A Brotherhood of Crows.

It happened in the same way as it always did.

Out of the grey fog of a winter’s evening, I found myself wandering down an endless alleyway in an unknown city. I had drifted for what seemed like hours through pale streets, past the ghosts of people, fluctuating in and out of transparency, heads beginning to turn as I passed, white faces and dark eyes watching me, until I came to this place one again. It was always the same.

The alley was long and narrow, and as I walked into it the sounds of the city seemed to fade away. It seemed to stretch on forever, with high brick walls that reduced the night sky to a narrow slit. Very far ahead, I could see where the alley ended and the street began again but knew that no matter how long I walked I would never reach the end.

Eventually, I reached the same place as always: a doorway, shuttered, with little steps leading up to it. It began to rain, heavily. The ground around my feet began to flood. I settled myself in the doorway, hunched up against the rain and sudden cold, and watched the water run of my boots and form into pools. The cigarette, the same wonkily rolled little white thing, was in my hand and I lit it and watched it burn.

Across the alleyway, on the world, were a series of neon letters embedded in the brickwork. As the rain became heavier, so heavy it began to cause the air to haze, they began to light up.

WHY ARE YOU HERE?

“I’m not sure,” I said.

New letters lit up.

WE DO NOT WANT YOU HERE.

“I know.”

I took a puff on my cigarette and let smoke slither from my nostrils.

WHAT WILL YOU DO?

“I’ve been trying to figure that out for years.” I was saying the same things I always said. Aware I was following a script, yet every response felt new.

WE KNOW WHAT YOU SHOULD DO - the neon letters said. Between each phrase, and through the haze of the downpour, they rearranged themselves like liquid.

“What? What should I do?”

A pause. I continued to smoke. I was aware of the rain getting louder and louder, and of the the alley beginning to flood and the water raising to the ankles of my boots. I waited to hear the sign’s response.

It came the same way it always did. A single word.

SUICIDE.

The water continued to rise. I reached down and took out my revolver. From its weight, I know it had a single round in the chamber. It always did. I raised it, pressed it to my temple, and pulled the trigger.

The sudden piercing shriek of my alarm annihilated the scene like a blast wave. The alley was gone, the rain and flooding gone, and I was sitting up in bed, dripping with sweat, in my dimly lit bedroom.

My world shifted and became more real. I realised there was a cool pressure against my head. I had my revolver pressed against it. As my alarm had gone off, there had been a hollow clack as the revolver’s hammer fell on an empty chamber. It was a sound I was used to waking up to.

I let the gun fall onto the bedsheets and swiveled, so I was sitting with my feet on the coarse carpet. The only source of light in the room was from windows leading onto my balcony. The thin beam illuminated the bedside table, where my alarm clock set (5.12 am it said) next to a holo-stopwatch, which had come to a halt at “1h, 55m” and was flashing a warning angry red. It was this that had tripped my alarm clock,

I rubbed my jaw sleepily. Two hours. That was the longest period I could spend asleep. Because when I slept, when I close my eyes, I went straight to Elsewhere. Sleep allowed me to move and explore Elsewhere while my conscious body remained prone in my bed. With time to kill, I would just follow my feet and see where I ended up, though at least half my mind was dreaming, the rest of my seemed driven by something outside myself, through the monochrome world, the black and grey cities, mingling in crowds of ghosts.

But there was a limit to how long I could stay in Elsewhere. Two hours. Not a second more. The closer it got to two hours, the more Elsewhere began to fragment, the more its pale denizens began to realise the intruder in their midst, and the more hostile it became. I had learned through a few narrow escapes that unless I wanted to be torn apart by grey teeth that became more solid with every second. Sometimes the silence of that place was filled with whispers, hushed voices that I swore repeated one phrase “Give us eyes.”

The consequence was that I slept in stages of no more than one hour and fifty five minutes. The five minute margin for error gave me time to wake up properly, and completely flee from Elsewhere. Even that was cutting it fine.

