by Maynard Sims
Holly was waiting in the black-and-white marble-tiled entrance hall.
He nodded to the leader of the group and followed the men as they took the sack into the library. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves held thousands of leather-bound volumes, and along the top of the shelves, a gallery was reached by some wooden steps by the window.
The sack was dropped, roughly, onto the large rug in front of the huge stone fireplace. The rope tying the sack shut was loosened and the contents tumbled out onto the rug.
Julia opened her eyes sleepily, still very weak from the feeding.
Holly thanked the men and dismissed them.
He sat in a sixteenth-century armchair and watched Julia for several minutes.
She hardly stirred during that time, lying on her back and then moving onto her side. If she realized she was naked, she gave no indication.
Eventually Holly walked across to a small desk and pressed a concealed buzzer. Moments later Alice came into the room.
“Alice,” Holly said. “This is our new breeder.”
Alice tried to look at the girl without revealing any emotion, but she wasn’t adept at concealment and Holly was prepared for her reactions.
“You should be pleased. I shan’t need your womb anymore.”
“Who is she?”
Holly ignored her for a while. “I want you to nurse her back to strength. She is not damaged, but she has been drained. There shouldn’t be any physical injury, but she will need nourishment.”
Alice knelt down and stroked the young woman’s hair. The girl opened her eyes and looked up at Alice, fear and fascination in equal measures.
“I asked who she is.”
“Forgive me, where are my manners? Alice Spur, human, meet Julia Czerwinski, half human.”
“Half…”
“…half…nonhuman. The perfect mix for the next stage of my research.”
Alice coaxed Julia into a sitting position, though Julia was partially slumped against her shoulder.
“Tell Karolina to help you, but please take our guest to the blue room and get her washed and rested.”
“Why can’t you…”
Holly was at her side before the blink of an eye. He took hold of her hair and twisted. “I asked you, not anyone else.” He released her hair. “This is a special job, Alice, and you’re my special girl aren’t you?”
Alice had always known she wasn’t special to Holly; no one was. Now she didn’t even know whether he needed her at all.
Chapter Thirty-one
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.
—Erich Fromm
Dunkerry, Republic of Ireland
Dylan climbed into the driver’s seat of his hired Ford Focus and slammed his palm on the steering wheel.
Damn Simon Crozier!
He took a breath to calm his anger and turned the key in the ignition. It was only a short drive back to the cottage he was renting on the other side of the village, but instead of turning right out of the pub car park back to the cottage, he turned left and headed up to the hills that surrounded the area. He needed to think.
He had been with the department for nearly twelve years, and recently he’d started to consider leaving. His reasons were those he’d mentioned in the pub, but there was more to it than he’d let on. There were elements creeping into his life that he wasn’t about to disclose to Crozier or anybody else for that matter.
He was aware of being watched, vague shadowy shapes glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. They plagued him constantly and were starting to make his life a misery.
Ever since childhood, he’d had the ability to see beyond the normal boundaries. Even as early as seven years old he was seeing and conversing with the recently deceased. His great-grandfather was the first spirit he communicated with. Not twenty-four hours in the ground, the old man was back at his bedside, telling the very young Michael Dylan exactly what it was like to be dead. But then his great-grandfather had always been a mischievous old bugger. A Dubliner to the core, he embraced the myths and legends of Eire and was eager to impart the stories to his grandson. And Michael had listened to the old man’s stories with rapt attention, never questioning them or disputing them.
“You’re different, Mikey,” his great-grandfather told him. “Different from the herd. I knew it the moment you were born. You have the eye. It’s a great gift to be sure, but you must use it wisely.” And although Michael didn’t really believe the old man, he never argued with him. If his great-grandfather thought him to be special, then who was he to disagree? “I’ll prove to you that you have the eye, that you can see things others can’t. When I die I’ll come back and visit you, and I’ll be as real to you then as I am to you now.”
And he did. And he was. It was like having the old man, living and breathing, in the room with him once more.
The visits continued sporadically for the next seven years, until he hit puberty, and then they stopped. There was no long farewell or any explanation why. They just stopped, and Michael felt completely alone.
Until he started getting other visitors.
Throughout his teens and into his early twenties, visitations happened on a regular basis. They set him apart from his peers and made him something of an outcast at school where his fellow pupils were quick to recognize that there was something different, something otherworldly, about him. The visitations also hampered his relationships with the opposite sex, with one young woman in particular running screaming from his bed when he told her that her dead father was sitting in the corner of the room watching what his daughter was getting up to.
After that incident he became more circumspect, shutting himself off further from the rest of humanity. The eye was a curse, something that was ruining his life. Until he heard about Department 18, and suddenly there was an avenue open to him; a way to use the power to his advantage and be with people who had similar isolating powers.
He flourished in the department, quickly becoming one of its top investigators, up there with the likes of Robert Carter and John McKinley, taking on cases of paranormal phenomena and usually solving them. For a while he was overseeing the department’s clean-up team, men and women handpicked for their resilience and their ability to go into virtually any situation and resolve them. He became friendly with Patrick Donovan, an ex-priest, Irish like himself, and an experienced exorcist. It was Father Donovan who first told him about breathers.
