She closed her eyes and wondered where her friends were now, whether Mr LeRoy had recruited more eidolons and was right now heading south. The desire to be with them, among the people she had come to think of as family, was like an ache.
Perhaps an hour later the vehicle stopped and the doors swung open. The armed Paladins hauled her from the cage, and they were led by the lieutenant along a grey concrete corridor and into a vast chamber. In the centre of the chamber stood a white, corrugated shipping container.
The lieutenant crossed to the container and opened a door in its flank, then gestured for the guards to escort her inside. He favoured her with a mirthless smile as she shuffled past him.
Something about the interior of the container frightened her.
It was obvious that it had been specially repurposed. She passed down a short corridor towards an door like that of a bank vault. A Paladin swung it open to reveal what looked very much like a padded cell. The guard jabbed her in the ribs with the muzzle of his rifle. “Inside.”
She stumbled into the cell and the Paladins followed her in. One attached her ankle shackles to a hook in the far corner, then retreated. The door sighed shut behind them as they left. The back of the door was, like the four walls, floor and ceiling, covered in large, diamond-shaped, quilted padding.
She sat down and snuggled into the corner. The cell aroused a primal fear of the unknown within her. But at least, she told herself, it was more comfortable than the last place. The padding was thick, like a mattress, and the room was warm.
Be strong, she told herself.
Don’t show the bastards how frightened you are.
THE PADDED DOOR swung open. It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes since her arrival.
Something was prodded inside.
Something…
A monster.
Ajia scrambled into a crouching position and pressed herself into the padded corner.
Beyond the thing, the lieutenant was staring at it with obvious distaste. He stepped forward and jabbed the monster with his nightstick. It lurched into the cell and landed on all fours. The doors swung shut.
The monster braced itself on its thin arms, for all the world like a sprinter about to launch itself at her. Ajia made a sound of revulsion in her throat and tried to squirm deeper into the padding.
The thing was small, perhaps no taller than three feet tall, an emaciated creature with stick-limbs and a huge bald, domed head. It wore a ragged loin-cloth and nothing else, and its huge eyes stared at her with inhuman intensity.
As if its appearance were not bad enough, it stank. Ajia had never inhaled the scent of a month-old corpse, but she suspected that it could be no worse than the putrescent stench that wafted from the being before her.
A zombie child––or an ancient man who had died and returned to life?
She recalled the monsters which had confronted her in Sherwood Forest, and what Fletcher had told her about them. That the Paladins had a cadre of these uglies, to use against their enemies.
This was one of them.
As she stared at the monster, she wondered if her fear was affecting her vision. The thing seemed to blur before her, lose its definition. She wondered if she were passing out, and fought to keep conscious. Who knew what depravities the creature might get up to if she were to pass out.
Not that it might desist if she were to remain conscious, she thought.
She found her voice. “What do you want?” She kept her breathing shallow, so as not to fill her lungs with its corpse-stench.
The thing had risen to its claw-like bare feet, hunched over, but still staring at her.
As she watched, it jerked spasmodically, its emaciated limbs twitching. It seemed hardly in control of its movements, a marionette controlled by a palsied puppet-master.
Its head rolled on its scrawny neck and its face––huge eyes, tiny hooked nose and slit mouth––contorted as if in pain.
And it blurred again, and Ajia knew that this time it was nothing to do with her vision.
The grey-blue skin of its arms and legs pulsed, as if maggots writhed beneath the surface of the monster’s flesh. It fell to its knees, and its hands rose to its head in a gesture at once horrible and somehow familiar.
Then she had it: Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
It gibbered. It emitted a strong of high-pitched gibberish, not one word recognisable to Ajia.
It looked as if, for all the world, it were fighting with some inner demon.
The monster jerked, and flung itself back against the far wall, where it slid down into a sitting position and stared across at her.
It appeared oddly calm now, and its gibbering had ceased.
Its breathing was slow. Measured. Even.
It spoke, and its voice was at odds with its earlier high-pitched outburst. For one thing, Ajia understood every word.
“Do not be afraid,” it said in a deep-throated croak.
“Who…? What are you?” Her heartbeat thudded in her ears.
The monster replied, “The body I inhabit… it is known as a phouka.”
“You ‘inhabit’?” she echoed. “But… So who are you?”
“That does not matter. Indeed, it’s better that you don’t know, for now.”
Ajia drew her knees up to her chest and hugged hers shins. “But… But you work for the Paladins?”
“The phouka does, yes. But I control it, now. As I said, do not be afraid, I am on your side.”
“On my side?”
She was instantly suspicious. This was too good to be true. The Paladins were tricking her. They were using the phouka to elicit the information about the whereabouts of Mr LeRoy and the others.
“Just who the hell are you?” she asked.
The phouka hesitated, then said, “I am responsible for… for everything that has happened to you, to Mr LeRoy, Wayland Smith and all the others. Every eidolon now roaming this benighted country. All my doing, Ajia.”
She shook her head. She wanted to believe it, but knew that it would be dangerous to do so. This was a ploy of the Paladins.
