Tourmaline

by James Brogden

  ‘Not bad,’ Ennias conceded.

  ‘For someone without any wacky otherworldly powers, you mean?’ he grunted. He shook his head. ‘This makes no sense, Ennias. How have we not been seen yet? I thought these people were supposed to be some kind of all-seeing, all-knowing super-conspiracy. How have we even got to within a mile of this place? And how are we supposed to get Vessa out?’

  Ennias sat down next to him and lit a cigarette. Waves hissed on the shingle just beyond their toes.

  ‘We can do this because everything about the Park is designed to stop the inmates getting out, rather than intruders getting in. Scary signs, men in authority, and the fear of actual plummety death will do that for most people. Trust me, it was nowhere near this easy escaping. Want to see the scars?’

  ‘I’ll pass, thanks.’

  They sat in silence for a while, getting their breath back. Presently, Ennias stubbed out the cigarette butt on a stone and settled back against the cliff face, gathering his coat closely about himself. ‘Right, we wait until dark, when the…’

  And the thing which had been watching them from the water struck.

  It was like one of those nature documentaries filmed in excruciating slow-motion: an orca launches itself from the shallows to snap up an unwary sealion. But there was no comfortable slo-mo for Steve, and the thing that grabbed Ennias would have given a killer whale nightmares. Its human front half was pale, armless, and diseased-looking, with cat-slitted eyes and a mouthful of finger-length fangs pointing in every direction; its rear half was a muscular tail bristling with spines and striped like a tiger. It seized Ennias mid-calf and was dragging him into the water before either man could do so much as cry out.

  This time Steve didn’t run.

  The only weapons to hand were the rocks around him, so he picked up the nearest and splashed in after the struggling figures, clubbing at the tigerfish-man’s head where it was locked around Ennias’ leg. The creature lashed back with its tail, sweeping his legs out from beneath him and dumping him into the freezing water, which was already clouded red. Ennias’ screams bounced back from the cliff-face, redoubling the sounds of his agony. Steve lurched out, spluttering, found one of Ennias’ flailing hands, grabbed it, held, and pulled. The man was choking more than screaming now, as the creature hauled him in a series of vicious tugs. But Ennias’ hands were slippery, and Steve couldn’t get any purchase with his scrabbling heels on the shingle which just slid away from underneath him.

  He was being dragged in too. How could that thing be so strong?

  With a final, savage yank, the creature ripped Ennias free from Steve’s grip, and the last Steve saw was his pale, outstretched fingers disappearing into the black-green gloom.

  For moment all he could do was stare at the marks in the sand, trembling. They were all that was left of Ennias – that, and the slim black shape of his phone lying on a stone. He picked it up. The screen was smashed and it wouldn’t switch on, so he put it away in his pocket. Just in case. Then – drenched, chilled, and exhausted – he tried to find somewhere to hide. There was no way that the sounds Ennias had been making could have gone unheard; there would be a response team on its way right now – and Christ alone knew what that would consist of. Given how close they were, he probably had less than two minutes, if that.

  Voices shouting, distantly above.

  Steve ran for the base of the cliff, but a cursory glance at it told him how laughable the idea of hiding was. It was reinforced at the bottom by several feet of solid concrete, above which the rock netting was a wide mesh of heavy-gauge wire, like oversized chain-link fencing, secured to the cliff face at regular intervals by thick bolts and cables. It provided ideal hand- and foot-holds, like one of those hazards on an army obstacle course, and he was able to make surprisingly quick progress up it. Still, by the time he heard the crunch of footsteps running along the shingle and the shout of voices below, he was less than halfway up.

  Three figures in fatigues, tactical vests and carrying squat and very lethal-looking submachine guns appeared, nosing around the area of the beach attack.

  He froze, flattening himself to the rock, willing the goons down there not to look up and praying that the angle of the cliff face above would obscure the sight of him from anyone looking down. It was a futile hope, and he knew it.

