by L. Lee Lowe
His headache has begun to abate. While he chews his strip of meat, washing it down with more water, last night's tale returns in all its vividness, as though Nashuk had indeed crept back to retell it in his sleep. He lays the water flask aside and stoops to pick up Mikitok's carving. Then hastily sets it back down, just managing not to drop it. Then picks it up again, his hand trembling.
The ivory seal-woman has emerged fully from her skin, which lies crumbled at her feet.
Chapter 37
'I know about Max.'
Laura's father did nothing dramatic like jam on the brakes or swerve into a parked car. Perhaps he hadn't heard, so she raised her voice to compete with the windscreen wipers. On the passenger side the black rubber of the blade was scritching wide bands of slurry across the glass, which she couldn't remember ever happening before. Her dad undertook all minor repairs immediately, and even repainting a room or laying a new floor was arranged in short order. Her mum wouldn't have tolerated it any other way.
At the next junction Litchfield slowed, then at the last moment continued straight on. Laura glanced at him. 'You've missed the turning.'
'There's something I've got to take care of.'
'Did you hear what I said about Max?'
'How are you feeling? Need to lie down?'
'I'm fine.' She lowered the zip on her jacket and reached to adjust the heater.
Her dad threw her a quick look, concern on his tired face. 'Sweating?'
'I'm not feverish, if that's what you mean. You've had the heater at full blast.' Unlike your mouth, but she knew better than to say so. Instead, she studied his profile. Sometimes he could be persuaded by silence, the power of which her mum had never managed to grasp. It wouldn't have occurred to Laura that both her parents liked it this way.
He was going bald, and on his thin face the pouches under his eyes sagged like a ripped hem. And those lines at the corners of his mouth, how deep they were becoming. A small scared voice piped up from under the covers, 'Please don't leave me alone with her, Daddy.'
It would be dark soon. She leaned her head against the cold window and closed her eyes. If her dad needed to run an errand, so what? She was in no hurry to get home.
The modest brick houses gave way to a superstore complex on the right and some monotonous prefab buildings—a car dealer, warehouses, a sports complex—scattered like a child's building blocks among scrubby lots on the left, behind which ran the canal. Greyish sleet blurred the passing scene more thoroughly than tears, as though someone had wiped the world with one of those sponges which float like a dead animal in the scuzzy water at a petrol station; she'd always made Max clean the windows. She tried not to think about Zach, but within seconds, five, ten, he's in the car with her and holding her and this time he's not holding back and it's nothing like Owen nothing like nothing like
'Laura?'
She swallowed a cry. They were bumping over a small bridge. Quickly she rolled down the window.
'Just a moment of nausea,' she said, her face in the sidestream, her deep breathing a touch melodramatic. Don't overdo it, she warned herself. The graupel stung like a cheap, gritty facial peel, not that it would cleanse anything; the worst pustules never rose to the surface.
'You were whimpering.' He steered towards the verge. 'Maybe we'd best turn round.'
'I'm OK, stop fussing.'
Rolling the window up again, she focused properly on their whereabouts. 'What are we doing way out here anyway?'
'You'll see in a few minutes.'
Within those few minutes they were driving along a narrow lane, which quickly became a track through dense woodland, bare branches as well as needled limbs scraping the sides of the car as if in warning; fingers tattooing a message into the metallic skin that enclosed them. But the track itself was surprisingly free of ruts, smooth as hard-packed turf and gravelled in places, so that Laura speculated how often it was used, and by whom. Somebody was maintaining it, without trimming the overhanging conifers which concealed it even in winter.
Riding in a car in bad weather has the feel of stasis, the sort of timely lull which releases a flash flood of memory. Laura's uncle died soon after her eleventh birthday when his car crashed through a low barrier and flipped into a river late at night; it had been raining, he'd been drinking, and though his window had shattered, he'd been pinned in the vehicle. Does your whole life really flash before your eyes when you drown, she wondered. Is there remorse in the last moments of life? Or only fear? She'd imagined the accident so often as to have become an eyewitness, his desperate struggle to escape, to hold his breath, to breathe, a spillway for her own throat-constricting nightmares.
