A CHILD MADE TO ORDER: gripping psychological suspense

by Piotr Ryczko

  It soon became apparent that Ronny wasn’t used to the level of indifference that was the norm for Norwegian police patrols. And these guys were no exception, as their nonchalance was already driving Ronny mad.

  “I should be inside there... helping her, you see?” Ronny was reaching a peak as he tried to explain his situation. But the chaotic nature of the recollection only managed to get him into even deeper trouble.

  “Inside where? And who is that she? Could you repeat that, sir?” One of the cops threw the usual line of questioning, in order to put even more stress on a balloon that was about to burst.

  “Pål! Tell them about the clinic. Viola. Aren’t they your buddies! Aren’t they?” Ronny demanded the very thing Pål couldn’t give him. At this moment, every word was another shovel in their grave.

  “Enough, sir! Calm down.” One of the cops stabbed at Ronny with his finger, emphasising the need for him to stay calm.

  “I am. Fucking. Calm.” He repeated the words to himself.

  Meanwhile, the other police officer was punching in their names on his tablet. And as the results drifted onto his screen, his face passed from evening boredom into keen interest.

  Pål hoped this had nothing to do with him, but his stomach twisted and churned.

  “Mister Skarbom. You were on the force. Suspended? A year ago?” the officer said, glancing up from his tablet. Pål knew these were only facts and what lay behind them was so much more precarious. And judging from the self-righteous smirk on the cop’s face, he had just connected the dots, the facts with what lay behind them – the word of mouth.

  But Pål knew better than to answer the question. If there was one thing he could still do in this mess, it was to keep his silence.

  “What’s going on, Pål?” Ronny’s rage was now re-channelled back at Pål.

  “Give me some answers, goddammit!” Ronny yelled, while he hurled himself at Pål. Before he could do any serious damage, the first cop rushed in between them, grabbed Ronny’s shirt, bent his arm, forced him to his knees, then punched him in the kneecap, grinding Ronny’s jaw into the concrete.

  “That’s enough, sir. Calm down!” he whispered into Ronny’s ear with an assuring tone. And this time, Ronny didn’t think of further resistance.

  The second cop took a look inside Pål’s car. Immediately, he was struck by the sight of the app recording on the laptop, property of police HQ at Grønlandsleiret.

  “Sir, would you care to explain this? Police property? And your suspension?” He spelled out the words one by one with an overbearing clarity.

  “Actually... it’s… fuzzy?” were the first words uttered by Pål since the two cops arrived. For some reason, which was unknown, maybe even to Pål, he phrased them as a question. Whether it was because he wanted to initiate a dialogue, or simply that he wanted confirmation that his ludicrous question would be sufficient at this moment, the two cops responded with a quick nod to themselves.

  The rest flashed away with clinical precision. Before Ronny and Pål could blink, they were already in handcuffs, and being pushed towards the police vehicle.

  Chapter 19

  Sunday, 14th February 2016

  Morning

  A wall of shimmering light barraged her senses. Her breath stuck somewhere in her throat, she gulped for even more air. Was this what it felt like when she was born? A crushing, involuntary passage. The light burning away at her corneas, and the air pummelling for the first time at her throat.

  But there was something else. Not a sensation, but a feeling accompanied by a realisation.

  She was back, and immediately she felt an inner sigh pass through her mind and cascade down her body. A realisation flashed through her mind. She knew what lay hidden behind that sigh.

  Disappointment.

  Regret that she had made it back. However much her animal instinct of simple survival was still intact, she felt less strength to bear another round of this punishment called the world.

  As the light gradually receded, so did the smothering grip on her mind. Soon, her eyes took in a sparse room in the clinic, half of it separated by opaque drapes. A woman sat on the bed. Beside her rested a laptop. Going by her apron, she was one of the patients. As Viola laid eyes on her, she radiated back with unequivocal enthusiasm. The woman may have been in her early thirties, but the iridescent glow she had about her could easily shave off ten years.

