This was nothing new. The life and times of Miss Indira King, daughter of Richard - presently of Basingstoke, England - and Amisha - formerly of Mumbai, India - King, was a tome’s worth of early arrivals. His ‘early bird’, Indira’s father called her. She came kicking and screaming into the world three weeks prematurely; her mother said she was born without the patience gene. She learnt to read and write before she was old enough to go to school in India, and when they moved to England, Indira skipped ahead a year and joined a class where all the other children were older than she was. Consequently she went to high school early, she went to university early, and she graduated early. She got her first promotion whilst most people her age were still taking their finals. Of course, the problem with always being early, she frequently told herself, was that it meant you were always left waiting around.

Indira decided to catch the end of Professor Russell’s lecture.

“The English word ‘eye’,” Professor Russell was saying. “Comes from the Sanskrit word for ‘fountain’. Think about that. Why do you think our forebears likened the eye to a fountain to such a degree that they adopted the word into the English language? After all, what does an eye have in common with a fountain? An eye is a receptor. It takes in; it receives. Yet a fountain does the opposite. Wouldn’t a better English word for ‘eye’ have come from the Sanskrit for ‘bucket’?”

Many of Professor Russell’s students laughed politely.

Indira closed the door quietly behind her and took a seat in the back row. The lecture hall was only three-quarters full, but it did seat nearly a thousand.

“If we go back even further in time,” Professor Russell went on, pottering across the stage. “We encounter the theory of universal subjectivity. Like theism, this philosophy sprouted independently throughout many civilisations, yet unlike theism, it hasn’t survived, at least not to provide spiritual bedrock to millions of people. If one wanted to be contentious, one might argue that it was in the vested interests of ancient religion to crush universal subjectivity. After all, to the universal subjectivist, if God exists, he can only exist in the human mind, utterly powerless but through the actions of the faithful, his immortality entirely dependent on our belief.”

Professor Russell paused; as if sizing up the audience reaction, Indira thought, and detecting whether it was safe to keep going down this line. Clearly, it was.

“It was universal subjectivity that took the Sanskrit word for ‘fountain’ and derived from it the English word for ‘eye’,” he continued. “In universal subjectivity, there is no objective reality. There are no corporeal absolutes. I’m afraid I can’t make this any simpler for you to understand. Even if I tried to sum it up with ‘we all see the world differently,’ I would be employing a misnomer. To imply we see the world is to imply that concrete actualities preclude human perception. Instead, the universal subjectivist will tell you that we don’t see the world as it is, but as we believe it to be; as our brains tell us it is. The world you think we live in is the one you project.”

Indira noticed many of the students had stopped writing. She didn’t blame them; she didn’t know if she understood what he’d just said, either.

Professor Russell returned to a lectern on the stage; replaced his spectacles and tidied his notes as if working up to a conclusion: “Of course, the universal subjectivist would be the first to point out how hard it is for him to prove his case. We all believe we see the same world. We share a communal idea of the world that’s taught to us from the moment that we’re capable of understanding. When we look at the sky, for example, we know it’s blue, even if we’re colour-blind, because our societal teachings tell us the sky is blue. But what is this concept ‘blue’? Is it a concrete fact? Is it even an abstract fact? In a nutshell, if every human being on the planet died this evening, what would ‘blue’ mean tomorrow morning? Does blue really exist?

“At the end of the day, our own personal conception of the world around us is as individual and as unique as our fingerprints, or retinas. Much of what we believe, is due to millennia of societal indoctrination, a certain centralisation of communal interpretation. Science has filled the gaps, and continues to fill the gaps in our understanding, and we accept it without question. But it is in those gaps, if you can find them, where you will find no understanding, no explanation but that which you come to on your own, and there lies the proof of universal subjectivity. In universal subjectivity, sight happens in the brain, not the eye.”

There was silence as Professor Russell removed his spectacles.

“Thank you for listening,” he said.

The lecture was over. A good proportion of the students, even the ones who looked as baffled as Indira, gave the Professor a round of applause. Some even gave him a standing ovation, but then Indira realised they were just clapping as they got up to leave, and made a beeline for the exit. Indira stayed seated.

The lecture hall cleared in a matter of minutes. Some students remained at the front of the hall, crowded around Professor Russell, asking questions.