At the end of the track there was a small turning circle. Her dad stopped the car and cut the engine, but only dimmed the headlights. Though the sleet was abating, Laura could see no path, no building, no reason whatsoever for the track to end so abruptly. The windscreen and windows gradually fogged as he sat with his hands on the steering wheel, staring ahead. There was an air of concentration about him, similar to his trancelike preoccupation when even her mum knew better than to interrupt: the solution to a thorny research problem might be lost forever, along with her chance for a Nobel Prize. And nothing like the fixed smile and rigid bearing which Max had dubbed their dad's Charles d'Arc stance after one particularly vicious rave of her mum's. Mummy Dear had overheard, though she was usually too possessed by her own rage to notice anything short of an approaching cyclone, and that only when it had already ripped off the roof. It had been the wooden cooking spoon and no TV for a week.
Zipping up her jacket, Laura decided to give her father till one hundred. Numbers, however, couldn't pin her slippery thoughts in place. By fifty she was wondering yet again how he'd succeeded in covering up Max's nature for so long—the why was obvious—and by ninety she was toying with extending her count, since she really wasn't keen to face her mum, when her dad broke his silence. 'Come on. I've warned them to expect us.' Without further explanation, he opened his door and an icy wind blew into the car. He frowned and poked his head out like a dog sniffing the air, then retracted it to ask, 'Smell anything?'
'Wood burning, maybe. Is there a cottage round here?'
At once he shoved the door full back and sprang out. After a brief hesitation Laura joined him where the ground canted sharply into thick brake. She crossed her arms, shivering despite her warm jacket. The smell of smoke was unmistakable now, and beyond the carspawn of light she could see a faint glow in the distance—the rosy tint of a charming winter scene with bonfire and wooden sledges and apple-cheeked children, painted in oil, the kind reproduced on Christmas cards and calendars.
'Something's on fire,' she said rather unnecessarily.
Her dad stared a moment longer through the trees, his lips thinning to extinction, then hurried back to the car. Laura followed him to the boot, from which he was already removing the survival blankets and emergency medical kit he always kept in readiness.
'What's going on?' she asked.
'Come on, you'll have to help.' He cleared his throat, and his voice strengthened. 'I can't abandon them.'
'Who—' Laura began.
He thrust the blankets at her. 'Carry these. There's a cottage up ahead—a safehouse.'
'A what?'
'Quiet, just listen. There are some kids living here, one of them may be injured. You're a good liar. I don't know exactly what's waiting for us, but follow my cues if anyone's about, you may have to play up the sweet young girl. Loads of syrupy innocence. It'll allay suspicion.' He went to switch off the headlights, pluck his torch from the glove compartment, and activate central locking, then led her grimly towards the funeral pyre.
For that's what it had become, this 'safehouse'. She knew it as they trudged through the sodden snow, the sleety wind harrying them despite the treebreak. Knew it as the air grew thick and brack. Knew it as she watched her dad bow further, with each step he took, under the weight of dread. His spirit's darkfall, and the trees creak
ing in the keening breath of the winter night. Grey ash drifting like flurries. The burnt smell of it.
Laura's boots and the bottoms of her jeans were caked with wet snow, her toes numb, by the time they neared the site. Flickers of flame were still flaring up here and there on the wind, and smoke embalming the remains. They shouldn't have come, she intoned under her breath, shouldn't have come, though she'd probably get a new pair of boots out of it. It was better to think about boots than what it felt like to be trapped in a fire.
How did Max block out the pain?
Her dad wasn't stopped by the sound of voices, an ugly laugh. Lowering his torch, he waded straight out of the woods and into their midst, while every cell in her body shrieked like a tripped smoke alarm. It was only the thought of what they'd do to her dad, to her, this rough-looking lot who were gathering round, that kept her from fleeing. There were too many of them, ten or eleven, brazening it out was their only chance. Openly hostile faces, and not a woman among them. And maybe a couple more out of sight. Beyond the ruins there was a flutter of movement through the haze of smoke.
