Paper Children (Phoebe Harkness Book 3)

by James Fahy

  “I’m saying, dear heart, that I’ve been framed,” he told me. “Listen, I’ve been snooping around this whole mess for quite some time, and whoever is behind the dead-eyed piper of Hamlyn leading all the rosy-cheeked kiddies away? They know I’ve been.” He smiled lopsided. “Clearly they wanted me out of the picture altogether. And they were willing to take out your team to put the blame on me.”

  I glanced to Sofia and back.

  “Why should I believe you?” I wanted to know. “No offense, Chase, but you’re not the most reliable or trustworthy person I’ve ever met.”

  He shrugged. “Because if you don’t, a lot of people are probably going to die. You strike me as the kind of person that would irk somewhat, Doc.”

  “He’s right, dear,” one of the interchangeable women said. “Our boy is a scamp, but he’s not a liar.”

  “Look,” Chase said to me with a smile. “I’ve said this to plenty of women in my time, but how about you untie me. We both promise not to electrocute each other anymore, and we can talk this out?” The flickering light from the smouldering chiminea played over his face. “Over a nice cup of tea.”

  “You think I tracked your crazy arse into the middle of haunted woods to have a cup of tea with you and the Blair Witches over there?” I said.

  “There’s peppermint,” one of the grey haired women said fussily. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

  I didn’t know what to think. Sofia, standing with her arms folded and still guarding the door, shrugged unhelpfully.

  I hadn’t come here for revenge, I told myself. I’d come here for answers.

  “Fine,” I said grudgingly. “I’ll untie you, but I’m warning you, one false move and-”

  Chase shrugged off the ropes. They fell clattering to the floor around his chair. “Oh, wonderful,” he said brightly. “This was all getting a little too Hostel for me anyway. Why don’t you have a seat?” He indicated the chair opposite me.

  He noticed my expression as I sat warily, my jaw working. I was still gripping my Taser. “Oh, I’m quite good at escaping ropes,” he said. “I didn’t want to have you feel bad. It would have been awfully bad manners, after you’d gone to all that trouble.”

  One of the women approached, shuffling towards us with a silver tea tray containing cups, a steaming pot and a small dish of sugar cubes. There were even tiny metal sugar tongs. She set it down on the rickety little table between us. This was all too surreal.

  “Now, where shall we start?” Chase picked up the teapot. “Shall I be mother and pour?”

  Chase claimed he had indeed broken into my lab. Stolen the incriminating drone footage, pilfered all of my investigation notes so far, but that he hadn’t been the one to kill my team. If that was true, then someone was trying to frame him, to take him out of the picture. Someone with enough skills to fool Director Coldwater into seeing someone she hadn’t.

  “First things first,” I said tersely. “What are you, Chase Pargate?”

  “I’m a Virgo,” he replied, adding milk to his cup. “I would have thought that was obvious.”

  “Stop being an arsehole for two minutes and give me a straight answer,” I said. “Cloves killed you, years ago. You show up again, looking younger, walking around and talking like nothing happened. We ran your DNA from the traces on the rooftop where that vampire was killed. I know you were snooping around that scene. And the girl’s birthday party too. Your sample… it came back dead. It also seemed to suggest you were a guy around Cloves’ age, and also a baby.”

  “It’s not always easy to give a straight answer to a twisty question,” Pargate told me. “But very well.” His eyes flicked up to mine as he dropped a cube of sugar in his tea. “I’m dead… yes.”

  I took the other cup, eyeing him suspiciously.

  “You’re…a ghoul?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Oh good god, no.” He looked affronted. “A mindless corpse, controlled by a vampire? Give me some credit. Those things are empty shells. How terribly gauche. No I’m the real deal, Doctor. Back from the dead like Lazarus and Britney.” He winked at me. “I’m an honest to goodness zombie.”

  The fire popped in the chimney. I stared at the quite probably deranged man sitting across from me, holding his teacup like the mad hatter.

