Ghost Electricity

by Sean Cunningham

  There was activity near the entrance of the warehouse. Bainbridge rushed out, pursued by two of his men, Bastien not far behind. Richard followed.

  An Odd’s Transport van had arrived.

  It looked like it had been through a war.

  Rob leaned on the van’s steering wheel and squinted into the early morning light. The hard-looking man who had met them at the gate to the warehouse grounds spoke to someone at the warehouse door, who vanished inside.

  He had driven the rest of the journey while Julian sat in the back of the van, knees against his chest, with what little distance he could get between him and the crate. He slept most of the way, but had woken long enough to get them onto the first Channel ferry of the morning.

  To Rob’s great surprise he had found the satnav, scratched and dented but functional, in the passenger-side foot-well. He had been starting to think he’d have to search through the service station for a map.

  He rubbed his chest. He was wearing a coat that was too heavy for the weather, but was bare-chested beneath it because Julian had run out of spare shirts. Rob’s skin was whole but tender and he kept remembering the feeling of the corruption that had spat out of Miss Koh’s corpse, the way it had eaten into his skin. Hugging the big electrical daemon had burned it out of him, but the memory of the sensation had yet to fade.

  “Julian, you awake?” Rob said.

  Julian jerked and shuddered. “I’m awake,” he said, though Rob guessed he hadn’t been.

  “Got a question for you.”

  Julian pulled himself up and knelt on the remains of the passenger seat. He rubbed his half-healed face and looked at the front of the warehouse.

  “This cargo,” Rob said, “it’s dangerous, right?”

  “Maybe.”

  “So should we be doing this?” Rob asked. “Handing over this dangerous whatever-it-is to people we don’t know, when we’ve got no idea what they’ll do with it?”

  Julian blinked slowly. “What?”

  “I mean,” Rob said, “I didn’t think anything about it yesterday. It’s the job, right? But it’s been a mind-expanding night, I don’t mind telling you. There’s shit going on I had no idea about.” He saw people emerging from the warehouse, the bull-like shape of Gordon Bainbridge leading the way. “What if they do something horrible with it? We’d have helped them do it.”

  “Like you said Rob, it’s the job.” Julian’s expression had no give in it.

  Almost a dozen people had come out of the warehouse. “Too late now anyway, yeah?”

  He climbed out of the van. Gordon Bainbridge bore down on him and shook his hand. “Glad you made it, Rob.” He smelled of burnt metal and stress sweat.

  “Pardon the unprofessional appearance, Mr Bainbridge, it’s been a night and a half.”

  “I can see that.” Gordon looked the both of them over and didn’t seem to know where to start. His eyes went to the van. “How the hell did you get onto the ferry with the van looking like that?”

  Rob was too frazzled to wonder what he should and should not tell Gordon. “Julian has this trick where he tells you something and you believe it. ‘There’s nothing wrong with our van’ or ‘You don’t need to see his driver’s licence,’ that sort of thing.”

  Gordon took in Julian’s near-dead appearance. “You one of Odd’s boys too?”

  “I am,” Julian said.

  Gordon shook his hand and Julian winced. “Good job, the both of you. I don’t mind telling you I thought it was my balls on the chopping block yesterday when I couldn’t get hold of that fucking ponce Dean.” He waved to the men behind him. “Get the trolley out here and get the materials inside.”

  “You mind me asking what it is we’ve been carrying, Mr Bainbridge?” Rob said. “What it is you’re doing with it?”

  “Confidential information, Rob, you know how it is with contracts.” There was an edge in Gordon’s voice, sharpened by fear, which warned Rob not to press further. “You boys look dead on your feet.” He took a notepad from a pocket, looked up some details on his phone and scribbled them down. “This is the hotel where I’m staying here in Paris. It isn’t much, but it’s close. I’ll give them a call and straighten out a room for you. Get some sleep before you head back to London.”

  “Appreciated, Mr Bainbridge, very much so,” Rob said, shaking his hand again.

