* * * * *
It wasn't just good. It was incredible.
Frightening.
* * * * *
The banked up coals crackled and spat in the grate, the flickering glow the only illumination to speak of. Neither of them had said a word since they had sunk back to let exhaustion stake its claim on their respective bodies.
Ben shifted, the arc of his shoulder beaded with the fragrant sweat-cologne of sex.
“What now?” He asked, breaking the silence. He ran his fingers through the thick tangle of his sweat-matted hair, savouring the warmth of the crackling fire on his skin. Taking the poker from beside the grate, he turned his back on her, prodding the coals and watching them shift under his careful inspection. “We can't leave it like this.”
Kristy made no effort to cover herself up. A slow, thoughtful, breath leaked through her pursed lips. “I know. Now we get dressed and one of us makes like nothing's happened,” she said, pushing herself into a sitting position. “Life goes on without me, to quote the song.”
He looked at her then. “Is that what you want?”
“Not a fair question, Ben,” she said quietly. “You know I can't answer it.”
“Why not? Tell me because I can't see one good reason why. Not for the life of me.” Ben shifted casually, the movement once again putting his back between Kristy and the flames.
“Because,” she began, and shrugged, defeated, “I don't know what I want or what I need right now. I can't trust myself to make a decision.”
“Okay, just suppose I said I didn't want that. I didn’t want us to get dressed and go our separate ways like characters in a second rate TV show. What then?”
She was shaking her head. To Ben she looked beautiful, fragile, vulnerable and suddenly and hopelessly out of her depth and floundering. Another aspect; day through to night was conjuring a shadow-play against the backdrop of the woman, acting out the person inside for its one man audience, and he in turn was hopelessly addicted, for his sins.
“Then we'd have to think about things, and I'm still not sure we could do anything other than shake hands and say goodbye.”
“I don't know if I'm up to any thinking at all, but, hand on heart, I honestly don't believe that I'm up to saying goodbye either.”
“Then I'd say we've got problems, wouldn't you?”
“We've got problems,” Ben agreed sagely. His smile was wide and guileless; a long way from the hurt of the morning; but that lasted for less than the second it took for the shadow to pass over his eyes and the hurt to creep back in.
“I suppose I asked for that.”
“You did,” he agreed, then lapsed into another long bout of introverted silence, wrestling with a phantom she couldn't see and couldn't help him fight.
They made love twice more that night, retreating to slow, gentle touches feeling each other's bodies as if they were maps embossed in Braille. They sought out every inch with lips, tongues and fingertips, so softly, so gently either of them could have closed their eyes and imagined butterflies settling on their skin, tasted the delicious tang of pleasure the butterfly kisses gave the other, and in turn given themselves over to the sensations once and forever.
* * * * *
But talking had to be done, serious talking, and no matter how much she may have wanted to, Kristy couldn't just lay back and let the sensations claim her forever. Over a breakfast of French toast and fresh orange she broached a very difficult subject, tackling it the only way she was comfortable with, head on. Now, if Kristy had been cursed with a gambling streak in that Liverpudlian blood of hers, hand on heart she would have been able to swear that even the odds offered on this year's rank outsider at Aintree would have been hard pressed to tempt her into parting with any of her hard-earned gelt. In every conceivable scenario she ran through her head Kristy saw herself burning too many already shaky bridges to the ground; she wasn't a gambler. She just said what had to be said and expected to be damned for it.
“I need you, Ben,” she began, and liked the way he smiled at her in misunderstanding. “And it's not fair. I didn't come here because I wanted to see you. I came here because I needed to see you. You were the only friendly face I could think of. I came looking for allies,” his smile had slipped just slightly. He looked up at her and seemed about to interrupt but she forestalled him with a slight shake of the head. “Let me go on, please. I'm in trouble,” and at that she laughed. Short and abrasive. “Shit, I'm in more than trouble. I'm in it up to here,” she pointed at the side profile of her nose, above the nostrils. “And going under. You remember how we met?”