  “A zombie,” I said flatly.

  “Is that so difficult to believe?” He sipped his drink. “I was dead, now I’m not. I’m not alive either, not in any traditional sense of the word anyway. Zombie is the most appropriate word I can think of.”

  Sofia was peering at him curiously from across the room. “If you are a zombie, should not your skin be rotting and your hunger for brains be obvious?”

  “I exfoliate, kitten,” Chase replied without turning around. “As for brain-cravings, honestly, the things old movies tell us. Have you ever seen a vampire turn into a bat? No. The only thing I crave is pizza.”

  “Do not call me ‘kitten’,” Sofia growled.

  “So… you’re a walking corpse?” I was determined to pin this down, despite Pargate’s maddening ramblings. “How is that possible?”

  “Walking, singing and dancing,” he nodded. “And it’s possible because of them.” He pointed to the two women who, completely ignoring us, were busy putting their groceries away in various cupboards. They were treating us as though their son had friends over from school.

  “And who… the hell… are they?” I hissed in a whisper.

  “They’re the sisters,” Chase said, with something close to real affection. “The witches of Wytham Woods. I have mentioned them to you in the past,” he added, a little petulantly. “You probably weren’t paying attention at the time. I think we were fighting some monster or other.”

  When Chase and I had been below the city, lost in the labyrinth and fleeing rabid were-creatures earlier that year, he had indeed said something. He had attempted to bring down one of the monsters with a metal stake, something he had said at the time was ‘sister-blessed’.

  “Witches.” I looked over at the two women, looking unkempt and rather dusty. They really were identical. “As in, broomsticks… and… cauldrons. I’m not buying it, Chase.”

  “Did you like my sign on the door?” Pargate grinned. “I thought it was a nice touch. Makes the place homelier don’t you think? I’ve been living with them for a while here, since they brought me back. They like the peace and quiet. Though I have to do all the shopping of course, they won’t even go outside, let alone into town.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose, fairly certain that I was having the beginnings of a migraine. “I’m having a hard time processing this, Chase.” I said patiently. “In my social circle, such as it is, I already have vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and now you’re telling me to add the Genetic Others of zombies and witches too? Are we rattling off all the classics here, what does that make me?”

  “I would have thought that obvious,” he said. “You’re the mad scientist, right? Jekyll and Hyde?” He toasted me cheerily with his teacup. “How is your anger-management these days, without the vampire blood helping to dampen that fire?”

  I stared at him. “It’s… under control,” I said. I didn’t know how he knew so much about me. I pointed at the two women. “Your ‘witches’ or whatever you insist on calling them. What… the hell? You say they brought you back? Who are they, really?”

  Chase set down his cup. “They don’t have names,” he told me. “Not that they remember anyway. But they were scientists once. Private company, but contracted a lot with Cabal. They were business partners with their husband… ex-husband now. They founded their own company, but they’ve been at the forefront of enhancement engineering since the beginning.”

  He looked over to them, with real affection, like a proud son. “And I’m talking a long time ago, back in the early days. There was a lot of experimenting going on back then, trying to cure the Pale virus, trying to make humans stronger, to fight, to survive, to advance. These two were the best and brightest. Well,
one of them was, anyway.”

  I frowned. “If they’re the best of Cabal’s scientists, why the hell are they living here in secret? Underground in the woods? With you? And why have I never heard of them?”

  “Because they’re dead,” he shrugged. “By which I mean, they’re officially dead, on record. Not actually, physically dead, like me. Everyone thinks they died nine years ago, and everything they were ever involved in has been long covered up. They’ve been forgotten, and that’s exactly how they like it. Better to live in peace out here than be killed for real for the things they know.”

  “And what do they know?”

  “Oh, we know lots of things, dear,” one of the sisters called to me, closing a cupboard door and dusting her hands on her tattered lab coat. “Whispers whispers whispers. We learned far too much, a long time ago. We know who the enemy is. We know what’s coming eventually. That’s what happens when you dig a little too deep. Sometimes the worst thing happens, and you actually find answers.”

