Liam closed the door behind them with a highly satisfying slam, which is when the giggles started to set in.
Lying on his bed, Beansy’s still coughing and wiping his eyes when big Kirk fills the door frame, Rocks and Dazza at his back. He’s got that game face on, serious as fuck, which kills the laughter. Beansy recognises it as the put-on game face, as opposed to the genuinely-on-the-brink-of-bleaching-some-cunt game face. This is potentially more dangerous, because in the case of the latter, you’re probably all right as long as you’re not the one who’s pissed him off. When it’s put on, it’s because he’s about to lay down the law, and any challenge to his authority must be met with full force, or else every fucker would be taking liberties.
‘Right,’ Kirk says. ‘Get yourselves tae fuck.’
‘Aw, come on, gie’s a break, big man,’ Deso appeals. ‘There’s four of us, and we were here first,’ he adds, looking to Rocks and Dazza, who can occasionally be appealed to when they know the big man is out of order. Dazza is glancing to the ceiling, looking fed up. He’s not exactly ready to die for the guy right now, but doesn’t look like he can be arsed arguing either.
Kirk responds by simply staring at Deso, nary a word spoken. Deso stares back, not feeling defiant, simply unable to restrain himself from conveying his anger at this moment. Kirk is a cunt for doing this: not just for muscling them out, but for bringing the threat of violence into their midst after what happened to Dunnsy.
He remembers a fight on the beach on a school trip to Girvan in second year: him and Beansy, a square go. Cannae mind what it was about, just shite that had been building up for weeks. Shook hands a wee bit later, mates again for the trip home: back when a fight ended in a burst nose and a squiggly walk from getting a boot in the sack. Violence is something else now, not wee boys incompetently trying to panel each other.
Suddenly Deso’s back at school, looking at the spreading, lapping pool of blood on the grey tiles in front of the lockers. It disappears again. Feels like he didn’t even have to shake the image himself; like something else kicked in and blocked it. The flash was so vivid one second, then the next, he couldn’t picture it if he tried.
Deso sighs and turns around, muttering as he begins repacking his bag.
There are several resigned ‘fuck’s sake’s emitted around the room as big Kirk and the boys step proprietorially inside. Beansy meanwhile makes his protest felt by means of his own specialised silent form of emission.
‘Aw, in the name of fuck,’ blurts Rocks, closing his eyes like it’s stinging them. ‘It’s bowfing in here.’
Kirk tuts, shaking his head. It’s only a fart, they all know, and the smell will be gone in a minute - maybe ten minutes; fuck it, half an hour - but it’s provided the excuse Dazza and Rocks need to back out of this.
Dazza taps Kirk on the shoulder. ‘C’mon. Let’s leave these clatty bastards to gas themselves,’ he says, offering Kirk an out that won’t look like a climbdown.
‘Good shout,’ Kirk says, accepting. He knows everybody is under no illusions regarding the fact that he would prevail if he chose to, but it’s not worth it, especially not with that niff to contend with. ‘Don’t know how these fannies are gaunny be able to sleep in here without firefighters’ breathing apparatus,’ he adds, walking out.
There’s silence for a few seconds, everybody bursting to laugh but calling canny until the big man has moved a respectful distance away, hopefully out of earshot.
Marky breaks first, falling on to his bed and shaking it as he buries his face in his pillow to stifle the sound.
‘I never thought I’d say this . . .’ Fizzy begins, but Beansy shushes him, finger over lips.
‘Wait for it,’ he urges. ‘Listen.’
They hear Kirk’s reprised order from down the hall: ‘Right. Get yourselves tae fuck.’
Jason’s response echoes after it, muffled by distance and intimidation: ‘Fair’s fair. We were here first.’ His voice sounds as pathetic as his reasoning.
The third voice is Dazza’s, low, harsh and unequivocal:
‘There’s two of you fuds in a four-bed room. Don’t give us your shite.’
Beansy steps into the centre of the room and takes a bow.