“How could I forget,” he said lightly enough. His eyes, however betrayed his obvious unease, even though his voice succeeded in staying level.
“Right. Now this is going to sound bloody strange, I know that. All I can do is ask you to listen with an open mind. Think about what you saw, what you've been seeing around you for the last ten days or so. Okay?”
“Open mind,” he agreed, munching on a slice of eggy toast. Scooby had taken up residence between their two stools, his head artfully angled to show off his doleful puppy-dog eyes to their best aspect and thus maximise handouts from above.
“Friday, May 15th, some local kids found a suicide in the woods not far from their school.”
“I heard,” Ben nodded, giving nothing away.
“Two days before he was found, Frank Rogan phoned the Gazette’s news desk claiming to have information we might want to pay for. I ought to say right now there are an awful lot of coincidences in all of this and I'm not going to apologise for any of them.”
“Shame I don't believe in coincidences then.”
“Well, that, at least, I'm glad to hear. Now stay put for a second while I nip out to the car, there’s stuff I'm going to need if you're going to believe even the half of what I've got to say.”
When she returned to the breakfast bar he'd finished the toast and juice for both of them and was smiling sheepishly. “Okay, here we go. The information Rogan had for us was about Judith Kenyon, one of three fellwalkers who have gone missing on the Northumbrian Moors in the last year alone. God alone knows just how long this goes back. I don't even want to think about it. Only thing is I never found Rogan to get his information off him, other than this little snap of Candid Camera.” She handed Ben the original Polaroid, watched his face while he studied the few details. She didn't expect him to recognise either of the two faces in the photograph, but she didn't need him to recognise them either, only to look and see and put two and two together.
“Judith Kenyon, right?” He offered.
“In one,” she followed it up with Jason's enlargement, laying it out flat on the breakfast bar between them. “Recognise anything unusual or out of the ordinary?”
Ben studied the enlargement for a few seconds, looking for its secrets. “Two things. First, her eyes. I've seen that look more times than I ought to own up to. Drugged?”
“That would be my guess. Second?”
“Second, the name over the gate. Havendene,” he said, as if the name in itself was explanation enough.
“What about it?”
Ben looked into his empty glass, then into Kristy's eyes. “Well it isn't, is it. Havendene, that's new. It even looks new.”
“Ten out of ten, teacher. Want to take it one step further while you're thinking about it?”
“The man?”
“The man. One and the same. Monk Sanders. His body was found hanging from the yard arm Friday morning.”
“Where we came in.”
“Exactly where we came in,” Kristy agreed, shuffling her prompts into a logical order.
“I see what you mean about coincidences.”
“You haven't heard the half of it. Since then Frank Rogan’s gone walkabouts. No one's seen him since before he placed the telephone call through to our news desk. You've got that stabbing in Westbrooke as well, remember. We can't discount anything right now. Jason, the photographer working on the st
ory with me, was savaged by dogs whilst he was trying to get out of Havendene’s grounds,” she pushed more photographs Ben's way; laboratory rats in the garbage and industrial bins.
“Taken inside?”
“About two minutes before the dogs got him,” she wasn't thinking about what she was saying and didn't have the wherewithal to thank whoever for the latent instincts just sat there waiting for her to fall back on. Each word came out crisp and businesslike, no time for crazy stuff like emotion to get in the way with what she had to say.
“Jesus Christ.” Then: “How is he?”
A while longer.
“He's dead.”
Ben felt as if he had just put both feet in his mouth and hit the evacuate brain cells alarm with both fists.
“Aww, Christ, I'm sorry, I didn't think. . .”
“It's okay. The dogs didn't kill him. He stumbled onto someone's dirty secret and got himself killed while he was in hospital. Coincidently, it was pretty well the same time someone was busy breaking into my flat and smearing dead rats all over the walls.”
“Are you sure? I mean, have you got proof. . ?”
“All I need to be sure for myself, and probably enough to take Richards to the police. I don't know. I challenged him over the rats and came home to find a dozen of the critters nailed to the walls of my flat and more of them cooking in the chip pan.”
