PART FOUR
Following Lois into an eerie facsimile of his wife’s old apartment, Clark faltered. Fire engines were hurtling towards a fire on the other side of the city. He could hear them as clearly as if they were screaming down the road just outside Lois’s apartment.
Great. His powers were back.
But he couldn’t respond, could he? He had a strong hunch that this universe didn’t have a Superman.
Heck. This was going to be torture if he had to listen to accidents and emergencies without being able to do anything to help.
“What?” Lois’s irritable demand dragged him back from his thoughts. She’d paused half-way across the living room and was regarding him impatiently. “Oh, let me guess,” she drawled, placing a hand on her hip and rolling her eyes, “this is nothing like your Lois’s apartment.”
“No, actually, it’s very similar,” he replied. “Or, at least, it’s very similar to her old apartment. We’re living at my place these days.” Anxiously, he tuned back into the fire scene. The fire fighters were shouting instructions to each other and in the background he could hear the roar of the blaze. From the tone of their voices, the firemen sounded confident they could contain the fire. Okay. He let himself breath more easily. No super help needed. Not this time.
He followed Lois into the kitchen, where, to his surprise, she began pulling out food from the fridge. “You cook?”
She twisted around and looked at him as if he’d just asked what colour the sky was. “Doesn’t everyone?”
“Lois...my wife...doesn’t.” He watched while she filled a pan with water for pasta and emptied a tub of pasta sauce into another pan. “She leaves the cooking to me. Says we stand a better chance of survival that way.”
“Clark and I usually cook together,” she replied. “He does the salads while I do the complicated stuff like emptying sauces into pans and heating things.”
Clark and I. In Lois’s mind, he noted, she and the other Clark were already a couple. Did Clark feel the same way? He certainly didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave his wife. What was stopping him?
“I can make a salad if you’ve got the ingredients,” he offered.
She opened the fridge door and gestured at the salad compartment. “Be my guest.”
He pulled out a lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber and sundry other salad ingredients, found a knife and a chopping board and set to work. “So, how much has your Clark told you about himself?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I think you already know he’s not exactly...from around here,” he said cautiously. “Don’t you?”
“He’s from Kansas, you mean.”
“Well, that too, but when I say ‘around here,’ I mean...here. As in...Earth...here.” He snuck a quick glance at her to check on her reaction. Nothing. Reassured by her relaxed prodding of the pasta in its pan, he began to pull apart the lettuce, taking great care not to do so at superspeed. No sense in blowing the other Clark’s cover if he hadn’t told her everything.
“Yes, I know that,” she said, moving over to stir the pasta sauce. “What of it?”
“I wondered what else he told you,” he said. “Other...differences.”
Her spoon stopped moving in the sauce. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said bluntly. “Clark is no different to you or me.”
“Actually, I’m very diff-“
“Look, just who are you, and why are you asking all these questions about Clark?” she demanded, whirling on him with her eyes blazing.
Okay, definitely a reaction this time. He suppressed the urge to take a step backwards. This was a Lois. He could handle Loises. “I told you, I’m another Clark. From another universe.” Boy, that sounded even crazier spoken out loud than it had in his head.
“If that were the case, you wouldn’t have to ask all these questions about him,” she pointed out. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t throw you out right this minute.”
“Because I’m your best chance of getting your own Clark back,” he said. “Believe me, I don’t want to stick around in this universe any longer than I have to.”
“How do I know you haven’t just kidnapped him?” she said, brandishing her spoon at him.
“Have I asked you for a ransom?” he countered, eyeing the drippy spoon and wondering how long it would be before a blob of sauce landed on the floor.
She snorted. “The people who want to kidnap Clark won’t be asking for a ransom.”
“What people?” he asked in alarm. There were people planning kidnap? “Who wants to kidnap him?”
She bit her lip and turned back to stir her sauce. “If you’re who I think you are, then I don’t need to answer that question,” she muttered.
Talk about paranoid! “Indulge me,” he said heavily, trying not to shred the lettuce into tiny pieces in his frustration. “Pretend I’m not who you think I am.”
She lifted the lid off the pasta to check whether it was cooked. “How well done do you like your pasta?”
“Al dente,” he replied. “Definitely not mushy.”
“Okay.” She took the pan over to the sink, grabbed a colander and tipped in the pasta to drain it. Then she gave the colander a couple of practised shakes and placed it back inside the empty pan with the lid balanced on top to keep the food warm. “Skywatch,” she said at last. “Although, I don’t think they want to kidnap him. Not yet, anyway.”