  All it took was one goon on top of the cliff shouting down to his mates, asking if they’d found anything, and for his mate to look up when replying: “Nah, there’s bugger all down he- oh Christ, he’s on the fucking netting!’, and Steve knew he was screwed.

  A surprised face leaned further out from above and looked down at him, accompanied by the business end of another gun. ‘Who d’you think you are?’ the face asked. ‘Fucking Spiderman?’

  3

  Maddox watched another prisoner transport van unload its shambling, dull-eyed cargo on the forecourt of the old Park Hotel, consulted his phone, and turned to Lilivet.

  ‘That’s Belmere Intensive Psychiatric Institution,’ he confirmed. ‘Eleven souls all told.’

  ‘Excellent,’ she beamed. ‘Get them under as quickly as you can.’

  ‘At this rate we’ll run out of rooms for them all in a few days, even if we treble the occupancy rates.’

  ‘Then we shall put them in the corridors, the kitchens, and the cellars, won’t we? And then the road outside, if necessary.’

  ‘Yes, my lady.’ Maddox felt sick. It wasn’t his own spinelessness in her presence, though that would have been bad enough on its own. There was something else, physically deep in his guts, a sick churning which had been there since Lilivet had fucked him. He wondered if this was what the onset of terminal cancer was like. ‘There is one other thing, however,’ he added nervously. ‘These transfers from acute psych wards all over the country. The Hegemony’s systems will register the anomaly soon; it’s what they do. Maybe we should…’

  ‘Don’t trouble me with petty bureaucratic concerns!’ she snapped. ‘We are changing entire worlds here, Maddox. By the time the Church has even the slightest clue of what is happening under their noses, our army will be too large for even them to stop.’ Turning on her heel, she strode back into what used to be the Ops Room to check on her prize. ‘Where is your precious Department now, Jowett?’ she continued to herself in bitter, gloating tones, apparently unaware that Maddox was still listening. He held back, trying not to attract further attention. ‘I will show you what it means to have an affinity with such things, you condescending bastard.’

  When she’d disappeared inside, he found Morris hovering at his elbow. ‘I really must speak with you, sir,’ he insisted. He’d been insisting for the last three days.

  ‘Come on, then,’ he sighed. ‘You’ve been moping around the place with a face longer than a suicidal giraffe’s. Out with it.’

  Morris’ head jerked around nervously, looking to see if they were being overheard. ‘Sir,’ he murmured, ‘with all due respect, what the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘See? That wasn’t so hard now, was it?’

  ‘You’ve given all-areas access to a being that every one of our wake-sensitives confirms is off the scale, and you’re letting her shift our assets around like she owns the place. Plus, we’ve had two significant breaches of the meniscus in as many weeks. Eyes are looking in our direction, sir.’

  ‘I know, Morris. I’ve tried telling her…’

  ‘You’ve tried telling her?!’ The look of actual fear in Morris’ eyes was enough to shut him up. Not fear of Lilivet, which would have been sensible; it was the kind of shock on the face of someone who’d just woken up lying next to a body, not knowing who they are, how they got there, or what killed them. Morris swallowed thickly. ‘Sir, walk with me?’

  Maddox allowed Morris to lead him by the elbow around the side of the building and to the rear lawn, which terminated abruptly in the eighty-foot drop to the ocean
. ‘Do I need to remind you about the scuttling charges, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course you don’t!’ he snapped, irritable now. The nausea in his guts was getting worse.

  Morris persisted, getting in his face. He hated people getting in his face. ‘Sir, if this gets kicked up to the attention of Regional, and they don’t like the way things look, it’s one button, no countdowns, and hello, bottom of the Channel. And I can tell you that from my perspective things do not look good.’

  ‘Well maybe what you need is a fresh perspective, then.’

