He lay still for some time, staring at the ceiling and thinking of nothing and everything at once, and, although he didn’t realise it, he became aware that he must have fallen asleep, as someone else was now present in the room with him. He sensed the person first, and then heard them, walking and moving objects. Opening his eyes hurt as did turning his head, although not as acutely as the searing pain trying to move his legs had caused him. He felt a momentary shadow fall across his face, which placed the person between the bed and the window, and that, he realised, meant that he could address them without the need to open his eyes.
“Could you shut the blinds, please?” he managed to ask roughly in the direction he supposed the person to be.
“Certainly, Mr Lyal, and how are you this afternoon?” the voice was female and cool and had an air of authority and comfort to it. It was not a voice that Mathew recognised though. She sounded young, and he felt the slight air of anxiety that comes from knowing someone knows far more about you than you do about them.
The room darkened, although Mathew noticed that the woman hadn’t moved and concluded that the blinds were remotely controlled. He slowly allowed his eyes to reopen into the subdued light. He watched the girl in the half-light while she moved around his bed and rearranged instruments in the room. She was young, maybe 25 he thought, with dark hair that was arranged carefully in braids around her head in a style he thought strange, especially if, as he presumed, he was in a hospital and she was some kind of health worker, presumably a nurse. The girl was oriental in appearance and moved gracefully, and he had the distinct feeling that if he was not in such severe pain he would have found her highly attractive. Her uniform was a pale cream, but not of a type that he recognised and she remained silent while she worked around him.
“I’m Mathew,” said Mathew, instantly regretting this and feeling a little like he had chosen the most stupid line to initiate a conversation with the most stunning beauty in a bar. The girl looked at him, coldly at first and then allowed the faintest glimmer of a smile to cross her lips.
“Yes Mr Lyal, I know. My name is Reiko Ishinomori, but for the ease of your tongue you may call me Rei.” He looked at her blankly. “Like, ‘ray of light’! I’ll be looking after you while you convalesce. How are you feeling? Is there any discomfort?”
“You’re kidding me. I feel like I’ve been trampled by horses. The light really hurts, and I’ve got a headache that would rival my worst hangover ten times.”
“We have some medication for these symptoms. But they will persist for a few more days, perhaps a week or so. You’re already on very strong pain relief, and anything more powerful will just put you to sleep. The pain should start to reduce gradually over the coming days and then we can decrease your dosage of pharmaceuticals. We’ve already reduced your medication several times while you’ve been here.”
Mathew thought for a second and tried to take in more of the surroundings, but the darkness meant that there was little visible. Something that Rei had said troubled him and he tried to nail the problem. She had talked about reducing his medication in a way that made it sound to him that he’d already been here for days. And he still had no idea where he was, or why.
“How long have I been asleep? What’s wrong with me?”
“You’ve been mumbling to yourself and drifting in and out of consciousness for the whole five days that I’ve been looking after you. You’re in a medical unit, one of the best in the country, and you’re being well looked after. All of your bills are paid for and so you have nothing to worry about financially.”
“The great NHS, eh?” he said, and the second time in the conversation feeling his line completely missed the mark. Rei merely looked at him in a strange manner, and continued her work. “You don’t say much, do you?” She glanced up at him from the floor where she was adjusting a small pipe, the other end of which Mathew couldn’t see, but assumed was attached to him, and he wondered if it was pumping stuff into or out of his body.
“I’m sorry if you’re disappointed that someone more loquacious was not here for you when you awoke, but I am a medical worker, not a counsellor.”
It was there again. “When you awoke,” she’d said. He had the distinct feeling that if he wanted information he’d have to ask, and he really wasn’t in the mood for a long conversation. He tried to sit up to speak with the girl some more, but as he moved he felt a small spasm down his side and the muscles in his left leg contracted involuntarily. Instinctively his head rolled back onto the pillow and the throb of the headache became a roar. He closed his eyes and still his head was filled with white light and white noise, suddenly every centimetre of his body throbbed as if it were being used for the first time ever. He was vaguely aware of tears on his face and could taste the ferrous tang of blood in his mouth. Somewhere a machine had switched into action and had changed from an ambient hum to a shrill beep. He could feel something shaking and somewhere in his head he realised that his own arm was twitching violently. The convulsion overwhelmed him and he felt a strange sense of peace as part of his brain wondered whether this was the end.
Then it stopped.
The contented hum of the machines returned and Mathew slipped back down to a state of mild pain. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on the situation, but sleep broke over him like a wave and he lost consciousness.
