Phoebe Harkness Omnibus

by James Fahy

  “I’m always creeped out by big buildings being empty when they should be naturally full and bustling,” I muttered, more to break the silence. “It’s like breaking into your old school at night or something. I don’t know why, but just knowing that it should be brightly lit and full of people makes it worse to find it like this, so quiet.”

  Kane looked at me sidelong. “Why would you break into your school at night? Did you not have more pleasant things to do?”

  “What? Yes, but…it’s just….what kids do, don’t they?”

  “I would not have dared,” he said solemnly.

  Cloves snorted. “The big bad mafioso were-bear scared? What, was it held in the alpha’s caravan or something? I’m surprised you attended school at all.”

  “There are many things you might find surprising about me, woman,” he said quietly.

  “And I couldn’t give a shit about any of them,” she finished, walking ahead.

  Kane watched her go, then raised his hand slowly and mimed squishing her head. I smiled despite myself.

  Cloves walked toward the wide staircase, her heels clacking loudly on the floor, echoing back to us from the silence. “Well, we’re not here to play Bloody Mary or crack out an Ouija board, so calm down, Harkness. There were people here, for a while at least, after the war,” she said. “The power station was initially manned. Then it dwindled to a skeleton crew, and once we’d developed the drones, well, no one needed to be out here anymore.” She ran a gloved finger through the thick dust on the reception desk, leaving a clean line. “Would you want to?”

  “People have been here,” I said, grabbing her attention. “And recently. The dust is disturbed on the floor.”

  She looked at the tracks, leading to the staircase. “Up we go, campers.”

  I suddenly felt how very far we were from the city, from the safety of the wall, and the pretence of civilisation we retained inside it. Back in the city, you could almost fool yourself into thinking the world hadn’t ended. We surrounded ourselves with bright lights, noise. Life as usual. Out here, in the darkness and the silence, there was no escaping the truth. Was this what most of Britannia was now? A silent abandoned graveyard? Still and dusty and dead from coast to coast? The only things moving in the vastness being clicking drones and the Pale? I shivered.

  “The stairs,” I said to Kane. “I’m not trusting the elevators. I doubt they’ve been serviced for a while.”

  As we climbed through the echoing, unlit building, it became more apparent that someone had been here, had been using the old power plant for some other purpose. Cables started to appear by the second floor, newly installed and crawling haphazardly across the deserted corridors. Large generators hummed in stairwells. They were not covered in grime and dust like everything else here.

  Silently and stealthily we followed the pipes and cables upwards, following them like a trail of breadcrumbs, twining around the staircase.

  Somewhere on the third floor, I thought I heard something in the darkness and froze, shining my flashlight down a long dark corridor. I hadn’t realised how wired I was until I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  It had hardly been a noise at all. Metallic, like a spoon falling off a plate somewhere deep within the building.

  Nothing moved in the beam of my flashlight except for dust motes.

  “We’re sure there are no Pale running around in here?” I whispered to the others. “I mean, really absolutely sure?”

  “Nothing is certain,” Kane said quietly at my side. “This place feels haunted to me.”

  “Calm down you two, it was probably just a pigeon. If the Pale had got in, the drones would have taken them out already… Probably,” Cloves said. “Look, next floor up, someone’s been redecorating.”

  At the top of the next turn of the stairs, misty plastic sheeting, heavy duty stuff, the kind used to close an area off for renovation, covered the corridor. There was faint light glowing through it. The pipes and energy cables snaked up and through the sheeting. There was a low, steady hum of machinery above us, soft and somehow sleepy. What the hell was up there?

  “Great,” I said, shining my torch up there. The light bounced off the plastic, making it glow faintly. “Looks like a quarantine barrier to me. What the actual fuck is this place?”

  Something emerged from between the sheeting above us as I trained my flashlight on it, making me jump. It looked like a large robotic spider, roughly the size of a breadbox. It was silvery metal with a cluster of glowing red eyes.

  “Interesting,” Cloves said, as the thing scuttled swiftly and deftly down the stairs. “It’s just another drone. A medscanner. Recent model too.”

