Tourmaline

by James Brogden

  Resigned, Degan filled a kettle in his tiny en-suite and set it to boil, while Maddox poked and prodded with lazy insolence amongst his belongings. He picked up a piece of driftwood which Degan had been carving into a likeness of the Suzerain’s winged mermaid figurehead.

  ‘Been keeping busy, I see.’

  ‘It bides the time.’

  ‘There’s only so much wanking a man can do, I suppose.’ Maddox laughed – easy, friendly. We’re all mates here, that laugh said. All in the same boat together. But flick-flick-flick went his eyes, looking for anything out of the ordinary. As if anything here could be. Maddox turned the carving over in his hands appraisingly. ‘I suppose this must be what they call “outsider art”, then. They don’t come much more “outsider” than you, do they?’ Degan was surprised at the sudden anger which flooded him, seeing Maddox pawing the likeness of his ship’s goddess – a man like that wouldn’t have lasted a day under Elbaite naval discipline. Afraid that the anger would escape him, he busied himself with mugs and milk.

  ‘This is against regulations, you know that, don’t you?’ asked Maddox.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Carving, paintings, stories, poems – anything about where you lot come from. You do know that.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Maddox glared at him. ‘Insolent little fucker, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The Custodian turned away and replaced Degan’s carving on the windowsill. There might have been a smile curling the corners of his mouth, but when he turned back, it was gone.

  The thing with the tea, Degan knew, was not just some kind of power game designed to remind of his place, and it definitely wasn’t just a random pleasantry. Degan knew about tea because Roger Simkin – the accountant whose body he inhabited – knew about tea, just as he knew about hotels, and driving cars, and everything else about this grey, hollow world. But the more that Degan dwelt on thoughts of home, the less able he was to make use of Simkin’s knowledge, and that made him useless to the mysterious Hegemony for whom Maddox worked. On the other hand, the more mired he became in Simkin’s mundane existence and further away from Elbaite, the weaker became the powers which bled through from home. Credit where credit was due: the Custodian understood very well the balancing act which his assets like Degan had to tread.

  And Degan liked his powers. On the Suzerain he’d been nothing more than deck-swabbing grunt, and even though he was a freeborn man, he was treated not much better than one of the galley slaves, but here… oh here, the things he could do. The things he had done – and willingly so. It felt good to be able to dish back a little of what he had to swallow here, even though it did nothing for his homesickness. Still, there it was: a winged mermaid or a cup of tea. Servitude whichever way you looked at it.

  ‘You mentioned an outing,’ said Degan, eagerly.

  From an inside pocket Maddox brought out a large envelope which he tossed onto the bed. ‘Chauffeur and retrieval duty,’ he said. ‘Nothing messy this time, you’ll be disappointed to hear, unless you fuck it up. Go to the address, pick up the girl, bring her back. Easy as.’

  ‘What kind of Passenger are we talking about?’

  ‘Read the file. That’s what it’s for. In the meantime get that brew sorted, and I’ll introduce you to your muscle in case you do fuck it up.’

  Mugs in hand, they walked down the hallway towards the lift, which took them up a floor to where the ‘muscle’ was being held. The zoo. Up here, no effort had been spent on maintaining the décor to a standard fit for human habitation. The carpet was filthy, the wallpaper peeling, and both carried the marks of damage caused by the Passengers that lived on this floor. Smashed plaster. Claw marks. Bloodstains.

  ‘You ever see a hradix?’ asked Maddox.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Vicious, clever fuckers. Reptiles, but they live in trees. Think chimpanzee crossed with velociraptor, and you’ll get the idea.’ He stopped by a door, keys in hand, and looked back. ‘You haven’t got kids, have you, back where you come from?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Good. Some people have… trouble with this. Take a look.’

  Degan peered through the fish-eye lens, which, as in all the doors on this floor, had been inserted back-to-front so that the exhibits could be inspected safely. It was gloomy inside; tatters of curtain were nailed across the window, but he could just about make out…

  ‘Sweet Lady of the Islands,’ he breathed, horrified and fascinated in equal measure.

