Sin (32 page)

I could do that. Except I
couldn't, could I? I didn't know how. And besides that, whatever
he'd done, I put myself under his 'care' to stop myself doing
precisely that. I wasn't him, and I wasn't going to let myself
become him. Well, if I could help it anyway. Best intentions were
better than none at all, weren't they?

Joy? She'd already proven she
could read my mind, so I didn't feel the need to shout out loud.
Luckily. I'm sure I would have found that a good number of others
had suddenly changed their names to Joy and I'd be surrounded by
all manner of people who really didn't bear any resemblance to my
sister. I called out mentally, hoping the sound would carry through
the skull and veins and flesh to seek her out wherever she might be
hiding. I listened to the sound of my voice as it echoed around in
my head. I couldn't tell whether it was still rattling around the
confines of my bonce or was out there running around free, playing
hide and seek. I wished for the latter but expected the former.
Nonetheless, I called out again.

I was greeted by silence. Ok,
perhaps the feelings of abandonment hadn't completely left me.
Perhaps they, along with Joy, were simply hiding in the shadows,
peeking out when I wasn't looking, waiting to run up and whack me
over the head.

I remember once my mum hit me on
the back of my head with a roll of kitchen foil. I'd been messing
about having a laugh - pretending to be a bee, I think, making
silly buzzing noises around her. She hit me a touch too forcefully
and apologised "I didn't mean to come so hard..." It took a good
while for us to stop falling about laughing, and for me to stop
feeling horrified that my own mother knew such a phrase. It was one
of the few times when the sound of laughter echoed around the
house. And afterwards it did seem to echo, fading into the
emptiness that was the house's normal psyche.

That moment, that few seconds of
hysteria (probably more profound because of its usual absence), was
genuinely funny, even if it was in a you-had-to-be-there kind of
way. This wasn't funny. Not even in a having-to-be-there kind of
way. In fact this was a having-
not
-to-be-there moment! Well,
maybe there was some dark humour to be scavenged from me finding
myself lounging on the tongue of Pinocchio's whale, especially as
I'd brought myself here. I didn't really see it though. I just
needed to find the kindling to get it to spit me out.

Anyone got a match I could
borrow?

Didn't think so.

Right. Sort this. That was the
plan. Not the same kind of plan that the A-Team's Hannibal loved to
come together, but perhaps one Howlin' Mad Murdoch would have been
happy with. Joy or no joy, that was the question. Right now, the
answer was no Joy, so no joy. I felt as if I'd become, in a very
short time, reliant on my sister. Perhaps her sudden disappearance
was a good thing. Perhaps this would be the making of me. As long
as it didn't make me into either a mass murderer (ignoring my past)
or a corpse, then I guess I could be happy. If I could figure out
what happy was. No. Turn my frown upside down. At the least into a
grimace, if nothing else.

I shouted out again in my head.
Less a (mental) gob open yell than raising my voice and calling.
She had buggered off. Whether she'd ran away or thought of
something more pressing than her brother's impending death and
destruction was up to her. I was on my own, and though I wasn't my
first choice for company, I was all I had.

Go Team Me.

Give me an 'S!'

Give me an 'I!'

Give me an 'N!'

What have you got?

Good question. About time we
found out.

Joy wasn't answering my calls.
Maybe she was doing some supernatural version of call screening and
hadn't bothered to turn on the answering machine. She'd said, about
a million years ago, that a storm was coming. Up until moments ago
I'd assumed she was going to be my umbrella. Well, hey-hey-hey, if
I was going to get wet, or even swept away by the downpour, then so
be it.

I looked up at the sky. The
stars stared back down. I wondered if they could see me; if they
were like the Norse gods; Zeus or Odin (mixing my deities) looking
down, moving me like a chess piece. Sin to Queen's Bishop One. It
sounded like a radio call to my backup team of Navy Seals. Well
they were probably down the club having a party. They wouldn't be
answering. And the stars may as well sit back and enjoy the show. I
was going to figure out Checkmate in as few moves as possible even
if it killed me.

Hmmm..... Anyone fancy a game of
draughts or snakes and ladders? Kerplunk? Russian Roulette?

