Any Alt

By William Bowden

The universe, and what passes for reality, has its dark secrets—for those that dare to seek them out.

But understanding the nature of reality holds no interest for Evyline Marron—she has only a shallow sense of its significance.

Evyline's pursuit is the human condition, one that finds her peering into the deceased heads of others, of which there has been something of a dearth of late.

Then, quite out of the blue, the cerebral cortex of a notorious individual comes her way.

An individual once possessed of some very peculiar notions indeed.

Reality, it seems, is a façade behind which all manner of horrors can be hidden, horrors discoverable by only the most particular of minds.

And that's exactly what happens.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Bowden
• Release date: May 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201302351

William Bowden

William Bowden is a British Science Fiction author. He lives near the city of Bristol and when not writing rules over his unruly garden.

Book preview

Self-published by William Bowden in 2019

Text Copyright © 2019 William Bowden

All Rights Reserved

The right of William Bowden to be identified as the author has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This is a work of fiction. All characters in this work are fictitious and any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cover art by Andrey Burmakin / manjik / shutterstock.com

PSYCHOPATH

Evyline Marron had been caught at a young age—early enough to make a difference, even if only in the mind of the man who had agreed to take her on. An intervention with good intentions, to be sure, but which would unwittingly serve as the beginning of an education. How to fit in. How to be, for appearance’s sake, one of the sheep.

Tell me about the rabbits, Evy.

That had been his very first question. No hello, no introduction. He had simply come into the room, sat down opposite, opened his notebook, and tested his pen.

The bunnies?

How old were they?

They were small…baby ones, I suppose.

Only then had the man’s gaze risen from his notebook, his steely eyes locking solidly onto hers.

And how old are you?

Nine—

You haven’t thought to ask who I am.

Mommy said a doctor—

My name is Lucius Gray.

How he had kept interrupting. Evy remembers that. Even nowadays the approach would be considered unconventional. Treated more like an adult than a child. More of an interrogation than an evaluation.

I am a psychologist. Do you know what that is?

You look inside people’s heads—

Describe the bunnies to me.

They’re cute—what are you writing?

What made them cute?

I don’t know. They just are—

"Are…or were?"

The man’s questions weren’t like the others. Not like her mother’s. Not like the policeman’s.  Somehow, they were…harder. More like a teacher’s at school. More…strict.

I don’t know what you mean.

The bunnies. Near the woods. What happened to them?

They’re gone away.

Even now, Evy can remember how he had set his notebook to one side, the pen tucked within. How he had rested back into his chair, his gaze never leaving her. Not for one second. And the calmness, when all before had been so…fraught. Her mother, screaming. The look of horror on the policeman’s face. All the people who had come after with worried looks. For days and days.

You fenced them in, the man had said. With chicken wire.

So they couldn’t escape. When they came out of the burrow.

You dug them out. With a mattock.

A what? Oh—Papa’s digger—

And as they came out, you set the dog on them.

I wanted to see them run—

But they couldn’t run, could they.

Benji bit them—

And they squealed, didn’t they.

The old lady heard—

And when she came running, she found you covered in blood.

Benji bit too hard on one—I tried to grab it, but he wouldn’t let go. Its head came away.

* * *

Twenty years or so later and the world is still providing bunnies for Evy. Today it is the barista setting down the espresso. Something of a fawn, barely out of her teens. Tall and slender. A long neck to match her lanky frame.

Evy imagines the fawn’s neck without her head.

Neuro-separation by means of a clean cut.

She has the surgical skill.

And there would almost certainly be a knife sharp enough in the café’s kitchen.

She could do it right here, at her sidewalk table.

The morning rush is over, and she is the only patron. Just her and the fawn.

Likely the few pedestrians there are would not even notice, immersed as they are in their own phone-zombie worlds.

She could get up from her table right now, walk into the café’s kitchen, take a knife, find the fawn…

It would require an element of surprise, of course—and a quick slit of the throat to silence her victim.