  Gordon’s men grappled the crate onto a trolley they’d brought out of the warehouse. Julian had already climbed back into the van, too exhausted to take in any of what was happening.

  Rob got back behind the wheel. He watched the warehouse door slide shut and wondered what he’d been a part of. He wasn’t used to asking himself that kind of question.

  He shrugged it off as tiredness, grabbed the scratched satnav and programmed in the address for Gordon Bainbridge’s hotel.

  Rob’s phone rang just as he pulled the van up in front of the hotel, La Villa de la Forêt, a roadside affair meant for those who were either just passing through or couldn’t afford accommodation closer in to the heart of Paris. He didn’t think it saw many tourists. Gordon Bainbridge’s phone call had smoothed things over in reception so, despite his appearance, Rob was given a room key without any trouble.

  Vincent Argyle’s number flashed up on Rob’s phone. He tried to put himself in the right frame of mind to lie if he had to, because Vincent Argyle was a stickler for punctuality and the English Channel lay between Rob and being on time for work.

  “Good morning Mr Argyle.”

  “Good morning Robert,” Vincent said. “I’ve just spoken on the phone with Gordon Bainbridge. He had many good things to say about you.”

  “Glad to hear it.” The part of Rob that had tensed up when he saw Vincent’s number relaxed.

  “Is Julian with you?”

  Julian was curled up in the back of the van again and had managed, Rob saw, to fall asleep even on the corrugated metal floor. “Out like a light, but here, yes.”

  “Good work to the both of you,” Vincent said. “No need to try and make it into the office today, Rob. We’ll see you both Monday.”

  “Thanks,” Rob said. “Julian, you awake?”

  Julian twitched and stirred.

  “That was the boss,” Rob said. “We’ve got the day off and we’re not fired.”

  Chapter 23 – Fiona and Jessica, Friday

  Fiona, hunched over tea and toast in the dining room of Flat 2 Hawthorn House, looked up at a glassy rattle and the sound of displaced air.

  Mr Beak was perched on the back of one of the dining room chairs. His claws drew light lines in the varnished wood.

  She lifted her head. “Where did you come from? I thought I was home alone.” It was early afternoon. Her mother had the afternoon-evening shift and Jessica was at school.

  Mr Beak scratched his way along the back of the chair. “Don’t know why you’d think you know anything about anything, lady, what with the job Jessica and the tortoise think’s been done on your head wiring.”

  “What are you anyway?”

  “I’m a bird onto a good thing,” Mr Beak said. “What about you? Do you know what you are?”

  She almost snapped at him, but she heard footsteps the stairs. I searched the house! She’d wandered aimlessly through every room in Flat 2 before coming down to make tea. The entire house! She stood up, wondering if she was in danger. Mr Beak didn’t look worried, but he struck her as someone who played it cool.

  Jessica bounced into the room and grinned at Fiona. “Finally awake. I’ve got so much to show you. Come on.”

  “Where were you?” Fiona asked. “The damned house was damned empty ten minutes ago.”

  Jessica grabbed her hand and dragged her through the kitchen. “I’ll show you.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at school?”

  “Too busy,” Jessica said. “Mr Beak called the school office for me. He can do Mum’s voice.”

  Fiona shot a look over her shoulder. The glass raven looked extremely pleased with him
self.

  On the upstairs landing, Jessica said, “Now you have to close your eyes.”

  “This is no time for games.”

  Jessica heaved a great, put-upon sigh. “Just close your eyes and let me lead you by the hand. All right? There isn’t even any point in explaining it because you won’t get it. You just need to see it.”

  Swallowing her resentment only because she wanted to know what Jessica had found, Fiona closed her eyes and allowed herself to be pulled forward.

  “There’s a step here right in front of your foot.”

  “We’re not at the steps,” Fiona said. “And we just came upstairs.”

  “It’s a step up.”

  Fiona frowned and inched her foot forward. Her toes struck a vertical carpet surface where there shouldn’t be one. She put her right foot on the step, then her left foot on the next one up.

  When they had climbed five steps, Jessica said, “You can open your eyes now.”