Star light, star bright, why
does it have to be so shite?

Where to start? I didn't know
whether to try and get out of the nursery and make my way back home
- either by foot or attempted teleportation - or to go and find out
what Dr. Connors was really up to. Gather my thoughts or plough in
recklessly? I was never one for recklessness really, much
preferring the more measured approach. I'd think before acting
rather than wading in all guns a-blazing. I would have betted on
being hit by any stray bullets in any shoot-out that may have
resulted, and that was the case here. I knew something had to be
done. But I also knew I might, or rather would, get hurt in the
meantime.

It's strange how things can
spiral out of control. A simple suicide attempt had morphed into
murder and experimentation and fear. Yes I was afraid. Who wouldn't
be? If you knew Jack the Ripper was hunting you down, you'd be
clenching your buttocks quite a bit, reaching for the Kleenex. If
Crippen was creeping around, you'd most likely want to take a
shower rather than a bath, preferring Bates’ knife to Crippen’s
acid. Not that I knew whether Connors was in the lofty leagues of
such serious slaughterers, but I wouldn't be surprised if he
aspired to be reworked in wax and displayed amongst the killers,
politicians and other monsters that populated Tussauds' darker
domains. Why couldn't I have a better hold on the situation though?
If my suicide had worked, would Jeremy still be alive? Would it
have stopped Connors in his tracks, Lady-esque? Would the world
have kept on turning, oblivious to the sudden lack of me? Would
Thor have thrown his hammer out of the pram for losing a pawn?
Chaos had spun its spidery web around me and caught me in its trap.
And now it was pulling off my legs one at a time and snacking on
me. Finger licking good.

If only I could - if only I
dared
- toss a coin. Head you win, tails I lose. Flip and
catch. Once upon a time that would have been so easy. Once upon a
time the coin was leaving my hand and spinning through the air
before I knew it had even left my pocket. Once upon a time little
girls followed white rabbits down holes in the ground while witches
hid out in gingerbread houses. Rats danced the conga behind pipers
piping and wolves slept soundly in Grandma's bed. And, my, what big
eyes they had. Oh, and ghosts haunted their lunatic brothers, and
windows into the past existed amongst the hills.

Oh yeah, that wasn't once upon a
time. That was once upon a yesterday.

It had been quite some time
since I'd had any cash in my pockets, much like the Queen. But,
unlike Her Majesty, I didn't actually have any pockets. Given my
previous experiences with certain coinage, I wasn't too eager to
have a pocket full of shrapnel - mainly because shrapnel of other
kinds was usually involved. Even if I wanted to
flippy-flop-catchy-monkey, I couldn't. For me, it wasn't a case of
money burning a hole in my pocket; it was a case of money burning
the whole of the world.

Should I stay or should I go
now. If I went would I be followed? Either way there would be
trouble. My secret hidey-hole that was my parent's house had been
discovered so I assumed nowhere was safe. Had that information been
siphoned out of me during one of my sessions with Connors? Who knew
what else he might have drugged out of me. Well, the Doctor knew,
of course. He probably even knew that I like my bacon crispy and my
boxers fitted. Home was definitely out then. But if he knew things
that I didn't even know I knew then how did I know what I knew
myself?

Erm...

I'd begun to rant with myself.
My mind was spinning out of control, trying to catch up with the
situation itself. I didn't know which would win the race, but it
was fast becoming obvious that I'd be the one who lost.

Right. Walk out of here and
figure this out or stay and...

Voices.

Poo.

* * * *

Typical, wasn't it. For six days
out of seven, this building was deserted. Apart from the mist of a
hundred water jets and the occasional buzz of an insect meandering
amongst the plants, this was as quiet as a mausoleum. And I had to
bring us - or rather, right now, myself - here right at the time
that Glenn Rafferty, of Rafferty's Garden Services ("No tree too
tall nor root too deep, your garden perfect we shall keep"), was
being escorted in for his weekly spruce up. He knew his stuff, did
Glenn, but then he had been in the business for so many years he
may well have pruned the Eden’s Tree of Life. The nursery wasn't a
window box by any means and it would normally take a whole heap of
tendering to keep it from wilting and dying. Glenn Rafferty
literally did have green fingers, in the way a hundred a day smoker
has fingers the colour of mustard dipped in pepper. He was so in
tune with plants I wouldn't be surprised if he had conversations
with them and understood when they spoke back. He probably even
went down the pub on a Friday evening for a game of dominoes with
the rhododendrons and a pint of bitter. I assumed rhododendrons
drank pints, not halves - they were thirsty plants after all.

