by Tom Pollock
Never knowing why.
They called Gödel “Mr. Why,” and look what happened to him.
Sometimes courage is just knowing what you’re more afraid of.
“Do it,” I tell her.
“But, Pete.” Ingrid sounds utterly lost. “How will you even . . . Pete!”
But I’m already up, walking, rounding the corner. I stifle a ridiculous urge to whistle.
Just doing what I always do: walking up my street like I always do, passing the naked birch tree like I always have, hopping between the cracks in the pavement—I might fall through!
Already the white car seems to have doubled in size; soon it’s going to swallow me, swallow the world. Dark windows glower and I can feel the whole street bearing down on me, its pressure, its weight. Stop, Pete! My home might be hostile territory now, but I still know it well. As I pass the driveway of number sixteen, I gather the loose brick from the gatepost, crouching without breaking my stride. Christ, it’s cold. I toss the brick in my hand like a ball, as if I’ve come out to play in the street like all the kids I ever watched from my bedroom window but didn’t dare to approach.
The car is enormous now. Fear packs in around my heart and squeezes. Only twenty strides to go, twenty chances to change my mind. I can hear the crunch of my feet on the frosty pavement, crushing those chances away.
Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen . . .
Panic pinches my throat, forcing out breaths in little steam-engine puffs. Ingrid’s question echoes in my skull: Pete, how will you . . . ?
I think of Seamus, eyeball-to-eyeball with me, the terror on his face in the instant before Bel’s bullet exploded his head. I think of Dominic Rigby; he was tortured by Bel, but that look he gave me from that hospital bed, that look of abject fear; it was almost as if it were me who’d done that to him; my gaze he was desperate to break.
Fourteen, thirteen.
Bel hurt them; Bel killed them, but I scared them. I don’t know how, but I did. The fear came from me.
I step off the curb, and it feels like stepping off a platform in front of an oncoming train.
Ten, nine, eight, seven. I’m level with the back of the car. He must have seen me in his mirrors by now. Maybe he’s talking to snipers in the windows, maybe crosshairs are zeroing in on the nape of my neck. This is seventeen kinds of suicidal.
Every nerve ending inside me is screaming, Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!
Three . . . two . . .
“But the wolf is my sister,” I whisper aloud as I draw level with the driver’s door. “And the fear is my friend.”
One.
I swing the brick.
The window dissolves into glittering rain, shattering the silence. I glimpse a pair of startled eyes and plunge my arms through the gap, ripping my sleeves on the glass teeth that cling to the frame. My eyes are screwed up in fright, but I can just make out a man shape, grappling with his jacket, fumbling for something under his armpit. He’s got a gun. My blindly questing hands touch his hair, soaked with sweat. They slip off and I grab his ears, wrenching his skull round to face me.
Strong hands clamp onto my wrists. Acid boils up in my throat. Shit! He’s going to pull me off him; he’s going to shoot me. Bang bang, Petey. You’re dead. YOU’RE DEAD! He’s yanking down on my wrists so hard I think they’re going to break. I picture the bones splintering, severing arteries, my arms turning purple-black as I bleed out internally. He’s been to knuckle school, I’m a scrawny wimp, I’m not strong enough to hold on . . .
But you don’t need to be strong, Petey, you just need to make him weak.
I force my eyes open, force myself to look into his face. Heartbeats pass. The pressure on my arms slackens.
He’s staring back at me through the shattered window, his face bloodless. He tries to pull my arms down, but he’s as weak as a toddler, and it’s easy to resist. He’s trembling, his mouth opening and closing silently around stillborn protestations.
And there it is. I can feel it in him.
Panic. My panic.
I feel it in the way his scalp shivers in my palms, I can smell it in the sour sweat that soaks his hair, I hear it in his trembling breath. I have no idea how much time passes. It could be hours, it could be microseconds.
I feel a pang of sympathy. I know exactly where he is; I’ve been stranded in that mine shaft more times than I can count. I belt him across the back of the head with the brick. He slumps forward, his eyes glazed.
“Pete.” I turn, and Ingrid’s standing in the open doorway to the house, her eyes wide.
“What did you do to him?”
“I don’t know,” I reply. But I do know. I gave him my panic; I infected him with it, and it dawns on me slowly . . . like I always do.
I feel sick and guilty, but a part of me is giddy with the power of it, and an even deeper part is eyeing my bleeding forearms and wondering how I can do better next time.
You practice, Bel’s voice whispers to me.
Shut up.
Quickly Ingrid steps forward and opens the car door. She gropes under the slumped man’s armpits for his phone and his gun and checks his pulse.
“Hmm,” she muses. “He might wake up while we’re here. There’s some towrope in the boot. Grab it and tie him up, eh?”
While I obey, she slinks off and returns with a handful of dark cloth she shoves into the spy’s unresisting mouth. I bind it in with more rope. He stirs groggily. She hesitates, shaping to whack him with her forearm, but then thinks better of it, checking his breathing through his nose instead.
“Ingrid?” I feel I have to ask.
“Yes?”
“Are those my socks you’ve stuck in his mouth?”
“They were the first thing that came to hand,” she answers defensively.