  They stood partway up a stairway, a stairway Fiona was sure hadn’t been there only moments ago. It was the stairway to –

  “The loft,” she said. “How could I forget we have a loft?”

  “Easy,” Jessica said. She ran upstairs.

  Fiona didn’t follow straight away. She thought she had done a reasonable job, all things considered, of keeping it together. She didn’t know for sure who she really was, a thought she had done well to step around. The world around her kept unfolding to include things that had not been real for her only last week.

  But it was a little too much to find the world wasn’t as it seemed even here in her own home.

  Just a little too much.

  Jessica’s head appeared over the top of the stairs. “Do you want to know what I found out or not?”

  Fiona took a breath. “I’m coming.”

  Jessica had converted the loft into a workshop. It was nothing like her bedroom downstairs, which featured a lot of pink, several large fluffy bears and an acrylic painting of one of Ealing’s churches that Fiona had always thought was rather well done for a girl who had then been nine years old. The loft was crowded with machine parts, electrical coils and cables, several crystals that reminded her of the ones in the rings Damon and the Tonno brothers wore, a laptop with a pink case and a large mechanical tortoise.

  “Hello, Miss Fiona,” the tortoise said.

  “Hi,” Fiona replied. “I suppose you’re Mr Shell then.”

  The tortoise bowed his head with a whir of gears. “I am pleased to meet you, Miss Fiona.”

  “Did you make these?” Fiona asked.

  “Oh no, I just fixed them up,” Jessica said. She dropped onto an old, patched couch and fired up her laptop. “Come and look at this.”

  Fiona sat down gingerly. Jessica hunched over her laptop and Fiona saw her bringing up documents she’d filed under Pretend Big Sister, which did nothing helpful to her temper.

  “You’re the one who hid the loft, aren’t you?” Fiona asked. “You made us forget.”

  “I made you not notice it,” Jessica said. “It’s really simple, actually. Just a single-tone psychic projection from a psycho-active crystal, powered by another flux crystal. I’m way past that sort of stuff now.”

  “You tampered with my memory too.”

  Jessica rolled her eyes. “You did most of the work. All I did was make you think there wasn’t a loft. Your own brain shut all the memories off. I think what they did to us was kind of the same.” She waved her skinny arms around. “Whoever they are, they stuck your face over the real Fiona’s in our memories and papered over the memory of her dying too. Our brains smoothed out all the edges themselves.”

  “But not yours,” Fiona said. She tried to ignore the real Fiona barb, but it was getting more difficult.

  “Oh it worked on me, like I said before. But once I isolated the loft, I started to see the rough edges. What I did up here messed with what they did in here.” She tapped the side of her head.

  “Tell me what you found,” Fiona said. “I want to know who did this to me.”

  Jessica grinned and shifted in her seat. “I was thinking too narrow, you see. At first I thought to myself maybe you weren’t from here so I’d have to start looking at missing persons reports from all over the world.”

  “But I have an English accent.”

  “So what?” Jessica said. “I mean sure, for me it’s just a little memory adjustment, but for you they had to wipe out a whole life and put another one over the top of it. Much harder. I think an accent change isn’t going to be a big deal to people who can do that.”

  “Fine,” Fiona said. “Fine. I might not be British.”

  “You’re not. You’re Canadian.”

  Fiona pinched the bridge of her nose. “I suppose that could be worse.”

  “That wasn’t all, though,” Jessica said. “Even when I widened my search physically, I still couldn’t find you.”

  “But you just said I’m –”

  “Yeah yeah, but I had to do one more thing to find you and this is the really weird part,” Jessica said. “I started out by limiting my searches to about two or three years ago. It took me a lot longer to find you once I took that search condition off, but once I did, there you were.”

  She opened one of the files in the Pretend Big Sister folder and swivelled the laptop. Fiona saw a black and white newspaper-quality photo of herself beneath a Toronto Star page banner. She was as she had seen herself in the dream: fourteen, a different hairstyle and the intense awkwardness of adolescence.

