Erased

by Nick Gifford

  “Whew... You’re hot, aren’t you? Intense. What have they been doing to you?”

  He remembered the pills she took. How she had struggled before ... some time in the past ... with having him close.

  She walked past him, and climbed the steps set against the wall. “Come on,” she said. “I feel exposed out here. You never know when they’re watching.”

  He hurried after her, as she turned left along the road behind the wall.

  “It’s not what you were expecting,” she said. “I’m sorry. What are you going to do now?”

  He thought of his dreams of only a few minutes before. Of finding his mother, and setting off for a new life somewhere.

  “I have a friend,” he said, finally. “She’s in trouble. I want to help her, and then I just want to get out of all this. How do I do that, Kath? How do I break free?”

  She didn’t answer. He suspected she didn’t have an answer.

  The road emerged from behind the wall, and cut through the shingle at the head of Wolsey Point. Ahead of them, there was a row of white cottages set at an angle across the beach.

  “I’m staying here,” said Kath. “With some friends. They’re out now. We have the place to ourselves. We can talk, for a time.”

  He followed her to number three, and waited as she unlocked the door. They went through to the kitchen and she set the kettle on an electric ring to heat. He had been here before, he knew.

  They sat at a long, narrow table.

  “I’m sorry, Liam.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes. Instead, she stared down at the table’s surface. “I’m not your aunt. Is that what you remember me as? I lose track. I’m not your sister, either. Or your mother. I’ve played all those roles at times. Somewhere in your head you have me in some kind of merged role as the older woman in your life, I suppose. They suck you in. Trap you. Sometimes I even forget who I am myself...”

  “I thought I was coming here to meet my mother.”

  She glanced at him for an instant, then looked away. “You never had a mother, Liam. Or if there ever was anyone who played that role in your life then it was a long time ago and your memories are probably so mangled there’s no knowing the truth. I’m sorry, Liam. I...”

  She glanced at him again.

  “Where did you get my number?” she asked, breaking a long silence. “That threw me.”

  He took out his phone and flashed the little screen at her. “On here,” he said flatly. “A reminder.”

  She nodded. “They must have overlooked that. It really is my birthday.”

  “What’s this all about?”

  Kath suddenly looked intense. “All around the world,” she said, “our kind are enslaved. They keep us in military bases or big commercial research units, they call us analysts and facilitators, but really we’re trapped, like battery hens or laboratory rats. They watch us, sort through us, and use us. They hook us to drugs that let us use our gifts and maybe even live a few years longer, even though those same drugs are just as likely to kill us young. They use us, control us, and destroy us. That’s how it has always been.”

  She went to the kettle, which was whistling on the hob. “In theory, NATS is part of that system, but in reality Sir Peter is running it like his own little kingdom – with our interests in mind. He wants to free us. The implants: they think they’re just part of the enslavement, but in reality Sir Peter hopes that they will be a lot safer than the drug programmes and let us live longer.”

  “Why me? What are they doing to me?”

  She sat again, having taken the kettle off the heat. “Talent is very variable. Unpredictable. Some people only have a touch of it. Lots of those who have it find that it fades in adulthood – that’s one of the reasons places like NATS are so important: they like to start using us as early as possible. With some people it emerges late and gets steadily stronger. Every so often, maybe once in a generation or even less, someone special emerges.

  “The normal world uses us, but they’re scared of us, too, Liam! They don’t want any of us to become too powerful, so they watch for any with special gifts. They’re looking out for anyone who might be special enough to pull the Lost together, someone who might channel their powers into something far more potent. Someone who could lead us to freedom.”

  Liam stared at her, the intensity in her eyes. She scared him, now. Where before she had just been a sad, broken figure, now she truly scared him.

  “They think that’s me?” he said, appalled.

  She sat back and looked him in the eye. “You have the right talent,” she said. “And it appears to be pretty potent. It’s still unlikely,” she concluded, “but you’ve passed all the tests so far. Sir Peter thinks he can shock it out of you: he reckons terror can accelerate the emergence of talents like yours. The harder he pushes, the more your capabilities will grow.”

  He shook his head. It was preposterous.

  “Don’t dismiss it, Liam. Don’t ever do that. The Government would eliminate people like you, people who might be a threat to the way things are.”

  “Isn’t that a bit drastic?”

  “You want drastic?” she said. “Like I said, these special talents only come along rarely, but the Government agencies who control us are terrified that it might happen again. They exploit our talents, but they don’t want us getting too strong. They’ll go to any lengths to stop that happening. The nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Second World War? They were targeted on a young woman who many thought might be one of the special ones. The Great Fire of London? A similar story, a young boy, this time. Usually it’s less extreme: a bullet, some poison, a car crash. You’re lucky. You really are lucky that Sir Peter is on your side and hasn’t just quietly swept you away.”

  ~

  Liam struggled to think. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t see Sir Peter Willoughby as being on his side. It was just a different slavemaster...

  There was a sound from the front of the house, a rattle of a key in the lock, the door opening, voices.

