Déjà Vu sb-1

by Ian Hocking

  ‘Your father returned to academia, eventually. He was found not guilty. He recovered his career.’

  ‘And my mother?’

  Hartfield rested against a wall-like baffle. Behind it, an electrical plant hummed.

  ‘Jennifer, I do hope I haven’t offended you. I came here to offer congratulations. And, because your father and I were once friends, I need you to warn him. He is in danger.’

  ‘What kind of danger?’

  ‘I can’t be certain. Talk to him.’

  ‘You talk to him.’

  ‘He wouldn’t listen.’

  Jennifer looked at this man: his blank, closed face; his unnatural body language; his clumsy threat. ‘What should I say?’

  ‘Tell him to stay in Oxford.’

  ‘Oxford.’

  ‘Every…’

  ‘Every what?’

  ‘Every effect has a cause,’ he said.

  Jennifer folded her arms. ‘What goes around comes around.’

  ‘That too. Thank you, Jennifer. I’m glad we met. Congratulations once more. I will study your reports carefully. Goodbye.’

  The frown did not leave her face until Hartfield had closed the air-tight door to the cavern. The radial arm of the centrifuge began to move. With each revolution, Jennifer felt her headache throb. The last of her drunkenness had gone.

  West Lothian, Scotland

  Professor David Proctor forced himself to breathe with tidal ease, to wax air, to wane. He counted the blown specks on the taxi’s windscreen as it idled. The hotel seemed to watch him. Twenty years ago, David had worked beneath its vast grounds in a research centre whose entrances were now capped and dead. He thought about the cut plumbing, the emptied kitchens, the barge-long conference tables splintered, the coffee pots emptied and the conversation silenced. He thought about it all. The young David Proctor was gone. The older impostor remained: a professor, a single parent, and burned out academic not far from retirement. His belly was larger. His head was balding. But he still wore a tailored suit. The aftershave was same brand as the younger man’s, probably.

  He opened his briefcase, took a brush, and tidied his hair.

  Now or never, Proctor.

  He opened the door and, without emerging, breathed the Scottish air. Nodding firs. A cloud-shot sky. For a moment, he was inside his memories of twenty years before.

  ‘Professor,’ whispered a voice in his ear, ‘you have a call.’

  ‘I’m supposed to be stealthed, Ego.’

  ‘It is your daughter.’

  David looked at his flat shoe on the gravel. Now or never. He put his leg back in the car and closed the door. He took Ego, a metallic computer the size of a credit card, from his wallet. ‘Go on, Ego.’

  ‘I am having difficulty. Might it be encrypted?’

  ‘Use my Oxford PGP private key.’

  ‘I already tried that.’

  ‘Oh. Are there any clues to the encryption method in the caller ID?’

  ‘None.’

  David’s frown turned into a smile. He could feel his daughter’s presence already.

  ‘Access my medical records, please.’

  ‘Just a moment.’

  David told Ego which data to use as a key, and, shortly, an image of his daughter appeared on Ego’s exterior. Her skin was puffy and her eyes were ringed with the sediment of hard work. A sickening fancy: that Jennifer had inherited a filament of decay from her late mother, whose head David had cradled in the last moments of her life not far beneath his taxi.

  ‘Hey, Jennifer,’ he said, unsettled by his thoughts.

  ‘Dad. You’re not easy to find.’

  ‘Jennifer, I’m really glad you called. Really.’

  ‘You seem shocked.’

  ‘It’s your accent.’

  ‘You sound as British as ever.’

  David feared this conversation would skim the surface of their hurt when it needed to plunge. ‘Jesus,’ he blurted, ‘we need to talk.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I sent you to New York too soon.’

  ‘You sent me away, Dad.’ Jennifer spoke without intonation. David wondered if she had rehearsed the statement with a psychiatrist. ‘You sent the freak to the freaks, then skipped the country.’

  ‘You couldn’t stay in Oxford any more. You wouldn’t have realised your potential.’ David rubbed his sore neck. ‘We’ve been through this.’