Skywatch! Wasn’t that the name of the group he’d seen mentioned in Clark’s files at the Planet? The quasi-military group headed by Jason Trask?
Thoughtfully, he turned his attention away from the hapless lettuce to the sturdier cucumber. Should he admit he’d read those files or not? If she thought he was involved with Skywatch, she probably wouldn’t believe him whatever he said.
She pushed past him back to the stove, not noticing that her hip had caught the handle of his knife where it lay on the chopping board. It spun around, the blade heading straight for her midriff. His response was automatic, his hand grabbing the blade before it sliced into her.
Damn! He’d moved at superspeed without even realising it.
She stared down at his hand where it still grasped the blade of the knife, then slowly peeled his fingers away from the sharp edge and turned his hand around to examine the unblemished skin.
He closed his eyes briefly. Not Lois’s fingers. Just someone who looked, felt and even breathed like she did.
“You knew,” she breathed. “You knew the knife wouldn’t cut you, didn’t you?”
He took in a deep breath and drew his hand away, unable to cope with the confusing and conflicting mix of the familiar with the unfamiliar. “Yeah. My body works just the same as his does.”
“And you moved as fast as he can...”
“Yeah.”
“But you’re not him. You...you don’t touch me like he does.” A little pink crept into her face.
“No.”
“My God,” she muttered. “How can this be? How can you be in Clark’s body?”
“I wish I knew,” he said, shifting along the counter so that she wasn’t so close to him. “That’s what we need to figure out, so that we can reverse it. Is there any chance these Skywatch people could be involved?”
“I doubt it,” she replied, turning off the heat under the sauce and fishing out plates and cutlery from a cupboard. “Their speciality is spying and covert operations, not scientific experimentation.” She glanced over to him. “Is that salad done, because the pasta’s ready.”
“No, but...” He shifted into superspeed and completed the job. “Now it is.”
She gaped. “Clark’s never done anything like that. Wow.”
“He doesn’t use his extra abilities in front of you?” he asked in surprise.
“He doesn’t use them, period,” she replied. “I mean, he’s shown me some of what he can do, but he says they’re useless in everyday life because they’re so clumsy and unreliable.” A corner of her mouth turned upwards. “When he showed me his heat vision, he sent me into the lounge for safety and even then I had to buy a new sink afterwards. He was mortified.”
“Sounds like he never practised enough,” surmised Clark. “It can be pretty useful, as you can see.”
“I’ll say,” she agreed. “He could clean this apartment in seconds.” She began dishing up the pasta. “He never will, though.”
“Why not?” asked Clark. “It’s never too late to start practising.”
She shook her head. “He hates what he calls the freak-show stuff. I’ve been trying to make him realise that a lot of people would love to be able to do what he can do. I tell him he’s special, not freaky. I tell him he’s as human as you or me. But it’s not easy after all these years, and Lana-“ She bit off the sentence and pursed her lips. “Let’s just say that Lana doesn’t help.”
She took the plates over to the table and motioned for him to bring the salad. “I’ve just about trained him not to say ‘freak,’ but then Lana does or says something and we’re back to square one again.” She sat down and continued in a strained voice, “She’s slowly tearing him apart, and the worst of it is, he doesn’t even see it.”
He joined her at the table and handed the salad bowl over to her. “Why doesn’t he just leave her?”
She shrugged her shoulders and gave a funny half-sob. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.” She pressed her fingers to her lips as if trying to prevent her emotions from spilling out, and he saw that her eyes had become glassy with unshed tears. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not usually so emotional, but I...I care about him, you know? He’s already been through so much, and now there’s this body swap thing, and I just don’t know how well he’s going to handle it. I mean, he’s pretty resilient – stronger than a lot of people - but everyone has limits, don’t they?”
He nodded. “But he’s with my Lois. She’ll make sure he’s okay.” Assuming she didn’t beat him up first when she figured out he wasn’t her husband. Lois could be pretty resourceful, even in the face of superpowers. “I’m sure they’re already well on the way to figuring out how to reverse this thing.”
“I hope so,” she said miserably. “I miss him.”
“Tell me more about these Skywatch people,” he suggested. “I know you don’t think they’re anything to do with this, but they’re the best lead we’ve got so far.”
“I guess so.”
And so, over dinner, she related their investigation into the covert military-esque group headed by none other than Jason Trask. Apparently, a couple of months ago, Clark had discovered quite by chance that his parents’ old farmhouse had been acquired by a faceless business consortium, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a cover for Trask’s group. Not only that, but the acquisition had taken place right back in the early Seventies, just after his parents’ death. Clark had been horrified, because, on the face of it, Skywatch appeared to have been investigating him – perhaps even watching him – since he was a kid.