Then the question he didn't dare ask but knew he had to: “And you think Mike's death is tied in with this somewhere?”
She shrugged widely. 'I don't know. I'm beginning to think I'm paranoid. Everywhere I turn I see Brent Richards and start jumping at his shadow. Maybe he had nothing to do with your brother’s death, it's possible things happen around here without his hand whipping up the agitator rod, but then why were Alex Slater’s fingerprints on the knife? Everything points to Alex being an unlucky kid mixed up with a bad sort, and in that case why weren’t Johnny Lisker’s fingerprints all over the shop as well? That one doesn’t make any more sense than the others.”
He didn't answer.
“But, I'm not prepared to discount any eventuality just yet. I'm steeling myself for the worst so I won't be disappointed when it happens, and I don't think it's all that far away from happening. Listen,” she flipped open the folder she had taken from Richards' office, continuing until she reached the sub-heading marked Judith Kenyon Phenomenon. She began reading Richards’ notes back to Ben verbatim: “Despite setbacks the Project has continued on several fronts, each area of investigation proving to be thrilling, each landmark more terrifying for its revelations. On a positive front, Jenifer has the virus-distillery up and running, and her time now is given over to the analysis of the E-motion foundation virus.
“FEBRUARY 18th: Neither patients nor self sleeping well. Can't seem to relax these days. More and more, I am finding the compulsion to occupy my mind with the Project irresistible. Begin computer collaboration of all data and begin protein and bio-feedback experiments. What mechanism liberates the patient from the inhibitions of appetite? And from there, to the root, what price emotion? It seems a natural extrapolation to seek out a viral-based manipulation mechanism.
“Once that step is accomplished, what price emotion then?
“FEBRUARY 19th: EEG scan of patient's alpha waves showing a dramatic down turn, by evening have gone into what appears to be REM state. Reaction to the levelling out of endorphin addiction? Possible, but unlikely. Cytotoxicity, then? Such a rapid and universal infiltration of host cell nuclei must have side effects. Now monitoring isolated cultures for trace of emotio-suppressant enzyme. Too early for diagnosis, but from initial recordings am estimating a 92.9% infection after exposure to host virus, viral compound cloning in target in two to twelve hours, conservative.”
Ben shook his head, struggling to soak her words up, no matter that they were crazier than a Vonnegut novel. “By March 15th he's identified the E-motion virus enzyme and a phenomenon he labels the Foundation-Slave relationship, and tagged it for cloning. Some sort of passenger-hermit antigen that is resident in the original viral compound tags on to the identity of the cell nuclei; I think he’s driving at the genetic fingerprint idea, but it's far from plain. Most of what he’s got to say is laid out in equations and scientific jargon that might as well be Dutch for the amount of sense it makes. Reading between the lines, the E-motion virus stamps its own trace identity on to the foundation of the cell and lives inside it rather like a hermit crab, which would be my guess for where the name comes from. Once it makes that connection it goes through a gestation period of between two and twelve hours before what Richards calls the Down Time. He lists a whole host of side effects present in primary exposure to the Foundation virus, all of which kick in during the Down Time. Accelerated metabolism of fat, carbohydrate and water, wildly fluctuating body temperatures and genital functions, outbreaking of sores around chin and mouth.
“Judith Kenyon suffered a forty eight pound weight loss in an observation period of seven hours. She came out of this Down Time a changed woman. Appetites radically increased, Richards claims her hunger increased triple-fold after emerging from the pupae stage, her sexual drives insatiable. Check it for yourself; don't take my word for it. Every word of it is there in black and white.
“March 20th,” he says “Injected epinephrine to stimulate emotional states. Quote, I felt as if I were afraid. . . Introduce cold emotion. Does subject need something on which to attach their feelings?
“Then on March 23rd: Emotion test cases - pass off emotion through association with stooges. Patient exhibited signs of extreme anger contaminating entire group with feelings of anger. All three reported feelings of rage.”
