Chapter Text
Julia
Corpses don’t decay in the cold. Thus, I don’t know how long Lester Briggs has been dead, dangling in the dark from a pipe in his office. Not that he looks at all lifelike; his formerly brown face is tinged with purple and his eyes stare unseeingly off into oblivion; and that’s to say nothing of the frost that has gathered upon his body.
To my untrained eye, his death looks like a suicide, like he’d climbed onto the chair now lying on its side by his feet and hanged himself with a fibre-optic cable.
I’d never really known Lester all that well; he’d been a PhD student of Maxime Constantin, one of the professors in the plasma-physics group. I saw him at seminars, exchanged a word or two at receptions or the occasional party…but I couldn’t have told you where he’d come from, or what he was like, or even what he’d been researching.
And now he’s dead. Alone and unmourned in the dark.
“You poor man,” I whisper. “You poor, poor man.”
I lower my flashlight from his face and wonder what to do with him. It seems wrong to leave him here, but the ground outside is frozen solid and I don’t want to waste wood cremating him. The idea of warming myself or cooking food over his pyre seems utterly macabre. At the very least, I can let him down, close his eyes, and cross his hands over his chest—assuming his arms will bend.
I’ve never touched a corpse before. I’d never even seen one until a few weeks ago, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t daunted by the prospect.
I set my axe down on a nearby desk and shrug my backpack off of my shoulders, retrieving my utility knife from a side compartment. Then, I climb onto the desk and stand upright, flashlight clenched between my teeth so that I can work with both hands. I manage to cut through the cord with relative ease, and Lester’s body drops to the floor with a crack-clunk!
There’s a moment of silence. And then something stirs in the darkness, making my heart skip a beat.
“Who’s there?” I demand.
“Professor Chen, is that you?”
It’s all that I can do not to scream. The voice sounds like Lester’s—or what I remember him sounding like—but seems to come from every point in the room at once.
“Professor, where are we? I can’t see anything.”
“Who are you?” I demand, whirling my flashlight around.
“…I’m Lester Briggs.”
My flashlight beam throws up a phantasmagoria of shadows, but the pitch-black office is just as empty as I’d supposed.
“You know me, Professor!”
“Lester Briggs is dead!” I exclaim, casting my flashlight onto the corpse’s face. He is indeed Lester; and he is indeed very, very dead.
There’s silence from the darkness, just long enough to make me entertain the idea that some combination of hunger, stress, and sleep deprivation made me imagine the whole thing.
“Oh.”
“Who are you?” I demand again.
“I…” the voice begins. “I thought I was Lester. I—forget things. Everything’s been so strange lately.”
“Lester is dead.”
“Yes. I remember that now. I did that, didn’t I? But now it…all seems like a dream.”
“You killed Lester?”
“I killed myself. Lester killed myself. He—I…” The voice trails off.
“You mean to tell me that you’re”—I take a split second to acculture myself to the idea—“some kind of ghost?”
“I was…confused,” the voice says, ignoring my question. “I’d spent so many hours down here. So many days. I’d been doing my thesis for five years. But my experiments stopped working. And then CERN held that press conference and said that it wasn’t real anymore—that everything had changed and nothing I’d worked on mattered. So I lost it. I must have been so angry—I don’t remember what it felt like. Like it happened to another person. I remember going to my office, tying the cord around my neck and—oh. Oh God.
“Professor?” the voice—Lester—asks after a pause. “Am I in Hell?”
I feel a shiver go down my spine. It was a suggestion I’d heard some people make at the shelter, but I’d rejected it on principle and wasn’t about to start entertaining it now.
“You’re not in Hell, Lester,” I say firmly. “You’re in your office.”
“I’m a ghost,” he says plainly.
“I think so. Yes.”
“Oh.”
There’s another pause and then: “Ghosts aren’t real.”
“No,” I agree with a sigh. “But there’s a lot of that going around these days.”
