by Debi Gliori
“My God—what have you done to your face?”
He'd forgotten entirely, till she reminded him. His initial relief at seeing her turned immediately to annoyance. He'd just pulled off their biggest job yet, and she was giving him grief about his appearance! He was on the point of reminding her that he deserved respect for what he'd done, not comments about how he looked, when he realized she was genuinely upset.
“I've been sick with worry,” she began. “When I found that you hadn't made the drop-off…I know I was at the right place—you said the jetty down from the huge house, didn't you? I hunted all over, sure that I hadn't gone to the wrong place, wondering why you hadn't left it, wondering if the police had picked you up—”
“What d'you mean I hadn't made the drop-off? Of course I did. That's why I phoned you last night. I told you I'd left it wrapped in plastic under the jetty. Remember?”
She stared at him, frowning in confusion. Gritting his teeth, he tried again.
“I tied it under the jetty two days ago. I phoned you last night to let you know it was waiting for you. Look, it doesn't matter. It came up as a news flash while I was getting gas. I'm waiting in line to pay, and there on the TV overhead some bloke's announcing to the world that ‘explosions have just destroyed the U.K. headquarters of biotechnology giant SapienTech, burying years of research under a mountain of rubble, yadda, yadda, yadda…'” He stepped forward to grab her by her shoulders, his face lit by a manic grin. “Don't you see? We did it! WE DID IT!”
She wriggled out of his grasp, pushing him violently away from her. “This time, we didn't do it!” she yelled. “Don't you hear what I'm saying? I didn't lay the explosives at SapienTech. It wasn't me. The explosives weren't under the jetty where you said they'd be. Don't you get it yet? Can't you understand—it wasn't me. I didn't do it.”
“So who did?” he screamed. “Somebody did. Someone picked the parcel up at the jetty. Someone took it to SapienTech, just like we'd intended to do. Someone must have known exactly what we were planning…. ”
She closed her eyes and turned away, going upstairs to pack, as the enormity of what he'd said hit him with such force it nearly caused his legs to give way beneath him. Sinking into a chair, he put his head in his hands and yelled out loud with the pain. His entire face felt as if it was on fire, each bite-mark a separate pinpoint of agony. He stood up and ran for the sink, meaning to splash his face with cold water to soothe the hurt, but when he turned on the tap, he almost fainted at the sight of what came pouring out.
A tiny, still-functioning part of his mind told him that it was only water; clear, pure, West of Scotland H2O.
“Water…,” he croaked in agreement. “It's only water.”
He tried to scream for help, but his throat had seized up. Something was terribly wrong—he was ill…very ill… or going mad….
He tried to turn the tap off, but his hands were shaking so much he couldn't get a grip on the spigot. Water poured down the drain, the noise filling him with the worst fear he had ever known.
Unperturbed, the rational part of his mind was calmly dissecting the situation.
I'm afraid of water, he thought. Afraid of water? Hydrophobic?
His mind skittered to a standstill, impaled on that one word.
Hydrophobia.
It was then he realized he was in deep trouble.
He was still clutching the edge of the sink and making little whimpering sounds when she reappeared, her face pale but determined.
“What's the matter with you?” she demanded. “You look awful.”
He could hardly reply, his throat felt so constricted with terror. All he could manage was a feeble croak followed by the unwelcome discovery that he'd dribbled a mouthful of saliva down his chin. Wondering what was going on, he looked up and found that he couldn't see her properly—she kept going in and out of focus, her voice echoing weirdly in his ears.
“Come on. Get a move on. I've got the passports, laptops, credit cards—everything's packed. It's a short drive to the airport.” She was walking around the kitchen, checking they'd left nothing behind. She picked up her cell phone, tucked it in a pocket of her leather jacket, and pushed past him to the sink to rinse out her coffee cup. The sound of running water was so unbearable that he had to bolt out of the kitchen and stand gasping for breath outside in the courtyard, making a determined effort to pull himself together. Spitting out a mouthful of frothy saliva, he was dimly aware of her locking up, replacing the key under a plant pot, and finally turning to glare at him as she climbed onto his motorcycle.