Clark felt the blood drain from his face. “That’s terrible,” he murmured.
“Yeah,” agreed Lois, sipping the coffee they’d made after dinner. “It’s the only time I’ve seen him get sick, when he found that out.”
Clark could sympathise: it was too close to his own worst nightmare. “So what do you think Skywatch are up to now?”
“We think they’re just watching him,” she replied. “Now that he knows about them, he’s noticed a couple of people who’ve seemed to take just a little too much interest in him, and once he was pretty sure he was followed.”
“And what does Lana think of all this?” he asked, remembering her cold behaviour this morning. He’d imagined that was due to suspicions about her husband’s fidelity, but perhaps there was another reason.
“She doesn’t know,” said Lois. “At first, he didn’t want to frighten her until he was sure of his facts, and then, just when he was about to tell her, he found out...he found the notebook.”
“Notebook?” Suddenly, an image of a guilty-looking Lana hastily concealing some kind of book this morning in the kitchen came back to him.
Lois sighed. “I shouldn’t be telling you all this, but I guess you have to know if you’re going to go back there tonight. Lana’s been keeping a diary. She writes down absolutely everything Clark does. And she calls him a thing.”
He frowned, sure he must have misheard her. “I’m sorry - did you say a thing?”
She nodded and took a swift gulp of coffee. “It. It ate a hamburger. It kissed me.” Her mouth twisted. “Now you know why I hate her...”
He didn’t hear the rest of whatever she was saying. Disgust anchored him to his chair for a moment, until seething anger propelled him from his seat to storm blindly into the kitchen. He grabbed the coffee pot, snatched a mug from the drainer on the sink and sloshed the hot liquid into the mug, heedless of the scalding spillage over his fingers. Lifting the mug to his lips, he drained it down in one, letting the fiery coffee sear down his throat to join the fire in his stomach.
It.
How dare she? What right did Lana have to call someone not of her own species a thing?
For a moment he was back at school, listening to his classmates discussing the latest monster alien movie and shrivelling inside whenever they laughed at the aliens and called them names. Made out that they were evil, emotionless creatures. Things.
“Are...are you okay?”
Lois’s tentative voice from the threshold of the kitchen drew him back to his surroundings. “Yeah,” he said thickly. “I figured drinking your coffee was preferable to smashing my fist through your wall.” He took a couple of deep breaths and turned around to face her. “Sorry. How can he bear to stay with her?”
She pushed away from the door jamb and came to mop up the mess he’d made on the draining board. “You’d have to know him to really understand the answer to that one, but basically, it’s the lesser of two evils. He’s always been terrified that people will find out he’s not human, and he thinks Lana would do just that if he left her.”
There was something in her tone... “You don’t agree?”
“No. She’d be ruining her own life as well as his if she gave him away.” She sighed. “But Clark’s fear of exposure is pathological – like I said, he actually threw up when he found out that Skywatch might already know about him, and you’ll know how rare it is for him to get sick – so he refuses to take the risk.”
All of which explained a lot, but Lois seemed to be clinging to a hopeless cause if Clark was that fearful of exposure. “Leaving you...?”
“Leaving me picking up the pieces and putting him back together again every time his sham marriage gets too much for him.” She shook her head in self-disgust. “I’m a fool to stick around, but I can’t seem to give him up. I keep hoping that if I chip away at him long enough, he’ll see things the way they really are.”
He nodded. “I’ve kind of been there myself. I had to chip away at my Lois for a long time before she even noticed me.” He paused, wondering if he should voice what was on his mind. The facts he’d been given were beginning to add up to a pretty ugly picture, and he suspected that, because this Lois and Clark were too close to the situation, they hadn’t made the connections he was now making. Of course, he could be entirely wrong, but he’d never forgive himself if he was right and didn’t say anything...
“You know, I caught Lana writing in her book this morning,” he said.
This time it was Lois’s turn to lose the colour from her cheeks. “She’s still doing it? We weren’t sure, because the notebook Clark found dated from their late teens.”
He nodded. “Oh, yeah.” He drew in a slow breath. “Look, has it ever occurred to you to wonder...Lana’s keeping a diary about Clark, and you know that Skywatch are watching him...is there any chance that Lana is working for Skywatch?”
She stared at him for a moment and then laughed. “Lana? She’s just a country girl with a warped sense of right and wrong. Sure, her family is pretty reactionary, but I can’t see her working for an organisation like Trask’s. She’s too well brought-up. Too...nice.”
