by A. A. Bell
‘And you’ll stay for the play? It’s preceded by a black-cane dinner at six — a fundraising four-course meal in a darkened dungeon with some of our blind clients as ushers and deaf clients as musicians. It’s fun. You won’t be able to see your food, but your table companions won’t be able to see the mess you make either. Can I put you down for four places?’
‘Sounds like an interesting way to finish a busy day,’ Zhou replied. ‘Okay, but you’d better only put us down for two places. If we bring helpers, they’ll have to stay in the room with our equipment … Oh, and Matron,’ he added at the last moment, ‘if we manage to contact Ben before you do, can I assume it’ll be okay for him to bring Miss Chambers to our hotel instead? We can still have her back at the centre before dinner.’
‘Well, I suppose …‘ Sanchez said, scooping a thick handful of bubbles back up to her chin, ‘so long as you don’t take her any further away, and so long as Ben stays with her the whole time. Then yes, under those conditions, I’ll assign him as her guardian for a gate pass. But I’ll be holding you and your team as ultimately responsible. Understood?’
‘Fair enough. Can you tell me his home address or phone number?’
‘Not just at the moment, but I can call you back in ten minutes.’
‘Never mind,’ Zhou replied. ‘I know people who can track him down faster than that.’
‘Good luck,’ she said as she hung up.
She scooped up more bubbles, compared their colour to her new shade of skin, then emptied in another full bottle of food colouring.
Killer barked and snarled at the sound of a car approaching. He hobbled out of Ben’s bedroom and down the stairs.
‘Ben!’ called his mother as she followed the dog to the front door. Dressed in her nightgown, she hurried to the curtain to peer out at the driveway.
Behind her, Ben opened the glass door from the rear deck, letting in the sound of the ocean as he trudged inside from the moonlit sundeck, yawning and rubbing his eyes. ‘What’s all the racket?’
His mother and the dog both turned to stare at him. ‘Why were you sleeping out there?’ Mellow asked.
‘Fresh air.’
‘Haven’t you ever heard of opening a window?’ She shook her head and turned her attention back to the driveway. ‘I didn’t know you had a girlfriend?’
‘I don’t.’ His first thought, however, was of Mira.
‘So who’s that?’ Mellow pointed through the curtain. ‘You invite them here on my night off?’
Ben slapped his cheeks to wake himself up. He shifted the curtain and saw a baby-faced brunette in a glittering evening gown getting out of a black van. ‘She’s not alone. There’s a guy behind the wheel.’
The woman’s heels clicked on the concrete driveway.
‘You’re not expecting anyone, Ma?’
She rolled her eyes and patted his cheek. ‘Wake up, baby. Would I have called you if I were?’
Ben opened the inner timber door, which still left a locked security screen between him and their visitors.
Killer growled again.
‘Sit!’ Ben ordered. ‘And smile.’
The dog obeyed, his tongue lolling sideways, but he didn’t take his eyes off their visitor.
‘If that’s his happy face,’ the woman said as she reached the door, ‘I’d hate to see him grumpy.’
Ben smiled. ‘He’s harmless, and you are …?’
‘Karin Sei, and in the van,’ she pointed to the driver, ‘is my associate John Duet. We work with Doctors Zhou and Van Danik.’
‘Oh?’ Ben replied. ‘Aren’t you a little overdressed?’
She smiled, but only a little. ‘Sorry to bother you at this hour, Mr Chiron. We did try to call, but no one answered your phones.’
‘Yeah, sorry.’ He opened the security screen and stepped out to greet her. ‘What happened to the other two guys? Hank somebody — Hawthorn, I think, and his younger sidekick?’
‘Both reassigned.’ She handed over a sealed envelope with a logo for the Drift Inn. ‘You’ll be paid generously for your time,’ she said as he opened it.
Inside, he found a handwritten note on matching stationery from Dr Zhou inviting him to assist the team during an interview of Mira Chambers the following day.