'Where the fuck have you come from?' A meaty bloke in a sheepskin jacket, no cheap tatty-looking item either.
Several of the men were carrying rifles, but she had no idea what sort. Not that it made much difference, nobody was about to check their licences.
'If you don't mind, I prefer my daughter doesn't hear such language.' Her dad put his arm protectively—demonstratively—around her shoulders, then squeezed a warning. With the incessant ranting from her mum over the years, he'd had plenty of opportunity to perfect a tranquil bedside manner.
'Answer the question, mate.' This from a belly with thick lips and a broken nose that had been set by someone with training in political caricature. 'You're trespassing on private property.'
'Daddy, I'm really really cold. Can we go home soon?' Laura stamped her feet and shivered and even managed to chatter her teeth. She hadn't used daddy since she'd been about six years old.
'Just a moment, sweetheart. These people may need our help.' Her dad hefted his bag. 'I'm a doctor. I saw the fire from the road, though it took me a while to find the lane. Is anyone injured? And have you rung emergency services?'
'A doctor, eh? What are you doing round here at your girl's suppertime?'
Not dim, then, the sheepskin. Laura smiled winningly at him. 'My big sister Grace has just had her baby. Such a sweet little boy, you can't imagine, so tiny, and those fingers. Mummy's staying over but Daddy has to operate tomorrow.'
'I tried to take a shortcut after the Arpingdale campgrounds,' her dad said, 'but my nav system seems to be acting up. Sometimes I think we'd do better without all these devices.'
A third man edged closer, his eyes glassy and his words just short of slurred. 'A medical man like you must like his tech.' Laura couldn't tell if all of them had been drinking, or only this bloke. The smell of smoke, bitter as slag, infiltrated everything. If she scooped up a handful of snow, it would probably taste like ash.
'I've no problem with technology to treat disease or save lives,' her dad said, 'but not when it's used to create inhuman monsters.'
A sucking sound like a plug pulled from the bathwater, then a tinnitus of sparks as something in the ruins collapsed. None of the men turned to look. There were a few whispers. Laura glanced round the circle of faces and saw that one or two of them were smiling at her now, and one nodding like a fucking marionette with a string loose. She would have liked to cut it through.
'Baby OK?' Sheepskin asked.
'Completely normal, thank god. Nothing like that in our family. But thanks for asking. So nobody's injured?'
'Nah. It's Siler's old place.' Sheepskin nodded towards a man standing near the old well, a lit cigarette cupped in his hands. 'We neighbours got together and torched it. Roof half gone already, windows too, but you know how it is. Vermin were taking hold.'
She could feel her dad's fingers digging into her shoulder and clutched the blankets tighter, but his face remained impassive. She didn't know how long his self-control could last. Seldom as he spoke about his patients, there are deaths impossible to entomb in silence—like the girl who'd been locked since infancy in a cellar, abused, incontinent, and emaciated, with only rudimentary speech, whom he'd tried to help with the latest neurolinguistic techniques. He liked kids. He was patient with kids. His favourite university patients were kids.
'Daddy, can we go now? My feet are freezing, and I'm hungry.'
'Here, lassie, I reckon you could do with some chocolate.' An older man handed her a whole bar, which she accepted with a show of enthusiasm. 'Save it for the car, you aren't wanting to take off your gloves in the cold.'
'We'll be off, then,' her dad said. 'Since there's nothing for me to do.'
There was a scattershot of goodbyes. As they turned to leave, Laura threw one last look towards the ruin. Only a single wall was left standing, rough-cut stone with fireplace and chimney where one day bats might safely roost. It wouldn't be long before brambles began to reclaim the blackened ground; spiders, insects, all manner of wildlife. Blinking back tears, she almost missed the flash of light from the trees on the margin of the clearing. This time he was holding the crystal aloft, a glittering arc of rainbow colours sweeping across the snow. Wildly she glanced round to see if anyone else had noticed, but once again, whatever this man—this apparition—wanted, he wanted only from her. Who are you? she thought. But nothing in her imagination could have prepared her for the sudden vista which opened before her—an obsidian sea of silence flowing into flowstone sound, and beyond sound, and beyond. She stumbled and would have fallen if her dad hadn't caught her arm. We have been called many names, in untold languages, but I have always liked the sound of fylgja.
