The Blood Tree

by Paul Johnston

  I didn’t see anyone in the restricted beam but I heard a movement, a sudden scurrying like a frightened animal diving for cover. And a low moaning sound that made the hairs on my neck rise. Jesus, what was in the room with me? I moved the torch round and revealed chairs and tables. Then arrested the movement of my arm. There were straps hanging down from the chairs, shackles like those on the prisoner’s chair in Hyslop’s office. I remembered the security warning and looked back towards the line of light at the door. That was when I was taken out.

  I landed on the floor with a thud and tried to disentangle myself from the heavy weight that had landed on me. The torch had flown off to my left and the beam was rolling to and fro. It disclosed a figure in white robes and a flash on the upper part of the body gave a bit more away – large, bald head and a slack, wet mouth. Then the light moved down again and I pushed hard. Forget it. I might as well have been buried beneath a ton of potatoes.

  “Get off,” I gasped. “I’m not armed.” Lying is always a good option when you’re up against it.

  “Doctor? You one of the doctors?” came a voice that was a curious blend of gentle and threatening.

  “No, I’m not one of the fucking doctors.” It had occurred to me that this guy might have a major antipathy to the people treating him. “Let me up and I’ll tell you who I am.”

  My attacker thought about it and, after what seemed like an eternity, relaxed his grip on my arms. He pulled away from me and I heard the breath scratching in his throat. Then the torchbeam rolled back over his face and I saw a sight that I’d been fervently hoping I wouldn’t encounter again. Like the murder victims there was an eye in the middle of the forehead, but this time it was much worse. This time there was only one eye. And this time its owner was very much alive.

  After a few seconds the overhead light came on.

  “That’s better.” A heavily built figure was standing by the door. He didn’t seem to be interested that it was open. “Now I can see you.” His large round face broke into a smile that was almost benevolent. “And you can see me.”

  I got to my feet, rubbing my limbs, and tried not to stare at him. The white T-shirt he was wearing bore large red stencilled letters that said “Inmate”. That didn’t reassure me much. Strangely the soft face did, despite the malformation of its upper part.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “You can look. I’m used to people looking.”

  It was hard not to. I realised he was young, probably in his early twenties, though the complete lack of hair made it difficult to be sure. The single eye was regarding me unwaveringly, the dark brown iris standing out against the pallid skin around it. I had the feeling that this individual hadn’t seen the light of day for a very long time.

  “Cyclops,” he said with another smile, this one briefer. “That’s what they call me.”

  “Oh aye?” I said, unsure whether he was making conversation or looking for a reaction.

  He nodded. “The doctors and the scientists, I mean. My friends in here just call me Big Eye.” He smiled again and I convinced myself that he wasn’t harbouring violent intentions towards me. “I’m a rarity, you know,” he said proudly. “Cyclopian malformation leading to a single median eye is very uncommon.”

  “Em, yes, you’re right there,” I said, glancing around the room. It was large and the far end was taken up by half a dozen beds. “Are you on your own in here?” I asked, looking back at the inmate. “What do you want me to call you?”

  “You can call me Big Eye,” he said. “You’re a friend, aren’t you?” He shook his head. “There used to be more but now there are only two others. Byron and Selkie. They took them away before you got here.” He inclined an ear to the distant alarm. “Is there a fire?” The prospect seemed to excite him.

  “No, we’re all right.” I was thinking about the names. “Byron. Does he have a club-foot?” Big Eye nodded enthusiastically. “And Selkie – what about him? Or is it a female?”

  He shook his head. “Male. There are no women in here, at least not any real ones. Don’t you know the old folk tales? A selkie’s a man on land and a seal in the water.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “Selkie’s got a condition called phocomelia.” Big Eye pronounced the word carefully. “He doesn’t have much in the way of arms and legs. His hands and feet are attached to his body like flippers.”

  I felt my jaw drop. Then I remembered Leadbelly and his references to the “poor, tortured fuckers”. He worked in the Rennie – he might have seen these guys.

