by Andy Graham
The trapdoor banged. Stella jumped. The wind outside was as nervous as she was. The Famulus was a harmless eccentric. A bit dotty. That’s all.
The harmless eccentric spoke. “Secateurs don’t cut hair well. You need scissors and then a razor to shave someone completely.”
“What?”
“It takes a lot of practice to do it without leaving a scratch. Secateurs are better for removing fingertips, except forensic science has moved beyond fingerprint ID.” She pulled something from her pocket.
“That’s a cut-throat razor,” Stella said, her eyes as wide as the moons. “You can only get those on the black market.”
“It’s the best way of getting all the hair. Right down to the root.”
A draft circled from the door that led to the crypt below, where the Famulus dazzled her followers with pyrotechnics, both physical and verbal. The air tasted of dust and ashes. She laid the razor underneath the scissors and secateurs. The three tools formed a triangle within the diamond of candles. “Three Higher Elements, four Lower Elements,” she whispered. “The symbolism is clumsy, Dr Swann, but I will make do with what I have.”
“What’s going on?” Her throat was dry and scratchy.
“I thought the four elements were the answer to immortality: fire, earth, air, water. The children of the Old Lady and Father Time”,” the Famulus replied, toying with something in her pocket. “I thought that only by using the four elements could we hold back the forces of death, the First Deceiver. Then I realised I was wrong. So I read more. I broke into Tye’s Great Library. There are tunnels running there from the crypt beneath us. I thought maybe the answer was in the Higher Elements: space, time and consciousness. Maybe there would be books that would help me.” She stretched her arms high in the air and pivoted. Her fingers left channels in the smoke. “The three Higher Elements frame and restrain the other four, with the exception of consciousness.”
“Which sets the living apart from the lesser elements,” Stella finished. “You’ve said this before. You’re scaring me.”
The Famulus traced a finger along the blade of the razor.
“What are you doing?” Stella felt for her coat looped through the iron ring behind her. Should she leave it and run?
The Famulus’s voice was dreamy. One hand disappeared into a pocket, the muscles on her arms twitching as she played with whatever was inside it. “Consciousness is what sets us apart from the dead and the never-lived. But everything has to have its opposite, otherwise it cannot exist. In this respect, the Donian tribe’s beliefs of a devil for every angel and a right for every wrong are so much more advanced than ours.”
The woman lunged forwards. The handcuffs she had been concealing snapped Stella’s wrist to the metal hoop on the bar.
“What are you doing?” Stella screamed.
“The four Lower Elements balance each other out.” The Famulus’s voice was rising. “Fire with water, air with earth. Space and time are part of the same equation.”
“Let me out. Let me out!”
“But what of consciousness? I couldn’t see how it could exist without an opposite? Unconsciousness didn’t make sense. It’s too temporary. Then I realised the answer. As with most answers, it’s as obvious as the sun.”
“Help! Someone help me!”
The Famulus slid the stun baton from her belt and adjusted the dial to maximum. Vicious blue sparks spiralled up its length.
Stella, panic-blind, groped on the bar. A bottle, the ash tray, anything she could use to fight this lunatic.
“The answer is simple. The Old Lady, Mother Nature, is made up of her children, the elements. It’s unnatural, a form of incest. Father Time is merely a vehicle, nothing more. Time is a slave to gravity, gravity is itself a slave to the elements: the earth of the planets and the fire of the sun. That left consciousness, what I believed was the central element.”
Her voice sounded like the smell of dust and ashes circling up from the crypt. The handcuffs were biting into Stella’s skin.
“The twin of consciousness is death. The answer I have been seeking is the thing I thought I was fighting: death, the First Deceiver. The Old Lady, Mother Nature, is the problem, not the solution. Death solves everything. As a medic, surely you can understand that?”
Stella took a swing at the Famulus. Her fist skimmed through the air. “You’re mad. People come to doctors to be helped, not murdered.”
