The Spook and the Spirit in the Stone

by Jilly Paddock

  "I'm with you, Lamont," she grins suddenly, as if at some private joke. "Never was much good with computers!"

  They drop me back at the station and I descend into the welcome quiet of the Pit. By the time I'm through with my search it's almost dark outside, judging from my terminal's erratic clock. I come up with seven names. Three live on the estate with roads named after exotic islands; Chester Huxman at Tasmania Terrace, and Aliss and Aimee Huxstone at Madagascar Mews. The four others work at the University; a physics professor called Huxstar, a sub-dean's secretary called Alicante Huxstable and two men called Huxon, Cheyne and Leigh, one listed as a groundsman and the other as a worker in the botanical gardens. I track down as many addresses and contact codes as I can, then I send the data to Afton’s terminal. Some malicious, mischief-wreaking sprite makes me force the display into negative mode, white text on black.

  It's Saturday night in Prosperity City and I'd dearly love to join the happy crowds out in search of the three D's – dancing, drinking and a date. Instead I walk slowly home through the hot summer's evening, nursing my aching, pounding head. Half-a-litre of ice-water and two big painkillers later, I strip off and belly-flop into bed.

  I rarely remember my dreams; better not to, when they're born out of grief and regret. Tonight they're full of dust, rushing wind and a little girl's tears. I wake with the inane words of an ancient song tripping through my mind – 'in a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine’

  Headache's gone but the gash on my brow is itching, the sutures pulling tight as I frown. Usually the heat doesn't bother me, yet tonight I'm sticky with sweat and knotted into my sheets, a febrile mummy. I untangle myself, stand under a cold shower for sixty seconds and then raid the ice-box for something to drink. All I have left is a quart of semi-sour stale milk. It's four in the morning and the city aches with silence. Naked and still damp, I pace around the living room. There are too many spaces in the flat tonight; a harsh emptiness in my bed and in my life, a bare place in the centre of the room where the coffee table used to live and a hole in the clutter along the shelf where Val's portrait ought to be. Try not to think about that, try to stifle the hurt. Concentrate instead on the case of the stolen child. In a cabin, in a canyon, excavating for a mine ...

  "A mine...?” the idea creeps up from my subconscious and sideswipes me. All of the canyons are old prospecting country, named for the precious metals cut out of the rock, their hillsides as riddled with shafts, tunnels and passages as Swiss cheese. Where better to hide poor Sophie?

  I dress quickly, scooping up my shabby, comfortable, off-duty clothes from the bedroom floor, then I leave a message for Afton on her voice-mail at the station. She's left one for me, reporting negative findings at Curtis' home. Mine isn't as concise; I've since heard the recording and I ramble on vaguely about gold-mines, Clementine and little girls lost underground. It never occurs to me that I'm deep in the throes of a concussion. I'm so caught up in the flow of absolute, delirious clarity, in the utter certainty that I can find Sophie and solve the case that I never stop to question my actions for a moment.

  Even at this time of the morning I find a taxi to take me across town, with a bored, world-weary driver who doesn't even blink when I tell him my destination. He drops me at the foot of Goldangel, where the tarmac runs out, and I walk from there. Siobhos has no moons but I can see well enough in starlight to follow the track, although I stumble a little in the shadows under the trees. The cabin is in darkness, tied up in orange fluorescent 'Do not cross – Crime-scene' tape, like a forgotten birthday present. I pass it by, heading east, finding a deer-path that winds under the ironwoods and clings for a while to the lip of the ravine. The breeze blows up from the plains, hot and reeking of all the sins of humanity, lifting the hair from my neck and tossing it into my eyes. Sometimes blind, sometimes not, I walk on, trusting to that sweet magic that cares for lunatics and fools to keep me safe.

  How I find the mine-shaft I don't know. Perhaps it isn't as well hidden as our kidnappers would like, or perhaps Giselle was wrong and tonight I do have psychic powers. There's a clearing in the bushes, a pale spill of scree and a triangular cleft in the hillside where one of the props has collapsed and part-buried the mouth of a tunnel. It's not as derelict as it looks – ten feet inside the timbers are new. The passage leads down and kinks to the right, becoming as black as spilt ink. I feel my way along the wall and keep my weight back on my heels, wary of pitfalls and traps. A hundred feet further in there's a glimmer of light that grows stronger as I approach. I edge into a cavern, empty except for the glow of a hurricane lamp and two more tunnels, and while I'm deciding between them, I hear a faint sobbing from the left-hand way. Another voice rises in answer, deep and impatient. Without thought of the consequences, I follow the sounds, creeping towards their source.