‘Who da man?’ he asks. ‘Who da man?’
‘You da man,’ they all reply.
He high-fives Marky and Fizzy, but extends Deso a hand to shake, reducing it to a single index finger as Deso reaches to grip. Deso knows what’s coming, but figures Beansy has earned it. He grabs the offered finger and pulls.
Blake can hear shrieks of laughter and the ring of enthusiastically exchanged abuse. He’s not sure if it’s bouncing its way through the network of corridors or traversing the internal courtyard separating the kids’ dormitory block from where the teachers have been allocated their single rooms. Sendak may have been wrong, he reflects, pulling his clothes from the zip-toothed maw of his rucksack: their host said the kids would be at a greater distance than most nocturnal noise can travel, but he’d never heard the St Peter’s lot in high spirits. There was that ‘nocturnal’ qualification, though. They had just got off a coach after a very long journey and were like a newly shaken bottle of ginger right now. At night-time, they’d keep it a little lower, if only to avoid giving Guthrie reason to patrol.
He hopes so anyway, if he isn’t to be kept awake half the night. It isn’t so much the noise he fears as the distracting awareness of once again being on the outside of someone else’s good time. It seems daft, but while Kane and Heather were expressing their relief at being told they had their own rooms in a separate block, Blake actually felt disappointed, though not surprised. He understands why, as teachers, they need their privacy and a respectful degree of isolation from their charges, but for a decade, Blake has known little but privacy and isolation. The fact that he’s considering the grass might be greener amidst fart gags, supermarket cider and juvenile moonlit reverie suggests he may have known it too well.
Five years in study and training, seven years a priest. Wasn’t he supposed to be over this by now? Or was it an ongoing test of strength, commitment and character? Rome to Royston, South America to South Lanarkshire: he had always been around so many people, all day, every day. He was immersed in their lives, in their works, in their troubles, their aspirations, their pain, their losses, in their celebrations and their joys.
He had once been a shy person, skilled at secretly keeping his distance, able to communicate without engaging, without risking himself. To do what he did as a priest, though, he had to engage, had to open himself and share all of those other people’s emotions, heedless of whether he might get hurt. It felt like he was giving each of them a little part of himself, and there were times when he would be exhausted but amazed that he could still find something more to give. Those, in fact, were the best days. So why, at the end of even those days, especially at the end of those days, upon being faced with a small, neat bedroom, did he feel the way he does now: that the room seems empty? That there is something missing, and missing from himself?
He takes out his little green toilet bag and checks inside to make sure his can of shaving foam hasn’t burst open and covered everything. It only ever happened the once, but after tasting it on his toothbrush for a fortnight, he’s always afraid of unzipping the top and finding himself facing a repeat. All is well, despite the minor collision endured by the bus. He goes to stick it in the bathroom, and reminds himself that a further consolation for not being an excited teenager this evening is that he won’t need to go creeping down any darkened corridors if he wakes up in the night and needs to pee.
Blake opens the bathroom door, and walks inside, which is when he discovers that it’s not the bathroom door. He has come through what turns out to be an adjoining door into the next room, in the centre of which Heather is in the process of changing her clothes. Her bra and midriff are exposed, but her face is obscured by the rolled-up polo-neck she is pulling on, which is why she didn’t see the door opening.
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br /> She hasn’t heard either, which provides a moment during which Blake could just possibly withdraw again unnoticed. He doesn’t seize it, though. He’s afraid it would look even worse to be caught like a peeping Tom, grabbing an eyeful and then scuttling away.
‘Oh, Jesus, sorry,’ he says, by way of announcing himself and owning up just before she gets clear of the polo-neck and sees him.
She doesn’t start, just laughs a little with embarrassment, though this embarrassment seems more to do with how the polo-neck has left her hair plastered to the side of her face than at being caught underdressed.
‘Thought this was my bathroom door,’ he explains.
‘Well, now we both know,’ Heather replies.