It was cold in my room. I left the balcony window open, so that the chill came in a kept my sleep light. Wrapping myself in my blanket, I got up, grabbed from the bedside table the cigarette I had pre-rolled before my sleep shift had begun, and walked out onto the balcony. Edinburgh sat still in the dawn light. On my last wake up, it had still been dark, and the city had twinkled with a thousand lights, and even from this distance I could hear the pounding of music from the clubs and shouts and chatter of crowds of revellers out on town for Friday night. Now, there were all gone, having staggered drunkenly to catch the last airship home. The music had slid into nothingness, and the city now seemed abandoned, as if some great disaster had wiped away almost all traces of human life and left the buildings untouched. From my balcony I had a decent view down onto Princess Street. The only signs of life were the few early rising power trippers, aiming to be in the office by six am, and scuttling poor, the cleaners and street sweepers, who would tidy away the detritus left by the wealthy at play the previous evening.

I stared at the city and smoked reflectively. That last journey into Elsewhere - the rainy alley and the neon lights - had shaken me. It shouldn’t have. I found myself there at least one a night. Every time was the same. Every time I woke up with the revolver dry fired against my temple. It had become a ritual of my bedtime routine that as I undressed and brushed my teeth, I would unload the revolver and locked all my ammunition, along with my katai blades, in a trunk at the base of my bed. That way, the nightly ritual of waking to a gun against my head would be nothing more than disturbing.

One day, I worried, I would forget. Maybe even deliberately.

I finished the cigarette and flicked it off the edge of the balcony. It fell past the narrow netting I had rigged up twenty feet below the balcony (another precaution, in case Elsewhere tried to convince me that the revolver was inferior to a plunge). I thought about going back to sleep, but I was too awake now, thanks to the cold and the nicotine and the remnants of those neon letters spelling out a word which I never said aloud (SUICIDE) but tended to resonate around my mind like an echo that never quite died. I went back inside, and surveyed my bare bedroom. Simple bed, foot locker, desk (empty), my bookshelf (also empty. Since when did I have time to read?) and unobtrusive wardrobe. It was a room that had no life to it. It could have sat totally empty for all the time I spent here. The bed had been occupied by me and me alone for years. No one had ever been up here apart from me. It was a place only I ever saw. A place I alone inhabited.

I dressed myself and wondered over the the dumbwaiter that was the only way in and out of my room. Since Tobias and I had moved into this place, four years ago, I’d deliberately chosen the old, circular room at the top of the watchtower that rose from the peak of Arthur’s Seat. Its original purpose was unknown to me, but it was only accessible by hand operated dumbwaiter, just big enough for one person. Tobias always joked that I should install some stairs or at least answer my phone sometimes, like a normal person. What I didn’t say to him, though I’m sure he realised, was that once I was up in my room,I was cut off. The only way down was via the dumbwaiter, and when it was at the top of its shaft, nothing could bring it down again. Apart from me, at a time of my choosing.

It was better that way.

The dumbwaiter led me down to the closest approximation to a living room Tobias and I possessed: a long rectangular space, running almost the length of the building, set on two levels with an open mezzanine running around it like a halo. I emerged on the top level. All the walls were set floor to ceiling with bookcases, stuffed to bursting point. Whereas I never had the time to read, Tobias devoured books at a frightening rate. I clambered down the spiral staircase to the ground floor. A series of old battered sofas occupied one area, and beyond that a dining table and kitchenette. I wasn’t remotely surprised to find Tobias sprawled across one of the sofas, tapping intently on his wrist unit.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked cheerily as I plonked myself down in an armchair and kneaded my temples.

“Ha-de-fucking ha. Any coffee?”

Tobias, without looking up from his wrist unit, motioned to a steaming mug on the low table between the sofas. “I guessed you’d be getting up about now. It’s that special stuff you like. You know, that you get imported from Italy.”

“You can’t argue with good coffee,” I snatched up the mug eagerly and inhaled the delicious fumes.

“I’m not arguing with good coffee. I’m arguing that by importing coffee from Italy, instead of living off Aldi own brand muck like the rest of us, you are a bit of a wanker.”

“I like the taste,” I said, defensively.

“Taste?” Tobias rolled his eyes. “Mate, you smoke twenty billion cigarettes a day. It’s a wonder you can taste anything.”

“I like the taste of cigarettes.” I countered.

“Oh, really? And what does your coffee taste like?”

I sipped it, paused, and then admitted defeat. “Cigarettes.”

