Both of them were smiling at the camera. Him with that crooked grin of his; hers with a face that was all pretend. Doctor Penhaligan – or anybody else who worked there – might not have noticed it, but she could see instantly. It was so apparent, even though it was all these years later and she couldn’t remember that photo being taken. Couldn’t remember – or even imagine – even wanting to be so close to Doctor Penhaligan. That smile was her fake grin, too forced at the cheeks. The grin she gave men she didn’t like when they tried to chat her up. No warmth visible in it whatsoever.
Doctor Penhaligan’s voice continued to purr. “Richie Clements wanted to make himself useful to the power he believed in. To a force much older and more primal than any god you could care to name. What he thought that use would be, I don’t know. But as it turned out, it was to die horribly mere feet away from you.
“It was the shock to the system you evidently needed. The very fact of being so close to his painful and violent demise woke up what has been too long dormant within you. The fact that he died in front of you, the fact that he too – although in a much more minor way – was connected to this incredible force, took you to a place where, no matter how much your conscious mind wanted to ignore it, you couldn’t hide your own nature anymore.”
With a whirr and a click, the photo changed. No longer did she have to look at the creepy snap of her and the doctor; instead it was another close-up of death. Richie Clement lying on the ground where he’d fallen at Cheam Cross, shards of bloody glass around his body. Fortunately the profile he gave the camera was his good one, but still she felt her legs tremble.
She told herself that all she was feeling on seeing it was surprise. Obviously she’d been there as it happened, seen the reality and must now – surely – be in some way immune to the shock. (Besides, she’d already been forced to face greater horrors since being trapped in this office.) Absolutely she did her best to tell herself that she didn’t get any pleasure from it, that there was no twinge of excitement in her at seeing it again.
That gleeful feeling wasn’t part of her, she didn’t want it to be part of her. And yet it was so close she could touch it.
“I wish I had you wired up to my machines right now, Alice,” Doctor Penhaligan smoothly told her. “So I could monitor your pulse and your blood pressure and see how you are genuinely responding. As I think you are more aware of what’s going on than you have been a long time. And I wish that I could see – behind your admirably placid expression – what you really make of it.
“There is something all around us, Alice. There is a force which surrounds all of mankind. It is all the aggression and the violence and the hatred and the fear made into one large intangible force. Most human beings are totally ignorant of its existence. It’s the power that the war-mongers tap into, whether they are conscious of it or not. But no one can really communicate with it, Alice. No one apart from you.
“It is The Marscht, Alice. And it is yours.”
From somewhere deep within herself, there was a dreadfully triumphant roar. It was hers. Even as it scared her and thrilled her in equal measure, she knew it was hers.
Chapter Fifteen
Her jaw raised, with little sign of any tremble or weakness now. Moving slowly, she used her free hand to deliberately wipe any trace of tears from her eyes. As calm as her voice had sounded in what seemed like a long while, although a little hoarse, she stared up at a pin-hole, most likely the nearest camera.
“What is it?” she asked.
It wasn’t just the memories of the woods she had now – the way the trees had looked in that shaded darkness, or the damp of the leaves – she also had the sensation of what it felt like when she called that fog around her. An overwhelming feeling, a sense of knowledge that was almost impossible to articulate. This thing, whatever it was, was something impossibly old. Something primal. It was an entity which was formless, that existed in the air around the entire planet, and yet it had found shape in her. She could feel it within her. It had always been there, part of her tucked away.
No, that wasn’t quite right. Words were almost useless when it came to describing this creature. It wasn’t inside her, but she could feel its tentacles somewhere in her gut. She, alone of possibly anyone on the planet, could feel it with an intensity that burned. Somehow she could communicate with it; be with it as one. It impacted the lives of everyone else on Earth, but they carried on their everyday life without ever knowing it was there. Or if they suspected it was there, they had no way to prove it, no way they could feel it beyond a vague sensation. She – Alice Whitstable, orphan of Fallowford – could not only feel it was there, she could communicate with it.
It was an entity which swirled around every being under the sun, and yet they were all so oblivious of its existence. But for her, well, she knew it intimately. The realisation of that came to her in a single second and – strangely – didn’t scare her at all.
This impossible thing made up a part of every person who had lived. Every act of violence ever committed had happened partly in its name. It was an invisible force, some kind of god. And she not only knew about it now, it undoubtedly knew about her.
Within her, above her, beyond any imaginings her conscious mind could properly bend itself to, she nevertheless understood that this thing was part of her. That it wanted to communicate with her; to protect her.
The knife tightened in her hand and she tried not to smile.
Doctor Penhaligan hadn’t realised yet how insignificant she now considered him. His smug voice was still talking:
“The ancient Germanic tribes had a word for it. It was something of a god to them. They called it The Marscht.”
That word again. It wasn’t that Richie Clement couldn’t speak which made his final message unintelligible. The creature had used that moment of violence (all moments of violence belonged to the creature) to reach out to her. To remind her that it was there.
It wasn’t just echoes of that bloody moment with Paul long ago which filled up her dreams. Instead it was that sleeping part of her which knew the creature – which was wedded to this vast entity – calling out again and again.
They had been separate too long.
Still though, she couldn’t put into language what she now felt. She comprehended that this thing was all around her, but couldn’t explain just what that meant. So she had to ask the question. Demand an answer from the bastard.
“What. Is. It?”
Uncharacteristically, Doctor Penhaligan – a man who clearly loved his own voice – fell silent. She wondered if it was because he suspected that she already knew more about it than he did.
Slowly circling on the spot again, she stared around this enlarged room. Her eyes not only getting used to the darkness, but seeing beyond it.
She barely noticed the click and whirr of the projector. Slide after slide still clicking into place. Whatever happy photos existed of her and her mother, of her and her brother, of the three of them together, had clearly been located by this clinic. There she was on her mother’s lap being cuddled; there was her and her brother in matching jumpers with identical grins; there were the three of them sitting on a beach, each eating a big swirly ice cream. Alice stared at them, not even half remembering these memories of them altogether. They were flashes of some blissful past that she barely believed existed. Her mother had been uncaring, she had been neglectful. She may have been scarred herself, but she seemed determined to pass those scars on.
With each fresh black and white image – each whirr and click – the hatred within her rose.
It was passionate loathing, far more intense than anything she’d ever felt. Those photos weren’t lies, she could believe that they’d actually been taken and weren’t doctored – but they made the past a lie. Her and Paul and Mummy all holding up pop bottles and staring at the camera. That wasn’t her childhood. It might have happened once the entire time she was in her mother’s care. Mostly her mother was too drunk or hungover to care a
bout the kids. Or Alice and Paul were in the way because there was a man around, pawing her, and she didn’t even want to be reminded she had bloody kids.
Who actually took those photos of the three of them? Who made up the fourth of the party? Her mother, to the best of her knowledge, never had a camera, so whose camera was it? The spite and disgust rose in her throat as she thought of her mother, as she imagined the men who were always around, as she remembered – a true memory, not a photographic lie – how unhappy she and Paul always were.
She’d thought that she had loved her mother. In her head she’d told herself repeatedly that – despite everything – her mother was someone she had loved. Given that Alice had barely known her, had never talked to her on anything like adult terms, who knew what terrible things had happened to her to make her do what she did? All the way through her life, Alice’s mind had filled with excuses. Trying to justify her mother leaving her the way she did. But right then, every one of those flimsy explanations was blown away. At that moment, all she could feel was rage. A disgust that made her wish she could find her mother alive, just so she could kill her all over again.
It was a feeling which consumed, which bubbled away so intensely inside it seemed to boil her innards. The knife was a deadly weapon in her hand, ready to use, ready to get some kind of primal justice. She nearly screamed a battle cry, such was the spinning tumult of her feelings.
But then the photos went backwards, slipping through time so far that Alice and Paul weren’t there anymore.
Instead there was a pretty teenage girl in pigtails and a 1950s plaid shirt. She had straw-like hair, a wide nose and a clear, unyielding gaze. And she was grinning at the camera so hopeful and so pretty. It was her mother, yet not the way she had known her mother – beaten down and cynical and devoid of hope. No, this was a version who stared at the world with promise. A girl who’d clearly believed in good things.
There was part of Alice – a huge well of unfettered fury – which nearly made her spring towards the screen and slash at the image. As if she could destroy her mother all over again. Somehow though, she managed to restrain herself. Alice’s mouth opened, but there was no battle cry. Instead she gave a short and sad sigh,
Despite her rapidly beating heart and the temperature of her blood and her keeping that knife tight in hand, she stepped back and away from the photo.
“Your mother was an orphan,” Penhaligan told her. “Much like you I suppose. But despite the poverty of her birth – a father who abandoned her before she even let out a cried gasp of air, and a mother dogged by ill health – she was a lucky orphan. She was lucky in that she came to the attention of The Butterfly Clinic. There were no more care homes for her. No more sleeping a hundred to a dormitory. Instead of being one of many, she came here and had her own room, her own space. She had respect. And when she was under my care – and under the care of everyone here – she had the chance to feel and experience something that no one else ever would.
“We needed test subjects. Children were always going to be the best. Those who struggled with anger, but were able to put that anger into words. So that it wasn’t just an inchoate feeling, it was something they could master, turn to their own use. At a young age they had determined how to make their anger work for them, learned how to shape it. We visited so many care homes, Alice, and saw so many children. We found only eight in the entire country – a country ravaged by loss and war – who possessed the ability we needed. Four boys and four girls, ranging from ten to fifteen years old. They were all brought here to try and prove the impossible. To find that impossible – which so many serious minds doubted even existed – and make it ours.
“Your mother was the star pupil, Alice. The drug we had was experimental, we had no idea whether it would work. However, after a few weeks of treatment, your mother proved that not only did it work, but all our research, all the legends we had pored over, had a basis in fact. A fact that was much bigger than any of us. A fact which, thanks to your blessed mother, could be the British government’s to use.”