Shuffling back through the pages to Emotion, Mood and Memory Triggers Kristy hurried on. “Emotional responses of animals remain intact even when higher systems of the brain are missing. Pin point Primitive Emotions – found in limbic system of old brain. Stimulating certain areas of the brain causes subjects to relive experiences (cv. Wilder Penfield research). Can invoke fear and rage through stimulation of hypothalamus with electricity.
“They studied her for two months, with three reported escapes, the last being March 13th.”
“The night Frank Rogan disappeared?” Ben said, feeling suddenly sick. The glimmerings of a horrible pattern were beginning to intertwine with threads of supposition inside his head. He could see where Kristy was going, or at least he thought he could.
“One and the same. Richards spends a long time discussing the nature of the changes taking place within Judith, the hyper-parabolic alpha waves, her eyes going into REM even though they were open and she was wide awake. He speculates about the validity of lucid dreaming, but later on dismisses the idea in favour of vivid recollections crossed with an L.S.D. style hallucinatory effect, producing tangibly real memories with the ability to invoke fear, terror and anger in the extremes of emotional response. He even goes so far as to identify “The hypothalamus as the nerve centre that acts as controller of sympathetic and parody-empathetic nervous systems, and call it the seat of primitive physical and emotional behaviour. Foundation stage of virus modifies cell structure of human body’s pain receptors, producing a signal which is capable of jumping synaptic gap or blocking out effects of normal autonomic nervous system. I've read this stuff ten times, a hundred and ten times, and a lot of it doesn’t make sense. I don’t know just how far Richards took some of his ideas, or how much of what's written here is a mix of supposition and wishful thinking on his behalf, but if he has developed something which dredges up the very worst of someone’s nightmares, induces all of the fear, loathing and anger associated with them, and then turns around and blocks out the normal conscience reins. . . They've got no control and they're living in their very worst nightmares. . . It doesn’t bear thinking about. I just can't imagine it. . . He’s creating berserkers; capable of inflicting Christ knows how much damage without feeling any of the sensations of pain or guilt in return. Without the intrinsic knowledge of what's r
ight and what's wrong, and a fully functioning conscience to stop them doing what they know to be wrong. . . we’re in real trouble. If they can survive the punishment of accelerating their metabolic rates and the sudden weight loss what is there left to stop them?”
Ben sat back, trying to take it all in and make sense of the suddenly senseless nature of the world around him. Why would anyone want to create a plague that triggered off the worst sorts of emotional trauma? What was there to be gained from it besides a torture drug that might have proved useful in Saigon, or Sobibor or Belsen or somewhere equally horrible?
He closed his eyes, shutting out the suddenly mundane breakfast room in his suddenly too damned neat and tidy life, giving himself over to the riddle Kristy had spent the last quarter of an hour spelling out.
If you couldn't feel anything, and yet you were compelled to seek out bigger and bigger thrills, hungering after the hit of adrenalin -- the endorphin rush as Richards called it, though surely endorphin was the chemical released by the brain as the body died – what happened then? Nothing good, that he could see, even without opening his eyes to look.
- AND WE ALL FALL -
These feeling-sound-thoughts shifting veils of fear, slurred with too much pain and sickness already. Half-formed memory-hallucinations shredded, only to be reconstructed by this unmistakable salt-and-rotting-seaweed darkness. . .
Who are we. . ? One question, one hundred and fifty-two voices behind it.
The sickness biting hard. . .
Yes. . . Yes. . . Here. . . Here. . . Bad. . . Feel Bad. . . Hurt. . . Hungry. . . Need. . . Need. . .
Already the first black fingers of panic were clawing out like offshoots from a ragged rose bush, thorns peeling away the layers of the waking awareness as if they were the skins of a nectarine, only for the black fingers to sink into the pulpy fruit. . .
From one hundred and fifty-two careening mind-voices the same scream of pain. Not an echo. A single searing cry scoring white-hot through this strangest of darks. . .
Sufferer's Song Page 39