  But suddenly Viola’s throat tightened, and she began to cough violently.

  “Easy, Viola, easy. Those drugs mess with your head, huh? You wanna talk about it? By the way, I am Ingrid.” She clapped Viola on the back and whispered softly to her, as if anything louder would hurt Viola’s senses.

  But Viola was irritated. She had way too many questions, far too few answers, and even less time. She was certainly not prepared to share her anaesthetic nightmares.

  “Where am I? Who are you?” Viola rasped at Ingrid.

  “Ingrid, silly. The one who placed the video on Marianne’s blog. Don’t you recognise me?” Ingrid announced, unperturbed by Viola’s harsh tone.

  Viola just shook her head in denial. She wasn’t going to say it outright, but this woman was lying to her.

  “Don’t you remember me silly?” She twisted her laptop around and pointed at the browser, which was loaded up with Marianne’s blog.

  She pressed play, and the video played pretty much the same as the last time Viola had seen it.

  Viola squeezed her eyes even closer to the screen, looking for any clues that might give away this scam. But she couldn’t find a single detail.

  Her eyes searched the room. For the first time since she derailed her life into this unknown territory, she felt a pang of doubt creeping in. Had Marianne been the woman she had seen in that clip? Or was it some twisted subconscious desire that had manifested itself? Had her incessant need to find the blogger warped her senses, forcing her to believe in something that wasn’t there?

  “What for? I mean, why did you place the video there in the first place? I don’t get it,” she prodded Ingrid.

  “Things got a little out of hand, didn’t they?” She chuckled at the very thought.

  “Those messages. They weren’t for you. They were for her. For Marianne. Don’t you see? Do you have any idea how much I would give to know what happened to her? I was trying to contact her. I’ve got what she has. You know, mitochondrial disease. I wanted to help her. Let her know about this place.” Ingrid pointed to her perfectly healthy kid on the video and let the words sink in. Viola was jolted, her mind trying to adjust to what she had just heard.

  Had she been so way off about Marianne? Was Ingrid telling the truth about her miracle? And did she hear the woman right? Mito-d kid?

  “And this thing they did with me. Drugged. Stripped. That’s like normal medical procedure at a medical institution?” Viola spat out, further resisting Ingrid’s story.

  “Ohh... Sorry about that. But they did a background check on you. Then they discovered the recent blog comment I made on Marianne’s page. Magda must have connected the dots.”

  Then Viola instinctively checked if she was still wearing the necklace with the mike.

  She gasped out when she realised it was gone.

  She whipped her head around, and heard a rustle behind the drapes. Someone was behind them, eavesdropping on their conversation from the very beginning. She grabbed at the bed railings, faltered out of the bed, then ripped away the curtain.

  She had no illusions about what kind of people these were. If she got in the way of their agenda, they would hurt her. But as the curtain fell to the side, Viola laid her eyes on Magda, reclined casually in one of the chairs.

  Except that the woman wasn’t alone. She was preoccupied with a small boy draped across her chest. An angel slumbering. Magda cast a comforting glance at Viola, while she was stroking him to sleep.

  “Want to say hi to Ingrid’s boy?” she whispered so as not to wake up the kid.

  Viola’s mind froze, her det
ermination crushed at the sight.

  Right in front of her was the boy she had seen in the video. The same boy she had believed to be Marianne’s.

  Chapter 20

  Noon

  Viola sat inside a small playground that was harmoniously carved into the clinic’s interior. She had not noticed a play area outside while entering. Or anything else that would suggest the presence of children.

  But now, as she glimpsed this artificially arranged play field, she realised how far the people in charge had gone to make sure they did not call attention to themselves. Everything from sandboxes to swings had been installed inside the clinic’s four walls.

  As Viola looked closer, she could see that the equipment was barely used. Were Ingrid’s kids the only ones here? Another peculiar thing was that the playground had been created for children up to four, maybe even five years old. Viola thought this was a rather strange thing to do. After all, this was a fertility clinic, dealing with new-borns only. Did the kids and their mothers stay here for longer, and if they did, then for how long, and why?