“I'll drive,” she stated, pulling her helmet over her head and lifting the visor so that he could hear her. “All I ask is, don't throw up on me, all right? And, yeah, quit dribbling, would you? I know you don't feel too good right now, but if we get through the next few hours, we might just manage to walk away from this one.”
She turned the engine over and dropped her visor. On legs that were suddenly three thousand miles long, Zander lurched onto the seat behind her. Just get through this, he told himself. Hang in there. It'll all be fine.
It wasn't until they'd stopped at the junction with the main road around Loch Lomond that he realized he wasn't going to make it after all.
A group of bikers looked up when the big Norton pulled up on the road near their lay-by. They listened to its thrumming engine with the same rapt attention normally given by opera buffs to passages of Wagner. Then, after a considered pause, they passed a verdict.
“Niiiiiice,” one of the bikers growled, adding, “not a bad wee bike, either.”
The bikers noticed that the bloke riding pillion was acting strangely: lurching back and forth on his seat, threatening to overbalance the bike, hauling at his helmet, and, it was agreed, behaving like a complete plonker. The bikers rose to their feet and ambled across the road, watching through narrowed eyes as the rider turned around and yelled at her passenger.
“Aye, that's right, then. Youse tell him,” one of the bikers muttered encouragingly, as the woman pushed her companion so hard he slid sideways, out of sight on the other side of the bike. To unanimous disappointment, she then kicked off, opened the throttle, and turned left for Glasgow, leaving her ejected passenger coughing in a cloud of blue exhaust fumes.
At least, that's what they thought at first. That was before the guy dragged his helmet off and began to convulse, before they'd called the ambulance, and before they found out what was really going on.
“Never seen a bloke take it so hard,” they told the ambulance crew.
“Bein' dumped isnae much fun, but all that frothin' and screamin's a wee bit o'er the top, eh no?”
“It's like he'd bin poisoned or somethin'. And when we tried to get some water don him, he acted like we were tryin' to murder him. …”
“He probably thought you were,” the senior paramedic observed.
The bikers couldn't help but notice that all the ambulance crew were now gloved up and wearing masks over their mouths and noses. “Hing oan a minute. What's going on … ?”
“Listen up.” The paramedic held his hands up for silence. “We might have a problem here. We need to get this guy into that hospital and run some tests, pronto. If they come back with the result I'm expecting, you're all going to have to be quarantined in the Isolation Unit. …”
In the ensuing riot, the paramedic held his hands up once again. “It's a precaution, OK? There might be nothing wrong with him, in which case you'll all have had a wasted trip to Glasgow. But…if I'm right, there's the possibility that some of you might be infected, and if you are and you don't get immediate help …” His voice trailed off as Zander was lifted into the ambulance, trussed and wrapped in plastic like an oven-ready chicken. What little could be seen of his face was not encouraging.
“Aw nawwww. Tell me this isnae happenin'…. I don't want whatever he's got. What has he got?” The bikers were endeavoring to keep calm and not throw a synchronized wobbly, but when the paramedic gave his response, sever
al of the big, bearded men had to sit down immediately.
“He's covered in bites, convulsing, hydrophobic, frothing at the mouth…. My guess is he's got rabies.”
And as if this wasn't enough to tip the bikers right over the edge, as the doors of the ambulance closed, the paramedic added in a whisper, “By the time you start to froth at the mouth, there's nothing anyone can do. That guy isn't going to make it.”
Through a Glass, Darkly
ulking in an attic bedroom and poring over recipes so saturated with grease that the words almost slithered off the pages, Marie Bain was the first to hear the sound of an approaching siren. Her cookbook slid to the floor as she scuttled over to the window to find out what was going on. To the cook's considerable excitement, a large red fire engine was hurtling along the track to StregaSchloss, dust and gravel boiling up in its wake.
“Les pompiers!” she squeaked, hastily running a brush through her lank hair and wondering which of her two aprons would set off her washed-out eyes to best advantage.
By the time the fire engine had nee-nawed to a stop on the rose-quartz drive she was ready and waiting on the front doorstep.
