by Joan Lennon
The fire burned irregularly in its makeshift hearth, leaping up and throwing huge shadows against the blank windows, then dimming, then sparking and hissing as the varnish on the wood caught. The pile of satin vestments and shiny cloth flickered in the light. And there was Fred, squatting in the midst of it, like a toad in the princess’s bed. Master Erick, awake again, paced back and forth, his tall figure foreshortened from this angle. She couldn’t help noticing a small bald spot in the middle of all that silky hair.
‘… What did you bring them here for, then?’ the boy was saying, ‘I don’t want them. I don’t want anybody!’
‘Why did I bring them here? I didn’t bring them – I found them! Wandering about. Poking their noses in. Getting their hands on you. They’re dangerous, that’s what they are, and they don’t belong.’ Master Erick’s voice had a brittle edge to it. ‘I want them where I can keep an eye on them. Even you must have felt the energy coming off that wretched little axe. The girl still stinks of it! They all smell wrong…’
Then his tone changed. ‘Anyway, you don’t think you’re adequate company, do you?’ The man preened. ‘I was ready for a little proper appreciation, a little adoration, and I got it! You could see they thought I was fabulous. And I am. Look at everything I’ve done for you, you little toerag.’ He made an expansive gesture at the ruination all around them and laughed. ‘And to think I used to be just a bit of you, trapped inside that miserable boy’s body – it hardly bears thinking of.’ He gave a theatrical shudder. ‘You did a good day’s work for yourself when you split me off, I can tell you!’
Madlen was bewildered. What was he on about?
‘You used to be all frustrated and helpless, didn’t you, until you figured out how to use your little number games for yourself. Once I existed, all the grey people just knuckled under, didn’t they? You had the power then, didn’t you? Feeling cross? How about smashing something? Don’t like somebody? Poof – they’re gone. Everything and everybody, just the way you want them. A little god.’
Master Erick turned suddenly on the boy. ‘Except you couldn’t do it by yourself,’ he hissed. ‘And that’s what you made me for, isn’t it? Because I’m everything you’re not. I’m big, and important, and people listen to me, and they believe what I’m telling them. Isn’t that right?’
He loomed over Fred, who was cringing now in his satin nest.
‘Leave me alone,’ the boy whined. ‘Don’t forget – I can get rid of you any time I like. You’re the one who’s nothing! I get tired of you and – poof! – you’re gone!’
Master Erick looked down at his elegant fingernails with studied insolence. ‘Are you sure?’ he said.
His voice was suddenly so quiet Madlen had to strain to hear and so sinister it made her shudder.
‘Are you certain that is still the case?’ He turned slowly back and fixed the boy with his eyes. ‘I’ve been separate for quite some time now, my dear, and I’ve developed a taste for it. Oh yes. I wonder if you have been noticing anything, anything in the nature of a change, hmmm? In our special relationship? Are you sure you want me to call your bluff, little friend?’
Madlen was holding her breath. The man was so threatening, so powerful… what would Fred do? How could a boy fight someone like that?
He didn’t.
He crumpled and began to snivel into the satin. Only muffled bits of what he was saying reached the balcony.
‘… It wasn’t supposed to be like this…’ she heard him moan. ‘It was supposed to be better… You were supposed to take care of things…’ Then Fred lifted his head and wailed out loud, ‘It was supposed to be fun!’
And Master Erick slapped him. It was so sudden, and so vicious, that Madlen gasped, then clamped her hand over her mouth. But he hadn’t heard. He had hold of the boy by his shirt and was shouting, and hitting him with each word.
‘It’s… fun… for… me!… It’s –’
‘STOP IT! STOP IT!!’ screamed Madlen. She couldn’t watch any more, ‘Leave him alone!’
There was a horrible moment of silence, with nothing but a sick, panting sound in it. Madlen realized the sound was coming from her. Her heart was racing and she felt as if she were going to throw up.
‘Ahhh,’ said Master Erick, tilting his head slightly to stare up at her. ‘It’s you. Join us.’
Madlen shook her head, dumb with fear.