Indira got up and slowly made her way down.

Professor Russell was packing his notes into a slim-line leather case, urging students with questions to visit him in his office after lunch, and modestly accepting the thanks of those who hadn’t thought a round of applause was enough.

“Professor Russell?” Indira said when they were alone.

“I’m sorry. Like I told the others, I can’t hang around today,” he told her, snapping his case shut and bundling his coat over his arm.

“My name’s Indira King. We spoke on the phone earlier.”

He stopped short. “Oh. Right.”

“I’ve got a car waiting outside, if you’re free to come now.”

“Of course. I’m sorry; I thought you were a student.”

She smiled. “Well, sometimes being a pathologist isn’t much different.”

That morning Indira got to work at 6.55am.

Indira King was a morning person. She liked to get up with the dawn, see the world in twilight, and eat her breakfast watching the sun rise. She thought staying up late was a waste of waking hours, so went to bed early so that she’d wake up early too. She was the kind of person who, once they were awake, couldn’t get back to sleep; she’d been this way since childhood, waking up excited to be alive.

The early morning drive across the city was typically pleasant and the only other car in the parking lot was Todd’s. His windows were fogged up with a layer of frost due to the car having been sitting out in the cold all night.

“Oh, good timing,” he told her wearily as she came into the lab.

“Morning, Todd,” she said, removing her coat.

Todd Griffiths was an intern, paying for his final year at medical school by doing a night shift at the Met pathology department. A ‘check-in clerk’ is how he referred to his job, but soon, Indira knew, his medical knowledge would exceed her own.

“This one arrived just before you did,” he explained.

On the slab in front of him was a grey body bag. Staff called this laboratory the ‘cooler’. It had an ambient temperature a few degrees above zero.

“So what do we know?” Indira asked with a sigh.

Todd lifted the top page of the notes he was holding. “Unidentified male, mid thirties.” He paused; let the notes fall shut, and looked up. “Indigo Chase.”

Indira glanced up from the body bag. “Another one?”

“I know.” He cocked his head. “And it’s not even Thursday.”

Indira gave another sigh, a determined one. She pulled a plastic apron from the dispenser and rolled latex gauntlets up to her elbows.

“Let’s have a look,” she murmured.

Carefully, she unzipped the body bag. At once it became clear the body had begun to excrete; whoever this guy was, he had been dead long enough to lose muscle tension in his bowels. Indira was unfazed, but Todd smeared his top lip with a potent-smelling cream. Though Indira had arrived early, his shift still didn’t end till nine.

“Oh. Says here he’s not a jumper.” Todd sounded surprised.

Indira was holding the flap open. “No. I’d say not.”

Then she unzipped the body bag the rest of the way and folded the topside back so that Todd could see. The hand holding the notes fell to his side.

“Is he... murder victim?” Todd asked quietly.

“Not unless you’re ruling out hari kiri already,” she said.

Indira’s first impression was that he’d died from exsanguination: in effect, death from loss of blood. The man was dressed, but his blood-soaked clothes were sufficiently shredded for Indira to see the gouged flesh beneath. She took a sterile probe, slid it between the man’s shirt and his skin, and took a closer look.

“I’m going to have to cut these off him,” she said.

She moved around the slab, settling on a large pair of surgical scissors. Todd hadn’t moved from the foot of the table. He was just staring.

“Todd, get me an evidence bag,” Indira said.

Todd blinked; now he was back in the room. “I’m sorry?”

“An evidence bag. I’m removing the clothes. Forensics will need them.”

“R-right,” said Todd, going off to find some.

She waited until he returned, then began cutting along the seams. It took a few minutes. She put one item of clothing in each of Todd’s bags.

Once the corpse was undressed, Indira stepped back to observe. The body lay very exactly, which ruled out any broken limbs. This was a man frozen in time; his eyes and mouth were wide open, and not, Indira suspected, due to the recession of his skin as it dried. His face had turned a mottled tan-brown, chalky in texture.

Uncovered, the man’s wounds looked less like gouges and more like deep, forceful punctures: “Someone go for him with a sword?” Todd said.

Indira glanced up at him but said nothing. She picked up another sterile probe and teased the yawning hole - one of seven; she counted - in the man’s chest. Then she slid it in until she met resistance; it went in four-and-a-half inches.