“Mon Dieu,” she gasped, wringing her hands. “Eet eees tragique, non ? Terrible. Incroyable.” With little idea of what she was supposed to be talking about, she carried on dramatically, “How deed such a terrible theeng 'appen? Moi, I am inconsolable, distraite. …” And apparently overcome with anguish, she selected the most handsome fireman as the perfect candidate and, tottering down the steps, collapsed at his feet. Dashing around the house from the kitchen garden, Latch wanted to roar with frustration when he saw the firemen bending over the fallen cook.
“LEAVE HER!” he yelled. “The fire's here! Run your hoses around the back! Hurry up, it's an inferno back here!”
With her eyes squeezed tightly shut, Marie Bain sensed that all was not going according to plan. The diminishing thunder of footsteps made her risk a quick peek in time to see the last of the team of firemen running away from her, around the back of the house. Over the mechanical rattle coming from the fire engine parked behind her, she could overhear a conversation. Marie Bain propped herself on one scrawny elbow and looked around, but there was no one to be seen. The rosequartz drive glowed in the afternoon sun, bees trawled the honeysuckle on the southern aspect of StregaSchloss, and overhead, a lone seagull rode the thermals, its cry barely audible.
“What are all these disgusting slimy things?” a voice inquired, following this query with a series of wetly slapping schlupp-schlupp sounds. “Hundreds of them… yeurchhh, it's like wading through jellyfish.”
Schlepp, schluppp.
Marie Bain sat up, drew her gray cardigan tightly across her bony chest, and made a furtive sign to ward off the Evil Eye.
“Just keep going,” another voice advised, “and mind the bones.”
Crunch, crunch, schlepp, schlupp.
“Allo? Who ees there?” Marie Bain whispered, praying that this was a bad dream.
“Can you hear something?” the first voice said, and Marie Bain's nostrils were suddenly assailed by a strong whiff of swampy decay. “I'm utterly covered in slime,” the voice continued, unaware that to Marie Bain, this sounded more like a threat than an observation. “Hey—Nonna, look. Daylight! Up ahead…we're nearly out !”
Marie Bain leapt to her feet, overcome by her imagination, which was telling her to flee before the bone-crunching, slimy Swamp Things appeared and dragged her off, schlepping and schlupping with glee as they devoured her entirely. Frantically turning her head from side to side to find out which direction they would attack from, she spotted movement down in the mud at the bottom of the moat.
“Non, non, non…,” she sobbed, as the mud sucked and belched, throwing up the shapes of clawed hands and limbs, until finally a head emerged, slime dripping down its tentacled skull. The first Swamp Thing crawled out of the mud, blinking in the light as it removed a decaying water lily from its neck. Catching sight of the quivering cook, it waved a slime-slathered arm in greeting, a gesture that entirely failed to reassure Marie Bain of its good intentions.
For the second time that afternoon, Marie Bain collapsed in a heap on the rose-quartz drive, but this time her faint was genuine.
A little later, Mrs. McLachlan poured tea, passed around a plateful of lemon drench cake, and smiled serenely at the assembled firemen squeezed around the kitchen table. The blazing icehouse had been extinguished, mercifully revealing no charred bodies in the embers, and now, with their job done, the firemen were in a celebratory mood. One of them had even been kind enough to carry the unconscious Marie Bain into the house to recover, much to Mrs. McLachlan's amusement.
“Excuse me for a moment, gentlemen,” she murmured. “Do help yourselves to tea and cake. I just have to attend to my duties for a wee while.”
Across the kitchen garden, Pandora, Titus, and the beasts were regarding the hissing ruins of the icehouse with dismay.
“Dad's going to go ballistic,” Pandora decided, awed by the scale of the damage. “First, he'll see this mess, and then we'll have to tell him about Zander…. ”
“It's hardly our fault Dad hired a psycho butler, is it?” Titus said. “And when he finds out that his employee torched the icehouse and then headed off down the coast and blew up a research center—” Titus clapped his hands over his mouth and rolled his eyes apologetically. “Ooops. Sorry. Me and my big mouth. We're not going to talk about that, are we?”
“No, dear. We most certainly are not,” a voice said, causing everyone to jump guiltily, unaware that Mrs. McLachlan had slipped amongst them.
