by Lynch, S. M.
She spoke in an educated tone with a voice that reminded me of someone else’s. She had an air of propriety that was edged with mischief, her eyes lit as though she never doubted for a second she would get us out of the situation we had found ourselves in back on the ground. While Ryken walked forward to greet her in a professional manner, I observed the scene and listened to the way she talked. You know how they say mothers and daughters sound the same… I felt sick. I knew the truth instantly.
I thought back to the little girl’s bedroom in that house back in Stratford. The drawings on the walls were of exotic plants and gardens, animals and birds. The images inside a budding scientist’s mind.
Lucius was a gentlemanly young man with dark features similar to his mother’s. He saluted Ryken and me, quite the trained soldier, before going up front to the cockpit.
I remained stock-still, unable to move. Mara and Ryken shared anecdotes regarding the Hellion, which she revealed was a favorite mode of transport too. I stared at the woman and guessed she was around 45 or 50, just the right age. She was wearing pink leather sandals and an ornately embroidered purple caftan over white linen trousers. She had long hair, black in color, brown eyes, a tall athletic physique and a slight patch of freckles across her nose and cheeks. She stood confidently, with her hands clasped around each of her elbows. Then, as she smiled at my observations of her, I saw it. Eve’s smile.
I stood up out of my seat and began to shake. It felt as though my stomach had been left behind on the ground. It was as if I were looking at a ghost. Silence filled the cabin and I held one hand over my mouth while Ryken remained in the background, wondering what the heck was going on.
‘Why do they call you the Apprentice?’
Mara smiled confidently. ‘I think you know. Camille taught me everything she knows. In my line of work, I learned long ago that the only person I could rely on for protection was myself.’
Ryken took a step back from Mara, knowing something was up.
I paced around her, surveying her as if she were a waxwork model. I walked over to my seat to rummage in my bag and retrieve the wedding photo. Mara continued smiling even when I held the photo up to compare the faces, before handing the image over.
‘Didn’t Mum look lovely?’ she gushed.
At first, I didn’t know whether to hit her or scream, or just collapse and drown in my own disbelief. This was intolerable. All these secrets and lies I could never have imagined.
I stepped backwards until my legs hit a chair and I fell into it with a thud. I dragged my knees up to my chest and hid my face.
‘So much pain,’ I managed to say.
Neither Ryken nor Mara dared move forward. I was no longer the creature I was before. I was retreating and they didn’t know how to deal with me.
I thought of Eve having to live apart from her husband and daughter, of the little girl’s bedroom with no wall covering except the handmade collage in pencil and crayon. I thought about Eve having Mara for a daughter and living with that knowledge too, that her virologist offspring could be dead any minute.
I vaguely heard Mara whisper to Ryken, ‘It’s shock. It will pass.’
His concerned response echoed around the room and his voice was like a foreign language. I fought to gather sense.
‘You’re the mirror image of your father but I saw her in you straight away too.’
‘I know,’ Mara replied, emotion finally entering her own voice. Mention of Tom meant she was definitely Daddy’s girl. ‘I always wanted red hair like Mum, but you seem to have been gifted with the recessive gene in our family.’
Again with the trivialities. I needed answers.
‘Why, why did we never meet before? Why did Eve never tell me about you? About your father?’
I looked out of the window but all I saw was nothingness. Meaninglessness. A world that had never given me anything but disappointment – that was all I could hope to expect. These latest revelations made me feel hollow.
Mara crept across the floor and sat beside me, gently taking my right hand from my knee to hold it. I continued looking the other way.
‘There is so much to talk about,’ her voice resounded clearly.
‘What was all that on the runway then? A trick? How did we get out of there so easily?’ Ryken cut in, demanding he have a part in the conversation.
‘Oh that,’ Mara said, ‘just something we’ve been working on for a few years… we coated the jet in a microscopic, nano-resin. Essentially, the plane’s computer draws in the general image from its surroundings and projects it back, like one large blank canvas. Listen Ryken, Seraph and I have a lot to discuss. Perhaps you might give us some time to speak alone?’
