The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children)

by Manda Benson

  She heard Graeme’s footsteps coming upstairs as she was putting the paint away. He knocked on the door.

  “Dana, can I come in?”

  “If you want,” said Dana nonchalantly. “It’s your house.”

  Graeme came in and sat down on Dana’s bed. Dana sat at her desk and put the fuse tin away in the drawer without looking at him.

  “It’s your house now as well,” he said gently. “I’m sorry you came in and heard the end of that conversation we were having. We didn’t mean it to sound like what you heard. And besides, it was wrong of us to talk like that. What you like is your choice, and not ours, and not our business to talk about.”

  Dana shrugged.

  “Pauline’s gone out with some people from work. Would you like to come downstairs and have dinner with me?”

  “All right, then.”

  “I recorded the news. If you like, we could watch that too.”

  “Yes please, Graeme.”

  Downstairs, Cale was sitting at the dining room table, eating tapioca pudding. Propped up in front of him was one of his music books with his b’s and q’s written in it. Cale was disinterested in anything musical and refused to play music for anyone. All he did was work out Pi, convert the digits of it into notes, and write them in the book and then play the tuneless string of keys they translated into on his keyboard. He was still working through the decimal places, and Pi in C Major as Graeme called it had built up into six volumes.

  Graeme brought his and Dana’s dinner plates into the living room so that they could eat off their laps. Dana started to eat while he sorted out the recorder.

  They both sat and ate in silence while the headlines ran. First was another report about electricity and nuclear powerplants, which had featured often on the news recently. Jananin wasn’t on it, and Dana was a bit disappointed as Jananin was very keen on nuclear powerplants and often would argue about them in public debates. But they did show a film of a site on Lewis — Dana didn’t recognise where, but the scenery was familiar to her — where they were proposing to build a new one.

  The next report showed a picture of a graveyard, and Dana didn’t pay much attention to the introduction to it.

  “...are shocked and disturbed by the desecration of the grave of a young victim of the First of December London Compton bombing. The deceased, a girl estimated to be about twelve years old and whose identity was never discovered, died from heart failure in the Information Terrorism attack over two years ago.”

  Dana stopped chewing and stared at the television. It had to be Alpha. No other girls had died in the Compton bomb blast.

  “The girl’s grave was dug up, and police say the coffin appears to have been tampered with, but that the body remains intact. They can only conclude this is some kind of tasteless joke.”

  “It’s horrible, isn’t it?” Graeme must have noticed something in Dana’s demeanour. “She was just a girl. They never even found out who she was, and now someone’s done that.”

  Dana couldn’t pay attention to the remainder of the news — Jananin wasn’t on it anyway, and the realisation that the girl whose grave had been dug up was Alpha shocked her and sent her mind working through a chain of questions. The first reason she could think of for Alpha being dug up was that someone had worked out how to bring her back to life, but she immediately dismissed that as irrational. Alpha had been dead far too long. So what had the news said? That the coffin had been dug up, but that nothing had been removed. Surely after this time, all that would be left of Alpha’s body would be bones, and this meant that the police, or whoever dealt with cases like this, had opened the coffin and found what they expected to find, bones, and counted them all and compared them with an inventory of the bones in a human body and found nothing amiss.

  But what if something had been stolen, something they hadn’t expected to be there: Alpha’s transceiver, the same as the one implanted in Dana’s brain. If it had been taken, the police who examined the remains wouldn’t know, because they’d have no reason to expect it to be there.

  Dana began carefully, “Graeme, you know when Bunce was dead?”

  Bunce had been a hamster whom Pauline had brought home one day. Dana had thought it a remarkably uninteresting little animal. For nearly three years it had eaten and drunk and slept and made the living room smell bad. It had a cage with transparent pipes coming out of it so it could climb around in them, and it had always done its business in the pipes, and that made it smell even worse. Pauline kept having to muck it out because no-one else wanted to. Towards the end of the last year, it had become thin and ratlike and balding, and one morning Dana had found it lying on its back in the bottom of its cage, legs in the air like when animals in cartoons are dead, lips pulled back over its ugly yellow teeth.

  So Pauline and Graeme had a funeral for Bunce in the back garden, and Dana went with Graeme and Cale to the garden centre to choose a plant to grow on Bunce’s grave, because Graeme said they could remember Bunce by the plant, and Bunce would turn into fertiliser in the ground and be good for the plant. Dana chose a plant with green and brown leaves called Oxalis, and Bunce must have made really good fertiliser, because nearly a year later there were Oxalises growing all over the garden and in the lawn, so that Pauline and Graeme uprooted them and hid them in the compost heap when they thought Dana wasn’t looking.

  “You know when Bunce was dead, and we buried it in the mud, and you said it would turn into soil and be good for the plant?”

  “That’s perhaps not something nice to talk about when people are eating,” Graeme said.

  “Why not?” said Dana.

  Graeme put down his cutlery and studied his half-eaten steak for a moment. “Never mind,” he said, smiling faintly. “What were you going to ask?”

  “You know when people and animals are dead and their skin and their brains and their guts all go rotten and turn into fertiliser, and there’s just a skeleton left?”

