Tourmaline

by James Brogden

  ‘Yeah, see that guy lying over there in a pool of seawater? Just my paranoia. Pride, Steve, can be a good thing sometimes, but I’m afraid that now you’re just being wilfully stupid. Goodbye.’

  He reached for her a third time, but she was in no mood for him to lay hands on her again. She spun, gathered a handful of his shirt, and cocked her other fist back. ‘Swear to God, McBride, so help me I will…’

  But he was holding out his cupped hand. ‘Give me the keys,’ he said. ‘I’ll drive.’

  5

  Degan had left the car in the shadow of some trees, at the far end of the parking lot, to try and avoid casual passers-by seeing the hradix – he’d even cracked the windows an inch and joked about how cruel it was to leave pets in cars on hot days – while Vessa had done her best to clean the creature up with a bottle of water and an old towel she’d found in the boot. But when she returned with Steve, she found that it had shredded the back seat upholstery and made a nest from the stuffing in the rear footwell, and there was no way it was going to pass for anything normal. When it saw her approach it bounced up and down, snapping at the air in welcome.

  ‘Jesus,’ he breathed, horrified. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘Since you ask, he’s possessed by a vicious man-eating reptile from Tourmaline,’ she replied. ‘And it will rip your throat out unless you give it a mint.’

  ‘That’s not funny.’ He watched her unwrap an entire packet of extra-strong mints and throw them onto the back-seat. He hradix dove for them, hooting delightedly, and Steve slipped into the driver’s seat gingerly, trying not to hear the crunching and slavering noises coming from behind him. As he fastened his seat belt, he became aware of its face suddenly being very close to his own. It was emitting a loose, rattling growl, and its breath stank. Worse, the eye which stared into his own wasn’t remotely human; the iris was huge and blood-red. He froze.

  ‘It’s not…’ he tried to say. ‘Not…’

  ‘Not going to hurt you.’ She turned to the creature. ‘This is a friend, okay? A friend.’

  The eye blinked – sideways – and a long purple tongue trailed up the side of his face.

  ‘See? It likes you. Still think I’m being paranoid?’

  Steve shuddered and started the engine, trying not gag at the smell of its drool on his cheek. ‘So, where to?’

  ‘Ennias.’ She was tapping at her phone.

  ‘Oh, him. I have to say, he wasn’t too complimentary about you the last time we met.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I think his exact words were “silly bint”.’

  She laughed. ‘He’ll change his mind and find us somewhere safe. He’ll have to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s from Tourmaline, too. He’s been living as an exile in this world for years with no way to get home. There are thousands – probably tens of thousands – of exiles here, and I’ve just sent one of them back. I can send all of them back. Trust me, he’ll protect us.’

  Chapter 21

  The Swarm

  1

  Degan had always hated the sea.

  He hated its easy lies and its sadistic indifference to human suffering. As a child, he’d lost his father and three uncles to it, too young to prevent his mother and sisters from being forced to earn a living by the cocks of foreign sailors, while all he could do was pick their pockets. Meanwhile, the sea glimmered in snatched glimpses at the ends of cobbled alleyways, promising escape and never delivering, while he fought in the shit with the other urchins. And when he was old enough to understand that it was only a matter of time before he was forced to sell his own skinny arse in turn, he signed on with the Elbaite fleet as a bilge-rat and discovered that he’d simply sold it for the King’s coin instead – the only difference being that on board a gun-cog there were fewer places to hide – and that taunting glimmer was all about him now, serving only to highlight how small his new prison was. For sure, he’d worked his way up through the hierarchy of shipboard cruelty, but all the time and everywhere, that limitless horizon was in his face, promising freedom which never appeared.

  So when he awoke, floating on a shabby raft barely bigger than a coffin and surrounded by that same diamond-lanced blue void, he threw back his head and unleashed a howl of despair.

  Sweet Lady of the Islands help him – he was home.

  2

  Steve and Vessa abandoned the car in a supermarket car park where they spent as much time as they dared buying new clothes for the hradix and cleaning it up properly, before travelling the rest of the way by bus to the address of the safe-house which Vessa said Ennias had given her. It turned out to be an extremely ordinary-looking semi-detached house in a sleepy, suburban street in Hall Green. Nevertheless, they walked past it warily several times before plucking up the courage to approach the front door.

  Vessa rang the bell.

  ‘What makes you think you can trust anybody here?’ asked Steve.

  ‘Sophie and I lived in a lot of care homes,’ she said by way of explanation, ‘but when she stopped sleeping we were sent to a sleep disorder clinic. Of course, it wasn’t just a sleep disorder clinic; the Hegemony keeps tight control on places like that because of the link between dreaming and Tourmaline, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Not that we knew this at the time. By then Sophie was unconscious pretty much all of the time, which left me in charge, and I stuck it for as long as I could before deciding to run away. It turned out that the Hegemony weren’t the only people with their eyes on places like that, because shortly after I left I was contacted by this man called Ennias who said he could give me somewhere safe to stay. Needless to say I totally ignored him…’

  ‘Why does that not surprise me?’

