by Tony Moyle
“I’ve seen some pretty weird goings-on over the last couple of months, so I can’t totally dismiss what you say out of hand, however unlikely it might sound. How can I be sure that John really is in there somewhere?” He flapped a wing around, pointing at different areas of Byron’s body.
“When we first met each other in Blackpool all of those years ago, when you convinced me to join your group, we used to go to a pub called Mallards. You used to order a pint of mild and smoke Gauloises cigarettes. You nicknamed me ‘high horse’ because of my tendency to check the legality of all of our actions, something you felt held us back. Does that convince you?”
“There are a few people who might know that, but tell me, you once bought me a pin badge that went on the left side of my black jacket. What did it say?”
“I never bought you a pin badge because the ones you had were totally stupid and completely unfunny. Plus I’m tight,” replied John without thought.
“My God, it is you. I didn’t even know that you were dead,” said Sandy. “What happened?”
John once again returned to the manner of his own death. The memories of that moment were still just uncoordinated fragments seeking some thread to bind them together. There again was the car bonnet crumpled into the postbox, followed by the figure of an old man peering through the broken car window. The mysterious young girl, hair as white and fair as a unicorn’s, that he’d swerved to avoid. He considered whether at the speed he had been travelling it was likely that the crash would have been fatal. He surely hadn’t been driving fast enough to have done that much damage? The smell of the fuel still swirled around an inextricable part of his memory. But how could the fuel tank have ruptured if he’d hit the postbox straight on? On reflection, he’d been so busy with the bigger questions of why, that most of these details had never occurred to him, let alone been answered.
“I think I died in a car crash, but I’m not quite sure how it came about,” John answered. “It can wait, we have no time for that now. We must act quickly.”
“Look, you told me what happened to Ian and what must happen to me, but why have you taken all this time telling me about it? Why haven’t you just killed me and uttered the same incantation you used on him?” asked Sandy, bravely facing the elephant in the room.
“There’s little point in saving the world, if what remains is not worth saving. I need to stop Emorfed. If you help me, I also believe I have found a way to get both of us out of our fate. I have been to Hell, Sandy. It’s an unimaginable place that doesn’t befit the descriptions given to it. I do not wish it on you. Will you help me, help us?”
“I will. What do you want me to do?”
“You need to do as Byron says,” replied John, smoothly returning to his host’s persona.
Byron explained his plan before they both left the cell, Sandy flying out as quietly as possible. Attached to one of his feet was a tiny camera that Byron had placed there before departing. Sandy flew deeper into the heart of the complex, following the tunnel to where Byron had described an exit by way of a disused air duct. Byron set off to find a guard.
“Who’s in charge here?”
“Sergeant Wallace, sir.”
“Okay, I want you to take these release papers to him as quickly as you can,” demanded Byron.
“Yes, sir.” The guard took the papers that Byron had just removed from his pocket and scanned them for the correct official signatures and seals.
“What would you have me do with Foster and Stokes when they are released?” asked the guard. “Should they be followed?”
“No. I promised Violet her freedom. You might suggest they go far away and find somewhere they can’t be detected. I hear Cornwall is nice this time of year.”
“It will be done. Forgive me, but I expected to see a different name on the papers.”
“Whose?” asked Byron.
“Your daughter’s.”
- CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX -
INTO THE SHADOWS
“Where is she?” John shouted, his rage bubbling through every limb of Byron’s body.
“She’s where we were told to put her, sir. She’s in cell number four hundred. In the hospital wing,” replied the guard.
“What’s wrong with her?” John demanded. “Speak quickly if you want to keep your job.”
“She’s recovering from some side effects, I believe,” replied the guard, “but Doctor Trent is responsible for that department. She’ll be able to give you an update.”
The guard moved out of striking distance, wary that the Prime Minister appeared to be holding him solely responsible for her condition.
“Side effects from what?” John bellowed, rising in stature.
“I wasn’t told, sir. It’s classified.”
John swivelled Byron’s not inconsiderable frame around and set off at a jogging pace. Off he went down the tunnel in the direction where he’d seen Sandy in cell three hundred and eight. How could this have happened? He’d been inhabiting Byron’s body for weeks, since before he had met Faith at Herb’s apartment. When did Byron give the order to have Faith interned here? Had it been premeditated? A compulsion driven by doubts over his daughter’s loyalty? Nothing to do with what had happened that night? How could he do this to his own flesh and blood?
By the time he’d reached the bottom of the long, dusty tunnel, drops of sweat dripping down Byron’s chubby face, his mind was no clearer on the situation. The end of the tunnel was blocked off with a strong, thick, wooden door with three large iron bars running from one side to the other. A small shutter had been positioned in the middle and a red cross on a white background had been shoddily papered onto one side. The sound of John’s fist bashing furiously on the door echoed around him. The shutter opened and a pair of brown eyes glared back at him.