“Dr. Chen?”
“Yes?”
“Could you show me…me again?”
It takes me a moment to parse the request. “You mean, your—um…” I struggle to think of a delicate way to say corpse. “Remains?”
“Yeah.”
I shine my flashlight back down until it plays over the stony face.
Lester is silent for a moment—morbidly fascinated, I suppose. “Oh God,” he mutters. “Oh God, oh God. Just look at that. Jesus God on high.”
I’m actually trying very hard not to look at it.
“Turn it off! Oh God, turn it off!”
I bring the flashlight up, plunging the corpse back into the darkness.
“Oh, I really fucked up this time…”
“It…doesn’t look great, honestly,” I mumble. “But you know…”
I have no idea how to finish the sentence. Every cloud has a silver lining? You’re always deadest just before the dawn? Any option just sounds ridiculously trite.
“Well, at least things probably can’t get any worse,” I say finally.
“Fuck!” Lester bellows, loudly enough that I practically jump out of my skin. I hear a thud issuing from somewhere in the dark. “I am an idiot! I am such an idiot!”
“No!” I insist. “No, you’re just…” I make a vague hand gesture. “Depressed, I guess. Happens to the best of us.”
I force a smile, though my nerves are all over the place. Lester may be a ghost, but he’s also a fellow human being in emotional turmoil. I have no idea how to talk to either of those things.
The ghost is quiet for a time. Then he blurts: “Take it away, please.”
“The remai—”
“Yes! Take it away. Please.”
“Where…do you want me to take it?”
“Anywhere! For God’s sake, just…take it away!”
A moment later, his tone is more conciliatory. “Sorry,” he murmurs. “I just—”
“It’s alright,” I reply. “I understand.”
*
The problem, of course, is that I don’t understand. Not at all about anything.
We physicists liked to say that the universe could still surprise us, but we never really meant it. “Surprises” were supposed to come in the data: a subatomic particle behaving aberrantly; a galaxy three billion lightyears away giving off an unexpected radiation profile. Not technology arbitrarily ceasing to function for no reason. Not magic or fairies or fucking ghosts whispering to us in the dark.
The “Shift”, as we’d come to call it, had come over the world gradually. It’s difficult to say precisely when it began—there’d always been a certain “background noise” of unexplained happenings going on in the world, low enough in frequency and intensity that you could ignore it, or reassure yourself that any given instance would prove to be a hoax or have some obscure-but-rational explanation if you just took the time to look into it. And when this background noise started to pick up, the obvious explanation had still been deception: fake news, post-truth politics, new technologies making it easier to doctor video than ever before. Even when an epidemic of disappearances had broken out, it had been easy to assume that it was just mass-media hype: your standard moral panic about traffickers. Electricity and the Internet had started going out and we blamed deregulation; well-established experiments started churning out anomalous results and we blamed planned obsolescence by equipment manufacturers; fish had rained from the sky and we’d blamed climate-change-induced waterspouts.
And then a dragon the size of a Hercules plane had landed on Fort Knox and claimed it as its treasure hoard, and suddenly our explanations had failed us.
Everything had fallen apart quickly after that. Markets collapsed; riots broke out due to runs on consumer goods; in Switzerland, CERN held a press conference to announce that the laws of physics seemed to have changed—though they couldn’t say how. The last international news that I’d heard before the power had crapped out once and for all had been about a mysterious army of glassy-faced figures in shining armour, coming out of nowhere to march on Washington, D.C. Three days after that, I’d personally gotten to watch a similar army marching on Parliament Hill here in Ottawa, bringing an unnatural winter in its wake.
It’s difficult to overstate the shock of it. On Monday of that week, I had been living in a rational universe governed by perfect, inviolable mathematical laws. By Saturday, I’d become a vassal of someone called the Winter Queen, and reality itself seemed to bow to the whims of petty tyrants.
And now, two weeks later, I am cold, I am hungry, and ghosts are real.
