Larry's Not Dead
If Larry wasn't in the grave, who was?
Magnus stared vacantly into space. This was awkward. Definitely awkward.
"Mrs. Reynolds," he began.
"Elisabeth. I'd really rather you call me Elisabeth."
"Yes, I'm sorry, I forgot. Elisabeth, what you're telling me, well, it's quite impossible."
"I'm not asking you to just believe me." said Elisabeth. "I can prove everything I've told you."
Magnus sighed. He didn't want to encourage this poor woman's deranged delusions. What was his legal responsibility, even? Should he report her to the police? And if so, for what? Perhaps a doctor was more appropriate, but where does one find such a doctor?
"I'm sorry. I can't take this case." he said.
"At least see the photographs." said Elisabeth. "And stop apologising all the time."
"I really can't ---"
"Wait there, I'll get them.”
A month earlier, Larry Reynolds, Elisabeth’s husband, had breezed through the door whistling, after returning from work.
“Hello, my love!” he shouted.
Elisabeth was painting a watercolour in the study. She rose and went to meet him, kissing him.
“How’s your day been?” he asked.
“I’ve almost finished the painting with the rabbits and hills.” she said.
“Oh, lovely!” he said, beaming.
Larry was forty-five years old, at least ten years older than Elisabeth in appearance, and his hair had substantially receded, in sharp contrast to Elisabeth’s long flowing golden locks. He was somewhat rotund and wore strong spectacles. His colleagues found it impossible to describe him without including the word ‘jovial’.
“I’ve made you your favourite beef stew.” she said.
“You’re too good to me.” he said.
“How was the lab today?” she asked.
“Oh, things are still a bit tense with Steve. He’ll come round. A productive day overall though.”
She smiled, gazing fondly into his eyes.
“I love you so much.” he said.
“I love you too.” she replied.
Later that evening she served him beef stew and potatoes, then went back to her watercolour. They never ate together.
Half an hour passed before Larry noticed anything wrong. It started as a mild stomach upset, which became steadily worse. His heart began to pound, and sweat broke out on his forehead.
At the time he was still eating, while leafing through a journal called New Frontiers in Plasma Physics.
He rose unsteadily to his feet and discovered his balance was a little off. The dining room seemed to lurch unevenly from side to side and he almost fell on his face. He staggered to the study where he found Elisabeth, still painting.
“Elisabeth,” he said, “I don’t feel well.”
She rushed to him, a look of anxious concern on her face.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“I feel sick and I’m dizzy.” he replied. “My heart’s beating really fast.”
“Come and lie on the sofa.”
He leaned on her while she brought him to the sofa in the living room, where he lay down.
“Oh!” he said, “I think I might need an ambulance. I think I’m having a heart attack.”
“Nonsense, petal.” she said. “You’re fine. It’s all that stress at work.”
He lay there for half an hour, gasping for breath. She watched him attentively and patted his forehead with a damp towel.
“Elisabeth.” he said, arriving at a firm decision. “Call an ambulance. Dial 999.”
By then he could hardly speak, and had to pronounce the words in-between taking big gulps of air.
“You’re fine.” she said. “There’s a virus going round. It’s probably that. I’m sure it is.”
He closed his eyes. His breathing soon began to slow, and scarcely more than an hour after he’d eaten the beef stew, he died.
The look of concern vanished from her face and was replaced by steely determination and a faint smile.
She immediately phoned Rob.
“It’s done.” she said. “Come over.”
Ten minutes later she let Rob in. Rob was tall and gangly, and wore a permanently surprised expression. Everything caught Rob by surprise, and in that sense, this was no different. He had gone through his entire life feeling that everyone else seemed to know what they were doing when he had no clue what was going on, and perhaps that was why he was so drawn to Elisabeth’s decisiveness.
“Did you bring the sack?” she asked.
“Yes, it’s in the car.”
“Get it then!” she hissed.
He fetched the thick plastic sack from the car.
“I think we should put him in head first.” she said. “That was if anything pokes out at least it’ll only be his feet. Anyway I don’t want to see his head again. Come and look. He’s all red and covered in sweat.”
“Don’t worry, it’s really long. It’s eight feet.”
Getting the sack around Larry proved to be relatively easy. Rob sealed off the end with a large cable tie.
“OK.” said Elisabeth. “Where’s the car?”
“At the front.”
“Put it at the back. Leave the boot open. Door’s unlocked.”
“He looks heavy.”
“He is heavy, but nothing we can’t manage.”
While Rob was moving the car, she carefully scraped the remains of the beef stew into a bin liner and washed the plate under hot water.
Rob reentered the house through the back door. “All set.” he said.
“You take his head and I’ll get his feet.” said Elisabeth, and together they dragged Larry out of the house, where the car stood waiting with an open boot.
“You sure he’ll fit in there?” Rob asked.
“Absolutely.” said Elisabeth.