  ‘I was the one who had to go through it, not you. Do you know what it was like in that school?’

  ‘I got your e-mails.’

  ‘I didn’t get yours.’

  Now his anger threatened to match hers. ‘Jennifer, why did you call?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m at the old research centre in West Lothian.’

  ‘Crap, already? What are you doing there?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that on the phone.’

  ‘This isn’t a phone, Dad.’ The tone: amusement that the old duffer could even check his email.

  ‘OK, I can tell you it’s a matter of national security. Now you know as much as me.’ There was one fact, however, that David omitted. That morning, before the official summons to West Lothian had come through, a mysterious, female caller had instructed him to carry out an act so extraordinary that he had laughed into the telephone. But, as her credibility built with each minute, his humour had died away. He had agreed to her plan. And here he was.

  These thoughts flickered through his mind in the time it took to smile, and say, ‘Well, I figured out your encryption.’

  ‘You mean your Ego unit did. Sounds like a nice toy.’

  ‘He’s clever, but a bit buggy. A prototype.’

  David reached into his jacket. ‘Do you know what I brought with me, Jenny?’

  ‘Dad, listen for second. Go back.’

  He froze. ‘Has someone been talking to you?’

  ‘Dad? Go back to Oxford. Go home.’ She might have been five years old again. ‘Please now.’

  Chapter Five

  The high ribwork of the orangery adjoining the hotel joined a sternum thirty feet above the floor. Evening had turned the roof panes dark blue. McWhirter sat but David stood with his elbow on the mantel of the empty fireplace, spinning the ice in his whisky with metronomic tips of his wrist. Otherwise, the orangery was deserted. Rain invisible but there, like passing traffic.

  ‘Somehow,’ said McWhirter, scratching the translucent skin of his knuckles, ‘he broke into your old laboratory.’

  ‘Tell me what it’s like down there.’

  ‘A steady five degrees. Structurally, it isn’t safe. We’ve had two cave-ins.’

  ‘His physical condition?’

  ‘I thought you could take a look at him.’

  ‘Medical school was a long time ago. Don’t you have your own people for that?’

  ‘You’ll do.’

  David abandoned the hearth for a winged chair opposite McWhirter. He noticed the broadsheet newspapers. Dead-tree editions for the old fossils of the Park Hotel. How long had it been closed? He disliked the malt, but sipped. ‘So you want me to go down there. Triffic.’

  ‘You know the layout as well as anyone.’

  ‘I worked here. So did you. I’ll guard the whisky and you go down. What say you?’

  ‘The bomber knew this place too.’

  ‘No argument. It was an inside job.’

  ‘He knew where to set the explosives,’ continued McWhirter, unblinking. ‘He knew when the scientists would be in the hall and away from danger. He knew which project to bomb.’

  David could hear the ping of his heartbeat. ‘Aren’t you a bit old to be playing games?’

  ‘Just between us. We’re alone. Did you do it?’

  ‘My wife died in the explosion.’ David let the moment stretch out until it snapped. ‘My Helen. If I ever found the man who did it, I would kill him. Someone put you in charge of security, McWhirter, and they made a mistake. You’ve both had twenty years to get over it.’


  McWhirter crossed his legs. The faded jeans were at odds with the smartness of the man David remembered. His crew-cut hair and combed moustache had whitened. He had a sailor’s squint. McWhirter looked at his glass. ‘Bruce has put Onogoro back online.’

  ‘Bollocks he has. It was destroyed.’

  ‘Evidently not.’

  ‘It needs a dedicated power plant just to boot.’

  ‘Twenty years ago, maybe, when you were working on it. Welcome to the future. The power spike is how we got wind of the whole business.’

  ‘I thought the entrances were capped.’

  ‘We cut through them.’

  ‘“We”?’ David surveyed the neat, empty tables and chairs. ‘So you and I are not alone in the hotel.’

  ‘This is the future. Nobody is alone anymore.’

  ‘You got grumpy with age, McWhirter.’

  ‘I was always grumpy. Now I’ve grown into it, like my ears. David?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t send any more of my people down there. It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘But you’re happy to risk me?’

