The Mercury Thief
He wasn't prepared for this.
Vee was lifted from his sleep by the sound of his Mother’s heels, knocking on the floorboards downstairs. She was leaving for work. Keys jangled. The front door opened and closed. The click clacking ebbed from earshot. As always, Vee’s first thought was of his Mother, his real mother at least. The only memories he had of her were soft edged. Big thumbs held in small palms. A deep joy heard in a voice not yet understood. The gentle touch of a fingertip on unsullied cheeks. That was the first incarnation of his mother.
A curtain of golden sunlight pried his attention back to the moment. As if mocking him, it landed on his notebook, it was standard issue, sturdy and black. Everybody had one, for when they took the drift. Vee’s had amassed a layer of dust. It was empty.
Today might be the day.
For a moment jealousy tinged his thoughts. Vee had caught a glimpse of Mother’s notebook once, it was crammed with post-its and photographs. Details of new names, jobs, bank accounts, passwords, insurance numbers. She had been a hundred different people in a hundred different lifetimes, a blessing bestowed upon few.
Why is she stuck here?
He thought for the umpteenth time. Whilst blinking the sleep from his eyes, a foreign aroma invaded his serenity.
Burning smell.
A whiff of burning matches accompanied by a metal tang. He sat upright, suddenly alert. He knew what this was could mean. His eyes flicked across the room to the full length mirror in the corner, sure enough, the mahogany rim spat and hissed with a powdery smoke. Tiny blue flickers gradually became cobalt flashes, streams of electricity tearing through the lacquered surface, Vee lurched to safety, using his bed as cover. A sharp crack hung for a moment in the now hazy air. It was replaced by a droning hum as if a hive of giant bees swarmed in the next room.
It’s happening.
The static electricity was so distinct it was almost audible. With every hair on his neck standing to attention, Vee peeked over his twisted mess of bedsheets to look upon his reflection. The wooden frame no longer bound the mirror. It lay on the ground split in two, still smouldering. The glass was suspended in the air. The mirror’s surface rippled, bending the reflection of the room around silver coils. Vee crouched there, unmoving, as the heat of his heartbeat throbbed in his ears. He gulped. Hesitated for a moment longer, then began stumbling around at great pace in a commendable attempt to dress himself. As he had been taught in school, you only brought two things with you on your first drift.
"Bring only your notebook and the clothes on your back,
Fear not the squeeze of slipping through the crack.
You may never return if you choose to go.
Understand what it means to enter the shadow.
May you drift to sweeter lands…"
He stood there fully clothed, trembling slightly, staring into the echo of this existence for the final time. He didn’t dare hope for what might await him on the other side of this quicksilver gate. Instead, he could not help but contemplate what he was about to leave behind. The mother of the present was the third to come into Vee’s life. Before she wore this name, she had been called something else on an earth very different from this one. They had never spoken of why she decided to leave her parallel to come here but Vee had felt her regret. Her parental efforts had been pervaded by it. She seemed angry at the cosmos for marooning her here.
Now she will be rid of me.
A momentary note of sadness clutched his heart. Perhaps it was the notion of what might have been, how different this moment should be. The ease with which he had made the decision to leave was almost painful in itself. He sniffed, gathering himself. The drone had become a tempestuous buzz, the noise was cutting. He snatched his notebook from atop his desk and with one hand, held it tightly to his chest. His other hand stretched towards the mirror. The Pins and needles washed over his skin. He gathered a shaky breath and plunged a fist into the mirror.
Pain.
A ferocious cold sunk its teeth into Vee’s hand. He shifted forward. The room warped with his movement, as if being viewed through a fishbowl. The buzz began throbbing rapidly as if Vee had angered the swarm. He forced his arm in deeper. A crushing pressure clamped his hand shut from the other side. Vee’s head whipped back in agony. Deeper he went. The mirror’s crystal edge pulsated before his chest.
Sweeter lands…
He drove himself through.
Dark. Quiet.
A silent wind tugged gently at his clothes. It tickled his cheeks and slowly stole the air from his lungs. There was no ground beneath his feet. He could hear nothing. He could see nothing. There was no sense of up or down. His pulse was stalled in his veins. He drifted, immobilised in the cold black…
After what felt like days of being trapped in the void, a splinter of light shattered Vee’s speculation that he may have gone blind. A lone star suspended in the abyssal darkness, promising an end to this purgatory. On seeing the glimmering point, Vee began to feel the sensation of gravity take hold of his form once more. Suddenly the fleck of illumination was visibly growing, the silent wind he had felt before had become a cyclone, acting upon him with such brutal vigour as to almost unburden his back of clothing. Rushing towards him at an impossible rate, the star became a breach in the endless swathes of darkness.
The drone.
The tone resurfaced from inaudibility at the base of his neck, rattling up into his skull, pulsing at a rapidly increasing frequency.
At least you’re neither deaf nor blind.