Getting Larry off the ground and into the boot proved challenging. Eventually they managed it by first propping him against the car and then sliding him into the open boot bit by bit. Rigor Mortis was already beginning by the time Larry was lying fully in the boot, but they managed to fold him half so that he was completely inside the car, and Elisabeth pulled the boot shut. She lay back against the car, smiling.
“That was more difficult than I expected.” she said.
“I don’t know how you do it.” said Rob. “You never sweat.”
She laughed sweetly.
Rob was now covered in sweat and his sandy hair was sticking to his forehead.
“Let’s go.” she said. “I’ll drive.”
They drove for an hour until they reached their destination: a track that led into a dark forest. There they dragged Larry laboriously off the track until they reached a pit previously dug by Rob.
“Should we say a few words?” said Rob uncertainly.
“What do you mean?” said Elisabeth.
“Like a prayer or something.”
“Oh God, no. Just dump him in.”
Rob pushed Larry’s body into the pit.
“I’ll go and get the spade.” he said.
“Hurry up, I’m freezing.”
Soon Larry was safely buried under four feet of earth.
The following day, Elisabeth was painting, a subtle smile on her face, when the lab called.
“Larry didn’t come into work today and he’s not answering his mobile.” said the voice on the phone. “We just want to make sure he’s OK.”
“Weird.” said Elisabeth. “He left at the same time as usual. I’m sure he’s just got sidelined. You know what he’s like.”
“He’s usually tells us if he’s going to be this late.” said the voice.
“Don’t worry about it.” said Elisabeth.
She went back to her painting, wondering what was going to happen next. She planned to start acting distressed and calling the hospitals when he supposedly failed to come home from work, or from wherever he had supposedly gone. Eventually, of course, she would have to phone the police, and then she would spin them a tale of how they had been arguing a lot and how Larry had said work was very stressful and he sometimes thought of just upping and leaving without telling anyone. She might add something in about suicidal thoughts too.
Obviously, she wouldn’t say all this right at the start. She would let them drag it out of her bit by bit.
At half-past six the sound of the front door being unlocked caught her by surprise. She went to confront the intruder, and there was Larry.
“Hello, my love!” he said cheerily. “Did you miss me? What’s for dinner? I was thinking maybe we should go out somewhere, for a treat.”
“Larry!” she exclaimed.
He finished taking off his coat and stopped and looked at her.
“Whatever’s the matter, Lizzy?” he said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Are you … OK?” she stammered.
“Yes, why wouldn’t I be?”
Her mind was racing. If Larry was here, who was in the grave? She had watched as Rob had put Larry in the bag. There was no way Larry could not be in that bag, and they had buried the bag. She had seen Larry die with her own eyes.
“Lal, what happened yesterday?” she said.
The words seemed to force themselves out of her, produced not via conscious effort, but erupting out of a kind of seething psychological magma.
“Yesterday?” said Larry, puzzled. “Well, you know I can’t talk about everything we’re doing, but I worked on Project D like usual. I wish I could tell you what it’s all about, but I can’t. Top secret.”
“What happened when you got home?” she said.
“What is this, some kind of memory test? Let’s see, well, I must have fallen asleep. I’m sorry precious, I’ve been working too hard recently. Too many late nights. But now I feel much better. Let’s go out somewhere and eat for a change.”
There was a knock at the door. It was Rob.
She ran to the door, opened it and practically shouted, “I’ve told you I’m not interested in your solar panels. Go away!”
At the same time she tried to frantically signal to Rob that he needed to leave with all possible haste. Rob assumed the police must be there, and dutifully went away.
“These salesmen.” said Larry. “They’re really getting out of control. So, what do you think? Chinese? Italian?”
“I think he was English.” she replied.
“No, I mean, what kind of food would you like to eat?”
“I’m sorry, I promised Becky I’d meet her tonight.” she said, thinking quickly. “She’s having some problems with marriage. I promised her I’d go round and we’d have a chat.”
“Oh, no problem, perhaps tomorrow then. You won’t stay away long, will you?”
“Just a couple of hours.”
“Are you sure you’re all right? You’re shaking! Why don’t you sit down and we’ll have a cup of tea.”
“No I’m fine, just feeling a bit drained.”
“OK. Offer still stands if you change your mind. I must warn you though, I’m going to eat sausages while you’re out. I know you hate the smell of them.”
She laughed greenly, then ran upstairs to change her clothes.
Unsettling thoughts raced through her mind. How could he not be dead? Had she gone insane?
As soon as she had changed out of her painting clothes she ran downstairs and out of the door, shouting “See you later!” over her shoulder.
She went immediately to Rob’s flat and banged on the door till he answered.
“I need to talk to you.” she said.
“What’s happened?” he asked.
Rob presumed she was going to tell him they had made some dreadful mistake, or that the police already suspected her, but the story she came out with instead was far stranger.