  ‘… and I ended up sleeping rough for a while. It… well, it wasn’t much fun, let’s just leave it at that, and he ended up looking like the lesser of several evils, so I took him up on it. I ended up in a house full of exiles in Milton Keynes, and they were the loveliest, most helpful people you could ever hope to meet. So I trust him, yes. I probably owe my life to him.’

  They waited.

  ‘So why isn’t one of the loveliest, most helpful people I could ever hope to meet opening the door, then?’ asked Steve.

  She frowned. ‘I don’t know. He said there might not be anybody in. I’m going to check around the back.’

  ‘Be…’ he started, but she’d already gone.

  It was evident that the place was well kept; the back lawn and hedges were neatly trimmed, though the patio furniture had a cover pulled over it, and there was no sign of people actually spending time out here. He looked under the cover and found an ash-tray. It was spotless.

  Vessa found a post-it note stuck to the back door. Open Me, it read.

  ‘Cute,’ she commented and, finding the door unlocked, went in.

  ‘It doesn’t bother you at all that this place has been left empty with the door unlocked?’ he asked. She ignored him.

  They found themselves in a bright, spotlessly clean kitchen. On the counter were two carrier bags stuffed with groceries, including a frozen pizza still solid enough, he thought, to have been put there this morning – all accompanied by another post-it inviting them to help themselves. He still couldn’t quite believe it was that easy. Checking out the rest of the house he found it to be well-furnished and tidy but utterly devoid of any sense of human habitation: no clothes hanging in the wardrobes, no rubbish in the bins – not even any little flecks of toothpaste on the bathroom mirror. It felt like a show-home or a theatre set. He only allowed himself to relax when he saw that the hradix had made itself another nest in the bath out of cushions and bedclothes.

  ‘Can’t we do something for it?’ he asked, as they watched it twitching in its sleep. ‘Isn’t there any way of finding his parents? Missing persons or something?
’

  ‘Maybe,’ she replied. ‘Eventually. We need to get ourselves safe first. There’s definitely something human left in it otherwise it wouldn’t be able to understand us as well as it does, but even if we did find out his name, do you really think it would be a good idea sending him home in his current state?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  They made tea and sat outside in the sun, watching blackbirds squabbling in the hedge. Or they might have been mating – he couldn’t tell.

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ she said eventually, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s actually worth more than you’d think,’ he replied.

  ‘I didn’t mean to use you,’ she added.

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  ‘Actually, yes, I did. But I feel horrible about it.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  She sighed. ‘No, I don’t.’

  They sat and drank tea.

  ‘The problem, Steve, is that I have an over-abundance of self-awareness.’

  ‘Oh, that’s the problem.’

  ‘You know how most people go through their lives not really sure about who they are, or what they want to do, or what their purpose is in life?’

  ‘Just the little questions. Sure.’

  ‘Well I don’t. I know exactly what I’m here for. I’ve been given a very limited toolkit of responses to fulfil a very specific brief, and that is to protect Sophie, whatever it takes: lying, cheating, it’s all good.’

  Despite telling himself not to get drawn into it again, he found that he couldn’t help himself. ‘But I thought you said you were trying to break free of her. You’ve been trying to make your own life. I thought that was what I was part of.’

  ‘You were.’

  ‘So why the lies?’

  ‘Right, like you wouldn’t have run a mile if I’d been totally honest from the start. Which you did, by the way, when I was. I needed you, Steve – all right, so I needed you for me and not for Sophie for once, but that needing you made it okay to lead you on. I’d like to feel sorry for it, and I want to be completely honest with you because you deserve that at least, but the fact is that I just don’t. I feel sorry for not feeling sorry, that’s what I mean. And I do still need you, because this business is nowhere close to being over.’

  Her insistence that she still needed him, despite everything that had happened, made him respond more harshly than he’d intended. ‘I’m in this business just until you tell me whether or not you can get Caffrey back, and then that’s me done, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ she scoffed. ‘Because you and him were such great friends. Last of the great bromances. You’re in this business because you can’t keep away from me – face it.’

  ‘You really are that full of yourself, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m trying to be honest with you! I thought that was what you wanted! Sorry if some of it isn’t what you want to hear, but I just don’t have time for all that he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not bullshit. But alright, have it your way. Let’s put that aside for now.’ She turned to face him squarely. ‘Steve, even assuming I can get him back, do you honestly think that will be the end of it? Come on, you’re not that stupid.’

  ‘Again, with the back-handed compliments.’

  ‘No, seriously. What’s going through your head? Caffrey has gone physically to a place that people from this world only ever reach in the deepest of dreams, and that makes him valuable not just to the Hegemony, who’ll probably want to dissect his brain or something, but also the exiles. There’s no way he’ll be allowed to go back to a normal life, even if he can.’ She hesitated, fidgeting with her mug. ‘There’s something I haven’t told you about the night we… about the night Sophie came.’

  ‘I’ll add that to the list, then.’

  ‘When I ended up in the place where she is, I met him. Briefly.’

  If he’d thought she’d lost the capacity to surprise him, he was wrong. He stared at her, shocked. ‘What do you mean you met him?’