*
Lester had always been a large man, and in death, he’s also as stiff as a frozen fish stick. But I manage to stand the body upright, and, by swaying him side-to-side, I “walk” him out the door and down the hall. In the beam of my flashlight—which I hold, uncomfortably, between clenched teeth—I recognize the door to a storage closet a couple of metres farther down. I should still have the key, and it seems as good a place as any to stash the body; I can’t very well leave him in the hallway where I might trip over him in the dark.
I lean Lester against the closet door as I fumble with the lock; my hands tremble slightly with emotions I refuse to let myself feel, but at last I turn the handle and the door swings inward. Lester falls in along with it, and I am not fast enough to ease his descent. He collides face-first with the concrete floor, making a sickening crack! If the sound is anything to go by, his flesh has gone brittle.
Don’t think about it.
I nudge the fallen body sight-unseen with my boot, slowly moving its legs off to one side. And then I slam the door shut.
Shit.
I feel an immediate urge to wash my hands—continuously and for several hours. Instead, I settle for shaking them vigorously, which has the effect of giving free rein to a full-body case of the heebie-jeebies. That was a dead body! I just walked a real, live, dead body down the hall, at the insistence of its ghost! How the hell did this become normal!?
Get a grip, Julia!
I run my fingers repeatedly through my greasy, unkempt hair and draw in a deep breath. Ghost. Right. Ghosts are real. Add that to the list. Life and death had seemed like a pretty fundamental distinction, but hey, what do I know? Hell, it probably takes some of the pressure off! I mean, I’ve been scouring the grad offices for whatever scraps of food I can find, but why should a little thing like not dying be a priority anymore? Hahaha.
Deep breath.
Okay.
It occurs to me that there might still be food in Lester’s office; in the shock of finding him there, I’d neglected to check. A box of Twinkies; a bag of sour peaches in someone’s desk; maybe even a minifridge, and whatever grad students kept in it. One could dream.
Yet I hesitate. The world is positively rotten with mysteries these days, but I’ve never encountered one so close-up.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? Everything may be chaos now, but it will make sense. It will make sense.
I knock on his door.
*
“Hello? Lester? Are you still there?”
“Am I anywhere?” he responds dismally.
“Hah. Fair question, I guess. Um.” I stand, awkwardly holding the door open and scanning the room with my flashlight. Notwithstanding the room’s recent history, it was your standard grad student office: windowless, beige, and covered in papers.
“…Yes?”
“Well, I apologize for the interruption, but um. You don’t happen to have any food in there, eh?”
“Food?”
“Yes. It’s just, I’m getting a bit short of it out here. Every little bit helps.”
“And you figure I don’t need it anymore.”
I suck in a breath. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be committing a microaggression against the dead.
“No, I have no food,” Lester says by way of ending my embarrassment.
“Ah. Well. Thanks for checking. Sorry to disturb your—Sorry to disturb.”
“Wait.”
My gloved hand freezes on the doorhandle. “Yes?”
“Why are you here?”
“Well, like I said, I’m scrounging for food—”
“No. Why are you here at the university?”
I pause. “Well…I don’t really have anywhere else to be,” I reply. “No family in the city. No tight-knit friend groups.”
No one to turn to when the world ends, I think without saying.
“No one else is here,” Lester observes.
“Well, there are a few thousand people sheltering at the stadium,” I correct. “But not here, no. Not in the STEM complex.”
“Because it’s worthless now.”
“That…appears to be the consensus, yes.”
The pedantic part of my brain wants to argue that there had been some concern in the Shift’s early days about looters stealing some of the lab equipment for precious metals—but of course, that’s not what he means.
“Worthless like me.”
I’m not sure how to respond to that. Finally, I just decide to state the obvious: “Me too, I guess.”
I smile without humour into the void.
“Sometimes I think I should just make for the border,” I add, my voice ringing out against the silence. “I’ve heard that it’s still summer in the States. Maybe their new ‘gentry’ are nicer all around, who knows.”
