[Sequoia]

by Adrian Dawson

  “I shall dance the whole night through,” she said, half to herself and half to the maid. Her voice sounded slightly slurred.

  “I’m sure you will,” I replied.

  “They shall marvel at my dress,” she said, clearly excited. “And my jewellery... they shall all marvel at my jewellery too.”

  “Keep still,” I said firmly. “We have a lot to do.”

  Her voice still slurred, Prudence said: “You should not speak to me like that, for you are just my... my...” she thought for a moment, searching for the word. “...my handcart. Yes, you are just my handcart and you should know your place.”

  “But you wish to look your best? No?”

  Prudence did not reply, she simply scowled like a spoilt child. She did; she did want to look her best. She would let it go for now. The woman’s insolence could be dealt with later.

  “You’re talking utter bollocks, you do know that?” I said. She repeated the phrase back to me, quite comically as though she had never heard such words before. To Prudence it sounded posh and she phrased it accordingly: udder bow-locks. “And do you know why you’re talking bollocks?” I continued, still working on her hair. “Because of those...” I nodded toward a clump of mushrooms in the furthest corner of the clearing; pale beige in colour with tall, thin stems and narrow pointed caps of a slightly deeper brown. “Psilocybe semilanceata,” I explained. “Where I come from we call them magic mushrooms.”

  “Ooh, magic,” Prudence said excitedly. “Is it good magic?”

  “I would say so,” I said. “Now, you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, you sick little fuck, but those are probably the same mushrooms you added to the mead the night you pricked Rachael, no? The mushrooms you had Hopkins’ boy go in search of before he brought mead to the house?”

  Prudence curled her face. She had only heard one word. Really. “Rachael?” she spat. “Rachael is a bytch!”

  “Opinions vary,” I said, with no visible emotion. I stepped back and admired my work. The red clay from the fields near Thorpe, combined with the Manningtree’s own more yellowish clay, had indeed made Prudence’s normally blonde hair look really quite orange. The addition of a little good old-fashioned dirt in amongst had rounded the whole ensemble out nicely.

  Now for the face...

  I scooped a handful of dark soil from the ground to my right and added a little water from a small bucket, mixing it into a thick paste on my left palm.

  “What is that?” Prudence said.

  “Face cream,” I said, matter-of-factly. “The finest. From Milan. Do you know where Milan is?”

  Prudence thought for a moment, then looked at me, wide-eyed. “Is it in London?” she asked.

  I sighed. “No, you stupid little tart, Milan is not in London. London is in London.”

  Prudence looked puzzled but completely unfazed and she shrugged. “I like tarts,” she said. “Apple ones most of all.”

  She started to feel a little uncomfortable in the chair and she moved her arms slightly. As she did, she felt something around her wrists and heard a deep rattle. “What are these?” she said, looking down. She looked slightly worried.

  I smiled. “Ah, the bracelets,” I said, almost with pride, “now they were your idea.” I started applying the dirt to her face like a true make-up artist. Carefully, I added smears of red clay with my fingertips where I could recall seeing a welt. “And a good idea they were too. You see, when I first came here, a long time from now, I saw these long marks gouged into both sides of Old Knobbley here. They were dark and overgrown, sure, but they were still visible because they were so very deep. Like someone had really been ragging something hard against the bark. Possibly for hours. But yet, when I came here the day before yesterday, they were not there.”

  Prudence looked as though she was listening and trying to work it all out. Typically Prudence, she also looked like she was failing on every level imaginable. I tilted her head with my hand so that I might work on her chin and, God bless her, she obliged me. As she did, she gently ran her fingertips across the surface of the manacles, touching each of the coarse rivets in turn as though they were the finest diamonds.

