Sandpaper Kiss

by Angel Wedge

  Higher up the cliff was where the staff lived, apartments marked by an occasional scatter of windows. They were linked by numerous small elevators and staircases, keeping the cost as low as possible by following the labyrinth of natural channels. The only fast route from top to bottom was using the massive freight elevator, which had been created using a special drill and a lot of explosives. That went all the way from the back of the Faulkner lab – which he sometimes said he had named after Lucy, rather than himself or his other children – up to the Observation Room. That allowed animals or whatever else the scientists had been working on to be taken up to the big room, and paraded in front of a press conference.

  It was an amazing place to live, and all the more special to Lucy because, in a way, it had been made for her. Now she looked down at the engraved image on the pedestal. It was clearly a child’s drawing, but it was easily recognisable as the valley and the falls, as they had been before all the buildings were there. In that picture the water rolling out over the granite spur of the falls was joined by a dozen smaller trickles from the various caves in the cliff face, and the pool was ringed by a thick growth of trees. The sunlight was the same: starbursts representing a dazzling brilliance reflecting off the lake and the waterfall itself, to cast light upward to the opposite cliff. The picture was of the view from this point, and the original was one of Lucy’s favourite pages in the whole diary.

  Somehow, for all the time she’d lived at Lucretia Falls, she’d never found an excuse to come up here and look at how the view had changed. And now she was finally here, it seemed a perfect time to open her diary to the two remaining blank pages at the back, and express in clumsy uncoordinated writing just how the sight made her feel. She had nothing better to do right now, as she had no intention of returning in time to hear Father’s call.

  * * *

  Another day running through the jungle, another succession of terrified moments just waiting for every snapping branch in the distance to become a nightmare of teeth, or a night-black guard in pursuit. And then I turned again to the diary. I gave up on the mysterious scrawl at the end this time; no matter how many hours I’d spent staring at it, I couldn’t make out letters among the wobbly rows of pencil marks. Instead I turned to the beginning, where the handwriting was uncertain but just about legible, with occasional help from an adult hand to spell out the longer words. The events of this story were clearly before the girl had come to the jungle, maybe even before her celebrated kidnapping if the handwriting was any indicator of her age…

  A plane soared low over the desert. It was a small craft, but could easily have carried three times the number of passengers who were on board today. The first thing Lucretia remembered when she came to write in her diary was how high the sun was, beating down on the ground in a land with virtually no shadows.

  The sun wasn’t an unfamiliar sight for her, though most places they’d been it wasn’t so intense. But in hindsight it was the thing she remembered, because that was the last time she’d seen it blazing like that. In the hospital she hadn’t been allowed to open the blinds, and in their new home in the jungle there was always the canopy overhead to block out direct sunlight. So rather than thinking about the awe-inspiring landscape that had captured her attention at the time, she persisted in remembering the heat of the sun, and the perfect weather of that day.

  The landscape was almost flat, and she could see for miles. But the place they were heading for was hidden behind a row of hills that looked tiny by comparison to the vast, open space. When they reached it, the canyon was massive and awe inspiring, like a wire had cut right down into the desert and exposed uncountable strata of rock. The image that stuck in Lucretia’s mind was that they were looking out at God’s layer cake, just after someone took the middle slice. It took her breath away for sure, and that was pretty hard to do these days. This girl had probably seen more of the world than any other eight year old girl, from the unbelievable artwork of the Nazca lines to the unspoiled, natural beauty of the fjords.

  She knelt on one of the seats of a twin-engine plane, pressing her face up close against the window to get a better look at the spectacular scenery. Behind her, Doctor Faulkner smiled at his daughter’s enthusiasm. The smile didn’t quite reach his eyes, but the people who spent a lot of time with him had learned not to look him in the eye lest they get swallowed by the unimaginable sadness that was exposed there.

  “It’s like something out of Africa,” Lucretia gasped in awe, “So much desert!”

  “Africa has more than just deserts, dear,” her father pointed out, “And there’s a lot of difference between American and African desert.”

  “Like elephants,” the pilot felt obliged to chip in. Normally he expected to be reeling off details about the landscapes they were flying over, the geology or the history, but this group was starting to unnerve him. When they’d booked, they seemed to be trying to fit in as many sights as possible, as if they were pressed for time. That wasn’t so uncommon for a family holiday, with only a week away from work and school, but they were taking it so seriously. While they’d been waiting for takeoff, the older guy had got out his bag and been on the phone to some tour operator, organising hotels and flights to Kenya for the week after next. He’d asked the girl what kind of landmarks she wanted to see, and he was quite happy to throw vast amounts of money at the holiday to make sure they found time for everything that interested her without any delays.

  “Yeah, we need to see an elephant in Africa!” Lucretia’s face lit up with a smile, “Can we ride one?”

  “Of course, Luci, I’ll see what I can do.” And that was the other thing that was clear. The kid got everything she wanted, there was never an argument. But she didn’t seem spoiled in any way, she was always polite and seemed genuinely surprised every time her suggestions were accepted without question. The pilot couldn’t help thinking there was an elephant in the room here, and he was the only one who couldn’t see it. Still, it wasn’t his job to ask questions of the passengers. His job was to give them a marvellous view, however uneasy they made him feel, so he pitched the plane to one side and let them look down into the canyon, and was rewarded by an excited squeal of delight.

