I knew how easy it could be. After all, hadn’t I given up Fox too? Hadn’t I forced myself to forget about him? Believed Daddy’s stories of betrayal? Thrown myself completely into the Institute, and my quest for sublimation?
‘It wasn’t long before other children came. The Red House became too crowded, so Daddy found this place. I don’t know how. I … know he had money, somewhere. When we moved here, he set up the Monkey House. He started talking about how children don’t have the spark yet, how they were blank slates. He made us shave their heads, and stop referring to them by names or personal pronouns.’
I remembered the blank faces of the Monkeys when I’d been trying to find an escape route. I remembered the one Monkey who was always out of place. The one who’d helped me. I wondered who her mother was.
‘It makes things easier. That’s why he does it. It’s easier to let your child go when they don’t have a name, or a gender, or any features to distinguish them from the other children. They have a good life. They have healthy food and fresh air and they play all day. Could I have offered Fox such a life if I’d been on my own? Would he have been as happy?’
‘What about when he left the Monkey House?’ I asked. ‘When he joined the rest of you? With a name?’
‘I wasn’t even supposed to know he was mine,’ said Lib. ‘Daddy doesn’t let us think that way. The Monkeys are orphans, rescued from the toxicants and made pure. He is their saviour. They don’t have mothers. So Fox was just … Fox. I watched him, yes. More closely than the others. I think deep down I was proud of him. That he was so sensitive. So thoughtful. But I didn’t allow myself to feel anything. Because if I had, I would have also had to feel the shame. The guilt. Because I gave him up. I abandoned him.’
Lib’s body shook as she broke into sobs. ‘I only wanted him to be safe. I thought he’d be safer here than out in the world. The world had been so cruel to me. At least if he was here, I knew Daddy would look after him.’
‘But he didn’t,’ I said. ‘Daddy didn’t look after him.’
Lib closed her eyes. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘He didn’t.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to her. ‘It was my fault. I … he never would have behaved that way if it wasn’t for me.’
Lib’s mouth hardened into a thin line. ‘You weren’t the one who beat him,’ she said. ‘Daddy was so angry. I’ve never seen him like that before. He locked you away, and swore that he’d make you pay.’
My stomach turned as I thought of my mother with Daddy. I think she’s seeing someone. That’s what Aunty Cath had said. Had Mum done it? Received from Daddy? I pushed the thought away in disgust.
‘And Fox?’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘I believed Daddy at first – that Fox had been an agent for the Quintus Septum. But you hear things. One of the Monkeys let something slip, and I realised he was still here. Still alive. I begged Daddy to let him out.’ She winced, and I remembered her black eye. ‘He told me if I didn’t forget about Fox, he’d kill him. So I stopped trying to save him. I let Daddy think I’d forgotten.’
Lib took a shuddering breath. ‘I know what you must think of me. I don’t expect you to understand.’
But I did understand. Daddy was powerful. The tug of his charisma was so strong it was impossible not to get pulled into his orbit. My rage at Lib dissolved into pity. She was … what? Fifty years old? And what did she have to show for her life? Lies, guilt and loss. I wondered if she would ever escape. If she would ever be able to look Fox in the eye and tell him the truth.
Fox.
Fox was alive, and I had to find him.
22
I waited through the dark silence of the night. I waited as birds began to chatter, and engines rumbled into life. I heard voices from outside, the crunching of feet on gravel.
I heard footsteps approach, and the lock on my door clicked open. Then the footsteps faded away.
I waited as everything grew quiet once more.
Then I moved.
The door swung open, and I stepped out into the corridor, listening for the faintest sound.
Nothing.
Outside, the Institute was silent and empty. The big doors to C Block were open, and all the boxes of water bottles were gone.
I crossed the courtyard quickly, and skirted around to the Monkey’s entrance. I tried the handle, and to my surprise it turned. I pushed the door open and stepped inside.