  Of course she was not sitting in any ‘fine and regal chair’, not at all. She was actually seated between the thick gnarled roots of Old Knobbley herself, staring at a small fire I had built at the side of the clearing to keep her warm through the night. The thing with psilocybe semilanceata, however, was that they had a habit of bringing out one’s deepest desires. Like living the good life. Or, in the case of at least one Widow and one Goodwife, one’s deepest fears. Widow Lawton had desired her husband’s return to end the misery of her loneliness, and who could blame her? She only had herself for company and even she might agree that she was actually not that interesting. Widow Potts had feared for years that her affair with Robert Morley might be uncovered and Goodwife Morley...? Well, she had heard about the whole rat-with-a-cat’s-shadow thing on her return with provisions and - given the fact that she was probably attending a pricking that scared the living crap out of her anyway - it had been playing on her mind ever since. By the time her little trip kicked in, she was almost begging the rat to appear.

  I had heard the testimony in Chelmsford just as clearly as everyone else gathered that day. Word for word. Indeed, I was standing not ten feet behind this little bitch at the time. The only difference was, I had considered the evidence as a scientist might consider it and, once you did that, the true nature of what had actually transpired that night was pretty easy to predicate to a far more logical conclusion than fucking witchcraft.

  Even Rachael had sipped the mead, it seemed. The only person who hadn’t... and the only person who could therefore make up whatever bullshit she liked to round it all off... was Prudence. Hand that dubious bag of crap to Hopkins for him to add his own little spin and then stick him on a pocket-lining stand and the verdict was always going to go his way.

  “Anyway...” I continued. “...that was when I realised that I would probably have to leave you sitting here for...” I mused for a moment, “...around seven hours or so, but that our little magic friends would probably start to wear off in about four or five. So you would wake up, you see? You would try to run from the party like Cinderella…”

  “Cinder..?”

  “Party girl; met a guy with a foot fetish. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, you would try to run and I really couldn’t have that, could I? Not really.” I leaned in close and smiled warmly, wrinkling my nose as though talking to an infant. Prudence smiled and mirrored the gesture back to me. “So I... borrowed... some fine bracelets from nice man in Colchester and I wrapped them right around the tree. That way you can make me some nice deep grooves as you struggle like the bitch you are to get free. Grooves that will still be visible long after they drop your slender little body down a nice deep hole.”

  “Does you think I look slender?” Prudence asked, almost excitedly. Clearly her mind was still sifting through the words I delivered and handing her only the ones she actually wanted to hear. Her tone became a little more sombre. “I fear I may have put on a pound.”

  I stood back and admired my work, wiping my hands on my trousers. My expression of pride did not escape Prudence. “Does I still look beautiful?” she asked.

  I reached to the mass of items that comprised my ‘make-up kit’ and retrieved a large, wide-bladed knife with a thick leather handle, then spent a brief moment cleaning dirt away from the blade with the corner of my shirt.

  “See for yourself.” I handed the knife over.

  Prudence carefully took the pearl-encrusted mirror by its fine bone handle and began to admire herself in its face. She was indeed a beautiful young maiden today, with bright blue eyes and the most perfectly understated make-up she thought she had ever seen. Her face was suitably pale with gently powdered cheeks and bright red lips, reshaped with a lipstick of beeswax and probably the finest plant extracts. Her eyebrows were trimmed neat and sharp and her beautiful blonde hair was tied
high; just a few selected strands flowing in soft ringlets down her forehead. Staring lovingly at the reflection, she turned her head from side to side repeatedly and gently touched her own face as she admired her beauty.

  “I do look quite beautiful,” she said, clearly in awe of herself.

  “You look quite... perfect,” I replied. And she did. She really, really did. Uncannily so. Every bit as filthy, wretched and ragged as my darling Rachael had done in the cells. “Now... I need you... to take another deep swig of this fine wine for me,” I said, holding up the bottle, “and that will help you to get some sleep. You have a little time before you are needed at the party and you would do well to be rested. You have a long night ahead of you.”

  “I shall dance the whole night through,” Prudence repeated, wide eyed and smiling.

