by Chris Ward
She reached up with her hands instead, feeling for the hair that had made a neat bob to her shoulders.
It was still there, but it appeared to have grown overnight. She felt along the strands and found thick braids of hair reaching down past her shoulders to her waist, and then on to her feet. She shifted her whole body and managed to get a look down past the end of the bed, at a massive pile of what she had originally thought were old curtains.
It was a huge coil of her hair, dozens of braids wound in a huge circle like a heap of mooring rope.
She took a few strands of her hair between her fingers, and slid them slowly downwards. Near the end of her natural length she felt a slight bump in the strands where extensions had been fused to them.
It didn’t feel like human hair, but was slightly coarser, like wool, although it had been dyed the same light brown as her own hair, and the strands fused one by one.
Was this some kind of ridiculous game? Here she was, trapped in a castle tower, with several metres of hair extensions that would have made Rapunzel proud, so much of it that its weight made it impossible for her to get up.
It was a novel way of trapping someone, that was for sure.
She remembered nothing after fainting in the courtyard below after seeing Grigore all trussed up with wires. That had been around midnight? Was it the following day, or had she been sleeping for two? Her head felt groggy as if she’d been drugged, so there was no way to be sure.
And what had happened to Grigore? Where was he now?
She turned her head as much as she was able until her neck muscles began to scream. There was nothing close that she could see would make a suitable cutting edge. If she could somehow drag herself to the window and break the glass she could use that, but it was fifteen feet away and she wasn’t sure she could even make it to the side of the bed.
Her hands were still free, and her only option was to reverse the process, strand by strand. Grimacing with each tiny jolt of pain, she began to pull out her hair, one piece at a time.
Grigore lifted his head as the door opened and one of the bird creatures came in. It lifted its head and the human eyes looked at him over the monstrous beak fused to its face with a sense of pity, blinking rapidly as if pushing away tears. The beak, though, opened and emitted a grating squawk. Grigore got a glimpse of something fat and red that could have been a human tongue.
‘You’re his prisoner too, aren’t you?’ he gasped. ‘Set me free and I’ll help you get away. We can get out of here together, and we’ll have that bastard strung up.’
The birdman cocked his head to the side the way an inquisitive bird really would, then it went over to a table in the corner, and began riffling through a tray of metal instruments.
They had moved Grigore from his tower room the day before, taking him in manacles down into a dark basement in the bowels of the castle that even he had never visited. They had finally given him a decent wash, but he was sure it was for their benefit rather than his.
And then, under the guidance of the man in the hood, they had got to work.
The hours afterwards were a blur. He had drifted in and out of consciousness, and his dreams had been vivid indeed. He dreamed that he had been walking around the castle in a robot suit which didn’t respond to his commands. The bird creatures and their master had been there, and so for a while, had Crina. They had all been laughing at him.
The creature was coming back. It lifted a syringe filled with a clear liquid and gave the plunger a little test press, causing a tiny fountain to spurt from the needle’s tip.
As its claws pulled Grigore’s nearest arm towards it, its human eyes said sorry while its beak clacked with laughter.
When Grigore awoke, he was lying flat on his back with three of them standing around him. His whole body ached as if it had been put through a tumble-dryer. His muscles felt tight when he tried to clench them, everything from his arms and legs to his cheeks and jaw. Everything felt … elasticated.
One of the creatures came up beside him and started cranking a metal handle. Grigore realised he was tied to an old hospital bed as his top half started to rise. A blanket covered his bottom half so he couldn’t see what had been done to his legs, but they felt tingly and strange. Part of him wanted to rip the blanket off and look, while part of him never wanted to look at himself again.
The room he was in had bare stone walls and a thick wooden door with a small barred grate in the middle. The door opened and the cloaked man who called himself Kurou stepped inside. The three bird creatures immediately stepped to the side, facing their master, their heads bowed.
‘Have you tested him yet?’ Kurou asked.