Then there is the matter of comparative stature, the lanky fawn easily standing at five foot eight—a full six inches taller than Evy, but unlikely to be practiced in the art of self-defense, a deficit that, with Evy’s leg carefully placed behind the fawn’s, would see the barista topple backward and, if correctly positioned, bring her down with the torso across the table, the knife already at her throat—

The fantasy has served its purpose—the passing of time.

A pretty head, to be sure—but one that leaves Evy reflecting on the usefulness of what it contains and the likely lack of interest for her.

Not so the true subject of Evy’s visit to the café.

The bookshop across the way, its proprietor opening up for the day, Evy watching as her carefully orchestrated plan unfolds.

Like clockwork, the bookshop proprietor sets about his routine—the shop lights, the security grilles, the cash register.

Then the window display.

It is here that it begins.

A perplexed look quickly deepening into consternation.

An item is missing.

A prized item.

Consternation becomes anger, the precursor to a series of probable events that, if they play out as predicted, should secure Evy a prize of her own.

It’s a tale of two philatelists, each seeking to always outdo the other. They had attended one of Evy’s high-society gatherings, lured by the chance to mingle with San Francisco’s elite, the hundred-dollars-a-plate fee not only paying for the event, but also a thinly veiled means to keep the riffraff away and ensure that the cerebrums attending were worthy of her true motive—donor recruitment, Evy charming her way into the craniums of the great and the good.

Such events had become a necessity of circumstance. The neuroscience laboratory had been set up with Pentagon funding and, as such, needs to justify its own existence—the money would keep coming if there were results to show for it. But results require research, and research requires specimens; the dearth of suitable donations in recent years had become somewhat alarming.

Not that Evy cares about the laboratory’s future, per se. Her standing, expertise, and notoriety in the field could easily secure another position, should her current tenure come to an end. Rather, it affords her the perfect environment in which to pursue her own research without drawing any unwanted attention, aligned as it is with the tactics of the Pentagon, with whom she shares a deep interest in neurological disorders of a certain nature.

Judging by the directives she receives, Evy suspects that the Pentagon sees psychopathy as having potential for weaponization. They could never openly engage in such neurological research, of course, but it does give rise to a cloak of secrecy under which Evy is free to operate, to pursue that particular nature of mind that others would say defines her, with both her own pursuits and those of the Pentagon requiring the same approach—to understand the aberration, one must first make a thorough study of the norm.

Not that Evy sees it that way. To her, the sheep are the aberration.

Lambs to the slaughter.

And therein lay the problem—the best specimens were all too young. It could be decades before a donation might be realized, and with the percentage of donor recruitment uptake being decidedly scant of late, the resulting economics of the situation had come to necessitate something of a hurrying-along.

The philatelists had been a surprise catch, their keenness to sign up as donors seemingly a mix of cerebral vanity and one-upmanship, with subsequent enquiries revealing the two stamp collectors to have been at loggerheads for years, even coming to blows on occasion.

Where one had established a shop, so had the other, both ostensibly selling rare books in order to fund the philately, with their storefronts a means to taunt one another with displays of their most prized stamps.

Evy found it all to be rather petty—and the stamps weren’t even worth that much.

Not so the personality profiles involved, each easily wound up, each with a hair-trigger temper.

A series of social media postings from bogus accounts had laid the groundwork. For all the world, tittle-tattle and society gossip, seemingly from one about the other, but in reality perpetrated by one Dr. Evyline A. Marron, and serving to heighten the level of mutual contempt to the point where only the slightest nudge would be required.

She could have arranged the demise of one, or the other, or even both, in a more direct manner, but as it had been with other candidates of late, Evy felt that a degree of separation of herself from the desired outcome to be not only prudent, but also a lot more satisfying.

Months of preparation had brought Evy to this moment, the two burglaries that had been required in the early hours merely the final steps in her plan, the oh-so-prized stamps of one now located in the bookshop window of the other.

With the ball rolling, all Evy can do is wait for events to play out.

Would you like another, Dr. Marron?

The fawn has been loitering for almost a minute.

Thank you, but no, responds Evy, with a charm designed to disarm. I should be getting to work.

The barista clears the cup and saucer, Evy having tucked payment, and a very generous tip, between the two.

It’s at times like this