I picked up the clothes I’d taken from him and locked the cell. Leaving those on the table, for now, I went over to the one the kid was in. That one didn’t have open bars I could watch through, the wall was solid, but the metal door had a big, hinged panel I could open.
“I warned you to keep quiet, didn’t I?” I told the brat as I glared in at him. “From now on, every time I hear you, I’m going to come in there and make you regret it. And you’ll go without food for the rest of the day. Is that what you want?”
The kid shook his head mutely, his miserable snotty face staring back at me tearfully with wide, frightened eyes. I showed him the cattle prod, and he flinched backwards. That gave me a nice tingling feeling. It would be a few hours before the new creature woke up. I’d come back after lunch and see what he had to say for himself then.
Twenty-Seven
Shay
I woke up slowly, with a sour taste in my mouth. Right. He’d hit me with the taser gun, a couple of jolts, then stuck the needle in. I’d started to drift away pretty quickly after that, a pleasant, relaxed sensation. Midazolam? He must have given me a big enough dose to bring about deep sedation. Crap! That stuff could fuck with your memory for up to a day. No noises nearby, no sensation of being watched.
I opened my eyes and blinked a few times to clear them. My right eye felt a bit sore. Had he been poking at it? Probably. I checked my thigh. He’d removed the darts. Nothing there now but a slight sting from the little burns. I ran the succession of events over in my head and decided I’d been right not to try to rush him. He’d been too cautious, too prepared, to come close enough for that to work, and it would have been entirely out of character too. The moment he decided I was pretending to be something I wasn’t, I’d be in real trouble.
I sat up, shivering slightly. That wouldn’t do. The brain could be easily fooled though. Under hypnotic suggestion, an onion could taste like an apple, hot feel cold and cold feel hot, a metal spike through the flesh of the arm caused no pain. It was all about tricking the brain into believing what it was told to believe, ignoring the real nerve signals and accepting the proposed alternative interpretation. You just needed to alter your state of consciousness. It wasn’t cold in here, it was pleasantly warm, see? I’d have to watch the extremities, keep the little muscles active enough to generate heat, but it was well above freezing in here. No danger of frostbite.
I was locked in a cell about fifteen feet deep and twenty long, the entire front of it was just a set of metal bars with a door in the middle. Those would be sunk deeply into the floor and ceiling. Bare, cement floor, plastered walls. The length of chain running from the manacle on my right wrist was attached to a horizontal bar on the back wall that it could slide along. Not long enough to get me near that door, but I was very pleased to find myself so loosely restrained. If I’d been chained hand and foot, I’d have been totally fucked. There was nothing in here but the mattress I was sitting on and a drain in the back corner. A low power light bulb, hanging from the ceiling in the room beyond the bars, currently provided the only light.
I continued my unmoving survey of my surroundings. A big wooden table and a chair occupied the middle of the floor out in the main room. There was shelving along the far wall, and the rest of my clothes were stacked on one of those in a little heap with the trainers on top. There were other clothes there too. There were also a disturbing number of spare chains, ropes and various tools. What looked to be a massage bed was propped up in the corner, legs folded. Yeah. I could picture Dominic Chuol strapped face downwards on that, puking harmlessly into a bucket below.
Above the shelves was a wall mounted metal box with an array of little lights, all inactive. A subsidiary display for the alarm system upstairs, probably. A glass-fronted cabinet held what looked to be a well-stocked personal pharmaceutical store. Lots of pill bottles, vials and unopened syringe packets. Enough funds and you could buy pretty much anything you wanted these days. There was a little electric heater out there too. Brady probably only turned that on for his own benefit whenever he intended to spend some time down here.
The door leading out of this cellar looked like a real problem. I’d only get to see how thick it was when he opened it again, but I imagined it would be a good couple of inches. Reinforced steel, with long bolts sinking deeply into the wall most likely. If the walls weren’t solid steel under the plaster, they would at least have regularly spaced reinforcing bars running through them.
Was there an equally formidable door above? His front door had been black-painted metal too, and the only window I’d spotted with the curtains open had bars on the inside. With the security setup I’d seen out there, nobody was going to take him by surprise or burst into this house quickly enough to prevent Brady from getting down here.
I stood, slowly and carefully and walked along to the corner a little unsteadily to get some idea of the full length of that room out there. It was bigger than I’d thought and there was another door on the wall opposite the main door. Another room, or cell. Was Jimmy in there?
Alright, the doors were a real problem. The little tools in my armband could deal with this manacle and the cell door easily enough but that thing? No chance! So much for the idea of letting myself out and sneaking upstairs to surprise him in his sleep. I’d have to deal with him down here. Well, I’d been expecting that, but it was still disappointing.
I emptied my bladder over the little drain and went to see if the mattress was stuck to the floor or loose. It was loose. It was a thin little thing but better than nothing. I dragged it over to the wall and bent it in half so that I’d have a padded back rest to lean against as I sat and waited. Was it after noon yet? I couldn’t tell. It depended how long I’d been out for.