“So why are you here?”
“To help you escape,” said the phouka, “to reach Mr LeRoy and the others, to communicate with him.”
“Escape?” She didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. What sick game were they playing with her?
“Escape? In case you haven’t noticed, we’re locked in a fucking box surrounded by armed Paladins. How the fuck do you think we can escape?”
The phouka seemed unperturbed by her outburst. “You can escape, not I.”
That treacherous spasm of hope again, fluttering within her chest.
“Escape how?”
“The phouka is a unique creature from Irish mythology,” said the thing before her. “It can transform itself. Metamorphose. It is a shapeshifter.”
“A shapeshifter?” She nodded, still very wary. “Okay. A shapeshifter. So how the hell will that help me get out of here?”
The phouka gestured, turning its long, taloned hand in the air. “Why, by changing its shape,” it said.
She considered this. “I don’t buy it, buddy. So the Paladins just threw you in here so you could help me escape? No, you work for them.”
“They think I work for them,” it said. “Indeed the phouka does, or did. But as I said, I have taken control of its form, to assist you. And I will do so.”
Ajia stared.
The phouka was changing its appearance.
Its feet transformed first. From thin hideous, sinewy claws, they gained substance, changed colour. It was as if her vision was blurring, as if she couldn’t trust the evidence of her eyes. The phouka’s feet were no longer bare feet, but…
She blinked. They had changed into a pair of blue Nike trainers, and the ankles above them were no longer stair-rod thin but fleshy and shaped and clothed in white socks, and its legs now wore black jogging bottoms.
“I don’t believe it.”
She stared at t
he creature’s head––or rather where its head has been. It was as if she were looking into a mirror, staring at a perfect reflection of herself, identical in every way.
Soon all that remained of the phouka of old was a lingering remnant of its foul body odour.
The creature, the semblance of herself in every detail, stared back at her with something like insouciance in its––her––expression.
But could she trust this being?
Or was it part of the Paladins’ masterplan?
“So?” She shook her head. “I still don’t see––”
“The Paladins will return, take you away from here, and let you go.”
She sneered. “Just like that? And why the fuck would they let me go?”
“Because I, the controller of this body, as I mentioned earlier, formulated the plan. They will let you go because they will think that you’re the phouka, mimicking Ajia Snell, and you will then lead them to what they want––Mr LeRoy, Wayland Smith, Reed Fletcher and all the others––with this.”
The phouka did another remarkable thing. It reached a hand into its chest––Ajia watched, incredulous, as its slim brown fingers passed through the material of its T-shirt to a depth of inches––and produced a slim silver cylinder perhaps two inches long.
“And what the fuck,” she said, “is that?”
The Phouka smiled with her face. “A tracking device. You will secrete this about your person, leave here and return to your people––leading the Paladins, or so they hope, to Mr LeRoy and the others.”
“And you, the controller, set all this up? Persuaded them to use the phouka, then took it over?”
“Exactly,” it said, smiling the smile she had seen so often in her bathroom mirror. “I said I would help them if they agreed to set me free.”
There was, she thought, something not quite right about what it claimed.
Then she had it. The flaw. The lapse of logic that proved the phouka was working for the Paladins, despite everything it said.
She pointed across at the perfect simulacrum of herself and said, “But how did you persuade the Paladins that the phouka, having transformed itself into me, would know where the hell Mr LeRoy and the others were?”
She stared across at the phouka, triumphant.
The creature matched her smile. “Because I told them that as well as taking on your physical form, the phouka would have access to your memories. I told the Paladins that you would know where Mr LeRoy and the others were, or were going, and that I would have those memories and would lead them there.”
Ajia was aware of her pulse again, as hope grew.
“And,” she began tentatively, “when I get out of here––if I get out of her––I’ll take the tracking device, lose it somewhere, then go on my own way and try to locate Mr LeRoy?”
The phouka inclined its head. “I would advise you to set the Paladins on a wild goose chase, leaving this”––it held the cylinder up before its face––“on some form of transport heading north. Then you will head south and locate your friends.”
“Easier said than done, pal. I don’t know where they are.”
“I do, Ajia.”
She blinked. “You do?”
“They are presently travelling down the M5 in a pantechnicon, followed by three other vehicles containing eidolons and assorted folkloric allies, towards the West Country. By nightfall they will have reached the village of Hewden, and a woodland on its outskirts, where they will make camp. You will rendezvous with them there, with this information. Listen carefully, and report this to Mr LeRoy in every detail.”
Ajia leaned forward, holding her breath. “Go on.”
“You will meet up with Dr Neve Winterton, who runs the Cry-Org Cryogenic Research Institute near Glastonbury.”
She nodded. “Neve Winterton,” she repeated. “But why does Mr LeRoy need to meet this Winterton person––and for that matter, just who the hell are you?”
The phouka shook its head. “It is better if you remain in ignorance, Ajia, in case…”
“In case the Paladins capture me again and torture the facts out of me, right?”