He continued to look at her while, almost casually, he shifted his grip to Fred’s throat and started to squeeze. The boy made a gurgling noise and clutched at Erick’s fist with both hands.
Madlen scrambled to her feet. ‘OΚ, OK,’ she said. ‘I’m coming! Let him go. Don’t kill him!’
Master Erick laughed and dropped Fred. ‘Of course not,’ he oozed. ‘What an idea! Why, the boy’s like… a brother to me. And bring the other two with you. I’d like us all to be together, if only for a while…’
Madlen turned and staggered back up the balcony steps to rouse the others. But it wasn’t necessary. Her scream had already woken them, and they were sitting up in their pews, wide-eyed and dishevelled. Without a word, they followed her down the stairs and into the nave of the church.
Master Erick was waiting for them.
19
Master Erich’s Cure for Boredom
Madlen, Bryn and Cam stood in a row.
‘What are you going to do with them?’ asked Fred. His voice was hoarse, and they could see red finger marks on his throat.
Master Erick stroked his beard and smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant sight.
‘What do we normally do when we come across something we don’t like?’ he mused. ‘Oh yes, I remember. We eliminate it. We tap into our clever little computer and we access their irritating little bubbles of life force and – hey presto! – they don’t exist. Well, they’re still around, aren’t they, but they can’t quite remember who they are any more, or where they were going, or what it was they were going to do…’
Madlen shut her eyes. Zombies, she quavered inside her head. They make zombies.
‘But that’s getting a bit boring.’
Her eyes snapped open again.
‘I don’t think we’ll bother with that this time.’ Erick was almost purring. ‘I’m going to think of something new. All I have to do is act out some of those things you used to imagine. Don’t you remember? You used to look at the lucky ones – just like these specimens – the ones who didn’t have to be special like you. And you used to imagine nasty things… Oh yes, there’s a lot I can do to our little friends, without beginning to strain my ingenuity. And all thanks to you…’
The three looked uneasily at Fred.
‘That was different,’ he muttered to the floor. ‘That was before…’
‘Before me!’ Erick laughed, and lunged at the same time. He caught Cam by the hair, wrenching the Dalrodian’s head back cruelly. ‘I can see this lasting a good long time – entertainment on tap…’
The horrified looks of the children seemed to interest him, the way a cat is interested in the terror of the mouse.
‘But I don’t want to hurry. The vestry would be a good place to store you just now, I think,’ he said. ‘The other two might like to lead the way.’
He twisted his grip in its hair, and Cam gasped.
‘OΚ, OK, we’re going,’ said Madlen quickly. ‘Where is it?’
The man indicated a door at the side of the nave, and Bryn and Madlen moved towards it.
‘Quicker!’
Another gasp from Cam had them running, and Erick followed with his captive. He shoved Cam into the room behind them and slammed the door to. There was the sound of a key turning in the lock.
Bryn went to Cam, and Madlen hurried over to the door.
She pressed her ear against the wood and listened.
There was the echoing of footsteps. It sounded as if Master Erick were leaving. A voice called after him.
‘Where’re you going?’
Madlen could hear the note of panic.
Master Erick chuckled unpleasantly.
‘Oh, don’t worry, little Freddy,’ he called back. ‘Don’t fret, little boy. I’ll be coming home to run things for you. But first I think I deserve another drink – and everyone should get what they deserve, just exactly what they deserve, don’t you agree?’ He chuckled again, and then added, ‘Don’t try and go anywhere, now, will you.’
It seemed as if Master Erick had gone. She pressed her ear harder against the wood, straining to hear more. For a long moment there was nothing, and then she drew back sharply.
A key scraped in the lock and the door swung inward. Fred stood in the doorway, a grubby, pathetic, white-faced figure.
‘Help me,’ he said.
20
Fred + Erick = ?
All at once he was shaking. Madlen made a move to put her arm around him, but he curled back his lip and snarled at her.
‘You aren’t allowed to touch me!’ he screamed. ‘I’m special! You’ll give me germs! You’ll make me sick!’
They looked at him, appalled.
‘Who said we shouldn’t touch you?’ asked Bryn. ‘Your parents?’