‘We can pick you up at nine in the morning and drop you home again in the afternoon,’ the woman said. ‘It may run over into Sunday too … I’m to wait for your reply.’
‘Wahoo!’ He grinned, and turned towards his mother to reassure her with a nod. ‘I’ll be here!’
‘Nine it is then,’ Sei confirmed with a curl of her disarming smile.
He watched her go, elegant on her heels but with a certain stealthy quality, like a panther on stilts. He closed the door and steeled himself against a tirade of questions from his mother.
‘What was all that about? And who are these doctors she mentioned?’ She poked him in the chest with her finger. ‘I thought you said you weren’t sick? Or are they making you do overtime at Serenity?’
‘The meeting’s in town, actually.’ He pulled her finger up to his lips and kissed it. ‘If you’re willing to skip the first waves of the day for once, I’ll take you somewhere amazing early tomorrow morning that will explain everything.’
She scowled at him, but he took it as a yes and went to the kitchen to set the oven timer to wake him at five in the morning. Then he headed back to his sunlounge under the stars.
‘Care to camp out here with me?’ he asked.
‘I most certainly do not.’ She gathered her long satin nightgown around her hips and headed back upstairs to her bedroom, leaving him to his thoughts, which strayed immediately back to Mira.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Mira lay flat on her back on the floor in her fleecy pyjamas, using a swathe of other clothes for warmth instead of blankets from her bed. She still wore her sunglasses, and through them she could see the unconscious ghost of herself sprawled awkwardly where they’d put her on the thin mattress. It didn’t feel right to lie on top of her. Or ‘in’ her. Yet she had only six more hours until she’d see Ben. She’d finally get her first glimpse of him! His ghost, at least.
She couldn’t sleep for excitement. Raising and lowering her glasses repeatedly, she watched the bluish vision of a storeroom slide back and forth over the brown ghostly version of her living quarters.
Knuckles rapped on her door.
‘Ben?’ She sat bolt upright. ‘Is that you?’
‘No, it’s me,’ Neville replied without opening the door. ‘And it’s nearly midnight. Do you want something to help you sleep? Tablets, hot milk or something heavier?’
‘No!’ Her fingers slapped momentarily over her lips. ‘I mean, no, thank you, Neville. I’m just … excited, that’s all. I can see things!’
‘Whatever you think.’
‘I’m not lying!’
‘Never said you were, lass, but it’s pitch dark in there.’
The latch clicked and the door creaked open a little.
Mira shifted her glasses twice more. ‘It’s not pitch dark to me.’ More like muddy night vision.
‘You have to sleep, lass. We all have an easier day around here if you don’t wake up cranky.’
‘Okay, okay,’ she grumbled and set down her glasses safely under the edge of the bed. ‘Oh, Neville?’
She listened for a reply, sure that he was still at the door.
‘Yeah, what?’
‘Thank you.’
‘For what?’
‘For giving me a choice about the hot milk or sedative. And for leaving the light off.’
‘Just doing my job,’ he mumbled. ‘Get some sleep. Working double shifts makes me almost as cranky as you.’
The door creaked closed, the latch clicked and she waited until she heard him take his first steps away.
‘Neville?’ she called.
He sighed. ‘Yes, Mira?’
She paused, thrown off by the sound of her name coming from him. ‘Is it too late to or
der breakfast in my room tomorrow?’
‘You’re allowed to eat in the dining room now,’ he replied. ‘A la carte or buffet.’
‘I know, but I want to eat in here tomorrow, same as always, but I forgot to ask.’
His fingers rapped an annoyed tune on the glass of the observation window. ‘First we couldn’t keep you in, now we can’t get you out. Are you sure?’
‘I’m hoping to see someone.’
‘There’s no names on your guest list.’
‘A lass can hope, can’t she?’
A long silence followed and she imagined his wrinkled face puckering up like he’d tasted a sour prune.
‘Neville?’