  Next to her picture was another one of a man in his forties. His hair was thinning and there were two faint marks on his nose from glasses, though he wasn’t wearing them. He smiled, but he looked tired.

  Beneath the two pictures was a caption that finally put the lie to the person she knew as Fiona Kendall.

  MURDERED: BARRY WILSON. MISSING: DAUGHTER LUCY.

  Across the room, displayed prominently above a work bench, hung a photo of Amelia, the original Fiona, Jessica and Jessica’s father, Peter. There were no photos of Peter downstairs. Amelia had done her best to remove all traces of her failed second marriage.

  Fiona had a similar photo in her room, hidden away in an old shoe box, but it had Amelia’s first husband Jared in it. She hadn’t taken it out for a long time because she didn’t like to think about the new, unconnected life her father had built for himself away from his ex-wife and daughter.

  She had wanted to push Jared out of her heart for a long time, furious with him for daring to damage his own daughter by telling her she wasn’t good enough to be part of his life. Now she could just let him go. He was still scum for doing it, but he had broken the heart of another little girl, not her.

  She looked down at the photo of Barry. It was easy to see kindness in that self-effacing smile and imagine that the tiredness in his eyes came from raising a teenage girl alone.

  Fiona started. “What about my real mother?”

  “I can’t find anything about her,” Jessica said. “There’s not much to go on except this news article. Have you looked at the date?”

  “The date?” Fiona’s gaze darted around the screen until she found the date. Her brain made an effort to rebel at what she saw, but the date on the screen refused to change. “That’s impossible.”

  “Isn’t it?” Jessica said, bouncing up and down in her seat. “You look great for your age, you know.”

  The newspaper article was dated forty-one years previously.

  They crossed the city on the Underground and took a National Rail service out of London Bridge. The afternoon was drawing down and the trains were filling up with evening commuters, but Jessica pulled what looked like a flashlight from her bag, shone it in peoples’ eyes and got them both seats. Fiona didn’t comment.

  The light from the flashlight reminded her of stones and a choir of thirteen, a set of associations she found more than a little peculiar, but disregarded on the basis that she had far more peculiar things on her mind.r />
  The train hummed out of London Bridge, heading to Sevenoaks and the place to which Jessica had traced the money that fed into Fiona’s bank account. Jessica consulted her phone as they rattled and clattered south-east. Fiona saw that the phone bore small signs that Jessica had modified it. Given what she’d done to the flashlight, Fiona supposed might mean she could use it to listen in on phone calls to Buckingham Palace.

  “Mr Shell says our target is still at home,” Jessica said. Text in different fonts scrolled down her phone’s screen. Fiona glanced over and saw the mechanical tortoise’s words appear in a cursive script. “What do you think that’s like, working from home?”

  “You seem to be doing it already,” Fiona said.

  Jessica giggled. “Beats going to school. Why should I learn basic geometry when I’m already doing aetheric calculus?”

  “There’s that, I suppose.” Fiona wondered what aetheric calculus was and whether or not she’d been taught it, along with being taught how to dream.

  “Am I supposed to call you Lucy now?” Jessica asked.

  Fiona shuffled her boots. “I don’t know, Jess. I’ve been thinking about it. Well, that’s not true, I’ve mostly avoided thinking about it. Lucy Wilson hasn’t been a real person to me yet.”

  “Is she now?”

  She thought about the weary-looking man, the father she had no memory of. “No, not yet. Anyway, what you found doesn’t make sense. I can’t be that old. I’ll keep Fiona for now.”

  “Oh.” Jessica went back to her own thoughts.

  The train pulled into a stop, though it wasn’t their destination. Fiona said, “Is that a problem?”

  Jessica shrugged. “No, I guess not. It’s not like it’s your fault this happened.”

  As far as you know, Fiona thought. “You know, you didn’t have to come. You could have watched from home through that scope thing you showed me. This could be dangerous.”

  “If we find the people who did this to us it’ll be dangerous all right,” Jessica said, her eyes blazing. “How dare they think they can replace my sister like this?”