At first glance, the room looked like a primary school classroom. Children sat at low tables, drawing on large sheets of butcher’s paper with coloured pencils. But it wasn’t a classroom. The Monkeys were dressed in their usual white shifts, with their pale stubbly heads. Their faces were calm – blank, even. And every single one of them was drawing the same thing. A man with bright blue eyes, white hair and spectacles. Daddy. I looked around the room. It was papered with drawings of Daddy, stuck clumsily to the wall with masking tape. There would have been thousands of them.
It was a shrine.
They’d all looked up as I entered. Eight pairs of eyes were trained on me, wide and unblinking, like the countless blue eyes that papered the walls. With their shaved heads and shapeless white tunics, they looked like ghosts.
The tallest Monkey stood up and put her hands on her hips. ‘You again,’ she said. ‘You can’t be here.’
I remembered the promise I’d made to Val.
‘I’m here to help you,’ I told her. ‘I’m going to get you out of here. I’m calling the police. Someone will come and take you away from here, and everything will be all right.’
The Monkeys didn’t look at each other or speak. But as one, they laid down their pencils, pushed back their chairs and crawled under the table, crouching low and wrapping their little arms around their heads as if they were expecting a bomb to fall.
I got down on my hands and knees and crawled under the table too.
I touched one Monkey on the shoulder. ‘It’s okay. I’m sorry if I scared you. I promise I’m here to help. But you have to help me first.’
The Monkey didn’t respond. It was as if they had been turned to stone. I wasn’t even sure if they could hear or see me anymore.
I crawled out from under the table and realised that one of the Monkeys was still sitting at the table. It was the freckled girl. The one who ate Val’s snow peas. She was drawing intently.
‘Hey,’ I said gently.
The sound of her pencil scratching over the paper was the only sound in the room.
‘I’m looking for Fox,’ I said. ‘Do you know what happened to him?’
The girl put down her pencil and reached for a different colour.
‘Can you hear me?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice light.
The girl’s expression didn’t change. I looked down at her drawing, and was startled to see it wasn’t a picture of Daddy. It was a picture of the beach – yellow sand and blue waves, with colourful bathing boxes lining the shore. I watched as she added some shells dotted along the shoreline.
At last she looked up.
‘Are you going to kill us?’ she asked, her voice perfectly calm.
I took an involuntary step back and raised my hands. ‘What? No. I’m not here to hurt you at all. I’m here to help you.’
‘Daddy told us that one day people will try to take us away,’ the girl said. ‘And that they will pretend to be nice, but really they are monsters wearing the skins of nice people, and that if we go with them they will take off our skin and boil our bones into soup.’
‘I promise I’m not a monster,’ I said. ‘You know me. You’ve seen me here before.’
The Monkey nodded. ‘You’re the Scintilla,’ she said. ‘Daddy says when you arrive we must be careful, because the end is close. He says if we are careful and hide from the monsters, we’ll get to be part of the Boundless Family.’
‘What is the Boundless Family?’ I asked.
The girl narrowed her eyes. ‘You should know. You’re the Scintilla. Unless you are a monster wearing
the skin of the Scintilla because you boiled her bones.’
I took a deep breath. ‘You know what? I’m not a monster, but I’m not the Scintilla either. I’m just a person. My name’s Ruby. Do you have a name?’
The girl shook her head. ‘I’m Monkey.’
‘Okay, Monkey. Do you want to play a game?’
‘Daddy says games aren’t fun anymore. Daddy says we have to stay hidden. Daddy says we aren’t hungry.’
I glanced down at the children, crouched and utterly still under the table. They were so different to the giggling, scampering Monkeys I’d seen when I’d first arrived at the Institute. What had he done to them, to make them like this?
I looked down at the girl’s drawing. ‘That place,’ I said. ‘Do you remember it?’
‘It’s not a real place,’ she said. ‘I dreamed it.’
‘Are you sure? You haven’t been there? A long time ago?’
The girl gave me a little sideways frown, as if she thought I was crazy. ‘It’s not a real place,’ she said again.
