She carried on now, softly... but only to herself. It sounded as though she was merely speaking the words to a tune; still huddled, still rocking back and forth. “Take me back, I’m coming home. Take me back, where I belong. Take me back, I’m coming...” She stopped, suddenly, as though some quite incomprehensible thought had just exploded in her mind. She turned in my direction, though her head looked to the floor in front of me and she never actually caught my eye. “Home,” she said, still thinking. “Home... came to me.”
I smiled. “Yes, darling.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, not really, but it sounded like it made some kind of sense. “Home... came to you.” It was only listening and recital, but I smiled with the kind of pride one might reserve for a child who had just got the hang of riding a bicycle. Then my face turned a little more serious. “And now I need you to listen to me, Rachael. I need you to listen to me very carefully. We have things to do, but I need you to listen.” I lowered my head and stared right at her.
Still she did not look back. She was back to mouthing the words to her song, so silently that I could not hear her over the Leech.
“I desperately need you to listen, Sunbeam. Can you do that for me..?”
I wanted her to move over to me; to come closer to the bars so that I might touch her face with the back of my hand, or hold her slender fingers in mine. I wanted to squeeze her really tightly in my arms and tell her that it was all going to be alright. But I couldn’t. That day was not here yet.
It was, however, close. Achingly close. If, and only if, she could listen to every word I said, understand what I was telling her and remember to do everything I told her to do. Still she did not look at me and that hurt for too many reasons to count. Instead, she turned her eyes to the highest reaches of the wall to her left; the very spot where the window had been positioned in the Chelmsford cell and just... stared.
She did not look, but she did speak.
“I like to listen,” she said gently.
* * * * *
By the time I left the cells, some twenty minutes or so later, Hoy was already awake. He heard my footsteps rising from below and was just about up on his own feet when I finally appeared through the narrow opening.
“Who the hell...” was all he managed to get out of his mouth before my fist, sent hard, fast and tangential to my body, hit him full in that same mouth and knocked him cold. He clattered into the table beside his chair, breaking it like a dry biscuit.
Even through the punch, I never broke my stride. I carried on, straight past to the wall that had been facing Hoy where I liberated a set of heavy manacles from a hook, then continued walking.
All the way I hoped to whatever God was left to babysit this horrid place that this would all work out; that Rachael had truly understood. If she was scared, she would freeze and if she froze she would die. When I released her from her trap, I needed her to run like the wind and not stop running until her legs took her where I needed her to go. The only glimmer of hope I felt at all was that, when I was done and readying to leave, she had spoken her only other words to me. As ever, they had been spoken as though they were for the ears of someone else, someone distant, and she had never once looked at me. Even so, they carried within them the smallest glimmer of understanding.
“You should be careful,” she had said. To everyone. To no-one.
“I will,” I had replied eventually, smiling. “I will be very careful.”
Like the one drunk at every party, an odd thought burst clumsily into the kitchen of my mind and dropped its trousers in front of grandma. Comically out of place, comically inappropriate and a comically perfect way to round things out. My smile grew wider.
“I shall use... Prudence.”
And with that I was gone. For now.
FORTY-TWO
Thursday, July 20, 1645.
Manningtree, Essex, England.
Tomorrow was to be a fine day. A very fine day. The dry air which sat below a cloudless sky said so, the warmth on today’s gentle breeze said so and, if one were to listen carefully through the rustle of the drying wheat, even the birds said so. Why? Because tomorrow was the day of final reckoning, the day on which the vile Bytch of Lawford Manor would be laid to waste once and for all, dangling like a rag-dolly from a beautifully-woven hemp scarf.
Also to be stretched were the ‘Dark Annes’ - West and Leech, along with young Helen Clarke. Prudence had not aided Master Hopkins with Clarke, as he had deemed it ‘unwise’, but she had been there to unravel both the Annes. Hopkins said that she was ‘a natural’, that she had ‘an eye’. He also said that she should keep that same eye peeled, for there were a great many more to be found. They were among us all, ‘hiding in plain sight’, he told her, and only the most pure and the most fair would have an eye keen enough to see them.
Master Hopkins was also to be there tomorrow.
Yes, tomorrow was to be a very fine day indeed.
But for today, unfortunately, there was work to be done, and Prudence had taken more than her share of time away this past few days. Yes, work and dream, she mused, for dreaming would always make the work pass swift. And dream she did, swinging the scythe as though she were dancing in the finest of ballrooms and slicing in time to the melody playing sweetly in her head and in her gentle hum. It was a hot one today and she was building herself a light sweat, but had little to do with honest toil.
As she swept and twirled amongst the fallen stems she stumbled slightly, catching herself just before she fell. It took her a second to recover but she was soon dancing again. Free and happy.