He awoke on his own. The pain seemed to have dissipated slightly for the time being and he shifted his eyes around the room, being careful not to move his neck or head suddenly. He tried to focus on what he knew. One, he was in hospital and couldn’t remember how he got there. Two, the oriental girl who was obviously looking after him here had referred to him waking, so he’d obviously been unconscious. Three, he felt like crap. Whatever had put him here had been serious and he’d been out for a while. Four, he didn’t know where he was. Five, he’d had no visitors that he knew of. What did that leave? Either he’d been involved in a serious accident, most probably a car crash; or he’d contracted some kind of weird disease. He couldn’t remember how he’d got here, which would seem to back up the accident scenario. That meant that there should be some visible signs on his body: scarring, cuts, broken bones. He checked his hands, being the only part of his body he could move to see. Nothing out of the ordinary, his fingers looked a little bony, and the skin was pale and slightly translucent, but that could always be the low light. As to why he’d had no contact from anyone – Paula, Robert his brother, the crew from work – well that might depend on where he was and how long he’d been here. If it was a day or so Paula would have remained by his bedside, which meant that he’d been out for at least three or four days, which was bad, but was in keeping with the constant pain. In fact it could also explain why the hospital looked kind of odd. Maybe he’d been transferred to a specialist unit. The girl had said that everything financial was being looked after, so perhaps he was in some private ward somewhere, although he couldn’t think who might be paying for it.
So what did that all suggest? He’d been out for a while, perhaps in a coma. God! That must be it, he thought. So how long? What was the date? He couldn’t think. What was the last thing he remembered? Talking to Paula about something while Jessie was playing in the front room. But what it was all about was sketchy, something important. Something about his health. That was it, he was ill. Something was wrong with him, something serious. He moved his right hand up his body and through the folds of the robe he’d been dressed in. He touched his chest and traced the scar. It hadn’t been an accident; it was heart surgery. But he felt sure that he remembered being moved from the theatre. Shit, why was his memory so fucking sketchy. He looked around for anything personal by his bed to jog his memory. There was nothing. Nothing at all. Which was a bit weird. He moved his hand across the small table to feel for anything that he hadn’t seen in the subdued light. It touched nothing. He moved it to the cabinet by the side, stretching as far as he could. He swung the door open, but stopped before he felt inside. On the
door was a mirror, and the face that stared back at him was wrong. He was skeletally thin, with patchy hair and skin that looked like it was stretched too thinly over a canvas.
“Jesus,” he said out loud. “How long have I been out?”
9
Philip Brading was fucked off. He had a monster hangover that had given him a headache that throbbed persistently behind his eyes. What he had wanted to do today was to lie in bed and think about nothing until early afternoon and then get up and carry on thinking about nothing until he was able to eat, and then, maybe, start work on a story. He had some notes he was putting together: an analogy of Eastern commercialism and the collapse of Western supremacy. He was going to link this to some half-baked ideas he had on secularisation in major trading powers, but the idea was stuck like a jammed machine, and he needed time to think things through in the single-minded way he found worked best when fuelled by large amounts of alcohol. But it hadn't worked last night, and he ended up flicking through channels on his c-pac before falling into an uncomfortable sleep on the futon that dominated the main room in his apartment. He had been rudely awakened at about 6 am by a call, and although he tried to ignore it, it had been prioritised and patched through. He’d had a shit journey through the countryside from Woking and now he was here. At eleven thirty in the fucking morning in Nowhere town in the middle of Shitshire, on a story that he really hadn't wanted to cover. He was really fucked off.
He parked in the makeshift yard to the front of the grey buildings and made his way through to the guarded entrance of the complex. He registered his press pass and walked past the police cordon. The road went straight towards the dark grey outer wall and then veered right to follow its contours. This led around the perimeters of the site before doubling back on itself through a 15-metre gap in the outer wall of the building that had been inserted in 1940 courtesy of the Luftwaffe. As Philip passed into the inner courtyard the dark, foreboding walls with their bleak and grassy ramparts towered above him. The road took another turn and he was inside the complex. Within the star-shaped outer wall was a second barrier, this time circular, and within this a series of buildings. The structures had mostly been erected between 1780 and 1840 and had the cold red-brick look that so often went with military buildings from the time. Four large offices stood on the far side of the complex, their sash widows and slate roofs partly missing. Built into the inner wall were a series of arched rooms, that Philip guessed had once been barracks, but were now store rooms, their doorless entrances open to the fierce south coast weather. A two-storey brick and timber building stood neglected to his left and a corrugated tin garage was slowly rusting past this. Towards the centre of the courtyard, although slightly set off from the exact middle were three sets of buildings. These were two floors tall and made from a mixture of the same red brick and grey granite and slate as the other structures. But what caught Philip’s attention was that these buildings had obviously only stopped burning recently. Smoke trickled skywards from the ruins through the openings in the roof and what remained of the windows was charred and blackened. To one side of the buildings was a hamlet of portable police huts that appeared to be the main part of the investigation. He looked for a familiar face and recognised a detective who had worked on some story or another a couple of years back. The guy was big, dwarfing Philip, and moved like some prehistoric creature across the scene. Philip sprayed a mouthwash jet between his teeth: “Let’s not smell too much like a drunken hack,” he said to himself, and approached the ursine bulk of the officer.
“Hi. What we got?” The policeman looked at him like the piece of shit that he currently felt he was, and motioned for him to follow.