‘He’s okay Mara, he can stay, I trust him. I told him about the Operator and he is still here.’
‘You will have to bring me up to speed, however, I am still catching up with all these revelations, too,’ he mocked lightly.
I got the sense he was trying desperately to hide some nervousness about something. He wasn’t in charge when it came to Maddon women, he knew that well enough already.
I turned to look at him to gauge his expression but instead, I caught Mara nodding frantically in his direction, as if they shared something else secret that was also tantamount to the fight we faced. One thing at a time, I decided, I can only handle one thing at a time, though clearly I was on the periphery of some knowledge they shared.
Mara gestured for Ryken to sit opposite us and I took a deep breath when she began, ‘Seraph, my father was known as Stephan Dulwich, but his real name was Tom Bradbury. In 2023, my mother signed his death certificate, but the body was not my father’s. It was his colleague’s Stephan’s. In the ensuing chaos of the flu, Mum and Dad used the confusion so that he could assume a new identity. I was nine years old at the time and have some vivid recollections of what happened. The devastation is imprinted on my mind. Unless you went through it, you might never really understand. The looting, panic buying… gang wars. Bodies lining the streets, doctors struggling to treat hundreds of thousands of patients, hospitals crammed full of victims, a country and a world weeping and wailing over a seemingly unexplainable tragedy. But there are a select few of us who know what really happened. The best person to explain is my father.’
Astonished looks passed between Ryken and I. Then Mara pulled a memory stick out of her pocket and held it up.
‘Listen to what he has to say very carefully.’
Mara took the old-fashioned USB and plugged it into an adaptor on her xGen, a large, pink leather-bound device with a sizeable screen. The contraption’s chunkiness suggested the amount of RAM it possessed was enormous. Once she loaded up the viewer, she passed it over to me and Ryken moved over my way to peer over my shoulder.
‘Yeah, thanks, it’s recording. Hi there… I’m Tom Bradbury, professor of zoology at Cambridge University. Today is Saturday, November the 10th, 2012. We just arrived in New Guinea on an expedition to seek out some more of the previously undocumented species here. We arrived in Jayapura yesterday before helicoptering out to camp a few miles from the Mamberamo river basin. It’s 6pm but the temperature is still at least 40 degrees Celsius. Even continually drinking water doesn’t seem to match the amount we’re sweating out constantly. The giant bugs around here are having a field day with my flesh. You can probably hear them trying to bash their way through the tent. I’ve had to throw at least four nets around the thing to protect myself. We have to remain vigilant in case the conditions take a turn for the worse. Unpredictable tropical storms have been known to cause extreme devastation. It will be a treacherous hike up into the rainforest but my colleagues Simpson and Harley are expert mountaineers and assure me that we will be okay. We’re waiting for a day when we can guarantee no rain for us to be able to get safely up into a lower-lying part of the Foja Mountains and see what we can find. We are going to erect a few canopies and try to smoke out whatever we can find. Two native ecologists have agreed to accompany us.
&n
bsp; ‘I find it hard to see how anything could survive here. It’s an impossible environment for crops and livestock to thrive in. It’s not only thick with vegetation, but the weather is unruly and the conditions in the mountains are quite often freezing. The flora and fauna have had to adapt to their environment over the millennia and seem to be highly evolved, having been left to their own devices for so long. Hopefully we will be able to venture into the wilderness tomorrow to see what we can find. I’m expected to hold a seminar on Wednesday so I’m due to fly back home on Monday night. If nothing turns up by then, that’s it. I’ll hopefully have some findings soon, so until then…’
*
‘This is my second video diary,’ he managed to say while coughing and spluttering, before regaining himself. ‘I’m laid up in my camp bed and I’ve no idea what day it is, only I know I should have been back in the UK a long time ago. We ventured up into the mountains the day after my last entry. The weather was quite fine, if a little cool the further up into Foja we got,’ he caught his breath, continuing, ‘I think it must have been around 5:30am when we set off and we reached our destination around noon.’