  Graeme took his plate off his lap and set it down on the coffee table. “Yes?”

  “Well what if you buried a computer? Would that rot and turn into the soil, or would it stay there like a skeleton?”

  Graeme sighed, leaned back on the sofa, and interlocked his fingers behind his head. “Well, I suppose it depends how long it was there. It takes about two years for a dead person or an animal about the same size as a person to rot down to the bones. After a few hundred years, usually the bones have rotted away as well. Some parts of a computer would never rot — the glass on the monitor, I suppose. The metal on it would gradually turn to rust and soak into the soil, but I expect that would take fifty years or more to happen completely. The plastic and the silicon I suppose could last hundreds of years.”

  “If I buried this,” Dana picked up the remote control for the television, “would it still work if I dug it up four years later?”

  “I suppose it might. The batteries in it would be flat, though.” Graeme’s face changed. “Now, Dana, I don’t want you going and doing any experiments on stuff in the house. The remote controls are hard enough to find as it is.”

  “I wasn’t going to. I just wondered.”

  Could it have been Ivor, if he was alive, who had dug up Alpha’s grave, in order to get the transceiver back? But this didn’t seem like the sort of thing Ivor would do. Ivor had cared about Alpha, and digging up the grave of someone you cared about didn’t seem to be a respectful thing to do. In fact it seemed like a disgusting thing to do. Dana tried to think of it in terms of what she would do. If someone found a skeleton and identified it as Ivor’s, she wouldn’t want to look at it at all, not even if there might be something with it that belonged to her and she wanted back. If someone had been dead that long, the remains wouldn’t even look like them any more. And besides, if Ivor was alive and he needed another transceiver, he had made them in the first place and could make another. At any rate, he’d sworn to Dana that implanting transceivers in her and the other children had been wrong, and that he’d never
do it again.

  Unless he’d lied.

  Dana and Graeme talked about other things that were being destroyed by time, like the wreck of a big ship called the Titanic that still lay on the bottom of the Atlantic ocean halfway to America, and this made Dana remember Cerberus and Ivor, and put her hand in her pocket to clutch Ivor’s watch. Graeme told her part of the ship had rusted right through and collapsed not long ago, and the Titanic was eventually going to end up as a big rusty stain on the ocean bed. Then they talked about plastic and rubbish in landfill sites, and how the Meritocracy was trying to invent new ways to get energy or extract metals from it, because it took hundreds of years to decompose and it was still there when someone wanted to build a house or make a golf course on it, and how some of the first optical discs ever to have music recorded on them were now unplayable, because the stuff they were made of had started to decompose and the information stored in it had been lost. Then Graeme looked at the clock and let out an exclamation, and Dana had to go to bed.

  Dana remembered that she hadn’t done her homework when she was getting changed. Perhaps she ought to have told Graeme about the boy following her, but it was late, and if she told Graeme and Pauline every time someone was horrible to her at school, there’d never be any time to talk about anything else.

  She lay in bed with the lights out for a few moments, fingering the cracked glass face of Ivor’s watch, the hands forever frozen at seven minutes and twenty-one seconds to three, the date reading 2 December, the time and date when she and Jananin had fallen into the sea. She thought about the Titanic, lost and forgotten about in the depths, and about Cerberus who could feel hate and fear and happiness, and she wondered about Alpha’s grave and who had dug it up.

  *

  A breeze touches your face. The pressing heat of a dark room smothers the drone of a fan.

  “It’s you again, isn’t it?” You feel your own lips moving, not through your bidding. “I remember you. You came to me before, when they were hurting me. Your name’s Epsilon, isn’t it?”

  You know you’ve had this dream before, many times. It’s always indistinct and difficult to remember when you wake, but ever lucid in memory are the countless times it has played out before you when you’re living it once again.

  You’re lying on your back. You can’t speak or move your limbs. It’s always been this way, in the dream. The only sound you can make is more imaginary than real, like the voice you think you once had, heard down a long tunnel. Yes, my name’s Epsilon.

  You start to move, as though guided by an invisible puppeteer. It’s familiar, rather like watching a film, but from the body of one of the actors with all their five senses. A gridded rectangle of yellow light stands out as I push us up into a sitting position. When our legs swing down from the edge of the bed, our feet touch clammy, plasticky flooring. With tentative, unsteady steps, the legs that are both mine and yours carry us to the barred window. Outside, stark lights flood a concrete yard surrounded by wire fence. A prison?

  I turn, panning the room with your field of vision. The bars on the window cast squared light upon a bare cell with a mattress upon a metal bedstead in the centre. There are thick straps on the bed, like seatbelts.

  Do you remember?

  My breathing quickens.

  You were a part of this mind, while the body screamed and cried and fought against the straps, alone in the dark. And no-one came, and you pleaded with the other consciousness, against the irrational fear and anger that had overtaken me, to explain to you what was happening. You wanted to help.

  The light from the windows casts a shadow from our body, lengthened and a little distorted, but not greatly unlike the shadow you recall you once had. Tangled curls of hair stand out in a halo around the head, and the mid-thigh-length hem of an unpleasant nylon shift sticks to our skin.

