Paper Children

by James Fahy

  “Different stories, depending who we talked to over there,” she told me. “But if the street-kid gangs and others are to be believed, we’re looking at a lot, Doc, upward of thirty.”

  I leaned back in my chair, stunned. Thirty. Thirty missing children, and the city didn’t know about them. Not a single outcry, not a single news article. No police action. Nothing at all on Cabal’s radar. I felt queasy.

  “There’s no way thirty kids are snatched off the street without Cabal knowing about it,” I said. “Someone is covering something up somewhere. I just don’t know who, or how high… or why.”

  Admittedly, I knew very little.

  “Do you think Cloves knows about this?” Griff asked me hesitantly. It was a valid question. I didn’t know. Cloves had held information back from me in the past, but surely even she wasn’t so stone-hearted not to mention mass child abductions. Surely she was none the wiser. She had to be out of the loop on this.

  “But why is this… thing… whatever the hell it is, taking these kids in the first place?” Lucy hugged her own elbows. “It gives me the creeps. It’s like it’s collecting children. Maybe it really is a demon.”

  “More pertinent that why,” Denison tapped his finger on the metal table. “Is where?”

  We all looked at him.

  “At least thirty children, not counting the recent additions? All taken, but no bodies. No corpses have turned up, anywhere? Not a one. If this thing isn’t killing them, where the hell is it keeping them?”

  “Maybe it eats them,” Lucy said, her hands flying to her mouth as though wanting to stop the words escaping.

  We all blanched. Oh god, please don’t be a troll-eating-billy-goats kind of deal. The kids were somewhere… they had to be. We just needed a lead.

  “There are a million places to hide in a city the size of New Oxford,” I shook my head. “But we only need to find the thing once. We need proof that these kidnappings are the work of the bastard I met at the library. We need evidence that it’s connected to the vampire deaths. Dove is scared for his people, being picked off by some kind of seraph, but he’s still pushing ahead with the parade on Halloween.”

  “By all accounts, this creature, whatever kind of GO it is, doesn’t sound like any kind of angel I ever heard of.” Griff sipped his coffee, looking concerned.

  “Maybe a fallen one,” Denison muttered.

  There was distant ping from the main lab. Griff left the table, excusing himself. His datascreen was chirping at him.

  The remaining three of us at the table exchanged worried glances. The case I had been brought in on, first to find a missing child, then two, went deeper than any of us had guessed. Something, or someone, was making the city its own dark playground, and either Cabal genuinely didn’t know the scale of it, or, worse, they did, and it was being suppressed, even from members of Cabal themselves. The meeting I’d eavesdropped on at the library suggested the latter. There were at least ten senior directors on Cabal’s board. Less than half of them had been at that gathering. Were there different factions working against one another, even within our lords and masters?

  I felt clammy. I don’t believe in demons, I told myself. We don’t have the full picture here, that’s all. The devil is not lurking in the shadows, taking away the innocent. But the image of the being I had seen at the library wouldn’t fade from my mind. Caught on the balcony across from me, its burned, ruined face grinning in a flash of lightening. Nor would the sound of its high giggle as it had playfully dropped my phone into my hand in the pitch black bathroom. I thought of the old governess, mangled beyond sense and mashed into the interior of the piano. Of the violence with which the unsolved vampire killings were being executed. That people as strong as the vampires were worried. That they had their own bogeyman, preying on saints and sinners alike. It was hard not to wonder if the perpetrator was genuinely a being of… well… evil.

  Or was this really the work of a dangerously unhinged mind.

  “Doc,” Griff’s voice called to me from his workstation in the main lab. I turned in my chair.

  “You’re going to want to come and see this.” His voice sounded worried, thin.

  Trailing Denison and Lucy behind me, I headed out of the conference morgue to the main lab. Griff was standing over his desk, poised over the keyboard.

  “What is it?”

  “I told you I was waiting on something? It’s come through, and-”

  “Your mystery footage?” I leaned in next to him.

  “Well,” he explained. “I was thinking. There was nothing caught on drone footage during the party at the Cunningham Bowls little girl’s party, was there?”

