“Fine; file it and forget it. We move on.” Albright sucked in some beer. It washed some of the ever-present grit out of his mouth and down his throat.
In the following days, they concentrated their efforts on people close to those who had been reported missing, but made no progress. However, a few days before their time was up, Sergeant Owegbo informed them that a boy they had screened had disappeared. “This boy was Friday Jakande, sah.”
“I don’t like to hear that, Sergeant,” Albright said. “Have you any leads?”
“No, sah. It is most likely he has been taken and made disappear. I do not think we will even know his body if we find it.”
“Well, I hope you find Friday alive and well.”
“That’s the cousin of the two boys with that mtDNA anomaly, Inspector,” Peter said.
“Is it? Was he also accused of witchcraft, Sergeant?”
“For me, I do not know, sah, but we can find this out if you like.”
“It might be worth our while, Sergeant. Might provide a fresh lead.”
“Perhaps, sah.”
They made their way to Friday’s home and spoke with his mother, distraught and understandably concerned for her other children. None had yet been accused of witchcraft, but it was not uncommon for the accusations to fall on more than one child in a family.
“The people, they came and take him from the street,” she wailed.
“Who?” Albright asked. “Who will take them? Can you identify them?”
“Oh, it was neighbors that take him. I think they did kill him.”
“You know the people who did this?”
“Oh yes, I know them, but it do no good to say, no good.” She took the inspector’s hand and looked into his eyes. In her face was a look that Francis knew well. A look he saw every day in his own wife’s eyes. This woman’s babies were all gone, and now her ancestors’ long line had ended with her.
The local policemen sat in their car, half listening, uninterested. Albright realized they probably weren’t hearing anything they had not heard a thousand times before. When they’d finished with Friday’s mother, he asked them, “The neighbors just come and take a child, and you do nothing?”
Owegbo slid his foot off the dash of the Rover and stepped out of the car, at ease. “There is not a lot we can do, sah. They will not talk, and we will not likely find the body in a form we can identify, you see.” He shrugged.
For a moment, Albright was lost for words. Then he asked, “Is this likely to happen to the two boys we met the other day?”
“Oh, yes, sah, it may happen eventually. The minister will tell the people in the flock of the evil in those boys, and the flock will make to stamp out the evil.”
“Surely once you know those boys are in danger, you can protect them?”
“With respect, sah, it is estimated by the church leaders that there are a million children possessed by demon in this state alone. We cannot protect them all. We would need millions of policemen.”
Albright felt anger, real anger, and frustration in his inability to do anything about it. The thought of someone taking Christianity, something so close to his heart, and corrupting it into something so evil that it could be used as pretense to murder a child was beyond belief. It was, quite simply, evil.
“They’ll do the same thing they did to our boy? Slice him up?”
“I think if you check the child you have found, it had a poison in him?”
“Yes, some sort of alkaloid. It wasn’t the cause of death, though.”
“Well, sah, this is the ‘ordeal bean’. The people give it to a person they think is maybe a witch. If it is a witch, it will die; if it is not, it will live. This is how they make a trial for Ju-Ju in the heart of a child. Normally, the child dies, but if they are proved innocent and live, sometimes I think they kill them anyway. This is the thing that happened to your boy.”
Albright bit his tongue and said no more. He was, after all, a guest and did not wish to offend.
That night, as Francis Albright lay in his sweaty sheets, tossing and turning, he fantasized about ways to save each and every child who suffered in this way. He got in and out of his bed a dozen times, and finally went to the reception desk and asked to place a call to the UK.
“Hi, love, how are you?”
“Frank, it’s two A.M.! Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, love. Listen; I have something I need to ask you, something very important. How would you feel about fostering two boys from down here?”
“Are you serious? Really?” She was suddenly wide awake. “Oh, Francis! You aren’t kidding me, are you? Who?”
“I am serious. Two boys, about eleven and twelve years old. Their names are Hyacinth and Joseph.”
“Hyacinth? That’s unusual. But…oh, I don’t care, it all sounds wonderful!”
It wasn’t difficult to persuade her; she had longed for a child, any child. The couple had been looking into fostering with a view towards adopting. He would talk to the two boys’ parents, of course. It wouldn’t be easy, but surely they would see the sense in it. He had to try. He directed his wife to call a friend of his in the Foreign Office the next day, a friend powerful enough to set the wheels in motion in both countries. In the meantime, he would try to ensure the boys’ safety until they could be removed from harm’s way.
Seventeen
Pat’s mouth snapped wide open, and he maneuvered the cheese steak with a surgeon’s precision. He bit down and chewed as he said, “I’d like to know more, Jimmy, a lot more. But if we’re going to run at this, we need to do so a little more scientifically.”
“How long will that take?”
“Well, these things take as long as they take,” Pat said, and took a second, bigger bite.
“I’m not sick, right? I can cope with the whole ‘other world’ thing once I know it isn’t something that’s going to kill me.”
Pat shrugged and took a sip of cream soda. “Hasn’t killed ya yet, has it?”
“Yeah, I guess. I just don’t want this whole thing to become my life, you know?”