Was the last thought he managed before his face smashed into the disc. “CHRIST.” A familiar voice penetrated Vee’s slumber. He immediately began to wretch. “I can’t believe this, bloody disgrace… Here.” Vee fumbled for purchase on the rim of the plastic bin. He yanked it to his mouth just in time to catch a big jet of spew. “This isn’t your first drift is it, Boy?” Vee opened his bulging eyes to look upon his mother’s hopeful face.
My room. I’m in my room.
He nodded before another round of nausea took effect. “CHRIST.” His mother began pacing from wall to wall. Vee found her mutterings were indistinguishable amidst his violent regurgitation. His mother stopped pacing. She hoisted him up to sit in his desk chair, still hugging the bucket. “Alright, your book.” She lifted it from the floor, opened the first page and despaired at the inscription.
Vulcan Bickle
25/04/98
Parallel: AF2974 - Y-phase
“Okay.” She said timorously. “I suppose I’ll give you your brief then, grab a pen and come downstairs with me.” All of Vee’s hopeful excitement had relinquished. His mother’s tone was tainted with a melancholy he had not heard before. He trudged down the stairs after his her. As he had been taught, he tried to drink in all of the small divergences from his parallel. The floorboards had developed a different set of creaks. The blue paint on the wall was a few shades closer to needing another coat. Hints of mould threatened to bloom in the darker corners of the house. The clearest and most alarming discrepancies however, were found in the details of his mothers visage. Rivers of dull grey overwhelmed the rest of her naturally dark hair, her bright eyes appeared watery and had retreated deeper into their sockets. She had developed a tremble in her left hand and wrinkles that forced her to express constant gloom.
They sat facing each other at the kitchen table. The room was more sparse than he had remembered, less hospitable somehow, as if an imperceivable blanket of grime coated everything. Her dissecting eyes took their measure of him. “Get your pen ready.” She flared impatiently. “This is going to be a lot so… Just try to get everything down.” Vee’s pen quivered above the empty page in his notebook, terrified of what he was about to scrawl.
What is going on?
“Here, your name is Hephaestus. You get called Phisty by people you know.” She offered a lukewarm smile, trying to reassure herself as much as anything else. “I am Hera.” Vee scribbled quickly, trying to keep up with the weight of what he was being told. “This is parallel…” Vee looked up from the page. His mothers nostrils were flared and her lips were clenched tight. She looked as if she were about to cry. “This is parallel KD1773… X-phase.” Vee’s eyes widened.
So far away.
Having been tightly bound to the one reality their whole life, it was unusual for someone to jump more than thirty or forty parallels on their first drift. Relative proximity directly correlated to reality divergence, meaning the further away the parallel, the more different that version of reality would be and the less suited the drifter would be to it.
“What do I do?” Vee blurted. The fear loaded question was met by a grimace. His mother subverted the initial intent of the question. She shuddered at the tingle moving up her back. “You work for a man called Erebus… He’s worse than anybody.”
It was before dawn, the night was still clinging to the sky when the people carrier squealed to a stop at the end of Vee’s street. The vehicle was a few hundred thousand miles past its prime. Four grotty looking bikes were lashed to the rack on the back. As per Hera’s plan, Vee marched out confidently so as to maintain the guise of normalcy to Erebus and the rest of Phisty’s crew.
He got into the car and said nothing. The engine gurgled from dormancy and the car lurched off the pavement. Vee had half-sat on a thick material sack. He pulled it out from under his bum. It was only now that Vee clocked the size of the man driving the car. Grey bristles protruded through a scalp that was pressing against the roof of the car, the man’s shoulders encroached upon the space of the woman in the passenger seat. He smelled of ammonia smothered in a pungent cheap aftershave. It was choking. His shark eyes caught Vee staring at him in the rear-view. “The Fist is looking unsettled this morning.” He said it with a silky smooth quiet that was as unnerving as it was unexpected. Vee’s pumping heart flooded his brain and his muscles with blood. He could feel the gaze of the other backseat passenger flick to rest on the side of his head. A moments silence.
“That’s not the Fist.”
The car lurched as Erebus yanked the handbrake. The backseat passenger revealed a sawn-off that had been enshrouded in his overcoat. Erebus and the front passenger swivelled to face Vee. Erebus’ two rows of silver, teeth were displayed in a sadistic smile. “Where did you drift from.” He hissed.
“Look at him. Wherever it was its too far for him to be of any use to us.” Said the front passenger.
“We’re meeting Ares in ten, we don’t have time for this.” The backseat passenger cocked one of the barrels on his sawn-off.
“Waste him.” Erebus whispered. “Get out boy, wouldn’t want to get the dough all sticky.” He chuckled. Vee glimpsed once more at the bag adjacent to him, he saw that it was filled with rolled and banded cash.
Burning smell.
Vee saw the rear-view melting in its frame. He slowly closed a statically charged fist around the bag of cash and with all the grit he could muster, he took his chance.
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