“The Marscht.” Alice revelled in the sound of the word.
Penhaligan coughed politely into his microphone, as if he was telling a bedtime story and didn’t want to disturb his sleepy charge.
“It was not long after Hitler, not long after a time of total war. And what we were trying to do was give ourselves – give this country – an advantage. After the war there was the atom bomb, there was The Cold War and an advantage was still desperately needed.” Penhaligan took a deep breath. “There are some who claim to be disgusted about what we did here, revolted that we carried out our research – our experiments – on innocent children. But I maintain that what we did was in the national interest. We were on the side of right and we had to make sure our side won.
“Marscht is to some a god, to others he’s a vengeful spirit. You can feel it now, can’t you?” His voice could barely contain his excitement and the lights seemed to flicker with unholy giddiness as well. “You might now be able to explain it in clearer terms than I ever could. But given how I understand it, it is every negative thought and every dark emotion given a huge and limitless consciousness. Who knows? Maybe it is the cause of these negative feelings, and we’d have lived thousands of years in peace without it. Or possibly, it simply amplifies what human beings are already inclined to do. Whichever, at times of war, or battle, or despotism, Marscht is the force which comes to the forefront of every person’s mind. An unspeakable power that presses down with hate, but also feeds itself with the hate that is generated. It drives us into conflict, revels in it. But what would happen if we had some kind of control over it?
“That’s what we were trying to do here. We were attempting to control it, to bend it to our will. And once we did that, we would bring it to our side. Use this incredible force in Britain’s interests, and take the upper hand in any war we found ourselves involved in.”
Alice’s eyes were wide, but she stood still and upright, listening to every word. She didn’t think she was imagining it anymore, there was something quivering inside her.
Pride mixed with excitement in Penhaligan’s voice now. “Of all our subjects, your mother was the one with the most ability, the one who got us closer to our aim. She could communicate with The Marscht. She couldn’t control it, but she could speak to it some way. We had a path ahead. There was a road we could follow. But then she fell pregnant with you and your brother and everything changed.
“I’m afraid I don’t know who your father is.” He sighed. “There’s a chance that it could have been one of the other subjects, which would be exciting; or one of the other doctors, which would be sad. We’ll probably never know. As soon as your mother found out, she tried to run away. Disappeared from us. We found her, of course, kept her here and monitored her through her pregnancy. She was valuable to us, we cared for her, and so we did all we could for her. And I am so proud that I was there to deliver you and your brother.
“But after you were born…” With a choke his voice trailed off. “She was helped by misguided souls, Alice. People here who thought this wasn’t a place for innocent babies. Who didn’t like the fact that we were monitoring you – when obviously it made perfect sense to monitor you, to lavish our attentions upon you. So they allowed your mother and the two of you to flee and that was a terrible turn of events for all parties. Lord knows what your mother’s life was like out there in the wilds, after her childhood here. I understand that it wasn’t good. I know from her final letter to me that The Marscht never let go of her as its conduit. She always felt that darkness. But because she was separated from us, she had no way to embrace it.
“We didn’t find you all again until she died. And by then the only thing we had was you children. We tried our best with you, Alice, we really did. It was unfortunate what happened with your brother. More than anything we wanted you to get along, to work in tandem. We hoped one would become dominant, not that one of you would die. There’s no way we wanted
that, of course not. After that, well, it was tragedy piled onto tragedy. New pointy nosed civil servants, new oversight, charged in with their jackboots and took you away from us. It was horrible. What if you had fared no better than your poor mother?
“But now, after all these years, you’ve come back to us! And you can feel it within you, can’t you? The Marscht is there!”
She could and it filled her; rage bubbled within her. Her mother’s youthful face had calmed the savageness of her mood, stilled her for a couple of minutes. But now she thought again of her dreadful childhood – all her hurt and loneliness. Mixed in was the realisation of what an ignored or patronised adult she was. How even when she’d come here for help, rather than simply talk to her, they’d trapped her in this damn room.
That sensation of being one with The Marscht bubbled and burned within her.
Alice threw her head back and howled at the top of her voice.
Chapter Sixteen
She screamed and it was as if the walls shook. Like every molecule in her vicinity vibrated at once. The world around her was jarred suddenly, and briefly, into a different reality, and she was responsible for it.
Alice’s mouth closed shut just as swiftly as it had exploded with noise, falling completely silent. With the sound of her heart beating through her ears, she let her face drop back to passive. But of course she was pondering.
The walls had shaken – she was sure of that – but when she stared at them again, they seemed as solid as before.
Once more she moved on the spot. Ignoring any photos which might now drop into her view, avoiding anything else that might distract her – instead she concentrated on her new faculties. The new things she could feel and sense and, even in some strange way, touch through the air around her.
Doctor Penhaligan was right, she wasn’t alone now. She could feel The Marscht (if that’s what it was really called) everywhere. It was all around her, consuming her. She hadn’t known about it before today, yet now it seemed as vital a part of her as the oxygen in her lungs.
Certain Danger Page 8