  “Don’t worry,” Big Eye said. “He doesn’t mind. He doesn’t know anything different.”

  I scratched my cheek as I tried to find an inoffensive way to extract information from him. I needn’t have bothered.

  “We’re the results of genetic modification, you know.” The young man wasn’t embarrassed. If anything, he was pleased. “The scientists here tried all sorts of things with us.” He gave me a conspiratorial wink. “I’m a true hermaphrodite, you know. I have an ovary as well as testicles.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to be expecting congratulations.

  “And they’ve made me indifferent to pain,” he continued. “Look.” Before I could stop him he’d closed the door on his little finger. The smile never left his face.

  “Jesus,” I said under my breath. So this was what went on in the Rennie. But what did the research have to do with the murders? I was bloody sure it was connected, that the third eye mutilation was some kind of link to this poor soul, but I needed harder evidence. I glanced at my watch. We were twenty-five minutes into Operation Aardvark. Time to get a move on.

  “I’ve got to go, Big Eye,” I said, moving towards the door and hoping that my smart card would open it.

  “I’ll come with you,” he said cheerfully. “I can show you around.”

  I stared at him. “Aren’t you locked up in here all the time?”

  “Oh no,” he replied. “They take us to the laboratories and the exercise rooms almost every day.” He smiled at me. “I keep myself very fit. I can do two hundred press-ups without stopping. And hit the punchball for ten minutes.” He gave a hoarse laugh. “That’s why they didn’t try to take me on when they came for the others. Here, we can look for them, can’t we?”

  I nodded slowly. “All right then.” He was between me and the door and I didn’t fancy taking him on either. I headed over there, offered up a prayer to the god I’d never believed in and ran the card down the panel. There was a click and Sesame opened. It seemed that security code A+++ didn’t run to a more complex locking system.

  “Where would you like to start?” Big Eye asked, sounding like an unusually user-friendly tourist guide.

  “Is there an archive room?” I asked. There was no reaction from him. “You know, somewhere the records are kept? The files?”

  He shrugged then stared at his feet. They were bare and the nails were long and horny. “Don’t know.” His face had darkened. It looked like I’d caught him out. I didn’t like the way he’d gone from happy to resentful in two seconds. Change of subject required.

  “Never mind. How about the labs? Where are they?”

  His expression lightened. “There are a lot of those. I’ll take you to the ones I know best.” He headed off down the corridor at a quick pace.

  I followed more cautiously, looking round corners and through glass panels. There was no sign of anyone. We passed a door marked “Record Room – Security Code A+”. I’d revisit that later.

  Finally, at the end of a corridor, we came to a heavy door. This time there was no identifying panel and, instead of a card swipe, a digital pad protruded from the wall.

  “Oh shit,” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” Big Eye said. “I know all the doctors’ code numbers. He tapped out four digits.

  We were in.

  The door slammed behind us and I breathed in the antiseptic air of a seriously high-tech lab. The lights were blazi
ng – presumably this area had its own emergency generator. Instruments and machines stretched away like an Edinburgh computer warehouse in pre-Enlightenment times, before the mob took exception to the rip-off prices and firebombed them. No evidence of fire damage here, nor of lab staff. In the middle of the area was a glass-enclosed section with a high bed in it. With a clench in my gut I saw that there was someone lying on it. Then a figure in a white coat rose from behind a control panel to the right.

  “Who’s . . .” I left the question incomplete because Big Eye was already on his way over to the man. I followed slowly, my hand on the weapon in my pocket.

  “Professor!” Big Eye called. “Here I am.”

  The scientist was looking at me intently. I recognised the gaunt features of David Rennie, the ward representative I’d met at the banquet who was founder of the institute and also Macbeth’s brother. Although alarm had registered on them initially, it rapidly faded. He didn’t look pleased to see his inmate but he offered me a welcoming smile. That put me off my stride.

  “Cyclops,” the professor said sharply, “what are you doing here? Where’s your escort?”

  Big Eye grinned. “Gone. They left me all on my own when the alarm bells started.”