“It’s impossible.” he said, as they sat on his sofa, Elisabeth alternately crying and ranting. “How can he be alive again? He was dead as a doornail, Lizzy. There’s no way he could come back from that.”
“I know it’s impossible.” she said, gesticulating wildly. “I’m telling you, it’s him, he’s back, and he thinks he just fell asleep last night.”
“Does he have a twin?”
“A what?”
“An identical twin. Maybe they’ve been secretly double-dating you. Well, not double-dating. Double marrying I suppose.”
“Oh, Rob, I would have realised if there were two of them. Anyway, he doesn’t have a twin.”
“You’re sure? Completely sure?”
“Yes, I’m completely sure! He’s an only child, Rob. Oh, what are we going to do? This isn’t normal.”
“You must be hallucinating.” said Rob. “You know, there are subtstances that can make people hallucinate all sorts of things, so they can’t tell them from reality. Extracts of certain plants in the nightshade family. Nasty things. Maybe you got a dose somehow. Maybe he poisoned you before you poisoned him. Or maybe you brushed against something poisonous in the forest. I had a friend once who ate some henbane seeds and he thought he was being prepared for sacrifice by Aztecs, but there was no-one there at all. He had a long conversation with the high priest, begging for his life.”
“I’m not hallucinating! You need to see him for yourself. You need to come to the house. You’ll have to pretend to be someone else. Maybe a gallery owner, who wants to exhibit my art.”
“I’ve never seen him before up close, except when he was dead. How would I know if it’s him or not?”
“I’ll show you some photos. Anyway he looked much the same dead as he does alive. You’ll see, it’s him.”
A little later that evening, Elisabeth went back to the house, where Larry was watching TV. He greeted her enthusiastically and started asking her about Becky and her marriage.
“Darling,” she said, “someone’s coming to see me in a bit. His name’s Alphonse. He owns a gallery in London. He contacted me via email. He’s interested in my paintings. You don’t mind do you?”
“No, of course not.” said Larry. “That’s wonderful news! I’m so happy for you. I always said it’s only a matter of time till people recognise how talented you are. Why’s he coming so late though?”
“He’s driving here from London and his car got stuck in traffic. He thinks he’ll be here by nine.”
“Does he need somewhere to stay?”
“Oh no, he’s booked a hotel.”
At nine on the dot, Rob knocked at the door.
“Come in, come in!” said Larry. “My wife’s in the other room. I’ll get her. Living room’s through here. Make yourself at home.”
Rob was wearing the top half of a suit over a t-shirt in an attempt to better resemble a gallery-owner from London, and he’d ruffled his already-ruffled hair.
Larry fetched Elisabeth, who told Larry that she wanted him to meet the gallery-owner too.
They assembled together in the living room, Larry fussing about getting people drinks. Rob gratefully accepted a glass of whisky.
“I really think I should just leave you two to discuss.” said Larry, looking from Rob to Elisabeth and back again.
“Oh no, we want you here.” said Rob, attempting to sound as much like he spent a lot of time in London as possible, but succeeding only in sounding odd. “I’m interested in … how Elisabeth’s paintings … make you feel. Yeah. Always important to get the feedback of outsiders to the art establishment.”
“I see.” said Larry. “And where is your gallery, if you don’t mind me asking? Perhaps I’ve seen it. I’ve spent quite a lot of time in London.”
“It’s … well, it’s very central.” said Rob.
“Oh? Convent Garden? Camden?”
“Yes, it’s in Camden. On the main road.”
“Wonderful. And what kind of art do you specialise in?”
“We do all sorts.”
“Classical? Modern?”
“Both.”
“Oh, that’s great.” said Larry. “What particular kinds of classical art do you like the most?”
Rob looked at him wild-eyed, stuck for words.
“He likes Renaissance art, don’t you, Alphonse?” said Elisabeth.
“Yes, yes, Renaissance art is my favourite.” said Rob. “Anyway, I’m really hear to talk about Elisabeth’s paintings.
“I’m a huge fan of Renaissance art!” said Larry ecstatically. “You must tell me, who are your top five favourite Renaissance artists?”
“Oh …” said Rob. “I like, well, all of them. I couldn’t chose.”
Larry nodded gravely, as if fully understanding Rob’s inability to chose his favourite Renaissance artist.
After twenty excruciating minutes, during which they looked at Elisabeth’s paintings and Elisabeth did everything possible to distract Larry from asking awkward questions, Rob announced that his phone was buzzing, and then pretended to check his messages. He announced that he had to leave urgently.
At the door, Elisabeth hissed at him: “It’s him! Do you see that it’s him?”
“It does look like him.” said Rob.
“It is him.” she whispered. “I know my own husband.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’ll talk tomorrow. Tomorrow morning.”
“I’ve got to go to work.”
“Phone in sick! This is important.”
The following day, Elisabeth met Rob in his flat and persuaded him that they had to go and check the shallow grave where they’d buried Larry, even though Rob argued vociferously that they should be nowhere near the grave, and that was the worst thing they could possibly do.
