by T H Paul
Penny had not troubled herself with those thoughts yet. The autumn felt like a lifetime ahead, and there were far more pressing things in front of her that were demanding her attention.
The loudest of these and fresh on the back of the truth about who she was had been her father requesting they meet. It would be the first time in nearly five years that she had seen him. Penny still hadn’t given him an answer.
She had met once with Justin––User123456 as he had been for so long––in person, and was seeing him again later that day. He was going to start connecting Penny with Enchanti working and living in the area. He’d been the first Enchanti she’d knowingly met in person, and the experience had been strange. Just knowing that inside, he had the same potential she did was a new experience. For every day of her life since first making Abbey outrun that dog, Penny had assumed that she was the only one, that she was unique, and freakishly so. It was what was inside her that had demanded she tell no one. Remain in the shadows and be thought a freak rather than to say to people and confirm the fact.
With money still an issue––outside of working for Clive Banks––the arrival of summer gave her two challenges. She now had more time, and more opportunity to take Clive’s calls, which were by that point coming every day. She was also still highly dependent on heroin, which kept Penny in his firm control. She had tried to give up drugs once when her exams were starting. She’d made it three days. Her body had given out. She was, however, able to go most days without using her gift. Since finding out the truth about it all, and despite Justin and many others warning her of the dangers of not using it regularly, Penny didn’t want to give it, the thing living inside of her, that pleasure. She could be strong; she could resist. The longer she did, the more the pressure grew inside. Her thoughts became darker still, her dreams becoming one long nightmare. Sleep was escaping her. All this threw her onto heroin all the more, and she needed to get through her exams. She’d told herself she would stop once they were over.
Now that she had reached that point, stopping didn’t feel so comfortable. She thought about getting some professional help. The voice in her head would always counter that with the knowledge that there was another way out. She knew only too well what that meant.
She’d been thinking about death, on and off, for the previous five years. In the early months, when her gift was still unexplored, and she had not understood how to control it, she would dismiss the occasional thought that would seemingly and randomly drop into her mind. Just one of many bizarre things about which a person thinks. Nothing to focus on.
However, as she delved more into who she was––and mainly through the most difficult times she had gone through––that thought came back again and again. The single time it had seemingly lifted––Penny had wondered if it had gone for good––was when Penny had been sharing with Joy. Those happy weeks, a time of real openness for Penny, had seen a massive release in that pressure. Now that was all long gone and the pressure was as intense as ever. It would reach fever pitch before the university year might otherwise begin.
Justin was waiting for Penny as she arrived at the cafe. She was running fifteen minutes late already.
“I thought you weren’t going to show for a moment,” he said as Penny took the free seat opposite him. Justin was quite a bit older than she was. Penny hadn’t asked but placed him at around her father’s age, maybe a little less. It was hard to know, and she hadn’t seen her father in the last five years. Perhaps he’d aged considerably, maybe that happened around midlife?
“The car wouldn’t start,” Penny said, weakly. She’d apparently walked from home, as she had done the previous time they had met. Justin didn’t bother to comment. A few seconds later the waitress came to take Penny’s drink order, before disappearing to go and prepare it. There was a slight moments’ awkwardness before Penny smiled and opened her mouth.
“I meant to ask you, have you ever met Rogue in person?” Rogue2017 had been the username for another man who had been continually working and tag teaming, it seemed, with Justin on the forums.
“No, he doesn’t fly. I’ve never been to the States, either.”
“Doesn’t fly?”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, though elaborated no more, nor offered any further comment. It was if that was enough of a reason.
“But you have met the man calling himself IAME1?” Penny had since learnt his real name was Clarence Aldridge. He was or had been, a computer programmer from California. Clarence was the man behind the forum Penny had discovered. IAME stood for I am Enchanti, and he had been the first to declare that fact openly. He knew more about the world of Enchanti than almost anyone else.
“Yes, Clarence travels widely. He’s well known. I’ve not had a lot of personal time with just him, but we have spoken. We’ve been around the same small table together.” Most Enchanti gatherings were small. In the past, they had been more substantial, growing over time until the attacks happened. People had been killed. It was soon apparent that they were targeted, and this had been possible after infiltration. Over the previous two decades, the whole group had become more secretive, gatherings far more low key and attended only by a few trusted souls. The online forum world had emerged. They would use that to find other Enchanti, people, and these mostly teenagers, looking for meaning to life when all their gift told them was that they were the only one. There were at least one hundred thousand registered Enchanti, with more and more emerging all the time.
“What does Clarence think about my father?” Penny had been asking Justin about what he thought of her father several times already, and Justin had always gone silent. It seemed he didn’t want to say something that might be considered out of turn. So Penny would move the focus onto the opinions of another man.
“We’ve been here, Penny. I’ve told you, it’s not my place to say anything, even if just the thoughts of someone else.”
“Is he dangerous? That’s all I want to know. If I’m going to meet him, if I’m going to give him the time to walk back into my life––even if just for a moment––I need to know what I’m letting myself in for.”