  I stepped aside as the thing passed us, oblivious of our presence, its many legs tinkling on the floor musically. It disappeared down one of the dark corridors, a steampunk nightmare.

  “I’ve never seen one of those,” I said. “We don’t use drones at Blue Lab.”

  “They use them at the Jenner Institute,” Cloves said, watching it go with interest. “They’re routine scanners, checking areas for contamination, that’s their only function.”

  “Contamination of what?” Kane asked dubiously in his low rumble.

  Cloves shrugged. “Whatever the boffins are working on at the time. They cure diseases over there, remember. If these drones are here too, someone brought them.”

  We pushed onwards, up to the fourth floor and tentatively through the plastic sheeting.

  The source of the light seemed to be coming from the end of one of the corridors. It was yellowish and sickly. The walls here were completely wrapped in plastic also, and it crunched beneath our feet, covering the floor. The newly-installed pipes and electric cables rolled along the corridor like an exodus of thick black snakes.

  The air was warm up here, hot even.

  “It’s like a sauna,” Cloves said, frowning as we walked slowly along.

  “There are no warning signs.” I shone my light around. “All this clean-room, quarantine stuff, but no official hazard notices like you’d expect. Whoever is doing whatever it is here, it’s a small operation. No need to control a workforce. They’ve made a secure area, everything wrapped up like this. No contaminants from the outside world getting in here, I’m guessing.”

  “Except for us,” Kane reasoned. “Do you hear that?”

  I did. The soft hum and heartbeat of machinery ahead, and beneath it, what sounded like…laboured breathing?

  I was suddenly struck with the unshakable certainty that whatever waited in the rooms at the end of this corridor, with its crinkled plastic walls and close, sticky heat, I really didn’t want to see it. An almost primal urge to turn and run fought inside me. The dusty, echoing spookiness of the power plant below us seemed infinitely preferable to continuing on. Even with its threats of the unseen Pale and creepy ass robot spider-drones scuttling all over the place.

  “I will go first,” Kane said. His hands were loose at his sides, his fingers flexing. He made to move off, but I grabbed his arm.

  “No,” I said, swallowing hard. My hair was starting to stick to the back of my neck in the moist air. “I brought us all here. I want to see, to know what the hell is happening out here. I’ll go in front.”

  I tried to tread quietly, but the crackling plastic sheeting underfoot made silence impossible. The doors at the end of the vacuum-sealed corridor were double swing doors, each with frosted windows, like at a hospital. The light poured out from them and I flicked my flashlight off as I pushed them open.

  The room beyond was unlike anything I’d seen so far. It resembled a hospital ward, one wall covered with dirty dark windows, the night outside black and blank. Power cables and wires snaked haphazardly over the floor and walls, like a tech version of Angkor Watt’s rampaging tree roots. It was even warmer in here, and I felt my shirt glue to my back. Rows of metal beds lined each wall, twelve in total. As Cloves and Kane followed me warily into the room, quiet except for the low buzz of machinery, we saw that every
bed was occupied. This was the source of the laboured breathing. There were no sheets, no pillows or blankets, nothing so humane. Each prostrate figure was lashed and bonded to a bare, thin mattress with thick, study looking restraints around their arms, legs and across their chests. It was like a horror movie asylum. They all looked either dead or very heavily sedated.

  And none of them were human.

  “What…the…holy hell…is this?” Cloves whispered.

  The inmates of this strange ward, comatose and strapped down around us, were the Pale. Twelve specimens, each grey and emaciated, all hairless and hideous. Someone had managed to obtain a dozen of the horrors. They lined the walls like the stuff of nightmare, lipless, leather-faced ghouls, with uniformly death-head grins and sharp broken teeth. The stench from their inert and filthy bodies was drowned under a sickly sweet medical scent which hung over all.

  “It’s the Pale,” I said softly. My voice was barely a whisper. I was terrified that any noise might somehow rouse them. For a moment I thought they were dead, but their laboured, hissing breaths rolled through the room, a macabre rhythmic susurrus. A chorus of the sleeping damned.

