Submersion

  ‘No, no you haven’t.’

  ‘The chamber of doors is the place that drains you of all hope, sucks out your very soul. And it’s a cruel, clever, slow torture. Are you sure you want to hear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was Elinor and Tristan. I couldn’t help but smile, and taste the salty tears as they tumbled over my curved lips. Tristan and his terrifying, dark tales that thrilled and petrified my beautiful daughter in equal measure. Where fact ceased and fiction began, that was anyone’s guess.

  ‘This is all I have so far,’ the old man explained when the voices stopped. ‘It sounds like she was recording people. Interviewing, maybe. Hard to tell yet. There’s quite a bit recorded, forty odd minutes, but this is the only section I’ve cleaned up to a decent level so far. I’ll keep going, I promise, and when I have more, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Can I take her with me?’ I asked, hearing a desperate pleading in my own voice.

  ‘I thought you might want to, need to even, so I’d thought ahead,’ he answered, nodding. ‘I’ve got a little machine sorted, which you can take home.’

  With that, he headed out of the room again and I followed as he spiraled back down the twisting staircase.

  As I descended, I paused on the first floor, with one step off the corkscrew flight.

  ‘I’m sure he’d love to see you,’ a voice called up from below, reading my mind again. How did he do that?

  With that, I stepped off entirely and gave the door to the room where Billy played a light tap and a gentle push. But Billy didn’t look up at me with his usual smile. Maybe it was because my appearance was so sudden – though surely he’d heard my voice and was aware of my arrival? Maybe it was just that this was his territory, not mine and my presence was an unwanted intrusion upon his privacy. Whatever it was, it dulled my nephew’s features, took the light out of his youthful skin.

  ‘Hello Aunt Agnes,’ he said, his tone bland, the greeting automatic, but not welcoming.

  I didn’t allow it to put me off and moved into the room, determined to show enthusiasm and take an interest in what he was doing. The room was wholly dedicated to a miniature train track that took up an entire table, which, in turn, consumed most of the space the room had available. Whilst it was a fascinating creation, I was less interested in the trains as they rattled along the tracks, weaving in and out of a hand-painted landscape, and more captivated by Billy’s sullen face. At times, it really did flush with those Morton features. Like me, Jessie had been one of a twin, only his other half – Joe – was still alive. Not that I’ve any idea where he is these days, Jessie would curse, cussing the fact his brother had simply sailed out on his family one night. Looking at Billy, I saw Joe and Jessie all over his face – the nose, the jawline, in his movements; boy, he was going to grow up a looker.

  ‘I’ll leave you then?’ I said, realising he wasn’t warming to my presence. I’d find out what was really bothering him another time, maybe employ Tristan’s charms to do the job for me.

  ‘Yes,’ he muttered, only his second attempt at communication, picking up one of the trains that had jammed in the tracks. As he held it in his hand and set it right, something caught my eye. For a second or so, I was petrified to the spot – the ability to breathe vacuumed from my lungs in a single spine-tingling extraction. ‘Aunt?’ Billy inquired, suddenly alert, my odd behaviour causing him to shed his indifferent skin. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ I told him, forcing a smile and descending hurriedly to the ground floor, where the old man met me in the hallway with a small black oblong gadget the size of my palm. He held it out in his open hand. A long, skinny lead was wound around it, with two small buds attached to the end. A Walkman. Had it not been for what I had seen in the playroom above me, I may have smiled in recognition.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked, once I was redressed in outdoor gear. ‘It was quite a thing to hear her again, wasn’t it?’

  I assured him I was fine and he left me to let myself out, scuttling out to his machines and experiments in the rear of his home.

  But I wasn’t fine. You see, what I’d seen, it couldn’t be a coincidence. It had to be a connection. It was such a rare name, so uncommon, that it couldn’t simply be a quirk. Xavier. Painted on the side of the train Billy had held in his hand. Xavier. The lettering in gold paint. And I’d quickly looked over the other trains. It was written on all four. Xavier. There was no denying it.