  Viola cast an eye at Ingrid’s kid. However unsure she was about Ingrid, the woman’s story and her own recollection of it, one thing was certain. Ingrid was now playing with her perfectly healthy kid, claiming she had done the impossible. She had borne a healthy boy, despite her mitochondrial disease. Everything inside Viola began to act up again, as she realised she didn’t know where the truth ended and the lies began.

  Viola’s thoughts were interrupted by Magda, who approached her. She searched Magda’s face for anything below the surface. After all, Viola was in possession of some crucial information about this place. An inside look into a well-kept secret.

  Viola was also a journalist, and this wasn’t just some story. This was earth-shaking news. And that was just one aspect of it. The other one, which was just as obvious, was the legal status of this whole endeavour. What would be the official consequences for this woman and for her kids, if this whole matter got out of hand? Into the media and the judicial system.

  “Sorry for scaring you like this. With your background, we had no real choice.” Magda returned the necklace to Viola’s hands.

  Viola peeked inside it, and her suspicion was confirmed: the insides were missing the microphone. She cast a glance up at Magda, demanding an explanation.

  “Whatever you might think about us, it was done for his safety,” Magda pointed to Ingrid’s kid.

  “Feed the bullshit to them.” Viola pointed at the kid and Ingrid.

  “Calm down, Miss Voss.”

  “No. At what costs are they alive? Have you given any thought whatsoever as to the consequences?” she shot back at the doctor.

  “At this moment, not a single country in the world has made CRISPR gene editing legal. Well, except China, who has admitted to have performed the first tests. Despite this, this boy’s embryo DNA was subjected to a CRISPR modification, directly modifying the nuclear DNA.”

  “Drop the tech facts. What interests me are people. What do you say to this boy when he grows up? I mean, how do you sell this bullshit to this Ingrid? Because she and her boy will have to live with this for the rest of their lives.”

  “People? Is that what you want to talk about?” Magda pointed towards one of Ingrid’s boys.

  “Rune would have been born autistic, and over the course of two years would have degraded to an irreversible point. At the age of three, his lungs would have collapsed. He would die a suffocating death,” Magda voiced her opinion, then nodded towards the other kid.

  And just as Viola fell silent, Magda caught a peek at her watch. As if on cue, a stream of kids burst into the playground, and proceeded to surround Viola and Magda with boundless laughter.

  Right behind them, several women followed. The women had all their attention on the children, obviously watchful mothers, worried about the safety of their young ones.

  Magda proceeded to point at the boys and girls who had just appeared.

  “That’s Arild. And he wouldn’t have made it past the fifteenth week of his mother’s pregnancy. By then his embryo would have to have been removed and discarded because it would be deemed life-threatening to his mother. And that’s Line. Through our gene therapy treatment, she avoided a severe immune deficiency that strikes new-borns and leaves them with almost no defence against viruses, bacteria, or fungal infections. The “bubble boy disease.” This time, when Magda finished, it was devoid of any showmanship.

  Viola felt at a loss at these facts and what lay behind them. How could she dispute the very essence of her life’s struggle?

  “You really think that if I had listened to people like you, any of these kids would be alive today?” Magda said.

  * * *

  Ingrid and Viola stood in the middle of the circle, surrounded by the rest of the spirited and vibrant kids. It took only a short introduction from Ingrid, before the women launched into all sorts of jokes with Viola.

  “You think these are normal?” Katrine said in reference to the children, with a playful smirk crossing her face. “Well, these turned out... okayish. But you should see the rest of them.”

  “The rest?” questioned Viola, and although she sensed some kind of pun arriving, she certainly didn’t want to spoil the fun for the rest of them. And she was richly rewarded with all around snickering for feigning her ignorance.