  ‘We have to. Nobody else can operate that device. And remember that Bruce needs you. He was your best friend.’

  Idly, David put his nose into the whisky glass. ‘He was. He was.’

  ~

  The preparations for David’s descent into the abandoned research centre were carried out by McWhirter alone. David saw nobody else. McWhiter claimed that this would protect the identities of his team. David appreciated that this made his presence ever more ghostly and asked McWhirter, with a crooked smile, whether he had anything to worry about besides the airborne contaminants down there.

  McWhirter gave him a serious look. ‘Yeah, the cold. Put this on.’

  It was an all-in-one encounter suit with a clam-shell helmet and respirator. As David climbed into the suit, he looked around the cloakroom. Those years ago, he would have stood exactly as he did now, placed his thumb on the wall and waited for the computer to scan his blood. Then the room would drop. But there was no longer a computer. Instead, there was a rough hole in the floor with a ladder leaning against its edge.

  David fastened the collar.

  ‘What happened to the lift?’ he asked.

  ‘It was dismantled. All part of the clean-up.’

  David paused. He did not want to talk about that. The regrets were shards of glass.

  ‘Anything else?’

  McWhirter nodded. He took a body-harness—the kind a mountaineer might wear. David put it on.

  ‘Am I going potholing too?’

  ‘It’s a possibility. We’ve already lost a guard.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘He was checking out one of the higher levels and the floor gave way.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘Pay attention down there. When you get to the bottom, attach both the carabiners on that harness to the safety line. It runs all the way to your old lab.’

  ‘Anyone else down there, or is it just me?’

  ‘Just you.’

  David closed the clam-shell helmet and tested the respirator. When the valve opened, his forelock moved in the dry air.

  ‘Are they going to give me a medal for this?’

  ‘Down you go. The clock’s ticking.’

  David sat on the edge of the hole, slid his weight forward, and began to descend. When his head passed below the level of the floor, he looked down and saw a circle of lighting twenty metres below. He had told his daughter that he had returned to the West Lothian Centre for reasons of national security. That was not true. He cared little about the clandestine world and its problems, all of which threatened national security if one defined national security as the interests of the men in charge. He was here for Bruce. He had been given an opportunity to make amends. The form of those amends would make McWhirter very, very angry.

  ~

  As he stepped off the base of the ladder, he shielded his eyes from the spotlights, which put irregular shadows over ruptured cabinets, upside down chairs and blackened computer screens. Shredded paper lay like snow. He could hear the faraway put-put of a diesel generator. There was a rack of recharging torches next to the ladder. He took one and clipped himself to the safety line that disappeared into the darkness.

  That darkness, when he entered it, was complete.

  His torch beam reflected from the ashy airborne particles. Something had stirred the flakes and he didn’t know what. As he breathed, his spit evaporated in his respirator.

  David remembered the corridor as a bright, air-conditioned expanse dotted with abstract art. Now there was just ongoing black. His feet settled feather-light, careful as an astronaut in moon dust, but the corridor sediment spilled nonetheless. His heavy-duty trousers snagged on cabinets, broken wood, and stalagmites of glass. He stopped to twist around one of the many cables that looped down. Occasionally, the ceiling purred.

  He fought against the silence but the silence won. Its negative pressure drew out the memories. He pictured Helen, his wife, leading Bruce into the dining room of her and David’s new house, noting the layout of chairs, counting the paces between the kitchen door and the patio, leaning against the doorjamb with her hands resting on her swelling belly. He remembered the way Bruce laughed.

  There was another purr from the ceiling.

  His tears grew, unwipable, behind his visor.

  Ten metres ahead, a light bobbed. David thumbed off his torch. The far light remained.

  ‘Bruce?’ he called, muffled.

  He pressed forward. Cables snagged at his chin. He heard a sound from his teenage years. It was the tight creak of rigging when the sails took wind. He looked up and saw the ceiling distend. Dust fell, absurdly liquid. He scrambled clear but tripped. His head struck a rocky swelling of concrete. The world canted and he could not stand. He heard the ceiling collapse and felt it through his belly. In the stillness afterward, he understood that he had lost the torch. The corridor was black as burial. The collapse had missed him by centimetres.

