Being Arcadia

by Simon Chesterman

  “You’re also kind of a sociopath.”

  Moira freezes for a moment, an unsettling interruption to her fluid movements. “You raise an interesting point. I admit that I’m not exactly a ‘people person’. But on the anti-social rollercoaster am I more sociopath or psychopath? Did my petri dish and society make me this way, or was I born like this? Maybe a little bit of both. Or maybe I just enjoy living in the moment. You should try it, Arky—live a little!”

  The other her drains the remaining liquid from the bottle, shaking it to get the last drops. Raising a finger, her sister ducks back into the vestry and returns with a backpack.

  “Now tell me something, Moira,” Arcadia says. “Why pretend to kill yourself? And why try to get me arrested for robbing the Tower of London?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Moira replies, opening the backpack on the altar and putting the chessboard and pieces inside, while rummaging around for something else.

  She realises that this is how she must sound to other people, and begins to understand their frustration. “No,” she confesses. “It’s not.”

  Moira rolls her eyes and speaks more slowly. “I needed to disappear for a while. And as for you, how else was I meant to protect you?”

  “Protect me?”

  “Having decided not to kill you myself, it seemed a waste to let someone else harm you. So I decided to keep you safe. Since I couldn’t watch you twenty-four hours a day, I thought I would delegate it to Her Majesty’s Prison Service.”

  “But keep me safe from whom?”

  Moira has stopped searching in the backpack and her eyes narrow, resting on something over Arcadia’s shoulder. “From him.”

  In the doorway, a man takes off a hat that bears a fine sheen of white. The first snow of the year. Even as he enters the room, the warmth of the air causes its crystalline structure to break down and the frost becomes mere damp.

  “You’re a difficult one to track, Moira, I’ll give you that,” Dr. Bell says, stamping his feet to warm up. “Keeping tabs on Miss Arcadia, on the other hand, is child’s play. And I knew that eventually you would come for her. Bravo, by the way, on your spectacular immolation. ‘Nothing in her life became her like the leaving it.’ Or something like that.” He continues to walk slowly down the nave. “You almost had me fooled.” He slows as he nears the altar. “Almost.”

  Beside her Moira is looking in the backpack once more, a grunt of frustration escaping her lips.

  “What’s the matter, Moira?” Dr. Bell inquires. “Looking for something?”

  The other her puts the backpack on the altar. “The backdoor to the vestry. You’re quieter than I thought.”

  Dr. Bell smiles, but there is no kindness in it. “Indeed, I found this in your bag while you were playing your little game of chess.” He holds up a bottle filled with fluid. “I won’t ask who won—I don’t want to kindle any sibling rivalry.”

  “Give me my bottle,” Moira says.

  Dr. Bell regards the plastic container, tipping it to watch the liquid move. Then he returns his gaze to Moira. “You didn’t say the magic word,” he taunts.

  This seems unwise. In one smooth movement, Moira produces a gun from the rear waistband of her trousers. The same revolver pointed at Arcadia a year earlier.

  “Give me my bottle,” Moira says, “or I’ll shoot you in the head.”

  “That’s more than one word.” Dr. Bell tuts.

  “Now.” Moira cocks the gun.

  Will the other her really shoot? Possibly, but a head wound would make answers from Dr. Bell unlikely. “I suggest you do what Moira says,” Arcadia offers.

  Dr. Bell hesitates for a moment, then throws Moira the bottle.

  Keeping the gun steady in her right hand, Moira catches it in her left. “Thanks,” the other her says, putting the bottle on the table while the revolver remains trained on Dr. Bell. “So Arky, people like to say that revenge is a dish best served cold, but I tend to think it’s best served as a ten-course tasting menu. Did you know, for example, that if you shoot someone in the spleen it can take hours for them to die?”

  The barrel now points at Dr. Bell’s abdomen.

  “I agree that’s one way to explore human biology,” Arcadia says, “but do you mind if we ask him some questions first? Like how he’s connected to Lysander Starr?”

  “Oh do catch up, Arky!” Moira exclaims. “Can we really be related?”

