Turquoiselle (18 page)

“We
shall just have to get on with things,” said Croft, who had not spoken again
until now. (What test was this one?) “How have you been, Carver?” as if
inquiring after a decent if not well-known acquaintance.

“I’ve
been here,” Carver said.

“So
you have. Let’s see. You asked me one or two questions before, didn’t you? I
consider, under the circumstances... I might try to reply to some of your
concerns. Do you think?”

Croft
gave every indication of now pedantically waiting for an answer himself.

“Yes.”

“
Yes
. A positive
affirmative.” Croft’s new tactics were odd. But what else? Croft uncrossed and
recrossed his ankles. He had not, this time, taken off his jacket. The jacket
was a little rumpled. Had he slept in it? It looked that way. Just like the
hair of some of the security men, sticking up unwashed and unsmoothed, unready
for action –

“You
wanted to know why we are so interested in you. Why your Mantik Corp were so
interested in you. Apart” (sarcasm?) “from your high intelligence rating and
other splendid personal abilities, of course. Mantik Corp,” added Croft,
musingly. He put his hands behind his neck, resting his iron-capped head back
on them. “There’s a thought. Perhaps you never have thought of this, Carver.
Even though that college place where they seeded you wasn’t bad, I don’t know
how much of
a
classic or etheric education
they offered... Mantik–” he paused, “
Corp
. Have you ever heard or read, Car, of
the mythic
Manticore
– a fabled
beast, dear old chap. In several of the old Bestiaries that gave – you’ll know?
– lists of magical animals supposedly seen, met with, documented, killed,
stuffed and mounted. Indian in origin. Had a lion’s body and a manlike face,
surrounded by a great mane. Loved eating humans.
What’s for Sunday Dinner, Mrs Manticore? Ooh,
Manti. It’s roast man with a bit of
roast man
.
They had three rows of teeth, all pointed. And barbs in the tail. Set the
table, Mrs Manticore, set the table on a-roar!”

Carver
found he stared at Croft. Carver switched off the stare. He glanced round at
the trees. Nothing moved. Everything holding its breath.

“No,”
Carver said, quietly.

“Ever
heard of Paracelsus, then,” asked Croft, flirtatiously – there was no other
word for it.

“I’ve
heard of him.”

“Physician-alchemist
in 16th Century Europe. Said everyone should fuck or masturbate. Commended the
practice as healthful. A man of common sense. He also named an algae that had
a certain colour. Nostocaris. Or Nostoc, they have it now. Blue-green. Special
properties. Or there’s a fish. Its name means Shining Knife. It gives off a
blue-green glow in the dark of the deep sea. This scares off would-be
predators. But also – and
hear
this, Car, my dear boy – it glows so
strong it casts no giveaway shadow – like the Devil, or someone without a
soul. And by its own light it can find its prey with enormous ease. They don’t
get warned by shadow, they’re dazzled by glare. And then –
Gotcha!
”
Croft smacked his hands – pulled from his head with an almost murderous speed –
together.

Carver
moved back before he could stop himself. He stood up.

Croft
was grinning, laughing up at him, delighted as a three-year-old child with his
alarming coup.

“It’s
energies, Car. That’s why your damn sheds light up. And that’s why
we
want to eat you alive. You can
conjure
energies. You’re like a mast
that catches lightning. Only it isn’t lightning you catch or that you create.
We don’t know – I shouldn’t tell you this, but I might as well, you’re even
more ignorant about yourself than we are – we don’t know quite what you
do
do, or create.
But it’s there. It goes off the scale. It has about the potential charge of a
little thermo-nuclear device. Only it doesn’t go off bang, old boy. It doesn’t
irradiate or poison or fry. So what
does
it do? Eh, Car? Eh? Any ideas? Any
response? Where do we go from here?”

Memory walked
with Carver, strangely, through the leafy wooden outland of the ‘Place’. It
slotted itself, surprising sometimes, between the on-off flutter of codes, numbers,
digits that seemed also, if patchily, to need to be there in his head with him,
trying either to centre or to faze him. Maybe too wanting to remind him of
something, but whether helpfully or simply without logic or relevant meaning,
how could he tell? He knew definitely what he was doing. Wandering their ‘grounds’,
as if perplexed and brooding, as if hoping to make sense of Croft’s enthused
outburst. But Carver had not credited a word of Croft’s confidences. They were
lies, set to provoke or tangle, all part of the game that went on here, and
perhaps – one point of truth – had done so too at Mantik.

