He offered Alan the chance of redemption. An opportunity to save his father, save the whole family. An opportunity to come home as a hero and be forgiven, to be back in England and take his place in the family. Michael shamelessly dangled the money right in front of him. Going back to somehow keep Effra Hall together when there was no money would be a grim chore and a constant round of hard choices. Being lord of the manor with a comfortable million in the bank was another matter.
It was an easier sell than he thought. Alan was not stupid; allowing himself to be dragged reluctantly back to save the day gave him a free ticket to everything he wanted. And it was not as though he needed to stay in England afterwards. He would be able to return to Phuket whenever he liked.
Michael bought Alan’s ticket back to London the next morning.
Alan drank heavily on the flight—nerves, Michael thought, or perhaps habit—and wanted to talk about the Beast and the effect it had on his life.
“Do you know what it’s like?” he asked petulantly. “Having that thing in the cellar and not being able to talk about it? It’s a family curse, I tell you. My brother and I used to go down at night and throw chocolate biscuits for it, can you believe that? Two kids and that thing.”
Michael shrugged.
“My brother joined the Army to get away,” said Alan. “But Father’s getting older, and Mother. If only we could destroy it…but that’s not possible.” Alan looked into his plastic glass of Scotch and ice.
Michael said nothing.
“Nobody helps. The civil servants are the worst,” said Alan. “They won’t give us any money even though the house is falling down. Every ten years they have a new committee and then a review, and then the government changes and it all starts again.”
“So they know about it?” He gathered from Sir Harold that the Beast used to belong to the Crown in some way. If there was some official involvement, then Michael’s plan might be stopped. Maybe they would arrest him when he stepped off the plane.
Alan shrugged vaguely. “Somebody somewhere in Whitehall knows something, but it’s all kept top secret. They don’t want to know. They just shuffle papers and nothing ever happens. Bloody civil servants, I hate them.”
Michael looked out the window, at the flat expanse of clouds rolling by underneath them like an endless white carpet. There was no need to worry. If Sir Harold had agreed to help the software entrepreneur get his fingers back before, this would be the same. Carried out without official permission…whatever official permission meant in the tangled secrecy of laws covering ancient Royal Beasts. No wonder they preferred to ignore the whole thing.
“Effra could be a million years old,” said Alan. “It’s got to be from Earth because of the DNA, but it doesn’t fit in. It’s some sort of synthetic life-form…” He looked up suddenly. “You don’t care about any of this, do you?”
“No,” said Michael.
IV
Finding a donor would be illegal, but not so very difficult when you knew where to look. While he was carrying out this part Michael took care that that he could not be traced, shape-shifting again. He bought a second-hand car for cash, wore a denim jacket with patches and a baseball cap. He called himself Steve. He talked to a lot of women as he did the rounds, but if they remembered anything of him it would be the cap and the jacket, and perhaps the colour of the car. Nothing that could be used to trace him.
He cruised likely areas, stopping to talk to the women about the services they offered. He wanted to find out just what they were willing to do for cash.
There were plenty of girls in London, immigrants mainly, who ended up selling themselves one way or another. It was just a matter of finding the right one, a woman who was sufficiently desperate. He had to find one who did not have a pimp or a boyfriend who would cut in and make difficulties or complications. He had a series of conversations, paying them for their time, telling them about how he needed a kidney donor for his sick wife. Half the time he had to explain what a kidney was.
Most were suspicious and refused straight off. A few listened and rejected him more or less sympathetically. But others were less wary or more careless about personal safety. He could have picked from any of dozens of women with dead eyes. Women whose brains had been fried by various substances and who would do anything just to keep the supply going. Or others who had been permanently been damaged by childhood abuse and did not seem to care what happened to them. Or whose minds had drifted into instability. If he had been in a state to care, Michael might have wept at some of the sad little stories he picked through while looking for the right one.
Then he found Lena: Romanian, early twenties, with a young child and a husband who was a violent alcoholic. The husband appeared occasionally to accuse her of being a whore, have sex, and grab any money she had before disappearing again. He had been in and out of prison, she did not know where he was now. She was scared of her neighbours, who were black, and whose accents she could not understand. She was scared of Social Services who would take away her child. She was scared of the police, and of the other girls working the street. She was scared of her clients. She was terrified of her husband and what he might do to her or her daughter. All Lena wanted was to escape, to go back home, to live in peace with her little girl and forget about everything in London. Escaping would take a lot of money, and she never had enough money.
Without even thinking about it Michael slipped into the role she wanted. He was the understanding authority figure, the father confessor, the wise doctor, listening to all her problems, knowing the answer to it all.
Lena made it through Michael’s complete set of questions, ticking every box. She would have given away a kidney without a second thought, even if it meant a risky backstreet surgeon operating on her, no questions asked. She was only insistent that arrangements must be made for her child to get the money and to be cared for by her family in Romania. Then he moved on to the real issue: if it would pay what she needed, what about giving up a hand?
“How much?” she asked, without blinking.