  And then she sees it: Dr. Bell visiting her in hospital a year earlier. A doctor at a teaching hospital who is also a professor. The professor. Dr. Bell guilty and looking at Arky. Dr. Bell who signed the Hebron’s death certificates. “You taught Miss Alderman,” she says. “And Lysander Starr. You were the professor who sent Miss Alderman to my school. And then you sent Starr to do some ‘housekeeping’ and kill us both.”

  “Ah Lysander.” Dr. Bell is close to them now. “A brilliant young man, but never the sharpest pencil in the box. He misunderstood what I meant by ‘housekeeping’. He had overstepped and risked compromising our whole enterprise, just as Milton had. And so I had to take action to remove him.”

  “You blew up his car?”

  “With a little help from Moira here, who had given me the explosives. I like to think of myself as somewhat enterprising, but it’s dashed difficult to acquire significant quantities of C4 on the open market.”

  “I can introduce you to my guy, if you like,” Moira says. “A nice ex-SAS chap. You’d like him.”

  “I’m sure I would.”

  How has she not realised Dr. Bell’s connection? And then she sees that she did: a hazy memory of him visiting her in hospital a year earlier; more recently her own withholding of the information that Moira was alive when he came to the police station. At the time, she thought she could not trust herself.

  “Why are you here, why now?” she asks.

  “I came to try to talk some sense into Moira. That this petty vendetta must end and that I can help her lead a normal life.”

  “Back to your petri dish?” Moira scoffs. “I don’t think so. In any case, I don’t want ‘normality’. I want to shine. But first I want to engage in a bit of Oedipal rage.”

  Once again the barrel points at Dr. Bell’s abdomen.

  “Moira,” she says. “Why didn’t you just warn me? I was standing there with Dr. Bell at Magdalen and you threw a Molotov cocktail at us both. You could have just told me, rather than hiding a jewel in my desk and phoning the cops.”

  “Yes, well the simple things in life are kind of boring, aren’t they?” Moira responds. “And when you started palling around with the good doctor here, I had to be sure you simply were that gullible and not in cahoots with him.” Gun still trained on Dr. Bell, the other her pops open the top of the second bottle and swigs a mouthful.

  “And you.” Arcadia turns to Dr. Bell. “Why get me to come to Magdalen? You wanted to keep an eye on your placebo, keep me in a controlled environment only slightly larger than the laboratory in which you imprisoned Moira?”

  “Placebo?” Dr. Bell cannot suppress a laugh. “Oh my dear girl, you really do understand nothing. What on earth did Lysander tell you?”

  “He said you were editing DNA in order to bypass evolution. That Moira was the future, and I was the past.”

  Again, he laughs. How has she not noticed the meanness in him before? “Close, but no cigar,” he says. “But there will be time in due course to explain.”

  From the corner of her eye, she sees the gun barrel wobble.

  “So stupid,” Moira is saying, contempt in her voice but her precise articulation is breaking down. “Arky, take the gun. Shoot him. So obvious.” The gun drops onto the altar as Moira stumbles. “Flunitrazepam in the electrolytes. Shoot him, Arky, or we’re both dead.” The other her leans against the altar, knees collapsing.

  “What have you done to her?” Arcadia demands.

  “As she correctly diagnosed, I added a little something to her go-go juice,” he replies, taking a long piece of wood out of
his coat pocket. “A trick I learned from you, Moira. ‘Roofies’, I believe the kids call them today. Just something to make it a little easier to bring you both in without a fight.”

  Moira sinks below the altar, murmuring on the descent into unconsciousness.

  “And yet I didn’t drink anything,” Arcadia says, leaning over to pick up the revolver. “That was your mistake.”

  As she turns back to face him she feels a prick in her neck. The piece of wood is now at his lips. A blowpipe? A burning sensation starts to spread through her body.

  “Which is why I brought this,” Dr. Bell holds up the small weapon in his hands. “The first time I went to Thailand to collect rhesus monkeys, the locals used blowpipes like this one. Today we have tranquiliser guns, but I still prefer to do it old school every now and then.”