The
reason for the game was not clear, and might not ever (to him) be fathomable.
There had been plenty of that before. He had certainly seen Mantik coin such
scenarios in which he had had his part, but never knowing more than his
particularised role. For now he wanted merely to see if he could find the end of
Croft’s set-up’s ‘Place’ – the physical geography of this territory set in
gardens and bounded only one way by sea. Where was the boundary, wall,
barricade? What was its type and what lay beyond? Might it, if not now then in
the future, be penetrable from the inside out: Escape. And Carver wore for this
search the body-language and general appearance of a man concerned and
unnerved, which was reasonably good camouflage. He had not questioned Croft,
after Croft’s vibrant statement on
energies
. Carver had stared at Croft, as
before Carver had not let himself stare. And when Croft rose and, smiling,
pleased, (the three-year-old again), sauntered, whistling, away, silently
Carver watched him go, standing with his hands loose at his sides, eyes wide
open, frowning. The picture of inarticulate insecurity that might well, after
all, be sincere.

The
storm Fiddy had prophesied did not yet manifest. Yet the darkness of the day,
especially between and below the trees, intensified. It was eventually like an
afternoon in an English November. Sunset due at about 4 p.m., but a sky so
ungiving that by three lights had gone on in the school classroom or the
college hall. Even, back then in Sara’s flat. And before
then
too, in the squat where she had lived at
first with him, and with his father.

And
this was the memory that now walked up beside Carver. Opening some after all accessible
door, it soaked gently inside.

And
it was a new memory – was it? Something (
something
) not recalled for two
thirds of his life – twenty years – or longer.
Never
recalled since childhood...

How
old then was Carver, in this memory?

About
three, he thought. (An
actual
three-year-old child.)

A
dark day, and the one electric bulb in the squat’s side room, that dangerous
and illegal rewiring had enabled to burn. The flare of it was calmed by a
lopsided lampshade of dingy fake pinkish silk. And Sara was sitting on a
cushion by the wall, asleep. The air was cold; no heating, but the cold not
yet biting or raw. A mild early winter then, back whenever in the earliest ‘80’s
of the previous century.

Carver
was trying to wake his mother. Who repeatedly, soporifically, shrugged him off.
But the man was there then, and picked him up. A big man, bearlike, with a
dirty unwashed tang to him, which they all, in their individual ways, gave off.
How not? There was no water here to wash in, except the cold water from the
other premises with the outdoor tap, and this had to be heated on the open fire
in the communal room. The child who was Carver had anyway no aversion to the
smells. They were normalcy. The man was warm, and held him with a vast
protective surging ease.

“C’mon
now, darling,” said the man, hugging Carver close. “Leave your poor mum to a
bit of kip. You sit with yer da. Ah, you’re a lovely boy, you are. You’ll be a
feller, you will, when you grow up. I’ll take yer fishin’ then. We’ll be rich
then, your mum and me. And you. We’ll all be rich, in a big red house in
Hampstead.
It’ll
be warm as
toast, and your mummy can have a chandelier in every room to light it all up.
Ah, me boy.” And the big face, still tan from a summer working on the roads, a
big undrunken face full of large green eyes and sheer approval and involvement,
laughing down into Carver’s child’s face, so Carver the child began also to
laugh. And the man and he sat by the long cracked window, a French door once,
and gazed out at the bare black and grey of a ruinous garden. “Look,” said the
warm, dirty, gentle bear, “look – a duckie birdl” And there
was
. There really
was. A duck with a head green as jade and coriander, and outspread swimmer’s
wings, flying low over the darkling sky.

Carver,
(the
man)
stopped under the trees of elsewhere and Present Time.

He
stared no longer inwards at the memory of Croft. He stared back down and down
the staircase of a million adult years, to that moment in November. Was
that
his father,
then?

His
father
– before
despair and alcohol got their fangs and barbs into him and changed him to what
he later became, a violently drunken abuser, a monster from hell.
Him
?
Then
?

A
screen shivered inside Carver’s brain. Instead of images numbers flowed across.
1. 1. 1. 1. 4. 4. 4. 4.

Seventeen

Anjeela Merville
was standing under a tree, motionless. Her garments matched or coincided with
the woodland – dull green, faded black – he might not have seen her, but some
freak of punctured daylight had caught her eyes. They shone like bluish
mercury. The luminous eyes of a doll, or a cat.

Carver
halted. He did and said nothing, for a moment. But this was, in the most
bizarre way, like a direct piece of continuity, following somehow instantly on
the events that had already passed. Even, indescribably, on the fragment of
memory that involved his father. Even on the random and ceaseless snatches of
numbers and codes.

