by Jon Mackley
Was this where Will had cowered in the dark, battling with the demons of his depression, scavenging for sandwiches? Could he be in a neighbouring room trying his best not to puke up his guts?
She continued her surveillance of the room, trying not to move her eyes too quickly. The walls seemed to melt and reform, like waves on the shore. She squinted, needing her glasses, as she searched for some kind of spying device. She gave up. They were so small these days they could be hidden in a light fitting.
She struggled to her feet, stumbled once as she tried to walk across the room, but managed to catch herself before she fell.
The walls were soft to the touch. That’s it then, she thought bitterly. They’ve locked me in the proverbial padded cell.
The silence beat against her like the relentless pounding of noiseless waves. She wanted to whistle and sing, but the room subdued her. Any sounds she made were swallowed by the quiet.
She jumped at the sound of grating at the door: the sound of a bolt being drawn back. At first, she wondered if she had imagined it, wondered if her insanity was starting to eat through her mind like a parasite and she was starting to imagine sounds.
The door opened. A small man peered in cautiously. He wore thick horn-rimmed glasses. His hair was thinning, his face was gaunt. She guessed he was in his forties. Even though he was wearing a laboratory coat, Lara saw his arms were spindly. If she had been at full strength she might have tried to rush him and escape.
Escape to where, though?
He hovered at the threshold of the door like a vampire, seemingly uncertain of what he should do next. Suddenly she felt her energy draining away from her. She staggered and leaned back on the bed. The man stepped forward and caught her arm. His touch was gentle. He helped her back onto the bed.
‘I did want to ask if I could come in,’ he said in a soft voice. ‘I am Eric Marsh, Mrs Greaves.’
Lara said nothing. She clenched the sheets, trying to steady herself. Marsh, however, appeared embarrassed. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, sounding genuinely contrite. ‘I meant to say “Miss Halpin.”’
‘Just “Lara” will do.’ She indicated to the white walls. ‘This is a lousy hotel.’
Marsh smiled stoically. ‘I do not think you realise the predicament you are in.’ Lara noticed he avoided contractions in his speech. Perhaps he thought relaxing his dialogue would undermine his situation. Perhaps it was to punctuate each word with importance.
‘Where am I?’ Lara asked. She couldn’t hold her head up. Her teeth clamped together. Marsh remained standing. Lara turned her head, feeling the tendons straining in her neck. Peering past him, she saw the door was slightly ajar; stark light slipped in from the passage beyond.
Marsh cleared his throat as if trying to drag her attention back to him. ‘I must say I am … very pleased to meet you,’ he said eventually. ‘I have been following you with some interest over the past years. You have proved to be a most … unusual subject.’
‘Subject?’ Lara’s voice was incredulous.
‘“Subject?”’ Marsh mimicked. Only now, Lara realised that a dangerous heart beat inside what had appeared to be a fragile shell. There was an unnatural glint in his eyes, something calculating and menacing. Now he moved towards her. Lara tried to back away across the bed. He stayed at the bedside, standing over her. ‘Yes, Miss Halpin. You have been the subject of a little research that was undertaken ten years ago.’ He smiled and there was that underlying blade of fear slipping between Lara’s ribs. ‘You were “selected”, Miss Halpin. We hope the next drug tests will provide us with … interesting … results.’
Lara’s heart thumped. ‘What are you talking about?’ Her voice was breathless. She rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand. ‘I’ve never taken drugs in my life.’
Marsh shook his head sadly. ‘That is what we all believe, Miss Halpin. True, we never consciously take drugs. But we find them every day, caffeine, nicotine, even pesticides …’ His voice trailed away as he reached toward her. Lara pulled away. His hand touched the top of her hospital gown. Expert fingers rolled up the sleeve of her left arm. She pulled away again, thinking he wanted to administer something.
He smiled uncomfortably. He seemed to read her thoughts. ‘Nothing up my sleeves, Miss Halpin. You took the drug ten years ago and now you are feeling its effects.’