Glenn was an OK guy. He was nice
in a wholesome, genial way. He'd had a lifetime of caring, and it
reflected in his demeanour - a gentleness that could calm, perhaps,
even an Audrey II.

But the patients of the
institute scared the gladioli out of him. Pure and simple. In his
bag, along with his gloves and secateurs, was most likely a roll of
toilet paper in case a freako-psycho-sicko might jump out and eat
his head. Or say "Hi," or something equally horrific. He'd fill his
pants faster than my dad could down a shot of whiskey. His fears
were entirely irrational. I could only think of one patient who had
professed to be a cannibal, and he thought he was a dog, so he ate
pooch rather than person. Any other patients were normally in such
a state of doped-up dormancy that Glenn had more to fear from a
Venus fly trap than Fido Freddy. Of course if said fly trap turned
out to want to drink his blood and burst into song, thinking his
name was Seymour, we all had a problem.

If Glenn Rafferty, of Rafferty's
Garden Services (You grow it, we'll mow it - he had at least a
dozen different business cards, each with their own little
'humorous' - or ‘humerus’ in his case - ditty) were to walk in and
see me, he'd scream like a banshee and spray me with weed killer,
before running for his life. It had happened. A patient, I forget
who, had fallen asleep by the indoor (not that there was an outdoor
here) rockery and water feature after a visit from the local mayor.
A simple newspaper, care in the community, propaganda-fest. The
most docile residents had been allowed to wander - almost freely -
around the nursery, and the staff was informed to keep them
gainfully occupied in play-gardening. No trowels or flora were to
be hurt, or used, in the making of this nonsense. After the mayor,
his entourage and the journalist-cum-photographer had left, Glenn
was brought in to undo any damage that the show-patients had
caused. It was, to be honest, minimal. A few shrubs and bulbs had
been pulled out, and someone had urinated in the fountain - which
was understandable as they'd seen the little boy stood in the
middle doing exactly the same. If they'd defecated it would have
been another matter, but at least the gardener would have been
along with his toilet roll to sort it out. In this case, he'd
walked in, escorted as ever by an orderly, the orderly had left him
to it, he'd discovered the sleeping beauty in the rockery, and his
scream could have shattered glass. Even an aged set of lungs can
reach the dizzy decibels of a scream when pushed, and Glenn's could
pop an eardrum at twenty paces.

Since that fateful day, he'd
refused to enter unless the orderly went in first and looked
around. Initially, this happened. The orderly, especially if it
happened to be Jeremy... oh God, Jeremy... erm... yes... especially
Jeremy, would go up and down the aisles, in and out the
greenhouses. Thorough. Not because, except for Jezzer, they were
conscientious, but more so that they didn't want to calm down a
whole ward of agitated patients who had been scared half to death
by the screech of a ghoulie kicked in the goolies. It was only to
keep Glenn Rafferty's, of Rafferty's Backbone Recyclers, testicles
from leaping into his gut so hard they could have played tennis
with his tonsils. After a while, though, they made less and less
effort until a cursory glance around was often too much.

It meant I knew that it wouldn't
just be Gardener Glenn who'd be walking through those double doors,
it would be Garry, with the tattooed arms that had so scared Edith,
the grandmother of the baby they'd found left in the Tesco trolley,
pushed back into the trolley station. She'd even reclaimed the
pound. The dragon really wasn't going to eat her whole, maybe just
piece by piece. Or it would be Ian, skinny little Ian with his lank
hair and his sly smile that made him look like he'd just killed a
cat or abducted a schoolchild. It could even be Connors himself,
making sure that none of his residents were hiding away, ready to
urinate up the side of his money tree. Either way, Glenn wouldn't
be alone and I was buggered.