They were soon devouring plates of food. Simon was ploughing through six hefty meatballs and thinking he could eat another three servings. It came as no surprise that Crispijn’s appetite was huge. At the same time he was staring at the buildings around them and trying to ignore a feeling of discomfort. That itching had started up again and had spread to his legs, lower back, and torso. Crispijn was allergic to the overalls most likely. As soon as he was able to, he’d change his clothes.
A scream erupted. The group dropped their forks in panic. Ten metres away stood a modest playground, with three swings, a teeter totter, and a spiral slide. Beside the slide a man was standing over a boy. He was shaking the kid’s arm and yelling in anger. The boy was tearful and very scared. He was maybe six years old.
“What’s going on?” Simon asked.
“Never mind,” Earl answered. “It’s none of our business.”
The man hit the boy a couple of times. Slap! Slap! Slap! The boy was shrieking.
“Now it is,” Simon growled, rising to his feet.
When the man saw him approach, he backed off quickly and said something in Dutch. Simon stood between him and the boy. He heard Emma call to him, “Is this a good idea?” As the man kept blathering, Simon turned to the boy and stroked his arm, to assure him he was there to help. That’s when he noticed the boy’s skull was scarred, his eyes were feverish, and his arms were scabby. What…? The kid had suddenly grabbed his wrist. He was insanely strong and started wrestling Simon.
“So it is you,” the boy spoke with a cackle. His voice was high-pitched, but contained something else … a note of aggression. By then the man had joined in and knocked Simon to his knees. The boy jumped on Simon and was starting to choke him. For all Crispijn’s strength, his vadh was growing weaker. Simon’s sight was dimming and the background sounds were fading, the passing cars, Emma’s screams, the boy’s crazy giggles. In a panic, Simon realized Crispijn was fainting.
A zssst ripped the air — it sounded like a bee whizzing by. The boy’s grip slackened. A second zssst sounded, as if the air was catching fire, and the man fell back a couple of metres. Shaking his head to clear his senses, Simon staggered to his feet. The boy lunged forward again but a third zssst stopped him.
“Let’s go,” Earl said, leading Simon away. He was holding a rod that was forked at its tip. Simon wanted to ask what it was, but Earl yanked him aside.
The boy was limping toward them again. Zssst. Earl zapped his ribs and knocked him clean off his feet. The kid hit the slide and didn’t rise this time.
“One zap usually does it,” he mused. “Especially on children.”
“You didn’t kill them?” Simon asked, as they were off and running.
“This is a cattle prod,” Earl said. “They’ve been stunned, nothing more. But we have to get away from here and … you can drive, can’t you?”
“I don’t have a licence but yeah …”
“Climb into the driver’s seat and let’s get going!” He handed him the car keys.
The women were in the car already, white with tension. Simon jumped behind the wheel and thrust the key in the ignition. He started the engine and pulled into the lane. He was going to say he wasn’t permitted to drive because his father thought he was too distracted, but he grasped that his lack of attention had been a heightened state of awareness all along. He could drive — masterfully at that. Veering onto the main road, he wondered why Earl had given him the wheel.
“I knew it!” Earl said, fumbling in his knapsack. A moment later he’d extracted a gun.
“Where did that come from?” Emma cried.
“Relax. It’s just an air pistol. I keep it around for pest control. Although this won’t be easy. Keep it steady if you can,” he advised Simon.
Earl rolled his window down and leaned his head out. In the rear-view mirror, Simon spotted his target: two pigeons were flying directly behind them. The bolkhs had left the man and child and hijacked the pigeons to track their quarry. Within minutes the group would have a flock to deal with, then cats, dogs, and humans as well.
Simon heard a soft thud.
“That’s one down,” Earl murmured, with a note of triumph.
Simon saw a pigeon fall to the road. He heard a metallic clack as his uncle reloaded. He pictured the bird’s kaba, the shock to its system, and its spasms as the pellet had ripped it apart. What a pity. What a brutal thing it was that one kaba’s survival meant the death of another.