“We’re not expecting anyone?” came a gruff, ugly female voice from inside. “Who is it?”
“It’s the Prime Minister.”
The eyes peered even more intensely up and down his body, piercing the gloom of the underground lights.
“No it isn’t,” came the response. “Where’s your visitor’s pass?”
“I don’t have one,” replied John cautiously, before adding more sternly, “I don’t need one.”
“Everyone needs a pass. These people might be extremely contagious and if you don’t have a pass then it means you haven’t signed the health and safety disclaimer,” croaked the jobsworth’s pair of eyes.
“Here’s my visitor’s pass,” he replied, holding up his Houses of Parliament security pass, “and if you don’t open this door right now, I will personally ensure that you will soon become an inmate here rather than an employee.”
John had never been a person particularly concerned with power. But he had to concede that sometimes it was quite useful. The choice to possess Byron had been a risky one. It was never going to be an inconspicuous role to play, but so far it was paying off. The only side effect was his sudden change in character, day by day he felt himself becoming more like Byron. Even though it was still John’s soul in control he’d never experienced anger like this in his whole life. In general he hated conflict but over the last few weeks it felt like his soul was trying to make up for lost time. Whether this had been Byron’s influence or a change in his own outlook, the verdict was still out.
The sound of three bolts opening and the slow creak of the door proved that John had got his point across adequately. The cells on the other side were no different from the ones that John had spent the day searching. The only significant differences, on this side of the wooden barrier, were the white coats worn by the guards and the sporadically placed medical instruments that cluttered the corridors, impatiently waiting a more permanent home.
“Where is Dr. Trent?” demanded John.
“I’ll go and get her,” replied the pair of eyes, who had mushroomed into a short, plump woman who nervously cowered somewhere below John’s knees.
As John waited restlessly for Trent to make a
n appearance he glanced amongst the cells, possessively seeking another glimpse of Faith’s addictive energy, the spark that had set his soul alight at their last meeting. His borrowed heart was running wild, torn between the urgency of his own desires and concern for her condition. Maybe subconsciously this opportunity had influenced his choice in picking Byron as his next host? Was the selfishness of his own soul leading him against his will, taking away any sense of control he had left?
“Can I help you?” came a softly spoken voice that glided through the air behind him, shaking him from his internal debate.
John was surprised to find that Dr. Trent was a woman, cementing the stereotypes that even dead people are capable of. Descending from a short, white lab coat, tanned legs wrapped in black, knee-high boots, she stood in an elegant, relaxed fashion more akin to a catwalk model than a scientist. When you spent your working life cooped up in a dark tunnel with infectious and dangerous individuals you’d be forgiven for being just a little bit edgy. Yet Dr. Trent appeared to revel in it, unfazed and unaffected by the claustrophobic unpleasantness.
“Sir, I can’t tell you what an honour it is to have you here. I never imagined that I would meet the man responsible for giving me the best job in the world,” she said, eyes as wide as saucers and swooning like a teenager meeting a film star. She played with her long, auburn hair and fidgeted awkwardly on the spot. “We don’t get to meet many dignitaries down here. To what do we owe this great pleasure?”
“I need to see Faith…my daughter,” John added, with a slight sense of the peculiar about it.
“Of course, Prime Minister…and can I add how brave it was of you to choose your own daughter to be the first person to enter this bold new world of ours. She’s still adjusting to the effects of Emorfed, but in general it has all gone as we expected. The limited testing that we managed to do at Tavistock made all the difference, I must say.”
“You’ve given her Emorfed. That’s not brave,” replied John cursing under his breath, “it’s callous and cruel. The whole programme is nothing short of a crime against humanity.”
“You may be having second thoughts now, but don’t forget this is science. It’s all about progress and you can’t stop progress.”
“Don’t count on it.”
“Prime Minister, it’s scientists’ job to break boundaries.”
“Dr. Trent, there are many things in science that were developed because it was possible rather than desirable. Humanity’s curiosity will almost certainly be its downfall. The atom bomb, chemical weapons, genetic engineering, cloning, all examples of science that can no longer be undone. I will not allow this monstrosity to be added to that list. Morality can’t be mixed in a test tube,” cursed John, almost as angry at science as he had previously been at religion.
Morality had never played a big part in Dr. Trent’s thought-processes. A follower rather than a leader, she used her superior intelligence and skill to push the boundaries of scientific know-how simply because someone had asked her. It never entered her head that it was possible to add the prefix ‘con’ in front of science in order to challenge the ethics of her experiments. That was the arena of politicians and lawyers. There was no reaction to John’s moral rant. She just continued along her rational viewpoint to which she had been manacled for as long as she’d owned a white coat.