“Hello,”
she said, “Car.”

He
did not speak. He stood looking at her.

She
seemed – different. Her hair again? Yes, it was longer. Just below her
shoulders now, thick and curling, liquorice black. More copious extensions,
then. But she was slimmer too. Perhaps how she had dressed? Corseting
beneath...

She
said, “How are you, Car?”

“Did
Croft send you?”

“No.
Croft is scampering about his section in high good humour. No one sent me.”

“You
just came after me, then.”

“Not
exactly.”

“Then
what
exactly?”

She
said, “Say my name.”

He
did not. He said, “There are enough games already.”

She
said, “Aren’t there, though. I thought perhaps we could just
play
, without a game
at all.”

He
turned away, and began to take long strides through the trees. So far this ‘walk’,
which he reckoned had used up about three more hours, had yielded nothing. From
a rise, on a single occasion, he had seen south-westward through the trees, and
had a view of the up-and-down building, the sea beyond, and the sun gradually
descending, discernible only by a metallic bruise behind the purple cloudbank.
And he had found no boundary barrier, no sign he was approaching any. There
were no sentries either, of any sort he could detect or concretely suspect. An
object fixed high up on a trunk had, for a second, convinced him he at last glimpsed
a surveillance device. But it was a piece of metal foil, perhaps pulled up there
by a magpie, or other gleam-keen bird-thief.

The
sun must be near to going down, he thought. But this twilight did not seem to
alter. Only
she
had altered.
Anjeela. Presumably gleam-keen on a bit of rustic fuckery in the fern.

Like
memory, she was walking beside him now. She had caught up and kept pace with
him, matching his long strides without apparent effort. Whatever weight or
hair–length, she was fit then. In any sense, he supposed.

“Say
my name, Car,” she repeated in a while, her breathing serene and unhurried.

“Have
you forgotten it?”

“Have
you?”

“Yes,”
he said, ridiculously as a kid of thirteen. “I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Anjeela,”
she said.

“Merville,”
he said.

“AJ–”
prompting.

“MV,”
he finished. He stopped again and turned again to look down the few inches into
her face. (She was also slightly taller than he had remembered, or wore lifts
in her shoes.)

Across
his mind, vivid enough as if physically it had flown by between them, the
number chain flashed on-off on-off. Code – the code –
J
udges.
M
arket.
A
lways.
A
ble –

She
interrupted.

“I
want to show you something, Car,” she said. Her voice was velvet. Panther
voice. He could scent her, cinnamon and honey, ambergris and pure coffee.

He
shoved her, with a roughness he never expressed against women, into a
convenient tree trunk. “All right. Why not. Undo your pants,” he said.

And
she gave her panther laugh. Not intimidated, not resisting, not eager or
willing or vulnerable, not
useable
at all.

“I
want,” she said, “to show you
this
.”

And
she held up her smoke-brown hand, slender and beautifully articulated by its
bones and tendons, gemmed with its five mother-of-pearl nails. One of which–

One
of which was – was it? – altering. Was – elongating –
g
rowing
, pushing out of
the forefinger, slim, straight, displaying its manicured oval tip –

“What
–?” he said.

“Just
watch, Car,” she softly said.

The
pearl nail, still smoothly couth, now two-three inches in length – but the –
finger too – the finger was effortlessly elongating now, not distorting, merely
lengthening, becoming the finger of some non-human being – a finger six inches,
one hundred and fifty millimetres – long. The finger ceased to grow. The nail
had ceased. They lay there, against his forearm, darker than his shirtsleeve. A
perfect finger, not ugly. Only – only – ex-tend-ed. Alien.

“You
see it,” she said.

“Some
drug. I don’t know how. In the coffee?” Or in her perfume –?

“No
drug, Car. This is really happening.”

“It’s
some trick, then.” He brought his own left hand across and clamped the alien
finger and its nail between his own. It moved. The faintest quiver. It was
warm, flexible; made of flesh and bone and coordinated. “How?” he said. “How
are you doing that?”

“Like
this,” she said.

His
eyes skipped back to her face, and saw the single strand of shining hair
against her cheek, still attached, but its end slipping down, passing like a
cord of silk unravelling, unwinding. The end fell on to her throat, slid
serpentine down again over her right breast. When it was long enough to reach her
waist it twisted, and lay still.

Closed
against his palm he felt the forefinger flex again. He let go – and watched as,
with its own lunatic grace, it withdrew seamlessly back and back into her hand,
regaining its proper length, sibling to the rest, the polished oval just a
pleasingly coloured and burnished nail. The curl was sliding up as well, up and
up, faster, faster, snapping home just under her shoulder with the others,
slinking in among them to hide.