“Sure, sure, I don’t blame you at all for that, fella! Though, to be honest with ya, I have to admit this is a dream come true to someone like myself.”
James squirmed. “You are going to keep this quiet, right? I don’t want to end up as someone’s ‘project’.”
Pat smacked his hand down on the table in mock indignation. “Would I? Never! Look, Jimmy, we’re not going to do anything you don’t want to do. For what it’s worth, I think you’re right about there being people in this world who will want to take advantage of you. What am I saying? I know there are, but I’m not one of them. Well, maybe a bit.” He made a small gap with his thumb and forefinger. “But you’re my best friend’s son, dammit. Only you, your mam, and I know what’s going on, and it’s going to stay that way, right? When you want out, out you get.” He took another bite, and chewed while he let his point sink in. “This path we’re taking here is your benefit. The more you know about yourself, the better you will be able to cope with this thing, I reckon.”
James nodded.
“Good lad. And there’s quite a bit in this for me. Well, the whole thing—it’s just irresistible. And your mother? Well, she’s your mother.”
James pursed his lips. After a minute he replied, “Okay, what the hell. Let’s do it.”
~* * *~
Bob Scholl sat in his darkened den and ran through the DNA charts. The patterned strips may as well have been hieroglyphs, but he understood that these were being compared for some reason—probably a congenital disease common to both subjects. Even to his unpracticed eye, it was obvious that the two subjects weren’t even distantly related, so it was probably not a disease associated with a particular haplogroup, like sickle-cell anemia. His instinct told him that Pat Roche was hiding something from him, but this wasn’t giving him much of a clue.
His wife, Barb, shouted up the stairs, “Want a cup of coffee, honey?”
>
“Yeah, thanks, Babes.”
“Can you pick up Bobby from hockey at seven-thirty?”
“Um, yeah, sure.”
Bob split the screen and set the two DNA maps side by side. He fingered the cursor back and forth between the checkered strips. Nothing jumped out at him.
“I need a gallon of milk, if you can get one on your way home.”
“For chrissake, Barb! I’m doing something here!”
“Sorry, honey! Tell you what, I’ll pick up little Bobby, okay?”
“I’ll get him, I’ll get him. Just doing something here.”
Bob put the laptop down and paced the living room floor. “What’s he up to?” he mumbled every so often. He repeated it with a different inflection each time, as if that would help provide some insight. Rummaging through Pat’s e-mails earlier in the day had proved fruitless, as had occasional unannounced visits during the past week. He marched out and banged the door behind him.
“Bye, dear, don’t forget the milk!”
Bob pulled the Audi into his parking spot and made his way to the lab. Security nodded as he passed their station. His pass opened up Pat’s lab, as it would any room in the building. Often one of Pat’s assistants would be working late, but it was Friday night, and Pat usually encouraged them to knock off early on weekends. “You’re useless to me without some recreation. Get out and go wild! Get yourself hammered,” he would say to them.
Bob poked through the projects left on the work counter, but found nothing interesting. The microscope logs yielded one reference to the mitochondria of a Subject S, so he booted up the electron ’scope’s computer and found the files, but again, was unable to divine anything from them. In a drawer near the optical microscopes, he found a pad with sketches of slides, of which he was reasonably certain were Pat’s work. Bob had personally seen to the acquisition of image-stacking software that had eliminated the tedious, and often inaccurate, pencil sketching that had been used traditionally. Pat had scoffed at the new machine. “Feckin’ thing will put the students’ brains into neutral. They won’t get any feeling for what they are observing. That thing is just a big fat toy, is all.”
Pat was a dinosaur as far as Bob was concerned. His talent would only take him so much further in a field that was making exponential advances week on week. “That’ll be his loss, anyhow. Plenty of up-and-comers can replace Pat Roche. Plenty who aren’t immature boobs. Plenty.” But Bob was kidding himself, and deep down, he knew it. He needed Pat.
The drawings illustrated the components of a cell, and because of that, Bob guessed that they were probably easily visible leukocytes—white blood cells. There were over fifty drawings all told, all dated from the previous week or so. Most were of the same cell and its details, including its mitochondria, Golgi apparatus, and all the other parts visible in an optical ’scope. There were no signs of disease present, so he assumed it must have something to do with the Toxoplasma gondii research. Some, like the mitochondria, were out of scale to the rest. Bob assumed Pat had expanded those for clarity. He tapped the pad thoughtfully, then turned on a desk lamp, took out his phone-camera, and photographed each page in turn. When he was done, he carefully placed the pad in the drawer where he had found it, in exactly the same position.
Bob moved into Pat’s office. The desk was covered in office junk—bobble heads, trolls, and so forth. Over the visitor’s chair was a fish that sang when its motion sensor was triggered. He knew to stay away from it, having set it off it several times, to Pat’s endless amusement. There was a slide rule, which appeared as though Pat had dropped it on his workspace mid-use. Bob tutted the notion that someone in Pat’s position still used one of those antiques, but he snapped a picture of it anyway. He pulled at the drawers of the desk, but they were locked. He snatched a nail file sticking out of a pencil holder shaped like a robot. On his knees, he pried and twisted until the lock gave way. As he slid the drawer open, a loud ringing began, very close by. Bob jumped to his feet, heart racing, slapped the drawer closed, and ran out of the office into the lab, where his presence could be more easily explained. As he reached the exit, he realized that the ringing was his own phone. Damn!
