Tourmaline

by James Brogden

  ‘We don’t know that!’ McBride protested and began compressions, even though he knew it was futile.

  ‘Look at her – she’s bled out! What do you imagine you’re pumping around her?’ When McBride persisted, he snapped: ‘Damn it all, man! Stop brutalising the poor girl!’

  Steve slowed and then stopped. Caffery was right, of course – but it still didn’t make sense. How could she be dead? Surely if she were dead he’d feel it more, like something vital wrenched out of his guts, but all he could feel instead was a shocked numbness. It was as if he was back in the hallway of her bedsit on the night he found out about the Cinderella curfew, looking at her lying half on the stairs and terrified that she was dead. As if all of his actions since then had done nothing more than delay the moment between then and now. Life, love – it was all just a holding action and a distraction until the moment you lay pale and unbreathing on the ground like this.

  Igor was stroking her hair and making a low keening noise in the back of his throat. He seemed genuinely distressed, but all the same McBride couldn’t stand the sight of him pawing at her body. ‘Get away!’ he shouted, slapping at Igor’s hands.

  ‘Back off, man,’ warned Carmen. ‘We’re just trying to help, okay?’

  ‘Yeah, well unless you can bring people back from the dead, it’s a bit bloody late, isn’t it?’

  ‘Um,’ said Blenny, doing a little dance of nervousness in the background.

  ‘I know,’ said Bobby. ‘We really should be getting a bit further away from here.’

  ‘Um, no, not that.’

  ‘Well what, then?’

  ‘Well it’s, um, sort of, yes.’

  ‘Yes what?’ he was getting annoyed now.

  ‘Yes. We can. Bring her back, that is. From the dead. Well, not that she’s dead. Not dead dead, anyway. Just a little bit dead. We can work with that.’

  McBride turned slowly, and fixed Blenny with a stare which nearly drove him backwards over the wall. ‘What?’

  ‘She’s dreamwrack now. The bits of her are floating apart, but they’re still close enough at the moment that they can be brought back together. It’s just that she isn’t strong enough to do it herself.’

  McBride turned to Bobby. ‘Is this making any sense to you? Because if your friend here is taking the piss…’

  ‘No, I think I know what he means. Blenny, what’s the plan?’

  Blenny shrugged. ‘Well, like I say, she doesn’t have the strength any more, so Igor, uh, wants to give her his.’ He gave a tense little smile. Carmen nodded as if this was the most sensible thing she’d heard in a long time.

  ‘His strength?’

  ‘His existence. The existence you gave to us, with your blood, when you fed us. It made us strong enough to follow you and be here, and he wants to give that to her.’

  ‘And what happens to him?’

  ‘He goes back to being what he was.’

  ‘Like Joe?’

  Blenny nodded. ‘Just like Jophiel.’

  ‘Who cares!’ shouted McBride. ‘If there’s something he can do, just do it!’

  Igor did it. He laid his forehead gently on hers and closed his eyes, as if trying to reach her by telepathy, except that where his skin touched hers it continued inward, so that first his brow sank into her brow, then his nose into her nose, his face into her face – until his entire head had disappeared into hers. It looked like he was paying obeisance; bowing not just to her but into her. Where they melded, a faint bioluminescence glowed, and as his touch passed her flesh emerged clean, undamaged, and flushed with life – but not entirely the same.

  The changes were so subtle that nobody but McBride, who had spent many hours stroking those features lovingly, would have noticed them. Her hair was ever so slightly darker – more auburn than blonde – her nose a little sharper, the softness under her chin a little leaner. They were the features of a woman in her early twenties rather than late teens. This process continued, past their shoulders and arms, chest, torso, hips, knees, legs and finally feet; until Igor was completely gone except for the faint flicker of something silvery disappearing into the gaps between the air, and Sophie awoke with a gasping cry.