“Why don’t you?”
I hesitate, trying to decide how much I feel like admitting to him. Even at this late date, I worry that a full explanation, if spoken aloud, will sound insane—not least of all to me. More than that, it will make me sound at best like a fool and at worst like a vacillating coward. Generalities it is, then.
“I’m a theoretical physicist,” I say at last. “I’ve spent my entire academic life speculating about new physics—beyond the standard model. And, well…” I raise a hand expansively. “Looks like we’ve found some, eh? Seems like the university is the best place to be!”
“Physics is dead.”
I wince. I probably should have expected the nihilistic interpretation from a suicide victim; God knows, I’d heard enough of it from laypeople at the Emergency Shelters. Fortunately, I think I’m on relatively solid ground, at least about this one issue.
“I’ve heard that theory,” I say, forcing a smile. “Personally, I’m trying to take a more optimistic view. Physics isn’t dead, it’s just become interesting again.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s dead,” returns Lester. “CERN said it. My experiment stopped working. The power went down. And by rights, I shouldn’t even be here talking to you.”
“And yet, the sun still went up at 5:27 this morning.”
Lester says nothing. It occurs to me after a beat that my statement might come across as a bit of a non sequitur, so I add: “That’s when it’s supposed to come up. Assuming it’s July 13th, which is what the calendar says.”
Lester seems to chew on this information. “July,” he echoes at length. “It’s not winter?”
“Magic says it’s winter,” I assert. “Nature says it’s still summer.”
Another long pause. “Oh.”
“And it’s not just the sunrise,” I add, finally stepping into the office and letting the door close behind me. “As far as I can see, everything about the sky says that it’s July 13th and the Shift never happened. The sun rises when it should and sets when it should. The constellations are summer constellations: Hercules, Pegasus, Aquila—you can see them all very clearly now that there’s no light pollution, all at the right altitude and azimuth. Um…it’s a new moon, just like it should be—”
“You’re saying the Shift hasn’t happened in space.”
I nod. “Or at least it doesn’t affect the things we see in space. But…it’s not just that either. The electricity doesn’t work, so we say that magic’s interfering with it; but our nervous systems are electrical, and they’re working just fine—”
“Speak for yourself.”
“Well…yes,” I concede. “But I mean…in general. And I’m not falling through the floor, so presumably Newton’s Third Law is still in effect—”
“So…what then?” Lester interrupts, and, for the first time, his tone sounds not entirely disaffected. “Physics is still around, but magic is just…there on top of it?”
I consider my words carefully. “I think it’s more like…the laws of physics are different from what we thought they were. Like, there’s some…secret ‘higher-order’ term in the equations that we can safely ignore most of the time, but which something caused to flare up recently. Giving rise to the, uh, phenomenology that we call ‘magic’.” I pause. “Or at least…that’s my working hypothesis.”
“Makes sense, I guess.”
I smile somewhat and adjust my glasses. I have to admit that it’s nice to have an actual sounding board for my ideas. Even if he is dead.
“But what happened?” he blurts.
“Eh?”
“I mean, if that’s true, like you said, and there’s some kind of…‘theory of magic’…what caused it to activate?”
“I, uh…don’t know at this stage,” I admit, and then brighten. “That’s one of the things I’m hoping to find out.”
“But you know how to figure it out, at least.”
“Not…as yet,” I say. “But I’ve been combing through the theoretical literature. I figure, maybe I’ll find some incidental references to the possibility of…sudden, dramatic shifts in the laws of reality that might be relevant to our current situation. I mean, already I’ve been reading up on false-vacuum decay; you know, spontaneous symmetry breaking…”
“And those things would allow dragons?”
I feel a flush rise to my cheeks. “Maybe.” I slide my hands into my gloved pockets. “I may have some…other leads, as well.”
