West shook his head vehemently, “No, I simply placed one on your chest.”
Charlene’s mouth contorted into a disgusted frown as she tried to look down at her chest, wiping the skin feverishly with her hands. “Where’s it now?”
West pointed a finger at her, “These particular leeches have an ability to pass through skin and muscle fibers with great ease, and they form a strong neural bond with their hosts.”
“You mean to tell me that there is one of those … those things in me?”
West nodded, “One single leech, yes.” Charlene moved her hand over her skin, trying to feel where the creature might be inside her. She was horrified, panicked at the very thought of such a creature moving in her, sucking her blood from within. “Why would you do this to me?” she asked, fear rising in her voice, “Will I die? Is that what you want?”
West looked sympathetic, almost condescendingly so. He had known that she might react like this, and he had been prepared for the risk, ready to reason with her, and explain what was happening. Still, he was surprised that Charlene would imagine he was trying to kill her.
Charlene had started to scratch at the skin of her chest, imagining that she could feel the thing moving, feel it destroying her insides. West moved to her quickly, pulling her hands down and holding them still, “Listen to me,” she struggled to release herself from his grip, “Charlene, just listen before you do yourself an injury …” She tried to spit in his face, but her mouth was too dry, her throat contracting with fear.
“Charlene, the creature can be killed, and it would do you no harm if it died right now. A single glass of salt water would drive it out of you, but I need you to listen to me first.”
She rounded her eyes on him furiously, “You’re a pig. You’re a monster, that’s what you are. How could you do this to an old lady?” She redoubled her effort to free herself from his grip, but his hands didn’t give at all.
“Charlene stop, now.” He shouted calmly. She stopped still, clearly terrified of what he would do to her if she didn’t stop struggling.
“Charlene, I will never hurt you. If you refuse to listen to me, and insist that we end this right now, I’ll understand and I will accept. I ask only that you allow me to explain myself before you judge.”
She leaned forwards, “Oh, you’re a big man, threatening an old lady. ‘Ooh, I’ll never hurt you’ you say, but you know that mentioning hurt puts the thought in my head. I know reverse psychology when I hear it.”
West heaved a sigh of frustration, and decided to forge ahead, disregarding Charlene’s fear.
“The creature inside you has an incredible ability to regenerate its own cells. Not only that, it has the ability to regenerate the cells of its host. It wants nothing more than for its host to be in perfect health, for its host to be the perfect body in which to be transported around the world.”
Charlene was stony faced, but West thought he might be getting through to her. He smiled, “Want may seem too strong a word to attribute to such a creature and perhaps it is, but these leeches do tap into their host’s nervous system and they know intuitively what they must do to keep their host healthy.”
He watched her eyes, watched the subtle changes in her attitude. Her body wasn’t the tightly wound spring of tension that it had been moments ago. She was trying to understand what he told her, fighting some internal battle with her thoughts.
“Before you woke, I placed a single leech on your chest. The first thing it did was to anesthetize your skin so it wouldn’t hurt you as it cut its little entry wound. You didn’t wake up at that point. You probably woke when the creature had found its bearings within your body and realized that the greatest risk to its host’s life was a cardiovascular blockage. If left to its own devices the creature will move through you, traveling through muscle fibers, under skin tissue, even through vital organs as it sees fit, and everywhere it goes, it will try to make you the perfect host. One leech though, there is only so much it can do.”
Charlene frowned, leaning towards him slightly, “What do you mean?”
“I simply mean that if you were to be seriously hurt right now, mortally wounded, you would die. You could sustain a wound in the direct vicinity of the leech and it would do its best to sustain you and heal you, but ultimately, if you walked out in front of a bus …” The skin of Charlene’s nose wrinkled slightly as her mouth opened. It was too much for her to take in, she felt like she was missing something important in what he was telling her.
West let go of her hands and smiled, “I want you to try something for me and I will leave you alone for today.”