“But . . . my feet sweat a lot.”
She shrugs and heads back up into the house.
“Sorry,” I whisper to the unconscious spy, “about the socks.” Dark blood glitters in his hair and on his neck. “And . . . everything.” I turn and scamper after Ingrid.
I catch up to her standing at the bottom of the stairs, her back to me. Long shadows cast by the streetlight stretch over the parquet floor towards her. My hand flicks automatically towards the light switch, and I jerk it back. All the doors off the hall are open, except for the one to the living room. There are dark fingerprints on the handle.
“Was there another agent?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“In the living room?”
“Yes.”
“Did you . . .” I take a step towards the door.
“Pete!” She still has her back to me. Her voice is harp-wire taut. “Don’t. Please. He’s . . . I had to . . .” She gulps air and then steadies herself. “I don’t want you to see him. I don’t want you to think of me like that.”
My fingers fall away from the doorknob. Instead I dive left into the laundry room, and root around under the washing machine until my fingers close on the ancient toolbox I know is there, and yank it out. Ingrid hovers beside me, silent as a moth.
“Basement,” I say. We clatter down the bare wooden steps to the door of Mum’s study, secured by its keypad lock.
“Do you know the combination?” Ingrid whispers.
“Nope.”
“Do you at least know how many digits it is?”
“Six, I think.”
“Christ, Pete!” she hisses. “That’s a million permutations!”
My old firm will be sending a lead-pipe team down here as soon as the watchers we just mugged don’t report in, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think we have time to brute-force it.”
“You’re wrong.” I root in the toolbox for a screwdriver and the lump hammer. I jam the screwdriver in between the door and the jamb about six inches down, then swing as hard as I can. The i
mpact judders through my hands, and I almost drop the damn thing, but I swing again, and again. At the fourth impact the wood splinters. At the fifth, the hinge rips itself free of the doorway; another half-dozen swings take care of the second hinge. My forearms feel like I’ve spent an hour clinging to a washing machine on a fast spin cycle, but a couple of kicks later and there’s a gap between the door and the jamb big enough to squeeze through.
“Jesus.” Ingrid’s staring wide-eyed.
“I mean there’s brute force and there’s brute force.”
It’s a pretty crap joke, but she starts to laugh anyway, and that sets me off, and our laughter fills up the narrow concrete cellar, chasing away my fear. It doesn’t last, though, and when the sound of it has faded, there’s nothing else for it.
Try to get in here, we’re done. You leave this house and you never, ever come back.
Even now that injunction weighs heavily. I creep forward with half steps.
Why, Mum? What didn’t you want me to see?
One by one, we squeeze through the gap.
The study’s exactly as I remember it: the rickety desk with the one wormy leg, nothing on it but a lamp and laptop; the white shelves, with their black notebooks packed in tightly, twenty to a shelf: rank after rank, like bats in a cave. Ingrid eyes them in dismay.
“We’ll never have time to search them all,” she says.
“We won’t have to.”
I feel the ghosts of my mother’s hands on my shoulders, yanking me around towards the desk, just when I was about to look . . . where?
Behind the door.
I turn to face back the way we came. More black notebooks sit snug to the doorframe, lobes of my mother’s outboard brain. Ingrid grabs one. I open another: a detailed sketch of an axon, scribbled notes on neurotransmitters; crossings-out and reiterations, an argument in the margins, in different-coloured inks but all in her cramped, scratchy hand. I replace the notebook and pull out another. A photo of some kind of sea worm is pasted onto the front cover, then on following pages, an MRI of its brain. Mum’s ringed various bits of the cortex. I see the words Distributed or local? and Prey response scrawled next to one, and an unexpected chill runs through me.
I put it back and take another; Ingrid’s already on her fifth. I look at her, and she shakes her head.
A choking feeling is settling in my chest and I don’t know if it’s disappointment or relief. I check my watch. We’ve been down here four and a quarter minutes already. How long before 57 reinforcements come charging down those steps?
“Not long enough,” Ingrid says, reading my thoughts. “If we want to run for it, we need to do it now, while there’s still time to put some space between us and this place.”
But if you do that, Pete, you won’t find out what set me off, will you?
Shut up, Bel. I need to think.
I squeeze the notebook back into place and stand back to look at the shelves again. There’s something off about them. Something my symmetry-seeking brain’s latched onto but that I can’t quite define. It’s like when you walk into an old house and it takes you a while to realise that all the wood and plaster has warped and there are no right angles left in the place.
“Pete?” Ingrid says again, the note of urgency in her voice stronger now. “We really need to—”
“Wait.” I stare at the perfectly straight volumes, all crammed in tight on their shelves, top to bottom, twenty to a . . .
Oh.
That’s it.
The books are jammed in tight, not a playing card’s width between them. And there are twenty on every row, except the bottom one. That shelf is no less tightly packed, but only sixteen spines face out.
I all but throw myself to the floor and claw the books away from the wall, and there, yes, there. It’s been cut on a curve from the top so it’s hard to see, but the left-hand wall of the bookshelf is considerably thicker than its twin on the right.
It takes me a fraction of a second with the Stanley knife from the toolbox to find the crack and lever the false side away.