  I sat at my kitchen table in turmoil. Should I go back and question the old man direct? How do you know him? Tell me what you know, where he is? Or should I try a more subtle approach, begin to visit more regularly and snoop. I was going to snoop at work, after all, what would adding an old man’s messy house to my list cost me? Nothing much, just a bit of time. I willed Reuben to come calling. He’d know what to do, he’d advise me. But that was the thing with Reuben; he wasn’t just turning up on demand. I was having to wait. And so I did, at the kitchen table – through lunch and the afternoon, until Tristan came home to find me slumped across it, where I’d fallen into a fitful day-sleep.

  ‘What’s this?’ were his words that woke me. To the right of me, on the table, was the reconditioned tape machine the old man had given me. I’d fallen asleep with the earphones in place, but they’d slipped out.

  ‘From the old man down the road,’ I offered, adding Merlin so there could be no mistaking who I meant.

  ‘Oh, has he been by?’ Tristan asked, following it up with an excited, speedy: ‘Is this it? Is this the tape? He’s finally sorted it?’

  I shook my head. ‘Just a bit of it. Elinor. And you.’

  ‘So it was hers? And me, you say?’

  I managed a smile, despite how weary I felt.

  ‘You and one of your horror stories.’

  ‘Ah, I suspected she’d recorded me a couple of times on the sly.’

  A smile from Tristan, but it faded when he saw something else in me. Something he couldn’t quite recognise.

  ‘What?’

  I’ve found a connection between that crazy old man Elinor visited and her father, Xavier Riley.

  Oh, how I wanted to unburden this discovery, share the load and talk it through. Ransack the chest of hopes and fears the day had unearthed. But I couldn’t. I’d made a promise to myself, to Elinor – she would be the next to know about Xavier, then Tristan. No, Elinor had to come first.

  ‘It’s nothing, tiredness. And I’ve work tomorrow – so I’m a little anxious, too. I guess.’

  I shrugged, as if to show I wasn’t entirely sure myself, and Tristan bought this. To demonstrate his conviction, he changed the subject with ease, brushing my vague behaviour aside.

  ‘Found out something interesting today. On a job with Jessie.’

  I looked up and he shook his head, reassuring me.

  ‘Not that kind of job. Above board. Repairing a flooded church, of all things. One of the other guys on the team reported another incident on tug-boat day. Several of his neighbours had put their bags out the night before – earlier than authorised, but not unreasonable – and discovered their river road strewn with rubbish. The authorities had to send out nets again, scooping up the mess.’

  ‘It wasn’t Peter Ashworth on the rampage further afield, then?’

  Tris laughed at my joke a little too heartily; he was surprised by its appearance and overdid his appreciation.

  ‘One of the tug-boat workers came into the church, after hours,’ Tristan continued, sobering abruptly, his tone back to serious. ‘He came looking for the priest. Seemed a bit worried, so we asked him a few questions. He was a bit cagey, didn’t really want to speak to us – he’d come to confess to a priest, not some labourers, but we got a bit of info out of him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They found something when they trawled the river. It wasn’t just the litter they caught with their nets.’

  I didn’t need to ask him what, it was clear in the sudden drain in his face.

  ‘He wouldn’t say f
or definite, but he didn’t deny anything.’

  ‘Jesus, Tris.’

  ‘It was dead, he confirmed that. There’s nothing else out there.’

  ‘How do we know that?’

  ‘It’s just unlikely, Agnes. And no one has been hurt, have they? No one has reported that?’

  He was right, I had to agree. ‘But who would report it, Tris? The authorities? If their attempts to protect us have been failure, if those dangers are still at large, would they really tell us?’

  ‘No, Agnes, they wouldn’t,’ he conceded, with a solemn shake of the head. ‘But it’s unlikely.’

  A sudden, terrifying thought struck me.