As soon as he’d spoken, it seemed like a dangerous sort of question to ask, but Fred had suddenly gone calm again.
‘My parents don’t tell me what to do,’ he said, matter of fact. ‘They’re just grey – grey people who go off to work. I have tutors, and analysts, though, and people who watch me, and people who watch the tutors and analysts… but I got rid of them.’
Madlen felt a cold shiver down her back. ‘How did you get rid of them?’ she asked.
Fred looked at her. ‘That was one of the very first things I did,’ he said. ‘People needed to pay attention – they needed to stop pushing me around. If you look like a kid, nobody listens, do they? So I divided off a bit of me so that the rest of me could get some peace. That’s Erick’s job – to keep all those grey people off my back.’
Cam was frowning. ‘Fred… Erick… Fred…’ it murmured, then almost shouted, ‘Oh, holy desert, are you trying to say you’re Frederick, and then you split yourself, and you called the bits Fred –’
‘– and Erick! Bryn groaned. ‘That is just so tacky! You could at least have gone for something like, I don’t know, Terry and Dactyl, or Watta and Wally. Or how about Cat-Ass and Trophy?!’
‘Cat-Ass and Trophy, oh yes, now that’s tasteful!’ tutted Madlen. ‘Frederick’s a perfectly normal name.’
‘Normal has nothing to do with it,’ muttered Bryn, but he subsided when Madlen kicked him.
Fred’s face darkened and he started to say, ‘You’re not allowed to make fun –’ when Cam interrupted.
‘Is that possible?’ it asked. ‘To do… what you said?’
‘Oh yes.’ Fred tried to sound casual, but didn’t succeed. ‘With access to enough power. Nobody else had noticed it, but I did. Staring them all right in the face…!’
‘What was?’ asked Madlen.
Fred looked at her with complete scorn. ‘The imbalance, of course. In the power potential. Like a weak place, I guess you’d say. Siphoning the energy through was a doddle – for me anyway. I could show you the maths, but you’d never understand.’
‘Where’d you learn to be so charming?’ muttered Bryn, but Cam cut in again.
‘What did your parents think… of you making Erick?’
And Fred crumpled into tears. They seemed to explode from his eyes, and his nose ran. It was a very sad, very unattractive sight.
‘They wouldn’t know,’ he gulped. ‘What do you expect? They were just Servers – they handed me over years ago. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Even to stupid people like you. They didn’t love me.’
Then, still leaking, ‘You don’t know anything,’ he half whined, half jeered. ‘I don’t know why I thought you could help me – you’re just ordinary.’
He made it sound like something dirty. He turned and started to walk away in disgust, until he heard a low laugh. It was Cam.
‘I used to be,’ it said. ‘Ordinary, I mean. And I used to know what was going on, and what was what. I’d give anything to make things back the way they were then. But they aren’t any more. And I guess they never will be again.’
Fred was intrigued in spite of himself ‘Why – what changed?’
Cam’s voice was low.
‘I found out the truth,’ it said. ‘I found out my mother had me as part of somebody else’s master plan and then she gave me away.’
Fred lifted a tear-streaked face.
‘She gave you away!?’ he whispered. ‘That means, you’re… you’re just like me!’
Cam looked horrified at the idea, but managed to nod.
‘Want me to tell you about it?’
Fred nodded solemnly. And he listened to every word. He listened as he hadn’t listened to a soul in years. Another voice, another face, another story – for the first time, something outside of himself was becoming really real.
*
‘I’ll show you my maths now, if you like?’
Cam heaved a big sigh and nodded. Fred trotted off into the darkness.
‘Got yourself a bosom buddy now,’ Bryn giggled softly. ‘You’re just so lucky!’
‘Shut up, Bryn,’ hissed Madlen. ‘Cam handled him beautifully – I didn’t notice you being very useful.’
Cam was too tired to even kick Bryn properly, so it just made a rude sign at him instead. He snickered, unrepentant. Then they heard the clunk of a switch being thrown.
At once, the whole front of the church was illuminated by hard, bright spotlighting.