  Except she wasn’t Sophie any more. Sophie was dead, killed taking the araka with her, as she had known it would be in the end, and for a moment Vessa felt the terrible, aching emptiness where the other had always been. This was her body now – wholly and in its entirety – and this was how she had always looked, the only difference was that now it was on the outside. She woke, and saw that Steve was seeing her for the first time as she really was, and that awful void wasn’t quite so empty any more.

  Moments later the cliff top collapsed completely, disappearing in thunderous clouds of dust, and they found themselves on the brink of an entirely new shore.

  Epilogue

  Dreamwrack

  1

  The Sea Life Centre in Birmingham’s Brindley Place echoed with the shrieking of children, tinny ocean-themed muzak, and the pervasive thunder of water. It was giving Maddox a headache, but at least that was some compensation for the roiling agony in his guts. He was watching a video of a male seahorse giving birth, and experiencing a mixture of fascination, horror, and an odd kind of sympathy.

  The poor creature was latched onto the stem of a plant with its tail and bucking like it was being electrocuted as the contractions started. With each spasm, clouds of wriggling fry – looking like maggots with whip-tails – spurted from the orifice in the top of its distended brood pouch. Hundreds of them. Possibly thousands. It seemed to go on forever, and when it was done, the male collapsed to the bottom of the tank, twitching listlessly.

  ‘I know how you feel, mate,’ he murmured. He didn’t suppose he looked much better. He knew that parents were steering their children away from him: the crazy-looking tramp in the stinking coat who was munching a hot-dog and getting mustard all over his face. He’d been on the run for days, trying to keep off the Hegemony’s radar. Ironically, it seemed that the best way to avoid detection by one of their psychic buoys was to look as much like one as possible. He hadn’t washed and barely slept, but in contrast his appetite was prodigious, despite the squirming pain in his stomach. He had no plan and no destination; every time he tried to think through a course of action, his thoughts floated away from each other. The only constant – other than the pain – was the fact that somehow he kept finding himself drawn irresistibly to water. Canals, rivers, sewage farms – it didn’t matter.

  A sudden, vicious cramp seized his insides. He doubled over, gasping, and dropped his hotdog in a spatter of yellow mustard which looked exactly like pus.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ he moaned. He was going to be sick. He had to get out, into the fresh air. Now.

  He was also as far away from the exit as it was possible to get. The Sea Life Centre was fan-shaped in plan, with its ground-floor entrance at the narrow end and its attractions rising up and away in a series of switchback turns to the far curving wall, which was where – amongst many other exhibits – the seahorse breeding tanks were on display. From this high vantage point he could look back down over the whole space, and see the crowds of visitors snaking their way past tanks and pools up towards him. Most of them were parents with pushchairs and their orbiting swarms of kids. More fry – human maggots with legs. From here it was an elevator ride down to the underwater viewing tunnel and then out. That was likely to be just as crowded. He didn’t dare bring attention to himself by shoving past all those people, not least of all because he was certain he wouldn’t even make it as far as the doors before losing his lunch.

  Another cramp hit, harder this time, and longer. Sort of like…

  ‘Oh Jesus, no,’ he whimpered.

  He lurched for the nearest fire exit.

  Braying alarms pursued him out into shockingly bright daylight, for all that it was an overcast day, and
down the exterior fire escape, more falling than running, to the pavement. Instinctively, he headed for the gleam of open water. The Sea Life Centre was built on the south bank of Old Turn Junction, where the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal met the BCN Main Line Canal, right at the heart of the city’s newest commercial and residential developments.

  At the edge of the water he fell to his knees, wracked by uncontrollable spasms, and with the last of his failing strength managed to drag himself over the brink. A woman began screaming nearby, but he was able to ignore it in the sudden, blissful coolness of the canal.

  His brood pouch split open from the navel, down to his pubic bone and up as far as the joining of his ribcage, and Lilivet’s spawn were birthed into the murky waters. There were dozens of them, each barely the size of a tennis ball, and their carapaces were still soft, but they came into the world with the viciousness of their kind fully developed nonetheless, and turned immediately to attack each other. The fratricidal massacre was brief, as Maddox’s withered corpse tumbled into the deep silt of the canal bed, and the handful of survivors scattered into the darkness to hide while they grew their armour.