  ‘He was there, on Stray. I only saw him for a few seconds. It was all a bit confusing. But I got the impression – no, I’m sure – that he doesn’t know who he is. He seems to think he’s somebody called Bobby.’

  ‘Maybe you made a mistake. If it was that confusing…’

  ‘No, it was definitely him.’

  ‘But why would he think he’s somebody else?’

  ‘I don’t know enough about how any of this works,’ she admitted. ‘It could be that the shock of travelling there in the body, without the protection of being asleep and dreaming; it could have done something to his mind.’

  ‘Done something to his mind. Christ, you’re a piece of work.’ He sat and watched the blackbirds, listening to the impossibly normal hum of suburbia around him. ‘Still,’ he reasoned, ‘that’s got to be some kind of good news. You know where he is, which should make it that much easier to bring him back, shouldn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose so, yes. But, Steve, listen to me.’ She leaned forward and grasped both of his hands with her own. He stared at them but didn’t try to pull away. ‘What if there’s only Bobby there now, and Caffrey’s gone for good? When you add that to the unwelcome attention he’s certain to get here, you have to consider the possibility that he’s better off over there. Bringing him home might be the worst possible thing we could do to him.’

  3

  Maddox closed the door of the police holding cell with a calm which belied his seething anger. The empty vessel that squatted timidly on the narrow bench across from him must have sensed it all the same, because it sat very still and didn’t say a word. The stink of its fear filled the cell, and his lip curled in disgust. He’d never liked Degan much at the best of times – trusted him, yes, insofar as it was possible to trust a man whose only reason for not escaping was because of the opportunities to inflict pain which Maddox offered – but this thing staring up at him with its big wet eyes was just an affront. He was very tempted to have it destroyed out of hand, but Maddox was nothing if not meticulous, so he ordered the Swarm which he’d brought with him to stand in a corner until it was needed.

  He hunkered down in front of the sweating figure and peered at its face closely.

  ‘Are you my solicitor?’ Its voice was trembling and faint. ‘Because…’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Maddox. ‘We’re going to do this once only, because I do not appreciate having to drive halfway across the country for this shit.’

  ‘I don’t understand what…’

  Maddox slapped him – only lightly, but he was a big man, and the vessel was obviously in shock, and the effect was like wiping his face with a lamppost.

  ‘On the off chance that I am still talking to Degan and that for some arse-brained reason you have decided to play possum, I am giving you this one chance to stop dicking around and explain how you managed to let the woman get away.’

  The vessel blinked at him. God in heaven, it was starting to cry. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ it pleaded. ‘My name is Roger Simkin. I’m an accountant. None of this makes sense.’

  ‘You’re right enough there,’ Maddox growled. Time to face facts: Degan was gone. Discorporeated, and in a fashion which defied sense. Whether you called it psychotherapy or exorcism, discorporeation was an expensive process which took weeks, if not months – it was definitely not accomplished during an afternoon jolly to a bleeding art gallery. ‘What were you doing there?’ he mused aloud, to the vessel’s sniffling incomprehension. He’d pulled the gallery’s CCTV and seen the scuffle for himself, but there was nothing about the way that Degan had been bounced against the painting which could explain this – the push hadn’t been strong enough for him to have even cracked his head, yet he’d collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. Nor was there anything in the muddy cow-eyes in front of him to suggest that a part of Simkin’s passenger from
Tourmaline remained – not even any vestigial memories. It was unusual. Unprecedented. A bit of personal leg-work might be required.

  At that thought, his mood lightened. He hadn’t been in the field for years. He even briefly considered letting Simkin go – surely, if he remembered anything of the Park at all, nobody would believe him – but then, no.

  ‘It’s about being meticulous, old son,’ he said, patting the man’s damp cheek, and he straightened away to call the Swarm forward.

  The suit that it wore seethed as it fought against the confinements of its human shape. It was a unique asset; the combination of factors which had to align properly for a sleeping human vessel to be anywhere near a dormant hive of anything – in this case, what seemed to be hornets – was so rare that only an exceptional circumstance could justify him putting it into action. He carried its queen – or at least, the lump of flesh which the queen possessed – in a sealed metal tube on a chain around his neck, and he could feel it buzzing as it fought to rejoin the others of its kind. The Swarm retained just enough of its vessel’s human intelligence to be biddable, once the queen had been identified and separated, and even that process had cost three lives.

  ‘Meticulous,’ he repeated. ‘From the Latin, that is, metus, meaning fear.’ Seeing the look on Simkin’s face as the Swarm came apart, leaving its human clothes in a puddle and surging towards him hungrily in a cloud of broken flesh and bone, he laughed. ‘Now that’s what we call ironic.’

  When it had finished, the Swarm reconstituted itself and approached Maddox, holding out between a squirming thumb and forefinger something it had found on Simkin which did not belong: a single blonde hair. The wake that it created was so small that only the delicate senses of one of the swarm’s insectile entities could have sniffed it out, and Maddox felt vindicated in his choice.

  ‘Find her,’ he ordered.

  4

  There is no awakening so sudden as one caused by something in the same room as you growling.

  Steve was conscious instantly, with no awareness of having slept.