  I shook my head.

  “No low level drones are allowed on private property in high end places like Portmeadow,” Denison confirmed. “The uber-wealthy have their privileges, and privacy is one of them.”

  Griff hovered over his mouse. “Well, that got me to thinking… for both that scene and the most recent vampire kill we know about. No low level drones, sure… but what about higher?”

  “Weather drones?” Lucy asked, her eyebrows raised. Griff nodded.

  “Cabal doesn’t directly monitor their feeds, they’re so high in the atmosphere, their only purpose is to record atmospheric changes, weather systems rolling in from outside the city, but they’re still always circling up there,”

  “And recording,” I said with realisation. “Griff, you’re a genius!”

  “Not too shabby for a digestive biscuit,” he shrugged. “Now of course, the picture quality isn’t so good from way up, but we can zoom and enhance it a bit. I’ve had some contacts over at meteorology working on this footage for a while, time-stamped and coordinated for both incidents. I thought perhaps, just maybe, we would get lucky and catch something on camera.”

  “Demons on tape!” Lucy whooped. “And did we hit gold? Or… brimstone, or whatever?”

  Griff glanced up at me, and there was something strange in his expression. His screen reflected off his glasses.

  “Not exactly,” he said, directly to me. “And bear in mind we don’t have exact times for both crimes, only estimate windows of around an hour for each, but we did catch something on the scenes. Both of them.”

  “Show me,” I said, leaning into the screen, my hands splayed on the table.

  Griff clicked through several still frames, all incredibly grainy, but full colour, aerial shots. Some of the Cunningham Bowls estate, others of night-time rooftops, the rooftop of the Jackson staircase where Cloves and I had found our most recently dismantled vampire. Most of the stills were empty. Static creeping around the edge of the frame. They had clearly been enlarged and zoomed as much as was feasible.

  “Here… and here,” Griff said, his fingers dancing over his keyboard. “I’ll bring them both up.”

  A split screen image filled the window. The left hand side showed a top down exterior view of the Portmeadow mansion, just over the music room where we had discovered the remains of the unfortunate Ms Fraeidrich. I could make out the patio doors and the grass of the lawn. The other was the top of the College, already slick with exploded vampire in the moonlight. Slightly blurred in both shots there was a figure, clearly moving away from the scene.

  Denison leaned close over my shoulder, squinting against the grain of the enlarged images. “That’s not a devil… is it?”

  My eyes went wide. I wasn’t sure what I’d been hoping to find, what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this.

  “No it’s not…” I said in disbelief. “It’s a dead man walking.”

  The figure in both scenes wore a long red leather duster jacket and had a shock of blonde hair so pale it was almost white. I couldn’t see the face from above, but I’d seen that distinctive outfit before, and I was ninety percent certain who I was looking at.

  “That’s Chase Pargate,” I whispered.

  Chapter 17

  Lucy was practically skipping to keep up with me as we paced through the streets of
Oxford. It was bitterly cold. October was out in force, biting into us with her cold, pumpkin-carved teeth, and I had my coat gripped tight around me. At least it was dry. Above us, framed by the spikes and crenulations of my city’s dark buildings, the sky was a deep purple bruise beyond the streetlights.

  “Where are we going again?” she sounded out of breath, tugging at my arm like a tired child two steps away from having a tantrum.

  “Christchurch College,” I replied. “Keep up will you?”

  It had taken me all afternoon to track my boss down, through various channels and her ever-so-helpful office assistant Melanie, who, in the grand tradition of receptionists everywhere, was incredibly polite and desperately unforthcoming with any useful information. It was almost 7.00 pm now, and at this time of year, that made it long after sunset. The vampires must love Autumn and Winter. So much more of the night for them to enjoy.

  “But why?” Lucy asked. “Griff and Dee could probably use our help back at the lab. There’s the ID on the vampire murder evidence to finalise, the full and final autopsy of the old lady, plus Director Coldwater called while you were tracking down Cloves. She’s coming down to the lab herself… in person… something about wanting to know further details on the story of that old homeless guy she took in for questioning. You don’t think we need to be there for that?”

