Fallout

by S D Wasley

  “Well, you’d have heard of the guy who ran this place when it was, like, a pregnant women’s shelter in the nineteenth century? Some of the old farmers say he had the women working at the tannery when they were carrying their babies.”

  “Charles Gaunt? I read about him. I thought the official line was that he was a philanthropist?”

  “Apparently he provided cheap labour to the tannery in the form of his charity cases. And not just doing the factory work either.” She gave us a significant look.

  “He prostituted them?” Cain sounded disgusted.

  “To the tannery workers and bosses. The historians say that’s rubbish, though. They say there’s not a scrap of proof he was using them that way.”

  “I wonder if Gaunt knew about these underground rooms,” I said, looking around. “Maybe this was where the women came to hide from him.” I looked up at the words carved into the wall above us: Adsero nos. Protect us.

  Even when Owen and Liz arrived, I kept thinking about Charles Gaunt and the history of the ruin under which we met each night. How many bad things had happened here? My mum used to talk about places having psychic footprints. Dad always dismissed anything that sounded new age or unchristian, but if anywhere had a psychic footprint it was this place. All of a sudden the room was oppressive.

  Everyone else was busy with conversation so I unobtrusively disappeared. I headed for the back rooms to carry out my own private exploration, using my phone for a flashlight. There were a number of abandoned chambers, large and small. Last week’s Ancient History class popped into my mind and I wished I had a ball of string to make a trail back, like Theseus when he was searching the labyrinth for the Minotaur. It would certainly feel better to have some kind of sure path back to the warmly lit main chamber where Cain sat casting his perfect light on the other five. Nevertheless, I wandered on my own, looking for this place’s Minotaur.

  Although I could still hear the others talking, I somehow became a little lost. I paused at the doorway of one of the rooms to get my bearings. God, it was so cold down here. I could have sworn something moved just as my phone’s screen timed out and darkened. I fumbled with it, desperate for some light and half-ready to call out for help. When I managed to illuminate the screen again, holding it up in my trembling hand, the room was empty. A rag lay on the floor in one corner but nothing else. I gave a shaky sigh of relief.

  Then I stopped. I’d heard something. I stood stock-still, holding my breath. Voices? I waited. Nothing. But as I was about to turn back, there it was again: the indistinct sound of speech. Nothing identifiable. I couldn’t even tell if it was man, woman or child but it was definitely mumbling speech. And it wasn’t coming from the main chamber; it was coming from this cold, empty room.

  Chapter 3: Adventu

  I didn’t mention my eerie moment. As soon as I got back to where everyone was sitting around with drinks and chips, chatting and laughing, I realised I was being ridiculous. Of course I hadn’t heard anything. Didn’t I have enough of the uncanny in my life without imagining ghosts?

  We got straight into our nightly work of recording the visions experienced during the day. Liz hadn’t had any visions at all, which was unheard of for her. Her face glowed with excitement as she told us her day had been vision-free, a strong sign of imminent transformation. Cain told the others how I’d noticed sound figured in Liz’s visions from yesterday.

  “Of course. Liz heard the truck driver speak. How didn’t we pick that up?” Nadine gave me a sour glance, perhaps irked that she hadn’t noticed it herself. “And now you haven’t had any visions at all for a day?” she asked Liz, who nodded. Nadine twisted her lips, ruminating. “Longer timespans between visions ...”

  “You’re getting close,” Jude told Liz, looking into her eyes. She beamed.

  The attention moved onto Helen who did have some visions to recount.

  “I had a vision of a little boy in hospital,” she said in her sweet, slightly nervous voice. He had a teddy bear tucked under his arm and his head was bandaged. He was asleep. There was a fifty-cent coin on his bedside table. I noticed it because of the colour―blue. A couple of greeting cards and a football, but this bright blue coin was what caught my attention.”

  “Silver converts to blue,” Owen told her.

  “What did he look like?” Liz asked as she wrote in the ledger. “The little boy?”

  “No colours other than the blue coin,” Helen said. “I couldn’t even get a hair colour because of the bandage. He had a round face, and maybe tanned skin, or part-black. His teddy bear was old and shabby-looking.”