  Fifty feet along and I'm aware that there's another cave ahead, larger and lower than the first. Sixty feet and I halt, inching forwards to try and get a look into it. In the light of a single lamp the man is little more than a tall shadow, glaring down at something I can't see, something below the level of the floor. It's where the sobs are coming from, the helpless misery of a desperate little girl.

  "Be quiet," his tone isn't angry, just tired. "Go to sleep. Be still for a couple of hours more and maybe, just maybe, I'll let you have some candy for breakfast. Now, you'd like that, wouldn't you?"

  My common sense finally kicks in and I know that if I really want to save Sophie, not to mention my own idiotic skin, I have to get out of here without being heard. I float back along the passage, thinking mist, thinking ghost, moving like silence distilled into flesh. I reach the first cavern and flit across it, then I'm in the dimming light of the entrance tunnel, hurrying towards the darkness and its promise of safety. As it folds around me, I let out a tiny sigh of relief.

  Something slams into the side of my head like a battering ram, knocking me to my knees. Suddenly dizzy and sick, I think I've run into a jutting spur of rock until it wallops me again, across the shoulders.

  "Hux!" a terror-struck female voice shrieks beside my ear and I realise that she's the one wielding the shovel. "Hux, help me! We've got an intruder!"

  I'm still too punch-drunk to stand and too off-balance to run. Stupid... so bloody stupid! Afton will skin me alive for this and I'll deserve it, if I live that long. I don't put up much of a fight as the pair of them drag me back into the light and hurl me onto the uneven floor.

  “Christ, he's a big bastard!" the man hisses. "You did well to poleaxe him, Martia!"

  "How did he find us?" she's still terrified. "Who the hell is he?"

  "Try his pockets," Hux suggests.

  She frisks me ineptly, an amateur. I didn't bring any weapons, not even my trusty pocket knife, but she does find my wallet, complete with my ID card. "Oh, hell, he's with the police! Technical support, it says, whatever that means."

  "Maybe one of the forensics guys who searched the cabin," he takes a handful of my hair and pulls my head up. "Did you come here alone?"

  I look up into a very ordinary face, neither ugly nor monstrous, just full of average disappointments and everyday pain. He has fair hair, bushy eyebrows and a beard with hints of grey and ginger. His eyes are odd, one brown and the other half-and-half, brown and bright blue, as if the eyeball has been constructed from two different donors. Martia is as plain as Polly Molyneux, another thin, middle-aged spinster, this time with slightly better dress-sense. She's wearing denim jeans and a dark-red vest, her pepper-and-salt hair drawn back into a plait.

  "Answer my question!" Hux repeats. "Did you come up here alone?"

  "There's a whole squad outside!" I say, with a snarl, all fake bravado. "We've got the mine staked out. You might as well give yourselves up right now!"

  "He's lying," Martia doesn't sound at all sure. "I've just come from the cabin and I didn't see or hear anyone out there."

  "How did you find us?"

  "We know you kept the girl in the cabin at first. I figured
that you wouldn't have moved her far," I try to look fierce. "If you've hurt the child... !"

  "You'll do what?" Hux laughs. "On your knees and bleeding, you ain't much of a threat! You came here to play hero – well, I'll give you a chance to do just that. Get up."

  I act about thirty percent weaker than I feel, trying to stand and failing. "I can't."

  "Get up!" Hux grabs my collar and hauls me to my feet. He's stronger than he looks, manhandling me along to the second cave. Martia follows on, with the shovel upraised. When the man releases his grip I slump to the floor, as if my knees are too weak to support me. It takes little acting – my head's still spinning, Martia hit me that hard. In front of me is the mouth of a shaft, ten feet in diameter and deep enough that its bottom is in shadow. Sophie's prison.