I knelt down on the floor beside her. ‘It is a real place, I’ve been there.’
The girl’s eyes widened, then she shook her head.
‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen that water, and those bathing boxes. Beyond that one there’s a jetty that sticks out into the water, and a van that sells ice-cream. Do you remember those?’
The girl’s pencil fell from her grasp, and she started to look distressed.
‘When I went there, there were lots of people,’ I said. ‘Some of them were swimming, and some of them were playing with a ball on the sand. There were kids and dogs and grown-ups.’ I looked down at her drawing. There were no people anywhere. Not so much as a seagull. ‘I think you should draw yourself on the beach.’
The girl’s brow creased in a frown, and she stared at me, baffled.
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘You could be eating an ice-cream. Or building a sandcastle. Or collecting some beautiful shells. Draw yourself.’
‘I— I can’t,’ she said, as if I had asked her to walk on the ceiling.
‘Of course you can,’ I said. ‘You’re a good drawer.’
‘I’m a Monkey. I can’t be there. I can’t draw … me. I don’t exist.’
I remembered seeing her crouching in the shadow of the warehouse, munching on snow peas.
‘You do exist,’ I said. ‘You exist because you want things. You want snow peas. You want to visit the beach. You want to escape from here.’
The girl looked back down at her drawing. ‘I can’t exist,’ she whispered. ‘Daddy will be angry if I do.’
‘Don’t worry about him,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take you to a place where he can’t hurt you.’
The Monkey hesitated, then looked up at me, her eyes wide. ‘Will Val be there?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe. Do you want him to be there?’
‘Yes. I like Val. He gives me snow peas.’
‘Did you know him, before you came here?’
The Monkey shook her head. ‘When I first became a Monkey, I was very frightened. I didn’t understand, about Daddy and how he’d saved us from darkness. I tried to run away. Val found me. He was kind and he told me a story about an ogre who made friends with a princess. He didn’t tell Daddy that I’d been bad.’
I wondered how the Monkey had come to the Institute. Was her mother or father here too? Or had she been stolen from somewhere?
‘Sometimes I draw Val a picture and sneak it to him,’ said the Monkey. ‘But he has to hide them, because Daddy doesn’t like it when we draw pictures for anyone other than him.’
‘If you leave here, you can draw pictures for whoever you like. You can draw pictures just for you, if you want.’
The Monkey bit her lip. ‘And you won’t boil my bones?’
‘I won’t boil your bones.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘Cross my heart.’
The Monkey nodded, as if this were enough. ‘Okay,’ she said, squaring her little shoulders. ‘What do we do?’
‘First, I have to help someone,’ I said. ‘Do you know where Fox is?’
‘Yes.’
A surge of energy coursed through me. ‘Can you take me to him?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice calm.
The Monkey pushed back her chair and stood up. She walked over to the cupboard, dragging her chair behind her. I followed. The other Monkeys remained crouched under the table, still and silent as porcelain. The Monkey climbed onto her chair, and reached for a small metal tin on a high shelf. The tin contained a keyring with two keys. She jumped down from the chair and handed me the keys, pointing to the door at the back of the room.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Promise you’ll come back,’ said the Monkey.
‘I promise,’ I said, and this time I really meant it.
The door opened out into the large storage space where I had labelled water bottles with Lib. The room was empty now, every last box cleared out.
People get thirsty.
I crossed the room to the door that I knew led to Daddy’s laboratory, and unlocked it with the second key.
It wasn’t the gleaming, spartan facility I was expecting. I’d imagined stainless steel and glass. Glowing refrigeration units and twisting beakers and tubes.
Instead it looked like the kitchen in A Block. A tiny office kitchenette with a sink, an old fridge, some cupboards. The only evidence that it was a scientific laboratory was a small rack of test tubes and a lone bunsen burner on the bench. I opened the fridge and saw jam jars labelled with white stickers and messy biro.