  ‘What if that’s what happened to her? What if I’m wrong about everything I’ve assumed? What if one of those creatures took my lovely-.’ I couldn’t complete the sentence, but I couldn’t shut out the horrific possibility. Tristan did his best, enveloping me in his strong embrace, squeezing the pain away gently, but the thoughts continued. What if the authorities had completely failed us and those evil, rabid creatures were slowly creeping back onto our streets, savaging our loved ones. ‘Maybe that’s why they tried to blame it on the platform collapsing, maybe this is what they are covering up.’

  Tristan squeezed me tighter, his voice dropping low, the tone deeper and soothing.

  ‘It’s just a bit of rubbish, that’s all. And a dead puppy, at worse. You know she’s alive, right? You can feel it in here?’ My eyes were shut, tears pushing through the closed lids, but I knew where he was pointing. In here. ‘She was taken, Agnes, but not by a pack of dogs. We’ve made some disturbing discoveries, yes, but nothing like that. We’d have heard, we’d have seen. A broken speedboat stop couldn’t cover up something like that. But.’

  He stopped; his sentence a single syllable, but incomplete.

  ‘But what?’ I asked, lifting my head, using my hands to wipe my eyes, pull wet hair from my dampened cheeks.

  ‘You’re not ready, are you?’

  Ready for what, I wondered, still caught in the clinging web of my thoughts.

  Then I realised.

  ‘No, I need to go back!’ I cried, almost desperate, as if Tristan was threatening to lock me in to stop me going. I have to go! I have work to do! Work I must do! I have to trawl the archives and find evidence! Reuben thinks it’s my best chance of getting her back! I wondered for a second if I’d spoken all this aloud – Tristan’s features were perplexed by my reaction, but I realised, quickly, he was simply concerned by the rapid change in my demeanour.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he said, softly defensive and I was suddenly conscious of the level of my anxiety. I forced myself to calm down, if only on the outside.

  ‘I just need to give it a go,’ I managed, sounding almost serene. ‘You may be right, I might not be ready, but even if I just make it to the office and have to come right back, it’ll be progress. So, please don’t try to stop me.’

  His arms squeezed in on me again and the calm I felt was finally genuine – I felt it hum under my skin and into my bones. Had I really told Reuben that Xavier was the love of my life? That was a statement I would surely have to rectify.

  As Tristan hugged me tight, cocooning me in his muscly hold, I gave my missionary friend a little thought. I wondered if he really would come back. Our last meeting had been awkward; an unexplored tension had arisen.

  You’ve broken the rules.

  What if I didn’t see him again? And what if my returning to work itself restricted our opportunity to meet. Maybe I would have to come clean and tell Tristan about his visits. I considered this for a moment, but I knew the answer; knew it deep in my bones.

  What Reuben and I had was just between us; it could happen no other way.

  ‘How about I run you a bath?’ Tristan offered, breaking my thoughts and his embrace. ‘I’m certain we’ve plenty of our water ration left.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Not too deep,’ I warned him gently and he slipped away.

  Minutes later, a luxury scent wafted from our small, cold bathroom. Something florid mixed with something citric. Drawn to the unexpected scent, I went in search and found a grinning Tristan standing before a tub that was brimming with meringue-like foam. Tiny candles were balanced all around the lip of the bath, their little flames reflected in the millions of bubbles that frosted the surface of the water.

  ‘Where on earth did you…’ I began, but I knew. Our old friend. But I didn’t say. I didn’t want to ruin the moment by inviting old lovers onto the scene. Instead, I said something very different. ‘Shame to waste it on just one of us.’

  Our romantic bath was followed by a fitful night’s sleep – but better than I could have expected. I did my best as I dressed for my return to work to banish my new theories concerning Elinor’s disappearance. Tristan was right – I knew in my heart that she’d been taken, I knew it so deep down it had become the truth. I just needed to find out how and why – and where she was. Reuben had been right too – the government office was my window into that world.

  Resolved to face any obstacle I encountered – emotional or regulatory – I pulled on my protective gear, slipped away without a final farewell to Tristan and stepped out into the street, back into our little boat and rowed south - my way to work.

  Rowed my way back to Elinor, I hoped.