  It was a boy. Or at least, it had been a boy, once upon a time. Its hair was matted and unkempt, the hair of an animal which had long since ceased to tend itself properly – or, if Maddox was to be believed, didn’t possess any in its natural state – and it was dressed in the remains of a public school uniform so filthy that it was impossible to tell what school it might have been from. Its mouth was a ravening, tooth-filled hole from which came a low animal growling. This rapidly escalated into a high yowl as it lunged at the door, only to be checked by a length of heavy chain anchored to the wall. It knew they were outside.

  ‘Yeah,’ grimaced Maddox. ‘It’s passengered in a ten-year-old kid. Having his tonsils out, would you believe it? Must have been dreaming about jungles and ended up close to one of the fuckers while it was hibernating, or something, when they brought him out of the anaesthetic. And here we are spending millions of pounds and thousands of hours trying to engineer just this kind of thing. Dumb fucking luck.’

  He unlocked the door, and Degan gagged at the smell – the ripe, fetid stench of rotting meat. The creature went into an agitated frenzy, thrashing on the end of its chain and snarling at them.

  Maddox took out a packet of extra-strong mints and tossed one to the hradix. It snapped the mint out of mid-air and crunched it down in two gulps, calming immediately. ‘There’s still enough of the kid left in there to be bribed with sweeties, though,’ he added. ‘How messed up is that?’ He passed the packet to Degan. ‘You might want to stock up on those.’

  The hradix’s eyes glittered with savage intelligence as they darted between the two men. Degan wondered if it understood what they were saying.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  Maddox glanced at him sharply. ‘Never you mind what its name is. All you need to know is that it’s your insurance policy in case things go pear-shaped. We’ll have it cleaned up while you sort out something from the car pool.’

  ‘I thought you said this was a simple chauffeur job,’ he said. ‘Why am I going to need this thing?’

  ‘The thing passengered in the girl you’re going to pick up isn’t from anywhere in either your world or this one. It’s from Between. At the moment we believe it to be dormant. Dennis the Menace here is your last resort in case you’re stupid enough to wake it up. Because it might just turn out to be even worse.’

  Part Two

  Chapter 11

  Berylin

  1

  Half a world away from Stray, as Bobbie and Allie dreamed of rain, Officer Berylin Hooper of the Oraillean Department for Counter Subornation stared up at the shabby red-brick façade of an ordinary-looking tenement building and tried to gauge what manner of nightmare was occurring inside.

  The subornation Event at 473 Willoughby Terrace to which she had been called should have been small, localised, and essentially harmless – if the clatter reports from the Carden Constabulary were reliable – but she knew that this was extremely unlikely to be the case. Far from exaggerating the details, or even making them up in a superstitious panic like the rural authorities were likely to do, the city plod were so phlegmatic in the face of such things that they were liable to underplay its seriousness – mostly because they thought they’d seen it all before (which they hadn’t, not by a long chalk), but also, she liked to think, because the DCS were that good at putting the genie back in the bottle. Which was why
she wasn’t going to take any stupid, complacent chances with one even as small as this.

  She’d already ordered the tenements on either side to be evacuated, for a start. From the cynical smirks on the faces of the constables, she knew that they thought she was overreacting; either that or ordering them around simply because she was a woman and she could. She knew that she didn’t impress them; she wasn’t all that physically imposing, with her hair cut short rather than in the fashionable ringlets of the pretty young things one saw perambulating in Alexander Park, and her gentleman’s trousers rather than a more respectable bustle and skirt. Well, let them smirk. There’d been few deaths in any of her cases, and only a handful of imbecilements – and that was a damned good track record for anybody.

  The Carden fire brigade were standing by at close quarters in their red uniforms and shiny brass coal-scuttle helmets, with their big drencher chuntering away as it got up to pressure. So too the Beldam Unit. They were a bit more discreet, but no less capable for their stove-pipe hats and padded waistcoats; these were seasoned ward orderlies who dealt regularly with some of the most violently unstable patients in the Kingdom. The three groups of men had staked positions on three separate street corners as if preparing for some kind of bizarre three-way tug-of-war. Behind them, of course, strained the inevitable crowd of gawkers.

