Page 64 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
He dropped the bag at his feet in amongst some of the pink and red flowers and it bulged open like a mouth to reveal its contents: the blue flower Lukas had just shown him, with its brightly coloured petals catching the light, and a gold coin, worn smooth. There was a hardback book like a journal, and then a wink of silver in sunlight that made Owen’s stomach leap up into his throat. The flask!
“Yes!” he grunted animalistically, removing the item from the bag, his eyes fixed upon it as the chain curled around his hand. “I told you I would come for you,” he said, not quite sure if he was talking to the flask or to Lukas. “I didn’t forget. Now,” he said, this time definitely talking to the man, “I’m going to have you dig your own grave while I watch, and you are going to lie down in it and I’m going to cover it over so you can’t get out, so nobody has to see your upsetting fucking face again. How does that sound?”
Lukas stared silently, unmoving, his eyes glistening. Then the silence was shattered by a voice, by a question.
“Owen?”
Owen spun on the spot, reaching for the gun in its holster on his hip. There was a man crouched in the flowers next to the church building, a face Owen recognised even though it was twisted in confusion and uncertainty.
“What the fuck... Weir?”
Waverly Weir. His handler from the British government.
The man he had killed a decade earlier.
Owen shook his head at this impossibility.
Weir raised a shaking hand to his own head and moved his eyes around the clearing. “How did I get here?” he asked, rising to his feet, a shaky and unsteady movement. Owen saw that he was naked, a doughy white body with wiry black hair on his belly and in his groin.
Then more people appeared in the clearing, naked and confused and pulling themselves up from the ground, rustling on all sides as they moved amongst the flowers, whispers in the air as these people spoke and gasped. They were everywhere, surrounding Owen. Mostly men, but a few women too. And Owen recognised them all. They were the people he had killed over the years—living people resurrected from Owen’s memories.
“No,” he gasped, taking a shocked step backwards, struggling to comprehend this impossibility. This couldn’t be. This was not the reality he knew and understood.
Owen turned his attention back to Lukas, and the man stared at him with still, frozen eyes.
“You,” Owen shouted, panic turning up the volume on his voice without asking his permission. “You did this! How did you do this?”
He backed away, watching warily as the dead people started to congregate, to exchange words and gaze around at their weird surroundings, squinting and raising hands to shade their eyes against the bright sunlight. Some of these people had been dead for decades and Owen wondered what it must be like to awaken to life after so long in death.
“No,” he murmured.
Some of the dead were looking at Owen now, as if they recognised him or remembered him from their final moments. He saw one woman—the daughter of a crime boss, he thought, a woman he had shot in Brooklyn perhaps fifteen years earlier—dart towards the church as if seeking cover. But then one of the saplings snapped forward, many branches twitching towards her, and she screamed and abruptly changed course, running in the opposite direction towards the trees on the far side of the clearing. Her naked body was as pale as porcelain in the sunlight, a shock of white against the greens and browns of the woodland.
As he watched the impossible dead, Owen realised the mistake he had made. The chess piece allowed him to control Lukas’s body but not his thoughts, and it was the man’s thoughts that had, somehow, resurrected all of his victims.
Owen started firing, killing for a second time all the newly resurrected people. He killed Weir first, and then the others—move, target, fire, move, target, fire—working methodically and meticulously, like the trained professional he was. He emptied the first clip and replaced it with the spare in his coat pocket, a swift and well-practiced motion. The resurrected dead were fleeing him, screaming into the air, and the smell of gun smoke filled Owen’s nose. He used the chess piece, still gripped in his left hand even as that hand steadied his right arm, as he concentrated on the many people darting about in the clearing, compelling them to be still. All movement ceased, and Owen shot them, one at a time. The air was filled with bloodred flowers as heads exploded and naked bodies dropped to the ground. Another one of the strange, spindly trees snapped forward and caught one of the unmoving men, wrapping branches around him and lifting him up. Owen heard an awful crunching and looked away before he could see what the tree was doing to its victim.
“Son?”
The voice stopped him and froze the blood in his veins.
Owen turned on his heel and saw a withered old man with a potbelly and a bald head, sagging jowls and dark eyes buried beneath his brow.
Owen’s father. The man who had beaten and terrorised him as a child.
The man Owen had smothered to death years earlier, in the house where he had grown up, in the living room where pictures of Owen as a boy and as a man had sat on the mantelpiece, as though his father were proud of him.
His father stumbled, his legs weak, and then looked around, blinking furiously in the light. Owen wondered if the old man remembered being killed, if he remembered his grown-up son returning to him after twenty years and smothering him where he sat on the tired old sofa in front of the TV. Owen hoped he remembered that, and then he shot him straight through the forehead, killing him for the second time. He watched the old man fall backwards into the flowers, and then surveyed his handiwork with satisfaction, ignoring Lukas, who remained frozen where he stood. The clearing was littered with corpses, naked bodies lying amongst the flowers, shocked eyes gazing at the sky.
Then another figure sat up in the shadow of the church. A man, glancing around.
“Owen?”
It was Waverly Weir again. Owen stared, his mind struggling to grasp this, like a climber falling and scrambling for rope that was dancing out of reach. He glanced over to where Weir’s body—hisotherbody—still lay, where Owen had killed him minutes earlier. The thief wasn’t just reanimating corpses; he was creating new versions of the dead each time he brought them back to life.
A moment later two more people sat up, people Owen had already shot.
“No,” he murmured, backing away.
