painted footsteps and whispered voices along behind me and he, at last, drained the remainder of his cup, threw the thing into a bin, and followed, hands buried in his pockets. He was wearing a coat I’d seen already in the night. He came level with me as I headed down the side of a newsagent’s towards the river, a tight little street of too few lights held too high up above too little pavement.
I said through gritted teeth, almost too breathless to talk, too busy to slow, “What the hell do you want? This is a walk for the dead.”
Blood dribbled from my closed palm, splattered onto the street at my feet, slipped into the mad gaps in the tarmac.
“Oh - I’m totally dead,” he replied. “I mean, totally.”
“You’re not. Unless we’re talking prophetically.”
“Noooo,” he said carefully. “No, I think we’re dealing with the past here. See, I got gutted by the shadow of my former teacher. He let me die by a phone box near the river. The last breath left my lungs, my heart beat its last, my internal organs decided to give the open air a try and my brain stopped crackling. Medically, dead. You seen Star Trek?”
“Of course I’ve seen Star Trek - do you mind, I’m busy here?”
“You thought about the teleportation stuff?”
“No.”
“You should think about it. A beam comes out of an empty vacuum and dissolves your entire body. I mean literally, everything stops. Your brain stops, your thoughts stop. You are nothing more than a 01010101001 in a computer! Jesus Christ, if that isn’t the definition of so dead you could drop it down a pyramid for a party then I don’t know what is! Sure, you get assembled at the other end, but it’s by a machine that could assemble spare ribs just as easy - it’s piling you back together bit by bit, like some ready-made sausage squeezed from a tube. That’s not life! That’s . . . cloning, at the very best. A reconstruction, probably a flawed one, of an entity that naturally died when you went and bloody dissolved its entire nature! So you see, and this is really the point, I’m dead. I mean, seriously, totally whacked.”
I could see the river ahead, blue lights on the other side, shimmering reflection of a thousand shattered colours on the black racing water.
“But,” I croaked, as the lights went out behind me and the mad eyes of the dragon spun and sunk down for ever in the streets, “if you’re dead, then what the hell am I?”
The man in my old coat shrugged. “Dunno. If I were you I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”
“Why not? Dead is dead is . . .”
“Is dead, yeah. But, you feel like Matthew Swift, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And remember like Matthew Swift?”
“Yes.”
“And hate like him, and fear like him, and want like him, and live like him, and marvel like him, and bleed like him?”
“Ticking all these boxes.”
“So I figure, fuck it! Sure, I might be dead,” he said. “But you’re an excellent copy of me.”
I looked at him out of the corner of my eye.
They, whoever They are, say you’d go mad if you ever saw the back of your own head. Or the universe would explode or something; paradox and physics and something along these lines. I didn’t see the back of the man’s head. But he had my face, he was Matthew Swift, right down to the blood soaked through his clothes and the tears across his throat and chest which had killed him. But his eyes were brown, not blue, and there was no scar upon his right hand.
I said, “This is turning from the surreal to the downright sick. I want my money back. I want to reload, reboot, try again without the psycho shit!”
“You think?” he chuckled. “You should see what’s behind you!”
I wouldn’t have looked.
I really wouldn’t.
But if you can’t trust yourself, even when you’re dead, then who are you going to put your faith in?
I looked.
“Ta-da!” said Matthew, the other Matthew, the one who died and didn’t come back, because you couldn’t, dead is dead is . . .
It was . . .
. . . dragon didn’t quite cover it.
Dragon implies something made out of scales, with a nod in the direction of reptilian ancestry: dinosaur meets flamethrower with wings. Sure, it includes anything from fluffy through to ferocious; and we could see a case for this thing fitting into both categories. But it felt impolite to