  And all the way there, I kept looking into the waters that surrounded me. What if? As I caused ripples and tiny waves in the murky stream, what if there was something in there? Something we thought was gone forever; something, instead, that had simply slipped under the inky surface, out of sight, submerged.

  Waiting.

  Reaching the south of the city, I moored my small wooden boat and felt a sense of relief, rather than the dread I expected, as I left the waters behind and stepped over the threshold into that government office, back on dry land.

  ‘Welcome back, Agnes,’ Jerry said on my entrance, greeting me with a melancholy smile he had clearly practiced, hoping it was appropriate.

  PLAY

  ‘I want to know more.’

  ‘More?’

  ‘About what they did to people, the tricks they played. About the way they got to people – hurt them, got them to confess!’

  A gruff chuckle.

  ‘What makes you think that kind of thing happened?’

  ‘You saying it didn’t?’

  A pause.

  ‘They could get into your mind. Work their way inside your head and make you think something was happening, when it wasn’t. When it couldn’t possibly.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Exactly that. They had ways – hypnosis, drugs and other kinds of tricks – that fooled you into believing certain things. Deception that gained your trust – made you talk. Made you confess things.’

  ‘But what did they make you think?’

  ‘The impossible. They’d make you think the impossible.’

  ‘But like what?’

  ‘Like someone had come back from the dead – someone you loved. And then they’d get you to confess all to a ghost that only existed in your altered state of mind.’

  PAUSE

  10. Tristan

  After the burning of the government laboratory and the faceless threat of the video posted to Jessie’s house in the days that followed, Monty Harrison appeared to keep his distance. I had watched that security tape over and over at Old Merlin’s, that grainy image of us raiding the place, taken from a distance. If it had come from Monty, he certainly wasn’t owning up to it that easily. I had expected a follow up visit – or at least another short film through the post, maybe one that showed us further along. Maybe even one of us starting the fire.

  ‘I hate this waiting, not knowing,’ I confessed to Jessie one morning as we prepared to leave his house. He had sourced us some new legitimate employment, as he was calling it.

  ‘No point in you fretting about it, Tris. Monty will come forward when Monty is ready. And if there are any rules to his games, o
nly he knows what they are.’

  ‘But what if he-?’

  ‘What if he whats? Nothing you can do. You can always leave town, take Agnes with you.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘No, you can’t – but equally you can’t predict what Monty may or may not do – it’s just wasted energy. And now we’ve got us a new job, I could do with you concentrating that energy elsewhere.’

  He was right. Whilst my worrying wasn’t needless and fear of being in Monty’s bad books justified, it was a wasted exercise. Nothing would be gained.

  ‘So, this kosher job you’ve got us – can I have the details now?’

  Jessie split his face open with an ocean wide grin.

  ‘It’s your perfect location,’ he said, stepping into his protective gear.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I responded, suddenly suspicious.

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he added, zipping up.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Nah, and no handcuffs or blindfolds, either.’

  Another pacific grin.

  ‘Then what’s the catch?’

  The building itself was not the issue. In fact, its architecture, its stubbornness to resist the decaying rinse of the flooding was something to admire. It was sturdy, an ox of a building, standing strong against the constant wash of corruption that lapped around its foundations. And it wasn’t the idea of faith I objected to, either. I understood its value, felt the hope it had to offer, how it could be the one thing that took you from day to day. I got that, and wasn’t going to deny anybody that particular desire. I understood what it was to find yourself with nothing to keep you going forward; no, I understood its true value, without a doubt.

  But it was the shallow hypocrisy I despised. Behind the dense veil of sympathetic smiling, happy clapping, good deeds and promise of unearthly rewards, there was a truer face with narrowed eyes, a turned-up nose and a persisting blush of disapproval.

  ‘Okay, so it’s not your thing,’ Jessie stated, as the speedboat took us north-east in the direction of St Mary’s. ‘But it’s good money and Esther will be pleased.’ He paused, considered something and shook his head, a hint of exasperation in his next question. ‘Is that it? Is Esther’s connection the problem? Look I know-.’