“Damn it!” Earl cursed, firing again but missing by a hair. There was another clack as he inserted a third pellet.
Simon glanced ahead. They were coming to a stadium where a crowd had gathered. If they spotted Earl’s gun they might get the wrong impression — they might call the cops and that could prove disastrous. For his part, Earl was aware of the crowd but it didn’t seem to faze him. Concentrating hard, he aimed the pistol.
“Got it!” he cried, with a note of triumph. “Pull into the stadium — there’s an entrance coming up. There. Now go to the underground parking lot — do you see the sign? Good. Nice driving by the way.”
A minute later they were parked in the garage. Earl ordered everyone out of the car. With his knapsack in hand, he ducked into the shadows. The others waited in silence. This underground lot had a menacing feel. The cars seemed to be looking them over, as if the bolkhs had taken control of them too. The darkness was like a cloud of poison gas. Simon wasn’t the only one spooked. Jenny was biting her nails.
A horn sounded suddenly, causing them to jump. Rounding a corner, Earl stopped before them, at the wheel of a dark-green Fiat sedan. He signalled them to take a seat. As soon as they were in he was off and rolling.
They drove a distance without anyone speaking. Simon was wondering about the struggle they faced. Was it worth it? Really? Over the last eight hours they’d taken over a sick man, gambled at cards with an unfair advantage, zapped two people (one of them a child), shot two pigeons, and stolen a car. Were these actions truly justified? How far could they go to ensure their own safety?
Earl caught his eye. His glance said everything. They had nothing to be sorry for. If pushed, he was prepared to go a lot farther.
He drove aggressively. Leaving Holland behind, they crossed into Belgium and sped toward the Antwerp region. Earl used his skills again and swapped the Fiat for a blue Volkswagen. By then the sun was on the horizon and they were grateful for the deepening shadows. They would be much harder to track in the dark, especially if they stuck to the highway.
Earl pushed on into the heart of the night. He went by Antwerp, Brussels, Mons, and a huge tract of farmland. They crossed into France and passed a dozen towns where battles had been fought during the First World War, involving the deaths of thousands — millions. This landscape hardly cheered them up.
Just as exhaustion was creeping in they reached the outskirts of a place called Compiègne, where, after navigating a maze of roads, they pulled into a lane that led to a farmhouse. Earl had rented this place for a week and laid-in a generous store of supplies, food, blankets, tools, and the like.
“That’s better,” Emma sighed, collapsing on a mattress.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” her brother warned. “We should be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.”
“Why? How long do you think we’re going to wander?”
“How long?” Earl laughed, with genuine amusement. “We’ll be wandering like this for the rest of our lives!”
Chapter Fifteen
“It's amazing, isn’t it? Now you know why it’s called the City of Light.”
“I never thought a city could be so grand.”
“Look all you want. But keep an eye out for Michel. He said he’d be wearing a dark-blue blazer.”
Simon and Earl were in the heart of Paris. They were seated on a stone bench in the Jardin des Plantes, not far from the Natural History Museum. In the distance they could hear the muted blast of horns as a stream of cars navigated the city’s Left Bank. By
looking north, above some trees, Simon could see the spire of Notre Dame Cathedral.
They’d risen before sunrise. After a hasty breakfast and a chat with the girls they’d climbed into the car. The plan was to drive to the city centre where they would meet a guy who could tell them what Tarhlo was up to. Earl hated leaving the girls behind, but he figured it was safer this way. Paris is full of drunks and addicts, any one of whom could be recruited by Tarhlo. If he and Simon were trapped by these hemindhs, the girls would still be free of their clutches. They’d been told to call a cab and leave the farmhouse if the men weren’t back by eight that evening.
Earl had also given Emma a cellphone. It was new and linked to the phone in his pocket. But she was to use it only in a moment of crisis. “A moment of crisis,” he reminded her sternly.