“Well, consider this,” he said. “This morning, when I woke up in Clark’s body, I felt ill. Okay, maybe you could attribute that to the body swap thing, but some of the symptoms I was experiencing...they were pretty familiar. On my world, I would have suspected I’d been exposed to kryptonite.”
“Kryptonite? What’s that?”
“Something that makes us sick,” he answered cagily. “And I might be reaching here, but I think there’s a possibility that Lana exposed Clark to it last night while he was asleep.”
Lois lobbed her cloth into the sink and leaned back against the worktop. “Why would she do that?”
“Well,” he said, turning to rinse out the mug he’d just used. “She was really insistent that I stay home today and especially tonight. What if she knows Clark’s having an affair with you and tried to keep him at home by making him ill?”
“Oh, get real!”
He up-ended the mug on the draining board. “They grew up together, didn’t they?” he asked, warming to his theory as he developed it. “So if anyone is likely to know what could hurt him, it would be Lana, don’t you think? Especially as kryptonite is usually found wherever his...craft...first landed. Smallville,” he added in case she was still in any doubt.
She stared at him. “You’re serious, aren’t you? Lana Lang: master spy.” She looked away from him for a moment, closed her eyes, then opened them again. “Nope, I still get xenophobic country girl, not Mata Hari. Anyway, how sure can you be that it was this kryptomium-“
“Kryptonite,” he corrected.
“Whatever. That this stuff was what made you sick this morning?”
He grimaced. “I can’t. But I just thought you should be aware of the possibility.”
“Okay.” She glanced at the kitchen clock. “It’s getting late. You should probably go home to Lana.”
Was she dismissing his theory? “You’ll think about what I’ve said?” he pressed.
She nodded. “I just...I need to be alone for a while,” she said. “You’re too much like him – well, you are him when I look at you. It’s...confusing.”
“I know,” he agreed. He understood exactly what she was going through, he reflected with an inner sigh. At least her hair was longer than his wife’s...
“I guess this is just as hard for you,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “We’ll figure it out somehow. In the meantime, I guess you’re right – I should head home.”
Not that he was looking forward to seeing Lana again. This morning’s encounter had been bad enough, but now he’d have to work twice as hard to be convincing. He’d also better have a good cover story ready for her, and as for sharing a bed with her...
Perhaps he could sleep downstairs on the sofa. Yes, that would be much better.
But no. If she was awake when he got back, he’d have no choice – he’d have to join her. Even if she asleep, there was still the risk that she’d wake up in the night and see that he wasn’t there. And what if she woke up before him in the morning and found him downstairs on the sofa? He’d never explain that away.
***************
Meanwhile, far away in a grey featureless building on the outskirts of Metropolis, a clerk broke the Skywatch seal on a brown padded envelope and tipped out today’s tapes for transcription. From the labels, she saw that these were the project director’s weekly report tapes and duly opened the relevant file on her computer. Entering the date and time at the top of the page, she slotted the first tape into the tape recorder, pressed play and began to type.
Project Status Review: Recommendations
1. Analyse the alien’s newspaper articles for subversive content and subliminal messaging: this has been a serious oversight and requires urgent attention;
2. Increase surveillance of Lois Lane;
3. Instruct Lana to strengthen all security and control measures: the alien must remain within her sphere of influence. However;
4. Lana not to be informed of suspected sexual relations between the alien and the Lane woman. More evidence needed (see point 2);
5. Authorise more frequent applications of Smallville B.
***************
Clark found that he was in luck when, later, he entered the bedroom he’d woken up in that morning. Lana was fast asleep, curled up with her back to the centre of the bed. Relieved that there would at least be no further confrontations that night, he undressed quickly. Oh, how he wished the other Clark wore pyjamas in bed instead of just his underwear! Even an added t-shirt would be difficult to explain. Oh, well... Steeling himself to a night spent virtually naked beside a complete stranger, he lifted the covers gingerly and slipped under them as silently and smoothly as he could.
This was horrible. He lay on his back, every muscle tense with unease. Lois should be sleeping here beside him. Just three short weeks of marriage and his love for her grew stronger and more intense with each day. She’d become part of his soul. She was his best friend, his lover and his companion. And he kept thinking of all the little things he was missing – had she found that CD she’d wanted to buy? Were her new shoes still killing her? He could be rubbing her feet and soothing away her aches and pains instead of stuck here in this horrible place. Tomorrow, he resolved, he was going to figure out a way to reverse this-
“So did you catch the bad guys?”
He froze. Lana was turning around to face him.
“Not this time,” he said. “I might have to try again tomorrow night.”