“Doctors have usurped the priests of old. Your dogma is no more flexible than that of the druids, witches and shamans that preceded you.”
“We have evidence and science on our side.” Keep her talking! Help will come. It has to.
“Science is a slave to statistics. Statistics can tell you whatever you want them to, they are as deceitful as words. So we come back to the same thing: the First Deceiver, death.”
Dead! Dead! Dead!
The blue light sparked up the baton again. It reflected off the bare teeth of the advancing Famulus. Stella stumbled on the rough brick floor. She cracked her head. A warm trickle spread down her neck. One shoulder was wrenched painfully up and back by the cuffs.
The Famulus loomed over her, her face carved into shards by the turquoise fire spitting from her baton. “I’ve read the reports. Your children are gone, Dr Swann. Go to them and mother them eternally in whichever afterlife you believe in.”
42
Matricide
Stella’s feet scuffed up clouds of dust. She pushed herself away from the cadaverous woman looming over her. Stella’s fingernails split on the bricks. The spitting light hurt her eyes. She had to get away, she had to—
A slow hand-clapping reverberated around the room, echoing back off the walls like pistol shots.
“Very good, very good. I like a theological discussion, it reminds me of the fairy tales my stepmother used to put me to sleep with.”
The Famulus froze. Stella craned her neck round, desperate to see her saviour. When she did, the panic consuming her twisted into fear.
“You.” The Famulus’s face was as white as a sun-bleached bone.
The VP’s mouth crooked up into a smile that stopped long before his odd-coloured eyes. Two legionnaires were heeling him. One, his skull gleaming through his close-cropped silver hair, helped Stella to her feet and unlocked the cuffs. He had a deep cleft running vertically down the centre of his forehead.
“I hope I’m not disturbing anything,” the VP said.
“She’s mad. The Famulus. She was ranting. Death and elements.”
“That old rubbish again?”
“She wanted to kill me.”
“Nonsense,” the Famulus replied. “The woman’s drunk. Smell her breath.” She pointed to the empty shot glass on the bar. “I had to take her in off the street before something happened to her. The serial killer has been stalking these streets. I wanted to help.”
“By handcuffing her?”
“She was a danger to herself. While she was here I wanted to see if she was ready to be initiated into the Higher Elements.”
Stella rounded on the other woman. “You lying, sanctimonious, two-faced bitch.“ She rounded on the VP. As much as the sight of him made her want to vomit, he was the preferable option, for now. “Can’t you arrest her or something?”
“I’ve done nothing wrong.” The Famulus twitched her cloak tighter around herself.
“Not tonight, no. I guess you haven’t.” The VP placed a hand on Stella’s shoulder. Her skin crawled under his touch. He turned to the Famulus. “I came here to see you tonight. Bumping into the doctor here is a bonus.”
The legionnaire who had helped Stella to her feet was still holding her arm. His fingers tightened, pressing her flesh into the bone beneath. Stella pulled herself free. He, J. Brennan his name badge proclaimed, didn’t seem to notice. His silver hair looked too old to be on such a young face. But that face… She shivered. It was as impassive as a gargoyle.
The Famulus lay the police baton down and glided over to them, her s
ky-blue cloak billowing out behind her. Her face had regained some of its colour. “How may I be of assistance?”
“I have some news about the murders. About the serial killer. A press release is being prepared, waiting for my personal approval as we speak.”
The Famulus sat, arranging her gown around her with care. “Has there been another one? Are they any closer to catching him?”
“No, maybe you could help us with that.”
“Whatever I can do.” There was a hint of a tremor in the woman’s voice.
Stella stole a glance at Brennan, at that deep furrow in his brow. His eyes bored into the Famulus.
“The press wanted to run with the Wig Murderess but I talked them out of it,” the VP continued over steepled fingers.
“A woman? I thought the common DNA they found in the women’s hairs was a man’s.”
“It was.”
“Then—”
“It was mine. I have an alibi for the times of death.”