  Kath looked up, past Liam. “That’ll be them,” she said. “I’m sorry, Liam. You really have been like a brother to me sometimes. You won’t remember, but there have been good times, too. They keep wiping you and starting again. Writing and rewriting you to try to shape you, mould you. I’ve begged them to leave you alone, but...”

  This woman, whoever she was ... she looked broken, defeated.

  He leaned across the table. “Kath, tell me,” he said. She looked up now, meeting his gaze. “Where is my real mother? What happened to her?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she told him. “I’m sorry. I don’t know. But maybe you know. If you can dig deep enough.”

  Liam turned as a man came into the room. He was wearing a dark suit, and he had thinning grey hair and dark-framed glasses.

  “Liam,” said the man, in a gentle Scottish accent. “You won’t remember me. Or my two friends.” He waved a hand at two men who had followed him in. “Mr Smith and Mr Smith. They’re not related.”

  But Liam did remember. He remembered these cottages, and he remembered this man. He had helped him once before. Maybe all was not lost.

  “Oh, Liam, I think you’ll find that it is,” said this man who he had once known as Alastair.

  He was a mind-spy, then. And an enemy.

  “Oh, Liam. How juvenile to divide the world up along such strict lines! Surely we are all working for the greater good. We just adopt different strategies. I was a sceptic, you know. I really didn’t think Sir Peter was right about you. But you should be grateful. If Sir Peter and I had been doing our jobs you would have been eliminated a long time ago. The authorities don’t want him taking any risks. But he convinced me to join him and we gave you a chance. We nurtured you. We established all the best conditions to help your gift emerge. We think you may be a very rare individual, Liam.”

  “Someone special.”

  Alastair nodded.

  “Well you can tell Willoughby he
’s mistaken,” said Liam. He felt certain of that. He was just an ordinary fifteen year-old caught up in a world most people didn’t even know existed.

  “Oh yes?” said Alastair. “How would you know?”

  ~

  “Okay,” said Alastair, gathering up an attache case from a work surface. “Time to go.”

  Liam didn’t need to ask where.

  He thought resigned thoughts. He wondered if he had been wrong about Willoughby – Sir Peter, as these people called him. If he really had protected Liam from the authorities then maybe he deserved a chance.

  He followed Alastair through the house, and was followed in turn by the two Mr Smiths.

  He would do what they asked. That’s what they wanted him to think.

  They crossed the shingle to the road and waited while one Mr Smith went round to the side of the house to start the car.

  Liam sprinted.

  He had trainers on and he was young. They had suits and shoes that wouldn’t help them run. He had a chance.

  “Hey!” That was Alastair.

  He glanced back. The other Smith was chasing him, but Alastair just stood there, fumbling with his case.

  A multi-coloured flash smothered Liam’s senses. It seemed to have started somewhere inside his head.

  He felt nothing, heard nothing, saw nothing.

  He was on the ground, gasping for air.

  He looked up, and Alastair came into view. He had his little notebook computer balanced on the palm of one hand. “Please, Liam,” he said. “You’re being disrespectful. We are professionals, you know. We are in control. Your implant isn’t just there for your benefit. It was specially built for you. It gives us extra options, like–” He tapped a key with a flourish, and Liam saw another flash of light, weaker and briefer this time.

  When he opened his eyes again, Alastair was squatting, leaning forward on a hand so that he was close to Liam’s face, peering at him sideways. “Come on, Liam,” he said. “You’re a bright lad. Did you ever think, even for one moment, that you have been beyond our reach? Did you ever think you had slipped away from our control?”

  20 Somewhere deep

  It was like a Russian doll: pull it apart and you find another slightly smaller doll inside. And inside that, another. With Liam, it was the other way round: he was on the inside and it felt as if he was surrounded by layer upon layer upon layer. Every time he broke out ... another layer.

  But what if he turned the other way? What if he dug deeper?

  ~

  They bundled him into the back of a big white car. Alastair drove, and Liam slumped in the back with a Mr Smith on either side of him. He felt thought-shapes pressing in on his mind and he pushed them away, angrily.

  “Easy, easy,” said Alastair, looking back over his shoulder. “No point fighting it now, lad.”

  Kath stood in the doorway of number three, her face almost as pale as the whitewashed walls of the row of cottages. She didn’t wave, just watched as the car headed off along the road through the banked shingle.

  Liam drifted in and out of consciousness as the car threaded its way through the narrow streets of Wolsey and out onto the Suffolk back roads. “You’ll feel a little rough,” said Alastair, conversationally. “Your implant induced a mild seizure, a short-circuiting of the nerves in your brain. It’s not something we’d want to have to do to you too often, you know.”

  These were the people Liam was lucky to have on his side, as they had told him...

  He recognised the drive at NATS, long and straight, lined by tall poplar trees. As the car pulled up in the gravelled semi-circle before the main building, Liam peered around to the side where the out-houses were. The garage door was closed, and there was no sign of Luc. But then, there wouldn’t be, he realised, given the nature of Luc’s ability to avoid being noticed.

  He was clutching at straws.

  They led him inside. They weren’t returning him to Senior House, then. He wondered what lay in store for him here.