The nearest creature squawked and shook its head.
‘Let us try then, my dear friends.’ He held out a bony, clawed hand. ‘Pen and paper, if you please.’
The nearest creature bowed and turned away, going to a cupboard and riffling through a drawer. Grigore had already become accustomed to their looks, but when one could see beyond the abominations of their faces they acted like highly intelligent dogs, doing their master’s bidding without question, without thought. Grigore was sure that Kurou had somehow brought these creatures into life, whether it had been by scientific means or by something far more sinister.
As a child of seven, Grigore had once seen something in a forest that he could never explain, a tall human-shaped creature leaning over a dead raccoon and appearing to suck it dry of blood. Years later, his adult mind had rationalised the beast as a gypsy or a mindless, emaciated hobo, but to that child it had been a vampire, nothing more, nothing less. To this day Grigore couldn’t explain it, but it allowed into his mind an element of belief in what was unexplainable that few people would encourage.
Whatever these bird creatures were, they should not exist. Yet here they were, in front of him, holding out pens and paper.
‘I would like to sign my name,’ Kurou said. He took a step towards Grigore and held out the pen. ‘Wouldn’t I, sire?’
‘You can go fuck yourself with that pen,’ Grigore said, every movement of his mouth taking a huge effort, as though the muscles had gone on strike. ‘You can—’
‘Shut up.’
Grigore’s mouth snapped shut so hard he was sure he had chipped a tooth.
‘Sign.’
‘N—’
Grigore’s hand started to move on its own, the fingers reaching out to take the pen from Kurou. His hands, covered in gloves, looked strangely angular under the latex plastic, as if they’d been replaced by robot hands in the night. The strange dreams began to revisit him.
Grigore’s jerking fingers began to write his name on the paper in childish, angular strokes. At one point he punched the pen through a couple of sheets of paper and snapped the nib.
Kurou lifted his head and squealed up at the ceiling, a grating sound that made Grigore’s ears burn and his skin crawl. The man’s hood fell back, and Grigore looked on the hideous face of his captor for the first time.
His eyes filled with tears as the monster stared back at him over a bony protrusion that looked remarkably like a crow’s beak.
‘Kurou,’ he gasped. ‘Crow.’
‘Go fuck yourself, sire,’ Kurou replied. ‘Sign that fucking document and we can all go home. Yourself included.’
Grigore glanced at the nearest of the creatures. ‘You made them, didn’t you? You made them to look like you. In your own image. So you wouldn’t be the ugliest motherfucker in the world any longer.’
Kurou shrugged. ‘Everyone needs some friends, doesn’t he, sire? Sign, won’t you? Pretty please?’
‘No.’
Kurou turned towards the three creatures standing patiently waiting for instructions. ‘Keep trying. Don’t give up. When I’m done with my little model kit I’ll come and have another try myself. He’ll sign, sooner or later.’
‘You’re a twisted bastard,’ Grigore said. ‘Grigore Albescu bows to no man. Although to call you a man—’
Ku
rou pulled a computer tablet out of a pocket in his clock and began tapping at a screen. Grigore scowled as he felt his butt suddenly go tight and then a sludgy warm feeling filled his pants.
‘You ugly bastard….’
‘Be thankful I don’t make you eat it, sire,’ Kurou said. ‘One might enjoy a change of rations, would one? A little backyard delicacy?’
Grigore opened his mouth to speak but Kurou tapped another button and Grigore’s mouth slammed shut again. Blood pooled in his mouth from where he had bitten his cheek.
‘Enough of this little tea party,’ Kurou said. ‘I have business to attend to. I’ll be back to see you again later. I’ll give your best to the girl when I see her.’
Grigore snarled at Kurou and suddenly his jaw went slack. ‘What girl?’
Kurou’s twisted face curved into a smile. ‘Oh, do you not remember your little meet and greet last night, sire? Crina of course. Who else would be pretty enough—not to mention rich enough to have commandeered your full attention?’