  Morris’ puzzled frown was abruptly punctuated by a small dark hole in the middle of his forehead – and a rather larger, messier one in the back of his skull. Maddox put his gun away, watching Morris’ body tumble over the drop to disappear in the waves below. ‘Things looking up now, are they?’ he asked the corpse.

  On his way back inside he stopped by one of the staff toilets, untucked his shirt and examined his stomach in the mirror. Lilivet must have scratched him: there was a long red weal running down the middle of his belly from just below his sternum to just above his belt-line. It was red and itchy – probably infected. He was going to have to do something about that later. He pulled himself together and went to resume his place at her side.

  The hotel’s large dining room had long ago been retasked as the Park’s Operations Room and had more recently undergone another transformation – the cubicles, desks and workstations and had been ripped out and replaced with closely-packed rows of hospital beds. In each bed was a patient from one of the many institutions for the treatment of acute psychiatric illness which fell under the Hegemony’s influence, transferred here under Maddox’s orders, which – so far at least – had not been questioned. Not that his name had ever appeared on a single document or email. They were all entirely legitimate orders signed off by the middle managers in the appropriate National Health Service Primary Care Trusts, conducted perfectly properly under the terms of each patient’s Individual Care Plan. People like McBride who seemed to think that the Hegemony was a huge conspiracy of shadowy, cigarette-smoking men ruling the world from their underground bunkers by brainwashing politicians and dumping oestrogens in the water supply missed the point completely; enough control and surveillance already existed in the bureaucratic systems of the world to render such a super-cabal redundant, even downright obstructive. It was the same with closing Spaghetti Junction – that had been done by a coordinated exercise of relevant Anti-Terrorism procedures across multiple services all the way from MI5 down to British Waterways. Maddox’s role was nothing more than a glorified co-ordinator. In a real sense there was no Hegemony at all. Nobody was being kidnapped or coerced, and not a single law was being broken – until the patients were wheeled through the front doors of the Park, that was.

  Each was attached to an IV drip feeding them a cocktail of barbiturates designed to induce an artificial coma – the kind of procedure used when dealing with serious head trauma or some forms of neurosurgery, even though nothing of kind was happening here. A handful of nurses moved calmly between the beds, checking the banks of ventilators and EEG monitors which filled the room with mechanical sighs and beeps like a quiet chorus of electronic crickets.

  Hanging at the end of the room, presiding over all like an altarpiece, was the Watts painting, She Shall Be Called Woman. Two figures were seated and bound before it. In a wheelchair was strapped the vessel which housed both Vanessa Gail and Sophie Marchant – she was only partially doped, and her drooping eyelids flickered like slurred syllables before the painting. In a chair facing her, secured and gagged much more simply with duct-tape, was her lover, McBride.

  Lilivet pulled up a chair next to him and sat down. ‘I’m afraid that you and I might have got off on the wrong foot,’ she said. ‘I’ll admit, that was mostly my fault. I was a bit… exuberant.’ She gave a soft, apologetic laugh. ‘I know how this must look to your eyes; trust me, a few weeks ago I would have thought exactly the same thing. But every field agent knows that changeable circumstances demand a flexible methodology, and as I’m sure you’re aware, I’m a lot more flexible now.’ Her laugh, when it came again, was markedly less sane. ‘In any case, I don’t expect you to believe a single thing I say, especially when I say that I have no intention of harming you. You’re much more useful to me alive. And before you go ranting on bravely about how you’ll never help me, let me explain. This young lady here…’ She laid a hand gently on Vessa’s arm; she moaned and tried to twist away. ‘…is under a lot of stress. She needs comfort. Support. Strength. The reassurance of someone she cares about who believes in her. Without it, she can’t do what I need her to do. You don’t care about that, obviously, but you’re a decent man, and I know you’ll do the right thing by her, at least.’

  She turned to Vessa, continuing to stroke her arm.