‘All right, all right. I’ll make an exception. Do you want a hot plate or cold?’
‘Cold, please … with yoghurt and fruit salad.’ She smiled and waited until she heard his shoes move away a few steps again. ‘Oh, and Neville?’
She grinned at the sound of him trudging back. ‘I forgot to say thank you.’
‘Don’t push it, cheeky. Go to sleep.’
PART SEVEN
Insights
A mind without instruction
can no more bear fruit
than can a field,however fertile,
without cultivation
Cicero
TWENTY-NINE
Zhou woke at four in the morning in the usual manner, with a nightmare and a scream. Curled up in the dry bathtub of his hotel room, he was still wrapped in the thick blankets and pillows he’d taken from the double bed. This was the only way he felt safe enough to sleep since the house fire that had claimed parts of his body and the life of his sister — fire-proofed, on a tiled floor, near water and with a man-sized window nearby.
Screams rang in his ears; not only his own cries this time, nor the familiar cries of his family trying to escape their first home in Australia — a run-down timber colonial. He was now also tormented by the more recent screams he’d heard on Likiba Isle on that first bizarre day that he’d met Mira. In his dream, three of those screams had been hers.
He threw off his blankets, shifted a water-soaked towel from the gap below the bathroom door into the sink, and hurried into the neighbouring room, where he swiftly unpacked the mobile polygraph and EEG kit onto the bed.
He didn’t bother with the ophthalmoscope, since he wouldn’t be able to read the responses within his owneyes without setting up the digital cameras as well, but he laid out the fingertip sensors and attached himself with a spaghetti tangle of wires to the heart monitor which would be enough to ensure that he wasn’t kidding himself. Then he attached the smaller network of wireless biosensors to his head to monitor brain activity, closed his eyes and tried to focus inwardly in an attempt to access memories of all the screams he’d heard at Serenity that first day and compare them to the ones from his nightmare.
One by one, he listened to them again, like warped songs replayed from the database that was his subconscious: first the screams he’d heard outside the gates while unpacking bags from Van Danik’s Harley Davidson; then the one he’d heard just before he’d entered the administration building; and finally, those he’d heard later while inside the building.
Yes, he felt certain that at least two had been Mira’s.
He opened his eyes to read the digitised recordings of his responses on the glowing laptop screen and saw that he was right.
‘Was she in pain?’ he asked himself aloud.
‘Yes.’
However, his subconscious was convinced there was more to it.
‘Was it guilt?’ he asked. ‘Yes.’
This response registered as a lie, even though he consciously remembered likening those first screams at Serenity to his own, which had woken him again tonight.
What else could have caused her to scream?
Fear.
He compared Mira’s cries to those of his sister as the floor had ignited, almost instantly, under an upturned heater.
‘Yes. Fear,’ he thought aloud.
The digitised response confirmed it.
Something had terrified Mira that day, and since her eyes had been stitched shut, it had to have been by something she could hear or otherwise sense. He jotted a note as a reminder to ask her about it during their next session, then stared at the laptop screen a moment longer, his eyes lingering over the peaks and troughs of his other responses.
‘Physician heal thyself.’
With a heavy sigh, he closed his eyes to concentrate again and asked himself the one question that had haunted him every night and day since the fire; the one question that fired his perpetual search for truth and had driven him to find a way to interrogate the human subconscious.
‘Was it me who was playing with matches that day?’
‘Yes,’ he replied, then reluctantly opened his eyes to see the response from his subconscious.
Ben woke in time to switch off the oven timer just as it counted down the final seconds before 5 am.
He hurried up to his room and dressed, then slid quietly down the smooth metal railings of the staircase and jogged out to the garage to prepare his mother’s car for their journey. He found her there already, reaching up to pull her surfboard down from its wall rack.
‘I thought we had a date this morning?’
‘I always have a date in the morning, Ben-Ben. You know that. You also know that you’re welcome to join me.’
