. You do not know whether Amen Corner’s name predates their deaths and disappearances. Onward.
Nell Lane is not long. Number 12 is near the end. It is the only house on this little tuckaway thread with any lights on. At every window the curtains are at least cracked, and the driveway gate is wide open. The front door is locked. Tick. Tick, says the geiger counter. You flick it off. The gate in the back garden fence is locked too. You scramble over and drop. And stumble. You’re no slouch, but you’re not James Bond.
The lawn extends further back than the light spilling from upstairs can penetrate, but you go for the door, which looks several renovations behind the rest of the exterior, bearing stippled glass at eye level. The key, which is in the lock, is pleasant to grip. When you turn it and pull, two parakeets fly at your head then swerve. You spin to follow. Their mint feathers glow, just
for one second, before receding into the night. You shiver.
And shut the door behind you. There is a thick, sweet smell in here. You recognise it from the homes of childhood friends. On recurring visits it was always there. Always in their homes; never in your own – this same scent. If it could be bottled, you’d buy it. For keeps, as a safeguard against decades of loss, you think, and the notion almost brings you to quiet tears. But you control yourself.
In any case, nobody charges to confront you. And there’s a sound to trace: television. The asinine chattering. The inane filler music. They lead you right to the interloper. She is female, as the brief said. And she is sleeping. Only her head protrudes from the duvet she has gathered over herself on the living room sofa (which is imitation leather). On the flatscreen, a charming bald man, now dead, is guiding hetero hippies through a barn. Swooshing summerwear. It must be the south, decades ago. The dead baldie is verbose. He’s offering suggestions. Meanwhile the eyes of the anthropoidess under the blanket flicker. And then they flicker at you. She’s bleary.
After some ten empty seconds, you open with “Hello.”
“Hello,” she answers, and lets her eyes fall shut again.
“Wake up,” you try, and she repeats this too, starting one instant before you finish.
With interlopers, you really can’t assume anything.
So you sit, claiming the unoccupied space by her feet. You watch the television until its barn becomes an airy home with a fine valuation, and the talkative bald man hugs each of the spangly yuppies, who – after trying not to – cry. In the wrap-up they restate the location and a map zooms out. It’s a place which was, famously, lit up in a thermobaric strike. There was a horrid picture of a burned girl that still circulates. Seeking escape, you steer your mind to the wind beyond the walls. It won’t stick, but the woman saves you by speaking.
“Who are you?” she asks, this time with open eyes. She’s shuffling upright as you consider your answer. You could present yourself as nobody: an intruder, perverse or curious. There is poetic truth there. Or a freelancer, because that’s half true and more literal. Or a different half-truth: that you are a representative from one of your employers. Committing for Parasite is probably the best play, and because it’s been a good year of secure income and cover for you, you can afford to (silently) give the finger to the Home Office.
Furthermore, you only feed the dangerous cases to the government. Or at least, the ones who leave a dangerous impression. Sleeping Beauty here… does not.
But despite all that thinking or perhaps because of it, you stall.
“Your birds escaped,” you note. Of course, those were not her birds. You can see her working to form a response. It seems difficult for her but this is normal. They are often sleepy. Home Office documentation says it is a recurring genetic characteristic. There’s no citation. Parasite lore contradicts this – you’re told there that it’s a form of jet lag.
“Who are you?” she eventually asks. Again. She shuffles further upright, and when the blanket drops slightly you can see she’s taken the former residents’ clothes – what you’d call a granny nightie. Long and warm. Interlopers don’t tend to arrive carrying much so are prone to take, and to adapt. Some with ease. Some are clearly muddling through.
“Put simply, I’m good news.”
“Good news.” She chews the words.
“Look at it this way. Have you had any other visitors?”
“Visitors…”
“Yes. Specifically, anyone scary?”
She shakes her head. “Nobody scary.” She’s gazing into you as one might the television. Which is now introducing an even more naive rerun. The bald man looks a lot younger. But he’s still bald.
“Good. But. Sadly it won’t last. The government hates you by default, and are going to purchase your location data from the Americans who own all the wires in this part of England. I would say, thanks to general inefficiencies, that you have about one week before you get dissected. But the good news that I mentioned is: you’re speaking to a rat. The Home Office, their little helpers – they pay me, but I’m not loyal.”
“So what?” the woman asks. An encouragingly productive question.