  The source of the dull yellow light, washing over everything like iodine, came from the far end of the long room. Six metal cylinders stood upright, each taller than Kane and wider than a phone box. They obscured much of the wall. The many tubes and cables we had followed snaked toward them, and occasionally they hissed softly, compressed air. Each of these large cylinders had a sizeable window, Plexiglas perhaps, and I could see they were filled within with a yellowish liquid, the source of the light. They looked like upended sensory deprivation chambers.

  Occasional bubbles would rise and gurgle from within. These bubbles moved slowly. The liquid within was thick, syrupy. There were shapes in the cylinders, large and indistinct in the misty fluid. Shadows.

  “What are those?” I asked, not really wanting to know the answer. It was hard enough dragging my eyes from the Pale all around us. “Is that…are those…people…in there?”

  Tentatively we made our way down the centre of the makeshift ward, passing between the rows of beds either side. All three of us stepping carefully over cables, trying not to touch the ancient hospital beds, as though the sedated Pale were sleeping lions. At any second I was expecting them to wake, snap their bonds, and leap, teeth snapping. Sweat rolled down the nape of my neck, feeling icy on my skin in the oppressive heat.

  I had faced the Pale once before. I had been thrown into a pit with the thing. There had only been one of them that time but it would easily have killed both me and my vampire companion had we not been lucky enough to be rescued. The three of us here would have no chance against twelve of them. It didn’t matter that Kane was a powerful Tribal. It wouldn’t make any difference if Cloves had secretly been a skilled ninja. Twelve Pale at once meant one thing. Death. Messy dreadful death. It was that simple.

  “These unlucky bastards have been…tampered with,” Cloves said in a hushed whisper as we passed between the beds. It was hard to be sure since the Pale went in for rather exuberant self-modification anyway. It was one of their many charming attributes. Most of them removed their own lips, some their own eyelids, no one knew why. But I could see what my supervisor meant. There were more precise, surgical wounds inflicted on these unwilling test-subjects. Many of them were dressed with bandages. A few seemed to be missing limbs entirely. Roughly bandaged stumps where arms or legs used to be. Someone had done this to them deliberately. “How are they under? I didn’t think it was possible to sedate them?” Cloves said.

  I had no idea. We approached the cylinders warily. The glass panel of each was frosted with beads of perspiration. They exuded the sickly heat. Tentatively I reached up and with a shaking hand wiped the glass clear. There was a body inside, suspended in the liquid. A naked female, her hair floating around her head like Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Her skin looked like yellow wax in the light. She was rotating slowly in the tube, suspended in the fluid, and as I peered within, her body… I couldn’t tell if it was alive or dead… slowly turned towards me.

  She had no face. Just a blank mask of skin.

  My blood crawled in my veins. “Cloves,” I whispered. “Look. It’s the same. It’s what we dredged from the river. Our faceless disease-host.”

  Identical to the faceless corpse which currently lay back in Blue Lab, this figure hung in its glass and steel pod like a twisted angel and surrounded on all sides by sleeping monsters.

  “This is what I smell,” Kane said, leaning in over my head. “What is that thing? It looks unfinished. An embryo.”

  Cloves looked behind us to the doors at the far end of the room. Her expression hardened. “Perhaps she can tell us,” she said.

  I looked back. A woman stood in the doorway where we had entered, the plastic-wrapped swing doors still closing softly behind us. She was dressed in a long black coat. She looked thoroughly startled to find us here.

  It was Director Coldwater.

  37.

  The director stared at us, her hands thrust into the pockets of her coat. Her eyes roamed the room slowly, her wide eyes taking in the tubes, the eldritch cylinders and the beds full of Pale on either side.

  “Well,” she said eventually, looking surprised but rallying well. Her voice was chipper as always, but there was something in her expression. She looked off guard. Certainly she hadn’t been expecting to find us here, but why was everything else in the ward making her seem so nervous. “What the devil are all of you people doing here?” She sounded more than a little flustered.

  “We could ask you the same, Director,” I said. “Surprised to see us? Where else should I be? Buried in a coffin in the wall, maybe?”

  Coldwater blinked at me as though I was insane. She was surrounded by evidence, but she looked convincingly at a loss.