“Dr. Robert Scholl here.”
“Bob! Are you picking up little Bobby or not? He’s been standing in the school driveway for almost an hour!”
Eighteen
Albright’s connections were as good as promised on the British side, but it took considerably more effort, not to mention several thousand pounds in bribes, to obtain the necessary papers on the Nigerian end. To Francis and Jane Albright, this was a gift from God. The two boys’ mother was desolate, but in her heart, she knew that, if they remained, it would be only a matter of time before her children disappeared.
“You be good boys for Mister Albright. He is a good man, and you must write to your mother so she know how you be. You send me picture, and perhaps I come visit in London someday soon.” She petted and kissed them. She cried. The boys promised, and hugged her until their father pried them loose.
Away from the house, across the road, he sat them on a crate and said to them, “You must be careful for yourself in England, my sons. There is not so much danger there as here, but still, there is danger everywhere for you. Do you understand me? You must remember what I have taught to you and carry it carefully, in here.” He tapped his forehead. “And here.” He held his hand over his heart.
“Yes, Abba,” said Joseph, the elder of the two, “we will never forget, I swear.” He made an “X” motion with his thumb over each of his eyes.
“You are special boys, and you must not forget.” Hyacinth began to whimper, and his father hugged him tight. “You will shine like the stars. There is one star in the south sky, and he looks at you, see?” The father pointed through the dusty night sky at a bright star to the south, and Hyacinth nodded quietly. “This star will be my eye on you, little one.”
~* * *~
The Albrights resided in St. Albans, not far from London. The two boys were bright; it took them just a few months to catch up with their classmates, and then academically surpass most. Ostensibly Christian, they showed little interest in the Albrights’ religious life or their straight-laced, fundamentalist views. They went to church with their foster parents, they sang the hymns, but were clearly not “of the spirit”. The couple were patient, though, and once the boys behaved, they did not pressure them. “The Lord will bring them into the fold in his own time,” Francis would say.
More worrying for the Albrights was the boys’ tendency to keep to themselves. They avoided contact with their peers, in particular, the few boys whose origins were also African. They were insular, spending most of their time in each other’s company, and because of this, they never really lost their Niger Delta accents. And they could not be cajoled into taking part in any sort of sport, a situation that drove the soccer coach to near-apoplexy.
“Those two are the most natural athletes I have ever seen!” the coach complained. “They could go professional, the pair of ’em.”
“We know,” said the Albrights, “but what can we do?”
“Force them! They’ll learn to love it by the time I’m through with them.”
So the Albrights forced them, but they did not learn to love it.
When Joseph was sixteen, he met a local girl, a curvaceous lass named Avril, who flirted with him as he walked past her bus stop on his way to school each morning. Soon they were walking together, and Hyacinth was left trailing behind them like a straggling dog. There was something about the couple that set the air around them ablaze, and they drew looks everywhere they went.
The Albrights fretted. They feared a sexual relationship was inevitable, and they sat Joseph down. “We understand that you have feelings for this girl, but you must understand that these are sinful feelings, son,” Francis told the boy firmly.
“This is not sinful! This is the way the saints wan’ me to be. You do not understand these things. This is the truth, now.”
“This girl, she is for me! Ezembe make it so, an’ he tell me so.”
Francis jumped to his feet. “How dare you bring those pagan gods into my home!” He marched in front of the boy, stiff-legged, shouting, and spitting. “I bring you here, save your life from those, those heathens, those savages that wanted to kill you, and you still embrace their false gods? Have you learned nothing, boy?”
Joseph glared at Francis, his nostrils flared. “I know what I must do, Ezembe makes me wan’ this one, and also he makes her wan’ me. You cannot change these things. Jesus, he would know this also. Why don’ you ask him?”
Francis struck Joseph hard across the face and stood in front of the boy, fists clenched, while Jane fell into the sofa cushions and wept. He sank on the seat next to her, and dropped his head into his hands.
“Tomorrow, boy. Tomorrow we will go and see the pastor. And you will pray.” He pointed at Joseph. “By God, you will pray with me.”
~* * *~
Pat pulled at the key. It was jammed solid. A little twisting and pulling only succeeded in snapping its head off. “Feck, some feckin’ thing or other is jammed in the lock,” he muttered to himself. He gave up on the drawer, flipped his laptop open and said to James, “So, let’s have a bit of fun, young fella, shall we?”
An assistant, a scraggly-headed youth named Myron, had set up a cot in Pat’s office, and now combed through the tangle of wires and tubes strung between a dozen or so machines. Pat introduced James to Myron as Mister S.
“Okay, here’s the plan. I’m going to take a few samples from old Mister S here, right now, then a few during the polysomnography—that just means sleep study, James. That will give us a look at your ATP production in both the waking and somnolent states.”
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