  “Yeah. The ones with twelve fingers and two heads.” Katrine fired off the punchline and launched every one of them into a howling laughter. And when Viola joined in on the giggling, it was not because it was funny, but rather because she connected. An immediate warmth and trustful atmosphere radiated from them.

  There was nothing feigned or artificial here, as they cracked terrible jokes, and spoke endlessly about the everyday stuff. The kind that, for most, led to boredom, but for them was an epiphany, simply because it was about their kids.

  Despite all this emotional sharing, something less tangible kept bothering Viola. A strange undercurrent, maybe her sixth sense calling out to her. The problem was that she couldn’t pinpoint where this was coming from. But her attention was constantly being drawn towards some glass door at the end of the kindergarten. Was someone watching her?

  But then Viola’s attention was drawn back to the women and their stories.

  She learned about the delicate twenty-five-year-old Rene, who had come to the clinic from one of the northern most parts of Norway, the snow-covered, tiny town of Kirkenes. With a population barely reaching eight thousand, this woman had gone through hell, as the ultra-conservative orthodox population ostracised her when she decided to take her chance at IVF procedures.

  Then there was Katrine from Bergen. The woman certainly raised more questions than Viola was prepared to answer. Usually, it didn’t take Viola more than a few glances to profile anyone she met. But everything about Katrine screamed contradiction. The woman was, after all, in her sixties. Viola didn’t want to pry into her story, she looked like a woman who cherished her privacy.

  But still, Viola observed as Katrine shared an intimate bond with the toddler she had draped around her chest. And the way they eyed each other was too intense and dependent on each other for Katrine to be a casual nanny. So, she had to be family. Probably a grandmother.

  But why did this grandmother come all the way from Bergen? And most of all, where was the mother of that child? During the two-hour talk, no one mentioned a word about her. So, when Viola finally voiced her question, everyone shot her weird glances, followed by an edgy silence, then finally interrupted by everyone exploding in laughter.

  Viola couldn’t grasp what the others found so hilarious, so she decided to just let the matter be.

  But then, her train of thought was interrupted again, this time by a subtle flash coming from a remote corner of the playground. The unease she had felt from the very beginning was confirmed. Was that a flash from a photo camera? Or was it her mind playing tricks on her due to that blasted Remifentanil?

  She fe
lt the dubiety creeping along her spine again. It whispered to her that there was no Marianne here, only these happy women fulfilling their dream. Whispered to her she had been wrong about all of this, she had lied to her partner based on some insane notion, then she had betrayed the trust of everyone at work.

  And, finally, she had deceived herself.

  Chapter 21

  Late Evening

  Her fingers refused to obey her. They were bent out of shape. She hit them. Not just once, but repeatedly. Still, they crumpled away and prevented her from packing her bag and getting as far away from the clinic as possible.

  Before she got to her room, she had stood huddled away in a corner of the kindergarten. She had watched the kids playing. But she knew better than to approach them. She had kept them at a safe distance.

  She had wanted to flee, repeatedly, but the sight of them was the memory of a dope addict’s first hit. Whispering to her, pervading her with thoughts the way only a drug could do. She had imagined their days. Careless, easy, filled with play and genuine laughter. It had made her body quiver out of control. And she had realised that there was no rehab for what she needed.

  When she had gazed into the eyes of those kids, a voice in her had appeared. The same voice that had drowned her in longing. And when she felt that wash over her, suddenly the women’s desperation wasn’t something frightening. Nor even remote. Far from it.

  It had the same unpredictable impulse that had driven her to have Markus, despite all the maddening odds. She knew exactly how these women felt. And when she watched their eyes connect with their little marvels, she realised they didn’t think in terms of a possible future, one filled with pain, disappointment, or even death.

  These women grasped at all the happiness they could get, in the here and now. This present was more than enough for them.

  All of a sudden, she realised she couldn’t stand being in the vicinity of these small creatures and their perfect lives. Not with this unabated need smothering away in her soul. It was enough that she had bombed her career and obliterated Ronny’s trust.