  “They say I shouldn’t listen to you,” I say, my voice weak, reedy, a lot like how you remember sounding some other time — in some other life — they pulled you from the sea, or something. “They say... the voices I can hear in my head...”

  The pain and the memories are coming back. I tried so hard to act how they wanted me to behave, just so they wouldn’t tie us to that bed and leave us there.

  I guide your vision to the dark rectangle of the door. “Epsilon, will you help me escape?”

  I will, you think. You don’t know who I am, and the vague, unreal feeling of being in the dream makes it difficult to understand, but you’re sure, as you always are in these dreams, that I’m held prisoner for something I’ve not done.

  Go to the door.

  The padding of feet on the sticky floor goes unheard over the fan. “The door is locked,” I say. Yes, the door’s locked. You remember that. That was why we called out for so long, because the door was shut and we couldn’t get out, even for a purpose as necessary as using the toilet. You remember the other dreams, after interminable discomfort and pain, how we had been unable to hold on any longer, and the humiliation and the horrible feeling, the silent crying and the self-hating that always followed, and how you told me, furiously, that it was not my fault, that it was the fault of those beastly people who had tied us to the bed.

  Where is the key?

  “I don’t know.”

  Perhaps it doesn’t need a key, you wonder. Perhaps we should ask it to open.

  “How?”

  I’ll show you.

  I raise our hand, indistinct in the dark. Fingers touch the smooth surface of the door.

  Like this. And you unlock the door in the same way you’ve known to unlock electronic locks for as long as you can remember. The dull click of the mechanism transmits through the surface to fingers that are and aren’t yours.

  The hand grasps the doorhandle. The door opens to a corridor smelling strongly of disinfectant. As we step through there’s a green LED marking where the swipecard reader that controls the lock is attached to the frame.

  I support the heavy weight of the door’s closing mechanism so it eases shut silently. The corridor is dark, apart from small windows in doors identical to the one we’ve just exited through.

  Do you know where you’re going? you think. ’Cause I can’t see anything.

  The left foot reaches forward and feels the way, toes flexing. Loose, gritty material scratches under our soles.

  We ought to get downstairs. You recall the window in the room looks down into the concrete courtyard.

  We pass the last door window and reach out with both hands. Your fingertips touch a wood surface. One hand finds a handle. The room behind lies in complete darkness, but from the smell of soap and damp you know it’s a lavatory.

  We close the door behind us and with one hand grope in the dark for the cord for the light.

  With a dull buzz and a click, a fluorescent tube lights on the ceiling. White tiles cover every surface of the room. The toilet and handbasin are also white, and a shower with a mildewed beige curtain occupies one side of the space. The fingers on the light cord, you see, are thin and pale, the skin around the nails frayed and reddened as though it’s been chewed.

  Curiosity overcomes you. Go to the mirror, you suggest.

  I side-step into the range of the mirror. I look a few years younger than you, about nine or ten. My face is very pale, and my eyes, although sunken and dark-rimmed, seem unnaturally large for my face. My hair is a tangled mess of loose honey-coloured curls, shoulder length and with no proper structure to its style, as though it was cut very short some time ago and ignored ever since.

  You can’t remember if you’ve ever seen what I look like in the dream before. I seem familiar to you somehow.

  There’s writing, on our clothes, you notice. The girl in the mirror wears an institutional shift with elbow-length sleeves and a mid-thigh-length hem, similar to one you remembered having to wear... in a hospital. You think you hit your head; you don’t remember. It’s made from nylon fabric and you can feel I’m not wearing anything underneath it. Orange and green words are
printed on the material. My hands pull it up towards our eyes, but either through the vagueness of the dream or some uncorrected defect in my sight, you can’t read them.

  My eyes begin to move. I’m looking back at the mirror, and the handbasin beneath it. A plastic mug stands there, containing a toothbrush and a disposable plastic razor, like the ones ladies shave their armpits on. My hand reaches and my fingers close on the razor’s stem.

  What are you doing? you ask.

  “I’m escaping.”

  That’s not the way! Please!

  “It’s the only way.”

  The hands fumble with the head of the razor. You try, with all your will, to make the fingers obey you, but they won’t, and you know now you’ve tried to do this countless times before, that you cannot alter the events in the dream, like when the film one has seen before is running, and the hero is about to make a terrible, fatal mistake, and wish as one might, the mistake cannot be averted and the hero cannot be saved.

  The razor snaps away from its mount and for a moment it lies in our fingers, a sliver of bright metal. Now the hand turns over, hiding the blade, and slashes across the blue-green track of the vein on the inside of our left wrist. You hardly feel the razor, it’s that sharp. A gasp comes from our mouth. The hand reaches to clutch the edge of the basin, the razor slipping from my grasp. I knock over the cup, and it and the toothbrush fall to the floor where a pool of dark blood spreads. Strength is running from our legs; the ground meets our knees. The blood covers the floor with sticky heat, but the shock you feel is overpowered by my emotions of triumph and release.