  But neither fire nor insanity scared her half so much as the third danger for which there was no adequate preparation other than dogged, meticulous protocol, and so she called Sergeant Bloom over one last time.

  ‘I’d like to double-check the residence status again,’ she said.

  ‘Double?’ The Sergeant’s boot-brush moustache corrugated as he sniffed sceptically. ‘We’ve already been through it twice, ma’am. I think if anybody’d got in or out in the last half hour, we’d’ve seen ’em.’

  ‘They say the third time’s the charm, Sergeant. So charm me.’

  He sighed and flipped through a sheaf of onionskin census forms for the tenement. ‘Apartment 473,’ he read. ‘Drabble, Hugo Marthen, twenty-nine years of age, mechanist. Wife, Margaret, twenty-seven, lady’s domestic. No elderly dependents, lodgers, or pets. Two minors; boy, Clive, eight; girl, Daisy, eleven.’

  ‘The husband is at work?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No – he’s over there, lookin’ a bit upset. Can’t say as I blame him, meself.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Let’s have a word with him, shall we?’

  Hugo Drabble was allowed forward from the cordon. He was pale, thin-faced, and grimy with soot and oil; a gawky denizen of Carden’s labyrinth of back-to-back streets who had probably never ventured further than a few city blocks from where he was born. His eyes were red with worry. ‘Are you the tezzer?’ he asked hopefully.

  She let the slang pass. ‘Yes, sir. That I am. I want you to know that I am going to do absolutely everything in my power to get your family back safer than sound.’

  ‘Oh, bless you miss,’ the man snuffled, knuckling tears from his eyes with both hands so that they made cleaner streaks like drooping pigeon’s wings down his cheeks. ‘Thank you so much.’

  ‘But I need you to help me.’

  ‘Anything! Anything!’

  ‘I need you to be as clear as you possibly can about exactly who is in your apartment. If it’s just Margaret and the boys, and nobody else.’

  ‘Meggie, miss. She’s my Meggie.’

  ‘Meggie, then. Is it likely that she would have taken the children out anywhere today – to the park, possibly, or a friend’s for supper?’

  ‘No, miss.’

  ‘To your knowledge, was she expecting visits from any cleaners, tinkers, or any type of tradesman?’

  ‘Not that I know of, miss.’

  ‘Very good. You are being marvellously helpful so far, Mr Drabble. Please forgive what I am about to ask – I am neither a police constable nor a priest, and I am not in the business of condemning anybody legally or morally – but I also need to know if you have any lodgers or relatives living with you not counted in the official census, or children unregistered by birth, or whether it is likely that your wife may be receiving visits from other men, or women for that matter. In short, Mr Drabble, for the safety of all concerned and for no other reason, can I and my partner expect to find any other people in that apartment at all?’

  ‘Why, of course not, miss.’ The man plainly couldn’t decide whether to be shocked, insulted, or just confused by her insistence – but then, he wasn’t the one who was going to have to decide whether he was pointing his gun at a phantasm or a suborned human being when he got in there. She searched his face and watched his hands carefully for any signs of deceit and, finding none, nodded gratefully.

  ‘Thank you very much, Mr Drabble.’

  The husband was escorted back to the police cordon, and Berylin returned to her carriage, where Runce was unloading their gear.

  ‘Typical plod,’ he grumbled, hefting down a crate. ‘No bloody help with the heavy work.’

  William Runceforth was a dour forty-something, grey from the thinning pate of his angular head to the army issue socks on his feet, but what he lacked in youthful vigour – or human warmth – he more than made up for with two qualities she prized highly. The first, and most surprisingly for a man of his military background, was that he’d never exhibited any qualms about taking orders from a woman. The second was an almost total lack of imagination. Runce was a literalist to a frightening degree. Poetry, art, allusion, metaphor – all bypassed him completely, leaving him fiercely insistent on what he referred to as ‘the bare bones, ma’am, just the bare bones’, and even though it meant he was certain never to be promoted higher in the DCS than assistant investigator, his indefatigable pragmatism had more than once saved her life in the hazy flux of a bad subornation Event, when she couldn’t distinguish between nightmare and reality.