Lara looked down at her arm: the BCG scar, the immunisation against most illnesses for the future. Just thinking about it threw her back ten years to a time she and her classmates had been forced to queue in cold corridors, roll up their sleeves and endure the pain, not just of the needle itself, but the scabs which had later followed, along with the torments and threats of bruising from others who had already overcome the pain. There were those who told of how painful the experience had been, so as to show their bravery at enduring the agony. There were those who’d declared it had not hurt at all, to show their resilience to pain. Worst of all were those who had refused to speak about it, fearing the silent humiliation of breaking down and crying in front of all their friends.
‘Bacillus Calmette-Guérin,’ Marsh said, as if stating the full name would place this interview within a more scientific content. ‘And our opportunity to administer a series of drugs to school children who knew no better than to do what they were told.’ Seeing the look of fear on Lara’s face, Marsh continued in a softer voice. ‘Do not worry, Miss Halpin. Although the drugs will yield some interesting results, they contained no harmful side effects, and they certainly contained no steroids that would have shown up on a drugs test. The drugs are designed to stimulate the neural pathways we know so little about.’
Lara’s mind fogged with incomprehension. ‘Neural pathways?’ she stammered.
‘Brain pathways,’ Marsh said, as if trying to explain to a small child. ‘They were designed to enhance sections of your brain.’
12
Lara stared at him, incredulous. The violation she’d felt by being undressed was nothing compared to the desecration she felt her body had endured. ‘You put drugs into me?’ she raged. ‘How dare you? Who gave you the authority?’
Marsh gave a hard smile. ‘I am sorry.’ His voice was laden with sarcasm. ‘I am not permitted to tell you who sanctioned it. Let us just say it was at the highest level.’
If she had had the strength, she would have thrown herself across the room, screaming like a banshee, and attempted to claw away his eyes. She managed a feeble push and managed to avoid falling face down on the bed.
‘Calm yourself, Miss Halpin,’ Marsh said. ‘This was something that happened a decade ago. What makes you think you can change the past now?’
‘I can damn well have a go at the people who have got me here now,’ Lara growled.
‘And where would it lead you?’ he said. ‘My dear, you are one hundred feet underground in some seventy acres of underground tunnels. There is a labyrinth down here. You would never find your way outside without our help.’
Lara pointed acerbically to the hospital gown. ‘So that’s why you put me in this mega-sexy dress. You’re scared I might try a version of Theseus and the Minotaur down here.’
Marsh stared at her blankly. ‘No. It is because we want the room to be as sterile as possible.’
A thought crossed her mind, a dark thought. She found a voice for her fear. ‘Those drugs,’ she said shakily. ‘Would there have been any after-effects?’
Marsh shrugged. ‘That is what we want to find out. We expect there to be nothing more than enhancements to your brain patterns.’
She did not take her eyes from him. ‘Would they have harmed my baby?’
A grin spread across Marsh’s face like the rising of the golden dawn. ‘You had a baby!’ he exclaimed with excitement. ‘I had forgotten.’
‘Would they?’
Marsh gave a smile that Lara wanted to hit. ‘You must excuse me, my dear Miss Halpin. I need to consult other motes. I shall return later.’
She wanted to try to follow him out of t
he room, but hardly had the strength to move, let alone dodge past him and overpower him.
She slumped down on the pillow and closed her eyes. She needed to urinate, but all she had seen was a chemical toilet in the corner of the room. She contracted her muscles. She could wait.
But there was the added complication that the muscles were clenching in her pelvis.
Bloody men! Why did they abduct her when she had the cramps, the headaches and needed, as a matter of urgency, chocolate?
She didn’t know for how long she lay there. She curled up on the bed. Her skin felt clammy to the touch. She tried to think of something to take her mind away from the discomfiture, but the antiseptic smell of the walls kept dragging her back to her own problems.
Will, she called silently. Where are you now?
She spoke Will’s name again and this time it was a searching question, rather than a desire. Something had been nagging at her ever since she had been bundled into the van in Avignon. Marsh had confirmed it. If she had been the object of their search, then why had the men in the trench coats been searching for Will? Was it simply a coincidence that Will had stolen a book from the same people who were about to search for a woman they had experimented on a decade before?
Were there two groups pursuing them for different reasons? Things weren’t adding up.
Without a watch, without any distractions, not even a window to look through and see the gathering clouds, her thoughts glided away from the room, back to the Église Saint-Pierre. “G=W”. She tried to think of the relevance of the letters, beyond the linguistic application. The poet would have known the poem would be read in England. If they had been in the right place, the letter would have been tied in with the code, somehow.
A part of her couldn’t shake off the thought that they were no more than a childish profession of love, like carving initials in a tree.
Her stomach cramps were becoming more intense. Despite becoming hotter, she pulled a blanket around her and circled into a small ball. The discomfiture was severe.
She had fallen asleep at some point. She woke with a start to see Marsh standing over her, grinning his toady little smile.
‘Glad to see you are awake, Miss Halpin,’ he said.
She managed to find her voice. ‘I need some sanitary towels,’ she told him. ‘And a shower. I need some water and painkillers. I’m not doing anything until I get them.’
Marsh’s cruel smile widened. It revealed yellowing teeth. ‘On the contrary, Miss Halpin. You are the one who is in pain. I am sure we can arrange these things for you once you have been cooperative.’ He sat down in a chair opposite her. She hadn’t noticed it before; he must have brought it in with him.
‘We have waited for a decade for the opportunity to study you, I am sure we can wait another couple of days. You, on the other hand, look like you want to deal with the matter in hand. The sooner you tell me what I want to know, the sooner I can arrange the things you want.’
‘Women are a lot more resilient than that,’ Lara snarled. ‘I’ve lived with this for a long time. One more painful period isn’t going to floor me. I challenge any of you men to go through the pain of childbirth.’
‘Fortunately, we do not have to,’ Marsh said. ‘But I daresay that you will not want to live in your own filth for the next few days. It is up to you to help us first. Which brings us to the first question: when your daughter was born, did you notice any abnormal thoughts during the latter part of the pregnancy?’
‘You mean aside from the craving for Dairy Milk chocolate and mayonnaise? Not really.’
‘That is not what we’re interested in, and you know it,’ Marsh said coldly.
‘What am I supposed to say then? I haven’t been looking for “abnormal thoughts”? What’s the difference between an “abnormal thought” and a daydream?’ She heard her voice raising, tried to control it, and then couldn’t care less if she expended all her energy screaming at Marsh.
Marsh didn’t seem to notice. He reached behind him and poured a small glass of water. ‘There is no need to fuss yourself, Miss Halpin. We simply want to know what you have been going through.’ He handed her the water. She held it uncertainly, wondering if it was drugged. She didn’t know whether to drink it or to throw it in his face. Eventually thirst overcame revenge and she drank quickly. The water tasted stale, but it moistened her mouth. She still had a dry feeling at the back of her throat. She gave the cup back to Marsh. He didn’t offer any more.
He sat back in his chair and folded his hands behind the back of his head. Lara stared at him coldly. ‘All right, what do you want to know?’
Marsh seemed to hesitate for a long time, making Lara wonder if he actually knew the question he wanted her to answer. Eventually, he fixed his gaze on her. She shifted uncomfortably. ‘How did you work out the Gawain clues?’
Lara smiled coyly. ‘Intuition.’ She started to wonder how Marsh knew about the manuscript and how he knew about the clues. But she imagined he knew an awful lot.
Marsh broke her thoughts by glowering at her. ‘Scholars have been looking at Gawain for six hundred years, and you are going to tell me you managed to work out everything in a few days? I don’t think so.’
She pulled her hospital gown down over her knees. ‘Maybe it’s because I’m not a scholar. I see things differently.’ She indicated to the unknown world beyond the room. ‘I assume this is the place the text was taken from.’
Marsh slammed his hand against the end of the bed angrily. ‘Stolen from, Miss Halpin. Will Stevens stole the manuscript from us, and you stole it from him.’
