‘That’s no answer, Sam.’
Sam freed his hand from hers and looked about him. He turned from the vastness of the universe to the confines of a bawdy seventies sitcom, and then back again. He couldn’t help himself – he just had to laugh.
‘Okay,’ he said, forcing himself to get his head around things. ‘Grace Brothers on one side, Infinity on the other. Very good. Excellent. Well done. Now – please – what the hell are you trying to tell me with all this?’
He planted himself squarely in front of the Test Card Girl and fixed her with a mocking, confrontational look.
‘Spit it out. You’re my resident Sigmund Freud. Let’s have it. What the hell does all this represent?’
The Girl looked up at him, and her eyes went cold. She said flatly, ‘It represents the System.’
‘What system? The solar system?’
‘No, no. The System you’re trapped in.’
She used her dolly’s hand to indicate the TV set, with its fake walls and prop dressing.
‘It’s not real, Sam, but even so you still can’t escape it. These make-believe walls enclose you. They confine you – and they define you.’
‘I – don’t understand.’
‘You think you can escape the System, Sam, but you can’t. You can run around, kid yourself, score a few petty victories, tell yourself that you’ll win in the end – but it’s not so. Everything is fixed, set in place, unchangeable – like all those stars out there. You can more easily rearrange the universe, Sam, than alter the fate that awaits you – you and Annie.’
Sam took a step away from her and clenched his fists. ‘I’m not accepting that.’
‘There is a terrible power coming after Annie. It is linked to her, Sam. It is married to her.’
‘No.’
‘It was married to her in life and it’s still married to her now it’s dead.’
‘None of this is true.’
‘It’s coming for her, Sam, and it will find her, and it will drag her down to somewhere very, very unpleasant. And there’s nothing you can do to stop it. It’s the System, Sam. It’s all set. You can’t change it.’
‘You’re showing me dreams! It’s nothing! Pictures in my head! I know where I am. Right now, right now, I know exactly where I am! At home. Asleep. In a chair. With Are You Being Served? on the telly. Everything is normal! Whereas all this crap you’re showing me here’ – he angrily swept his hand to indicate the stars and the stage set about him – ‘all this bullshit, it’s just loony pictures you keep putting in my head!’
The Test Card Girl shook her head slowly, with mock sadness, and said, ‘I’ll tell you where you are, Sam – where you really are. You’re lying in a coffin, six feet down in a Manchester graveyard.’
‘That’s the future!’ Sam retorted. ‘That’s thirty years from now!’
‘You’re rotting, Sam. You glimpsed it yourself, remember? In the ghost train, in Terry Barnard’s fairground?’
Sam froze.
‘Tell me what you saw there, Sam.’
‘I saw …’ he said, and he found himself trying to swallow hard in a dry throat. ‘I saw something. I saw whatever it is that’s after us, that’s after Annie …’
‘Did you? Or did you just see yourself?’ the Test Card Girl asked. ‘You’re a mouldering corpse, Sam. The worms have got into you. They’re eating you from within. Your eyes are already gone. They’re just two holes now, filled with maggots.’
‘It wasn’t me I saw, it was that devil out there!’ Sam howled. ‘I am alive! The here and now is 1973, and in 1973 I am alive!’
‘No, Sam. You’re dead. You’re dead, and you’re lost – not in one place, not in another – somewhere in-between—’
‘I am alive!’
‘You’re fooling yourself, Sam.’
‘If I am, then I’m happy with that! I came back here by choice. I came back here because I want to be here. I came back here for colour, and feeling – and Annie. I came back here for life. I don’t understand what it all means, and I don’t want to understand. I just want to live my life.’
‘You have no life, Sam. And neither does your beloved Annie. Or that horrid man you work for, the one who smells of ciggies and is always shouting. Or any of you.’
‘Bullshit! They’re all alive! Of course they’re alive! And as for me, I’m more alive than I’ve ever been!’
‘If you’re all so alive, Sam, then what are you all doing here? This isn’t a place for the living, Sam.’
Sam wanted to yell at this little brat to keep her lies to herself, but deep down he knew that she wasn’t lying at all. Indeed, he had long since suspected what she was telling him, though he had fought against the knowledge, suppressed it, blotted it out with his police work, with his clashes with Gene, with his feelings for Annie, with that constant internal mantra that said, I’m just a copper, not a philosopher – I’m just a copper, not a philosopher – I’m just a copper, not a—
‘You don’t need to be a philosopher to work it out, Sam,’ the Test Card Girl said. ‘A simple copper is more than able to see what’s what.’
‘I’m alive,’ Sam declared.
‘No, you’re dead.’
‘I’m alive, and so is Annie.’
‘She’s dead too. So’s your horrid boss man. So are your friends in CID. All dead, Sam. You know that. You won’t accept it, but you know it. Think about it, Sam. You know you’re dead – you remember – you remember jumping from that roof and falling—’
Sam turned away, shaking his head, but the girl’s voice would not stop.
‘You remember, Sam. The others, they don’t remember. They’ve been here too long. They should have moved on by now. And if you stay long enough, Sam, you’ll start forgetting too. You’ll forget you had a life before this one. You’ll become like them. Lost, Sam. Lost.’
There were tears in Sam’s eyes now. He dashed them furiously away, but more came. He was thinking of Annie, of the life she’d had before this one. Had she, like Sam, come from the future? Or had she come from a life even further back than 1973? And how had that life ended? How had she died?
‘You know how she died, Sam. It was a horrible death.’
‘Stop it.’
‘Painful. Nasty.’
‘I said stop it!’
‘And it wasn’t quick, Sam.’
‘I don’t want to be in this damned dream any more, you filthy little bitch!’
‘Awake, asleep, whatever.’ The girl shrugged. ‘And calling me names won’t help you, Sam. Look at that vast universe out there. You can’t just wish it away. What will happen to you, Sam? Do you think you can carry on like this for ever, drifting in the gaps between this world and that one? You all have to move on one day. You, and your guv’nor, and your little friends in CID, and Annie too.’
‘I’m not going anywhere! I’m staying here, in nineteen-bloody-seventy-bloody-three with Annie! I am