He rolled about to get comfortable and frowned with the effort it took to speak. ‘All five of us reached a plateau and surveyed the scene below us… the lush green forest and active, diverse wildlife were a sight to see. It did seem as though we had reached a lost world. The knowing nature of the environs suggested an evolutionary strength beyond anything of any other land. We didn’t find anything new, but one of my colleagues overheard one of the guides panicking when they realized we were in the vicinity of what they referred to as the “Devil’s Fowl”. However, we were so inquisitive, we insisted they show us the way to this mysterious creature’s habitat. I don’t know if it was the thin air, but I could have wept when we discovered it was a bird of unparalleled beauty. The size of a chicken, but much slimmer, its feathers were as white and fluffy as a chick’s, tinged grey-black at the ends. It had an elegant long neck with a black patch of velvet fluff on its crown. Its pink feet and claws were small in comparison, while its wings were built for the purpose of short flight. It crowed a sensational rhythmic cry almost resembling birdsong but exhibited vicious tendencies as soon as we went anywhere near.’
He struggled with more coughing and spluttering. ‘We took some samples of feathers and excrement but the creature wouldn’t let us get close and we didn’t want to risk infringing on its environment any more than we had to, such was its apparent rarity. We came back down the mountain that evening, and arrived back at camp at around 6:30pm, sound as a pound.
‘However, the next morning…’ he spluttered, wiping his face with a cloth, ‘…where was I? Oh yes, the next day my colleagues and I woke up feeling as if we’d each been hit by a truck. While I exhibited symptoms of a chest infection, Ed Harley had a terrible stomach upset… possibly gastroenteritis, I think… and Hal Simpson had something akin to glandular fever. I think I remember us saying to each other that we’d suffered similar ailments as youngsters, but for us all to experience them again, all at the same time, it was too strange. We thought we would be able to shake off our maladies but we were soon all bedridden. Our guides fled and left us to it, not wanting to catch whatever it was we’d caught.
‘We’ve all spent the past few days hanging by a thread, delirious and barely able to function. We ran out of water and had to use the satellite phone to call for emergency aid. It only came after three more calls for help, but someone merely dumped a medical kit along with a few barrels of water, plus tins of rice and beans. They left them a few meters away from our tents and somehow, I slithered along the ground to retrieve the supplies. I slept for about four hours afterwards, such was the energy I’d had to exert to get myself there and back. I injected myself with a penicillin shot but honestly felt worse off for having had it. Harley also felt worse off for it, while poor Simpson’s allergy to the stuff meant he couldn’t have anything anyway.’
He caught his breath, clutching his throat and chest, ‘We got the feeling that the locals knew of some terror hiding in those mountains and were afraid that we’d caught it and would pass it on to them. However, for the two guides not to have been struck down like we were, they must have had some sort of immunity. I honestly don’t know how I’ve gotten through the past few days. I’m sure I’ve suffered palpitations and my mind has been so troubled I’ve been hallucinating, waking up in pools of sweat, having to talk myself into trying to beat whatever it is we’ve been plagued with. I feel like my skin is hanging off me, having had no appetite. It must still be well over 100 degrees out there and yet sometimes I feel as though I could have easily been in Siberia one minute, and the Attacama desert the next. I’ve often felt as if some virulent creature has been gnawing away at my bones and tissue. My lungs have strained to take in oxygen and even my eyesight seems to have suffered. The worst off of us all was Ed. With all the trips to the toilet, he suffered extreme dehydration and passed out a few times. Harley was so weak he couldn’t even lift himself out of bed but had to keep trying to keep liquids down. It seems we are recovering slightly now, God help us.’
He fell back onto his camp bed and into a violent coughing fit before the video cut out.