She still looked a little scared, though she managed to contain her thoughts, so he continued, “Go about your day, don’t leave the apartment today, don’t tell anyone about our encounter, simply live for today with the creature inside you. I promise that if I return to you tomorrow and you feel uncomfortable about it, I will stand by you and comfort you as you drink your glass of salt water and the whole thing will be over and done with. Leeches have been used medicinally quite frequently throughout history; treat this as one day of medical testing okay?”
She wrestled with her thoughts as she looked around the apartment. There were many little tasks and chores she had avoided because she had known her chest pains would cause her discomfort. Perhaps this was to be how she would die. Then again, perhaps it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to enjoy being busy without that nagging discomfort. He was the most perfect double of the man who had left her so abruptly all those years ago, and surely, if he wanted to kill her …
“Mr Yestler, tell me about the first time we met.”
West smiled, glad that for the first time that day, his memory was capable of serving a use, “It was Wednesday evening. It was warm outside, and I was visiting one of my favorite bookstores off central park. There was a girl, leaning against a high stacked bookcase at the rear of the store, one leg crossed behind the other, hair hanging to one side of her head as she thumbed through the pages of Don Quixote. I walked up to that girl, and I said, ‘Too much sanity may be madness, and maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.’ Then you looked at me for the first time, and you said …”
“Until death it is all life.” As she spoke the words, Charlene frowned, trying to wish away the tears, then relinquishing, she wiped her eyes and smiled at West.
“Is there anything I need to know? Is there anything I should do?”
West smiled deeply, feeling no small amount of accomplishment, “No Charlene, just don’t go out and don’t accept any visitors.”
“Why? What will happen?”
West laughed, “Nothing will happen, it’s just a precaution, and one you may understand more fully tomorrow.”
Charlene looked at the liver spots on her hands, then she looked at West and she felt a deep sense of melancholy and loneliness, “Promise you’ll come back tomorrow?”
West nodded and leaned forward, “I promise I will return.” He touched a hand gently to her cheek and stood, walking to the apartment door. He paused as he reached the door and turned, “Do you have plenty of food in?” he asked. Charlene turned to face him, “I do. Why do you ask?”
West shrugged, “You will probably need to eat a little more today than you usually would.”
David wasn’t good with tools. He was good at fixing things, identifying problems, but he was bad with tools. He resented when people called him clumsy, and it especially hurt when it came from Stephanie, a human who was basically capable of hurting herself before she’d even climbed out of bed. There was blood on his shirt which had poured quite abundantly from a wound that went almost clean through the palm of his right hand. He had almost passed out when the Phillips-head slipped its target, and when he grabbed the chain of the swing to prevent himself from falling, he’d managed to wrap the plated iron links around two of his fingers, nearly breaking them in the process.
He was in agony, he was nauseous, and suddenly exha
usted. Tentatively, he sat on the swing seat, not entirely confident that the job was done. He could see Hannah and Stephanie through the sliding glass doors of the den, the pair of them hunched over an old tablet computer. When his wife Carol had died, there hadn’t really been much discussion about moving in with Hannah, she just became a whirlwind of affection, and action, and she hadn’t stopped until David and Stephanie were completely settled. The house was owned outright by their mother, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore. She wasn’t missing, she still wrote them occasionally, and called once a year, but when Carol had died, it became quite apparent that Valerie Beach didn’t want anything more to do with the unmitigated disaster that had become her family life.
Avoiding thinking about his mother, he started to back track, searching for what it was that had brought him out to the yard in the first place. His chest suddenly burned with acid reflux, like a five kilo weight had been dropped on his diaphragm. Tiernan, of course. How silly he’d been to think he could escape that mental anguish for five minutes.
He’d gone through it all a thousand times, and he still couldn’t figure out what exactly he’d done. There had been no direct accusations yet, that much was true, but the phone call, that one ember of doubt they kept coming back to seemed poised now to catch, and engulf his entire world. It was unfair. That’s what was eating him up. He didn’t have the first clue as to why the phone call mattered so much, but they, the royal they, were going to ruin him over it.