Just before Simon had entered the car, Jenny had asked him to do something strange. “Jump inside me,” she’d prompted him. “You’ll bounce right off but I have my reasons.” While her request was odd, Simon had complied and leapt at her a couple of times. On the third attempt he’d squeezed a good way in, to the point where he’d been able to glimpse her kaba, only to be ejected with near painful violence. Jenny had been satisfied. When pressed to explain she said, “You’ll remember me if I leave any clues behind.”
The drive to Paris had been uneventful. Simon had asked if they could buy him some clothes; his skin still itched and was driving him crazy. If he could swap his overalls for something else perhaps the itch would go away. Earl had promised to visit a store in the city.
“So where is he?” Earl fretted, even though it wasn’t yet noon. While his uncle had great qualities, patience wasn’t one of them.
“How did you meet this guy?” Simon asked, squirming on the park bench. The itch was super irritating.
“We met in Vienna. He seemed normal enough but I knew he was a vrindh. Not only that, it turned out he was married to my wife’s first cousin. Like me, he was forced to leave everything behind. We exchanged cell numbers and have been in touch ever since. The last time we spoke was two weeks ago — he said he’d discovered something huge. That’s why I think he can answer your questions.”
“Haarlem, Paris, and now Vienna. Have you really travelled everywhere in Europe?”
“I’ve been moving about for seventeen years, to avoid being nabbed by Tarhlo and his goons. I’ve been all over.”
“Why is Tarhlo interested in you?”
“You still don’t know?”
Some bells started ringing, startling Earl. He jumped and assumed a combat position. Realizing they were sounding the noon hour, he smiled and relaxed. Simon listened closely. While he hated music, these chimes were almost charming and distracted him from his dreadful itching. They really had to stop off for a new set of clothes!
“It’s because of me,” Earl said, sitting when the bells had stopped, “that Terry Kalkin pursued my sister — Terry is Tarhlo, as you probably know. Years ago I met a woman named Dolly. We got married and had a child.”
“Jenny.”
“Yeah. Well, two years later Emma weds Terry and, shortly after, gets herself pregnant. So far, so good. Then she phones just after she’s given birth and tells this cockamamie story, how her baby daughter spoke to her and was hiding her twin brother inside. She also said that Terry was out to hurt lots of people. So she’s running off, she says, and will write from the road. ‘You have to escape too,’ she warns before hanging up.”
“You didn’t believe her.”
“Are you kidding? I thought she was nuts! Until I told Dolly. When I explained the story, she burst into tears. That’s when I discovered my wife wasn’t human, but a freak of nature called a limnl.”
“A bolkh who’s hijacked a newborn. Like me.”
“Like you, exactly. But it turned out I wasn’t normal either. If I were we’d never have had Jenny together. I was a vrindh, she told me, an incarnated bolkh. Bolkhs and humans can never have children, not even if the bolkh appears in a body, but vrindhs and bolkhs, well, that’s a different story. This is why Terry courted my sister. He and Dolly are distant cousins. When he’d found out Dolly had gotten pregnant by me, he figured there was a chance that my sister was a vrindh as well. So he borrowed a body and poured on the charm. And there was more: Dolly said that Terry hated humans — luras they call them. For centuries, millennia, he’d been plotting against them and now, at last, because of Emma’s twins, his chance had come to do something terrible.”
“How?”
“Dolly didn’t know. But the threat was real, so we ran for our lives. When Terry found out Emma was gone he’d have taken us hostage to lure her back. He’d have tortured us too, if it served his purpose. Dolly was scared, and she didn’t scare easy. So there you have it. In the space of maybe fifteen minutes I went from being a happy guy to someone who’d be running for the rest of his life.”
He stood and some bills slipped out of his pocket — part of his winnings from the Holland Casino. He’d given Emma half, in case the girls had to manage on their own. Chuckling at his carelessness he tucked the cash into his knapsack.