“Clarence trusts him. That’s why he is allowed on the forums.” Penny couldn’t help but read a million things from Justin’s expression and his tone. How she wished she could use her gift to read his thoughts, though it never worked on a fellow Enchanti.
“But others don’t?” Penny wasn’t going to use his name, but it was clear that was true as well.
“It’s not that. Someone is giving our enemies inside information. Someone––maybe it’s an individual, maybe it’s more––on the inside and a part of our invisible cyber world, is passing on information. It has to be from there.”
“Is there anywhere else it could be coming from?”
“No, not really. It all exists online now. There used to be physical stuff, but that was too dangerous. It all got destroyed.”
“All of it?”
“Yes, I think so. None of it is current anymore, anyway. It’s the forums that have the most up-to-date details of how many of us there are, where we are and all that. Anyone on the inside who isn’t who they really are could be abusing this information.”
“To what end?”
“To expose us. To destroy us, and ultimately to kill us.”
“To kill?” It seemed a somewhat extreme reach to Penny at that moment.
“Absolutely. People have died. Enchanti, I mean. Murdered, I believe. And not only Enchanti. Humans who have been given gifts by Enchanti, even if they didn’t know that fact. People who were unwittingly serving our kind, murdered and no longer able to do what they did for us.”
“Why?” Penny had read a lot about how humans in security positions were given abilities to see anyone invisible, for example, so that nobody could rob a bank. It made no sense why these people would be targeted.
“Why, it is quite simple, Penny. They think anyone who has any gift in them is no longer human. They want to cleanse the world
of us all––Enchanti and the gifted alike.” The gifted was a collective term for anyone in the real world who carried powers endowed on them by an Enchanti. Millie, Penny’s friend, was one of these people. Had Penny put her friend in danger?
“And some people wonder if my father is behind all this?” It seemed far-fetched, and yet why should she defend him? What right did he have for any of her compassion, given what he had done to her?
“Some have concerns. He is outspoken. He openly talks along the lines of a purer race, not in the sense of Hitler and all that, mind. He thinks Enchanti should lay down their gift. It would disappear within a generation. You know, he never wanted children for that reason.” Penny knew that too well, and he was known for championing that mindset. However, and especially since learning everything she had over the previous few months, Penny couldn’t help but see self-preservation being a factor, the fear her father must have lived with if his offspring would turn out to be a son.
“He wants us to die out?” The fact Penny was using the inclusive term of us showed how much she had come along in such a short period. It didn’t seem long ago that she thought she was the only one.
Half an hour later, their drinks long finished, the conversation had come to a close. Clive had just called Penny. He had some more heroin to drop off and had another couple of clients lined up for that evening.
“Look, I need to go,” Penny said to Justin, her hushed conversation she’d just had over the telephone now over. He could tell something was up.
“Everything okay?”
“Yes, it’s fine.”
“Was that him?” There was panic in Justin’s eyes, Penny momentarily misunderstanding what he meant, a slight terror rising in her that he otherwise knew about Clive Banks and all that it meant for Penny. “Your father. Was it him?”
“Oh, no, it wasn’t. It was work,” Penny said, letting out a silent breath. “They need me to come in later.”
A couple of minutes later, Penny had said goodbye and left Justin where she had found him. She still wasn’t sure what to do, or how to think, about her father.
2
I’ve always been an all or nothing kind of girl. I wonder now reflecting as I have been if that is why the parasite living inside me affected me so much, why the side-effects were so extreme if I didn’t keep it active?
You see, I’d since read all about how most Enchanti do simple things every day to keep the risk at bay––like making things float, making trees and plants grow or fruit. Little stuff. Like someone taking moderate, stress-free exercise daily, instead of the mass impact stuff I occasionally did. I’d started light, with the gift––I’d grown lemons, I’d made lamps float. But that had soon lost its appeal. It had to be more significant; it had to be riskier. Of course, now I see that it was the weeks apart that caused the excess. I wasn’t taming whatever it was that needed taming. It wasn’t happy.
Well, neither was I. All it had done was destroy me. I was soon to understand, that for me to be free, one of us had to die––and there was no killing this parasite, not really, anyhow. My demise felt as inevitable as the daily need for another fix.
So I knew I had nothing to lose. I might as well see my father, at least once. If it was all going to be over soon, I didn’t have a great deal to fear from arranging a meeting. It was time to allow my father a visit.
The call had come one week into June. It took some getting used to, hearing her father’s voice for the first time in years. He’d sounded frail, as if age and life had caught up with him, as if it wasn’t giving him much longer, though the more they chatted, the more he seemed to gain strength. Penny figured that he must have been as nervous as she was feeling. It couldn’t have been easy for him, though as soon as that thought, that inch of sentiment settled, Penny quickly dismissed it. He didn’t deserve her compassion. Not yet, anyway. Probably never.
Still, going from a call to a face-to-face meeting took more courage yet. Penny had not mentioned the home as a possible venue––if he had been expecting that, he’d done an excellent job of not seeming disappointed. A high-street cafe would easily suffice for the most unexpected of reunions, as far as Penny was concerned. She reminded herself, as she set out on foot for the appointment with her father that she had learned some months before that he’d been looking for her. Penny’s father had been searching for his lost daughter. As much as she didn’t want it to be the case, Penny couldn’t help but allow a little hope to flood her doomed soul.