Nevertheless, an hour later they were there, and Rob was digging the grave up.
He stopped suddenly, staring at the soil beneath his feet.
“What is it?” said Elisabeth.
“I’ve torn open the plastic sack with the spade. Look, that’s his nose.”
She peered into the grave.
“Pull it back more. We have to see if it’s really him.”
“Of course it’s him. Who else could it be?”
“Get more earth off him and pull the plastic back. Just his face will be enough. I just need to see his face.”
Rob dutifully obeyed, and soon they were staring at the soil-strewn face, literally as pale as death, of Elisabeth’s husband.
“It looks like him.” she said.
“It is him.” said Rob. “You murdered him and we buried him.”
“Then how do you explain that Larry came home from work the same as usual and last night he was at my house, watching TV?”
Rob shook his head.
“This makes no sense. No sense at all.”
“We’ll have to kill the other one as well.” said Elisabeth.
“No!” said Rob. “Enough killing, Lizzy. We’re not serial killers.”
“Rob, whatever’s in my house, is not Larry. That’s Larry, down there. The thing in my house is a copy of Larry. We need to kill it. It’s not natural.”
Rob leaned his head on his spade.
“Are you crying?” she asked him.
“No.” he replied. Then he lifted his head up and said, “OK, how are we going to do it this time?”
“He wants me to go to Litney Forest with him.” she told Larry that night, when they were lying together in bed. “He says there’s a little glade there that I absolutely have to paint.”
“Can’t he find anywhere closer?” said Larry. “It’s nearly an hour away by car.”
“He’s very insistent that I have to paint that particular glade. He says if I do it, he’ll exhibit my paintings.”
“Then you must do it.” said Larry, smiling.
“Will you come with me? I don’t want to be alone with a strange man in a forest.”
Larry frowned. “It’s a bit difficult to take time off work at the moment.” he said.
“Please Larry. I just need one day. We’ll all go to this glade and I’ll paint it. If we go in the morning we might even get back by early afternoon and you can go back to work for the rest of the day.”
“Why don’t we go on Saturday?”
“He’s only here for another day. It has to be tomorrow. You can call in sick.”
“You know I hate lying. There’s no need; I can just tell Steve I have something important to attend to. If that’s really what it takes to swing the deal, then I’ll do it.”
She kissed him.
The next morning, Elisabeth, Rob and Larry set off for the forest. When they got there, they led Larry to a location not far from his grave, where Elisabeth stabbed him with a kitchen knife.
As he was dying, gasping for breath, he caught Rob’s eye and said, “She’s … not …”
But he expired before he could finish the sentence.
They buried him ten metres from the previous Larry.
“Seriously,” said Rob, after he’d finished filling in the earth over the top of the second Larry, “they were twins. You’ve been married to twins. There’s nothing else that makes sense.”
“Let’s go back to my place.” said Elisabeth. “Larry has a ten-year-old bottle of Scotch that he was always going on about. You need a drink.”
When they got home and cracked open the bottle, Elisabeth found she wasn’t in the mood for drinking after all, but Rob drank a couple of glasses.
They spent the rest of the day together and Rob was eating takeaway food in the living room, Larry’s Scotch standing half-empty on the table, when the door opened.
“Hello, my love!” shouted Larry.
When he saw them, he stopped, surprised.
“We’re not going to the forest now, are we? Or did you already go?”
Elisabeth and Rob stared at him like frightened rabbits. Larry spotted the opened Scotch.
“I see you’ve been celebrating! Are you going to exhibit Elisabeth’s work, Alphonse?” he asked Rob.
“Y-yes.” stammered Rob.
“Oh, that’s marvellous! Well I hope you don’t mind if I join you!”
Larry poured himself a glass of Scotch.
Elisabeth laid out of a series of photographs in front of Magnus. Some of them had been taken in a forest, and others in the house in which they sat. They all showed the same thing; a dead Larry.
They had killed him by poisoning, stabbing, suffocation, by pushing him off a cliff and by blowing up his car. In many of the photographs he was covered in blood and in some he was horribly burned.
“H-how many times have you killed him?” asked Magnus nervously.
“Twelve.” said Elisabeth. “We’ve killed him twelve times. He always comes back.”
“You’re confessing to murder.” said Magnus. “Do you realise I will have to report this to the police?”
“How can I have murdered him if he’s still alive? At half-past-six he will come through that door”—she pointed in the direction of the front door—“absolutely alive and healthy.”
“OK, but you have murdered someone. Even if you didn’t succeed, it’s … an attempt, how do you say …. attempted murder. And are there not twelve dead bodies? You are a serial killer, Mrs. Reynolds.”
“Elisabeth.” said Elisabeth. “You don’t understand. I didn’t want to tell you this, but Larry wasn’t what he appeared to be. He pretended to be happy and kind, but the reality is that he was a monster.”