Conall was going to be so pissed when he got that message but maybe he’d have calmed down enough to be reasonable by the time I got out of here. If I got out of here. Things were going pretty well, so far, but I still didn’t like my chances. He’d call Uncle Danny, wouldn’t he? Yes, he would. Not doing so would be as unthinkable to him as it would be to me if our situations were reversed. Whatever happened, Con wouldn’t have to deal with everything by himself.
I settled down to wait. I had plenty of books to choose from and a good music library stored away too. Or maybe I would dip into some good memories instead, revisit some of my favourite days.
Twenty-Eight
The Ally
It, or he, didn’t understand a word I said. It just looked curiously at me whenever I tried to ask it anything until it got bored and its attention wandered. I think it was starting to get a little annoyed by the taser and the pokes I gave it with the cattle prod, but it never showed any sign that it found those jolts in the least bit painful. It was more as if, now that the novelty of a new sensation had worn off, it didn’t find it amusing any more.
It hadn’t touched any of the food I’d thrown in there yesterday either. It had picked up the first sandwich and turned it over and over, staring at the cling film and testing it with its tongue. I’d even unwrapped one myself in front of it so it could see what to do. It had found a loose end to pull at, which had kept it happily occupied for a while, but once it had opened it up and sniffed at the contents, it had screwed up its face in disgust and tossed it aside. It seemed to like the cling film though. It had played with that for ages before it got bored with it. If it was hungry, it certainly wasn’t showing any sign of it.
Today, at my Companion’s suggestion, I was trying something different. I gave it a couple of good jolts before going in there and injecting it. What would a subcutaneous dose of LSD do to its brain? At first, I thought the acid wasn’t doing anything at all, but after a good while, I could see some signs of a change in its behaviour. Its eyes began to flick about, and it licked its lips, frowning.
I moved my chair and the heater a little closer to the bars and turned another light on before sitting down again. The brightness made it hiss quietly, and it squeezed its eyes shut before cautiously
opening then again with a series of rapid blinks. A little, catlike sneeze followed.
“I think it’s starting to feel it.”
“Yes, I believe it is.” As before, its reaction to the Companion’s voice was very different to its reaction to mine. It scowled and bared its teeth whenever it heard that.
The warrior had become very agitated when I’d done this to it, pulling futilely at its chains and making all kinds of threats before swiping at invisible attackers and eventually collapsing into a sobbing heap, banging its stolen head against the floor. I’d had to sedate it quickly when it started doing that.
This one was reacting much less strongly. It hadn’t even stirred from the comfortable seat it had arranged for itself. That had been surprising, such a simple, clever thing to do. None of the others had thought of using the mattress like that, even when they’d been able to move freely enough to do so. There was something very feline in the way it moved, when it did move, and I’d seen it sprawled out in the most unlikely positions, perfectly at ease.
It certainly hadn’t shown any signs of being dangerous, not yet anyway. It didn’t seem frightened or angry or even impatient. Just alternately curious, bored, then curious again. For now, we were happy to keep observing it, but if it couldn’t tell us anything useful, we’d probably kill it soon.
It was moving now. It crouched down in the middle of the floor and began to draw a pattern in the air with its fingertip, concentrating intensely, turning slowly as it did so. It was making a soft humming sound too, an eerie, disturbing little repeating melody. It would rise to a really high, nasal pitch and stay there for a while, putting my teeth on edge, before dropping to begin all over again.
“Stop that!” the Companion snapped. It ignored him. It had its back to us by then, half its circle completed.
“I’m not sure he can even hear us just now. That acid’s got him away with the fairies alright.”
“What?”
“You know, off in a dreamworld. It’s a saying. He’s probably hearing and seeing things that aren’t there. We gave him a good dose of acid.”
“Away with the fairies… your people still say that? Even now?”
“Sure. Why?”
“It’s nothing. Your racial memory holds more old truths than I expected, that is all. You wanted to know what that creature is? I believe one of the names they were given was The Sidhe. The Daoine Sidhe.”
The creature’s head shot up as it spun round and stood, to stare at us. For the first time since we’d caught it, it spoke. A rapid torrent of words pouring out of its mouth as it eyed us questioningly. What was that? Gaelic? Seeing my incomprehension, it stopped again suddenly, falling silent with a frustrated, sulky expression on its face. Its hand reached up to feel at its bare neck before dropping listlessly again.
“Dayna Shee.” I repeated the sounds I’d heard the Companion say, but all it did was bite something off under its breath, crouch down, and start humming and turning again, stepping unthinkingly over the chain as it did so to avoid tangling its ankles.
“Shut it up. That sound is irritating.” Happily! The sound cut off again as I caught it in the back with the taser and it collapsed into a twitching heap. “I think we need to look at that torc it had in its pocket.” I went upstairs to fetch the neck ring and took it back down with me. “Feel it, all over, does it have any moving parts?”
My fingers found some little bumps in the metal that gave a little when I pushed at them but they didn’t seem to do anything. The knobs at the ends didn’t turn or come off either.
“I think it might be a translation device of some kind,” my Companion told me.