  The pip in his ear said, ‘Professor Proctor, you have lost your telemetric connection to the surface.’

  ‘There’s been a cave in. Looks blocked. Is there another way out?’

  ‘Not directly. But McWhirter’s team left an extremely low-frequency transmitter in your former laboratory. You could send a message.’

  ‘I think I broke the torch, Ego.’

  ‘Your visor is equipped with a zero-light mode. Would you like me to activate it?’

  ‘Please.’

  ~

  Aboveground, McWhirter completed his nightly exercises with ten last press-ups on his knuckles. Sweat dewed his chest hair. He jumped into a crouch and pressed a towel against his forehead and each armpit. There were eight mirrors in his Victorian suite. The full-length glass in the living room showed him what he wanted. He walked through the French doors to a balcony set with hardy, dark green plants. McWhirter had such shrubs in his own garden, where they defined a pet labyrinth. He hung the towel around his neck and looked down the hotel’s gravel drive—footlights marked its edges—while his sweat dried in the wind.

  His telephone rang.

  ‘McWhirter.’ He sat on the bed and rolled his head to treat a crick. ‘Go on.’ He removed the towel and sat on it. ‘What? Fuck.’

  Chapter Six

  David stopped in the doorway of his former laboratory and studied the ceiling. False colour belied the dark ruin on which the visor’s zero light camera worked. Fire had taken the tiles. Exposed cables trailed. No doubt some of them carried power.

  His first footfall crunched.

  ‘Ego, can you analyse the air?’

  ‘There are fine transition metals, some acids—chiefly sulphuric—and insoluble particles. The atmosphere is acutely carcinogenic.’

  ‘Remind me to give McWhirter a slap.’

  ‘When would you like this reminder?’

  ‘Forget the reminder.’

  ‘Very
well.’

  The liquid storage device had once prompted a joke about LSD, but David could not remember which of the team had cracked it. The transparent chamber was the size of a car, and the soup of liquid polymer, the tonnes of it, rolled in huge fronts of colour. Once it had reminded David of the surface of Jupiter. In contrast with the darkness, it was nova-bright.

  ‘Ego, I will place you beneath the forward stanchion of the device. Do you understand?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  David slid Ego into the drifts of dust.

  ~

  Though the laboratory had never stored hazardous materials, it contained a decontamination room as standard. There was a shower, a bath, and a huge sink. The concrete floor sloped towards a drain on the far wall. The emergency lights were dead behind their grills. David walked across the broken tiles and burst pipework, and knelt in the corner, where a body lay in a sleeping bag. He peeled away the fabric.

  Bruce might have been dead. His face was sunken and his mouth lopsided. His hands were drawn against the chest. There was a blanket over his legs. When David moved it aside, a writhing ball of blackness fragmented into rats—their hands pink, their eyes winking—and he checked the urge to scoop them away. Gently, he examined Bruce’s trousers. They were intact. The rats were in it for the warmth. If Bruce got some warmth in return, David was easy. He resettled the material.

  Bruce lay on a mortuary headrest. David felt underneath. Sure enough, there was a neural bridging unit.

  ‘How long have you been inside, Bruce? Two days now? Soon after you broke in, I bet.’

  His unconscious patient said nothing. David considered ripping the cable from his brain. He thought about the lab mice who had died when unplugged. Then he thought of Bruce moving around in the inkiness of this place, making his nest, his grave. The darkness of it. The same darkness that had fallen on Bruce at the age of ten. The blind man navigating by touch; coughing; hurting.

  David thought, Cancel, and the rumination evaporated. He went about his work efficiently and calmly. He put a saline drip in the left arm and an antibiotic drip in the right. It was impossible not to think of former, better times. They had been inseparable. He found a note in Bruce’s trouser pocket. It was wet with urine. In handwriting frozen at ten years old, it read: