The Upright Man by Michael Marshall

belonged to, thirty-five years earlier. This group was called the Straw Men, and they believed themselves the only portion of humanity uninfected by a virus promoting social conscience above the cold-hearted individualism they believed inherent to our species. Whether they genuinely thought this, or it was just a convenient cover for acts of violence and depravity, was not clear. What was clear was that the group was wealthy and well connected. It was also evident that their point man, a person who called himself the Upright Man but could more accurately be designated as Paul, my lost brother, was about as dangerous an individual as could be imagined. The night before Bobby Nygard died we watched a government tape together, a compilation of the world’s atrocities over the previous two decades. Shootings, explosions, mass killings. We saw the Upright Man in the background of a number of these events, mutely claiming the glory. In addition he had been acting as a procurer for the occupants of The Halls, a group of men—and, for all I knew, women—involved in considered and repeated acts of serial murder. And to cap it all, he looked exactly like me.
    The first steps had been easy. I did my initial research a hundred miles down the road from Relent, sitting in a wired coffee bar with a laptop. I hated the idea that someone might think I was writing a novel, and kept glaring at people who smiled encouragingly at me, but I needed the net access. What I had to do first was confirm the city in which my sibling had been abandoned. Paul had sent me a message in which he claimed he had been left in San Francisco, but I was not inclined to believe anything he said without evidence. I had nothing else to go on except the short section at the end of the videotape my father had left me, which I had converted to a DVD.
    The last section was in three parts. The first showed a train journey. There was no locating information, but I knew my father well enough to be confident he would not have included it just for background color. The washed-out look of the transferred 8 mm stock, along with my mother’s hairstyle and clothing, did help date the segment, but this was more easily achieved by the sight of my two-year-old self. So my guess was the first part was to signal that a journey had been undertaken—and that it was far enough from our house to make sense by rail, but not far enough to take a plane. This gave me a choice of maybe thirty or forty cities and towns in or around northern California or Oregon.
    The tape cut then to a wide street in a downtown area. The camera followed my mother as she walked down a sidewalk, hands held down and out of sight: holding, as the final part would make clear, the hands of two young boys. There was not much else to see except passing examples of the fashions of the late 1960s, in the shapes of suits and cars; and understated storefronts of the kind that made you wonder what made anyone buy anything in those days. Nothing remarkable, except . . .
    I froze the image. Over on the right side of the road was a small department store, opposite a grassy square. I could just about make out a name—Hannington’s.
    Ten minutes on the web told me there were nodepartment stores by that name still in operation in the U.S., or at least none who’d made their existence known to the internet. So I had to let scientific detection methods go hang, and work back from the conclusion.
    I tracked down a selection of “San Francisco of Yesteryear” sites and spent a while dredging through evocations of the city’s days of yore. My eyeballs were beginning to melt by the time I found a reference to a Saturday morning ritual for one little girl, now grown old, whose long-dead mother used to take her to look at fancy haberdashery in a store called Harrington’s. They couldn’t afford any of it. They just went to go and look. I found I couldn’t think about that for very long.
    I flipped back to the freeze-frame