Her voice cracked slightly as she said the word ‘monster’. She paused to wipe a tear from her eye with a paper tissue.
“How do you mean?”
“He tortured me. He brutalised me. I was left with no choice but to kill him.”
“Then you should have gone to the police.”
“I have videos. He filmed himself torturing me. I want to show you the videos.”
Before Magnus could say anything she’d gone off to fetch a computer. She brought back a laptop and opened it in front of Magnus, who had already stood up and was edging towards the door.
“Sit down.” said Elisabeth.
Magnus continued to edge.
“Oh, get a grip on yourself. I’m not going to attack you. Larry’s the only person I’ve ever killed. Twelve of him. I would never hurt anyone else. I’m not a psychopath. Sit down and watch this.”
Reluctantly, he sat down again, in front of the computer.
She started a video. In the video, Elisabeth was tied to a chair and Larry, dead-eyed and unsmiling, was pouring iced water, with ice cubes literally floating in it, over her head.
She was screaming and shivering and begging him to stop.
After five horrible minutes, Magnus said, “How long does this go on for?”
“Eighteen hours.” said Elisabeth.
“My God.” said Magnus.
“He didn’t pour water over me the whole time. He did it every half hour. For eighteen hours. And I have four other similar videos.”
“Why? Why did he do this?”
“He said it was punishment, because I’d been bad. I don’t know what for. I’d burned his beef stew or I didn’t do enough cleaning or something.”
Magnus took off his wire-rimmed spectacles, rubbed his face with both hands, and carefully replaced the spectacles.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs—Elisabeth. But this still does not mean that you can kill him. There are rules. You should have gone to the police.”
“Do you think they would have believed me? Who am I? A woman who does watercolours all day. An unsuccessful artist. A housewife. And who’s he? Some great scientist whose work is all hush-hush. A doctor of physics who works at an important government laboratory.”
“Why didn’t you leave him?”
“I was afraid of him. He told me he could find me no matter where I went. He got angry if I ever even left the house for too long.”
“And this man Rob, you say he wanted to help you?”
“I know what you think. Rob isn’t my lover. He’s a friend. A good friend. I met him in a library, in the biography section. I showed him the videos. He agreed to help me.”
“I need to meet this man, Rob.” said Magnus. “And I need to see the graves.”
“You can do both tonight.” said Elisabeth.
Suddenly the door opened.
“Hello, my love!” shouted a cheery voice.
“Hello, darling.” shouted Elisabeth. “I’m in the kitchen.”
Elisabeth went to the kitchen draw and took out a chopping knife.
“Wait a minute,” said Magnus hurriedly, “I don’t agree to …”
Larry stepped into the kitchen and Elisabeth plunged the knife into his heart.
Larry looked down at the knife, horrified, and fell to the ground.
Elisabeth pulled the knife out and began rinsing it under the tap.
“It’s not easy.” she said. “You have to get it between the ribs. I’ve practised it.”
“I can’t be a part of this.” Magnus gasped.
“Oh, he’ll be back.” she said carelessly. “Tomorrow.”
She began to drag Larry into the middle of the kitchen floor. “I don’t want the blood to get on the carpet in the hall.” she explained.
Then she pulled up Larry’s shirt and began searing the wound with a kitchen torch.
“Normally it’s for searing steaks.” she said. “If you cauterise the wound it saves having to mop up too much blood.”
Magnus stood up. “I’m calling the police.” he said.
“Wait till you’ve seen the graves.”
Magnus’s mouth opened and closed wordlessly, then he groaned and sat down again.
When Elisabeth had finished cauterising the wound, she phoned Rob.
“He’ll be here in fifteen minutes.” she said, after finishing the call. “We’ll take the latest one to the forest and you can see whichever Larry you like. Take a good look at his face. You’ll see the other corpses have the same face. You can take their fingerprints if you like. I don’t know if you do that sort of thing.”
Magnus rubbed his face again.
“I’m taking my own car.” he said. “You can drive there and I’ll follow you.”
Soon the three of them were standing in the forest, the sun beginning to set. Rob shone a powerful flashlight around.
“I have to get up at 4.30 every morning so I can work on the graves before work.” said Rob. “It’s a nightmare. Then we kill him and we bring him here, if I’ve got a new grave finished. Please, you have to help us.”
“I need to see one of the other Larrys.” said Magnus.
“Yeah.” said Rob. “Take your pick.”
He handed Magnus a paper with graves marked on it.
“This one.” said Magnus, randomly picking a grave on the map.
“We burned that one.” said Elisabeth. “You won’t be able to recognise him.”
“OK, then this one.” said Magnus.
Rob sighed. “That one’s nearly four feet deep.” he said. “Can’t you pick another?”
“Either I have a free choice of graves or I can’t verify they are really all filled with Larrys.” said Magnus.
“We’ll do that one, then.” said Elisabeth. “Rob, get the spade.”