  The burning is making it hard to breathe. Her hand closes around the handle of the gun but lacks the strength to pick it up. A fog comes over her. What does she want the gun for again?

  “The poison is fast-acting, I’m told, and quite disorienting.”

  Why does her tongue feel so big? Oh if only she could get a nice block of ice. Her skin is so itchy. Ooh, ice would be nice. Who is speaking?

  “You might want to sit down, because when it reaches the brain the—”

  Darkness.

  8

  CAPTIVE

  A low hum. Ventilation? And the faint buzz of many fluorescent lights. Also a clock. How long has she been unconscious? Impossible to tell until she can see again. The left side of her face is cold, resting on something hard.

  She has been knocked out before, but the poison dart is cruder than a tranquiliser gun. Her muscles ache and a throbbing clouds her head. Focus on the senses that work.

  Breathing. Someone nearby inhales and exhales with the regular rhythm of sleep. A snore escapes his lips. Or hers.

  She focuses on her own respiration, taking air in through her nose. She almost gags at the smell. The reek of bodily waste permeates the air, leavened by an earthiness. Not a sewer—an overflowing toilet?

  She is indoors, a temperature-controlled environment with fluorescent lights. Dr. Bell said he was going to bring her and Moira somewhere. Is this what Moira called her petri dish?

  With what feels like a heroic effort, she pushes her eyelids up. The brightness of the room is blinding as she focuses on the figure next to her. Horizontal lines separate them, but the image slowly resolves. Too small to be Moira, is it a child? He or she shifts in sleep, lips smacking softly. A baby? It is wrapped in a shaggy blanket, or wearing some kind of rough woollen clothing.

  Again, the stench of faeces is overpowering. It does serve to clear her vision, however, and she looks once more at the pink face. What sort of baby has facial hair? She shakes her head, a movement large enough to attract her neighbour’s attention. The yellow eyes open—yellow?—pupils constricting even as they focus on her own. Bared teeth and a screech shock her into wakefulness as she and the monkey in the next cage stare at each other.

  “You’re awake then.” Her own voice, Moira’s voice, somewhere nearby.

  “Where are you?” she says, coughing to clear the phlegm that has built up in her throat. “Where are we?”

  “The first question is easy: I’m about two metres away from you. If the poison used on you was the juice from the giant taro, your vision should be returning soon and you’ll see me. If, on the other hand, it was from the seeds of the strychnine tree then—well, then you would already be dead.”

  She pulls herself up onto her elbows, the monkey—a rhesus macaque, by the look of it—watching her carefully. It has light brown fur with a tuft of white on its forehead. The cage is big enough for her to sit but not stand. There is no sign of her bag.

  “The second question,” Moira continues, “is more challenging. From the state of my bladder, I would estimate that I was unconscious for about six hours. A roofie wouldn’t have knocked me out that long, so the good doctor must have administered some kind of tranquiliser to keep me under. It is possible that we were travelling all that time—but unlikely. More probable is that we are somewhere near Oxford. My best guess is a warehouse in an industrial estate on the edge of town. Given our proximity to a river and its size, I would think we’re on the bank of the Thames, which for reasons of tradition and pretension is here called the Isis.”

  For the first time, she notices the sound of rushing water. She blinks and registers the blurry outline of Moira in a cage opposite her. Craning her neck she looks down the corridor formed by barred metal doors. At least two rows of ten cages, though she cannot see how many are occupied. Above them, fluorescent tubes illuminate the room in a pale light.

  “Why are we here?”

  “You’re just full of questions today, aren’t you, Arky? How about you use some of your own little grey cells for a change? Why do you think we’re here?”

  Another shake of her head merely causes the fog in her brain to swirl. She closes her eyes and breathes slowly, pulling her thoughts into line. “Dr. Bell is the professor who sent Miss Alderman to the Priory School, keeping an eye on my part of the experiment about the same time that you were escaping from yours. He’s been using gene-editing technology on human embryos—on you. But he started with monkeys first? And he’s brought us here because we know too much.”