The wheat had grown fast this year, no doubt as a direct result of the Bytch’s New Year removal, and from a distance its height made Prudence’s head look little more than a skin ball bobbing on a yellow tide. She was to the eastern side of the field, where the shadows were lessened, and had nearly completed ‘a patch’. She had not long finished her break for lunch; mead, bread and cheese, and had spend it chomping, swigging and musing at a bright future that lay just around the corner. Now it was time to crack on for the afternoon. She had not done a particularly good job so far, but she had a job and, for those who knew Prudence well, that was about the best one could expect. Her grasp of the linear extent of ‘a patch’ also left a little to be desired. Indeed, were visitors from a distant star to arrive tonight, and look down from above, they would probably have thought that they had already been beaten to the punch. Given Prudence’s swirling dances, the eastern side of the Pa Barnaby’s ten acres now looked as though she had been making a rather crude attempt at crafting crop circles.
By tea-time Prudence would have done all that had been expected of her for the day. Or ‘remarkably little’ to give it its proper name. Then, with Ma already off at the Clarke’s for the night to help tend to their infant as the soon-to-be-widowed Charles fretted and wept (for it was not the child’s fault that her mother had been bewitched), she would have the house all to herself. She might light herself a candle or three (knowing full well and caring little that such wastage would earn her a hot spoon on her behind), pour herself some mead and try on her new blue dress just one more time. Not just any blue, mind, as the stall-holder in Colchester had told her as he laid it full-length across his arms. Royal blue. The blue of the gentry. And he was to be believed, of course, because his accent was definitely one of those which came from somewhere closer to London.
So she hummed her tune and swept her scythe and twirled her dress and...
...stopped. Dead.
She looked around. Nothing. Though she was quite sure that someone had just recently spoken her name. No, wait, not spoken... they had sung her name. Softly. Delicately. Prudence had rarely heard her name delivered back to her so soft. Usually it was one side or the other of a stern telling off. Had she dreamed it, she wondered, or was it perhaps her future actually beckoning her through the wind as she had so often dreamed before?
She carried on working, for just a few moments, then stopped again. There it was.
Again. She was certain.
She looked around, but it was hard to see above the wheat, even on the tippiest of toes. She could see nothing beyond the ten or fifteen feet or so of clear space which surrounded her body. She readied to start dancing once more.
Again, on the wind: “Come out to play...”
She heard that. She definitely heard that, but the wind rustling the wheat - and perhaps even the mead - made it difficult to sense from which direction it had actually come. She continued to look around.
“Hello?” she said. Warily. “Is someone there..?”
“Deeeeeaaar Prudence...”
She span around to where she was certain the voice had come from, but still there was nothing to see but an ocean of rippling wheat. It seemed now almost as though the wind had suddenly picked up speed, as though the waves which surrounded her were readying to engulf her like a fallen sailor. The field seemed to be closing in and she felt as though she needed to somehow wish it away.
She laughed, trying to make light and hoping that the owner of the voice would see that they had been caught in a mere prank. “Who is that..?” she said, still laughing. “I have no time for games.”
“Open up your eyes.”
Again she asked who it might be, but there was still no response. She laughed again, but it was more nervous this time. Awkward. Worried. The voice did not sound threatening, however. No, it sounded soft, but yet it was making her feel uneasy. Partly because she had yet to allocate it to a face, of course, but partly because there was, she sensed, something underlying it. Something dark and slightly malevolent. She knew the tone well, for she had used it herself many a time. Against the Bytch most recently.
The voice swirled around her like autumn leaves. Dead leaves cast to the wind like ashes.
“Deeeeeaaar Prudence...” A pause. “Greet the brand new day.”
An instruction, she wondered? She was unsure, but she looked up to the skies anyway, temporarily blinding herself with the light of the afternoon sun. There was nothing to be found above but a few chasing swallows and a distant hawk hovering steady as it prepared to pounce on its quarry. For reasons she could not fathom, she suddenly felt pity for the quarry.
The voice was coming faster at her now, still from many directions.
“The sun is up...” Left? “The sky is blue...” Right? “It’s beautiful. And so are you...” Everywhere.
Nowhere.
She was starting to feel dizzy, a little light-headed. Perhaps from the spinning. The world around her kept getting brighter, then duller, then brighter again. Her focus was lost. She took a breath.
She did not like this game any more and she was starting to get very, very scared indeed. It showed on her face. She called out again and again and again, spinning all the while, and each time she still received no direct reply. Her head felt dizzy. She could feel herself stumbling on the scythed wheat underfoot. The scythe itself was now flailing wildly in front of her, so she might cut deep into anyone who even dared step close.
But there was no-one, was there? There was just a gentle voice carried in, around and on the wind. Somewhere in the distance a crow cawed loudly. It sounded as though it were laughing at her.
“Deeeeeaaar Prudence...”
From behind. Definitely this time. She turned and stopped. Suddenly. And there he was. She thought. A tall man in a long dark coat and wide hat, standing right at the edge of the wall of wheat. A stranger. No, two strangers. No... just one. She thought. Maybe. He had shoulder length hair, a neat-trimmed goatee beard and from the lower part of his face, the part not in shadow of the hat, what seemed to be quite handsome features. At least, they might have been handsome had they not been painted around one of the nastiest smiles she felt she had ever seen in her life. But there was no smile. Not at all. Was there? And then there was. Malevolent again. Then it was gone. She could not see clearly and her brain felt awash.