“It’ll take me three hours.” said Rob. “At least.”
“Which ones can you dig up that aren’t burnt or too deep?” said Magnus.
“Any of the others.” said Rob.
“OK, then this one.” said Magnus. “Is this one OK?”
“That’s shallow.” said Rob. “Yeah. We strangled that one five days ago.”
Magnus had a troubled frown fixed on his face all the way home. As he navigated the dark roads, two questions were uppermost in his mind. First, how was the whole thing even possible? And second, what were his legal responsibilities? Magnus had seen a documentary about British prisons and he was very keen not to end up in one.
He considered going to the police, but what would he tell them? That a woman had confessed to murdering her husband twelve times? Thirteen now, and he had witnessed the thirteenth. They would laugh at him.
On the other hand, he was in urgent need of money and Mrs. Reynolds had already made a hefty payment for his services. If he could get to the bottom of the matter, surely the police would be grateful to him.
The next day he went back to the Reynolds’ household and watched as Elisabeth murdered Larry again. After that he had no doubt that he had now seen the same man murdered twice. Or at least, he had seen what he would see if the same man were to be murdered twice.
For several days he brainstormed every possible explanation for the phenomenon.
He considered the possibility that Larry had twenty different doubles who had all had plastic surgery to look like him. Perhaps Larry’s work was so important that he needed twenty doubles. It was unclear what he actually did. That was protected, apparently, by the Official Secrets Act.
He considered the possibility that Larry had been involved in some kind of cloning operation. Was it possible that Larry had been cloned twenty times, and the clones were waiting around in case he needed a replacement?
He waited outside the imposing gates of Larry’s workplace and watched him walk home, only to be murdered. He watched Rob and Elisabeth drive off to the forest again, half an hour later.
Then he received a strange phone call.
He answered his phone one morning and a gravelly voice said “I know what you’re doing. Stop your investigation. You are in danger. Elisabeth is not what she appears to be.”
The phone rang off before he could ask any questions.
The following day he went back to Elisabeth’s house.
“What happens if you kill him on a Saturday?” he asked.
“He comes home from work around 6.30 like usual.” she replied. “Sometimes earlier, on a Saturday.”
“And on a Sunday?”
“The same.”
“Has he always worked at the weekends?”
“No, he started doing it four months ago, before we killed him for the first time. He said he’s working on something important.”
“I need to get into the place where he works.” said Magnus. “The answer, whatever it is, must be found there. That’s where the Larrys are coming from. I’ve seen that he gets into the gate using a keycard. He must have this keycard when he gets home. What happens to it when you kill him?”
“He always has it in his pocket.” said Elisabeth. “We bury it with him.”
“Next time, keep the keycard for me.”
“They won’t let you in. They probably have cameras there. They’ll realise you’re not him.”
“I have a contact in the theatrical business.” said Magnus. “She knows people who can make me look like Larry. Well enough to get in, I think. They use rubber prosthetics. But it’ll be expensive.”
“I’ll pay.” said Elisabeth. “I don’t mind how much it costs. I’ll pay.”
“Very good.” said Magnus. “I’ll need a set of his work clothes too.”
A week and three more murders later, Magnus approached the gates of the laboratory complex wearing a padded body suit and Larry’s clothes, his face clad in an elaborate mask. The mask was carefully glued to his face and a specialist makeup artist had worked on him for three hours.
He looked very much like Larry, except, to anyone who actually knew Larry, he was not quite right in various difficult-to-define ways. Even so, he was good enough to fool a security guard peering at him through a camera.
He had practised speaking in Larry’s voice extensively, concentrating on a handful of useful phrases.
He went up to the gate and swiped the keycard against the reader.
It bleeped red. The gate didn’t open.
After his third attempt, an intercom crackled into life.
“Larry?” said a voice. “The system says you’re already inside.”
“I’m obviously not. I signed in earlier, then I had to leave again to do something.”
There was a pause.
“You sound weird, Larry.” said the voice.
“I have a cold.” said Magnus.
There was another pause, during which Magnus prepared to flee, but then the gate opened and he walked inside.
The prosthetics were making him feel extremely hot. Magnus had lived in four different countries, all of them even colder than Britain. His Scandinavian and Baltic genes were not prepared for wearing prosthetics, and he was sweating heavily.
He walked up to the door of the main building and swiped the card. The door unlocked immediately.
Inside he tried to stride confidently past the reception.
“I didn’t see you go out, Larry.” said the receptionist, puzzled.
He waved at her, and she made a perplexed expression with her face and then went back to doing whatever she had previously been doing on her computer.
The important thing, Magnus told himself, was to look as though he knew where he was going. The problem was, he had no idea where he was going.
He found some steps and walked down them, relieved to be away from people for a while. The steps were an alternative to the lift and no-one else was using them.
At the foot of the stairs was a long white corridor lined with locked doors. He walked nervously along it. Suddenly one of the doors behind him opened. After a pause, a voice shouted, “Larry?”