  * * *

  I couldn’t believe how different Lucretia’s experience was from my own. I’d read the news reports: Faulkner had kidnapped his own daughter and they hadn’t been seen for months. He’d only returned her to safety in the States when her condition actually became life-threatening, and then she’d vanished for good less than a year later. I’d always assumed that the story everyone else believed must be true. The mad scientist was torturing her with experiments, even sacrificing his own flesh and blood in the pursuit of the elusive discovery that would make him famous. But the diary contained many more stories like the page I’d just read, and the more of them I went through the more it seemed the girl really had got everything she could ask for. Over the course of nearly a year, they’d visited every continent and always first class. Why would he do that if he didn’t care for her wellbeing?

  There was no mention of any experiments in most of these stories. Sometimes she would have a comment that her father or Doctor Balletyne would take some blood samples, but the nurses always seemed careful not to hurt her and those instances were few and far between. The more I read of this tale, the more convinced I was that the whole point of Faulkner’s experiments was to cure what was wrong with his daughter. She was ill, she knew that, and Father was doing everything he could to save her. But then, why the luxury world tour? That didn’t really fit into either of the stories I could see in my head.

  I couldn’t read for too long before I had to put the book back under my coat, and start thinking about which way I would travel for the next day. I had to keep on moving, had to keep heading back towards civilisation. I’d been in the jungle before, but never really had to rely on my own resources, and this was an altogether different situation. I had a vague idea about the dangers of flora an
d fauna that could be found in a place like this, and knew my only hope with most of the large animals was not to encounter them. I knew that primitive tribes could be a danger too, though fewer and fewer of them were permitted to continue their traditional ways. The tribes round here would deal with outsiders occasionally, but mostly kept to themselves. Somehow, nobody knew how, Faulkner had managed to gain their allegiance. In the current situation, they were almost as much a wildcard as the creatures of unknown descent that Faulkner’s lab had created, and as I thought about those travesties against nature I realised that I would have to take responsibility for some of them escaping into the wild. That was something I didn’t want on my conscience, but I couldn’t go back there now.

  Better to think about the natives, the tribes. If one foreigner had gained their trust, then maybe I could too. It could be as simple as spotting what had been right under my nose when we’d had our chaperoned tour of the jungle. If nothing else, thinking back to that would give the higher parts of my mind something to do while I scrambled slowly along a gully on the jungle floor.

  Chapter 14 — The Experiment Revealed

  As I wandered through the jungle, I started to think about just how much of a part Dr Igor Barishkov had played in the construction of Lucretia Falls. He had been one of the more senior scientists, and had become the head of the Oversight Committee after the UN took over. But his background was in genetics, and after he’d given us a presentation on his analysis of Faulkner’s work I had started suspecting that he was more closely involved than he had admitted.

  The Observation Room at the summit of the Lucretia Falls facility was treated almost like some kind of ancient holy site, with guards to prevent anyone unauthorised wandering up there. Most of the security detail were foreigners now, and clearly resented by the Benedictean staff members, but they were the ones with guns so they were in charge. They theoretically took their orders from the Oversight Committee, with representatives from all the countries whose military forces had chipped in to keep a lid on this potentially explosive situation, but in practice they reported only to Dr Barishkov. He was the most senior person who was on site at the facility, and was reputed to be a genius even though nobody else seemed to know what he’d been working on.

  The dome of the Observation Room looked like a cloudy marble from the ground outside. It was only once you got up there that you realised just how big it was. There were three floors below the Observation Room itself, a short circular tower that supported it. And around the perimeter of those levels, there were long arcing flights of stairs. The rooms on those lower levels had a pretty good view themselves, allowing you to see out over the cliff edge or as far as the treeline in the other direction, but it was only the dome itself that had a view above the forest canopy in all directions. Somehow, we never thought to ask what was in the middle of those three levels, surrounded by a ring of general conference rooms and dining areas.

  When we were told that Barishkov’s presentation would be right at the top of the building, the announcement was treated as if we were being offered some rare reward. I thought back to the day before, when we’d been quietly spirited away from the facility to visit the tribes in the jungle. Had the subterfuge then simply been an opportunity for whatever he wanted to show us to be ferried up the chain of elevators from the valley-floor laboratories to the big amphitheatre without anyone getting a sneak peek?

  As we filed up the stairs one by one, we were struck first by the sheer scale of the place. Giant curved windows almost entirely replaced a conventional ceiling or walls. Above about three feet from the floor, the walls just gave way to giant glass sheets, supported by four arcing chrome pillars that met somewhere near the apex. Higher up, the surface was still coated with a year’s dirt, but the staff had obviously been in here to polish and shine the glass. It was set up as an audience chamber, the floor divided into concentric rings of shallow steps to allow those at the back a slightly easier view of a presenter at the centre. There was no other furniture in here at present, but scuff marks on the floor indicated that there had been some kind of desks around the room fairly recently.