She removed the probe and dropped it on a plate. “Does it say on his forms whether they requisitioned a murder weapon?” she asked.

Todd flicked through the notes. “No.”

The dead man’s wounds perplexed Indira. She had seen enough stabbings, on both the living and the dead, to recognise a knife wound. The flesh would swell up, sealing off the entry point, bruising terribly, yellow and purple all around.

But these wounds were different. There was no bruising, and little swelling; in fact, if anything, the skin had receded from around the punctures.

Like they were made post-mortem, she thought. But if they hadn’t killed him -if he was dead before they were inflicted - then what did?

She didn’t tell Todd the current direction of her thinking. “What did they write on his form as the cause of death?” she asked him.

Todd just stared at her; after all, it did seem obvious.

“Todd?” she said, not looking up.

He sighed and checked the notes again. “Multiple stab wounds. Why?”

Indira didn’t respond. She had expected as much, but hoped the forensic investigators might have found an alternative at the scene.

“Says he was found in a drugs den, though,” Todd added.

Indira glanced up. “Drugs den?”

“Yeah. According to this there were needles and spoons and razor blades; they’ve all been sent for analysis, but they didn’t find any drugs.”

Indira lifted one of the man’s arms and turned it. It was stiff, and there were no needle marks. She checked the other. It was the same.

“Check his ankles,” Todd suggested.

That’s what she was going to do anyway. She knew veins in the feet and groin were a less accessible but more covert option for intravenous drug users.

Indira herded Todd out of the way and took up the body’s right foot. Sure enough, there were track-marks across his ankle-joint.

She sighed. “Take a blood sample. Test it for opiates.”

In a living person morphine would degrade to barely detectable levels over forty-eight hours, but if an overdose had killed this one, then a lethal dose would present itself in the test results. So that was it.

If anything, Indira felt a sense of anti-climax.

Once the test results came in, and if, as expected, they confirmed her suspicions, Indira would perform a full autopsy, simply for the sake of being thorough, verify the guy died of heart failure, and that would be the extent of her involvement in the case. It wasn’t her job to work out the who’s and why’s.

She looked at the dead man’s gaping - screaming? - mouth and his wide-open eyes again. Indira knew the science behind opiates, and he didn’t look like a man who had drifted off into a blissful sleep that ultimately overwhelmed him.

He looked like a man quite literally scared to death.

Indira sighed again and pulled off her gloves. Todd returned to the table with a wide-barrelled syringe capable of holding several millilitres of blood.

Indira dumped her gloves in the yellow bin marked for the incinerator. Her plastic apron had also been spattered with the swill of congealed blood and bodily fluids that the corpse had been lying in. She started untying it.

“I still can’t get the hang of this,” Todd said.

It was easier to get blood from a stone than a dead body. Or so Todd had been told by one of his tutors at medical school. But there was a knack.

“Try the carotid artery,” she told him.

“Oh. Right.” She’d told him this before. He moved up to the neck.

Despite having worn gloves, Indira rinsed her hands.

“Miss King?” Todd said a few minutes later.

Indira didn’t like being called that. It made her sound like one of his tutors, and that made her feel old, when really there was only four years between them.

“Does heroin make your eyes go blue?”

She frowned. “Not as far as I know. Why?”

“Well, come and have a look at this.” Todd cocked his head. “I swear it looks like his eyeballs are blue. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the light in here.”

As she walked over, Indira checked out the overhead lighting. The bulbs mimicked natural light. The glass they were made of was tinted blue, but that meant the light they gave off was white, rather than the yellow of normal opaque bulbs.

Todd moved back from the head of the table. Indira bent over the corpse and looked into its eyes. The whites were indeed a subtle shade of blue.

“See what I mean?” said Todd.

Indira didn’t answer him. She checked both eyes, and they were both the same. All of a sudden, this corpse had piqued her interest again.

“Get me a swab,” she said.

Todd found a cotton-bud on a tray.

“Thanks,” she murmured, using it to delicately stroke one eyeball. Having been open for innumerable hours, its surface had dried out.

After a few strokes, she held the swab up.

Todd frowned. “Is that a dye?”

