Morpho Read online

  Morpho

  NewCon Press Novellas

  Set 1: (Cover art by Chris Moore)

  The Iron Tactician – Alastair Reynolds

  At the Speed of Light – Simon Morden

  The Enclave – Anne Charnock

  The Memoirist – Neil Williamson

  Set 2: (Cover art by Vincent Sammy)

  Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Bedevilled Poet – Simon Clark

  Cottingley – Alison Littlewood

  The Body in the Woods – Sarah Lotz

  The Wind – Jay Caselberg

  Set 3: The Martian Quartet (Cover art by Jim Burns)

  The Martian Job – Jaine Fenn

  Sherlock Holmes: The Martian Simulacra – Eric Brown

  Phosphorous: A Winterstrike Story – Liz Williams

  The Greatest Story Ever Told – Una McCormack

  Set 4: Strange Tales (Cover art by Ben Baldwin)

  Ghost Frequencies – Gary Gibson

  The Lake Boy – Adam Roberts

  Matryoshka – Ricardo Pinto

  The Land of Somewhere Safe – Hal Duncan

  Set 5: The Alien Among Us (Cover art by Peter Hollinghurst)

  Nomads – Dave Hutchinson

  Morpho – Philip Palmer

  The Man Who Would be Kling – Adam Roberts

  Macsen Against the Jugger – Simon Morden

  Morpho

  Philip Palmer

  NewCon Press

  England

  First published in the UK by NewCon Press

  41 Wheatsheaf Road, Alconbury Weston, Cambs, PE28 4LF

  April 2019

  NCP 176 (limited edition hardback)

  NCP 177 (softback)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Morpho copyright © 2019 by Philip Palmer

  Cover art copyright © 2018 by Peter Hollinghurst

  All rights reserved, including the right to produce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  ISBN:

  978-1-912950-01-0 (hardback)

  978-1-912950-03-4 (softback)

  Cover art by Peter Hollinghurst

  Cover layout by Ian Whates

  Minor Editorial meddling by Ian Whates

  Book layout by Storm Constantine

  Here are some snippets of rolling news:

  There are unconfirmed reports of a terrorist assault in the sleepy Yorkshire town of…

  No further news as yet on the suspected terror attack in the town of Hebden Bridge. Locals reported…

  The Yorkshire Constabulary has categorically denied rumours of a major terror incident in the sleepy Yorkshire town of…

  Internet rumours are flying about damage done to historic buildings in the sleepy Yorkshire town of…

  We are now hearing that the two confirmed fatalities in the Yorkshire town of Hebden Bridge were caused by an exploding gas main.

  Do not believe what you read about the incident in Hebden Bridge last week. Reliable sources say that for once, the bad guys did not win the day. Let us hope so. And our thoughts are with the two individuals who defied, for the first time in recorded history, the powers that be. Remember:

  YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

  One

  Their kind were familiar with fear. It was like oxygen for them; though they did not need to breathe, and only did so to conceal their true nature.

  Jane drove fearfully but fast. She was touching speeds of ninety miles per hour on these narrow country lanes. The car’s grey shell was blackly scarred with scratches from the tall flanking hedgerows. The smell of burning rubber was like autumn bonfires wafting across the fields.

  The armour-plated Jaguar pursuing them was out of sight, its driver clearly too cautious to replicate such speeds. But it had their scent and could not easily be shaken off.

  ‘There’s a left turn in fifty yards, unmarked,’ said Billy Franco. She knew this too. He was swallowing and reswallowing the same gobbet of vomit but his voice remained calm.

  She took the sharp left turn, then hurtled down a road too narrow for tractors, and swerved with a brutal right on to another unmarked B road which would lead them to the Doncaster by-pass where, they hoped, the heavy traffic and its residue of oily smog would cloak them.

  A helicopter throbbed above.

  ‘We’re done,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘We have lost.’

  ‘No. Let me – get out.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get out of the car. I so instruct you.’

  He did not know how to disobey a direct command. So Billy opened the car door and threw himself out.

  He hit the tarmac like road kill.

  Centuries ago Jane was called Ursula and she was the daughter of a mighty Northumberland lord. And Billy, who was called William then, was nothing but a Geordie serf. But the two of them met and, somehow, sensed that they were kindred spirits. Not like other people. And so their love was born, though not declared; for they knew that any liaison between them would be a defiance of the natural order of things.

  Then William died of the plague. Ursula took to her bed and wept for a week. Her parents were distraught and sent for the physician who encouraged them to bleed her. Ursula refused the surgeon’s knife and wept until her eyes were red balloons but could not tell anyone that she was mourning the death of a scrawny servant who sang bawdy songs to her and who somehow without words had pledged his undying love.

  A week after William was carried away by the plague cart, the twelve-year-old Ursula was composed again and willing to discuss with her mother potential matches to bolster their hold in the North. In her heart, though, Ursula felt her life was over. From this moment on, she resolved, all she would know was duty.

  As for William – he spent two days buried in the plague pit before he realised that he was truly alive, and not in Hell. It took him another full day to claw his way out. By this point his boils had burst and his skin was flaming hot. He was unable to breathe because of the mass of corpses around him, and yet his heart still beat.