As I speak, my mind drifts up to that other room a few floors above us: a radioactivity lab empty to all external appearances. But as Lester himself can attest, appearances can be deceiving these days…
“Like?”
I open my mouth, then close it, reconsidering. “You, uh… You really want me to get into it, eh?”
Lester says nothing for a moment. “I guess. I don’t have anything else to do.”
“No, I suppose you don’t,” I mutter, looking down. I draw in a deep breath. “Alright. The truth is that my main intention upon returning to this university was to…” I shut my eyes. “To kidnap and interrogate Rumpelstiltskin.”
My words hang for a long moment in the frigid air. I had expected to feel embarrassed to say it out loud, like a madwoman giving voice to her delusions. Even with everything that had happened—even when talking to a bloody ghost—the statement still had the ring of certifiability to me. But now that it’s out in the open, I feel…relieved, I suppose. Giddy, even. The world’s gone mad and now the professor has joined the party. I look to the darkness, awaiting Lester’s reply.
“Who?”
I furrow my brow. “You know. The fairy tale character. Spins straw into gold, steals children…”
“Not ringing any bells.”
“I guess they don’t have that one where you come from? Sorry, I just assumed that this sort of thing was common knowledge to anyone who grew up in a Western country. Rumpelstiltskin, Three Billy Goats Gruff, Hansel and Gretel—”
“Sorry.”
“It’s not important,” I murmur.
“But he’s a character.”
“Yeah.”
“But he’s real now.”
“Well…” I sigh. “It’s a bit ambiguous. It’s kind of a long story.”
A pause. “I have nothing but time.”
I purse my lips. “Well. If I’m going to stay here, I need something to burn.”
*
“It was about a month and a half ago,” I begin, warming my hands by the light of a small, smoky fire that I’d built in an aluminum wastepaper basket beside the opened door. “This was…well into the Shift, but before any respectable person could talk about it in anything other than vague pronouncements. ‘Lots of weird news lately.’ That kind of thing. I’d, uh, been prepping to present a radioactivity lab to some third-year undergrads. Just a simple experiment, really: popping a sample of Caesium-137 into the detector and mapping the spectrum of gamma-ray emissions. You probably did it yourself when you were an undergrad.”
“…I must have.”
I nod. “Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, then. But this time, as I sat down to perform the experiment, I found…nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Well, not precisely nothing, I suppose. The apparatus was set up properly; the detector was on, and there was the usual background of cosmic radiation…but nothing else. No spectrum. No peaks, no plateaus. No evidence of radioactivity.”
I shift about in my chair. “So, naturally, my first supposition had been the most obvious: I’d forgotten to put the sample in the detector. And so, I opened up the chamber to look. Well, the sample was there. But now…there’s this card there too. A, uh, business card. Actually, I’ve brought it with me...”
I fish around in the pockets of my oversized parka and withdraw the card, which is printed on high-grade paper and embossed with gold to an extent well beyond the limits of good taste. The inscription reads:
TRANSMUTATION ISN’T FREE!
- I can spin straw into gold and caesium into barium
- Knock five times on the counter in Room 1L03 to ask about my very low rates!
“You can read that I assume,” I ask into the darkness, holding my flashlight over the gilded letters.
“Yeah,” answers Lester. “Weird.”
“That’s what I thought too. That, and that it must have been someone’s idea of a practical joke—even if I had no idea how they were pulling it off. So, I looked around the room, assuming that they must have been in hiding, and said ‘who do you think you are, Rumpelstiltskin’?”
“Your fairy tale character.”
I nod. “Anyways, that, apparently, was the wrong thing to say, because at that point, all hell breaks loose. There’s this horrible, horrible howling sound coming from all around me, and what’s even worse is that the radiation detector starts chittering like mad. So, I run, basically on instinct. I bolt for the door and slam it shut behind me—probably saving my life in the process. And I go to the laboratory director, to tell him what took place.”