“Looks like it,” Indira said.

“Why’d he put dye in his eyes?”

Indira handed him the swab, then put on another pair of gloves. Returning to the corpse, she pushed its eyelids back as far as they would go. Even beneath the lids, where the eyeballs retained the last of their moisture, they were tinted blue.

Indira clicked her fingers. “Got a light?”

Todd fetched her a pen-sized torch.

“Thanks.” She shone it into the corpse’s right eye.

She didn’t understand what she saw.

She shone it into the corpse’s left eye, then back into the right, then the left again; they were both the same, but it didn’t make any more sense.

She held the light out to Todd. “Look.”

He did; in both eyes, more than once.

“W-what is that?” he said under his breath.

Indira sighed. “Honestly? I have absolutely no idea.”

Driving across the city was a lot less pleasant mid-morning. Delayed by an interminable series of traffic lights and congested roads, Indira quickly ran out of small-talk to make with Professor Russell. He was sitting in the backseat, his hands folded over his case, which he rested on his lap. Indira didn’t think he looked quite so old close-up, especially when he wasn’t wearing those half-moon spectacles. She guessed he was about forty. His black hair was starting to grey at the temples.

She looked at him in the rear-view. He caught her doing it.

“What did you think of my lecture, Miss King?” he asked, smirking.

“Actually, I only caught five minutes of it,” she said.

Professor Russell snorted. “That’s usually enough for most people.”

Then he returned to looking out the window. He didn’t seem like a driver himself, not least one who drove through the centre of London regularly. He seemed more like a tourist, double-taking whenever they passed a recognisable landmark. He had also climbed into the backseat before she could open the passenger door.

There was something that still concerned Indira.

“Though I must admit, Professor,” she told him. “I was surprised to find that you weren’t teaching in the school of medicine.”

Professor Russell started nodding.

“When I was put through to King's they said you were the best in your field,” she continued. “I was expecting you to be a practising physician.”

He chuckled. “Best in my field? Who exactly did you talk to?”

His evasiveness made Indira uncomfortable.

Professor Russell patted his case and sighed. “Look, if it’s my qualifications you’re after, then just name one; I’ll probably have it. And if that makes me the best in my field, then I guess I must be. But no, I don’t practise optometry anymore.”

Not a man who likes his competency questioned, Indira realised.

“But you have surgical experience.”

She didn’t want it to sound like a question.

“In copious quantities,” he said, rising in his seat a fraction. “I did a four year stint in general surgery before I decided to specialise in optometrics.”

Having told him over the phone what she wanted him for, perhaps he knew what she was going to ask him next, Indira thought.

“So you’ve had cadaver experience?”

“Cadaver experience!” Professor Russell laughed.

Again, his evasion unsettled Indira. She shuffled in the driving seat.

“You don’t have to worry about my constitution, Miss King,” he told her. “I have my sea-legs. It takes more than dead meat to shift my lunch.”

The body was still lying on the slab, covered with a nylon sheet when Indira led Professor Russell into the lab twenty minutes later. All of a sudden he didn’t look quite so sure of his own constitution after all. Indira didn’t say anything.

Todd’s shift had long finished. Now Jan and Howard were on duty. Howard Duffy had been in this job for over twenty years. Indira privately saw him as a sort of mentor. She had observed him performing countless autopsies. He estimated that he had carried out close to a thousand in his career. Indira believed him. He worked with precision and skill, like a plastic surgeon. Meanwhile, Howard called himself a ‘forensic butcher’. He was reading her subject’s notes as she came in.

“Your bloods are back,” he told her, not looking up.

Momentarily forgetting Professor Russell, Indira strode forward. “And?”

“Well, he tested positive for diamorphine,” Howard said.

“But?” She had detected one was coming.

“Only trace amounts.”

“So not enough to kill him?”

Howard shook his head. His sagging cheeks wobbled. “No. I’d say he hadn’t taken any in the twenty-four hours before he died.”

“So it wasn’t an overdose.” She was stating the obvious.

“I want to take another look at those wounds,” Howard decided. Putting the notes aside, he started moving toward the corpse.

Indira held out an arm before he got there. She didn’t want Professor Russell to get any pre-conceived ideas about how the man died before seeing his eyes.