  He reached the top of the mountain of bodies at the dead of night and crawled away for three long miles until he found a river and there he doused himself.

  Within two more days his boils had healed and his naked white skin was bitter with cold. He broke into a cottage and stole a jerkin and trews and a pair of boots which did not fit and which he had to discard. He walked on bare feet to Alnwick and was caught stealing another pair of boots and was beaten and left for dead. But that ‘dead’ too passed quickly enough, and the bloodied boy crawled to the safety of the market square. And there, with a stolen knife, he stole more clothes from a beggar boy, together with boots which fitted him.

  For three years he lived in the town and worked as a butcher’s boy. William was handy with a knife, and oblivious to the frequent nicks and gashes which were a common consequence of his trade.

  At the age of fifteen he was a brawny lad and a bonny one. Any girl might lose her heart to him. He went as ‘Will Darke’ these days and claimed to have family in Berwick-upon-Tweed. No one enquired much, and Will volunteered little.

  On a Sunday in the market square young Ursula Warkworth was walking with her mother on the eve of her wedding day and sensed him. In a town with thousands of citizens, amidst the shit and refuse and the aroma of baked meats, she knew he was there. And she began to run towards him.

  When she found him at his trade, this startled butcher boy, she made him drop his knife, and took him by the hand and pulled him into the open lane and without a trace of shame, she kissed him. He hardly recognised her – she had grown up so much, her fair hair had darkened, and the girl had become a woman. But the moment they kissed, their souls touched.

  And as the years and the centuries passed and they did not age, they realised they were no
t like other people. They truly were kindred spirits.

  When he hit the road, Billy felt his organs rupture, and his bones shatter. He rolled in closer towards the hedge. His skull was cracked and he was blind, though not deaf. He could hear the purr of the Jaguar’s engine as it drew nearer. Then he could hear it skimming past him. He could imagine the hard-faced men sitting inside, with their guns and swords. He knew their type. He had run away from them before and always had he been caught. For they were remorseless, and there were many of them, and his kind could always be sniffed out. They had a stench that left a musky trail across the planet.

  He knew Jane was a fool to think she could avoid her destiny. He wished she had not ordered him to flee with her. It was wrong of her to do that. But perhaps –

  He lost consciousness and when he woke, the pain was almost unendurable. And yet, he welcomed it.

  He stood up. His legs were like twigs and could barely support him. His T-shirt was ripped, the skin of his upper body hung loose on him. His tattoos were peeling from his body. His skull was fractured in – he did a quick tally – eleven places.

  He started to walk, slowly, along the country road. It would take him a day to reach the city at this rate.

  As he staggered onwards, his flesh began to grow back upon him.

  He had lost an eyeball but he could now see well enough with the one remaining eye, and he could sense his surroundings through the flakes of ripped skin that floated above him, like a brooding thundercloud.

  Billy Franco wept, through the tear gland of his surviving eye, on to a cheek that was bloodied and ripped, and the weeping hurt and made him feel alive.

  Hayley was mopping blood off the floor.

  That was a big part of her job, it seemed. Keeping the mortuary clean. Wiping off blood and bodily seepage. Spraying surfaces with disinfectant. She wore nose plugs some days. The sweet smell of death was with her always. It followed her home too. Even when she was in the bath, she could smell putrefaction through the scent of lavender bath oil. It was fortunate, she sometimes felt, that she was already a solitary misanthrope; otherwise this job would make her so.

  The blood on the floor was not visible; there weren’t huge gobbets of scarlet gore pooled upon the plastic parquet. But every time the pathologist cut open a body with an electric saw, colloids of plasma and flesh filled the air in an invisible miasma. So the floors had to be cleaned every day with immaculate care. The microscopic splashes couldn’t be left to fester. The blood had to be mopped away.

  Hayley wore a white coverall over her jeans and T-shirt. Her head was shaven. Every now and then she twitched her head, to reorient her lazy eye.

  When Hayley was eight years old she had walked into a moving swing in the park, with bloody and painful consequences. After three days in what her Mam always called the ‘hospital for stupid children’, she was told she had to wear an eyepatch for six months. When the patch came off the eye had a mind of its own. She could see fine with it but it had a tendency to drift, to eerie effect.

  When she was sixteen she had the huge tunnel piercings in her ears, which her Mam said made her look like a [racist expletive deleted]; and soon after that she started shaving her head. The nose piercings came next, then the tattoos, including a map of Terra Incognita on her left arm, and a more restrained blue butterfly on the soft skin under her chin.

  Hayley was now twenty-six years old and no longer lived with her Mam, thank Christ; and she was wearing, beneath her mortuary-issue white coverall, on strict orders of the management, a long-sleeved top that covered the arm tattoos. The invisible blood on the floor was a bugger to get off but she was persisting.

  She was thinking about songs she would sing if she could only sing. She was on stage at Glastonbury. In that context, her look was a killer. Her band was all girl and hardcore and they were playing driving chords. Hayley was singing Paranoid, and killing it. Her sister was in the crowd, crushed with jealousy. And –

  She heard a sound – a groan? She ignored it. Another groan. The groan became a stifled scream.

