by Nick Gifford
“Danger. Unexploded ordnance.”
“This is a prohibited place. Unauthorised persons entering this area may be arrested and prosecuted.”
He turned. To his left was the Mere, now about half water and half exposed mud dotted with birds. To his right was the steely grey North Sea. Ahead of him, about half a mile away, were the first houses of Wolsey, a terrace of three white Coastguards’ cottages.
He wondered now at the address. Such a prominent position, with a view of the town, the Point, the marina where Principal Willoughby kept his yacht, and even across the Mere to the rooftops of NATS. A good place from which to keep an eye on everything. Jake and his friend ... had they been watching NATS? Had Jake’s help been less innocent than it had appeared?
Liam walked. The effort was almost too much for him. His body ached from the rowing, and from the nights sleeping rough. His head throbbed, and he knew it was the pain of withdrawal, the chemical hook they had sunk into his body at NATS.
The concrete road became a tarmac-surfaced road by the cluster of wooden buildings of the sailing club. Either it was becoming a hot day or Liam was becoming feverish again. He loosened his shirt. He had left his fleece back on the Point in his haste to leave. Steadily, he was losing everything that had ever been his.
The road curved round in front of the cottages. The row stood at an angle to the beach, looking south-east over the sea. The first was marked with a number “3”. Liam approached it and knocked.
The door was opened by a man in jeans and a baggy brown jumper. He had black-framed glasses and short grey hair, thinning on top. He smiled, and said, “Liam. I had so hoped that you would drop by.”
He spoke with a gentle Scottish accent. “I’m Alastair,” he continued. “Do come in.”
Jake’s friend was the investigator from Special Intelligence who had called on Kath with the two Mr Smiths.
~
Liam sat in the kitchen, a long, narrow room with a wooden ceiling. On the table in front of him there was a mug of steaming hot chocolate, fresh from the microwave.
Alastair leaned in the doorway, waiting for Liam to talk.
“Jake said...” Liam started, but stopped again. Jake hadn’t said much at all.
“Jake’s a bit of a wild card,” said Alastair. “But he’s a good operative.”
“He’s dead,” said Liam.
Silence.
Finally, Alastair shook his head. “Damn,” he said softly. “Where? When?”
“He’s in the creek. Near the Camp.” Words. They simplified so much. They didn’t come close to describing what Liam had seen. A life snuffed out.
“I told the boy not to take stupid risks,” Alastair continued. “The stakes are too high.”
Liam stared at him. “Who are you?” he said. With even the slightest movement, his head spun. His throat was thick, tight, and he found it hard to form words. “What is this ‘Special Intelligence’ you said you work for? What are you?”
“Take it easy, lad.” Liam felt Alastair’s words in his head more than he heard them. He felt them as a reassuring weight. “It’s just like Jake told you. I’m a friend. I’m here to help.”
Liam swallowed. “Jake... He said you would help.” He stopped, started again. “The medication,” he said. “Jake said you could help with the medication.”
~
They were in a room. Not the kitchen, but still in the cottage, Liam thought. He could see heaped gravel outside the window.
He felt dizzy.
He leaned on his elbows on a pine dining table, his head in his hands. He could feel the pulse from his temples drumming in his palms like a captured moth.
Alastair was there, and Mr Smith. The first Mr Smith, that is. The one who had answered Kath’s door, not the one in the car. Maybe that meant he was the second Mr Smith, then.
Whichever Mr Smith stood by the window, arms folded, watching as Alastair sat down opposite Liam and opened an attache case. It looked like a doctor’s case, or that of a travelling pharmaceutical salesman. Jars and bottles and syringes nestled among dividers, some retained by black elasticated straps.
Alastair took out one unmarked white plastic pot, then another, and another.
With a thumb, he flipped open the lid of each, and looked inside.
“Well,” he said. “Which to give you?” He pushed the three pots towards Liam with the side of his hand. “We have white ones, pink ones, blue ones... Pills to shut it out. Pills to let it in. Some to make it stronger and some to kill it off. What’s your fancy, Liam? Which one should we give you?”
Liam looked at the pots, and then at Alastair. The man seemed to be enjoying himself.
“‘It’,” said Liam. “What’s ‘it’?”
Alastair smiled. “Oh, Liam,” he said. “You really don’t know, do you?” He took a single white pill from the nearest pot and slid it across the table towards Liam. “Take this,” he said. “I’m pretty sure this is what they’ve been giving you. They like to keep us under control.”
Us...
Liam stared at the tablet, and for a moment he wondered what would happen if he refused it, if he tried to see out these withdrawal symptoms. Then he reached for it, took it between forefinger and thumb and placed it on his tongue.
It dissolved instantly.
“You and me, Liam. Mr Smith, too. We’re not like the others. We’re different. We’re ... more than them.”
Liam stared at him. It was the oddest sensation. As the pill started to take effect his head was clearing and yet ... yet everything seemed to be getting weirder and weirder. “What are you saying?”
Alastair leaned back, pushing his glasses up his nose with an index finger. “Have you never noticed anything odd about your world? Anything strange?”