Lara raised an eyebrow. ‘As a historian, Will had every right to take it. He said you’re hiding documents of public and historical interest. I’m sure he saw the justification.’ She coiled her legs beneath her and tried to sit up. ‘You’re not going to believe anything I say, so I may as well tell you the truth. It was intuition that sent us looking in Chester. That was Will’s intuition. After that, it was simply a case of looking at the facts as they were presented to us and reading the clues in context.’ She let this sink in, then continued. ‘Until modern transport, what we did would have taken months, even years of travelling. Gawain travelled for a month in North Wales. We did it in an hour. That’s why no one’s done it before.’ She laced her fingers behind the back of her head, mimicking Marsh’s posture. He scowled at her, but said nothing. ‘I want some answers,’ she said. ‘I’ve answered your questions, now you can answer some of mine.’
‘I do not owe you any explanations.’
‘All right,’ Lara said. ‘But remember: I’m the one with the answers you want. You may think you’ve got the monopoly on asking questions, but you don’t. If you don’t tell me what I want to know, these could be really short interviews.’ She took a deep breath and felt nauseous with the smell of disinfectant. ‘I want to know whether it’s me that you’ve been following, or Will. Will’s been paranoid you’d find him ever since I met him. But when push comes to shove, I’m the one who’s here and he’s not. Now, are you telling me all his fears were in vain and you’ve been looking for me all along?’
Marsh raised an eyebrow. ‘And what makes you think he is not here as well?’
‘Because I don’t think you know where Will is and you’re hoping I’ll tell you.’
Marsh said nothing. Lara continued. ‘You’re avoiding my question,’ she said. ‘My question was, were you looking for me?’ When Marsh didn’t answer, Lara tried again. ‘Okay, what’s this drug you’ve put in me, instead of the BCG inoculation?’
Marsh grinned. ‘Oh, you had the BCG inoculation,’ he said. ‘This was just an optional extra we installed as well.’
‘I’m not a computer where you can install “optional extras”. Now, what was it?’
‘All right, Miss Halpin,’ Marsh said coldly. ‘Let us start spelling this out for you in words you’ll understand. You have been a guinea pig for an experimental serum. It was administered with your BCG inoculation.’
‘It was designed to open your neural pathways over the course of the last ten years. When we designed it, it was hoped you would develop a certain … affinity with the past.’
Lara shook her head. ‘This doesn’t make sense. If you wanted to look into my past, wouldn’t it be less expensive to use hypnosis? This is basic psychology we’re talking here!’
‘People lie under hypnosis,’ Marsh told her. ‘I am talking about something more prolific. I am not talking about remembering the past. I am talking about an affinity with it.’
‘To what end?’
‘To invoke past memories. To look at it from an academic point of view, to view the past from the eyes of another. The serum makes it possible to look back in time and call upon the memories of that time.’
‘I don’t follow …’
Marsh sighed patiently. ‘Think of it as folding time, time before you were born.’
Lara still didn’t understand. ‘What’s the point of that?’
‘For academics it is a tool to discuss what happened in times gone by, to interact with people from a forgotten era, to understand their desires and motivations, to speak with a clear authority on issues that elude us.’
‘You don’t strike me as a historian,’ Lara said coldly.
‘One might say I am, from a certain point of view,’ Marsh said with a malicious smile. ‘You see, beyond science, my field of interest is military history. I am interested to know just how much you can affect the times gone by with this little serum. We want to see if you can go back in time and change history.’
‘You’re insane,’ Lara said. ‘You’re absolutely bloody insane. You can’t change the past. It’s something that’s already happened. Even if I did, how would you know? If you sent me back in time to stop the rise of power in Germany, suppose I refused to kill Hitler on the battlefields of the Somme, but devalued the Reichsmark to cripple the country. Didn’t that give Hitler the finger of power? Time didn’t change, it just made sense. Or what if I killed Hitler and some more brutal dictator took his place and decided not to fight a war on two fronts, but made peace with the Russians until they had conquered Britain and America? How do you know history could be made better with my intervention?’