  “If he’s with the police, he’s bound to have backup,” Martia says. “At the very least he’ll have told them where he was going. They may already know that we’re here. We should move the child...”

  “No.” He doesn’t even stop to consider the idea. “We’re safe here. This place is protected, too deep within the rock to show up on their scans and guarded by something they can’t fight.”

  “Your fierce spirit?” there’s doubt in the woman’s voice, plus a trace of fear. “Wouldn’t it be wiser to move Sophie again?”

  "No. Strip him," Hux directs. "He may have some hidden weapons or an electronic tracer device concealed about his person."

  Nice idea – wish I'd thought of it. Martia's hands are shaking as she awkwardly removes my clothes, handing each item to Hux, who checks it over meticulously. As if I'd hide a tracker in my socks, I ask you! Or my boxer shorts, for that matter. The woman lets out a startled squeak when she sees what's under them, or rather, what isn't.

  "Jesus, man! What happened to you?" Hux asks, staring at my flat stomach and featureless groin. "You are male, aren't you, and not a sex-change?"

  "I had an accident as a child – fell into a threshing machine," it's a fair cover story, as the edges of my genital pouch meet in a groove that looks quite like an old surgical scar. "Almost died. The doctors put my legs back together, but they couldn't save everything."

  "You poor bastard!" Martia's pity is sincere. "How dreadful it must be to have to live like that, maimed and denied love."

  "Just breaks my heart!" Hux says, with a sneer. There's a ladder leaning against the wall of the cave, which he fetches and lowers down into the pit. "You came here to find the child, didn't you? Well, she's down there. Why don't you join her?"

  I glance up into their faces, this odd-eyed man and one of his loyal, unlovely women, knowing that their civil words are a fragile mask, a thin veneer over violence. If I resist, Hux would have no compunctions about throwing me down, and I guess he has the muscle to do just that. Accepting my fate, I climb slowly down the ladder, twenty feet or so, to a platform of rough planks built across the shaft. It shifts a fraction under my weight. a cruel illusion of frailty, since the construction seems solid enough. Hux twists the ladder out of my grasp and pulls it up, trapping me. He leans over to study my expression, smiling for the first time. "Good night, sweet prince. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!"

  I know the words, from that tragic final act of Hamlet, with bodies all over the stage. My captors have a brief whispered conversation and decide to leave the mine. I listen as their footsteps die away and their words fade down into nothing. Out of some scrap of goodness still surviving in his evil heart, Hux fails to take the lamp. I'm relieved not to be left in darkness.

  I turn around slowly, taking a look at my prison. The platform doesn't occupy all of the shaft and the gaps at its sides have been roughly filled in with chicken wire. A cool air current blows up through the slats, a breeze from the abyss. I can't guess how far the shaft goes down; it feels deep, bottomless. I share the space with a bucket for a makeshift latrine, a bottle of water and Sophie Crispianou.

  She's huddled against the rocky wall, a pale, skinny child, naked and grimy. Her hair is as dark as her mother's and cut into a cute little bob, now tangled and lank. Her eyes are sepia-brown and enormous, filled with fear and fixed on me. Aware that I probably look a worse threat to her than her kidnappers, I find a place to sit with my back against the dusty rock. My head's bleeding again in two places, where the shovel bounced off my thick skull and where this morning's gash has re-opened. I wipe the worst of the gore away and try for a reassuring smile, hoping it makes me look more like a friend in need than the sort of crazy lunatic with a bag of sweets that her mother warned her about. "Hi there. I'm Jerome. You must be Sophie."

  She doesn't answer at first, watching me with those huge, distrustful eyes. After a while some of the fear leaks out of them and she's able to speak. "Are you an angel or a teddy-bear?"

  "Pardon?"

  "You're all smooth down there," she waves vaguely in the direction of my absent anatomy. "Like teddy-bears are and angels are meant to be. Which are you?"

  "Neither, I'm afraid. I just don't come from this planet, that's all."

  "Neither do I. I'm from Earth," she says, grandly. "I'm the President's niece, sort of... but you know that, don't you? I heard the Martia-woman say you were with the police. Are they with you, here to rescue me?"

  "No. I came up here alone." I hate to kill her hope, but truth is the best policy. "All of Prosperity City’s police force is looking for you though."