“An enchanted one? Sidhe magic?”
It just laughed at that.
“All advanced technology seems like magic to primitive people. The very concept of ‘magic’ is pure, superstitious nonsense. The laws of physics cannot be circumvented.”
“So they were advanced? Were they aliens, then? Like you or like the hostiles?”
“Neither. They were unknown to us all, before we discovered this planet. They claimed it was theirs. Whether they ever belonged here is another question. They seemed to come and go as they pleased but they did not travel through space to do so. Our scholars proposed that they belonged in a different universe, or at least a different dimension, and had found a way to slip between the two. They were not pleased by the new arrivals. Eventually, they stopped coming back.”
I thought about that for a while.
“I suppose that might explain the time lapses in all the old stories. People would vanish and turn up again only to find that years had passed in what, to them, was only a day or two.” I hefted the torc thoughtfully. “Shall we put it on him? See what happens?”
“Not now, no. We will wait until it is sensible again. Tonight perhaps.” My Companion sounded pleased though. Our little experiment had told us something that might be useful. I didn’t fancy sitting here jolting it every few minutes to shut it up until then. I’d come back down in a few hours. It was already trying to get up again as I went out.
Twenty-Nine
I’d have said that my cousin was lucky he was somewhere I couldn’t get my hands on him if I hadn’t known who could. Christ! I should have known!
He was good, though. When Shay put his mind to it, he could still hide things from me, especially when I was asleep on my feet. A direct question like, ‘Do you know where Brady O’Hara is yet?’ would have been enough to prevent him from going through with this fifty/fifty chance insanity. We never tried to tell each other direct lies because doing so would be futile.
I hadn’t even stuck my head into his room to check on him before I left home that morning. I didn’t want to risk waking him up. It had sounded to me, last night, like he meant to stay up for at least a few more hours. For once, I hadn’t found any reason to call him during the morning either. No, the first I knew of what he’d done was when it was already hours too late to prevent it.
The message he’d prepared for me popped up on my screen at noon on Wednesday.
His option one predicted that Jimmy Stewart would almost certainly die. Option two dropped that to a fifty per cent chance but would almost certainly kill my cousin too if it failed. Of course, he’d gone for option two. The fact that I understood all the reasons why he’d kept it from me, didn’t help matters at all. After I’d read that message through, I felt ill enough to throw up and furious enough to strangle him. The fact that he hadn’t come back to cancel this message, Shay said, meant that he’d at least succeeded in getting in.
If he didn’t get in touch, we were to go in on Friday afternoon, as soon as we had the promised address. Four o’clock on Friday was almost fifty-two hours away. How long had Brady O’Hara spent in Jackie Gibson’s house? Two hours? Three? Was my cousin already dead, right now? Was he being tortured? Or was his planned deception working as well as his ‘best-case scenario’ predicted it would?
Brady had kept both Dominic Chuol and Chris Arnold for over a week without his alter ego taking over and prematurely damaging either of them too much. Jackie Gibson’s death had been a rage induced response to our actions. I could trust Shay not to poke that bear.
At least the suggestion that we make sure the entry team had both Ground Penetrating Radar and a magnetometer with us was a good one. Once we had a clear picture of the composition of any secure structures the house may contain, both above and below ground, we’d know where to focus our attention to start creating entry points. His suggested equipment list was comprehensive. If we worked efficiently, he figured, Brady would only have twenty minutes, at most, to take his rage out on his captives before we got to him. Any hole we could get him in sight through we could also shoot through.
I emptied my water bottle in a few quick swallows, trying to moisten a mouth that dried up again almost instantly. I needed to stop thinking about what might be happening in that house right now, wherever the fuck it was. I got up and stuck my head out of the door.
“Caitlin, could you get me some water please?”
She glanced up, surprised at the odd request, took one look at my face and paled. She didn’t waste time asking questions. I went to sit down again before my shaky legs betrayed me.
“You look like you’re going into shock,” she informed me a minute later as she handed me the full glass she was holding and put the equally full jug on my desk. “Like you’ve been shot or had a heart attack or something. What’s happened?”
I drank off the glass and refilled it, sloshing a little. My hands were shaking too.
“Shay did,” I said shortly and turned the monitor around for her.
“Jesus Fucking Christ!” she whispered disbelievingly as she read through his dispassionate little composition, with all its probability calculations and cautions. “He’s in there? Now? Is he insane?”
“It’s McKinnon’s grandson, Caitlin, although he’d probably have done the same for a total stranger, knowing him. It’s just the way he’s wired, he can’t help it. But no, he’s not insane, he’s just whatever you can call being Shay is.”
“What are you going to do?”
Good question. What could I do?
“Call my da. That’s top of the list. He needs to be here, either way. Then send this to McKinnon and Anderson.” And after that? I had no idea. Wait, breathe, hope.
“If Shay found the address, can’t we?”
“And do what? Intervene? Take away any chance he has of succeeding? Get them both killed?” She flinched as I snapped those questions out and I shook my head, “I doubt we even could, in two days.”
Death in the Black Wood Page 24