Her dad picked up the survival blankets, shook off the snow, and bundled them under an arm. In silence they walked through the wood, following the path they themselves had trampled. When they reached the car, her dad stowed away his kit while Laura plucked the chocolate bar from her pocket, gripped it tightly in her fist as if to crush it, then raised her arm and lobbed it savagely across the track into the opposite bank. She hugged herself in an attempt to subdue—conceal—her shivering. The simus were right, men are predators. Sick, vile, brutish predators.
Dark, but never dark enough. Waiting. Endless sleepless hours waiting. Finally the soft click of the latch, the spill of pallid light and the sourish smell of him, the door sighing shut, the bolt snibbing into place. His footsteps, barefoot, onetwo threefour . . . at seven he always reaches the bed. Laura, he says, pretty little Laura kitten. No more waiting. He's waiting, she knows what to do. The magic ice cream cone which grows bigger with every lick.
'You're cold, we need to get you back home and into bed.' Her dad peeled off a glove and laid a hand on her forehead. 'A bit feverish.'
Sidestepping out of reach, Laura was about to blurt out a reflexive denial when she realised that bed, and sleep, would in fact be welcome. For a moment she ached to crawl into Zach's arms, to lie in the sweet simple reservoir of his warmth. But it would have to be a hot bath and flannel pyjamas, as after a bruising swim, and the sanctuary of bittersweet daydreams.
Why had she been so stupid? Why hadn't she remembered that even kittens have claws and teeth?
*****
Once inside the car, her dad gripped the steering wheel without speaking. Laura waited, tears close again. Illness and fatigue make you trembly, shock, there was no reason to think she was going mad: seeing things that weren't there. Or things that were always there, imperceptible to a mind saned rather than sainted. Joan of Arc heard voices accompanied by a blaze of light. Poets have heard hierarchies of terrible angels. She and Max were siblings, weren't they? Is that why her dad wouldn't talk about Max?
The mind builds the walls of its own, perhaps its only, safehouse.
'How naïve of me, how misguided to think I could keep them safe. How arrogant. I should have let Fulgur have them.' He turned to look at her, h
is eyes raw with the pain of it. 'At least they'd still be alive.'
Kids shouldn't have to give that sort of forgiveness to a parent. 'Who? You haven't explained.'
He switched on the engine, the headlights and wipers, jammed the car into reverse, gunned backwards, but when the wheels began to spin, he stopped and took an audible breath, collected himself.
'Simu twins, a bit younger than Max. Eliot and Nicola. And their foster mother.'
'You were hiding them?'
'Something like that.'
'Why? It's a pretty serious crime. I mean, I can understand about Max, he's your own son, but . . .'
'They were very gifted kids. Wonderful, trusting kids.' He removed his knitted cap and passed a hand through his hair, then stared at the damp wool till Laura was obliged to prompt him.
'And?'
'Max told you about the scare he had at the Christmas party, didn't he? It's only confirmed what I've suspected for a long time. Fulgur is keen to get its hands on a telepath. And Eliot and Nicola were telepaths, fearsome telepaths, so fearsome that it scared me sometimes.'
After a short silence Laura asked, 'What does Fulgur want with telepaths?'
'Has Zach said anything at all about his project?'
She shook her head.
'The wars over oil reserves are nothing compared to what we're likely to see in the near future. The mind—the cognoscens mind, especially—is our most valuable natural resource. Fulgur has just been quicker to recognise it.' He regarded his hat as if it had mistaken him for a hat rack, then tossed it onto the dashboard. 'I'm not surprised Zach has been scrupulous about not involving you. But if you care for him the way I think you do, it's far too late. You're already involved.'