From the Afternoon edition of the London Evening Times, 10th May 2010.
CONFUSION AS DEAD MEN SHARE IDENTITY
London Metropolitan Police were presented with a mystery today as two individuals who died in unrelated incidents appeared to have been uncannily similar to one another.
A man who fell under a train at South Kensington station this morning seems to have been found with the same identity documents as another man who jumped to his death from the Canary Wharf office complex at one thirty in the afternoon. Witnesses report that the men were both white males of about thirty years of age wearing white shirts and grey trousers, with horn-rimmed glasses and light brown hair. Neither were seen to have been acting oddly before the incidents, nor do they have left any means to have got to the locations of their deaths.
Further to the eyewitness reports that the two were the same person, the Evening Times can exclusively reveal that pathologists found identical personal effects on both men. These consisted of a travelcard dated to August of 1996, thirteen pounds and fifty two pence in cash, and a photo ID card for the Chelmsford Temporal Physics Science Laboratory.
Initial reports had both men named as a junior-level physicist who worked for the Chelmsford based lab in the mid-nineties, but who has not been known to public records since. These statements were rescinded following the realisation that press were being told that the same man had died twice.
The Temporal Physics lab closed, embroiled in scandal, in 1997 after a government investigation proved a whistle-blower’s report of widespread bypassing of industry imposed safety measures. This occurred in the wake of a series of high profile accidents, including one where the technician named earlier today as both dead men, was first reported to have died, though no body was found at the time.
The lab had been working on theories of dimensional manipulation, gaining massive funding by claiming to have developed a low cost method of instantaneous transportation that required only upscaling to become universally applicable. No other laboratory has since been able to replicate early successful experiments. Some observers at the time stated the closure of the lab to be a step-backward akin to mankind forcibly forgetting writing.
At the time the Evening Times went to press neither Scotland Yard, ex-Chelmsford based scientists, or the family of the named man were willing to issue new comments. The Times will stay on the story and hopes to have new developments to report before the West End final edition this evening.
Later editions of the London Evening Times had no trace of any new developments or reprints of this story.
The Night’s Plutonian Shore
Found amongst the documents of a late Doctor of Psychiatry. Names have been removed to preserve anonymity, suffice to say the writer holds an unusually high office.
My Dear Doctor,
You have helped me before, please, though I cannot make a personal visit at this time, diagnose my ailment though my descriptions of the symptoms as best you can.
The dreams are all the same. No thing but the same series every time sleep approaches.
It begins innocently enough. A walk, as one is accustomed to take. Traversing the streets towards… The night is still. The air is cool with mist. The sound of my footsteps alone reverberate. So little is visible through the fog. The pale light of the Moon is all.
The Moon. It hangs heavy in its shroud. Ones attention is not taken, not grasped. It is diverted.
I walk, towards the Moon. There is nothing but the Moon and the absence of it, a feeling of desolation. Hours pass (days, years, eons?), then it has gone, hidden behind a hill. I scrabble at the slope, desperate to reach the top.
In the lake the disc has doubled. I swim into the water. The reflection remains unbroken, there are no tears caused by the rippling waters. Then I am drowning, sinking. And the Moon is blurred by the waters above me.
Waking up has been terrible since the nightly visions began. Every time I feel the water filling my lungs. I feel myself falling into the abyss. Waking is freedom, made bitter by the unceasing dreams. They come at all hours and seem to resolve to the horrid conclusion in no waking time at all, though dream feels endless.
I have tried drugs to no beneficial consequence, and now resort to nightly tortures. Trying to sustain consciousness through the dark hours. I cannot even step outside in the darkness, for it is there, and it is horrible. But still it diverts, still it clamours for attention. I feel that one night I will go out and find it all as in the dreams, but I fear most of all the recent expansions.
Here I sink to the bottom, conscious of my body dissolving, of my mind becoming one with the water, but then it is no longer water but the rocks of the Moon. My body has gone, it remains on Earth, but there is another consciousness dwelling within it, laughing at me. One that has slept, trapped in the Moon, filled with hate since before the dawn of man. It has taken my rightful place, and I, its. I fear this malicious spirit stealing my body and leaving me frozen and screaming without a voice.
Help me doctor, for the attraction grows every minute.
Yours,
- X.
To put an antic disposition on
A cruel and malformed tale brought about through an offhand remark and having read too much F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The bitch was mad. This was the only reasonable explanation for the situation Matthew Taylor now found himself in. The tips of his toes touched the cold metal at the bottom of the vat and kept his head above the baked beans. He was considering the depth of the beans a minor miracle, especially as the steel walls rose up a further ten feet above him, preventing unassisted escape.
Two days ago Matt had been drinking in a normal pub with a couple of friends. As a group they were taking advantage of Spring Break to see parts of the country that were noteworthy but that none of them in any of their twin decades of life could remember having visited. The morning had been spent looking around a five-hundred year old church in the centre of a small town. Lunch was taken in a very traditional tea house then they had watched the men of the town play cricket on the green. They had all been completely unaware that a Heinz factory was located less than ten miles away.
Evening approached, with the slow turning of the skies from cerulean, to coral pink, to red, to deep and dark cobalt. They had found lodging for the night in The Royal Oak public house. Before retiring they had chosen to spend their evening at the bar speaking to the locals and drinking far too much.
So it came about that Matt was tight when she walked in. His friends were already sleeping into their pints but from some terrible haze Matt perceived her gliding through the room like a phantom. He staggered over and introduced himself by tripping into her breast and passing out. Fortunately for him she chose not to take offence and arranged for him to be placed unconscious in a booth with a glass of water ready, while she sat across from him and took a claret, waiting for him to wake.
Soon enough he came to, drank the water in one, and noticing her, sobered with the speed granted by memories of debauched actions and thoughts seen in hindsight for their worth. Matt gave ample apologies and was rewarded by somewhat of a proper introduction. The girls name was given as Rosemary, though in truth she was named Nicole.
They got to talking and Matt found her to be very like minded on a number of different matters. One thing led to another and as last orders came Nicole invited him to stay at her house, a little down the road. Four miles later, Matt was presented with a couch to sleep on that was far less comfortable than both her ample bed above, and the worn mattress of the public house he had been persuaded to leave. Having come so far, and being now quite tired, Matt resigned himself to his fate in her front room.
Nicole was amicable enough the next morning, presenting him with a large fruit-filled breakfast and revealing her real name to an increasingly baffled Matthew. Though she insisted he call her Rosemary when they slept together following lunch. Afterwards Matt began to talk about rejoining his friends, but stopped when she began to quote Catullus to him. Confusing as it was, Matt still found the act, and her, terribly attractive. This was of course, still a few hours before she slipped him the first Rohypnol.
As he shivered, suspended in the vat of baked beans waiting for the morning and the factory workers it should bring, Matt began to think about freedom. He was certain that Nicole was insane, but to what degree was her lunacy a result of genetics or upbringing. She was culpable of course, but he dreaded ever encountering the parents that could such a creature onto the world, and their parents for the same reason, and so on as far back as one could care to go. At which point does a person become distinct? When can one ever make uninfluenced life choices? Or are all decisions necessarily a result of the society a person lives in?
He wondered why he had never chosen to act the way she did, to descend upon others like a rampant Fury and punish a person for sins unknown. Perhaps he had been produced with inhibitors against the forcing of his will onto another. Would his experience here have weakened these inhibitors? More likely he would move on and try to forget his encounter with the utterly free girl, and live in chains, self-imposed, like any good and normal member of a social species. But who knows, Matthew opened his mouth and ate some beans, thoughtful he chewed them slowly.