‘You’ve got Crina….’
‘Indeed, sire. And as we speak she’s reacquainting herself with her childhood fairytales. How delightful for her, don’t you think?’
19
Puppetry in motion
As his hands worked over the body of the old woman, pushing metal inserts into her dead skin and tightening wires, while one of his birdmen worked with a welder on the other side of the body, Kurou found it difficult to sympathise with the human race. A despicable, degenerate species, the planet would be best off consigning it to memory. And yet, regardless of how much cruelty and pain humans dealt out like an endless poker hand, not just to each other, but to every other living thing within reach, they continued to complain about their lot in life, about how hard done by they were without their little toys or their endless sex or their overloaded plates of food, when everything else around them just tried to survive. Countless species had already fallen under humanity’s extinction hammer, and his adored Romanian Black Eagles were destined to join them soon if that fat, lazy fool didn’t sign the fucking mandate to turn the region around Heigel Castle into a nature reserve.
It wasn’t so much to ask. Why the need for so much drama?
‘Sign the fucking form,’ Kurou muttered, humming along to a Romanian rock song that was playing on a radio in the corner. ‘Sign the fuckin’ form, or I’ll make you sign the form….’
He had spent a lot of time contemplating life over the last few years. He had travelled the globe, generously tapping into his previous employer’s burgeoning bucket of money—every damn cent of it earned off the work-arched backs of thousands of underpaid employees—and observed the human disdain for one another from the southern tip of the world to the northern, and back again. He had watched begging street children in Sao Paulo say the same desperate words as those in Delhi, ‘please sir, please mister, spare me some change’, yet when he had lowered his coin to their dirty little hands they had screamed and fled, every single one. Only a blind boy in Panama had thanked him politely, and as a rewarding act of kindness Kurou had left a wad of several thousand dollars in his grimy outstretched hands. Whether the boy had ever got it home he didn’t know. He only vaguely cared.
As he used a machine of his own designing to sew the old woman’s torso shut, he mused on the ridiculous notion that beauty was more than skin deep. It wasn’t. There was no beauty in humanity, only in its death. Even himself, one he considered a messenger sent from some special place to remind people of the errors of their ways, was ugly both inside and out. Caring for the elegant birds that these spiteful people so hated was no sign of beauty, just one of understanding.
He understood his place in the world, and he did what he could to improve it. Few others did.
‘Have you finished, my good friend?’ he asked the creature standing opposite. The beak dipped in a short bow, and the creature stepped back. ‘Wonderful. You may rest. I will test the new toy.’
As the birdman withdrew into the shadows of an alcove, Kurou went to a computer set up on a desk nearby. He connected the micro-sensors now built into the woman’s corpse to their control panel on his screen, adding in some auto response codes. It was tiresome for him to stay behind the controls all the time when he had so much other work to do.
The schoolboy who had destroyed his work seven years ago had done him some favours in many ways. Kurou wasn’t about to show forgiveness, but it had encouraged him to up his game a little, to improve his coding, robotics skills, and ability with genetic manipulation. While it had taken years to grow the cybernetic bears from embryos infused with robotic elements, all he was doing now was elaborate puppetry, and he was a master. If it wasn’t for the macabre base material he used for his work, his skills would be much fought over in movie studios all around the world.
‘That should do it,’ he said, dramatically lifting his hand before plunging it back down to press a button on the touch screen marked IGNITION.
With the wheezing groan of dead air escaping her lungs, Gretel sat up and looked around.
‘Oh, ho, ho,’ Kurou cackled, rubbing his hands together. ‘We have lift off! Can you hear me, my dear?’
Gretel nodded, her ancient head flopping forward like a ragdoll. ‘Yes,’ came a gravelly croak from her throat.
‘Ooh, we have voice command,’ Kurou said. ‘Mapping?’
Gretel nodded again. ‘Yes.’