Three notebooks sit flush against the brick wall. I remove them carefully, almost tenderly, like a priest with a sacred text, or a virologist with a deadly sample, and carry them to the desk. Their pages are yellow with age and stiff at the edges. Whatever’s in them was put there a long time ago.
We each take one. My fingers hesitate, just for a fraction of a second, on the cover of mine, and Ingrid says, “Pete.”
The catch in her voice stops me cold. I turn back to her. She’s holding up the notebook she took. Scrawled on the inside cover are two words.
Red Wolf.
I hold my breath, half afraid that if I exhale on the paper, all my answers will disintegrate into dust.
She turns the book back to face her and, as gently as if she were peeling a dressing back from a wound, she turns the page. She stares at it, but she doesn’t speak.
“Ingrid?” My throat tightens. “What does it say?”
“I don’t . . .” She shakes her head. “It just jumps in—I don’t understand it. It’s like it’s missing a chunk.”
Missing a chunk, I think. Like another, earlier notebook? Is that the one that Bel found?
“Read it to me.”
She licks her lips, hesitates, then obeys: “As noted earlier—see entry 31/1/95—preliminary data suggest that the rage response can be compounded via synaptic loop . . .”
Loop. A chill grips me.
“‘Increased adrenaline may yield enhancements in speed and strength—evidence is inconclusive—but the principle advantage is in the long-term commitment to violence.’”
In the back of my head, I hear Bel’s voice, the panting breath as she stood over Seamus’s blown-apart skull with the calm, focussed excitement of someone doing exactly what they were put on this earth for.
I practised. It’s all I’ve ever really wanted to do.
Ingrid turns a page. She hesitates.
“Pete, are you—?”
“Keep. Reading.” I bite the words off. She blanches and obeys.
“‘There are significant defence applications, obviously, military intelligence swarming like piranhas. I could finally buy that new washing machine!’”
For a second I feel utterly lost, swimming in darkness miles below the light. Mum made Bel.
Mum made Bel.
Bel’s voice whispers in my mind; the answer she gave when I asked her why.
She made me mad.
I can be pretty literal when I’m scared, but apparently not literal enough.
Why didn’t you tell me, Bel? But I already know the answer.
You wouldn’t have believed me, Pete.
I would. She’s my axiom. But would she have believed that I would have believed? Loops on loops. Even five days ago, before Ingrid dropped her own bombshell, I would have thought the idea insane. Not now. Now—overlaying her voice as she continues to read from the notebook—Ingrid’s advice from days ago, echoes back to me: You’re a mathematician Pete, a scientist. This is the scientific method; adjust your theory to fit the evidence. I’m here. I’m evidence. So adjust.
Bel was engineered this way.
A cold current of shock goes through me, but it’s fringed with something else, something warm, even comforting:
Relief.
It’s not her fault. After the hideous, lurching uncertainty of the past six days, the realisation is like solid ground under my feet again. Bel was engineered this way; it’s not her fault. Her brain chemistry was torqued so hard to feel rage that she couldn’t help herself.
I feel numb, distant. In front of me, Ingrid’s still reading, but I can barely hear her:
“‘. . . the most powerful primer for the kind of fury we’re looking for is fear, but requiring a super-soldier to be petrified the whole time is a bit of a d
esign flaw. The fear would need to be introduced from outside, transmitted by a counterpart who could be removed before deployment . . .’”
Jesus. I feel overwhelming pity for my sister. Bel, I mean, Christ. I can’t imagine how that would feel, to find out your own mother deliberately designed you with a neurological disord . . .
“Oh.”
Ingrid’s stopped reading. She sags, looking heartbroken for me, like she’s been let in on a cruel joke at my expense, and is waiting for me to catch up. Her gaze falls from my face to rest on the second notebook, the one still gripped in my hand.
It takes a second, but my brain catches up with my ears.
. . . counterpart . . .
Slowly, I lift the second book and open the cover. Two words are neatly inscribed on the first page:
White Rabbit.
Over the years, I’ve become a connoisseur of fear, but what I feel now is very different from the familiar frantic pawing of anxiety at my heart. Now I feel dread; cold and heavy and coffin-lid certain.
My fingers are numb, clumsy. They shake like they’re freezing. I try and try to turn the page, but the harder I try the harder they shake. I get paper cuts but keep fumbling. My muscles conspire against me. It’s like Bel’s wall. I can’t move; I can’t make myself look.
Ingrid eases the book from my grasp. I lift my eyes to hers, pleading.
“It’s okay, Pete,” she says. “I’ve got you.”
I press my back to the wall and close my eyes. I know she’s using the gentlest voice she can muster as she begins to read:
“‘In order for the subject to most effectively promote RW’s violent tendencies, WR must be able to both sustain and transmit significant quanta of fear. Maybe I can leverage the existing empathic machinery of the human body. We know that sweat excreted under stress contains pheromones that stimulate a fear response in mammals of the same species, and that anxious facial expressions elicit anxiety from those looking at them. If WR’s pheromones can be refined so that they “prime” surrounding subjects to respond more intensely to its expressions . . .’”