“What you have done, Prime Minister, is remove the very worst of human nature with a single treatment that’s safe and quick. My only concern is that we have yet to perfect its replication. We have produced a few examples that are very close in chemical structure to Emorfed. But none of them seem to have the same effect on the frontal lobe,” she exclaimed. “We understand that you were given the substance. But we have no records as to by whom or which organisation. Do you have the original formulation?”
Given it? Well, this was new. Who had given it to Byron? When time was a less important commodity than it was now, he’d need to find out. What he knew for sure was this was a piece of good news. A finite supply with no process for duplication meant destroying the current batch would give the human race a fighting chance when he’d ‘moved on’.
“Are you saying there is a limited quantity of this stuff?”
“Yes, until we can replicate it. There appears to be a constituent part that, as far as we can make out, doesn’t really exist. It’s preposterous, of course, we just haven’t worked it out yet.”
Nothing was preposterous in her world, just unexplained. There was a computerised error message etched on the scientist’s face, unable to process the realisation that in a world governed by fact and certainty, this was a mystery. How would she react if he’d told her everything that he now knew? She’d probably combust like a silicon chip being provided with too much electrical charge.
“How much of the stuff is there?”
“The batch that has been sent out to Hemel Hempstead is almost the lot. The rest is just a small quantity of test samples that we are using for live experiments,” she replied.
John’s anger subsided for a moment. Hopefully if all went to plan with Sandy, that would be the end of it. Forever removed from the fingers of such reckless and morally suspect chemists.
“Let me take you to see Faith, and then you can see the success for yourself,” said Dr Trent, leading John towards her cell.
There was no security at the entrance of cell four hundred. The door was unlocked and had been left open against the outer bars. The interior was also much different from what John had seen before, more attune to the inside of a mid-priced hotel than a prison cell. Soft furnishings blended in against tasteless floral wallpaper. A TV in the corner of the room sat talking to itself, whilst the lights, of which there were many, were beating out brilliant tungsten-white light. There was a deep sense of warmth and hospitality awarded to this place. But it felt false as if a shroud had been placed around it to distract attention from reality.
In the middle of the cell, seemingly unaware of the concocted external stimulus, stood Faith. Immovable, her eyes were transfixed on a point in the distance, invisible to anyone else but her. The warmth and energy that had so stimulated John at their first meeting had been siphoned away. The scientists had decanted her spirit and replaced it with a grim and inanimate persona. Hair lay limply against a grey and lifeless face drained of colour, her once radiant smile grafted from her face and replaced by a vacant expression.
“What reaction have you had from her?” John asked, quietly.
“You don’t have to whisper, Dad, I can hear you,” replied Faith, lips barely moving but with a voice as strong as a megaphone. She clicked out the words like a ticker tape of computerised binary code, monotonal in delivery and as grey as her complexion. There was no other movement. Her eyes still pierced the wall and, if he didn’t know better, her sound could have come from any of the machines out in the hallway.
“See, she still recognises you. Your medicine has not damaged her. You have improved her,” commented Dr. Trent, disturbing his fixation on her patient. “She has memories that stretch back to childhood, just like anyone else. Unlike you and me, though, there is no emotion connected to those memories.”
“How can that be possible?” asked John.
“The memories she has described are very clear. Memories are stored in the grey matter of the brain but the emotions that bring those memories alive are connected to something much deeper. So deep, in fact, that modern medicine doesn’t understand it.”
“I think I might be able to shed some light on that,” said John under his breath.
“Other people can describe their feelings, yet Faith can voice no opinions about her memories. If you or I were to think of something from our past we might express the memory, or even show physical signs of that emotion. With Faith, there is nothing other than fact. She does not feel anger, she does not feel fear, and she does not feel desire.”
“As well as those frailties, you have also robbed her of happiness,” John responded disparagingly.
“I recall a similar defence was made by Nazi prison guards. It didn’t work for them and it won’t for you.”
“I do not fear progress, sir,” replied Dr. Trent as if she herself had been included in the Emorfed trials. Even though John knew he had not given the orders, he was responsible for not doing enough to stop them. Byron’s failures were his also.
“What have I done?”
“You have created a perfectly balanced human being,” replied Dr. Trent, sympathetically placing her hand on his shoulder.
“No. She was perfect, and you have removed the elements that made her unique. You have extracted her vibrancy…her colour…her character,” said John, tears welling in his eyes.
John moved closer to Faith, taking in every part of her appearance. It was hard to observe her without feeling like an art critic assiduously appraising a controversial still life painting. As he came closer he noticed her eyes were clouded with a dense mist.
“There is darkness here,” she droned.
“But it’s so light, is there something wrong with your eyes?”
“There is a shadow. A shadow of darkness around me. It creeps within me,” she replied, with no semblance of fear or worry in her voice. This was no more than a factual observation that required no opinion or explanation. Faith wiped a tear from Byron’s face. Her hand was clammy and cold as if all the heat that shone down on the room from the burning lights was being reflected from her back onto the walls.