by Heide Goody
The woman tapped her toe impatiently while the man on the other end spoke. Morag pretended to read a poster that reminded staff to shred all printed documentation. Some comedian had cut a ragged fringe on the bottom edge of the paper.
“Grey. Mrs Vivian Grey. You have already made the call back and you know I have authorisation. Do not waste our time by continuing to question it. Now, to the body. I need to know the names of any recently deceased who were virgins. Virgins, Mr Williams. I am sure you do know what I mean.”
Lois the receptionist rapped on the glass to draw Morag’s attention.
“We’ll take a wander down to Mr Sitterson’s office and get this sorted out,” she said. “I’ll pop round.”
“Do you not record such things?” said the imperious Mrs Grey. “The name ‘Register Office’ implies that you keep a register of important details. How is such a detail not important? And I could easily imagine it being noted on most autopsies. No?” The woman pursed her lips irritably. “Clearly, a lapse on your part then. I will need to examine the bodies myself. A hospital mortuary will be fine. Which is largest?”
Lois appeared from a side door.
“This way, bab,” she said to Morag.
She swiped them through a security door and along the corridor.
They almost instantly bumped into an unkempt woman in a cute ‘Life is Meaningless and Everything Dies’ T-shirt.
“Lois,” said the T-shirt woman, “do you know what room we’ve got the student protestor locked up in?”
“Miss Izzy Wu. Room Three. Rod wanted to sit in on the questioning.”
“I just need to check that she didn’t touch anything else in the Vault.”
“That’s between you and Rod.”
The T-shirt woman slipped past.
“It’s all go today,” Lois said to Morag. “Bit of a to-do in the Vault last night.”
“Something serious?” said Morag.
“Complete shitstorm, I should think. That’s how it usually is round here. Wait here a moment.” Lois knocked on a door and popped her head in. “I’ve got the new starter here, Mr Sitterson.”
There was a pause.
“Ms Murray,” said Lois, prompting.
“Ah, the Caledonian Sleeper,” said a reedy voice. “Yes, we were expecting her. She will need a full induction.”
“Okay. Who’s doing that?”
Even though Morag couldn’t see either of them, she could read the silence between them.
“Fantastic,” said Lois icily. “I’m sure everything else can wait.”
There was a faint scrape of metal.
“We have arranged short-term accommodation. Bournville. Be sure to pass these on.”
“Do you want to come and meet her?”
Another pause, a lengthy one. “Later, Lois. I have a lot to… contemplate.”
“Of course.”
Lois backed out into the corridor, closed the door and stared at it for a moment. Then she turned to Morag.
“You know those times when you just want to punch something very very hard?”
“I do.”
Lois smiled humourlessly. “But, we shan’t do that, shall we? We’ll just comfort-eat instead. Coffee? And cake?”
“God, yes,” said Morag.
Nina pressed her fingers to the glass and followed the faint drifting trails of blood. She put her phone to her ear.
“Rod, where are you?”
“With the otters.”
“Otters aren’t sea life, are they?”
“I don’t think they snuck in illegally or anything.”
“I’m in tropical fish. Kevin’s been here. Munched his way through the cast of Finding Nemo by the look of it.”
“I’m coming down.”
“You said this thing only eats virgins.”
“Maybe he’s just playing. Pulling-the-wings-off-flies sort of thing.”
“Nice.” Nina proceeded cautiously through the tropical fish section. The walls and ceiling were clad with fake rock and lit in shifting blue and green light. It was hard to take matters seriously when one was tracking a monster through what amounted to a cheap science fiction film set. Nina gripped her tracer spray gun tightly as though it was something more protective than a can of paint.
The path through the tropical aquarium led on to the ocean tunnel. Nina stepped inside and scanned the enormous tank about her. Smaller fish darted about in nervous clouds. A giant turtle skulked in the shadow of a rock. Half a shark bobbed above her head.
“Yep, been here too.”
A shadow swept down and encompassed the tunnel directly above her like a nightmare parasol. Toothed tentacles and a posy of lidless eyes pressed themselves against the acrylic glass.
“He’s here,” she said, as calmly as she could. “The Kevin has landed.”
“Tropical fish?” said Rod. She could hear him running.
“The sea tunnel thing,” she replied.
“Are you safe?”
The ceiling creaked faintly as the Venislarn worked its teeth against the reinforced plastic.
“Momentarily, I’d say,” said Nina. “Do we have a plan?”
“Vivian’s gone to find a virgin sacrifice.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“And until then?”
“We sweet talk it in remedial Venislarn.”
“Remedial?” said Nina scornfully. “Unlike a certain ex-squaddie, I actually bothered to learn Venislarn.”
“Champion. Then charm his pants off.”
“That I can do.” Nina put her hand on the glass. Kevin quivered. Red, toothy flesh bunched up over her hand.
“Slor’han azh perrigh-forl. Skeidl hraim,” she began and then proceeded to explain why she wasn’t his type.