  “Could you see any charts or medical apparatus?” Liz asked.

  Good thinking, Liz. Being a nurse, she might be able to identify details about what had happened to this boy from clues around him.

  “I should have looked for that.” Helen’s voice was apologetic. “I didn’t, though. Sorry.”

  “How old, approximately?” I asked.

  She thought. “My little brother’s seven. This boy looked older than that. Maybe nine or ten?”

  She’d also had a vision of a man holding a blue clipboard, standing over a pit of sand. He was scribbling, back turned to a group of men talking nearby. He’d written something but all she could recall seeing on the page was CRVIX.

  “Crvix?” Jude frowned. “What’s a crvix?”

  “Sorry.” Helen shrugged. “That’s all I can remember.”

  “Roman numerals?” I suggested.

  “There’s no ‘r’ in Roman numerals,” Owen told me.

  “It couldn’t have been crack?” Nadine asked. “Like, the drug?”

  “Don’t think so. It was handwriting, obviously, and not that neat, but it definitely looked like ‘crvix’ to me.”

  “Shorthand for ‘correction’?” Owen suggested. “Or corrective? Corrective Services?”

  “Crux?” was Liz’s contribution. “That’s a word, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s a misspelling of cervix?” Nadine gave a laugh and Liz frowned. “Cervical cancer is very serious,” she reproached her.

  I was hoping for my own insight to kick in but it didn’t. All I could do was shrug when Cain glanced my way. With Helen’s recount done that was pretty much it for the evening’s activities. Perhaps this was what our future would look like. As each member of our group stopped having fragmented visions on a daily basis, and became a fully-fledged supernatural being who had only complete and detailed visions, would our nightly meetings become redundant? Eventually Helen and Liz would also transform and none of my decoding would be necessary anymore because the visions would be clear and whole for all of them. A quiet voice nagged at me, asking what my role would be once that came to pass. If they didn’t need Frankie to help decode the curious fragments of visions anymore, then why would they need Frankie at all? I gazed at Helen, fighting my gnawing envy.

  With no reason to stay around any longer Nadine departed early. Cain wanted to do some research on the mysterious crvix word so the rest of us also left pretty early. As I parked Uncle Max pulled into the driveway behind me, unusually late home. He stopped the car to speak to me.

  “Frankie, bella,” he called out the window, “are you all better?”

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  “Oh, good.” He looked tired. “This bug is sweeping through town, whatever it is.”

  “So it wasn’t only people who ate at Misty’s Coffee Shop?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. Looks more like a nasty widespread infection. Maybe E. coli. Some people are having mild doses and others are quite sick. There have even been a few hospitalisations.”

  “Wow. I got off lightly.”

  “Good,” he said. “One of my patients is particularly ill. I wouldn’t want you to suffer like he is.” He took the handbrake off.

  “I hope you get a decent night’s rest tonight, Uncle Max.”

  “Me, too! Goodnight, bella.”

  ****

  There were a lot of empty seats in my college classes
that week. The town’s doctors demanded testing for E. coli contamination but it wasn’t that, after all. Presumably it was a virus that had hit the Augur’s Well population hard. Uncle Max remained busy in his clinic and at the hospital for over a week before the spate of illnesses tapered off. A couple of people got so bad they had to stay in hospital for several days. My uncle said he’d never seen so many people affected by a single wave of gastroenteritis in all his years as a doctor. Luckily I didn’t pass the virus on to anyone and the whole of Cain’s group stayed well. Albion took herbal preventatives and washed his hands with antiseptic gel all day long.

  Around a week after she’d started at Gaunt House Helen called my phone while I was on the bus home from college. I answered it with a quiet hello so I wouldn’t disturb the other passengers.

  “Hi, Frankie. I’ve got a problem.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Gran had to take Mum to hospital.”

  “Oh, no ... is she okay?”

  “Yeah, I think so. This happens sometimes. She takes a bad turn and needs a night or two in hospital. But that means there’s no one to look after my little brother.”

  My heart seemed to stop for a moment. For real? Was she honestly going to ask me to babysit so she could still go to Gaunt House? Was her respect for my role in the group that low?