“But...” The Famulus’s eyes were wide.
“Of course there was likely to be my hair on the women if I had been with them shortly before their death. It doesn’t mean I killed them.”
“It’s more likely to be a man, you said so yourself,” the Famulus protested, pink spots rising in her cheeks.
The VP pulled out his phone. “What makes you think it’s a man?” The Famulus’s voice in the speaker was tinny and muffled. In the background Stella could hear the thrum of air passing a microphone, birds chirping.
The VP tapped the screen and the recording skipped forwards. “I assumed the killer was a man because I hope that a woman couldn’t do that to another woman,” his voice answered.
“Everyone starts out female up here,” the phone replied in the Famulus’s dry voice. (The VP tapped his temple as if to fill in the gaps for Stella.) “Some of us stay the way that we were intended to be. That makes all behaviours originally female, even the less desirable ones.”
He swept his thumb over the screen. “I recorded that upstairs. In the church above this Ward. Do you remember?” The VP’s voice, unfiltered by the phone, seemed too loud to Stella.
“You slept with those women!”
“Yes. I did. How did you know?”
“You told me in the church.”
He shook his head. “I said I’d slept with one: Lena.”
Brennan’s head snapped round. “Lena?”
“Yes, Lena.”
“But, sir—”
“Not now, Captain.” The VP waved him to silence. “I didn’t say ‘those women’. How did you know this?”
The Famulus wiped her brow with one of her capacious sleeves. It came away with dark sweat stains. One of her eyebrows had smudged. “Someone’s been killing my Ward, of course I was going to look into something like this. I have access to classified information through my work in the police station.”
“An abuse of position you complain we politicians are guilty of.”
“I—”
“And what did you do with the information?”
The Famulus clamped her mouth shut.
The VP rubbed the thin gauze of stubble on his face. “We’ll get to that last bit in a minute. But back to the press release. I was thinking something like the Merkin Murderess. Kind of covers all kind of angles, don’t you think? And it neatly takes away any kind of glamour that you may have been hoping for.” He stared up at the low ceiling, tracing a wide arc with his hands. “I can see the headlines, the profiling, the trashing.”
“You wouldn’t.” The Famulus blinked, twice.
“Your accent is very good, by the way,” the VP said. “I didn’t notice it for a long time, and I pride myself on being a connoisseur on these things. I assume you are aware of what some have referred to as my unwarranted hatred for Mennai and its people?”
Stella looked desperately between the two people. The Famulus closed her eyes. Her back was straighter than that of the hard wooden chair. She reached for a bottle and drained it, pausing between shots to scratch at her head.
“You have no idea what it is like to be Bucket-born. It’s worse in Mennai than here,” she said at last. “There the poor really are poor, they dream of being able to be in debt.”
“And matricide was going to make it all OK? Slightly ironic given your little group venerates Mother Nature.”
“Matricide?”
“I admit this was a surprise to me, too, but most of the victims were pregnant. Two were mothers.” The VP put a finger to his lips, leant closer and whispered, “I actually quite like the pregnancy thing. You can take more liberties with fewer chances of complications. Understand?” He curved his hands in the air over an imaginary belly. “And” — he ran his tongue along the base of his top teeth — “it really, really annoys their partners. Kills the relationship in some cases.”
“I didn’t know they were all...” The Famulus held her head in her hands. Her scalp was outlined under a thin fuzz of hair.
“Well, in that case I’m sure it’ll be OK then,” the VP said dryly.
Stella’s eyes flitted from one to the other. “Surely this is a lie?”
The Famulus smoothed her skirts as the words fell to the floor. “It was only supposed to be one or two, to scare you off.”
Stella retched.
43
Captain Brennan’s Sister
The two legionnaires stood immobile in the background, sucking the shadows from the darkness.
The Famulus spoke: “Ignorance. Intolerance. Fear. Discrimination. The reborn Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Lords of Misrule, sent forth by their bigoted father, made in His own image, Death, the First Deceiver.”