Hartshorn
Diethylstilbestrol
Fulminating Silver
Cyproterone Acetate
Flowers of Antimony
What was Daddy planning? Why the water bottles? Why election day? What was the Boundless Family?
People get thirsty.
I remembered the news article about Glen Ardeer, his controversial research into sterilisation. His trial.
And I heard Daddy’s voice, as clear as if he were in the room with me.
The Scintilla will come and light the way for us. The Institute of the Boundless Sublime will rise above all. The Quintus Septum will be vanquished, along with all their pathetic meat-followers. We shall rule the planet, gods of light and science. You, my children, will receive riches and power beyond your wildest imaginings.
And I will be everyone’s Daddy.
And suddenly I knew what he was going to do.
I had to get to a phone. Why hadn’t I talked to the police earlier? Why had I let Mum fob them off with lies about healing and not being ready to talk?
I saw something move beside the fridge, and took a step forward, my breath catching in my throat.
23
Fox was tucked in beside the fridge, crouched over a pile of paper. He was wearing one of the white Monkey shifts, and someone had shaved his head.
‘Fox,’ I said, softly, as I approached. I noticed that he was tethered to an old pipe that ran along the wall, cable ties digging into the swollen skin of his bare ankle.
He was so thin, skin stretched so tight across his bones. His face was bruised and there was a long slash across his brow, blood clumping in his hair and angry pus weeping into his eye.
He’d been here all along. While I’d been playing blackjack and eating pillow mints. While I’d been plotting my escape. While I’d been at home, standing in the shower watching my hair swirl down the drain.
All along, Fox had been here. Suffering. Slowly slipping away into nothingness. I looked down at the paper. He was drawing Daddy, like the other Monkeys had been. Scattered around him were hundreds of pictures. All the same. All Daddy.
I hoped I wasn’t too late.
He looked up at me, his face blank. ‘Are you here to boil my bones?’
‘Fox,’ I said. ‘It’s me. It’s Ruby.’
Fox looked around. ‘Who are you talking to?’ he asked. ‘
A fox? I haven’t seen a fox.’
‘I’m talking to you. Your name is Fox.’
Fox shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not a fox. I’m a monkey.’
What had Daddy done to him?
‘Don’t you remember me?’
Fox’s mouth curved in a faint smile. ‘I had a dream about you. I have lots of dreams.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, it wasn’t a dream. It was real. I’m real.’
‘Daddy says that good dreams are never real. Only bad ones. Are you a bad dream?’
I had to free him. I had to get him out of here.
I opened drawers and cupboards until I found the pair of boltcutters I’d used to cut off Pippa’s finger. They were still crusted with dark stains. I shuddered, but grabbed them and carefully levered the blade under the cable ties around his ankle.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘It’s time to go.’
Fox looked down at his ankle, swollen and bruised where the cable ties had been. ‘Go? Where are we going?’
I remembered our long talks. Lying on our backs in the park. Holding hands under the table at the Red House. Our secret meetings after Family Time. I thought about the one rebel Monkey, drawing blue waves and yellow sand.
‘The ocean,’ I said. ‘We’re going to the ocean.’
A smile spread across Fox’s broken face, and it was all I could do to keep from bursting into tears.
‘I’ve always wanted to see the ocean,’ he said dreamily.
I wrapped his arm over my shoulder and helped him to his feet. He was so light, like a bird. I couldn’t quite believe that he was full of blood and bone and organs like me. There didn’t seem to be enough of him to be more than a papery shell.
‘I think that’s enough,’ said Daddy, from where he was standing in the doorway.
I moved quickly, putting myself between Daddy and Fox. ‘Don’t come near him,’ I said. ‘You’ve done enough damage.’
‘Not quite enough, I’m afraid,’ said Daddy. ‘I should have taken care of him a long time ago. I hoped he’d come around. See the error of his ways.’
He sighed and reached behind his back, pulling a gun from the waistband of his trousers. ‘Oh, well.’
The Boundless Sublime Page 28