Liam shrugged. “How would I know?” he said. His world, his family and friends, the things they did and said – they were what he knew, so of course they were what he thought of as normal.
Alastair sighed. “They really have managed to shelter you, haven’t they?” He paused, then went on. “This is how we survive. This is how we have survived centuries of persecution. We hide our true nature from the world, even from our own children.”
“What ‘true nature’?” Liam’s head was clear now. Too clear, maybe.
“Like I say, lad, we’re different. You, me, Mr Smith, half the kids at the Academy ... we’re members of the Lost Families. We’re not human, Liam. Or at least, we’re a different kind of human. A gifted kind.”
Liam stared at him. He was in the company of a madman. Two madmen.
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking, Liam. You think we’re mad.”
Liam opened his mouth to deny it, but was cut off by Alastair’s next words.
“That wasn’t a lazy choice of phrase, Liam. I know what you’re thinking. Not word by word, not the intimate, embarrassing detail. But your thoughts have shape and I can reach out and grasp those shapes and make sense of some of them. I can push them, too.”
Instantly, Liam flashed back to their first encounter in Kath’s flat. Or was the memory triggered, pulled out by some other force? He remembered the urge to tell Alastair everything. That urge had come from nowhere, it seemed. Or had it come from outside?
Back in the cottage ... Alastair watched him intently.
“You don’t believe me, of course,” he said. “About 75 per cent of you doesn’t believe me. But the remaining 25 per cent is entertaining the possibility that I might be the first person to tell you the truth about who you are, who we are. Give it time, Liam: that 25 per cent will expand. You will come to believe me. And then you’ll start to make sense of what’s been happening.”
“You mean you read minds,” muttered Liam.
“And control them, or push them, a little,” said Alastair. “It’s only a moderate talent, but it’s my most developed one. Have you never felt the world pressing in on you, Liam? Have you never sensed what’s going on in the heads of those around you? Or has it always
been kept under control?”
Liam shrugged. Of course he’d felt that. Everyone felt that. Didn’t they? “What do you mean, about the Lost Families?”
“We’ve suffered,” said Alastair. “Our kind have always suffered. We have a range of talents, what they call psi powers. Mind-reading and control, grasping the shape of future events, even affecting physical objects at a distance. Sometimes in the past our kind have been held up as religious visionaries and leaders. More often, we’ve been persecuted for witchcraft or anything else they can pin on us. It’s only in the last century or two that we’ve re-emerged and got together with others of our own kind. Before then, we were almost driven out of existence. Now, the Families have re-united and we have networks all around the world. You’d be surprised how many very important people are actually members of the Lost Families. People in power.”
“NATS...?”
“We educate our own. The Talented and Special.”
“But I’m just a Grunt,” said Liam. He had a place at NATS because his father worked for the Ministry, not because he had been singled out as particularly talented in any respect.
“Sometimes the greatest talents are late to emerge. They can be buried deep within the mind. It’s a protective mechanism.”
“Protection,” said Liam. What was he implying? “Protect me from what?”
“No,” said Alastair. “You misunderstand. Not to protect you – to protect the rest of us.”
10 Home again
It was like learning that red is blue and up is really down.
The world is not the world, Liam: the world is different. You are different to other people. They are the family of humankind, but we are something else.
~
Some time around the middle of the day, they ate fish and chips that Mr Smith brought back from the town.
Liam had sat quietly in the front room for a time. Alastair had left him in peace, giving him space to think.
About a world where humankind was divided between normal humans and others.
About the Lost Families.
About people with strange powers strategically placed throughout society – leaders, people of influence, people who made a difference.
About how everything had to be seen differently, reinterpreted in the light of this hidden power struggle. Was that why all this was happening? Had he and his parents become some kind of threat to the big secret of the Families?
And about being different. Did he have these gifts? All he wanted was to get back to a normal, quiet life, but that had been ripped away from him forever if any of this was true.
The banging of doors and the smell of chips led him through to the kitchen again. Alastair and Mr Smith were seated at the narrow table, unwrapping the takeaway.
“Oh, not salt and vinegar!” Alastair complained. “I told you: no salt and vinegar.” He turned to Liam, and said, “If I want salt and vinegar I can add my own. Don’t you find that the most annoying thing?”
Liam sat at the vacant seat, and took a chip. “What’s happening?” he said in the kind of firm, quiet voice that cuts through any background noise. “What happened to my parents? What’s happening to me? What have they been doing to me and my friends at NATS?”
Alastair broke open a piece of fish, so that its white flesh was exposed.
“Your parents...” he said. “We’re puzzled about that, too. We’re still looking into it, but I’ll admit that we’re not making much progress. The Families are not united, by any means. There are different factions, different groups, each with their own agenda. Me and the Mr Smiths stand back from it all: Special Intelligence mediates between the Government and the Lost Families, preventing any extreme courses of action. The Government have a lot at stake with us. They want our kind to work with them – for them. And they can’t let us get out of control. Our kind of person can be dangerous, you know. We need watching.” He gave a grunt of laughter. “I think that either one or both of your parents turned against the Families, Liam. Or against Willoughby, at least. I don’t know the detail. I don’t know the reason. It may have been simply a case of money talking, or they may have some ideological grudge. As you can imagine, there are some strange ideas about.