Tobias nodded triumphantly to himself, and went back to his tapping. I drank the coffee in silence and tried my best to forget the words written in unseen brick walls in neon lights.

“Why are you up so early?”

“I’ve been busy.” said Tobias.

“Doing what?”

“Tell you in a moment. I just need to finish this…”

I sighed, and surveyed the room blearily. “Tobias?”

“Yeah?”

“Why is there a dead guy on our dining table?”

“Ah!” Tobias’s eyes lit up and he leapt to his feet, bounding with excitement. “Here is the fruits of my labours!”

“...A dead guy?” I followed him over. On our dining room table, a shape, covered in a white sheet lay. It would have been innocuous apart from the feet sticking out of the end.

“Not just any dead guy.” Tobias continued to finish up whatever he was doing on his wrist unit as he spoke. “This is the dead guy. The one you shot at Waverly.”

I frowned. “How...how did you get his body?”

“Oh, simple really. I couldn’t sleep so I hacked into the City Morgue’s dataframe, rejigged some files so this body was swapped with one scheduled for cremation. I figured we could use it to figure out what the hell was going on.”

“Right...um...how did you get it here?”

Tobias grinned. “The pizza delivery boy and I have an understanding.”

I blinked, nonplussed. The brief step into Elsewhere didn’t do anything to clarify the situation. “You got the pizza boy to bring us a dead body.”

“....And breakfast!” said Tobias triumphantly. He skirted the body on the table and yanked out a limp slice of pizza from somewhere, which he then thrust in my direction. “Hungry?”

“What is it it?” I accepted the slice over the corpse hesitantly.

“One large omivorgasm with extra cheese, jalaponos and...” Tobias hesitated and examined his own slice of pizza for a second. “... haribo. Oh my God, Fabio, you know my tastes so well!”

I looked at my pizza with trepidation. “Why...why is it so damp?”

“Ah, well, that might be the extra cheese…”

“Oh, that’s fine -”

“....Or it could be the embalming fluid. The pizza has been under the corpse for about twenty minutes.” Tobias gave me a defensive look. “What? I only have so many hands. You try manhandling a corpse, a large pizza and a delivery boy at the same time.”

I opened my mouth to retort but gave up. I threw the pizza over my shoulder. It hit the wall behind me with a damp sound, and stuck.

“Still not entirely sure why you brought this corpse here.” I said, as Tobias wolfed his slide of formaldehyde flavoured haribo pizza and began poking at the body with his fingers.

“Well, I thought since, you know, the guy we were chasing suddenly transformed into a gigantic steel clawed monster, we might be able to figure out why if we did an autopsy.”

“An autopsy.” I repeated. “Right, and who’s going to do the autopsy?”

Tobias gave me a look of exasperation. “Me, duh.”

“You know how to do an autopsy?”

“Sure!” Tobias, with a level of energy that no one should have at almost six am, skipped across the room and returned with a first aid kit and a toolbox. “ I’ve been learning. Partly, I’ve been watching seminars on anatomy and post mortem surgical methodology on the holo.”

“Ah, ok, that seems legit -”

“But mostly?” Tobias reached into the toolkit, took out a hacksaw, regarded it critically then threw it away. “I’ve been playing a literal fuck ton of Mortal Kombat recently. Those fatalities are educational you know.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but then gave up. Instead, I settled myself at the table - a suitable distance from the corpse - and lit a cigarette. Tobias’s boundless enthusiasm for everything could be disorientating at times. I could never work out whether he was an idiot, a genius, or some bizarre mishmash of the two.

“So how did your meeting in Cambridge go?” Tobias asked. He continued to rifle through the tool kit, drawing out objects and then discarding them over his shoulder, so that a small pile of tools was now building itself up against the wall, beneath the damp pizza slice.

“Odd,” I said. “The job doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.”

“Who were you meeting again? Ah! That’s where you went!” Tobias yanked out a double barrelled shotgun, cocked it, and then threw it over his shoulder. I cringed, half expecting it to go off and blow a hole in the wall.

“Some academic,” I inhaled, and then sighed smokily. “Horatio Crucius.”

Tobias stopped dead in his search.

“The Horatio Crucius?”

“Is there more than one? God awful thought.”