The Queen Elizabeth Hospital is a vast nine-storey monument to modern healthcare. It serves the city of Birmingham and is also the nation’s one-stop shop for war-wounded members of Her Majesty’s armed forces as evidenced by the constantly busy helipads on the roof. However, much to Vivian’s annoyance, the gigantic hospital was too good in its mission to heal the sick. Either that or the hospital administrators were canny enough to send its patients home to die. The mortuary, though it had capacity for many more, contained less than a dozen corpses.
“I expected a much larger field to select from,” she told the attendant. “I calculated you should have close to a hundred pass through here each week. I am very disappointed.”
“Disappointed,” said the attendant, nonplussed.
“I need to see their records.”
“Whose?”
“All of them. Chop chop.”
As the attendant scuttled off, Vivian opened a corpse drawer speculatively. She regarded the wrinkle-faced dead man.
“What percentage of the population are virgins?”
“Pardon?” said the returning attendant.
“Out of nine, ten, eleven corpses… what is the likelihood of one of them being a virgin?”
“I couldn’t speculate.”
“Of course you can,” said Vivian. “You are perfectly capable of it. You just don’t want to. What do the notes say?”
The attendant looked at the plastic wallets in his hands. “We don’t record that kind of thing.”
“You have next of kin or somesuch on there. Let us start by discounting the ones who have children.”
The attendant spread the wallets on a counter.
Sitting down had been a mistake.
Lois had left Morag in a small meeting room with nothing but the Birmingham consular mission staff handbook for company and gone off in search of refreshments. Three of the room’s walls were white and featureless. The fourth was entirely taken up by a window that offered views of the large civic square outside through the interlocking ring façade of the Library.
Morag was almost entirely overcome with the need to sleep. Ten in the morning. She hadn’t slept in over thirty hours and, yes, she had definitely progressed fro
m drunk to regrettably sober. The white walls offered no diversion. The view of the square, with its tiny figures of city folk coming and going (all of them blissfully unaware that their world was a thin sheet of ice floating on a broiling hell of alien gods) was like a soothing screensaver to Morag’s tired eyes. And the staff handbook… She didn’t even dare open it to page one in case the paper-based soporific sent her tumbling over into coma territory.
Instead, she slapped her cheeks, pinched her skin and tried any number of other more obscure techniques to keep herself awake. She had her hands clasped above her head (the theory being that if she nodded off they would fall and smack her) when Lois returned.
“Praying isn’t going to save you now chick,” said Lois.
“God. Sorry,” said Morag. “I was just stretching. It was a long journey down and…”
Lois slid a tray onto the table.
“Let’s see if we can’t fix that with caffeine and sugar. Ingrid — She’s our Venislarn expert. We bumped into her in the corridor. — She’s always banging on about budget cuts crippling our service, but cuts don’t seem to have reached the executive biscuit budget. Look: Kit Kats and Penguins and mint Viscounts. I didn’t even know you could get them anymore.”
Morag poured herself a large cup of coffee and emptied four sugar sachets into it.
“You have no idea how much I need this,” she said, before taking a large and unladylike slurp.
“I can guess,” said Lois. “Well, this induction isn’t going to induct itself. Induct? Induce? You induce babies. Is that the same thing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Both things often end in screaming and tears and someone needing a good slap. Or maybe that’s just me.” She opened the staff handbook folder. “We’ll need to go through the policies and procedures, I’ll need to issue you with a photo ID and then get you to fill out a gazillion forms.”
“I have only transferred down from Edinburgh –”
“Beautiful city.”
“I’m sure most of this is the same.”
“One of the things Vaughn did when he took over was rewrite all the consular policies. It’ll be better if we go through this. It’s one of the few things he’s actually done.”
Lois flicked to an employee hierarchy diagram. She tapped the top box.
“Vaughn Sitterson. Our consular chief.” She looked at Morag.
Morag read her expression and nodded: it was okay to say it.
“The man’s a massive wanker,” said Lois with stoic cheerfulness. “He sits in his office. No one knows what he does.”
“Apart from rewrite policies.”
“Apart from rewrite policies. He’s only been in post a month. Maybe he’s still in shock. Greg Robinson used to be our consular chief and lead investigator. Refused to let that last one go. Died on the job.”
“I’m sorry.”
“At least he got out before the Soulgate. We have about eighty employees in this consular mission. About half of them work specifically with the Vault or the Dumping Ground. That’s our, er, regional specialism, taking other people’s crap. We’ve also got people working on international co-ordination, religious liaison, a couple of guys in sales for the day when we will have to sell this to the public, a whole office on interagency cooperation, us cheerful souls in admin… And then, the sharp end of things: the response team. Your lot.”
“My lot.”
Lois''s finger slid down the chart.
“We’ve got two response teams in the city. You’ll be on team A. There’s two of you on investigation. Rod Campbell is a sound bloke. Ex-SAS, six-foot-six of pure muscle but really isn’t a knob about it. He’s also your clean-up lead and the only firearms officer in the team. You’ve got Nina Seth who mostly handles housing, property and resources. Spends a lot of time dealing with the half-breed things in Deritend. Fish-chavs the lot of them. And then you’ve got Vivian Grey – Mrs Vivian Grey – who handles registration, regulations and compliance. This handbook is her Bible. She’s such a stickler for the rules and scary with it. It’s like she’s got, you know…”
“Autism? OCD?”