  “Frankie?” She checked if I was still on the line. “What should I do? I can’t leave him by himself. Do you think Cain would mind if I brought him along?”

  “Uh ...” I was caught off-guard. I shoved my mistaken resentment back down and wrangled with this new idea. A child, sitting among us while we met at the underground chamber, discussing unnatural visions of death and violence? “Uhhh ...”

  “Patrick is seven years old and profoundly autistic. He won’t betray us. He can’t. He only speaks occasionally, one or two words at a time. He’s not capable of telling anyone about our meetings.”

  “Why don’t you ask Cain?”

  “I ... I wanted to ask your opinion first.”

  “Are you scared of what he might say?”

  She hesitated. “Not scared.”

  She was. She was as overwhelmed by Cain as I had once been. I remembered cornering Jude to ask him about Cain before he let me in on their secret. God, Helen really was crushing on him. I took pity.

  “I think it will be fine to bring Patrick.”

  “Thanks, Frankie.” She sounded immensely grateful.

  I offered her a lift, recalling that she shared a car with her grandmother, and arrived to pick her up outside her house as night fell, beeping the horn from the driveway. Helen ushered a little fair-haired boy out of the house. He wore sunglasses and stared down at a handheld game device. She buckled him into the back of Albion’s car, working around his device―an older model smartphone. The familiar music of one of those inane arcade-style games piped loudly from the phone. Honey Hive or Buzzy Bees, something like that. Vanessa had been addicted to it for a while.

  “Headphones going on, Patrick,” Helen said, raising her voice. She placed headphones over his ears. He made a sound of protest until she hastily plugged them into his phone. Then he became peaceful again, settling back against the seat, immersed in his game.

  “He’s cute,” I said as she joined me in the front.

  “Yeah. He’s a good kid if you know how to handle him,” she said. “Thanks for the lift.”

  We drove out to Gaunt House. Usually Cain was the first one there each night but tonight it was us in the little pink hybrid. As I parked I wondered how we would get Patrick down into the underground chamber. I grabbed a flashlight from Albion’s car in case the little boy was scared of the dark.

  “Is he okay with ladders?”

  “Yeah. He spends half his life in his treehouse. He’s got this.”

  The main issue, it turned out, was that we had to take his phone away while he climbed down. He fought at first. Helen had to say, “Patrick. Ladder,” about five times before he settled down and looked at the ladder inside the open trapdoor.

  “Down,” he said.

  “Yes, down.” Helen sounded relieved. “Want to go first, Patrick?”

  I thought the dark might spook him but he got straight onto it. Helen really knew him. I kept the flashlight shining on the ladder until Helen was down the bottom with him, and then dropped it carefully into her waiting hands so she could shine it for me.

  “Pretty cool, huh, Patrick?” she said to the little boy.

  I pulled the trapdoor shut, a little worried about how the kid might react. He could freak out at any moment. Most kids would already have done so.

  “You keep the flashlight,” I said to Helen when I reached the ground. “Lead the way with Patrick.”

  She led him down the short tunnel to the chamber door and let us all inside. Patrick wasn’t at all interested in the candlelit subterranean chamber. As soon as she’d got him settled on a mattress he looked at his sister’s bag and said, “Bees?”

  “Yep.” She fished his smartphone and headphones out of her bag. “Here you go.”

  Patrick immediately launched his bee game again, ignoring Helen as she arranged his headphones over his ears. I broke open some chips and she put the bag in front of him but Patrick wasn’t interested.

  “Good thing you don’t need a signal for that game,” I said and Helen nodded with a wry smile.

  The ground above us rumbled with the sound of Cain’s motorbike. Within a minute he was in the room with us. He gave us both the start of a warm smile but stopped dead and stared with amazement at the kid between us. Helen looked at me urgently, like she wanted me to do the explaining.

  “Uh, this is Patrick. Helen’s little brother,” I supplied. “She didn’t have a sitter for him, so she brought him along.” The anxiety in Helen’s eyes prompted me to confess my role in the incident. “I said it would be fine.”

  “He’s autistic,” she added. “Barely speaks.”