As a trial, he picked up her from outside Crystal Palace station next day. In daylight she looked thinner and older. She was exactly on time and, as far as he could tell, sober. He took her to the Medway Clinic by an indirect route, but she was not paying attention anyway. They took blood and urine samples and swabbed her cheeks. Michael had asked for a full battery of tests, anything that might affect her suitability as a donor. Lena accepted everything they did. Afterwards he gave her an envelope containing a thousand pounds, fifty crisp twenty-pound notes. She packed the envelope away in her handbag without excitement, without counting it, and Michael was confident he had his donor.
V
A few days later, after the test results had come back and he was satisfied she was healthy, Michael picked Lena up from the same place and took a different route. He stopped at a layby a mile from Effra and handed her a paper cup with a dozen capsules in it and a bottle of water.
“Take these,” he said.
She obediently gulped the big red capsules down, one after the other.
“Now just sit back and go to sleep.”
The dose was calibrated for her body weight. The drugs were illegal, but not hard to find on the Internet. Michael would have preferred a proper general anaesthetic, but for this stage of the process that was not practical. He could not afford to have too many witnesses. He had done his research and the risk was minimal.
The Medway Clinic’s unmarked ambulance was waiting at the end of the drive outside Effra Hall.
Alan was waiting outside. In a calm and workmanlike fashion he helped Michael carry the unconscious Lena inside and lay her down on the sofa. Anne was already there, brought by the ambulance. She was on the other sofa, also unconscious, her bandaged hand lying on her chest. She looked beautiful, vulnerable, the sleeping princess in a fairy tale.
Sir Harold, looking as frail as ever, watched gravely as they prepared.
“You must stay calm,�
� he told Michael. “Whatever happens. This procedure is risky. We are dealing with very, very powerful forces.” He clearly had his doubts, but he knew better than to ask Michael if he still wanted to go ahead. He and Alan both pulled on thick rubber gloves as though they were going to help at a calving.
“Do it,” said Michael.
There was no visible signal, but seconds later something like a torrent of black liquid poured through the doorway. It looked different in daylight, a gelatinous mass like bunches of darkly translucent grapes compacted together. It stopped at Sir Harold’s feet, forming an egg which collapsed into a hemisphere and then uncoiled tentacles like elephant trunks from its upper surface.
Very gently, Sir Harold took Lena’s left hand in his and carefully guided a tentacle until it was in contact. He was murmuring something under his breath that Michael could not quite hear. Alan, a few paces away, was murmuring as well.
The tentacle formed a nodule at its tip which opened into a leech-like mouth and wrapped itself around Lena’s fingers. The whole body of the creature twitched suddenly, ripples running through it.
“Easy,” said Sir Harold, as if calming a skittish horse.
The tentacle swelled to take in the top half of Lena’s hand. There were small popping sounds, just like popcorn starting up. Michael realised that those must be the finger bones being torn loose one by one.
“Enough,” said Sir Harold, and the creature paused but did not withdraw. A second tentacle was now coiling softly around Lena’s wrist next to the first.
Then things happened very rapidly.
Alan shouted something, and the second tentacle melted around her arm, joining with the first into a single, seamless piece. There were things moving beneath the surface in a series of rapid, jerky actions, as though a school of piranha were boiling below the surface, or a swarm of maggots, tearing at the flesh with myriads of tiny teeth.
Another tentacle started to form, and another, fumbling around, reaching for Lena’s legs. There were more, louder pops.
The two men moved forward and Michael’s view was blocked. They were not wrestling with the creature—it was far too powerful for that—but seemed to be urging it or chastising it, more with their voices than their hands. Michael stood back, impassively.
The body of the creature split up until it was all tentacles, uncoiling and reaching. Alan and Sir Harold seemed quite unafraid of it, in spite of the way it tried to reach over and around them, pushing away the tentacles as you would the nose of a dog begging under the dining table.
Under their influence the creature subsided and flowed back again. Alan was standing by Lena, holding wads of bandaging and wiping away the black mucus, but Michael did not see him.
He was watching the older man, who had taken Anne’s mutilated hand and was coaxing a fresh tentacle towards it. Sir Harold glanced up at Michael.
“This will take a couple of minutes,” said Sir Harold. “But he took plenty of material, so it shouldn’t be so hard to get him to give some back for us.” The tentacle formed over Anne’s hand, and Michael stood rigid, fighting the impulse to leap in and tear it away. After feeling its way around, the tentacle fused on to the hand. Michael leaned closer: the tentacle was partly translucent, and through it he could see veins like a network of cracks open up and start to flow. Human cells were being drawn back to a human body.
Sir Harold held the tentacle, the tube connecting the Beast to Anne, looking for all the world as though he were milking a cow. An intuition struck Michael: of course, this thing was a domesticated animal. This was what it had been bred for.
“It took her whole arm,” Alan said from the other side of the room. “It’s a very clean job, not much bleeding; the healing factor has sealed it off. The bugger took everything up to the shoulder joint though. Jesus.”
He picked something up from the floor and tossed it to the Beast. Michael glanced round and saw it was an arm-bone—a humerus—snapped up like a dog taking a biscuit. Of course, the tentacle-trunk was too small to assimilate large bones. The humerus had been picked clean and ejected.