  ~

  A room. Much like any other pupil’s room, except that it was a single room, not shared.

  There was a bed up against one wall, and a desk and wardrobe opposite. At the far end, opposite the door, there was a tall sash window. He went to it, and saw that it was screwed down from the outside.

  So it was a room much like any other, except that it was a single room, with a screwed-down window and a door that had been locked behind him.

  A room much like a prison cell, then.

  He wondered if Hayley might be nearby, locked up in a similar room to this one.

  Perhaps, if they had not dealt with her already.

  It came as something of a shock to him to realise that it had only been earlier today – or yesterday, as he was sure it must be past midnight now – that Hayley had been taken from Senior House. Only a matter of hours.

  Perhaps she was nearby, then.

  He thought of that old film where they tapped out Morse code on the pipes to communicate between prison cells. He looked down at the radiator and kicked it, producing a muffled ringing sound. He didn’t know Morse code, and what did he have to say, in any case? Let her know that he, too, was in big trouble? That would cheer her up.

  He sat in the chair at the desk.

  He remembered Kath – if that was really even her name. He remembered what she had told him.

  Maybe you know. If you can dig deep enough.

  She had talked about what was happening to him as if it was some kind of repeated cycle. Trial and error. They kept wiping him and starting again, trying to mould him, to shape him into this legendary figure who would solve everyone’s problems, unite the Lost Families and lead them to freedom.

  He had protected some of his old memories once. Memories from before. The gull, the children singing, Three Trunker, the coastguards’ cottages...

  Those memories had mattered to him, and he had clung to them through whatever Willoughby and his people had done. The gull: freedom, from when he had broken free one time before. The children singing: his father betraying him. Three Trunker: a place of friendship. The cottages: Alastair, and help.

  He had been wrong in three of these, he realised. He had never been free. Anders, the mind-spy, had been one of the friends with whom he had shared Three Trunker. And Alastair had betrayed him, too, just like his father.

  But they had been memories that he had managed to hang onto, and rediscovered when they should have been lost to him.

  What if there were other memories, buried deeper? Memories from some earlier stage in this cycle of moulding and re-moulding him. Memories are who you are. You hold onto them with all you have.

  He tried and tried but nothing would come. He kept on though, it was all he had.

  And finally, it came to him some time in the depths of the night, in that dead time before dawn starts to silver the sky.

  ~

  “You don’t have to do this, Liam. You don’t have to go through with this.”

  His father held him by the shoulders so that he had to look back, into his father’s eyes.

  Slowly, Liam nodded. He’d had enough. The mind-games, the playing with his head.

  He was twelve years old, and he had just learnt that the things Dad and Sir Peter had been telling him weren’t true. He’d had enough of the lies.

  “I want to know what happened to Mum,” he said, patiently, as if he was talking to a small child. “I want to know. What really happened.”

  His father nodded. “Okay, son.”

  They were out on the Point. They had driven down here from Wolsey in Dad’s old Land Rover, through the high gates in the first fence, through the gap in the second fence, and through the gates in the final fence. Here, to the old Camp.

  Now, his father started the Land Rover up again, and they drove on past the big hangar to a cluster of buildings. The windows and doors were boarded up, and tamarisk and gorse grew all around, leaving only narrow trails through to the buildings themselves.
/>   A yellow sign read, “Danger! Contaminated premises.”

  They left the car there, and walked through to the second of the four buildings. The board over the door lifted aside easily and they went through. There was a door in the rear wall. Liam’s father opened it and they stepped into a small lift.

  “You realise Dr Shastri is going to have to edit your memories of all this, don’t you?” Liam’s father asked.

  Liam nodded. He wanted to know, even if only for a short time.

  Then his father leaned close. “You have to work really hard to hang onto memories when Dr Shastri removes them.” And he winked.

  They stepped out of the lift and into a long, brightly-lit corridor, much longer than the building above them.

  “So, Dad,” said Liam, “are you going to tell me?”

  “Give it time,” his father told him. “Now you’re down here, you might as well see some of what’s here among Sir Peter’s Follies.”

  Liam looked at his father. His guard seemed to have slipped this afternoon, perhaps because he knew that these memories would be wiped soon.

  They went into a room full of glass display cabinets, and framed photographs, mostly of small children. In the cabinets were foetuses – all damaged, deformed. One even had two heads: one normal, the second stunted like a doll’s head, sticking out at a strange angle.

  Liam stared.

  “Sir Peter’s failed experiments,” said his father. “Are you okay?”

  Liam nodded, and backed out of the room. He came to lean against the wall opposite the door, out in the bright corridor. His father stood in the doorway.

  “He comes down here sometimes,” he said. “Sir Peter. He comes down here to remind himself of the cost of his grand project. That’s what he claims. I’m not so sure, myself. I think he comes down here to gloat at the power he has over us all, his power over creation.”

  “The pictures?”

  The pictures on the wall... He recognised one. He had seen a smaller version of it before, framed. This larger version had been cropped closely around the small boy’s head and shoulders, but in the smaller version you could see the boy, held up in his father’s arms.