  “Dark answers, things you can’t then… unknow. Then you have to disappear,” the other said, a little wistfully. “Otherwise there are people will make you disappear for good.”

  “Between you and me,” Chase whispered. “They’re no longer ‘all-there’, if you get my meaning. But they still have brilliant minds. Even shattered mirrors reflect the sun, and they have skills you couldn’t dream of.”

  Having someone who I considered borderline insane refer to someone else as quite mad, made me feel even more uncomfortable about being here.

  Something about what Chase had told me of the strange sisters rang a bell in my head. I just wasn’t sure what it was yet.

  “And these… women…” I said. “They brought you back from the dead?”

  Chase leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs casually. “In a manner of speaking, yes. You’d call it magic, hence the witchy titles, but you and I both know that all magic is, Doctor, is science that has not yet been explained. Think of all the breath-taking modern inventions we have these days that would have been called witchcraft back in mediaeval times. Mobile phones, microwaves, vaccines, cheese-strings. All the amazing advances we take for granted only because we are used to them. The sisters’ company was, and it remains, even without them, on the cutting edge of what can and cannot be done.”

  “The trouble with certain parts of Cabal, dear,” one of the sisters said a tad wistfully. “Is that they only really focus on what can be done, not whether it should be.”

  “She’s right,” Chase nodded. “Some of the projects these two were involved in, honestly, it would put hairs on your chest.” He turned and nodded at Sofia. “And more on yours, duck.”

  “Someone has reopened our old project files,” one of the sisters said. “All the dark work we were part of long ago. Someone is poking around again in things we should never have in the first place.”

  I honestly found it hard to tell the women apart. I wondered if they were twins.

  “No, we’re not twins,” the other one said with a chuckle. “Not in the usual sense anyway.”

  I started in my chair, staring across the room at them with wide and startled eyes. “You… you can read my thoughts?”

  She waved a hand vaguely in the air. “Snatches… snatches, like wind in the trees. Thoughts aren’t like words on a page, dear. There’s no neat procession of words. Most people’s minds are humming five tunes at once.” She smiled in a friendly way. “Sometimes we catch a bar or two of a melody, that’s all.”

  I had thought only vampires could invade people’s heads, low level telepathy and all that.

  “The sisters are a little of this and a little of that,” Chase told me. “When Cabal first discovered Genetic Others, one very private branch decided to try to harness the unique abilities of some of them, and apply them to humans. To put us on a more level playing field, as it were. Their company was involved.”

  “Splice and dice,” the sisters said together.

  “One of these women didn’t exist back then,” Chase explained.

  I tore my eyes away from the strange old women, and back to Chase. What the hell was he talking about?

  “She made a synthetic, a simulacrum of herself, to experiment on, to imbue with various different… abilities.”

  “Playing god,” Sofia said.

  “Quite, yes. Home grown clone, and farm fresh. Entirely organic. Almost perfect copies,” Chase mused. “The trouble was, the copy was quite a helper, they fed off each other’s ideas. Two minds are better than one, right? They experimented on one another, to the point where…” He lowered his voice a little. “I think something broke in both of them.”

  I stared at the witches. So one of them was, or had been, human once, and the other was… a clone? Like a three-dimensional printed image.

  “They don’t remember, now, which one of the two of them is the ‘original’,” Chase told me. “So don’t bother asking. Their minds and memories are not what they used to be. But they’re still brilliant genetic artists. That’s how they brought me back too. A little grave robbing here, a little splicing there…”

  “So you’re… a clone? Of the original Chase Pargate? They what, grew you in a test tube?”

  Chase scoffed. “Don’t be absurd! They grew me in a petri dish.” He cracked his knuckles. “And then later in that.” He nodded across the dimly lit room. In the far corner, furthest from the door, amidst the many monitors and apparatus of the old outpost, there was a large contraption. It looked something like a sensory-deprivation tank, but stood up on its end. It was connected to the walls with various tubes and snaking pipes, seeming to tether it down to the floor around it like vines around a space-age Ankor Wat. “They brought me back to fight the good fight.”