  She turned around.

  The female corpse on the autopsy table was sitting up. Looking at Hayley, bold as brass. The corpse was a young woman – mid twenties or thirties, Hayley guessed. Slim, verging on skinny, with ribs you could count. Her face was smashed in and disfigured by some terrible accident. Her mouth was open in a ghastly rictus, like a silent scream. And when she spoke, her lips barely moved.

  This must be a try on. Is this bitch wearing horror movie makeup?

  ‘Help me,’ the dead woman said, softly.

  The dead woman had raven black hair and very pale skin and Hayley realised that she must have been beautiful, when alive, and when her face was intact. She had a soft whispery voice. The voice said: ‘Please, whoever you are, help me.’

  No. No! This can’t be happening. Maybe I fell asleep in front of the telly again? Hayley, wake the fuck up!

  ‘Help me, please. People are coming for me. Bad people. I have to get out of this place. Help me. I’m begging you. Help!’

  Hayley tried to scream but couldn’t.

  ‘Save my baby,’ whispered the corpse and Hayley flinched.

  The corpse’s eyes rolled, and the body slumped back down on to the stainless steel dissecting table, and was once more inert.

  And now, finally, Hayley screamed.

  Billy Franco, once known as Will Darke, and before that William Prentis, was standing outside the Leeds Hospital Mortuary and every atom of his being told him that his one true love was inside this building. And he yearned to have the courage to go in and rescue her.

  He thought of all the times over the years when she had cherished him, and protected him. He remembered the days of Queen Mary, when he had been burned at the stake, and she had carefully carried his embers away and watered them daily until his lips were moist again. He remembered the time he lost his mind and she had to lock him in a room for almost a year before his gibbering stopped. He remembered the hundred years he had spent as an Andromeda; and the moment when he had emerged from the castle in Scotland, wasted and skeletal and pale, and drained of all but a cup of his own blood, and she had been waiting for him patiently in her car. Her love undimmed.

  He owed her everything. She was so brave. So fearless.

  Not like him. He was a coward even before the powers that be had captured him, and worked on his mind, to drill him in obedience. That was – when? Yes, he did recall – it was early in the reign of the first King Charles. That bloody dandy. Then there was the civil war, he and Ursula missed most of that. They were locked in that house in Kent being taught about theology and Divine Retribution, and learning that they were God’s children after all, even though they reeked of sin.

  He remembered the many years they lived apart, forced to live with human masters, learning obedience and reverence to God. And yet somehow, at the end of his hundred years in the Scottish castle chained to a wall, she had managed to track him down. And they were reunited.

  And so they fled. And they had lived as man and wife, without human masters, in a myriad different identities, from 1929 until 1948. Until, once more, some immortal traitor-to-their-kind had caught their scent. And they were tagged, and monitored, but otherwise left free to live their lives in a small house in Liverpool.

  Then came the day, less than three months ago, when Jane was told she had been chosen. She had been instructed that it was now time for her to do her duty, to become an Andromeda. And she had raged, and ranted, and refused And then – then they had fled, once again.

  It took the Defenders a scant eleven weeks to find them.

  She’s in there, Billy thought. Still alive, I’m sure of that. A crash wouldn’t kill her. She probably crashed the car deliberately, knowing that would cause a fuss, and make it harder for them to take her. So I should – why don’t I –

  No. If I try to save her, I’ll be spotted, he thought. They’ll have spies everywhere. On the alert for one such as me. Ready to cap
ture me and use me abominably in her place. Could I bear that again? Could I endure another hundred years of – of –

  But I have to save her! She is my beloved. If I do not I am shamed!

  Yet courage eluded him. He did not dare go into the mortuary. Besides, if he did, he reasoned, what could he actually do? Carry out her broken corpse in his arms? It was absurd. He could see at a glance how hard it would be to smuggle her from this place of humans. Security guards were everywhere.

  She should have accepted her fate, he told himself. Why did she not? After all, I did, when it was my turn. What crazy folly made her act the way she –

  He remembered her resolve. Her determination. She had a plan, she said. She had fake ID, she had a car, she had money. She was confident she knew a way to elude the spies who followed them on a daily basis. Come with me, she had said. We’ll live together in freedom, she had said. We’ll make a new life for ourselves, she had said. We’ll be just like we were in the old days. And he had followed her. Well of course he had followed her.

  It was in his nature to follow. They had trained him to follow. And to obey.

  Defeat wrapped itself around Billy’s heart. He remembered how glorious they had once been, he and she, as runaways arriving in London back in the days of Henry Tudor. He remembered the crowds and the stench of the Thames and the bustling energy of the streets.

  Billy knew himself to be unworthy of her, his one true love. Despite all their ‘training’, their indoctrination, she remained herself. A burning flame of herness. She was so courageous!

  But he was not. He never had been, in truth. Sheer terror had taken him out of that plague pit.

  Billy was conscious that too much time had already passed. Within twelve hours or less from the moment of her ‘death’, her blood would sour and her immortality would be gone. She would become dead meat. He knew this, but did nothing about it.