Having done the honest thing and let himself be caught red-handed, Blake retreats and closes the door gently but firmly. He stares at it, his heart thumping so loud he’s afraid she’ll hear it, already feeling the conflict and confusion get revved up as her words keep looping in his head. Christ. Had she just screamed, had she just tutted with annoyance, had she just muttered ‘For God’s sake’ in rightful indignation, he’d have gotten a light sentence: maybe ten minutes beating himself up over an accidental moment of mutual mortification. Instead she had batted him something sufficiently ambiguous as to condemn him to spending at least the next hour dissecting her reaction, at the end of which he would be none the wiser.
Then he’d have to say mass, with her watching.
III
A brace of static pings cause his monitor to degauss, the second shuddering the image like a boulder dropped into a millpond just as the ripples of the first have finally cleared. Those were bigger than normal, and he knows what the bigger fields mean: each one heralding yet another new arrival through the Dodgson anomaly.
Merrick pulls himself back from the computer, and it’s only as he disengages from the trance-like state induced by so long immersed in the data that he realises his head is splitting with pain. He hears a guttural, rumbling cry from outside the lab, across the corridor in the controlled area they’ve started referring to as TLV. On the other side of the room, Avedon seems oblivious to the sound, remaining intent on the microscope’s imaging monitor. This tells Merrick that he has no idea how long the cries have been sounding out, exacerbating his headache, as he was in the same detached state up until a few moments ago. Now, it’s like someone scraping the inside of his skull. He can do that these days: phase out the sound of the animal noises like he’s learned to zone out the permanent hum of the machine. It’s a purely analgesic process: the damage is still being done, and it hurts like crazy when he withdraws, but zoning out the noise does mean he can work through it.
He’s been working through a lot of things of late.
Avedon steps away from the microscope and makes towards the supply cupboards that take up the full length of one wall, the other three lined with sinks, workbenches, machinery and a fume cabinet.
‘Can you throw me some Brufen out of there?’ Merrick asks him. He needs something for his head, though the water he swallows the tablets with will be just as important. The bottle beside his PC is empty, and he recalls there was barely a mouthful in it when he sat down. This prompts him to look at his watch. He’s been at the computer for nearly four hours. His clothes are damp from sweat, so he must be pretty dehydrated. Who would have thought you could spend so long in the north of Scotland without ever feeling cold?
Avedon chucks him a blister pack of pills. He pops two into his palm and goes to a sink, where he pours some tap water into a glass beaker.
Avedon remains at the supply cupboards, evidently perplexed.
‘Is there a problem?’ Merrick enquires.
‘We’re out of oleum.’
Merrick feels the headache become that bit sharper as an involuntary tension seizes him. He’s clenching his fist around the pills with one hand, gripping the beaker too tight with the other. He feels threatened. Avedon is getting at him.
Then he realises that Avedon is merely looking for oleum. It’s his own conscience that’s pushing his buttons.
Oleum. Hazardous material. He can picture the decal on the jar: the little hand, the test tube, the descending droplets, the cartoonish wavy lines indicating a harsh, corrosive reaction with organic material.
Warning. Avoid contact with skin.
Danger.
The test tube. The droplets. Little wavy lines. Looked like the hand could just be giving off a smell, a 2D depiction of perfume. And in truth there had been a smell. Wavy lines too: of smoke, of gases. Screaming. Screaming he couldn’t zone out. Screaming he’d be hearing forever.
If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, then what did it say that he had been tempted down that path by holy water?
What he witnessed in the test chamber had spooked him on a number of levels, so much so that it took him days just to make sense of his memories. He felt like he had to sift through the data collected by his own senses, disentangling and interpreting it like any set of lab results until a coherent picture could be assembled. He was still so reeling from the fear, shock and astonishment that he needed time to get his analytical head back on.
Holy water had burned the creature’s skin: real Hammer horror movie stuff, and it had happened before his very eyes. The fact that the skin belonged to a horned demon bolted to the table did make this particular sub-phenomenon seem minor to the point of incidental, but the utter enormity of what they were dealing with was too huge to compute, so he had, almost by scientific instinct, homed in on one detail that he could try to make sense of.