  Many of the strongest would perish all the same – in the jaws of the Realt’s natural predators, or the propellors of boats, or tangled in rubbish. They were creatures of pure instinct, and the only impulse stronger than those to feed and kill – the one they had inherited from their human blood – was to be conscious. Thus, they crept away into the drains and sewers, hunting for the sweetest meat of all: human minds.

  2

  The investigative committee set up by the Hegemony’s Interstitial Assembly was swift in its investigation of the incident, completely exonerating the Regional Supervisor for the United Kingdom, Ireland and Iceland of substantive culpability in the matter of the meniscus breach at Facility UK187, known colloquially as ‘The Park’. Video data salvaged from the operation at the Gravelly Hill Interchange, coupled with witness testimony from the survivors of The Park’s enforced closure, supported RegSup UKI&I’s contention that the catastrophic breach of the meniscus there was instigated by a female of unknown identity possessing unquantified wake-abilities, who fatally compromised the command of UKFac187’s custodian. The subsequent burden of culpability was deemed to be on the Oraillean Counter-Subornation Chief responsible for the investigation and closure of the breach identified locally as ‘The Flats.’

  When the Regional Supervisor for the United Kingdom, Ireland and Iceland got home late that evening after the final committee session had adjourned, he found that there was a call waiting for him.

  ‘You bastard, Foulkes,’ snarled Timothy Jowett.

  The voice on the other end of the telephone connection was flat and toneless, despite the anger in its words, because strictly speaking they weren’t its words. The voice belonged to a gaunt, shadow-eyed young man who lived in heavily-guarded seclusion on a remote mountain farm in Wales. His twin – or at least, the twin of the Passenger from Tourmaline he carried – was somewhere just as secure in Jowett’s city of Carden, a place which Foulkes himself would never see. The twins’ existence had been one of the lucky coincidences which the Hegemony had exploited to its full advantage: a unique opportunity to establish a line of direct communication between the two worlds. It was a telepathic back-channel which for many years had allowed Foulkes and Jowett to circumvent the Hegemony’s often tedious bureaucracy – but occasionally it had its drawbacks. This appeared to be one such occasion.

  He sighed. ‘What on earth did you expect me to do, Timothy?’

  There was a time lag of several seconds, which was the twin in the DCS relaying his question and listening to the response. When it came, it was in the same toneless delivery. Foulkes hated not being able to hear the other man’s voice and the nuances of emotion underneath it. He hated these conversations generally, even when he wasn’t getting a mouthful of abuse.

  ‘I expected you to mention the bloody araka, that’s what.’

  ‘I hardly think the committee would have been interested in a common parapsyte.’

  ‘There was nothing common about it when the God-be-damned thing incorporeated and destroyed one of my teams!’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘No? Oh, well I must be mistaken then.’ Foulkes didn’t have to stretch his imagination much to hear the sarcasm dripping from every word. ‘I must have completely misread the clatter message which my man sent from Danae – the one in which he described fighting black tentacles in the water and meeting the same Sophie Marchant who you declared dead. But never mind. I’ll just ask him to clarify the details himself when he gets back.’

  Foulkes thought it highly unlikely that Jowett’s man would live long enough to be debriefed by his superior. If Jowett thought that the twin was his only contact over there, then he was an imbecile. But he hadn’t finished, apparently.

  ‘What I’m trying to puzzle out,’ he continued, ‘is why you wouldn’t tell them about such a common parapsyte in the first place. I mean, why not? It’s such a little thing, and you’re such a stickler for dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. What are you up to, over there? What are you hiding?’

  ‘This conversation has officially become absurd. Goodbye, Timothy.’

  He hung up.