  ‘That’s why I have an assistant, Runce. Don’t be too hard on them – they’re probably scared to bits of touching it. I would be, if I were them. And please mind your language. We’re in public.’

  ‘Beg pardon, ma’am.’ He straightened up and flexed the small of his back.

  ‘Are we set?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Mirror stations are established, and the perimeter is holding at a steady eighteen kay-vee, tezlars are fully charged, and Buster has been fed.’

  ‘Where is he? Here boy!’

  Down from the carriage jumped a beagle, all flop-eared and loll-tongued, who sniffed eagerly around their feet and the equipment crates, pausing only for a quick pee up one of the carriage wheels. Berylin ruffled Buster’s ears and clipped on his leash. ‘Going to catch some ghosts, aren’t we boy? Aren’t we?’ Buster grinned and licked her nose.

  Runce humphed. He busied himself with a large satchel-like affair which gleamed with dials, grilles, bulbs and meters; fine-calibrating their settings. His job would be to monitor the extent to which the laws of physical matter had mutated within the subornation Event, as well as the speed and scale of any further change – what was referred to as the Event’s protean vector, or simply its pv. It was crucial to know how inimical were the conditions inside and how apt they were to change. For her part, Berylin strapped the heavy battery pack of the tezlar pistol to her belt, ensuring that the flex cables swung freely. Only ever one tez per team; too many investigators had been killed or maimed hideously as a result of friendly fire from a partner who had panicked and mistaken them for a phantasm. Fire-retardant coveralls, thick goggles and rebreather masks completed their protective gear. Both gave their canisters of atomised sal volatile a few quick squirts to clear the nozzles and, looking like a pair of deep-sea divers, approached the door to the tenement building.

  2

  Runce, efficient as ever, stopped to check the mirror station by the main door, even though it needed no checking. In a handful of cases where
a phantasm had been cornered and the investigators too slow to tez it, it had tried to make a break for freedom – not that it could survive long outside the subornation zone of its own creation, but it had caused significant damage and distress all the same. A circuit of mirror-stations – highly polished reflective metal plates carrying the same electrical charge that their tez-guns fired – prevented this, based on the well-documented observation that phantasms could not bear the sight of their own reflections. Nobody knew why. So much was unknown, and it frustrated Berylin because more and more often she felt like all she was doing was cleaning up the mess and not getting to the root of the problem.

  They heard it as soon as they entered the ground floor lobby: the squeal and groan of a building’s frame protesting at the stresses that were being caused by whatever the subornation Event was doing to the laws of physics up in apartment 473. Hairline cracks spiderwebbed the walls. The lobby and stairs were scattered with belongings dropped by the other tenants as they’d fled: clothing, toys, photograph frames. Buster sniffed at them and moved on. Broken glass crunched underfoot as they climbed steadily.

  By the time they reached the fourth floor, those sounds had been joined by others, dim but distressing: screams, shouts, and discordant music. The lines of the hallway were subtly twisted out of true, as if perspective, or light, or gravity itself were being drawn to the door of 473.

  ‘PV?’ she asked Runce.

  He checked the readings on his console satchel and so-so-ed. ‘Maybe point-oh-four. Seems to be contained in the apartment.’

  Good. No spillage. Nice and neat.

  Buster had set up a low, insistent growling. Berylin wasn’t alarmed; he was well-trained and knew that the noises didn’t yet indicate a threat. It was simply the canine equivalent of a man muttering under his breath: ‘Steady now, steady…’

  They took station on either side of the door. From inside she could distinctly hear scratchy, echoing music – the kind of mindlessly cheerful burbling that bands played on Sunday afternoons – voices, like platform announcements, and a distressed shrieking which rose and fell. She raised her eyebrows at Runce. Ready?