  “You shall... fly,” I replied with a wry smile. I handed her the bottle and she took a deep, long and completely un-ladylike swig. Just as she had many times during her lunch in the fields; about an hour or so after I had tampered with her own mead as she danced like some love-struck teenager in the badly hewn wheat.

  After that I had just watched her from the shadows and waited. At her first stumble I had started singing. The rest was easy.

  Given the high dosage of ground mushroom I had included in this bottle, however, her eyes were now starting to flicker toward closing in no time at all. I picked up a length of cloth and readied myself to tie it around and into her mouth. Apparently, slender as this little bitch was, she had quite a set of lungs on her. Who knew how far those lungs might carry her screams in the still night air.

  “The Bytch shall hang tomorrow,” she said sleepily. It made her smile.

  I smiled too. “Do you know what, Prudence..?” I said with a gentle smile. “As last words go, those were really really quite prophetic.”

  “Pa-thetic,” she ‘repeated’ and her eyes fell shut.

  “And now you’ve gone and spoiled it,” I said, stretching the material tight around her mouth.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Wednesday, August 23, 2043. 1:42am.

  5th & Alameda, Los Angeles, California.

  Of course, my timings had been out, given that I had calculated them from the time it had been when I first mentioned it to Milton, not the time it was now. Besides Milton had needed to power up the system and run the standard diagnostics before we could even think of getting started. I had needed to recalculate.

  He had then had to go onto the net to try to access my cPad account to ascertain the sixteen digit serial of the pad itself, the sixteen digit serial of the NTRCard within it and the 36 digit NTR number itself given that, for some unknown reason, I’d been unable to remember them off the top of my head. Apparently using my number alone would not be enough for the device from which he was sending, given that it was tuned to more specific purposes. I did find it extremely scary however that, when pushed - just for shit and giggles - Milton had actually reeled his own serials off without even pausing for breath.

  It soon became clear that we had a bit of a problem, or rather I did, because those numbers were not logged anywhere on my account. I probably had them, in an email somewhere, but where would be anybody’d guess. The only other place they probably existed was on the phone itself and that was currently using its built-in altimeter to test the depth of a small lake north of Sunday Peak. In the end Milton had suggested something that I should have known all along, given the events that followed. He suggested we could send the messages as a geo-fenced ‘squarks’ - the same kind of message that was sent by network providers in the event of an immediate emergency at the request of the local police. The geo-fencing aspect of the message took account of the device’s location, based on GPS data, and only delivered the messages to those within the affected area. As each mobile communications manufacturer had their own proprietary technology, any messages we transmitted would not be received on competitor devices but they would appear on KRT devices. Every god-damn one of them. And mine was very much a KRT device.

  Given the time I believed the first message had arrived in my glasses, he told me to hit the first send button at precisely 1:48am. He, it seems, had done all his necessary calculations using that specific time as his marker.

  “So… what if I don’t actually send the messages?” I asked pensively, staring at the machine. “What do you think will happen then?”

  “But you did send them,” Milton said. “Apparently.”

  “Yeah, I know. But what if I didn’t.”

  He scowled slightly. “Seriously, Peter, we’re already prodding the universe with a really big stick here. I see no benefit whatsoever in putting it down and picking up a cattle prod, do you?”

  I had to agree. I keyed in the message and then looked to the clock as the seconds counted toward 60, my finger ready to hit the send button.

  >Look to your right.<

  As the clock flipped to from 1:47:59 to 1:48:00 I pressed. At exactly the same moment, the computers controlling the entire system sent an immediate blast of overwhelming electrical charge directly into the titanium container which leaped through the vacuum and hit the siberium chunk. I had expected something huge, like I had experienced in my own lab; something that filled the room with blinding white light and knocked me full off my chair. I’d even tensed in readiness. I got nothing.

  “Is that it?” I asked.

  “That’s it,” Milton said. “What were you expecting? A black hole to open up before your very eyes?”