The tip of the tentacle in contact with Anne’s hand gradually started to change colour, becoming pink and red and white. Then the coloured part split off and the tentacle pulled away, leaving the hand with a blob of pinkish material attached. The blob seethed and ran as Michael watched, a leech shaping itself into a new form, becoming more and more recognisably a pair of fingers.
“There we are,” said Sir Harold, with a sigh of relief.
Alan was still tending to Lena, but as soon as Sir Harold’s attention lapsed another tentacle flopped out, reaching to encircle Anne’s neck.
Alan started to move, but Michael moved faster. A knife would have been useless, or a gun; even a sawn-off shotgun probably wouldn’t have had much effect. When Sir Harold called it unstoppable, he probably knew what he was talking about. A flamethrower might have worked, and Michael had thought about taking a hand-held signal flare from the boat supplies. But using one indoors was impractical, and he couldn’t risk setting the place on fire with Anne unconscious. So he had settled for the one weapon he could carry in his pocket that might have been of any use.
He jammed the device against the tentacle and squeezed the trigger. There was a little crackle and the tentacle snapped back suddenly, stung by a jolt of fifty thousand volts from the electronic stun gun. The Beast was suddenly back to being an egg-shaped blob, quivering and rippling and forming eyes to see this new threat, ominous black shears materialising and preparing to strike.
Before the Beast could make its next move, Michael had scooped Anne up in his arms and raced out of the room, out of the house. He carried her down the drive to the waiting ambulance. The paramedics were calmly professional as they laid her down on the stretcher, checking her breathing. His eye went automatically to her hand, to her new fingers which looked raw and pink but otherwise normal.
He went back to the house. The Beast had gone back into its labyrinth under the cellars and down to the river. Alan had finished cleaning up Lena. Her entire arm was gone, but, as he had said, there was virtually no blood: the skin had re-formed over the wound and there was just one ragged section where it had not joined up.
“That was a bloody stupid thing to do,” Sir Harold snarled. “The thing could have gone berserk and killed us all. It can decapitate you in a second just by reflex—that’s what it does. It takes heads off. When it’s threatened it can go wild.”
“We could have dealt with Effra ourselves,” said Alan. “It was just trying it on, trying to get what it could. But—anything could have happened after what you did.”
“No harm done,” said Michael coldly. “Except for her,” he added, indicating Lena.
“This isn’t micro-surgery,” said Alan. “All along, you were warned and warned how dangerous it was. It could have been worse, for all of us.”
“Let’s get her to the ambulance,” said Michael. “She needs blood.”
Michael was already calculating how much money he would need to dispense and to whom he would need to drop a word of explanation. All this could be smoothed over, nice and easy. Everybody was still on board, nobody was going to crack and ruin things. Lena was, after all, still alive. That was a welcome bonus: he had only half expected that she would survive the experience, and had already written her off.
It was a beautiful afternoon, with sun streaming in through the window into Anne’s room at the Medway Clinic. There were three bouquets of flowers along the windowsill; any more would have looked excessive, but they made a lovely show. Even more lovely was his wife, and Michael’s eyes were fixed on her face as she came around from the anaesthetic at last.
“Morning,” he said brightly. “Have a nice sleep?”
She blinked at him, and before she could speak he lifted up her left hand and slipped the wedding ring on to her restored ring finger. Her ring had been bent and scratched in the accident, but Michael had retrieved it and the jeweller had done a good j
ob.
“Oh my God,” said Anne, staring at her hand. She held up the other one next to it, flexed her fingers, turned it around, looking at it this way and that. There was no scar, no stitches. “Oh. My. God. I don’t believe it.”
“How does it feel?”
“Incredible. Just like it was.” She looked at her fingertips: even the fingerprints were perfectly matched. “I can’t believe it, it’s magic. You said you’d do it, and you did!”
Then she burst into tears, sobbing like a child while he held her for a long, long time.
Anne could not stop looking at her hand, and even weeks afterwards he sometimes saw her holding up her hand and flexing the restored fingers. Then she caught his eye and laughed merrily, flapping her hand in front of her.
“What a clever husband I’ve got,” she said.
“Just stupid with car doors,” he added.
“Oh, don’t be so miserable,” she said, and they kissed. And everything really was just as it had been before. Their perfect life was restored, regenerated, made whole again.
He told Anne a little about how it had been done, after she was sworn to secrecy. He told her that Lena had donated her fingers for money, but did not describe her eaten-away body. He had only seen Lena briefly the day afterwards, almost completely recovered. He drove her home and carried her case up to her flat where her sister was looking after the daughter. But he checked the next day to make sure the taxi had taken her to the airport and the two of them had flown back to Romania. She had plenty of money, and realistic papers for the tax authorities which explained her windfall as compensation for a road accident. Whether she could hold on to the money, or keep her mind together, did not especially bother him.
At least Lena’s daughter might have a better life. Not that Michael was troubled either way. Lena had fulfilled her function and had received her due.
The Dulwich Horror & Others Page 13