  “Oh!” Cain gazed at Patrick, his expression unreadable. “Okay ...”

  “Are you sure?” Helen fidgeted. “I can leave if you ...” She didn’t finish, probably, remembering she had no car tonight.

  “No, it’s fine, of course,” he assured her with a smile.

  We had to go through the same ritual each time someone new arrived. It was Liz who seemed the most perturbed by the little boy’s presence. He was no trouble though. He sat playing his game, sunglasses still covering his eyes, while we talked. We got into the vision discussion once everyone was settled. Liz went first, flicking an uneasy glance at Patrick.

  “The vision I saw today was quite detailed.” Nadine and Jude exchanged a fleeting look. “It was the two little boys at Market Lake again. They’re talking, or maybe arguing. They’re walking. One’s wearing a red hoodie. The small one stops and the bigger one looks back and says something to him. He’s bossing him around, I think. The younger one looks upset. Worried. He stays there a moment while the other boy walks on, but then he follows. It seems like he can’t make his mind up about something. The other boy is worried, too, but he deliberately isn’t looking back because he wants the little one to follow him.” She paused. “It’s like ... it’s like the bigger one wants to go somewhere but the younger one is scared.”

  Helen had seen something related to the Market Lake visions, as well. “The woman in the kiosk was pulling in her napkin and straw holders, packing up like it was the end of the day. I saw some disposable cups stacked behind her, next to the drinks dispenser, you know, those giant cups they use for milkshakes and stuff? They were striped bright blue.”

  Helen had also had a vision of a woman walking with her dog, the leash neon yellow. The woman was staring at something ahead of her with a look of interest upon her face. Helen didn’t recognise the scene but thought it may have been Market Lake because there was water glinting through the trees beyond the woman, in the distance.

  After a while Patrick stopped his game to eat half a bag of chips, his solemn eyes takin
g in the roomful of people. By now we were so used to him, no one even paused in their speculations on the fragmented visions. He got up and started poking around a little. Helen glanced over as he peered at the stereo Jude had hooked up, usually out of batteries. The little boy prodded ineffectually at a button and Helen went back to the continuing discussion about the Market Lake vision.

  “Maybe we should keep watch at Market Lake,” Liz suggested, appealing to Cain for back up. “Taking shifts. Helen’s vision suggests the event will take place near closing time for the kiosk but it’s still daylight when it happens. That’s a pretty small window each day so it shouldn’t be too hard to cover.”

  Nadine gave her an impatient glance. “Liz, you need to trust us. Trust the visions. One of us will have a full vision before it happens. Maybe even you.” Although Liz flushed with pleasure I found Nadine’s words condescending. She threw a look my way and for a moment I suspected she could read my thoughts.

  “What we will do,” Cain said, his voice washing calm over us, “is be ready. We may need to drop everything and be prepared to act when the vision comes. Make sure our phones are charged and audible at all times and that we’re never stranded without transport. We don’t know how much warning we’ll get.”

  Nadine gave him a frown. “What about you? You stay down here sometimes, right? You won’t have a signal.”

  “Yes, that’s a problem,” he said. “But I’m not generally down here during the day. I’ll be conscious of regularly connecting to the network, anyway.”

  Helen jumped up, startling us all. “Patrick!”

  The boy had vanished. He must have wandered off down the dim corridor. I scrambled to my feet to help her.

  “Come on, we’ll find him in no time,” Cain said. The sound of his voice erased most of the worry from Helen’s face.

  Liz noticed my flashlight on the ground and passed it to Helen while I pulled a candle off a sconce. The unpleasant temperature of the lesser rooms meant we rarely ventured beyond the main chamber or the little room where the cooler was kept, so none of us knew our way around particularly well. However, Patrick couldn’t have gone far. He’d been in the room with us only a few moments earlier and, anyway, he didn’t have a flashlight. And what kind of kid roamed around in pitch blackness? We called his name, Helen and Cain leading the way down the black corridor. Some of the chambers contained doorways to further rooms, like little clusters of cells, and I turned into one of these to check for Patrick. I couldn’t see far in front of myself but he didn’t seem to be in this set of cells so I made my way back out and tried the chamber across the corridor.