“I was going to say a broom up her arse, but okay.”
Lois flicked forward.
“Right. Sickness, Absence and Death in Service Policy.”
“I am merely suggesting that, when an autopsy is carried out, it would not add much time to the post-mortem examination to pick up a torch and check to see if the woman is virgo intacta.”
“I couldn’t say,” replied the mortuary attendant.
“There appears to be a lot you cannot do,” said Vivian. “One wonders if you are capable of anything at all.”
She picked up the patient notes and gazed dismissively at the three bodies that had been pulled out of their corpse drawers. She added a note to the list of ideas she’d scribbled on the front of the notes.
“If only the dead could speak,” said the attendant philosophically.
Vivian did not dignify the unhelpful comment with a reply. She pulled out her phone and called Rod.
“Found us a virgin’s heart yet?” he asked.
“Not yet,” said Vivian. “The hospital notes are woefully lacking in detail. I might have to find a live one.”
“That would be a shame. I suppose children are, by and large, technically virgins.”
“It had occurred to me,” she said. “Unfortunately, this place is plumb out of dead children.”
“How thoughtless of them.”
“There are other places I could try. There are always dead children somewhere but the question is how fresh they need to be.”
“You’re not thinking of digging up dead kids, are you, Vivian?”
“If it resolves our problem, I don’t see why we shouldn’t.”
“It could be considered insensitive.”
Vivian looked at the notes she’d written on the front of the patient file and added a question mark next to ‘Cemetery’.
“Sentimental claptrap,” she said. “Dead bodies are better than the last resort.”
“Which is?”
“Maternity wing.”
“Aye,” said Rod slowly. “Babies would be worse.”
“Worse than children? But they’re easier to transport. Presumably the mothers would be less attached to them than they would one they have had for longer.”
“Mmmm. You never had children, did you?”
Vivian considered the smiley face she’d drawn next to ‘Random baby’. Maybe it wasn’t as good an idea as she thought.
“I’m not the selfish type, Rod,” she said.
“Selfish?”
“I tread lightly on this world. I have no intention of leaving behind a massive carbon footprint and some diluted genetic copies of myself.”
“Quite right. Let’s leave children out of it for now. If we need to placate Kevin –”
“Kerrphwign-Azhal,” said Vivian.
“Him – with a live sacrifice, let’s look for an older one. Perhaps someone closer to death.”
“Where would you suggest I look?”
“Roman Catholic priests are traditionally celibate.”
“Not according to the tabloid press.”
“Nuns?”
“There was a house of Carmelites in Hall Green.”
“Good.”
“But the last pair got too old to care for themselves and were shipped out to a community in Northumbria. I checked.”
‘Nuns’ was already crossed out on her list.
“We could fly them in.”
Vivian considered it. “That depends on how much time we have. When do you estimate it will start actively hunting?”
“Be buggered if I know. It’s been happily causing fishy carnage in the Sea Life Centre this morning.”
“And what is it doing now?”
“Hmmm.”
“You lost it, didn’t you?”
“Its precise geographical location is currently unknown. But it’s a known
unknown. We’re on it.”
“You are a fool, Rodney Campbell. I am going to find a suitable subject with which to placate it. I suggest you track down the Uriye Inai’e. And swiftly.”
“As I said, we’re on it,” said Rod. “Give us a call wh– What? Okay. Nina says that if you’re looking for virgins, just go to the Nostalgia and Comics shop with a net. I think that’s being unnecessarily prejudiced.”
“No,” said Vivian thoughtfully. “The sad, lonely nerd angle is worth pursuing. Maybe ask Nina to do a social media trawl for comic geeks, real ale aficionados and what is that thing with dice where they pretend to be elves and wizards?”
“Dungeons and Dragons?”
“Excellent.” Vivian added it to her list. “Get to it. I’m going to try one more line of enquiry here.”
Vivian ended the call. She turned to the attendant.
“Do you have a ward where you keep all the terminally ill ones?”
“Terminally ill ones?”
“I assume you would consolidate them somehow, if only for the sake of efficiency.”
The attendant seemed lost for words for some reason.
With the aid of uncounted cups of coffee, Morag ploughed through the staff handbook. She read and declared her understanding of what she should do if she was infected with a Venislarn parasite, what to do if her colleagues were wounded, possessed or transformed by a Venislarn encounter, what her employer considered a “reasonable level of mental illness” and ineligible for sick leave. She confirm her understanding of the Equal Opportunities Policy, the Safety in the Workplace Policy and the Whistleblowing and Summary Execution Policy. She learned the different sirens that would sound in the event of a fire (a ringing bell), a Venislarn incursion (an intermittent klaxon) and the end of the world (bell and klaxon together).
“We need an alarm for the end of the world?” she said to Lois. “Why? What are we expected to do about it?”
“Very little I should imagine,” said Lois. “It’s to be sounded when the Soulgate closes. I think I would want to know when there’s finally no way out, not even by suicide.” Lois stared at nothing for a moment and then smiled brightly. “Not for a few years yet, eh, bab? Another biscuit?”
