IMPOSTORS
Sarah Monette
They were pulling out of the parking lot of St. Dymphna’s Psychiatric Hospital when the radio crackled into life. Mick Sharpton answered. Dispatch said, “There’s been another one.”
“Shit,” Jamie said. They’d developed a rule that the partner not holding the handset did the swearing for both of them. Mick said to Dispatch, “Give us an address, and we’re on our way.”
There was a hesitation, infinitesimal, but years long in Dispatch-time, which they understood when the dispatcher said, “Langland Street subway station. He jumped.”
“Christ,” Mick said, racking the handset.
“That makes what, three jumpers?”
“Three jumpers, a bullet to the brain, and Mrs. Coulson back there in St. Dymphna’s. I think the police are right. This one’s paranormal.”
“Evidence or hunch?”
“Hunch mostly. But. People don’t just ‘go crazy’ out of a clear blue sky, you know. And here’s four people—five now, I guess—no history of mental illness, going zero to psychosis in sixty seconds flat. Something is very definitely wrong with this picture. And it feels paranormal to me.”
Mick’s 3(8) esper rating wasn’t quite high enough for his intuition to be admissible legal evidence, but Jamie had never known him to be wrong. “Then we’d better start trying to figure out what these people had in common.”
“Nothing,” Mick said, pale blue eyes staring an angry hole in the dashboard. “Absolutely fuck all. Aside from the fact that they all went crazy, of course.”
“Well, and crazy in the same way,” Jamie said, determined not to let this blow up into a fight, not even to make Mick feel better.
“Yeah.” Mick sighed, offered Jamie a sidelong, apologetic smile. “What did she say? ‘I stole her life.’ ”
“Yeah,” Jamie Keller echoed softly and shivered, trying not to imagine what it would be like to wake up one morning believing himself to be an impostor. He didn’t blame any of them for committing suicide, nor Mrs. Coulson for trying.
“Must be hell on earth,” Mick said, and they drove the rest of the way to Langland Street in troubled silence.
Paul Sinclair was brought up off the subway tracks one piece at a time. Jamie kept a weather eye on the progress of that operation and its delicate balance between speed and thoroughness; the last thing anyone wanted was for ghouls to be drawn out of the tunnels by the smell of blood. But although dealing with the ghouls if they appeared would be his and Mick’s responsibility, they’d only be in the way of the morgue workers if they went over there now. They were listening to witnesses instead.
Eyewitness testimony was notoriously volatile, but allowing for the inevitable variations in what individual witnesses perceived, Jamie was getting a fairly clear picture of the last two minutes of Paul Sinclair’s life.
The witnesses agreed that he’d been nervous and jerky in his movements when he came down the stairs from the street. A homeless woman who panhandled in the station on a regular basis remembered noticing him the day before, and he hadn’t looked well then, either. Jamie would have dismissed that as embellishment, a natural desire to stay in the limelight a little longer, but Mick said she was telling the truth.
Paul Sinclair—bank manager, aged thirty-two, single—had advanced to the edge of the platform, where he’d set down his briefcase and waited, attracting attention by his fidgeting and the way he moved sharply apart from the other people on the platform. “Like we were dirty and he didn’t want to touch us,” said a teenage boy who probably should have been in school, but that wasn’t Jamie’s problem and he wasn’t asking. When the 10:43 D train made itself heard approaching the station, its ghoul-ward howling, Paul Sinclair said, very audibly, something like, “Don’t try to save me. I’m not me.” And he jumped straight into the path of the D train, which tore him to pieces.
When the police opened his briefcase, it contained nothing but a suicide note along all too familiar lines. Paul Sinclair, in handwriting Jamie had no doubt would be proved conclusively to be that of Paul Sinclair, asserted that he was an impostor. I have stolen his life, he wrote, echoing Marian Coulson and the other victims. I don’t deserve his life. The note was not signed—poor bastard, Jamie thought, what name could he use?—but scrawled at the bottom, a painful afterthought: Please take care of Mr. Sinclair’s dogs. Their names are Leo and Bridget.
“Just like the others,” Mick said. He sounded–and looked—ill. “Even the same phrasing.”
“Definitely paranormal.”
“You say that like you think it helps.”
“It is the first thing Jesperson told us to do.”
“Well, hooray for us.” But there was no anger in him now; he just sounded defeated.
“It’s better than nothing.”
“Tell that to Paul Sinclair,” Mick said, and Jamie was glad to be called away to talk to the morgue crew.
After a hurried and unenthusiastic lunch, they spent the afternoon going through the case files again, correlating and cross-checking, trying to narrow down the possibilities. Mick remained subdued, which increased their efficiency, but Jamie found himself perversely wishing for Mick’s usual argumentative and scattershot approach to this kind of work. It did not reappear, and Thursday was more of the same, as they conducted interviews with witnesses and survivors and Marian Coulson’s bewildered husband, and if Mick strung three words together into a sentence, it was as much as he did all day.
At 3:32 Friday morning, Jamie’s cellphone rang, waking him from a confused dream in which the Bureau of Paranormal Investigations was being moved into his old elementary school. He had the phone open and to his ear before he was even sure where he was, and his “Foxtrot-niner” was as clear and crisp as if he were in his office rather than up on one elbow groping for the lamp on the nightstand.
Lila mumbled something, but Jamie’s attention was focused on the silence from his cellphone. “Hello?”
More silence, but the distinct sound of someone breathing, too rapidly and hard.
“Who is this? Look, if you don’t say something, I’m going to have to assume you have hostile intent, and we don’t none of us want that paperwork. So come on. What do you want?”
Thin thread of a voice: “Jamie?”
“Mick? What the fuck?”
“Jamie, how do you know you’re you?”
Jamie felt every separate blood vessel in his body go cold. “Where are you, blue eyes?”
“I, um, I don’t know. On a bridge.”
Jamie rolled out of bed, yanking sweatpants on over his boxers, shrugging into a flannel shirt one arm at a time, so he didn’t have to put the phone down. “Which bridge, blue eyes? Come on. How’m I supposed to come get you if I don’t know where you are?”
“You’re going to come get me?”
Mick sounded dazed, the way he did when his esper hit him hard.
“Course I am.” Shoes. Shoes. Goddammit, they had to be here somewhere. “Can’t leave you freezing your ass off all night.”
“But I’m not . . . ”
“Yes, you are,” Jamie said, as forcefully as he thought he could without spooking Mick. “You’re just confused, blue eyes, that’s all.”
“Are you sure? Are you sure I’m me?”
It was all too easy to imagine Mick standing on one of Babylon’s bridges, hunched around his cellphone, his long dyed-black hair straggling across his face. Jamie tried to keep that imaginary Mick firmly on the pavement, but it was even easier to imagine him standing on the railing, one arm wrapped around a stanchion, teetering out over the black water.