  For a couple of seconds Rennie’s expression suggested that the security personnel were for the high jump over the Erskine Bridge, but he quickly got a grip. “I’m rather busy at the moment, Cyclops. Why don’t you go back to your quarters?”

  “Too busy to see me?” Big Eye said haltingly. “But I’m your favourite subject, that’s what you always say.” His expression was black again, but his voice was as querulous as a child’s.

  The professor eyed him with a hint of anxiety then pointed to a chair. “Why don’t you sit down for a minute? I have to speak to your new friend.”

  Big Eye glanced at me and smiled. “Fine.” Then he looked lost. “But I don’t know his name.”

  Rennie laughed. “Didn’t he tell you? He’s not much of a friend then. This is Quintilian. You’d better call him Quint. That’s lot easier, isn’t it?”

  “Quint,” the young man repeated, smiling at me. “Quint.”

  I nodded, trying to make out the condition of the figure beyond the professor. The body was sheathed in a white robe and the head turned away. The long dark hair and the slender form suggested it was a girl.

  “Yes,” the professor said. “Quintilian Dalrymple.” He gave me another long look. “I’ve been expecting a visit from you. I imagine the farce at the front entrance is your doing. Yours and that idiot Duart’s, along with the idiots in the Major Crime Squad.” He played with some buttons on his console. “What exactly do you hope to find?”

  “The evidence that will nail you and close this place down,” I said, glancing at Big Eye. He was looking at me in horror. The poor guy obviously regarded the institute as home.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” David Rennie scoffed. “This facility provides the ward and the city as a whole with an enormous amount of income, primarily from our American friends.”

  “What exactly is it that you provide for them?” I demanded. “Cloned children?”

  Rennie’s eyes flicked uneasily over to the inmate. Then he nodded. “Among other things. Since the religious right over there prevailed in the abortion wars there’s been a huge market for the genetic engineering services that they banned. We’re world leaders in the field.”

  I wanted to ask him where Big Eye and his wretched friends fitted into the grand scheme, but I had other priorities.

  “You needed a file attachment from the old Parliament archive in Edinburgh, didn’t you?”

  The scientist’s eyes were still locked on mine. “I wondered if you knew about the break-in. You’re not in Glasgow just to do Duart’s bidding, are you? How did you manage to link the file attachment to me?”

  I wasn’t planning on telling him about Leadbelly or the Edinburgh murders, at least not yet. “And you arranged the kidnap of three hyper-intelligent teenagers from Edinburgh via your brother’s good offices, didn’t you?” After a few moments he nodded. “Why? Had you run out of specimens?”

  Now he was grinning triumphantly. “You’re out of your depth, Dalrymple. You’re flailing around like a drowning man.”

  Then it hit me. “Jesus, those kids were genetically engineered too, weren’t they?” I scarcely heard his affirmative reply. None of the kidnap victims was older than seventeen. That meant they’d been produced after the ban on genetic engineering in Edinburgh. Someone had been carrying out illegal research under the guardians’ noses for years.

  “Those adolescents are particularly fine examples,” Rennie said. “I needed to carry out tests on them to further my work.”

  “Who was responsible for producing them in Edinburgh?” I asked breathlessly.

  He laughed. “You don’t expect me to tell you that, do you?”

  “You’re fucking right I do!” I shouted. The figure on the bed in the observation chamber moved slightly. “You’ll be in the cells before the night is out,” I said, lowering my voice. “You’d be well advised to co-operate with me.”

  The professor found that very amusing. “Co-operate with you?” he repeated. “It’s you who’ll be begging to co-operate with me, my friend.” He turned back to his monitors and made a note in a file. “As I said, I’ve been expecting a visit from you.”

  “I suppose Broadsword told you about our meeting outside here the other night.”

  He looked up – for a moment I thought he was surprised – then he went back to concentrating on his console.

  “Dougal Strachan was here, wasn’t he?” I said. “Why did you have to kill him?”