‘Dad’s dead, Ma! You can swim out there with his memory any time.’
‘Dawn and dusk are the best times, baby.’
‘Sure, if you want to increase the risk of a shark eating you.’
‘You worry too much.’ She kissed him and tucked her board under her arm. ‘It hasn’t happened yet.’
He scowled and slumped against her car. ‘We had a date. There’s a lot I need to talk over with you; a lot that you wanted me to explain.’
‘So come with me.’
‘Ma!’
She turned to leave, but he grabbed her arm. ‘This is important to me!’
She wrenched her arm away from him. ‘And this is important to me! You’re not in jail anymore, Ben. You don’t need me.’
‘What?’
‘I’m sick of waiting for you to let me back into your life!’
‘I’m not the one who’s been stashing secret lovers in their room!’
She stopped at the garage door. ‘That’s for your benefit, not mine.’
‘Oh, and how do you figure that?’
‘You’re my only child and your father’s been dead for two decades. You figure it out.’
‘He broke your heart with his womanising, I know. But I’m not like that. I promise!’
‘You really don’t get it?’ She walked back to him and touched his cheek. ‘You’re all I have, Ben-Ben. I haven’t dated much since your father, and if it doesn’t work out with …’ She sighed. ‘I don’t see the point in upsetting you over something that might turn out to be nothing.’
‘Over something like what? I told you, I think it’s great that you’re dating again.’
‘You say that now, but you’ve changed since the robbery. You might not realise it, but you barely tell me anything about your life — where you go, what you do … or what really happened to your car.’
‘You say that as if you know already.’
‘You’re talking just like your father used to when he had something going on with another woman and didn’t want me to know.’
‘That’s not fair. I’m trying to explain things to you now. I want to take you somewhere I can —’
‘Look, if you’ve got something to say, just say it. You’re not dragging me all over the countryside at this hour.’ She pointed to the beach. ‘Surfing is the only thing that gets me through the day, especially those six years in and out of jail visiting you. So are you coming with me or not?’
Ben rubbed his forehead, wishing he could, but he didn’t have time if he was going to drive out to Mira’s treehouse to make sure r
edevelopment had stopped and still be back in time to meet with the doctors.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘I’ll explain everything when I get back.’
‘Sure.’ She spun on her heel to leave. ‘So it’s safe to hold my breath waiting?’
Ben watched her go, wishing he knew what he could do or say to break down the barriers that kept rising between them. Then he remembered the journey ahead and the petty crime he’d need to commit when he got there. He strode to his father’s dusty tool bench and hunted for a set of bolt cutters.
‘… the north wing.’
Private Lockman regained consciousness just in time to catch the end of the driver’s conversation. He wondered if they meant the north wing of the Sandy Creek laboratories. Not good, he thought, knowing the security on the base made it a modern-day Alcatraz.
On the upside, it was only two buildings away from the lab that Dr Zhou would be returning to in a day or so.
Through the grogginess of sedation he worked out that he was lying on his side on the floor of a truckwith his arms cuffed behind his back. There were more cuffs around his ankles. He kept his eyes closed, hoping his captors wouldn’t notice he was awake yet. A kick to his stomach made him cough and he realised they must have him hooked up to a heart monitor to watch his state of consciousness.
‘Hand me another shot,’ said an unfamiliar voice above him. ‘Sleeping beauty needs to catch a few more winks.’
Lockman turned his head to see who the voice belonged to, but again, all he saw was a fist coming towards him.
Zhou paced the floor around his bed, still linked to his equipment by an assortment of wires. He glanced at the response from his subconscious again and shook his head in frustration.
‘This is ridiculous! How can I be both innocent and guilty? It’s got to be a glitch! First Mira and now me.’
The phone rang, startling him. He picked it up and relaxed a little when he heard the electronic voice of the hotel’s wake-up service.
‘This is your 5:30 am wake-up call. This is your 5:30 —’