  "For both of us, now," Sophie says. She sounds far too calm for a little girl who's been held captive for seven days, but perhaps I should expect the daughter of an ambassador to be an extraordinary child. There are marks of Hux’s abuse on her body; fading bruises on her wrists and around one eye, fresh blood splattered over her face from a nosebleed and more from a split lip, and weird cuts over her arms, shoulders and chest, more than a dozen of them, each an inch long, vertical and precise. She wraps her arms around her knees and hugs them up to her chin, and I see that she's trembling.

  "Are you okay?" I ask, making my voice as soft and gentle as I can.

  "No!” There's a sudden flash of annoyance in her eyes. She's been kidnapped and beaten, and now this stupid great lunkhead is asking her if she's all right? "I'm cold, this horrible wind never stops, I haven't been warm for days, I'm hungry, 'cos he won't give me enough to eat, and I hurt... "

  "I can help out with some warmth." I open my arms to her, not expecting her to respond – after all, she has little enough reason to trust any man – but she crawls on all-fours across the planks and slips into my lap. She is cold, a mass of bones and bruises, and she stinks worse than the slop-bucket. I hug her close and she buries her face in my hair, nuzzling into the curve at the base of my neck like a blind kitten. I think she cries for a while; I can feel the warm wetness of tears on my skin and her uneven gasps for breath as the sobs catch in her throat, but she makes no sound. I stroke her hair and say nothing.

  When she does speak again, her voice is husky. "You smell good, all soapy and clean. I'm filthy!"

  "Doesn't matter."

  "Is that another lie?"

  "Only a lesser one, just to be polite. Okay, so you smell to high heaven – and I will too, by tomorrow. Satisfied?"

  "Yep," smiling isn't a viable option for her, not yet. "You're very warm too. It's nice."

  "That's good," I don't like to tell her that I'm probably running a fever.

  She stays quiet for a while, until she finds a question. "Is my mother okay?"

  "Not really. She's worried about you and I don't think she's sleeping." That's too negative, and right now she needs better news. "We have most of our detectives working on the case, and someone from Terrapol too."

  Sophie lifts her head to look me in the eye. "Uncle Clemmie sent an agent-pair? Or would you call them a spook?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Cool!" She has a winning smile; thankfully Hux didn't hit her hard enough to shift any of her teeth. "You remind me a lot of Mason, Jerome. Do you come from the Cluster too?"

  "Sure do
. Is Mason your bodyguard?"

  Sophie nods, serious again. "I hope he's all right. He told me once that if anything happened to me, his contract required him to kill himself."

  "He was fine, the last I heard and anyway, I'm sure he wouldn't do anything that drastic unless... "

  "Unless I was dead?" The fear flows back into the dark pools of her eyes. "Hux will kill both of us, I know he will! I think he's done it before... "

  "I believe he has." I grin at her suddenly, making her jump. "But don't worry, I don't aim to die here and I'll do everything I can to keep both of us alive."

  "I was right – you are an angel!" Sophie snuggles up to me again. "Can I sleep here? I've been having nightmares about the floor collapsing while I'm asleep and I'd feel safer with you holding onto me."

  "Sure you can." I shift her into a more comfortable position. "But the floor isn't going anywhere, so you can nap for as long as you like and I'll be sure to wake you in good time for breakfast."

  "Oh, we don't get any of that, unless the Polly-woman comes back. She'd feed rats, that one, and wild birds, stray cats and squirrels. It's her purpose in life," she giggles. "Hux wouldn't agree. He’d say ‘what do you think this place is, a hotel?’"

  "Next time I'm booking into the Grand. The beds are much softer and they have room service!"

  I stay awake long after she's safely asleep, too wired to relax, my head jangling with fever. It hurts where Martia decked me, a dull ache, not bad enough to be a fracture. I've probably collected another concussion – one more and maybe I can trade them in for a coma. I still can't quite believe that I've found Sophie, and that she's alive and pretty much unharmed. The real miracle is that she's prepared to put aside most of her fear and fall asleep in my lap. This new-found responsibility is scary. A child's trust is a terrible thing; I hope I can live up to her faith in me.