“Can’t you skip it? Let someone else go in your place,” she murmured, easing closer to him. “I miss you.” She kissed his bare shoulder.
“It’s my story,” he said. “I have to go.”
“Give the story to someone else,” she said. “Your partner, for example.”
Oh, boy. How much did she know about Lois? “She’s got enough work of her own.”
“I just bet she has,” she muttered, planting another kiss on his shoulder. “Women like that always do well.”
Women like that. Just what was she trying to imply? Fighting to keep any edge out of his voice, he said, “What do you mean?”
“Smart and good-looking,” she said. “It’s an irresistible combination for most men.”
Was she trying to get him to lie? Say Lois wasn’t irresistible to him, because he had Lana? Well, he wasn’t prepared to lie on the other Clark’s behalf, that was for sure. “Lois isn’t like that,” he replied as a compromise. “She hates women who sleep their way to the top.”
“Of course she does.” A small, warm hand landed on his stomach and began tracing small circles there. “You’re so tense,” she murmured. “How about I ease that for you?”
Repulsed, he turned quickly on his side. “I’m tired,” he muttered. No doubt his refusal would fuel any suspicions she already harboured about her husband’s affair, but too bad.
He listened to the pregnant, angry silence behind him. Deep, frustrated breaths full of recrimination. “You know,” she muttered eventually, “if you’re having trouble getting...you know...there are things that can be done. Pills you can take.”
He grimaced and remained silent: there was no response to a remark like that.
“Of course, they might not work on you,” she continued. “But you won’t know until you try, will you?”
There it was: the reminder that her husband wasn’t human. How many times a day did she do that? As for her implication that Clark was impotent – well, he was pretty sure she didn’t really believe that herself. She was just testing him. Needling him.
“Just a thought,” she said, turning away from him again.
Glad he was being left alone again, he forced himself to breathe deeply and relax. Sleep was, for once, a necessity after the day’s stresses and strains.
***************
Lois opened a baleful eye and glanced at her bedside clock. Three minutes past midnight. The last time she’d looked, it had read twenty seven minutes to midnight. The time before that, twelve minutes past eleven.
Time just seemed to move so incredibly slowly at night. Especially when there was a gaping emptiness on the other side of your bed where your husband was supposed to be.
Sighing, she pulled herself out of bed and crossed to their chest of drawers, where she drew out one of Clark’s sweaters. Holding it close to her face, she breathed in deeply, inhaling his scent. Better. As soon as she smelt that fresh, clean, male scent, she could picture him in the sweater, smiling broadly down at her.
She padded back to the bed and slid under the covers on his side, hugging his sweater to her chest. He’d come back to her, she knew he would. She just had to figure out what had caused the switch, and then reverse it. Easy.
In the meantime, where was he? Was he with Lana, sleeping next to her in her husband’s place? He’d hate that. He’d be tense and unhappy, and that little muscle in his jaw would be jumping along his jaw-line. He’d try to sleep but she doubted he’d manage it. She’d discovered almost immediately after they’d married that he wasn’t good at sleeping when he was unsettled. A particularly upsetting rescue had kept him tossing and turning most of the night – or at least until she’d pulled him into her arms and held him tight.
She didn’t much like the imagine of him sleeping next to Lana, so she moved quickly on. Had he figured out that the other Clark was having an affair with the other Lois? Well, if he’d gone to the Planet and met her, he probably would have. He might even have told her who he really was, if he’d thought he could trust her.
Could you trust a woman who was having an affair with a married man?
She pursed her lips, remembering how much she’d hated Mrs Belcanto, the next-door neighbour her father had courted over the garden wall. For a time, she’d laid the blame for the entire affair squarely at the evil woman’s feet; labelled her as a Jezebel who’d schemed to lure her Daddy away from the family home.
But life wasn’t that simple. She’d learned later that her father was as complicit in the affair as Mrs Belcanto As the old cliché would have it, and as the other Clark had said himself, it took two to tango.
And so it was with the other Clark and Lois. Her counterpart probably wasn’t a Jezebel, just a woman in love who’d met the right man at the wrong time. Should she have resisted temptation? Of course she should, but Lois herself was only too acutely aware of how powerful true love was. Not only was it impossible to ignore, but it made you do almost anything to make your partner happy. No doubt the other Lois thought that was what she was doing – giving her man the support and comfort he desperately needed while he was married to a monster like Lana Lang.
Did that mean Lois condoned the affair these two were conducting? No, she didn’t think she did, but she understood it.
Still, the man sleeping on their sofa downstairs really did need to gather the strength together to leave Lana. If he was here much longer, she’d tell him that. Quite often.