She was the first to arrive of the pair, though had planned on that being the case. She hadn’t wanted him to be already waiting for her. She needed to settle herself first. She’d thought about calling Justin that morning, asking him to come and sit nearby––not apparently there, but close. She had resisted. Her father might have seen, might have recognised Justin. It would have made it more awkward than it might already otherwise be.
As it was, there were plenty of people around. Penny searched the faces of everyone present, most deep in conversation or lost on their phone. None of them was the face of a man she wondered if she would still recognise. When he had left, Penny’s mother had removed all the photos of him, which was all the family photo’s, as he only appeared with either Penny’s mother or a few rare ones of them as a three. Penny didn’t know if these pictures still existed anymore.
Penny had been in the cafe for twenty minutes, already on her second expresso, when Thomas walked in through the door. He’d hardly changed, and Penny recognised him immediately. He had glanced around, but his eyes took little time to settle on Penny. There was instant recognition. He smiled, working his way around the crowded tables until he was standing in front of Penny.
“Hello, Penny,” he said, their reintroduction plastic and awkward. Neither quite knew how to refer to the other.
“Hello,” Penny replied, not knowing whether to call him Thomas––a name she’d never used, or dad, the title she’d always used before he’d left. She didn’t think she could call him by the name she’d used ever since that day. That might not have gone down well in a place with so many children around.
“You’ve grown so much!” he said, after taking a seat. He’d examined Penny, as much as he could see of her. She’d remained seated as he’d arrived, though he couldn’t blame her for not standing up to greet him. He knew this was far more difficult for her than it was for him, most certainly.
“That's what happens after five years,” Penny shot back all too automatically. She didn’t want it to turn into an argument, not from the outset, anyway. “I’m sorry,” Penny conceded, having realised what she’d just said.
“No, it’s okay. You have every right to be angry, and that’s something you need to get out of your system someday. Sometime soon, for sure. I just ask that it’s not today. Let’s park those feelings for the moment. Treat this as a truce, a chance to reconnect first, before we go over old ground.”
A thousand objections jumped to mind for Penny, but she held her tongue. What Thomas had said made a lot of sense.
“Can I get you a drink?” a waitress said at that moment, springing alongside their table, catching them both a little unaware. She had addressed Thomas, seeing as Penny was already nursing a coffee.
“I’ll have a latte, please,” he said, the waitress vanishing into the melee as quickly as she’d come, taking an empty cup away with her.
“Look, I’m so happy that you have agreed to meet with me, Penny, I am.” He seemed genuinely beaming as he spoke, and Penny couldn’t help but let out a little smile, though chased it away as soon as she realised it had come. Penny didn’t know what to say, so didn’t say anything, taking another slow sip of her drink instead, understanding there was not that much of it left. She’d have to pace herself or buy a refill very soon. That seemed a little excessive, however.
“You’ve learned a lot over the last few months,” Thomas said, the silence a little off-putting after it had continued since his previous comment. “That’s a hell of a thing wit
h which to come to terms. You okay?” Penny lowered her mug away from her face and placed it on the table. There was the slightest of shakes in her fingers as she pulled her hand away––it had been a day since her last fix––but if her father had noticed anything, he wasn’t letting on.
“It’s a lot,” Penny said, quickly, determined to make conversation, to move attention on from whatever he might have just noticed about his daughter’s heroin dependent, drug depleted body. “I mean, it changes everything.”
“Changes how much you hate me?” Thomas said, though smiled at his attempt at humour.
“I think it’s a little early to be joking about anything, dad,” she said, the last word coming out automatically as if she were just thirteen again, and her always joking father was telling yet another story.
“Look, I don’t expect you to welcome me back with open arms. That's not the purpose of this get-together. I’m not looking to move back home. I have somewhere to live.”
“That’s good. I’ve got used to living on my own too,” Penny said, though realised her father hadn’t mentioned whether he was alone or not. Had he met someone else since? Penny realised afresh there were a million things she didn’t now know about the man in front of her.
“How’s the cough?” Penny knew what he meant. She’d seen it multiple times mentioned on the threads, and the information she’d then read went on to explain things more. Without an explicit name for what it was that was inside them, Enchanti had regularly just called it a cough. That way, if out and about, anyone overhearing would be none-the-wiser, assuming they were just talking about some infection or other.
“I have it under control.”
“You don’t use it daily?” He’d asked her that on the telephone.
“No.” Her father seemed happy with that––his mission, Justin had said, was that Enchanti should end the dependency that the cough demanded, and learn to control it, learn to live a healthy, human life. He campaigned that Enchanti were human beings, that they had always been that, and it was only someone back many generations ago who was infected by the parasite that had changed things. Thomas believed the only way forward was for his kind––he was still an Enchanti, even if only a carrier––to rid the planet of the parasite for good.