He continued walking but whoever it was started hurriedly walking up behind him, calling Larry’s name.
He turned to see a man in his mid-sixties wearing a lab coat and with a rather commanding presence, in spite of his slender, almost emaciated build.
“Larry, you shouldn’t be here.” said the man. “We’re not finished yet. What are you doing?”
“Just checking something out.” said Magnus, in his best impersonation of Larry’s voice.
“Your voice doesn’t sound right, Larry.” said the man.
Magnus noticed the man was wearing a name badge that said ‘Dr. Steven Richley’. He could feel sweat running down his face, neck and body underneath the thick prosthetics.
“I’ll catch you later.” said Magnus, and he turned to walk away.
“No, no, you aren’t right at all.” said Dr. Richley, and he caught Magnus’s arm and turned him round again to face him.
“I’m fine!” he said, and then a piece of rubber prosthetic, loosened by sweat, fell off his chin and hit the floor.
“You’re deteriorating!” said Richley, almost in a panic. “You need to come back to Lab 5 immediately. Come, Larry.”
He look Magnus’s arm and led him along the corridor. At the end they turned a corner and a little further along was a door covered in radiation warning symbols, bearing the text ‘KEEP OUT’.
Richley swiped his card and they went into the room, which was lit somewhat dimly. At the far side of the room was a huge machine with glass doors. Like a gigantic misshapen microwave, Magnus thought.
“I told Peterson not to run the replicator without me.” said Richley. “He has absolutely no right. I’m going to have serious words with that fellow.”
Magnus grunted assent.
“Right, well we’d better terminate you and start again.” said Richley.
He picked up a syringe from a tray at the side of the room and walked briskly towards Magnus.
“It’s a new formulation.” said Richley. “Quicker and less painful than the last one.”
Magnus shrank back from him.
“That’s not necessary.” he said, dropping the fake Larry voice and speaking normally. “Stay away from me with that stuff.”
“Larry, you’re a mess. Your voice is completely abnormal and there are bits falling off you. That idiot Peterson has completely messed up the process. This won’t hurt much, I assure you.”
He waved the syringe.
Magnus backed up against the wall.
“Listen to me.” he said. “I’m not Larry. Whatever that stuff is, I don’t need it.”
“Good Heavens, your brain’s not right either. Peterson, are you in here?”
Magnus abruptly bolted for the door, but found it locked.
“Oh for crying out loud.” said Richley.
Richley ran after him with the needle and for some minutes he chased Magnus around the lab, Richley pleading with him to “see sense”, Magnus trying to explain that he was not actually Larry.
Eventually Richley cornered him by the side of the vast machine.
“Let’s talk about this.” said Magnus.
“Yes, of course.” said Richley, and he pretended to be putting the syringe away in the top pocket of his lab coat, but then he suddenly lashed out and jabbed Magnus with it in the chest.
Only the prosthetic padding saved him. The needle didn’t quite make it through the thick layer of foam and rubber.
Magnus began to angrily rip the rubber off his face.
“Hey,” said Richley, “don’t …”
“I’m not Larry!” shouted Magnus.
“It’s you.” said Richley in astonishment. “You’re the private investigator.”
“You’re the person who called me. I recognise your voice.”
“Oh dear, oh dear.” said Richley. “What a mess.”
A short while later they sat in Richley’s office, Magnus having removed the rubber and padding, still wearing Larry’s outsize clothes, the trousers held up by a new notch Richley had cut for him several inches past the notch that Larry used.
“You must understand, if you breathe a word of this to anyone, MI5 will murder you.” said Richley. “I’m not exaggerating. They murder people all the time. If they don’t murder you, they’ll have you locked up on some trumped-up charge, and in prison they’ll most likely arrange a shanking. Someone will stab you with a sharpened toothbrush. Sorry to be crude.”
“No, I understand.” said Magnus. “I quite understand. I just want to know what’s going on.”
Richley sighed heavily.
“I’m sorry I tried to kill you.” he said.
“Water under the bridge.” said Magnus.
“I’d better start at the beginning. In the 1990s, we began work on a new kind of weapon. An assassin. Like in the Terminator films. Have you seen those?”
“No.” said Magnus.
“Neither have I, but I’m told they involve lifelike humanoid robots that kill people. That was what we were trying to build, and by 2017 we thought we had something that was pretty good. Our robots weren’t especially strong or smart, but they could pass for a normal human being and they could carry out orders.
“They were very lifelike. The problem was, they were prone to overheating, and when they overheat, they tend to go a bit crazy. They become unpredictable. For all our ingenuity, we just couldn’t solve the heat problem. You see, these things couldn’t just be made of metal. A metal outer case would have dissipated the heat more than well enough. Well, you know what it’s like, you’ve been walking around in prosthetics for probably the last few hours, trying to look like Larry. We had that exact same problem with our robots.