  “We’re going to Christchurch because that’s where Cloves is,” I explained, weaving around pedestrians. The streets were busier every night as the Fangfest parade drew ever nearer. “There’s some kind of open air cinema set up in the quad. Part of the week-long vampy-goodness celebration. Oscar mentioned it to me at Sanctum. They’re showing old pre-war movies there, and Cloves, I am reliably informed by her PA, is doing a DataStream spot to promote it.”

  Christchurch was south of the High, down past Carfax and further. Far beyond the boundaries of the vampire GO district that centred around St Giles. It was unusual, under normal circumstances, to see vampires out of their district. There had been some small but (so far) non-violent protests about them using the hallowed Christchurch Quadrangle as the site for their screening, but in the end, Cabal had green-lit it. The Dean, whom I’d spotted at Dove’s swanky party the day before, was a great GO supporter.

  “Griff and Dee can handle Coldwater,” I assured her. “That was definitely Chase Pargate present at both scenes. I have to talk to Cloves about it before I decide what it means.”

  “Isn’t he the guy who tazed you that time at Oscar Scott’s place?” Lucy enquired.

  “He also saved me from death by rabid were-beast and death by evil drone gun… oh, and a hospital wing full of the Pale,” I paused, thinking. “And some faceless girls too.”

  “But he stole that book didn’t he?” Lucy remembered. “That old one everyone was going crazy over, with all the secrets of the GOs in it?”

  Well yes, there was that, I admitted. From my experience, Chase Pargate was happy-go-lucky, extremely dangerous and quite possibly very unstable. I wasn’t sure whose side he was on, if anyone’s. His pulling my arse out of the fire on more than one occasion had been quite coincidental. It had suited his needs at the time. I wasn’t convinced that if circumstances had been different and I’d been in his way rather than by his side, he wouldn’t have hesitated to eliminate me.

  “Yes, Luce, drive a point home,” I said, exasperated. “He’s morally grey, I get it. But kidnapping kids?”

  Cloves had already killed Chase once, years ago, for trying to bring down Cabal from the inside. Why he was back, and how he was tangled up in all this, I couldn’t fathom. But I knew that Veronica Cloves knew him better than I did. I didn’t care if I had to gate-crash her social event. She could spare two minutes from shaking hands and kissing babies to give me some answers.

  All the colleges in New Oxford, and there are many, are impressive in their own way, but of all of them, Christchurch is perhaps the pinnacle.

  Entering directly off the street through the gatehouse, as Lucy and I now did, we were spilled into the Great Quadrangle. A wide open space encircled on all four side by the towering gothic splendour of the college walls. This space is the heart of Christchurch. We born and bred Oxfordians refer to it as Tom Quad, named after the huge bell in the central tower, which rises like an exclamation point at the centre of the college façade, a spire of imposing carved stone designed by Christopher Wren himself.

  The huge open space, fenced in by tall decorative college walls peppered with countless diamond-leaded windows and open to the tumultuous night sky ahead, was usually a stately expanse of neatly trimmed grass, intersected with pathways leading the eye to the middle, where a fountain boasting a statue of the god Mercury made an impressive centrepiece.

  Tonight, as we entered, the entire quad was filled with brimming crowds like an outdoor festival. Many had brought blankets to sit on. There were several groups picnicking, some had deck chairs. Across from the gatehouse, at the far side of Tom Quad and directly below Wren’s gothic bell tower, a massive canvas screen hung, lashed tight across a goodly portion of the face of Christchurch. It was stories high and many window-bays wide. Onto this, the evening’s entertainment was being projected.

  I glanced around at the riot of milling people, silhouetted against the vast cinema screen. Flaming tiki lights stood all around the perimeter of the quad providing warm illumination, and all around the doors and windows of the college were strings of Halloween lanterns. Despite this, the inner space, the grassy oblong larger than a football pitch, was mostly dark like any other open air cinema. Countless pinpricks of light from hand-held datascreens and mobile phones twinkled like a starry night sky fallen to earth. Most of the festival crowd were nothing but shadows.