“Whole complex burnt out,” said Detective Sergeant Renfrew. Philip remembered why he hadn't liked this man: he had only one volume to his voice and that was shouting. “Looks like it was started deliberately but we’re waiting on the arson report. They’ll be through any time now. But I’ll tell you what we’ve got so far. There’s been an explosion in the old boiler house attached to the main building over to your left, which has started a fire that’s ripped through the rest of the facility, although it looks like there’s a couple of other secondary fires started in other buildings. The main hall seems to have had about 150 to 200 people in it at the time of the fire. The doors were locked from the outside, although I reckon most of the people were either asleep or already dead, there’s very little sign of anyone trying to escape. There’s a about a dozen bodies in the other buildings and around the complex, and at least four of them were shot before they were burned.”
“So what the hell was this place?” Philip asked.
“Some kind of commune apparently. We have’t pieced it all together yet, but it seems to have been a sort of Christian religious cult. A couple of preachers put it together about eighteen months ago, but we’ve had no complaints from either within it or from the locals. They’ve been pretty self-sufficient; you can still see the earthworks and fences of the farming.” He motioned to the rectangular allotments that covered the area originally intended as a parade ground. He viewed Philip for some reaction, but got none and continued his analysis.
“We’ve got probably six fires, all separate, at different locations in the site. They all seem to have started simultaneously. We don’t have any reports of anyone leaving, or any survivors. According to the records that we have, and we’re not sure yet if they’re complete, we should have about 180 people living here: oldest 63; youngest 2.”
“What’s the movement?”
“‘The Divine Temple of Jesus’,” said Renfrew with a cynical lift of his eyebrows as he read the name from his record. “They do a little preaching, but mostly keep themselves to themselves. We’re not sure how they recruited, or what the belief structure was. So, what’s your story angle?”
“Fuck knows. Mind if I have a look round?” Renfrew commented that he didn't really give a rat’s fuck and Philip wandered off.
“Hey, keep off the cordoned areas,” he shouted condescendingly as an afterthought.
Yeah, I know! thought Philip, with a certain degree of resentment. He hated the way the police treated journos.
The site was pretty wrecked. Most of the buildings had been burned out and Philip imagined that the complex could be made hard to escape from; after all, it had been built to stop people crossing its borders. There was the stench of burnt flesh in the air that somehow always reminded him of his mum’s cooking, and he hated himself for having made the connection. He walked across to the far side of the parade ground, checked that he wasn’t being watched, and slid under the cordon up to the smoking wooden shack in the centre. He eased the door open and slid inside.
The smell almost made him vomit and the smoke in the air stung his eyes. Groups of people were sifting through the wreckage and in one corner a heap of filled body bags was mounting up. By the door were some tools: a crowbar, an agricultural fork and a couple of hammers. He kicked the door shut behind him. Even through the ash at the entrance he could make out four parallel lines on the wood. He slid his fingernails down the marks: they fitted. “Fucking way to go,” he said to himself out loud. He slipped back out and walked the perimeter of the site. He walked slowly around until he was nearly back to where he’d started when he felt a firm hand on his shoulder.
“Brady, got something for you.”
“Thanks. And it’s Brading.” Renfrew ignored him.
“We’ve had preliminary reports through,” shouted the detective, despite being directly beside him. “We’ve got some details off their database. They seem to have had 183 members. Two were outside of the complex on some kinda missionary work yesterday. We’ll be starting work looking for them later today. But we got names for all the others.”
“So you got 181 dead?”
“Well…no. We’ll have to cross-reference everything. But from the records that they’ve kept and the on-site ID team, we have 179 bodies.”
“Don’t tell me. The cult guru’s missing!
?”
“No! We have her. Caroline Atkins, she was in the east block, caught up by one of the blocked doors. We’re missing two nobodies: Nasreen Freeman and Deon Underdown.”
Maybe, thought Philip, this is more of a story than I’d thought.
10
Rei was troubled by her patient. The man spoke in an accent that was sometimes unfathomable and seemed to have little idea of what was happening to him. He obviously had problems with his memory on top of the medical condition that she still was not completely sure about. She’d checked the records available, which were incomplete, she noticed. She slipped off her jacket and poured a glass of tea from the dispenser. Sipping her drink she walked across the small apartment to the window and looked down on the sprawling city beneath her. It was animal: unkind and unknowing, London was the sort of place that should have disappeared years ago into nihilistic chaos. It was coiled: ready to strike; ready to kill. There really was no reason for places like this to exist today, she thought as she watched the people mill around on the street beneath her. The city streets were full of food carts, motorbikes, robbers, addicts and the millions of poor who she hoped she could in some small way help. It seemed an impossible task from this location looking out over the endless expanse of the vast conurbation. It was strange that her position, her birth, had made it possible for her to afford an apartment that was superior to anything that any comparable British citizen would live in, and this unsettled Rei, who often worried that it made her feel superior to the denizens of the city who needed people like her. She turned away from the sealed window and settled into her favourite position in the flat’s seating area. She put her black leather-bound case on the low table and took out a wad of papers.
Copying a patient’s notes was of course highly irregular, and she could be dismissed for it; if she was caught, and using hard paper copies made that far less likely than simply copying information to the personal file of her c-pac. She began reading the papers she had copied earlier. She flicked through the leaves, following the path her finger traced and reading at that speed. In less than five minutes she read the full notes that she had access to.
The Relic Keeper Page 4