“Larry thought he could work around it. He thought that there was an underlying problem that the robots weren’t socialised. He thought that if he could teach them more about human morality, and human life in general, he could instil some kind of self-restraint in them, so that when they did overheat, they’d gracefully sit down and go to sleep instead of acting out.
“His idea was just too dangerous to try. When these machines overheat, they are prone to killing without compunction, and in real weird ways sometimes.
“You look at people and you see heads, arms, eyes, sentience. The robots only see data. They can stab someone in the face with a screwdriver just as easily as you or I can calculate two times four.
“But you see, we’d been working on another machine, and work on that ramped up when the years passed and these robots still weren’t ready. There was a lot of pressure on us to come up with effective killers of some sort. Soldiers and assassins who could kill without paying any kind of human cost, if they were killed in return.
“We built a machine, we call it the Regenerator, that could assemble a copy of a human being. A perfect copy, identical to the original. That way, you understand, the sting is entirely removed from death. A person can die, and it has no impact whatsoever on his friends and family, and he knows that when he dies that a perfect copy will live on. He himself will live on, essentially. It’s still not nice to die, of course, but we discovered that people found the idea a lot easier to accept if they knew they would, in a sense, survive.
“Larry put a proposal to me. He’d take one of our robots home and if the thing overheated and killed him, we’d regenerate him. They’re fitted with trackers anyway, so we’d always know where it is. He thought he could persuade it to stay peacefully at home while he gradually socialised it.”
Magnus’s eyes were wide.
“You’re saying Elisabeth’s a robot?” he asked.
“Yes.” said Richley. “But she doesn’t know that herself. She thinks she’s human. She possesses a full set of normal human reactions, or at least the appearance of them. It’s important not to allow her programming to process any kind of what we would call cognitive dissonance, were she human. That was all Larry’s idea. He began to treat her absolutely like a normal human being. They go out for meals, even. She always invents a reason why she can’t eat. He had that programmed into her.”
“I don’t believe it.” said Magnus. “I’ve met her. I’ve talked to her. She’s human. She has feelings. I’ve looked into her eyes and I’ve seen that she feels.”
“What do you see, when you look into her eyes?” said Dr. Richley. “What do you really see? You see something that looks like eyes, something that looks like skin. They arrange themselves the way that they would if she were a human being, with feelings. But inside, there’s nothing. Inside, there are only data processing algorithms.”
Magnus stared at him stunned.
“And what happened?” he asked.
Dr. Richley removed his spectacles and began to clean them with a cloth taken from his pocket.
“Unfortunately Larry got rather attached to her. He knows they don’t have feelings. They’re digital. Everything they do happens because some bit gets shifted from one register to another. They’re ultimately just following theirx programming. But I suppose it’s difficult to really understand that at an emotional level when you’re living with one. Look at you; you’re having difficulty with it and you’ve only met her a few times.”
“You know she murders him almost every other day?”
“He succeeded in socialising her a little too well. She thinks he’s an abusive husband. A psychopath. He thinks of her as his wife. It’s really a mess. He persuaded me to carry on regenerating him. He claims he’s close to cracking the problem.”
“She—-It’s having some kind of platonic affair with a man named Rob.”
“Yes, I found out about that quite recently. He’s in considerable danger.”
“You need to stop this project.” said Magnus.
“We can’t. Word from above is, Rob’s disposable. The project is too important.”
“Can’t you regenerate Rob if he is murdered?”
“No. We haven’t scanned him. It takes two years of intense work to scan someone’s profile into the Regenerator.”
“Then what are you going to do?” said Magnus. “Something must be done.”
“You’re right.” said Richley, staring down at the floor and wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. “Yes, of course, you’re quite right. We’ll bring Elisabeth in for an upgrade. Peterson has a new idea about how we can fix the heat problem.”
Perhaps Larry could have succeeded in socialising Elisabeth. Perhaps Peterson’s upgrade would have ameliorated the heat problem. We will never know.
Ten days later there was a fire at the laboratory, in which Dr. Richley sadly died.
Rob was found by the side of a half-filled-in grave in the forest, his face and neck horribly mangled, as if he’d been attacked by wild animal. In the grave, under a layer of earth, was the body of Larry Reynolds.
Magnus decided to move to Norway, where he’d spent many happy years as a child.
Although he felt sorry for Rob, and even, to a lesser extent, Larry and Dr. Richley, he also felt a certain sense of relief that the entire business was over, and that he, Magnus, was not in prison.
Magnus now makes a modest living for himself as a private detective in Norway.
But sometimes, in the early hours of the morning, he awakens from a terrible nightmare; a nightmare in which a regenerated Larry has taken Elisabeth into the lab for some adjustments, and Elisabeth, fresh from murdering Rob, runs riot, slashing and stabbing and clawing at people’s faces, until a researcher throws flammable solvent over her—or rather, it—and lights the murderous overheated robot on fire in a desperate attempt to stop it.