  Then he called up the images which had been grabbed off the CCTV cameras overlooking Old Turn Junction in Birmingham. Bloody Birmingham again. A man’s body floating face-down in the canal, his coat open on either side like the wings of a drowned angel. Enhanced close-ups of the same image, cropped to blurred shapes in the water around him – black stars, or spiders. Dozens of them. What was he hiding? He didn’t know. Yet.

  3

  The hospitality of Serj Osk’s home turned out to be as generous as the foulness of his temper had been. It was touch and go whether or not he threw Allie and Runce into Timini’s only cell when they showed up on the dock in the Spinner’s dinghy, had their story not been corroborated by the fact that the Flats had most definitely disappeared – and because of his wife.

  Paege Osk took one look at Allie and threw her hands into the air. ‘Oh, my dear!’ she trilled, sweeping a large maternal arm around her shoulders. ‘You will stay with us until a ship can come for you. I will not hear a word against it!’ She shot a look at her husband which dared him to contradict her, and so, being a man who knew when a case was hopeless, that was decided.

  Their house was large, as befitted the Chief Constable of the island, but largely empty, the little Osks being mostly grown adults with families of their own. As a result, Allie found herself given the pick of the daughters’ old clothes – most of which were too small, but at least they were clean. When Paege drew her a bath in a big old tin tub in the scullery, she thought she’d died and gone to heaven, but had to protest when the older woman started throwing handfuls of fragrant herbs into the steaming water.

  ‘Oh no, really that’s not necessary,’ she said, as kindly as she could. ‘Honestly, I’m just glad that it’s warm and doesn’t have anything living in it.’

  Paege Osk shook her head indulgently. ‘They are medicinal,’ she replied. ‘They will help,’ and nodded knowingly at Allie’s belly.

  It took a long moment for the penny to drop. Then:

  ‘What?!’ Allie broke into peals of laughter. ‘Oh no! No-no-no-no-no. I’m not. You’re mistaken. I can’t be.’

  Paege laid the flat of her palm on Allie’s lower stomach. ‘I am never wrong in these things,’ she said gently. ‘All the girls in the village, they come to me. I am always right. Don’t worry, it is lovely!’ She laid her other hand on Allie’s cheek.

  ‘Well I’m sorry,’ Allie replied, carefully disengaging her hands, ‘but you’re wrong on this one. No offence, but there is simply no way I can be pregnant.’

  Paege Osk shrugged in a gesture which said suit yourself clearer than any words, and left her to her
bath.

  When Runce returned from Timini’s clatter office to tell her that he’d reported back to his superiors in Carden and that a fast ship was being despatched to pick them up, she barely heard him. She sat on the Osk’s first floor balcony with a cup of kaff going cold on the table in front of her, idly scratching Buster’s head as she stared out at the glittering waters of Moon and Sixpence Bay, but she wasn’t really looking at that either. She was seeing in her memory drops of Bobby’s blood falling through the water like crimson pearls.

  Slowly, her hand went to her lower belly and rested there.

  4

  ‘Excuse me, sir, may I sit here?’

  The old man looked, up, startled out of his doze. He’d nodded off again in the drifting afternoon light of the Barber Institute’s gallery. He seemed to be spending more time asleep than awake, these days, he thought. As if rehearsing. But after all, he was nearly ninety years old; he might be allowed the occasional public kip.

  The young man was well dressed, which was a pleasant change these days, and there was something familiar about him – something that he thought he recognised, but it slipped away. Finally going gaga, you old fart, he told himself. He shuffled along the wooden bench and waved a hand at the space beside him. ‘By all means.’

  Bobby sat down. Now that he was here he found that he had no idea how to start this conversation.

  The painting opposite them showed a mother and child standing on a rocky shore against a moonlit sky, pointing out to sea where a small fishing skiff was approaching. The interpretation card put it somewhere in Norway; to Bobby it looked just like Moon and Sixpence Bay.

  ‘I used to work here, you know,’ he said.

  The old man nodded politely.

  ‘Security guard. I must have walked past this one a hundred times and never seen it properly.’

  The old man looked directly at him for the first time. ‘And what do you make of it, now that you see it?’ he asked.