I chuckle slightly, despite myself. “I, uh, left out the part about the card, of course. I guess…reporting weird anomalies is one thing, but telling everyone that a storybook character tried to nuke you is something altogether different. I’m um…” I scratch my head. “Well, to own the truth, I’m a little offended that such a thing can happen now, honestly.”
Lester seems to absorb this. “I remember the laboratory wing being shut down for an afternoon. Guys in hazmat suits.”
“Yes,” I agree. “The ministry of public safety got involved. Except, by the time that they showed up, the radiation levels had died down. Only…the caesium sample had turned entirely to barium. That should have taken over a hundred years. He—or whoever this entity is—did it in a matter of minutes. I’ve been carrying his card ever since.”
“And this is the guy that you want to summon,” says Lester. “This guy who tried to kill you.”
“Want is a strong word,” I reply. I look down into the trash can, where the fire has burned down to a smattering of red-glowing embers. “Or maybe…not strong enough. Need, perhaps.”
“Why?”
I frown, taking up a fresh wad of papers from the desk behind me. “It’s…hard to explain. Frustration, I suppose, most of all.”
“Guess I know that feeling.”
“Hm.”
I lay the papers in the bin. “There were kids at the emergency shelter who could heat things with their mind—to the point of combustion. I didn’t even believe that it was real at first. Does that sound crazy? I mean, I can almost countenance the idea of invaders from a parallel universe—or wherever the hell they come from—shrugging off thermodynamics, but…”
“Not kids?”
“No.” My mouth draws into a line. “But it was real. They even taught other people. I tried to learn it—for about six hours. I failed.”
I peer back into the bin and sigh. “I don’t think this is catching.”
“But your story.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, there’s not really that much more to it,” I say. “Basically, it, uh, came to my attention that the language of reality has changed. A child can apparently learn the new language with ease. But I—a tenure-track physicist with more than 3,000 citations on ResearchGate and a PhD from MIT—cannot. That’s when I remembered the card.”
I reach down and set the papers ablaze with my barbecue lighter, basking in the renewed flood of light and heat. Now if only I had a hotdog…
“That was my thesis,” says Lester.
I feel a jolt of horror as I see the flames engulf the pages. “Oh! Oh my God, I’m so sorry—”
“All it’s good for now.”
I settle uneasily back into my seat.
“So how did it go?” Lester asks after a moment. “I assume you tried to summon him.”
I open my mouth. “Not…as such,” I admit. “Every time I try, I, uh—psych myself out.”
“But that is what you’re here for, isn’t it?”
“In theory,” I reply. “In practice…” My expression darkens. “It turns out, I’m kind of a coward.”
Lester apparently has nothing to say to that. For a long while, I just stare into the fire, listening to it crackle. Finally, I watch it die.
“Well,” I say at last, rising to my feet. “I guess I shouldn’t keep you.”
“Wait.”
I pause.
“I—don’t want to be alone. Not after…you know.”
I glance sympathetically into the dark. “…You could come with me, if you like.”
“That’s just it. I don’t think I can. I don’t think that that’s how…being a ghost…works.”
“No, I suppose it wouldn’t be,” I say softly.
Suddenly a thought occurs to me. “But how do you know that?”
“Eh?”
“How do you know you can’t leave?”
“Well, it…I just don’t have a body, you know? Like I’m not moving around, I’m just…here.”
“Lester,” I say carefully. “Would you consent to an interview?”
“Interview? Yeah, I guess, but why—”
“Well, please don’t take this the wrong way, but…your existence is classically impossible. You’re a sentient, interactive aberration of the laws of physics.”
A pause. “You sure know how to flatter a guy.”
“Sorry. But I mean…how many anomalies can you just sit down and talk to? It’s like receiving a slow pitch from God!”
“Well,” says Lester after a moment. “I guess I’m not exactly a ‘rumpelstiltskin’ or whatever. But I’ll try to answer your questions.”
“Thank you.”
With that, I set about to interview the ghost.