“There’s not a lot to add,” he went on. “We wandered the continent for ten long years. Name a place in North America and chances are I’ve seen it. But eventually we got careless. Stupidly we bought Jenny a dog. A bolkh took it over and we failed to notice. He found out who we were and reported us to Tarhlo, who hadn’t tracked down Emma yet. By then he’d tortured all of Dolly’s clan, cousins, aunts, uncles — everyone.”
“Is that why Michel left his old life behind?”
“Yes.”
“So how did you escape?”
“It was Dolly’s doing. She fought Tarhlo off while I rescued Jenny. He murdered her, you know. He killed her shatl in the back of a truck and wouldn’t let her kaba go. She died within minutes.”
For a moment, Earl’s face dissolved. Just as quickly, he regained control and plunged on with his story. “After that, I split up with Jenny, only because she’d be safer that way. I rented her a place in Vancouver. That’s why she attended your school. I came here — I’ve always loved Europe. Since then I’ve been hopping all over the place. It’s tiring to be moving always, but I suppose it beats being murdered by Tarhlo.”
The day was hot but Simon felt chilled. He didn’t mind that Emma was his mom. She’d been there for him always and was kind and loving. But Tarhlo? What a brute. Why did that thug have to be his father?
“There’s Michel,” Earl said, breaking in on Simon’s thoughts. “And he’s brought his daughter with him.” He nodded toward a man who was standing a short way off. Like Earl, he blended in: his suit was plain, his posture stooped, his features bowed and nondescript. The same was true of the girl beside him. She was dressed in jeans and a dark-brown sweater. Neither one approached or signalled that they’d seen them. Michel only glanced at his watch and walked off quickly, like a man in a hurry to return to the office.
Earl went after them, but made sure to keep his distance, and Simon followed suit. Navigating the path, they veered to their left and entered an open area that was filled with plants of every size and description. To their right was an old-fashioned greenhouse, crammed with trees from tropical climes. It was as if a jungle had taken root inside it. They turned right and approached a huge stone building with oblong windows, sculptures all over, and an ornate black roof. Like everything in Paris, it was oversized and centuries old.
Michel and his daughter climbed a wide flight of stairs and passed behind two wooden doors. A plaque revealed this building was the Great Gallery of Evolution. Earl and Simon swiftly followed.
A cavernous room received them. It was packed with animals (stuffed of course): giraffes, apes, zebras, elephants, the list rolled on and on. There were also cabinets on the side of the room, exhibits with bones of all shapes and sizes, and stairs that led to a second-storey catwalk. The space was stunning: it had a gleaming wooden floor and was drowning in sunlight. But was it Simon’s imagi
nation or were the animals watching? Never mind that they were too far gone for bolkhs to take them over. Michel must have felt the same because he climbed some stairs and hurried past a door, as if he were anxious to put the hall behind him. His daughter didn’t stray from his side. Weaving their way past a knot of tourists, Earl and Simon followed close behind.
After drifting through a network of rooms, each with cabinets of beasts on display, Michel stopped in a chamber full of bones. Along one wall was a row of human skeletons, only their dimensions seemed a touch smaller than normal. The skulls weren’t typically human either and the jaws were heavier, less elegant looking. A large case showed five skeletons in a ring, their arms upraised as if they were casting a spell.
Michel turned to face them. “The answers you’ve been looking for are here,” he said, without bothering to introduce himself or the girl.
“Hello, Michel,” Earl replied. “You always get to the point, don’t you?”
“I don’t get it,” Simon said. “Why am I looking at a lot of old bones?”
“These bones,” Michel said, tapping a case with a finger, “belong to a hominid called Neanderthal man. He was a master hunter and ruled all of Europe for a hundred thousand years. Unfortunately a competitor happened along, Cro-Magnon man, or Homo sapiens sapiens. Because his body was a bit more advanced, or his mind was sharper, Cro-Magnon slowly ousted Neanderthal. He multiplied and gave rise to us, the people who would farm, give rise to cities, and, further down the road, produce planes and computers; but the Neanderthals didn’t fare so well. As far as we can tell, they became extinct.”
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