  “Well, yah, kind of,” I said, turning back. A white hole at least. I felt cheated. I keyed in the next message and waited for what I somehow just knew would be just the right amount of time; the chicken and egg thing now starting to make my brain hurt like a bitch.

  >Go! Drive!<

  This continued for some time, Milton keeping his eye on the clock the whole time. As it passed two o’clock I could feel his impatience building, like static electricity on my neck, but I was by no means done yet. Ridiculous at it sounds, and it does sound ridiculous even to me, even though I already knew that the messages would hit me at exactly the right time, I still reasoned that I had to set what felt like exactly the right interval between them. I know, stupid right? Until you get back into the whole chickens and eggs thing and start to wonder if it was because I did that that they hit me at exactly the right time.

  Mindfuck.

  I still found it amusing, however, that at the same time I would be receiving these messages, so would numerous other people who owned KRT branded, identical technology cPads, glasses, tabs etc. in the Los Angeles area. Which would explain why, whilst I was looking right, as I had been told to do, so was the young woman whose car had quite forcefully removed the rear end from mine. And why numerous pedestrians had also been looking to their right at the same time. It would explain why, as I responded to the “>Brake. Hard.<” message, the bus which almost took me out had also begun braking already.

  It would not surprise me one to little bit to learn that both the chicken and whatever might ultimately have popped out of that egg had eventually ended up in rehab.

  At four minutes past two, Milton heard something. “Mike,” he said. “You need to disappear.”

  “Not funny,” I said, but I knew what he meant. Annoyingly, just for a couple of minutes, it was.

  But there was nowhere to disappear, short of ducking under a table and becoming the worst player in the world’s easiest, and shortest, game of hide and seek. I looked around, panicking. Eventually I did what they seem to do in all the best and most clichéd movies, I scrabbled across the room and hid behind the door. About half a second before swung cheerily open.

  “Everything OK with your delivery, Mr… er, Milton?”

  “Yes, thanks,” Milton said, looking deep into what appeared to be an old spectrometer and noting down figures. He looked engrossed and barely glanced up.

  Mike smiled and, seeing that Milton was busy, the door started to close again. Milton looked up. “Oh, Mik
e..?” Mike looked in again. “I should be done by three but, if I’m not you won’t forget about the car, will you?”

  “No, sir,” Mike said, tapping the pocket that presumably had the $150 PPP inside. “I won’t forget. I’ll leave at five to at the very latest.”

  “Good man,” Milton said and, slowly, the door closed again.

  Which explains why I didn’t get the messages I needed for about two minutes. Mike. Sometimes I am so blind to the obvious that I even amaze myself.

  I waited a moment before peeling myself away from the wall and staring directly at Milton. I didn’t like the fact that his contingency involved him not ‘being done by three’. Didn’t like that one bit. Inside this building this was my mess and mine alone. If he did not get out by three, then he did not get out. Simple, explosive logic.

  “And when you are out before three,” I said sternly, “like you should be, what happens to Mike then?”

  “Then he’s coming with me,” Milton said. “I don’t quite know how I’m going to convince him - yet - but he is.” He stood upright and suddenly looked very decisive. “Right, clock is ticking. We need to get ready to go.”

  The clock was indeed against us so I had to move fast. “Just a couple more to send,” I said, running back to the chair and getting straight back into it.

  Then, a minute or so later, I realised I had a problem. Yes, another one.

  “I need a three hour delay,” I said, swivelling to face him. “Ish.” The look on my face told him that I knew just how big a problem this might prove to be.

  “You are joking?” He looked at the clock and then threw me one of the filthiest looks I think I’ve ever seen. And I’m Strauss.

  “No, I mean on the system,” I said. “I need you to…” I flicked my fingers around wildly,”…reprogram, reduce the power or whatever it is you do. I got a message telling me to drive north and keep driving, which I did. There was about a three hour gap in messages. The next two didn’t arrive until I got near the lake.”