David sucked his bleeding palm and eased himself up from the swing, suddenly aware of how much the chains were digging into his under-exercised hips. He walked through the grass towards the sliding doors and mashed his face against the glass, puffing his cheeks out for Stephanie’s amusement. Stephanie ran up to the door, grinning from ear to ear as she unlocked it. “Dad, I’ve got over fifty sphincters,” she exclaimed gleefully.
“That explains a lot honey.” He smiled as he bent down to hug her, but Hannah had already leapt up from the floor and grabbed Stephanie from behind, “No, you can’t have her, she’s all mine.” She ran towards the couch and threw Stephanie onto the cushions, in a bundle of giggling limbs and hair. Hannah faced David now, her arms spread wide, palms facing backwards so she could grab Stephanie if she attempted to get by, “I’ve captured Captain Spiff, and she will not be released until the human cooks eggs. I demand lots of eggs, and hot sauce.”
Stephanie wrapped her arms around her aunt’s neck, “No, I want soldiers. Demand soldiers.”
Holding onto Stephanie’s wrists, Hannah stood up, “We have revised our demands human. Bring us soldiers, and eggs, and the eggs shall be of the kind in which we can dip the soldier’s heads, and bite them off at our pleasure.” Then she stopped abruptly, gasping a little as she saw the blood on her brother’s shirt.
“Holy sh …” she caught herself, “… Shish kebab David, you seem to have sprung a leak.” Although her words were light calm, for Stephanie’s sake, her eyes were wide, serious with concern. “Do we need to take you to be repaired?”
David looked at his hand, the skin ragged and painful around the wound, “No, I’ll be fine, we’ll just wrap some gauze, throw some rubbing alcohol on it.”
Stephanie laughed and then whispered in her aunt’s ear, “You were going to say shit.”
Hannah’s eyes widened further, and she sucked her lip to prevent herself from laughing, but she decided to say nothing, just this once.
Opening the cupboard under the granite topped island, David pulled out a heavy bottomed pan, and took it to the sink. He set the water running, but when the weight of the water caused his hand to spasm, he realized he was going to have to attend to his wound before cooking. Stephanie had already taken her place at the island, pulling herself up onto one of the tall stools, and he could see the anticipation etched across her face. He asked Hannah if she would mind taking over the cooking duties while he fixed himself up, and she grumbled her consent, “What is the point of hostage demands if we have to carry them out ourselves?”
By the time he’d cleaned the wound, applied antiseptic, and taped up the gauze, he returned to the kitchen to the sight of steam rising from the pot of boiling water, and the sound of some unrecognizable girl band streaming from the ceiling mounted speakers.
“How long have they been in?”
Hannah pointed at the old fashioned egg timer on the counter, which looked about half done, “Maybe a minute and a half? Maybe seventy thousand grains of sand? Maybe Spiff forgot to turn it over when the eggs went in, so maybe the soldiers are going in dry,”
Hannah was a little disappointed that the euphemism didn’t get much of a rise out of David, but she knew he must still be stressing, so she tried again, “Spiff, how do you like your soldiers?”
“Almost black.” Stephanie answered innocently, but that was enough to set Hannah off, laughing at her own set up, “Me too hon. But you know what they say …”
David almost choked on his laughter, “Don’t you dare Hannah!”
Hannah feigned offense, glaring at her brother, “They say that burnt toast is carcinogenic.”
Stephanie spun round to look at her aunt, “Really?”
Hannah wrinkled her nose in sympathy with Stephanie’s shock, “They sure do.”
“I’ll settle for soft and white then.” Stephanie responded, then watched in confusion as her aunt ran out of the kitchen.
“What’s wrong with aunt Han?”