On Kurou’s screen, a GPS display window opened. A flashing red dot indicated Gretel’s current location.
‘Perfect.’ Kurou entered some commands, then zoomed out of the map until a second dot came into view. ‘Here’s your destination,’ he said. ‘When you get a little closer I’ll assume manual command.’ He waved a hand towards the door. ‘Off you go now, my dear. Enjoy your walk.’
Gretel’s reanimated corpse headed for the door in jerking strides. Kurou gave a satisfied nod as Gretel disappeared down the corridor, heading for the tunnels that led down through the bluff to the forest below. He had been kind in his programming; he had assigned her a route that would take her right past her old cottage. Nothing like the nostalgia of one’s lifelong home.
‘Come out,’ he said to the other creature waiting in the shadowy alcove. ‘Let’s get this place cleaned up.’
Of course, reanimating the dead had its problems. The sheer workload involved to create anything other than a stumbling proto-zombie was hardly worth it. As he looked at the human eyes blinking over the birdman’s beak, he reflected that it was so much easier to work with the living.
And talking of which, one of his creatures had brought him in a little present last night, one he had yet to find the time to open.
He headed out of the room, leaving the birdman to clean up and tidy away his tools. He took a flight of stairs down to a lower level, then withdrew a key from his cloak and opened a heavy wooden door onto a dark, chilly room.
Something shifted in the corner as he entered. He pulled a flashlight out of another pocket and shone it into the face of the man sitting in a corner with his knees up against his chest, his hands tied in front of him.
‘Well, what a surprise this is. Ken Okamoto, isn’t it? I don’t suppose you remember me. My name is Kurou. I am the creator of those wonderful bears you took it upon yourself to destroy. Now, offer me the answer to a simple question. Will your little friend Jun be joining us?’
Ken didn’t answer. The birdmen had given him a little beating and then gagged him. Now Ken’s bruised face stared up at Kurou with undisguised hate.
‘What’s the matter? Did a crow pluck out your tongue?’ Kurou threw back his head and laughed, the screeching cackle filling the room.
20
Information and passengers
‘Look,’ Jennie said. ‘Police.’
Across the field three police cruisers were parked in a line by the side of the road. A patch of ground in the middle of the field had been enclosed with a bright yellow tent with red NO ENTRY signs on it. A couple of
police officers were standing on guard outside. A third was walking up and down with his head in his hands.
Jennie had started walking towards them, but Jun pulled her down into a crouch. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I have an idea.’
‘What?’
‘If you go over there and start talking to them in Romanian they’re going to tell you to go away. We have to act like dumb tourists and we might pick up some information about what happened.’
She shrugged. ‘Okay, I guess.’
Jun smiled. ‘It’s worth a try.’
They got up and ambled across the field towards the police tent. As they got closer, they saw the officer pacing up and down was the youngest of the three and looked rather more upset than the others.
‘Excuse me!’ Jun shouted in English. ‘We lost! We look for campsite! This is campsite, yes?’
The younger officer turned towards them and started waving them away. ‘This is police place! You can’t come here.’
‘Excuse me!’ Jun shouted again. ‘Please draw map, good officer. Please help us.’
The man looked tired and exasperated. As they got closer Jun saw his eyes were bright red as if he’d been drinking or crying.
‘Get away from here, you fools. Only campsite is on other side of town. But it is open only summer.’
Jun scratched his head as if trying to understand the English. Beside him, Jennie gave a sweet smile. ‘Please help, kind policeman.’
The police officer scowled for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Okay. But stay away from tent. Wait here.’
They ignored him and came as close as they could before one of the other officers stepped away from the tent and started waving his hands. The first man pulled a notebook out of a bag then came back towards them. Jun was starting to think that the whole ruse was a waste of time as the police officer supported the notebook on his knees and started drawing a crude map of the town. Unless they rushed the tent—something that might get them arrested—they might never find what was inside or what was going on.