‘The vicar had all that?’ Madlen gasped.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Fred, returning. ‘The vicar had an old Xerox machine and a manual typewriter. I brought this lot over from the lab where they used to keep me.’ He snorted and dragged a sleeve across his nose. ‘Totally blew the wiring, first time I booted it.’
The equipment covered the altar, and spilled over on to chairs and the pulpit and the floor. It was matt black and chrome, lean and powerful-looking, and it didn’t take much technological insight to guess that it would use an astonishingly huge amount of energy to run. At the moment, though, it was only humming gently, as if working on some problem so simple it could do it in its sleep. Fred moved between the monitors, checking and pressing buttons. Streams of equations began to trundle down the screens and disappeared, like shoppers on an escalator.
‘I keep it turning over most of the time,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of stuff I’ve never been too impressed by – quantum theory, basal physics – so I’m reconfiguring a lot. I could really do with a better rig. This does OK but it’s just not very fast. Later I – DON’T TOUCH THAT!!’
Cam leapt back as if stung. It had been bending over one of the monitors with a particularly complex cascade of numbers and symbols, which flickered and changed colour, and generally managed to look pretty and dangerous at the same time.
‘That’s the Mother Program,’ said Fred flatly. ‘It is not something you want to mess with.’
Cam held up its hands. ‘OΚ, OK, not a problem.’
Fred nodded stiffly and then looked away. The Dalrodian shrugged and wandered off to another display.
But Madlen didn’t. A peculiar expression had come over her face and she crept up to the monitor Cam had just left as if approaching something miraculous. Bryn was watching her. There was an almost visible shimmer of connection between her and what to him were only scribbles on the screen. She was hardly breathing. He moved closer to her.
‘Madlen?’ He spoke quietly. ‘You OK?’
She took a deep breath and sighed it out.
‘So beautiful,’ she murmured.
Bryn scratched his head. ‘What… that!?’
‘Yes. It’s just so… right,’ she said fervently. Then she grabbed his arm so hard it made him squeak. ‘That’s it!’ she whispered urgently. ‘Remember what Kate said? It would feel right! What if this is it… it must be – it’s what we�
��re looking for – the Quest Object! This is what we’re supposed to bring back…’
‘That? A bunch of numbers?! How can you know –’ began Bryn, but Cam, who had caught the end of the conversation, cut in with, ‘Never mind – just write it down quick! So you don’t forget it.’
Madlen shook her head. ‘You can’t really write it down, but it isn’t something you could forget,’ she said.
‘I told you, you won’t understand that,’ Fred interrupted loudly. ‘I’m the only one who can.’ He was watching them now, swinging back and forth on a swivel chair.
Madlen was still staring at the screen.
‘You really are a genius,’ she said quietly.
‘What?!’ Fred stopped swinging abruptly. ‘How can you tell?!’
‘This is how you accessed the energy leak, isn’t it,’ Madlen said, with wonder in her voice. She reached out a finger but didn’t touch the screen. ‘It’s a Non-repeating Möbius Loop Equation – a Ribbon! I’ve only read about those – I never believed I’d ever see one.’ She turned to Fred. ‘And you did it!’
Fred’s face was turning redder by the minute and his mouth was hanging open.
‘You did it,’ Madlen continued, her voice suddenly husky, ‘and now you’re going to have to terminate it.’
Fred’s head dropped and he glared up at her from under the mat of hair like a malevolent goblin. ‘It’s mine!’ he hissed. ‘Mine!’
‘It’s not yours,’ she said. ‘I think you know that really. Stuff like this – energy like this – it doesn’t just lie about for no reason.’
No response.
‘You must have thought, you must have wondered, if I’m taking it, who’s losing it? I don’t believe you didn’t wonder.’
Still not a flicker.
Cam sighed and stepped forward.
‘She’s right,’ it said firmly. ‘And you know it. It’s over, Fred. Time to turn off the computers, seal the leak, get shot of Master Erick and then… well, we’ll see where we are.’
Fred’s face was sullen and bleak, but he nodded.
‘And turning off the Mother Program is the way to do it, right?’ Madlen persisted. ‘Stop the flow of energy, and the separation between you and, er, the rest of you won’t be maintained any more?’