“I’ve heard the speech, woman. Get on with it.”
“I was trying to fight the Deceiver. Him. The Bigot. His claws get everywhere.”
“What happened to all behaviour being originally female?”
The Famulus pressed on, the words coming out as if they were a prayer. “Very few people are genuinely tolerant—”
“Is there a point to this?”
She nodded, rocking back and forth in her seat. “Yes, please, listen. Don’t lecture, listen.” She finished in a whisper.
“Hypocrite.” The VP clicked his fingers and the second legionnaire poured him a drink. The first, Brennan, looked shell-shocked.
When the Famulus started speaking, Stella had to strain to hear her. “There are sexists who aren’t racist, racists who aren’t sexist. In my homeland of Mennai, homophobia coexists with religious tolerance. The intellectual bigots stand behind them all, fanning the fires, claiming to be the ones who tell it like it is. Everyone needs someone to hate, to look down on. People think that by very publicly not being seen as one type of bigot it gives credence to their other twisted views. This gives them a moral platform to spout their bile. The rich hate the poor, the poor the rich, the scientists the faithful, the fat the thin and so on. You’re either one of us or you’re not. It shouldn’t matter.”
Her eyes gleamed in the thin light, her voice taking on the depth Stella remembered from the ceremonies. “It was different here, in the Ward. It was more than just a place to explore the world, the superstitions, myths and stories that your government took from both our peoples. Your government ruins everything it touches. I lost family to this government in Castle Brecan, my grandfather Deian and aunt Aerfen.”
“It was a terrorist attack that preceded the Silk Revolution,” the VP said. “If your family were there and attacked Ailan troops, they got what they deserved. Any leadership would do the same. The response of Edward De Lette’s government was measured and proportionate.”
The Famulus squeezed her eyes shut. “The official government response was, the gradual war of attrition, sanctions and slander that followed wasn’t.”
“What does this have to do with the Ward?”
“Everything. You own and control everything else, could you not have left us at least this? The Ward was a haven for everyone lik
e me until people like you hijacked it.”
“Stop trying to give your base emotions lofty reasons. You murdered one woman. It probably revulsed you but then you realised you had a taste for it and couldn’t stop. You are an addict of the worst type.”
“I thought if there was a scandal, you’d stop coming. I thought the PR risk would be too toxic an issue for you and you’d leave us alone.” The Famulus’s eyes closed. “This place was a refuge for the weak and poor—”
“So you started killing them?”
“You kill the diseased to save the hale.”
“I think Dr Swann here may disagree with that left-handed logic.”
The Famulus pressed on, deaf to his words. “A refuge for those being hounded by the government, the downtrodden and the offended. I—”
“In my experience, people who get offended enough to need support like yours don’t have the moral fortitude to stand up for themselves. Either that or they’re too weak in their own beliefs for those beliefs to actually mean anything.”
The Famulus squeezed her eyes tighter. The woman looked to be one step away from putting her fingers in her ears. “I wanted to help. I wanted to create a true society for all, not just the zero point one percent.”
Stella saw the room as it usually was: bustling and raucous. Full of laughter and tears, screams and shouts. The inhibitions of all who came here slowly wore off. The cloaks and disguises were shed. People who had once hidden themselves from top-to-toe flaunted their identities, Buckets and Gates side by side, powerful and poor. They danced, talked, drank, argued and loved. The tragedy was all of them, including her, would deny ever having been here and ever having met anyone from here. Much as Stella hated to admit it, the Ward hadn’t been a secret society of backhanders and under-the-table favours. It really had been an underworld without bigotry. The Famulus had succeeded.
The VP clicked his fingers. The dry bony sound snapped the Famulus’s eyes open. “Did you want to help the president, too? Is that why you let her assist you? What kickbacks were you getting from her? Or did you just like the fact she was your assistant here?”