“You have to be very wary of them, Michael. They are souls with no conscience, stranded on earth as a result of their misdeeds during their lives and unable to cross over to the afterlife. They are very angry, very bitter and, once they get their hooks into you, it’s the devil’s own job to get rid of them. They will haunt you, follow you, invade your life and make it a total misery. And the worst of it is that you’ll never really see them. They’re dark and elusive and will always be just there hovering, dancing on the edge of your perception.”
He later learned that Father Donovan was speaking from bitter experience. He had spent years being tormented by the breathers, and just six months after Dylan’s conversation with him, Patrick Donovan walked into a local meatprocessing factory and threw himself into an industrial grinder used for mincing the beef into hamburger.
Once departed, Donovan never came back to visit, but Dylan always believed that it was the breathers who were responsible for the ex-priest’s grisly end, that they literally tormented him to death.
And now he had his own breathers to contend with and was terrified he would end up the same way as Patrick Donovan. Only he knew what they were. Not the souls trapped in limbo that the Catholic priest had conjured up to explain his own demons. Dylan knew they were a race apart, knew they were probably the most dangerous foe Department 18 would face. In their unformed state, they may appear as shadows, floating black shapes that sometimes swooped in pac
ks, seeking hosts for food. Their true form usually remained hidden away.
He parked the car halfway up a hill and sat there looking out across the landscape. He could see Dunkerry and the pub. There were a few cars in the car park. Probably one of them belonged to Bailey or Crozier. He needed to think long and hard about this. The case intrigued him, and he was itching to get back to work, despite what he had told his boss. At the moment he was hiding himself away and vegetating. He could almost feel his brain ossifying through lack of activity.
But going back, getting involved with the department, was risky. Not just for him, but for whomever he was teamed up with. While the breathers were a problem, and one he was struggling to contain, he couldn’t be sure that they wouldn’t latch on to someone he was associated with, and that would be catastrophic. It would sit on his conscience for the rest of his life.
His last case, the poltergeist in Burnley, had very nearly been compromised when he’d lost concentration at a crucial point. Something glimpsed out of the corner of his eye caught his attention and he let his mind wander, leaving him vulnerable. With his defenses down, the attack came swiftly and brutally. One moment he was sitting at the table in the prosaic little kitchen of the house; the next he was flying across the room, propelled by unseen hands that crashed him face-first into the far wall.
He wasn’t badly hurt physically—a cut forehead and two broken teeth, but the damage to his confidence and his pride was incalculable.
Sitting on the floor wiping the blood from his brow and his mouth, he realized he would have to deal with the breathers once and for all. The only problem he had was just how he was going to deal with them.
Coming back home to Ireland seemed like a good enough place to start. In familiar surroundings, in a place he felt safe, he tried to banish the breathers from his life, let them be someone else’s problem. So far he’d had some success. It wasn’t a complete rout, but, as he grew stronger, fortified by the home comforts, he felt better, and so far he had gone five days without seeing a single shadowy shape or hearing a malicious whisper in his ear.
He checked his watch. The flight to London was in two hours. He didn’t have long to make his decision. He got out of the car and breathed in the crisp, fresh air, filling his lungs. Delving into his pocket he produced a coin. Heads or tails. He wagered with himself and tossed the coin, catching it deftly. Then he slapped it down onto the back of his other hand. Heads I go, tails I stay. He took his hand away to reveal the result, smiled grimly, and got back into the car.
Two hours later he was sitting aboard a Boeing 737 with Crozier and Bailey, headed for London.
Chapter Thirty-two
Department 18 Headquarters, Whitehall, London, England
There was a knock at the door and Trudy, Crozier’s secretary, walked in with a tray of cups, saucers, and teapot. The reputation of the English government flourishing on a diet of afternoon tea and digestive biscuits was kept alive in this part of the establishment.
Crozier stood and walked to the windows. Looking out, he could see the traffic starting to build up. The roof of Buckingham Palace was visible a short distance away. The flag was flying, indicating the queen was in residence.
“Twenty-seven million,” Martin Impey said, addressing the five people seated at one end of the large oval table in the Department’s conference room. “That’s the figure. The estimated number of people worldwide kept in one form of slavery or another.”
A murmur rippled around the table.
“Are you sure that figure’s right?” Simon Crozier said. The flight back had passed quickly enough, and they had all settled into the task ahead.
Martin flicked on the projector. The screen was filled with a PowerPoint slide showing a breakdown of the figures. “I checked and rechecked,” he said. “I’ve used all the Internet data available, and that’s the figure. Staggering, I know.”
“And an indication of the difficulty of the task ahead.” This from Alan Liskard, the Under-Secretary at the Home Office, whose job it was to oversee the running of Department 18. It was a job he hated, one that had been foisted upon him by the prime minister, who wanted a buffer between himself and a very suspect department. The notion that he was that buffer irked Liskard immeasurably.