David laughed, and started towards the bread bin when the phone rang. David ignored it. The phone rang off, then immediately started ringing again. David made towards it, but it clicked off again. When it started ringing a third time, Stephanie ran and picked up the phone from its base unit on the side table.
“This is the Beach residence, Stephanie speaking, how can I help you?”
A voice on the other end of the line asked condescendingly if her Daddy was home and on autopilot, Stephanie responded, “No, my Dad is out at the grocery store, can I take a message?” The line clicked dead and Stephanie hung up the phone.
David felt himself welling up with emotion. There were so many reasons he loved his daughter.
CHAPTER FOUR
Shadowcab
West leaned against the window, one arm on the glass, his head resting against his forearm. He could see a burning car in the street, but whoever had set the fire had already moved on to other acts of mindless vandalism. He understood that people were angry; the whole world was in turmoil, but it distressed him when people vented their frustrations in such misdirected and futile acts.
The political landscape had never much interested him, because it nearly always played out as expected. The onward march of the great dream, Somnium Mirificum, that endless self-fulfilling prophecy. Except it wasn’t endless, which was part of the problem. He couldn’t pretend he saw the assassination coming. It wasn’t surprising, but it certainly wasn’t written in the stars. It had heightened his awareness of the fact that he’d been out of touch with most of the key players for far too long. The few people he knew how to contact were on the wrong side of the fence. He was starting to feel uncomfortable with himself, cringing at his cowardice every time he saw his own reflection. As much as he understood, even after looking at this thing for a few weeks, there were still things about the Tiernan incident that made no sense.
David Beach had been his first stumbling block. From what West could tell, Beach was an almost depressingly mundane member of Tiernan’s staff. His father, an author of little note, had died when David was young. West was unable to find a copy of Doctor Julien Beach’s only published work, but he had found a couple of mentions of him in the digital archives of academic reviews, and both of these suggested that the doctor had been widely regarded as a laughing stock by the time he died, completely shunned by academia. His book The Kings Mosaic was described in one article as a rambling mess, focused loosely on the supposed links between modern day politicians, various royal families and their ancestors. There
was something to that of course, but without a copy of the book, West could make little more of it. If David had followed his father’s work, it would go some way towards helping to explain his fascination with conspiracy theories, which was all well and good, but it didn’t help West with the issue at hand.
He’d tried to look at it from the FBI’s perspective, but West just couldn’t understand why Beach had become a target. The reports of one agent McMahon described his concerns that Mr Beach had been snooping into files relating to Arctum Industries immediately prior to the events of March 10th. That could only be a bad thing, but on its own, it didn’t seem particularly damning. McMahon’s report also didn’t actually evidence this, so as far as West was concerned, McMahon was tiptoeing into the realms of hearsay. Beach had been interviewed by McMahon a couple of times, and prior to that, he’d also spoken at great length to an agent Carmichael. Going by the transcripts, these interviews were almost singularly focused on a phone call which occurred on March 6th. The FBI appeared to be fumbling in the dark on this one, and they had apparently stumbled out of that particular closet, clutching onto the fact that the phone call hadn’t come from the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. There was no audio transcript of the call, which was probably the most miraculous discovery West had made so far. Someone must have lost their job over that one …
A large solid mahogany pedestal desk stood several feet from the Eastern wall of the living room. There was sufficient space to access both sides of the desk, which was often necessary as it boasted nine drawers to the front, and three drawers and two cupboards to the rear. The desk was ornate, but not obscenely so, and West treasured it almost as much as his bed.
He walked over to the desk and seated himself facing the eastern wall, unlocking the large central drawer and removing the tablet that was nestled away there. West refused to rule out the possibility that the FBI really weren’t interested in finding anything genuine on Beach. Why bother, if they could simply cut and paste him into a fiction? There were things, obvious things about Beach, which weren’t mentioned anywhere in their files. Notably, David Beach was a frequent visitor of on-line conspiracy newsgroups, and reddit subs.
Histories of the Void Garden, Book 1: Pyre of Dreams Page 5