“So let’s get you out of here. I know drivers. I know pencil pushers. I can set you down a relay that will bag you a place in society, if you want it. Or, we can try to get you back home without losing any organs.”
She shares a sad smile. You fight a fidget. It’s no secret to yourself: this part of the job is your weak spot. The conversations. The circular, pissing persuasions.
“Look. You’ll be mince in a bag if you don’t play ball. So how about it?”
“I won’t go back,” she says, returning the blanket to her chin. She’s older than you, rendering the gesture mildly disturbing. Posed thusly, she reminds you of a childhood friend. Long before pubescence. Once there was a powercut, and your mothers shared a mutual panic in the kitchen while the pair of you giggled together in the dark upstairs. And the awkwardness of this present scene: you, a woman, blanket. It sets you thinking of old trysts from the apps. The adult sleepover for the adrift. The dissolute. You gave that up long ago. The threshold for safety has risen like floodwater since, and the freaks are everywhere. You are probably one of them.
“You won’t go back. So it’s society for you.”
“Yes.” She nods.
“Okay,” you nod back. “I give everyone this disclaimer before we commit: you have arrived in a terrible world. One with no prospects, run by criminals, in which you will be a target if anyone ever learns you arrived via portal, which – despite my contacts’ best work – could happen.”
She’s quite deadpan when she replies. “You said I have a week left before they come for me.”
“I did,” you concede. “Switching your location before then, without my help, is an option. But it’s a temporary fix.”
At that, she rises, pulling the blanket with her. It trains behind her as she departs for the hallway. You follow, leaving the television to entertain itself. She is borderline regal as she ascends the stair. You tail her right up to the balcony in the largest bedroom. It’s the same haunting view of Romiley – the nightscape, the howling windtunnel, the runic branches unseen but still singing so loud that you heard them from the landing. This view, it would be quite perfect, were it not for the rooftops and chimneys of number 8 and 10. The woman is sitting on the cold stone when you reach her. She’s huddled in her blanket. You crouch next to her and she looks at you.
“Your birds got out,” you tell her for the second time, because it’s something to say.
She only blinks.
Onward. “There are actually wild colonies of them out there, getting bigger every year. Once I saw a buzzard dive and pluck a – ”
“I have been alive for thirty thousand years”, she interrupts. “I began life as a plant, then was harvested and lived without a body. Then was distilled from gas to be placed in a human form among the middle class of a slave world. A very small middle class, where every newborn spare those of the few rulers receives surgical debilitations upon birth.”
You struggle for a response. All interlopers are wildcards – you know that. And yet, you forget. “So your coming here is an upgrade. But you must have been around. You must have seen a few Earths.”
She grants you another of her sad smiles. “There are… uncountable planes. Most are run as farms or hunting grounds. All are worse than this one.”
You find it easy to believe, and that’s tragic. “You missed the best times. Portals only opened after.”
She beckons and pulls the blanket around you both when you lower yourself to obey.
She’s warm. You’re warm. And you are at the end of a very long day. There’s another train on the Hope Valley line now, crawling the other way. She tells you about a few of the worlds. There’s a story about traversing wheat fields every day for one month under blood red cumulus clouds that sends you back into a childhood memory of your own, in an open rust yellow field that felt at the time just as large. Stupid thought. Stupid dream. It draws you in. Far off, the air is still singing and shredded flags are still flapping. Far away, the television is still talking. She places a hand across your face with one thumb hooking into your ear, pushing you deeper into sleep, and then carries you and the blanket to the bedroom floor. There in her granny nightie she lays atop you, and begins to eat you.
And you awake on the balcony, cocooned side by side, to the steady tick of the geiger counter. You flick it off and prod her until she stirs. Extricate yourself from the duvet. Downstairs you salvage and stitch together two mugs of instant coffee, and back on the balcony, breathing in their sweetened steam, you describe the first safehouse. Where it will be. How you’ll get there. She agrees to it all, and you leave Nell Lane together on foot. Striding down Sandy Lane, kicking aside detritus, you relay an update to Parasite and snap a photo of her for evidence. You get the same deadpan expression. The strange interloper is a
blank slate. But your dreamlike daze – and your self-satisfied despair – are gone.
Angus Stewart writes strange stories and essays that have found home in publications including Necksnap, Big Other, Ab Terra, and Typebar. He hails from Dundee, lives in Stockport, and ran the Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast for five years. angusstewart.myportfolio.com/work
Leave a Reply