“Twenty-seven million men, women, and children across the globe who have been taken from their homes and traded illegally. The UN estimated a figure for human trafficking at 800,000 a year. The amount of money generated by this business is off the scale; it runs into tens of billions. It’s the third most profitable business for organized crime, after drugs and arms trafficking,” Martin said. “The current price for a white newborn baby in the UK is ten thousand pounds. The price drops slightly if the baby is from an ethnic group, but only slightly. Adults fetch less again, but remember that many of those are actually selling themselves into slavery. Many have parted with their life savings to escape countries with oppressive regimes or poor economic structures, only to find themselves working for a pittance or, quite often, nothing at all, in wealthy countries. Trapped and unable to extricate themselves from the position they’ve been suckered into.”
“So Holly and his kind take advantage of this illegal trade?” Harry Bailey said.
“The people they take for their own uses are part of an unmanageable statistic. These figures are no great secret, but few governments see human trafficking as a priority. Isn’t that right, Under-Secretary?”
Liskard glared at him but said nothing.
Martin continued, “It’s one of the reasons Holly and his kind have stayed undetected for so long. The poor souls who are traded are invisible, untraceable. And it’s easier to leave them that way. There are groups in the UK, like the Salvation Army, that try to raise awareness, and there are charitable organizations in other countries with similar agendas. But faced with such a huge problem on a truly global scale, they might just as well be pissing in the sea for all the difference they make. It’s the perfect environment for these creatures to operate.”
“A bit melodramatic, isn’t it?” Liskard said, his face sliding into a sneer. “Creatures? Surely they have a name.”
Crozier said, “Not as far as I know, Alan.”
“Breathers,” Martin Impey said.
Crozier looked at him sharply. “Pardon?”
“I found a book in the British Library written by Professor Oliver Vance in the 1930s, dealing with the myths and legends of ancient Rome. Apparently these creatures were around at that time too. The Roman’s called them Spiracie, from the word spiraculum. Which translates as breathe or to breathe. The creatures have small openings in their fingertips like spiracles, or breathing tubes, and the Romans believed the Spiracie killed their victims by burrowing into their lungs with their fingers and stealing their breath.”
“Well, they weren’t that far away from the truth, were they,” Bailey said.
“No, I suppose not,” Martin said. “Anyway, the colloquial name that seems to have stuck for the last few hundred years is breathers.”
Alan Liskard clapped his hands together. “Okay, let’s get on. We have a name for them. Not particularly accurate, I dare say, but it will do, I suppose. The question is, what are you going to do about them?”
Michael Dylan’s thoughts were drifting. The words were sinking into his consciousness, but his mind was miles away in Dunkerry. This was the part of the job he hated. When the starched shirts got involved, the fun dissipated. And Liskard was so buttoned up he looked permanently constipated.
Dylan glanced across the table at the young woman sitting opposite him. He’d never seen her before and was curious. She looked to be in her early thirties with jet-black hair pulled severely back from an unmemorable face and held in place with a tortoiseshell clip. Her clothes were loose, baggy, seemingly chosen to hide the body beneath them. She was listening intently to the conversation, tapping the end of a pencil against her teeth and occasionally using her nicotine-stained index finger to push her heavy, black-fr
amed glasses back from the tip of her nose.
She’d been introduced to the group as Dr. Miranda Payne, an Oxford-educated psychologist and, Dylan suspected, brought into the team as a last-minute replacement for Jane Talbot. He felt sorry for Jane and missed her at the table, but her absence was understandable. Her last assignment on the island of Kulsay was the talk of the office. For her, the experience had been nothing short of cataclysmic. According to Crozier, Jane was on indefinite sick leave and he had no idea when she would be back to work, if ever.
“Are you still with us, Dylan?” Crozier’s voice broke into his thoughts.
Michael Dylan mentally shook himself. “Yes, sorry.”
“The under-secretary was asking what we’re going to do about the problem.”
“Problem?”
Crozier glared at him.
Miranda Payne put down her pencil and pushed back her glasses. “I think we need to focus,” she said. “You’ve researched this brilliantly…Martin, isn’t it? But bandying about the figures for human trafficking is only going to muddy the waters. Slavery is not the issue here. It seems to me that we’re dealing with ruthless predators that see the human race as nothing more than food. If, as you say, they’ve been around since Roman times, we have to assume that they are either very adept at living in the shadows or that their presence has infiltrated the highest levels of our society and they are being very well protected. I suspect the latter.”
“That’s quite an accusation, Ms. Payne,” Liskard said. “You surely don’t believe that their influence could have reached as far as government.” He sounded affronted, as if the mere suggestion that the government, his government, could have possibly been compromised.
“Why not?” Miranda said. “And it’s Dr. Payne.” She lifted her chin defiantly, as if daring him to challenge her.
“Sorry, Dr. Payne,” Liskard said, a slight smile playing on his lips. “Please continue.”