“Howard, this is Professor Benjamin Russell,” she said.

Howard glanced over her shoulder. Professor Russell stood just inside the lab door, still clutching his case; looking like a commuter who took a wrong turn.

“He’s the eye specialist from King's College,” she added.

“Oh, I see. Well, welcome to my lair, Professor.”

He held out his right hand. It was still sheathed in a soiled latex glove. He held out his left hand instead. Professor Russell approached cautiously.

“I only hope it hasn’t been a wasted trip,” he said.

Indira folded the sheet back to reveal the man’s face.

“You might want these, Professor,” said Howard, offering him gloves.

For a moment Professor Russell neither moved nor said anything. Then he handed his case to Jan Burgess, as if that was the reason she was standing beside him, and took the gloves from Howard. Indira watched him pull them up to his wrists. He was frowning, and didn’t take his eyes off the body for so much as a second.

Flexing his covered fingers, he stepped up to the table.

“You’ll need this,” Indira said, holding a pen-light out to him.

Professor Russell bent over the body and ignored her.

“Did you put a colouring agent in his eyes?” he murmured.

“No, we think he did that himself,” said Howard.

Professor Russell glanced up. “Do you know what it was?”

“Our lab technician ran some tests on a swab.” Howard lifted the top page of the notes. “No, he couldn’t identify it. Says here it’s synthetic, though.”

“Check out the backs of his retinas,” Indira said.

“Light.” Professor Russell held out his hand.

Indira held it out halfway; made him come the rest of the distance. He turned it on and looked in both eyes, then stood up straight, switched it off again.

“Now that is odd,” he said to himself.

“There is something there, then?” Howard said, leaning on the end of the table. “I mean, it’s not just a burst blood vessel or anything?”

Professor Russell didn’t answer that question.

“Got a retinascope?” he asked.

The retinascope worked on the same principle as the retina scanners found increasingly commonly in civil airports. Each individual’s retina being unique, a scan of one provided instant, infallible computer identification without the delay or mess of taking fingerprints. It took Jan nearly ten minutes to locate their one. After all, it was rare that they were called on to identify a corpse without fingers or teeth, and people’s fingerprints and dental records were more widely held, and more accessible.

“This should only take a few seconds,” Jan said.

Jan Burgess, five years Indira’s senior, but technically a more junior member of staff, was sitting at the computer, calibrating the retinascope. Howard was holding the camera over the left eye of the corpse; the lead only just reached.

“Professor, we’re almost ready over here,” Indira said.

She found Professor Russell’s impatience grating. He hadn’t said anything, but he had taken to walking around the lab, reading things on the wall she couldn’t imagine were of any interest to him, whilst polishing his glasses.

He came and stood behind Jan, looking at the image on the monitor as Jan increased the contrast, compensating for the bright light inside the camera.

Eventually, a clear image came into focus.

“There,” Jan said, taking a still of it.

“Now the other one,” Howard said, switching eyes.

Jan had to recalibrate the retinascope. “Hold it still, Howard.”

“I am,” he grumbled.

“Right. Got it.”

Howard lifted the camera away from the corpse’s eyes and placed it to one side. Then he joined the others behind Jan.

“Let’s see,” he said.

Jan brought the left eye up.

“Can you magnify?” Indira asked.

Jan nodded, and then the image expanded to fill the screen.

“Okay, now that’s not a burst blood vessel,” said Howard.

“No, it isn’t,” said Professor Russell, leaning closer.

“So what is it, Professor?” Indira asked.

Professor Russell didn’t reply.

Indira had seen it with the naked eye and known something was amiss. Now, looking at it at five or six times the size, she was sure of it.

Seemingly imprinted onto the back of the dead man’s eye was a black form, only a quarter-of-an-inch tall in reality, but magnified with crystal clarity. The form had structure, a clearly defined outline. It didn’t look like a random shape.

“Now, does that look like anything to anybody else?” Indira said. “Or am I just seeing butterflies in ink blotches or something?”

“Good analogy,” was all Professor Russell had to offer.

“Can you bring up the other eye alongside this one?” Howard asked.

“Sure,” Jan said, and brought up the left eye too.

“It’s the same,” Howard muttered. “Well, that’s pretty unlikely.”