  As I reached the top of the stairs, I turned to the window and looked out in awe. The rainforest was beautiful, and the view from up here was somehow even more dramatic than the one from the air. If you kept your gaze on the recently cleaned parts of the window, it was as if you were looking out from an open platform above the highest of the trees. Then I turned to the centre of the room, where everyone was slowly directing their attention to a pit thirty feet across. Whoever had designed this place certainly had a flair for the dramatic. Barishkov wasn’t in sight, but we were confident he wouldn’t keep us waiting too long once everyone was here.

  Was that the kind of thing he did: being fashionably late to his own show? I didn’t know any more than the rest of the audience, as none of us had actually managed to meet the guy who had stepped up to save Lucretia Falls in its darkest hour. I’d spoken to a few of the other journalists, and it seemed he was too busy running the facility to spend his social time in the clifftop part; which many of the staff seemed to have taken to calling ‘the hotel’ once they heard us using that name.

  I made good use of the time while we waited for Barishkov to arrive, speaking to a reporter from a Latvian state newspaper to ask if they knew anything about the statement in John’s file. I hadn’t thought to check Igor’s credentials before coming out here, and cellphone transmissions through the lab’s communications centre would no doubt be monitored, but someone from the region he’d originally come from was probably the best way of fact-checking I had at this point.

  “Oh yes, it is well known,” a tall guy called Vic grinned, “You can look it up easily enough if you check the newspapers from his home town. In the national press it was just a sidebar, noted scientist arrested, and terrorist flees custody. They thought he was moving to Denmark, and spent some time trying to organise extradition papers, but then it turns out he wasn’t even there.”

  “Terrorist?” I probably didn’t do such a good job of hiding my surprise, “My brother said that, but I didn’t have time to check the records before we got here, and I thought…”

  “Oh, no, no,” he shook his head, “It’s not so serious as all that. Barishkov gave some scientific information to an anti-government group, that’s all the public knows. Maybe he’s making some weapon-suitable strain of super ebola, or maybe he helped someone to analyse statistics that would show a vaccination programme isn’t as effective as the government claim. To some of the newspapers, anyone who is against the people in power must be a terrorist.” I nodded. I didn’t know how it was in Arstotzka, but I could imagine that kind of thing happening in a few of the Baltic States. In reality, Barishkov’s crime probably lay somewhere in between the bio-weapons of John’s rhetoric and the permit problem that Paul had claimed.

  “Is there likely to be any way to find out more?” I asked, “I didn’t have long to plan before coming out here, but surely one of us,” I gestured to indicate the reporters and politicians milling around all over the room now, “There must be someone who thought to find out why the new Committee Chairman can’t return to his home country?”

  “Probably,” Victor shrugged, looking a little embarrassed, “I’ve emailed my office asking them to look for more information, but I think their response got shut down by the censors here. I can’t believe they had Barishkov on the list of scientists who were being arrested by the Americans; we thought that Petrov and Corliss were probably the ‘existing lab staff’ mentioned on the–”

  He suddenly faded into silence, and I turned to see what had caught his attention. In the pit at the centre of the room, something was becoming visible. It seemed to be a cage, slowly rotating as it rose so that we could see every side of it. Some kind of elevator system rose like a screw head out of the pit, giving us a view from every side. The cage took up most of the platform, and standing to one side was a figure that could only be
the infamous Dr Barishkov. He was shorter and older than I would have imagined, getting on to late middle age with sparse grey hair combed over from both sides in an attempt to conceal a bald spot. He wore a grey suit with creases so firm you could have used him as a ruler, and his gaze roved the crowd with displeasure, as if he was looking for anyone who had written something bad about him in the past.

  Hunched in one corner of the cage was a huge black panther. No doubt some people would immediately protest, say that it was inhumane to confine the magnificent beast to such a small cage even for a short presentation. But I figured the cage itself was probably almost the size of the college dorm room that I’d barely left for the last six months of my course, and the big cat’s expression as it stood to survey the room was a perfect reminder of why you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near it without the bars. Most of the observers in the room weren’t scientists, but still I hoped a few of them would recognise the distinctive features of P. pardus sangra, a critically endangered leopard species. I was sure it had been mentioned in the official briefing packet, but there had been no mention that the lab had one in captivity. A few of these creatures had been found in the forest around here, though not enough to suggest that they would survive without human intervention.

  “Panthera pardus sangra,” Barishkov spoke clearly and loudly. The echo was a little tinny and unnatural, leading me to think that speakers were positioned somewhere along the long chrome beams, making them resonate as well as amplifying his voice. “Sangra’s Leopard. Maybe you’ve seen one of these magnificent creatures in the zoo. There are, after all, seventeen of them in captivity around the world. And six known to be living in the wild, after certain naturalists sent expeditions to this region over the last decade. They are perhaps the second most famous cat of this region, after their close cousin P. pardus alba which was believed to be extinct until Benedict Moore realised that the creature called the ‘white tiger’ by the natives here was not, in fact, what the rest of the world knows as a tiger.”