He laughed at her. Deep and dark. Then he stopped. Then others laughed as well. Five voices, ten, one hundred - all laughing at her from all sides; right in her ears, filling her skull with deep cackles as though trying to break their way through to the very centre of her frantic mind. There were hundreds of shapes, hundreds of malevolent smiles, fading between each other, crossing paths without moving a muscle. Then, in an instant, there was just one. The original. The one that scared her most.
She could not see his eyes, so black was the shadow of his hat, and she did not like that one little bit. He started to blur, like an apparition. Like a ghost. He split into two and then back to one. Then flickered back to two. Two in one, dark and light. The wind was fast now, she could feel it cooling her flesh, wheat shards flicking hard into her skin. Her hair whipped around her face, stinging her cheeks. Insects crawled across her arms and she had to rub them away, but as fast as she rubbed they reappeared. They were everywhere; searching, crawling, feasting. She began to cry, though it felt as though her eyes were bleeding.
Oh God, they were eating her alive.
On the warmest day of the year so far, Prudence was frozen.
“Won’t you come out to play?”
Like a sack of fresh-harvested ’taties dropped hard from a cart, Prudence collapsed.
FORTY-THREE
Wednesday, August 23, 2043. 1:16am.
5th & Alameda, Los Angeles, California.
Having taken delivery of his heavily delayed parcel from the female delivery driver who had been hugely apologetic regarding the late hour, Milton had further managed to secure the loan of GlobalParcel’s electric trolley jack, just so long as it was returned to the next GP driver who came to KRT deliver anything. Having watched the whole thing closely, as his position demanded, Mike had assure her that it would be. Using that same jack, Milton had then carefully wheeled the large box backwards though C-Door and along the corridor to his own lab located at 9BG: Lab 9, Blue Quadrant, Ground Floor.
I knew for a fact that he would have headed into Blue, differentiated primarily by the colour of the LED lights set within the floor and the walls, because all laboratories on all floors were located in Blue Quadrant. Red was always Administration for the floor in question, Green exclusively Testing and Orange was allocated to Filing and Data Processing. As one progressed up the Building One tower complex, these coloured locations rotated so that whilst Blue was located on the east side of the ground floor, it was actually located to the south on the floor above and the west on the floor above that. So on, so forth. This continued right up to floor twenty where the executive offices began to kick in. At these upper levels, they took over entire floors, working all the way up to the late Josef Klein’s office which still occupied pretty much all of the twenty-ninth floor.
Once Milton had entered his lab code and wheeled the jack inside, the door closed hydraulically behind him and he set about removing the magnetic security tape. With a deep smile, he opened the carton and peered inside.
I have absolutely no idea what had been in that box with me, but I coughed, loudly.
“Do you have any idea how long I’ve needed to do that?” I said, standing and stretching.
Of course, it would have been just awesome if somebody had told me that, within about a minute of delivery, I could have coughed as much I had liked. But nobody had. Mike had returned to his desk and apparently we had made most of the journey alone. It wasn’t worth mentioning right now how annoyed I was at that, given everything that Milton had been prepared to do, but it still riled. You know, a bit.
“It’s good to see you too, Peter,” Milton said, politely.
We had only spoken about any of this on the phone, but boy had we talked. Somehow, and I’m not even sure how right now, I had managed to talk him not only into helping me into the building but also, in a sense, helping me right back out of it again. Above and beyond.
He shook my hand warmly. “So… this is really happening?”
“I’m afraid so,” I said. “Sorry.”
Milton looked around, taking in every s
quare inch of his laboratory. He had a lot more stuff than me. I didn’t know what half of it did, of course, but I guess that was partly the point. Still, he had a lot more. It didn’t go unnoticed, however, that his entire lab was a mess, as if it was the direct result of some crazy hoarding and cobbling spree. Truth be told it looked as though a bomb had already gone off in here. Not at all what I expected from Milton’s lab. Mine, perhaps but his, no.
“Shame,” he said. “Crying shame. I quite liked working here.” He looked directly to me. “And you’re sure she’s there?”
I sighed. “Truthfully, no,” I said. “No-one, including me, can be one hundred percent sure. But it looks that way and I have to know. Really I do. Besides, if I stay here, it’s game over for me anyway. Especially after tonight. They’ll find me.”
Milton took a deep breath. “You’re cutting your cloth very fine with your timings,” he said, referring to the events set to occur at precisely 3:00am. “I do hope they’re accurate.”
“They are,” I replied. By which I meant that I hoped they were. Scrub that, I really, really, really hoped they were. I could only rely on Victoria and she, in turn, could only rely on her father: the late Nick Lambert. His first device had gone off on schedule but even he would have no way of knowing if his second would ever do the same. “But, if we manage this, and God I hope we do, then I don’t want anyone getting any data from it and following me. That’s why it has to be last minute. I need that lab closed down almost immediately after I leave so that this can all happen, and end, tonight.”
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