Professor Russell frowned. “Maybe.”

“What are you thinking, Professor?”

“Jan, can you overlay the images?” Indira asked.

“What? One on top of the other?” Jan queried.

“Yeah. I want to see if they match exactly.”

“Sure. Give me a second.” She managed it in three.

“They don’t match,” Professor Russell said.

“No, but they’re pretty damn close!” Howard cried.

Indira shook her head. “I didn’t expect them to.”

Howard and Professor Russell looked at her.

“There’s a couple of degrees differentiation between them.” She returned their looks. “Accountable by the fact that they’re adjacent eyes.”

“Wait,” said Howard. “Are you suggesting this is a three dimensional object, something that poor bastard actually saw?”

Professor Russell was already shaking his head. “Impossible.”

“How do you account for it, then?” Indira asked.

“I can’t,” he admitted, whilst giving her a weary, condescending look.

“Jan, can you magnify that even more?”

Jan did; now the black shape alone filled the screen. Nobody said anything for about half a minute. The longer Indira stared at it, the more she thought she was recognising features. The long, straight protrusions became limbs. The bulbous swelling at the top became a head. However, when she closed her eyes and looked at it afresh, she saw something different. But she never just saw a black blob.

“It looks like a shadow,” Jan said eventually.

“Yeah, but a shadow of what?” said Howard.

Indira tipped her head sideways to check it out from a different angle.

“Or a silhouette,” Professor Russell murmured.

“What?” said Indira, straightening up.

Professor Russell tucked one hand under his armpit and cupped his chin in the other. Indira thought it was a defensive gesture. Whatever he’s about to say, he’s going out on a limb, she thought, and that made her willing to listen.

“Technically, I suppose, if you had a light source powerful enough, and shone it directly into someone’s eyes for a mere fraction of a second, not only would you blind them, but anything between them and the light source could become burnt onto the sensitive skin cells at the back of the retina, much like a photograph.”

“How powerful a light source?” Indira asked.

Professor Russell snorted. “Well, that’s why I said it’s impossible.”

“Yes, but you also said that, technically, it wasn’t.”

“Technically, no. Plausibly, yes.”

“Why?” asked Howard.

Professor Russell sighed. “Because the last time I heard of such a phenomena happening was in a little town called Nagasaki, about seventy years ago.”

Howard chuckled. “Well, I don’t think there’ve been any nuclear explosions on the south bank recently.” He paused. “More’s the pity.”

“I dare say there’s a distinct lack of strange creatures with seven limbs running around the south bank, too,” Professor Russell added, removing his glasses.

Indira frowned. “Seven limbs?”

“Yes.” Then he swiftly tapped the monitor in seven different places.

Indira continued to frown. He had seen limbs in all the places she had seen limbs, but where she had seen one large one, Professor Russell had found two close together. As she looked harder, she began to see two, too.

“They look sharp,” she muttered.

Professor Russell sighed. “Now you are seeing butterflies in ink blots, Miss King. Don’t let your imagination run away with you.”

Indira stood looking at the magnified image on the computer screen a moment longer, then she span round and walked up to the body on the slab.

“What is it, Indira?” Howard asked.

Indira pulled the sheet back to the man’s waist.

“One.” She began pointing. “Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.”

Seven wounds.

NOTES:
I don't know whether the English word for 'eye' really comes from the Sanskrit for 'fountain'. Though I'm not entirely responsible for making it up if it doesn't. The whole 'universal subjectivity' philosophy I extrapolated from something the author Hubert Selby Jr (most (in)famous for the previously banned "Last Exit To Brooklyn") said in an interview with Ellen Burstyn on the DVD of "Requiem For A Dream" (adapted from another of his novels). He claimed 'eye' came from a Sanskrit (or Hebrew) word for 'fountain', then went on to explain how what we see is what we are, not what there is.

For what it's worth, when I pictured Indira King in my head, I pictured the Anglo-Indian actress Parminder Nagra, from "ER" and "Bend It Like Beckham". Jenna recommended Clive Owen for Professor Benjamin Russell. I now picture Clive Owen as he'll look in five years or so. Sticking with the name theme, I thought Todd was an appropriate name for someone who works in a mortuary - it's the German word for 'death' (well, Tod is, anyway).