  I peered at the containment unit, glowing softly and clicking occasionally in the dark. “What’s in there now? Sephiroth?”

  “Not quite,” Chase smiled secretly. He glanced over at Sofia “The sisters are fixing another problem, but it’s slow progress. That’s another line of questioning all together.”

  I looked back to Chase, at his young, annoyingly handsome and very real face. If they really had regenerated him from his own dead DNA, even with accelerated growth, that would explain why he looked so young when he had died well into his 50’s. But it didn’t explain how he still had all his memories from his ‘previous life’. I said as much.

  “We put his mind back afterwards,” one of the sisters told me lightly, as though it were nothing. “Like re-upholstering a brand new chair in an old comfy cover.” She laughed a little. The other one copied her. “It’s not as complicated as you’d imagine, when the details and memories from someone’s life are all minutely catalogued on old Cabal archives. It just took a lot of hacking.”

  It came to me suddenly, like a revelation, who these women…or this one woman who stood before me twice…had been. Something had itched in my memory when Chase had mentioned the company she used to run, with her ex-husband, and that she had officially ‘died’ to disappear, nine years ago. I was fairly certain that that company had been PAPER. I was looking at the first wife of William Cunningham Bowls. The mother of the missing Melodie.

  Cunningham Bowls had told me himself that he had started PAPER with his wife. That she had been a brilliant scientist, and that she had passed away suddenly, only a year before he himself had stepped down from the company, to spend his remaining time at home with his sick daughter and new wife.

  What ‘dark secrets’ had this woman discovered, working in conjunction with Cabal, which had been serious enough for her to fake her own death? Abandon her family? Disappear off the grid with her copied self for company and live hidden away in the woods ever since? Her husband, and everyone else, clearly believed she was dead. Chase had said her mind was a little broken these days. Did she really not remember who she had been?

  “Why did you bring him back at all?” I asked the women, indicating Chase.

  “Because we needed
a champion,” one said simply. “Someone to help fight the good fight. You’ve already been told, Doctor, we found out terrible… terrible things… We know what’s coming eventually.”

  Her sister nodded. Both of their faces had become quite grave. “We know the endgame… the faceless ones.” She almost spat these last words. “We cannot go back amongst the people, but out here we can watch and see, and prepare.”

  “Prepare for what?” I stood up. “What is this endgame? What secrets did you find out? And what the hell does this have to do with these missing children? These vampire deaths?”

  Chase leaned forward, trying to calm me, “Look, doctor dearest, you’re a formidable human, but one thing at a time, okay. There’s no need to blow your entire head off with too much information at once.”

  “If you call me ‘dearest’ one more time, I swear to God-”

  “Endgame is coming,” one of the women cut me off. “Make no mistake about that. But not yet. The faceless ones are still getting their chess pieces in place. There is still time to stop them… to undo their preparations… before the real trouble arrives.”

  “That’s why we needed the Voynich manuscript,” the other nodded, patting her sister’s arm comfortingly. “He was a wise man, that one, a genius. Knew a lot in his time. Spent a lot of time amongst the others, did Bacon. That book tells you a lot of things. Tells you how the others were made… tells you how some of them might be un-made too.”

  I had almost forgotten that Chase had stolen that ancient manuscript. So he had been stealing it for them?

  “The last person who used any information from that manuscript was Marlin Scott, and he created a dirty bomb so bad, it would have killed every last Genetic Other in New Oxford.”

  “Indeed. Including the faceless ones.” The sisters both nodded in tandem. “Why else do you think they intervened and stopped him?”

  “I stopped him,” I argued. They shook their heads.

  “Faceless ones made you,” they corrected flatly. “Fingers in your head, yes? They point the gun and you pull the trigger?”