  ‘Are you in there, witch-girl?’ she crooned. ‘Can you hear me? I hope so. I wanted to let you know that I’m sending you some more castaways to add to your collection. I’d dearly love to know whether or not the ones I’ve already sent have arrived; the most feeble minds are the quickest to cross over, but this isn’t an exact science, as I’m sure you can appreciate. Still, we’ll know when the Flats spread as far as the first island and my new army of Exiles starts waking up here, won’t we? I wonder, do you think I could send you enough souls to make the Flats cover the whole of my world? I could bring everybody here, and give them all the powers of gods! If in the end I cannot stop your people dreaming, I can give mine that, at least. What fun we’ll have then.’ She planted a kiss on the girl’s pallid forehead and stood.

  ‘Time to let you two get reacquainted, I think.’ One of her araka limbs tore off Steve’s gagging strip and she swept away, humming an old Oraillean lullaby.

  Chapter 28

  Newcomers

  1

  In the days following the destruction of the Spinner, there had been some heated debate about how to proceed. There wasn’t enough room in the Spinner’s dinghy for all of them, including the four surviving members of the ship’s crew and Buster. Sophie flatly refused to move on the grounds that she didn’t want to take her subornation zone any closer to human habitation. It crossed Bobby’s mind that now she was free of the araka there was nothing to stop her leaving this world for good, but that was her decision, and he’d never press her on it. As for himself, Allie had no intention of leaving and so neither did he; besides, whoever he’d been in the Realt meant nothing to him now. Runce also elected to stay, out of a sense of honour which forbade him abandoning anybody at sea, be they friend or enemy, and instead instructed the crew to take the dinghy back to Danae. With Seb using Allie’s little cracker compass to navigate, they left, promising to return with a rescue ship as soon as possible.

  At some point during the night following Jophiel’s departure, Lachlan disappeared. Despite the watch that Runce had posted, his blanket and belongings were found cold and abandoned in the morning. There was a brief and minor panic over whether the Spinner’s dinghy was still there, but the surviving Strays knew better. Lachlan hadn’t escaped. Quite the opposite: he’d chosen to wake up.

  Those that were left behind set about collecting together the largest pieces of Stray’s shattered platform, and they had not long finished lashing them together when the first of the newcomers arrived.

  There was a surge of water a dozen yards to one side, and a small raft shot edge first into the air, landing with a heavy slap on the surface. A figure clung to it, coughing.

  ‘Well he sure picked a sweet time to come visiting, didn’t he?’ commented Allie with heavy sarcasm. ‘And here’s us – we haven’t even aired the guest room.’

  ‘What’s this?’ demanded Runce sharply. ‘Where did he come from?’

  ‘The same place we all did,’ replied Bobby. ‘Come on, let’s go and collect the fellow.’

  ‘Why in Reason’s name would we want to do that? We know
nothing about him. He could be dangerous.’

  ‘Everybody’s dangerous here. He’ll be in good company. And you’re a guest too, remember that.’ Bobby tied a line about his waist and tossed the coil to Allie. He dove in but got only halfway to the new raft before its owner began yelling and waving his arms.

  ‘No!’ he screamed. ‘Keep away! Don’t you dare come near me!’

  Surprised, Bobby stopped and treaded water for a bit. ‘Steady there, old chap,’ he called. ‘We’re all friends here.’ He started swimming forwards again.

  ‘No!’ the newcomer screamed, even more shrilly than before. ‘I won’t let you take any more! No more! Never! I’ll kill myself first!’ He stood up and began gesticulating wildly, making his raft seesaw.

  ‘I know you’re confused, but there’s no need to…’ Bobby stopped again, this time because he couldn’t move forward; the rope had tightened around his waist. He looked back. Allie had taken in the slack, preventing him from going further.

  She shook her head. ‘Bobby, no. There’s something wrong with him. He scares me.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him is that he’s terrified because he’s got no idea where he is or how he got here.’ Memories of his own first days drifting alone were still close and painful.