“And now take this,” said the phouka, “and hide it about your person.” It passed her the cylinder and she slipped it into the pocket of her trainers.
Then she saw the cuffs on her wrists and ankles. “Just one problem here,” she said. “How the hell do I get out of these things?”
Her mirror image smiled again, pushed itself from the wall, and crouched before her.
The phouka placed a finger on the locking mechanism of the cuffs shackling her wrists, and something thin and white––a length of bone?––extruded from the flesh of its fingertip and inserted itself into the keyhole. The phouka twisted its finger this way and that, and the manacles sprang apart.
Ajia rubbed her wrists as the creature used the gruesome osseous key to perform the same operation on the cuffs shackling her ankles. In seconds she was free.
She moved to the far wall against which the phouka had crouched, while the creature placed the manacles on its ankles and wrists and snapped them shut.
They sat against the walls, regarding each other.
“When the Paladins return,” said the phouka, “they will take you from here and drop you, as per my instructions, at Manchester Piccadilly station. There you will ‘lose’ the tracker and board a train south. Do not worry that they will be following you. It will be the tracker they’ll be concentrating on. And also,” the creature added, “do not in any way evince any hostility or resentment towards your captors when they lead you away from here. And do not speak while in their company, as you will be unable to replicate the phouka’s tone of voice, and so give yourself away.”
Ajia nodded, still only half-believing that any of this was true.
Was she really about to be released by the Paladins, or was it merely part of some devious scheme she was too stupid to fathom?
“I told the Paladins that the transformation would take one hour,” said the phouka. “I estimate that we have only ten minutes left to wait.”
She looked across at the phouka. “And you?” she asked. “What will happen when the Paladins realise that you’re not really me?”
The phouka smiled. “I can maintain the phouka in this guise for perhaps another three or four hours. Then I shall relinquish control. I will take great delight in watching their consternation when they realise their mistake.”
“But will they take it out on the creature?”
The phouka shook its head. “It’s too valuable an asset for them to harm it. Though they will be mystified as to how the mix-up happened.”
Ajia smiled at the thought, then sat back against the wall and closed her eyes.
She wondered at Mr LeRoy’s reaction when she walked, as large as life, into their woodland campsite near Bristol that evening.
Best not look too far ahead.
The cell door opened, startling her. She opened her eyes, her pulse loud in her ears.
Two armed Paladins entered the cell, one of them training his rifle on the phouka shackled in the far corner while the other covered Ajia. The lieutenant followed them in, glancing from Ajia to the phouka. He smiled down at the shackled creature, which he assumed to be her, Ajia, and sneered, “We’ll attend to you later.”
The phouka gave him a resentful stare, brilliant in its mimicry of her, then lowered its face to its raised knees.
The lieutenant nodded to the armed Paladins, indicating Ajia. “Get this thing out of here,” he said.
One of the guards took Ajia by the upper arm and pulled her to he feet. Recalling the phouka’s instructions, she rose without demur, sleepwalker-like, and followed the guards from the cell.
They marched her from the shipping container. The lieutenant crossed to where a tall, familiar figure was standing watching the operation, and saluted.
Ajia stared at the officer.
Major Wynne, the bastard who had shot Perry dead at Summer Land al
l those days ago.
Her first impulse was to shout her rage at him––but she recalled her saviour’s instructions, quelled her rage, and kept her expression neutral.
She was escorted to a small room, still under armed guard, and there the lieutenant passed her a manila envelope. “For contingencies, as you’ll be needing cash. I understand you’ve been briefed on what to do?”
Ajia took the envelope and nodded, keeping her expression blank.
“And you have the tracker?”
Ajia touched her chest.
“Very well,” the lieutenant said, obviously uncomfortable in the presence of the shapeshifting creature in the guise of his erstwhile captive. “Good luck.”
He nodded to the guards, who escorted her along the corridor and into the back of the armoured car. Once again she was locked in a cage and driven away at speed.
Even now, when it seemed that she was almost free, Ajia couldn’t allow herself to believe it. What if whoever was inhabiting the phouka lost control, and the Paladins realised their mistake and contacted the driver?
She tried not to dwell on that awful possibility.
Her thoughts were brought up short when the armoured car came to a halt and the rear door swung open. A Paladin unlocked the cage and gestured for her to get out.
They were in the car park of a big railway station, milling with commuters. The sight of them––everyday, ordinary people going about their everyday, ordinary lives––made Ajia realise that perhaps she would soon, truly, be free.
“Right, you little phouka,” the Paladin said, laughing at his joke. “On you way.”
Keeping her expression neutral, Ajia strode from the vehicle and joined the flow of pedestrians moving towards the station entrance.
Even then, when she passed into the station and out of sight of her captors, she felt that her freedom was too good to be true. She turned and studied the crowd flowing in after her, but saw no Paladins and no one paying her any attention.
She clutched the tracker in her pocket and wondered at the best course of action.
She hurried through the station until she found an information display listing all the departing trains. A train for Glasgow was leaving the station in seven minutes. She took the escalators to the footbridge and hurried to platform fourteen.
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