*
‘Hi, Tom Bradbury here… probably for the last time. It’s very important I record all my findings in New Guinea, so here goes…
‘It’s now December 13th and I’ve been stuck on this island for more than a month, despite only intending to stay here for a couple of days or so. My colleagues and I had to prop each other up as we battled the life-threatening illnesses we each came down the mountain with. We struggled to open tins of food and drinking water was painful. Between the insect bites, dehydration and hunger, each of us nearly gave up and died in that jungle. There was no help whatsoever and it was only two days ago that we felt strong enough again to pack up the camp and venture back into civilization. Even then, the journey was tiring and the relentless rain drove us to despair almost. We somehow made it back to Jayapura yesterday after hitching a lift on the back of a wagon. We’ve checked into a hotel and we all feel much better thanks to some hot food, warm beds and a bath.
‘If we weren’t all fit and healthy, I’m sure we would have died out there of whatever it was that struck us down. The fact we survived in those conditions is testament enough, but overcoming infection too, that was not easy. I still don’t feel myself and I’m not sure I ever will. I feel as though something has eaten away at my very core and I will never be the same again. Out here, all I could keep thinking about was my first love, Eve Maddon. She was a beautiful, red-headed creature with a figure to die for. The memory of her has haunted me for years. I always regretted us breaking up and now I realize I still love her, I’m going to find her when I get back. Life is so precious and I never realized it until now.
‘We’ve still got the samples we took from the bird, along with a few images, and we will be flying back to the UK tomorrow. I’m sure there will be a lot of questions to answer and a lot more to ask ourselves. Whatever this thing that struck us down was, it was a force of nature unlike anything anyone has ever seen the like of before. Wish me luck getting back to some sort of normal life. Goodbye.’
CHAPTER 23
I passed the xGen back to Mara and shook my hands out to try to rid myself of the shock I felt. Tom and Eve’s wasn’t just a love story, it was something else.
‘I think I know what this means, but I want you to tell us in your own words, every detail. Leave nothing out. It is now or never.’
I stared into her eyes to show my cousin the depth of my own internal battle. Mara’s eyes softened and she rose to take the floor, letting Ryken take the seat beside me as we awaited her version. He grasped my hand and I felt him shaking. This was enormous for him, too.
2023 and why it really happened…
‘My father went to New Guinea on that expedition when they were still finding all kinds of new species out there, having been previ
ously unable to tackle the treacherous and uninhabitable environment. When he returned to England after that trip, he took some time off and found Mum again. They married quickly and had me not so long afterward. His near-death experience made him realize what he really wanted out of life.
‘He took a job at Durham University and used to travel up there for work three days a week. When he would come back after that time away, I’d always be sent off with some babysitter or other, leaving Mum and Dad to have their alone time together. They couldn’t be without each other, you see, they were so passionate, so in love. I realized that from a very early age and it both bewildered me and left me in awe of their bond. They both worked very hard at their marriage. Mum was from a broken home, and Dad, well, he had survived against all the odds. They knew what was important. I think if Mum hadn’t suffered complications during my birth, they would have had several more children!’
Mara smiled and I saw such love emanate from her. Her coolness, and that mischief, she had gotten from Eve. The two hadn’t fought in broad daylight or on the streets because they’d had so much happiness to protect. Something, so simple, had always eluded me.
‘He tried to forget his experience in New Guinea but there were always people emailing or phoning – wanting to question him about the infection he had suffered. He and his colleagues didn’t want to dwell on it and indeed each of them was determined not to talk about what they had been through. They wanted to get on with their lives and leave it all behind.
‘Tests carried out on the bird’s samples didn’t reveal much, except its genetic make-up did seem to suggest an immune system beyond comprehension. Having suffered so terribly at the hands of the disease, neither Dad nor his colleagues wanted to contemplate any further research. Having nearly met death, they simply wanted to ignore its existence and hopefully protect humanity by not revealing the extent of their struggle.