“No, Eli, seriously. Was it the Horatio Crucius? The Unnatural Scientist?”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “You know him?”

Tobias gave me an incredulous look. “Mate, he’s only the founding father of British Unnatural Science! I’ve read all his books! The man’s a legend. What was he like in person?”

I considered this for a moment. “A pain in arse?”

Tobias frowned, disappointedly. “You think everyone’s a pain in the arse.”

“I’m usually correct.”

“But surely there are scales, you know of...arse pain? Like Hitler was a bigger pain in the arse than the guy down the corner shop who wouldn’t sell you a Cornetto because you came in covered in blood after a job?”

I considered this. “Well...they’re both wankers.”

Tobias rolled his eyes. “Well, maybe. Anyway, so are you going to watch me do this autopsy or not?”

“Do I have to?”

“Dunno, could be plot important.” Tobias began rummaging in his kit again. “Also, what are we doing about Dr Crucius’ job?”

“London,” I replied. “We’ll head there this afternoon. I don’t have much to go on, but an idea or two of where to start.”

“Cool,” midway through his search, Tobias hesitated, “Why this afternoon? Can’t we go after the autopsy?”

I crushed out my cigarette and finished my coffee. “There’s something I need to do first,”

“Oh, pray tell - aha!” Tobias, inexplicably, pulled out a gigantic battle axe from his kit and began to sharpen it.

“I -” I hesitated. How exactly did I describe what I had planned for the morning? “There...there’s this girl I need to speak to.”

Tobias froze, midway through his sharpening. “Oh. A girl. A girl. A girl…” he put his head on one side. “I thought you weren’t into girls.”

“I’m not,”

“Ah! At last, you admit it! You’re into guys. Welcome to my world, we’ve been expecting you -”

“I’m not into guys either,” I said, gently but firmly, “I’m not into anyone. You know that.”

“Whatevs,” Tobias sniffed. “Pull back the sheet, would you?”

I sighed, and then did as he asked. The sheet covering the corpse was heavy, thick and it took a few seconds to draw it fully back to reveal the body beneath. I frowned. “That’s...he looks different.”

What lay on my dining room table was not the hideous creature that I had fought off in Waverly. Instead of that, what lay on my table was the pale, dead body of a middle aged man.

“Take a closer peek, though,” Tobias moved in closer. “Look at his skin - that seem odd to you? It looks like it’s been stretched. You see the marks here on the face, around the neck and the shoulders? Also, look at this,” he gestured to the corpse’s fingers, “Nails look like they’ve been split and healed up, do you see? You see elsewhere on the skin as well, that same thing - tissue expansion, presumably opening up mechanotransduction pathways - as if the body was changing shape rapidly…”

I opened my mouth to ask him firstly how he knew all of that, and secondly how he’d figured that out from spending less than thirty seconds looking at the corpse, but Tobias had already moved on. He was using the edge of the axe to gingerly open the corpse’s lips. I inhaled sharply at the sight.

“That’s grim,”

“Significant gum damage,” Tobias continued to monologue, “No sign of any teeth, but look at the way the gums have split, hmm? As if something had been forced through them rapidly -” He glanced up at me, “You get a glimpse of this thing’s mouth?”

“Metal teeth,” I replied, “Like a mouth full of steak knives,”

“Mmm,” delicately, Tobias leaned over the body, and with the edge of the axes, flipped open one of the eyelids. “Well, would you look at that…”

There were no eyeballs. The corpse’s sockets were empty pools of sickly deep red and black. “They look cauterised…” I muttered. “It didn’t have eyes - there were flames there instead...I lit a smoke on one.”

“Mate. Gross. Also, knew it. Anyway.” Tobias leaned back and continued to sharpen this axe. “My two cents? This guy’s body went under huge trauma - and transformation. I’ll probably know more once I get inside him.”

“Poor choice of words,”

“ Jesus, Eli, he’s dead. That said, it’s been a while. The pizza boy left half an hour ago, and a man has needs. You gonna stay or go find your young lady?”

“She’s not my young lady,” I grabbed my coat and hat from the arm of one of the sofas, where I’d flung them the previous day.

“Oh, well who is she then?”

“That,” I said as I made for the door, “Is what I’m going to try and find out.”