“Oh lord…,” Tock sighed. “D'you think if we amend our plea to ‘guilty with provocation,' we might get off with community service?”
“Suddenly I have this overwhelming desire to turn back to stone. That way no one could put handcuffs on me…,” Sab murmured.
“Feel sick,” Knot moaned.
“I don't want to go to jail !” Ffup squeaked. “I didn't do anything wrong. It wasn't me ! A big boy did it and ran away…. ” The dragon's voice trailed off, quelled by a glare from her fellow beasts.
“Indeed?” said Mrs. McLachlan, in a tone of utter disbelief. The beasts shuffled uncomfortably, trying to avoid meeting her eyes. “Now, dears,” the nanny continued, smiling at Titus and Pandora, “it's a terrible shame about your poor icehouse, but it was an accident—”
“It wasn't!” Pandora yelped. “It was deliberate—” She stopped, aware that Mrs. McLachlan was holding something in her outstretched hand. “What's that ?”
The nanny didn't say a word, just waited for Pandora to work out the answer for herself. The object she held was a small glass ball about the size of a marble, on the end of a melted metal chain. The glass had cracked, as if it had been subjected to intense heat, and, furthering this impression, it was so damaged by smoke that it was almost opaque. Feeling faintly sick, Pandora realized what she was looking at.
“It…it was Zander's…,” she whispered. “His dowser's crystal. The one Mum transformed…”
“The Orba Occultis,” Mrs. McLachlan said, adding, “Honestly, the things some people leave lying around. I suppose it wouldn't have occurred to him that the combination of sunshine, glass, and tinder-dry straw might be quite so lethal. …” The nanny waved a hand at the smoking ruins of the icehouse and emitted a meaningful tssk.
“Oh, come on.” Pandora's voice was indignant. “Why are you pretending it was an accident? Zander tried to kill me and Strega-Nonna—”
“Don't mind me,” Titus said. “He only tried to blow me up. That wasn't an accident either, was it? I feel sick when I think how close we came to…I mean, we nearly—”
“Yes, dear.” Mrs. McLachlan laid a hand on Titus's shoulder. “But it didn't happen. Trust me, your parents don't need to know how close they came to losing you both.”
“But…but Zander's dangerous,” Pandora insisted. “He's a murderer. Shouldn't we at least tell the police about him
? Before he tries to kill someone else?”
Mrs. McLachlan peered into the Orba Occultis and sighed. Passing it across to Pandora, she said, “Take a good look at this and tell me what you see.”
Shuddering at the thought of touching something belonging to Zander, Pandora reluctantly took the glass between her finger and thumb and gazed at it. “It's darker,” she whispered. “It's turned almost…black.”
Mrs. McLachlan held out her hand and Pandora returned the glass, glad to relinquish it. For once, no one could think of anything to say. Taking a deep breath, Mrs. McLachlan slowly closed her fingers around the glass and looked straight into Pandora's eyes.
“The glass is now completely black. Young Mr. Imlach has no future, I fear. It's over, dear. We won't be seeing him again.”
Something about the way Mrs. McLachlan said this made Pandora's skin crawl. On the brink of blurting out a question, she closed her mouth with a snap. Mrs. McLachlan looked at her watch and tutted.
“Just look at the time, dears. What an exciting afternoon we've all had, what with fire engines and…everything. I'm just so thankful that none of you were hurt. So fortunate you were out on the boat at the time…wasn't it?”
Titus gulped and looked down at his shoes.
“And Pandora, your parents might not appreciate seeing you dressed like a mud-maiden, dear. Why not have a quick swim while I get our supper ready?” Mrs. McLachlan reached out to pluck a decaying water lily from the front of Pandora's T-shirt. “What a state you're in, child. Your mother would have a fit if she saw you like this. …” Turning her attention to the beasts, she held them transfixed with a chilly stare. “Your mistress would make herself ill if she knew what really happened today. …” Holding her hands up to forestall objection, she continued, “No. I don't want to know. Next time you decide to go and volunteer yourselves as guinea pigs for medical research, don't leave the newspaper ad lying on the kitchen table for anyone to find.”