  Rennie stared at me. “I had nothing to do with Dougal Strachan’s death. I never even met him.”

  “Bullshit.”

  The professor shrugged. “Please yourself. But think about it, Dalrymple. Would I be stupid enough to arrange a murder within walking distance of the institute? And why would I want to dispose of a subject I hadn’t even had the chance to use?”

  “Maybe some of your minions are out of control.”

  The professor thought about that. “What are you suggesting? That I employ the person responsible for the mutilations and murders?”

  “You or your brother.” I stepped nearer him.

  “Stay where you are,” he ordered.

  “All that bollocks about the Macbeth cult and Scottish reunification is just a cover to provide you with subjects for experiment, isn’t it?” I looked at Big Eye. “What do you think about being a victim, my friend?” I had the feeling that I needed all the allies I could get. Rennie’s confidence was making me wonder where Broadsword and his side-kicks were.

  “A victim?” the inmate said, his forehead above the single eye heavily lined. “What do you mean, Quint?”

  “A victim to be used as the subject of experiments,” I said. “That’s what happens to you, isn’t it, Big Eye? He keeps you locked up here when you could be living an ordinary life in the outside world.”

  Rennie laughed harshly. “How many people can you see behaving normally when he’s in the room, Dalrymple? He’s a freak. We produced him to test the limits of our procedures.” He glanced at the young man. “And to give us material for future experiments.”

  “The name Frankenstein springs to mind,” I said. “You can’t treat people like that, even if you do produce them, as you so delicately put it.”

  The scientist turned his back on me again. “You’re in no position to stop me.” He leaned forward and spoke into a microphone. “Derek? Come to the main lab now.”

  I had my hand round the Ladykiller but I kept it concealed for the time being. I wanted to see what happened next.

  “You are impotent, Dalrymple,” Rennie said, standing up and pointing at the bed in the chamber. “Totally powerless. Take a look.”

  I stepped forward, registering the arrival of Macbeth at the far end of the lab. He was in normal clothes for a change, the tweed j
acket making him look worryingly like an Edinburgh guardian.

  “I mean take a look in the observation unit,” the professor said, turning a switch under the mike. “Wake up, Aurora,” he said in a soft voice. “Wake up. There’s someone who wants to see you.”

  I stared at the scientist then looked to the front.

  The occupant of the bed stirred and sat up, rubbing her eyes. She turned towards us and lowered her hands. Her eyes met mine and I felt the floor beneath my feet move violently. Earthquake, dislocation, the sensation that my heart was being torn apart. For a few seconds I even thought I heard Sonny Boy Williamson singing “She Brought Life Back to the Dead.”

  The girl was about eight or nine. The face that the black hair shrouded was a beautiful one, the lips slightly parted and the eyes brilliant dark pools. It was also a face that had been imprinted permanently on my mind.

  It was the face of my long-dead lover Caro.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I was staring at the little girl, staring at her like the world, time, the order of things had all lost their meaning. Which they had. I was back on the hillside at Soutra, my eyes on Caro as she prepared for the last operation against the Howlin’ Wolf gang. The girl’s face, it was Caro’s face – younger and softer, but indisputably the features I’d loved and never been able to forget. And it was a living face, not the reddened, contorted horror that I found on the floor in the barn as the rope choked the last breath from Caro’s lungs.

  Then the child looked at the four men ranged around the observation chamber. Her eyes screwed up in panic and she began to sob desperately. Macbeth was holding a heavy-duty automatic pistol in his right hand. Both he and his brother had empty expressions on their thin faces. I heard a low moan from Big Eye. No doubt he’d been in that chamber often enough himself. I got the impression that he was sympathetic to Aurora’s plight. Aurora. For a moment I thought about the beautiful name which meant “dawn” in the original Latin. Who had given her that name? Then I wondered how many of us would see the dawn that was approaching. The Ladykiller was still in my pocket, but I couldn’t risk a firefight with Macbeth – he was on the other side of the chamber and Aurora was between us. I took my hand off the weapon and my finger encountered the other small object in there.