What if, he pondered, it was water itself that caused the reaction? As far as he could ascertain (access to the holding area remaining highly restricted, with an information seal almost as tight as those on the mag-locked doors), the specimens were being given water to drink. That suggested there couldn’t be a complete aversion, but internal tissue could react differently from external. He knew from painful experience that chopped chillies, for example, could be swallowed without damage while the fingers that carried them to the mouth could suffer a chemical burn from the contact, to say nothing of what happened if you rubbed your eyes or worse, went for a piss.
He took a skin sample from one of the expired specimens, then tested it against a number of substances: tap water, holy water, an acid and an alkali, these last two of corresponding pH. The results were even more perplexing than he had anticipated. Both the acid and the alkali inflicted visible damage to the skin, while neither water sample - sacred or profane - produced a reaction. Not only did this suggest that simple water wasn’t responsible for the damage he’d witnessed in the chamber, but it indicated that holy water only reacted with living tissue. The ramifications of this were dizzying, but he knew he couldn’t draw any conclusions without comparison tests on a live subject.
The term TLV - The Little Vatican - had initially been coined by Steinmeyer out of ill-tempered flippancy, but it was more accurate than he could have anticipated. If the Vatican was indeed a state, then its outpost here was like an embassy, accorded full diplomatic status. The US Government might hold the note on this facility, and it might be sited in Scotland, but when you stepped through those doors on the opposite side of the central corridor, you were as good as on Roman soil. Cardinal Tullian had even consecrated the ground, carrying out some ritual at what had to be a record altitude below sea level. Sacred ground didn’t have to be the high ground, it seemed, but whether that went for the moral distinction as well as the physical was a matter for debate. Certainly, nobody would be calling any of The Little Vatican’s house guests to supply endorsements.
Gaining access to a live subject proved a prolonged and delicate process of negotiation, the key to which was keeping his frustrations in check. It might seem surreal to Merrick that the facility’s scientific personnel were having to go cap-in-hand to a bunch of priests in order to gain access to specimens procured through their own experiments, but not only was he quickly learning to redefine hi
s concept of reality on a daily basis, he had also learned to accept which realities around here were genuinely unalterable. Chief among those was the way the military operated. Their purpose was, first and foremost, security. Therefore, as they saw it, the moment the first of those creatures was brought forth into this world was the moment their role here ceased to be the running of an R&D facility and transformed into a threat-containment operation. Priority number one, at that point, was garnering intel on what the full scale and nature of that threat might be.
To that end, as well as consulting the science personnel, they had called in the base chaplain, who immediately declared it to be way above his pay-grade, in respect of either of his employers. Neither the chaplain nor the scientists were in the position to offer any kind of informed assessment, but in the padre’s case, he was at least able, as he put it, to ‘point them in the direction of a man who could’. With the world of science incapable of similarly recommending someone with comparably superior credentials, it was the American Cardinal Terrence Tullian who swiftly became the US Army’s senior adviser on what they considered to be potentially the greatest threat they might ever face.
To be fair to the military brass, it wasn’t a difficult choice. For their part, the science personnel offered, at best, frank admissions of ignorance and, at worst, in the case of Steinmeyer, histrionic displays of outrage. By contrast, Tullian offered information, experience and cold, measured certainty, which had been in far scarcer supply than the military could tolerate. Unlike everyone else, he was able to assure them that he knew precisely what he was dealing with, which was always going to be music to their ears, but he played an even sweeter tune when he offered to bring in his own personnel and effectively take charge of the threat. This gave the military a role they were far more comfortable with: they were content to let someone else accept responsibility, as long as they knew they had ultimate control. They were used to peacekeeping, used to securing borders and maintaining stability while a reliable, autonomous infrastructure was established beneath them. Tullian gave them that, and in exchange they gave him complete control of the specimens - at least while they were alive, after which they became official (if ultimately disavowable) property of the US Government.
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