  “Shitballs,” I muttered to myself, wondering how on earth we were going to find Cloves here. I hadn’t expected so many people or for it to be on such a grand scale.

  “Ooh this looks fun!” Lucy grinned. “We should have brought popcorn! I wished I’d had time to dress better.” She was looking around a little self-consciously. “Literally everyone here is more Helsing than I am. Dammit. We should have stopped at Nameless City. They have new Fangfest designs I’ve had my eye on.”

  Ignoring her craving for vampire fangirl clothing, my eyes strayed up to the huge makeshift cinema screen, on which the pre-war actor Lance Henriksen was currently driving a beat up old black van through the desert, his face smoking and hissing as his brood of vampire companions strove to black out the windows with spray paint cans. I knew the movie. Near Dark. One of the classics. Movie audio boomed out of huge freestanding speakers either side of the screen and at all four corners of the quad.

  “There,” I pointed, tugging Lucy’s arm. “Across Tom, that raised area, see it? It’s all velvet-roped off. Looks like a VIP area.” My reasoning was that if Cloves was to be found anywhere, just follow the sound of complimentary champagne corks popping. I dragged Lucy away from the gatehouse and into the crowd, trying not to step on people sitting in the dark, huddled in their parkas and crunching popcorn, as we made our slow way across the huge lawns.

  “Why do you keep calling it Tom?” she asked, one eye on the screen, where there was now a violent and very vampiric bar brawl happening in a diner.

  “It’s the name of the bell up in the tower,” I pointed upwards. “Although I suppose it could also be for Thomas Wolsey.”

  “You’re not really expecting me to know who that is, are you?”

  “He was the Archbishop of York and the founder of Cardinal’s college,” I told her. “Powerful guy, back in his day.” And like all powerful men of the time, he wanted to display that power through some pretty extravagant buildings. I gestured around us. “Tom quad, here at Christchurch, along with Hampton court palace, are his legacy, his masterpieces.”

  I guided her around a pack of Helsings who were gathered around a masked festival-garbed vampire, who was expertly juggling fire, painting them all in suitably hellish dancing light and shadow.

 
“Ironic really, that he wanted this place to be a testament to renaissance learning and the catholic faith, all that pious archbishopness. And now here it is, filled with vampires swallowing swords and students getting drunk on schnapps.”

  “Students have been getting drunk in college quads on schnapps since the dawn of time, Doc,” Lucy smirked.

  “Great Tom is the bell in the tower.” I shook my head at my lab assistant. “I can’t believe you don’t know this? I mean, Great Tom is to Oxford what Big Ben is to London.”

  “London is a pile of ash overrun with cannibalistic Pale zombie monsters,” Lucy pointed out. “And Big Ben burned to a matchstick skeleton way back.”

  “What Big Ben was to London then,” I amended, testy. “It’s the backdrop to every day in the city, ringing the hours. You can hear Great Tom from everywhere.”

  Light dawned on my cherubic companion’s face. “Ah… yeah. I always assumed that was a recording over the Cabal tannoy to be honest.”

  I looked at her, aghast, as we passed the central fountain, and the statue of Mercury looking as majestic as ever, floodlit in bright red spotlights for the evening’s entertainment. My inner history geek wanted to tell her many things about the fountain too, but heroically I resisted.

  “Anyway, it’s not that impressive. Big Tom or Great Tom or whatever it’s called. It’s always late in the evenings and it rings like a billion times,” she scoffed. “My alarm clock is more accurate that that old bell.”

  “It rings a hundred and one times, to be exact,” I corrected, leading her on past the fountain. I still hadn’t spotted Cloves. How far away was this bloody dais? “It was originally to mark the curfew. When students had to return to college and be tucked in tight for a good night’s sleep. One hundred for the number of students Henry the VIII attached to the college, plus one extra for one more student who was allowed to join the college by bequest halfway through the seventeenth century.”

  Lucy glared at me. “We really need to find you a boyfriend, Doc. Or at least a cat.”