“Whatever. One or both of them went too far, and my guess is that the Families have reacted by making them non-persons, removing any trace that they have existed.”
Erasing them.
“But what happened to them?”
Alastair shrugged, and straightened his glasses again. “If they’re lucky, they will have been taken in hand and re-educated. Our kind are good at that. We’re good at manipulating people’s minds.”
He didn’t elaborate on what might have happened if they had been unlucky.
“Will I ever see them again?”
“Probably not, lad,” said Alastair. “You have to hope for the best, but even in the very best outcome you’re not likely to be reunited. I’m sorry.”
Liam took a chip, and toyed with it between forefinger and thumb. He had no appetite.
He wanted to strike out. He wanted to find out what special talent he had, if any, and turn it on the people who felt that it was right to reach into his life and chew it over like this. He wanted to hurt someone.
“Anger’s understandable,” said Alastair. “But it’s not going to get you anywhere.”
He felt a calming pressure in his mind, and he tried to imagine himself pushing it away. He didn’t want this calm and reasonable madman exerting any kind of influence on him. He clung onto his anger.
“Okay,” said Alastair. “Okay.”
A long silence descended. Outside, it started to rain, and Liam watched the water tracking down the window, channels running, joining, combining into a huge network across the glass.
“There was a time when we thought Katherine was something rather special, you know.”
Liam looked at Alastair. How did this man know his sister so well?
“I taught her at the Academy. We have people there, observers. Jake was one. I was another for a time. Some of their practices are ... a bit extreme, shall we say. They need watching. Sometimes we work with them, sometimes we have to pull them back into line. I spent five years there.”
“Kath?”
“We thought she was going to be a star student. She was fast-tracked almost as soon as she arrived. But something in her tests flagged her up as one to watch for other reasons, danger signals.”
“What do you mean, ‘danger signals’?” Liam hadn’t known Kath had done well at NATS, even if only briefly. He only knew that she had gone for two terms and then been dropped. He had been young then, and the memories were all vague.
“She couldn’t hack it. Couldn’t take the pace. It’s all one big filtering process, you see. Even before the Academy. The National Curriculum and SATS? All those tests every school child has to sit every couple of years or so? Whatever reason they give publicly, the real reason for all that is to identify children of talent. The Families have hidden themselves so well over the generations that many of our kind don’t even know that they belong. We are scattered through the so-called normal world. We have to do what we can to identify our own kind and return them to the fold.
“It’s hard to be sure, though. When a child is identified with possible talent he or she must be taken aside for more testing. That’s what schools like NATS do. They provide an environment where we can test and filter those who might be descended from the Lost Families. Over time, pupils are sorted into those who may be ignored, those of our own kind, and those who may be a threat. The first are filtered out. The second get inducted into the Families in Senior House.”
“And the third?”
“It depends on the nature of the threat. Remember that the Families have been persecuted for centuries. We cannot allow rogue talents to threaten our survival. Katherine was identified in the third category, Liam. She was an extreme sensitive. The world talked to her. Sometimes it shouted at her. Her talent coul
dn’t be controlled, so she was treated. They operated on her to kill off the sensitive parts of her brain. They sterilised her so that there was no danger of her rogue talent being inherited by future generations. The operation on her brain was not entirely successful. She will be on medication for the rest of her life. I don’t expect you to be grateful, Liam, but that was my doing, giving her that chance: there were others who wanted to remove her from the picture altogether...”
Liam stared at the rain tracks on the window. He remembered being with Kath in Norwich and realising how little he knew her. He remembered how sensitive she was to his presence, how she couldn’t bear to have him close.
“You, Liam,” Alastair continued. “You’re definitely not in the first category. The Families are not going to ignore you.”
~
He felt like the victim of some almighty hoax. The biggest practical joke in the world, at his expense. How could he believe such impossible things?
But he had known that Kath was a woman who nursed deep wounds, and this was the first time he had been given any kind of explanation.
Still, he fought against believing what Alastair had told him. If he accepted it, then he was accepting the likelihood that he would never see his parents again, that he would never even know what had happened to them.
He couldn’t give up on them so easily.
Alone again in the front room, he took out his phone and flipped it open. He watched as it went through its powering up routine: battery okay, PIN code. He thumbed the number in and waited to see if there were any messages. The signal here was weak but better than none.
Then a message he had not seen before appeared on the screen. “User not recognised. Please call our network sales team to register this mobile.”
He stared at it. His account was in credit, his PIN was the same as it had always been, so why wasn’t it recognising him?
Just then, Alastair came in and tossed Liam a can of Coke. “What’s up?” he asked, seeing the look on Liam’s face.
Liam turned his phone to Alastair. “It’s not recognising me,” he said. “My account’s dead...”