  “Hmm. OK, maybe I’ll give you another gentleman’s pass for that. You’re on the right track, but heading in the wrong direction. If we simply knew too much then he would have used the strychnine on you and any number of poisons on me.” Moira takes a drink from a plastic bottle, her electrolytic cocktail. Dr. Bell must want them both alive and functional.

  “Right, right.” She sits up properly. At one end of the row of cages is a wooden door with a glass panel; at the other are two padded chairs with restraints. They remind her of Sebastian’s “old sparky”, but these have elaborate helmets. Too big for the monkeys, they are designed for humans.

  “We’re still useful to him. He needs something from us, more data for his experiment? Or is there some sentimental reason why he hasn’t killed us?”

  The door opens and Dr. Bell walks in. “To be honest, it’s a little of both,” he says. He has been listening from an adjoining room. The door was only open for a moment, but her bag is on the floor of that room. “I do apologise for the simple accommodations and the manner in which you were brought here, but it was necessary.”

  Her phone is inside the bag. She has left it switched on, which means that Henry can locate it. She needs to distract Dr. Bell long enough that Henry will realise she is missing and try to find her.

  “Why was it necessary?” she asks.

  Dr. Bell walks down the corridor, inspecting each cage. He is holding a tray with a plate and two drink containers. “Moira, here, was bent on interfering and had to be stopped. As for you, it was quickly becoming clear that the relationship of trust that I had so carefully cultivated was beginning to break down.”

  Keep him talking. “Why would you say that?”

  As he approaches, the monkey in the cage next to her bares its teeth and hisses. If its earlier screech upon seeing her was fear, this is closer to anger. He does not seem to notice. “I would like to attribute it to my uncanny ability to read emotions,” he says. “But in fact it was because I know that the woman you call Miss Alderman has contacted you.”

  There is no natural light, but if six hours have passed it should be dawn. How long before Henry notices that she is missing?

  “By the way.” Dr. Bell is still talking. “I must apologise that while bringing you here I dropped your phone.” He places the tray on a bench next to the cages and picks up what is left of her device. The screen is shattered and it has been snapped almost in half. “Well, that’s not quite true. In fact, I dropped it, stepped on it a few times, and finally reversed over it with my van. I am so terribly sorry.”

  He puts the phone back on the tray and gestures to the plate, on which there are two croiss
ants. “We did have a somewhat nicer facility, but dear Moira rather spoiled that when she blew it up. The least hospitality I can offer you, however, is a simple breakfast. There’s a lovely café down the street that does pastries and a decent coffee. A skinny flat white for you, Arcadia, and a triple espresso for you, Moira.”

  Neither she nor Moira reach for the gifts, as it is clear that there will be conditions.

  “But it doesn’t seem right just to give them to you,” he says. “It is a Saturday morning, after all, Arcadia. How about we start it with a nice puzzle? Perhaps a matchstick problem, just for old time’s sake?”

  Locked in a cage solving quizzes for food. Is he pushing the lab rat metaphor a little far? She contemplates saying this out loud, but antagonising her captor seems unlikely to help at this point. How did she fail to see this side of him?

  “Now Moira,” he turns to the other her, raising a finger. “No helping. If you tell her the answer then there will be no breakfast for either of you.” From his pocket, he takes out a box of matches and begins arranging them on the tray. Roman numerals again, but a more complicated equation.

  From her cage, Moira glances at it for a moment and then laughs. “Just as well—it’s an easy one. I like my coffee warm. Come on then, Arky. Shake a leg.”

  Moira might be accustomed to being poked and prodded in this way, yet the other her’s confidence is oddly unsettling. On the puzzle itself, Moira might have seen it before—or maybe is just that quick. Despite the absurdity of the situation, she tries to concentrate. Push everything out of her mind except the problem to be solved. Twenty-three divided by seven equals two. Her mind begins to clear. No, it doesn’t. It equals 3.285714… but Roman numerals are ill-equipped to handle decimals.