  “What on earth are you talking about, Harkness?” she asked. “Where have you been all day? You didn’t show up for the meeting with…” She trailed off, noticing Kane looming beside me. “With…this chap.” She stared at Cloves. “Veronica? Explain yourself immediately. Why are you here?”

  “I’m afraid you have more to answer for right now, Director Coldwater,” Cloves said, clicking her flashlight back on, rather unnecessarily, and shining its beam in the director’s face from across the room. “What are you doing with the Pale? Why did you try to kill Harkness?” She glanced at me. “Don’t get me wrong, she annoys me too, but really…it’s an overreaction.”

  “Where is my daughter, murderer?” Kane said, stepping forward, and completely ignoring Cloves’ chain of command. “What are these things in these pods? You did something to my Tribals, you altered them. Sent them mad and set them on others. If my daughter has been harmed…”

  Coldwater raised a suede-gloved hand to silence him. “Okay, enough, just be quiet all of you, for goodness sake,” she said. “Honestly. I could have you all locked up and the key thrown away just for being here. I am a member of the board of Cabal for heaven’s sake.”

  “But you’re not calling it in,” Cloves pointed out. “Couldn’t help but notice. You don’t appear to be contacting HQ to report us. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t do that, is there? Unless, of course, you’re not supposed to be here either.”

  Coldwater’s eyes narrowed a little. It was the first time since meeting the woman I had ever seen her serene countenance falter. My boss had touched a nerve.

  “Doing a little moonlighting on the side?” Cloves asked. “Bureaucracy not interesting enough as a day job? Adding a little mad scientist to your impressive CV?”

  “What is all this for?” I interrupted, indicating the horror surrounding us. “The deaths in Portmeadow, the kidnappings of the students, and now this? The Pale and these…these things?”

  The director began to take her hand out of her pocket slowly. Kane growled at my side and she stopped. She looked us each over carefully.

  “Deaths? Kidnappings? You think they have something to
do with the work here?” she said. “Tell your Tribal to stand down; good man, I’m reaching for my phone, not a gun for goodness sake. What do you think this is, mystery theatre?”

  She took her phone from her pocket. “I don’t know what on earth has gotten into you people, but you are making no sense whatsoever. It was under my instruction that Cabal took over the investigation of the Portmeadow killings, if you recall. It was I who assigned both of you to the case, and endeavoured to build a bridge with this man here and his people. I don’t know what you are accusing me of.”

  She began to punch in numbers. “What is happening here, at the power plant, is something altogether different.” She was still looking around at the Pale. Something was amiss here. She looked shocked herself. As if she hadn’t seen this before. As if it wasn’t her own handiwork. “And yes, it is off the record,” she continued. “I have financed this project myself. I have directed funds towards it. But not for whatever sinister reason you seem to have gotten into your heads.”

  She was looking around at the Pale, strapped to their beds, and at the cylinders behind us. She still looked bewildered. “I agreed to this…research. I secured the site for him. It was all in the interests of the greater good. What in heaven’s name does that have to do with a Tribal serial killer slaughtering people in our city? You people have crossed wires.”

  “What research?” Cloves asked suspiciously. “Who are you calling?”

  Coldwater looked uneasy. “I haven’t been out here since I set up the site for him. I gave him access to anything he needed. He said…he said…it would be controlled.” She glanced at the mutilated Pale again. “Humane even. I…I don’t know what I’m looking at here.” She stared over our heads at the tubes filled with liquid, with floating bodies. “What the devil are those things?”

  “You…you mean you don’t know?” I said, dumbfounded.

  Coldwater put the phone to her ear. “Of course not. What on earth they could have to do with the cure, I cannot imagine. This is all…wrong. This is not what I agreed to.” She sniffed, composing herself. “I’m getting to the bottom of this right now. Calling me out here in the middle of the night to this godforsaken place. He said it was urgent. That there had been a breakthrough. And for what end? To find two of my own staff and a Tribal wandering around some kind of grotesque torture ward? This is…” She shook her head incredulously. “This is absolute madness.”