He
drew away from her. Two metres between them now.

“Very
clever,” he said. His voice had no substance. It was a mindless and redundant
voice. Not even his. Then whose? Who – what – was speaking through him?

She
said, “It’s what I can do.”

He
said, “Their cameras will have seen you do it, in that case. Or do they know
already?” He thought,
Nothing happened
. It was some form of hypnosis. Or
drugs... It will be some drug –

“They
don’t know. Won’t hear. Can’t see. Something is messing up the spy-cameras, the
clever sound system. Sun spots.
Something
.”

Something
, he thought.
The repeated word from the beginning, from the dark, from – somewhere.

“I’ll
see you around, Car,” she said. She smiled. Her eyes – were not blue. They were
– dark. Dark bronze – And then she blinked. Her eyes were blue.

She
turned and ran lightly away.
Fleet
, he thought, that old word, fleet as a
deer.

AJ
crossed the
mind-screen.
MV
. 1. 1.  4. 4.

Full night had
come, by the time he got round to the northern side again, having given up on
discovering any finishing line for the ‘Place’. He had had nothing with him.
Having to go out with Croft had precluded that, nor had he been given any
coffee or water, no nourishment, only confusion and its subsequent anger.

Regaining
the more inward environs of the ‘grounds’, Carver found tonight several
drinking parties went on. Hardly a wake. An anniversary perhaps. Or seven or so
birthdays being celebrated separately but simultaneously. Given Charlie Hemel’s
death, that was peculiar. But by now, everything was. One seriously sane and
reasonable event might, in this climate, be the most suspicious. Carver was
enthusiastically offered, and accepted, a drink of apple juice among the
loitering festivities he inadvertently passed. Was the juice spiked? It seemed
only by very weak vodka. He drank enough to alleviate thirst. The day, and
currently the night, stayed weather-wise oppressive, but finally dim thunders
were rolling round the sky. Pinkish sheet lightning sometimes opened the black
ceiling wide. (A pink lopsided lampshade. C’mon now, darlin’, leave your poor
mum to a bit of kip. A mast that catches lightning. Look – a duckie bird.
Crazy. So many crazies in his life. What memory could he trust, here? How many
had been
implanted
? Fingers that
grew long like CGI. )

He
reached the foot of the rise, (on which the seven railway carriages were
stalled), by his own guess around 10.30 p.m.

For
some time he leaned on a tree below the hill.

There
had been isolated rills of noise rising, sinking, and strings of lights across
the woodland, bonfires even. But here, only darkness. So, no doubts.

The
shed, just as before, was glowing. The central shed. This was, it went without
saying, something else
they
had done. An organised and chemically-triggered glow. Mantik must have organised
something similar. Treating objects he might steal. A slow release, empowered
only in one closed area. The shed. No other answer made sense. Why, God knew.
He was the errand boy, the
pawn
. Move him here, there. Decoy, bait,
shadow, fall guy.
Experiment
?

Tonight,
to start with, he did not properly scrutinise the illumination. His imagination
had once more stepped in to try to block his intellect.
It’s just the same. Carver
. A vivid
turquoise. Should be used to it by now, Except,
tonight
, it was in reality – if any of this
were
real –
not
just the same. Tonight,
the sheen that bloomed like radiation from the shed – was green. Lime-green.
Emerald infused by citrine, much sharper than the sting of vodka in juice. A
colour that any minute might become solely the yellow of a mid-Urgency,
doubtless escalating, Alert.

He
sat in the dark, the shed’s light burning above him, his back to the trunk of a
tree.

The
thunder and lightning had rainlessly aborted. There was, in the inert warmth of
the air, the taint of burnt wood from the party fires. There had also been some
fireworks and Chinese Lanterns for a short while, lifting southward, towards
the sea, maybe on the terrace from which the cyclist had taken flight.

Senseless.
Even macabre, in an amateurish fashion.

Carver
slept a little. And Anjeela had filled her mouth with him, sucking and
caressing. But the sharp dream-pleasure woke him, and immediately died, gurning
numbly down the darkness, leaving a sour ache; and even that died, losing its
way.

The
letters and numbers resumed their irritating constellations.

He
registered that code, one of the less elusive, which worked the alphabet in two
blocks of 1 to 9, and then one last block of 1 to 8 – the letter A counting as 1,
B as 2, etc, with I as 9. Then resuming with J as 1 to R (9) and S to Z (1 –
8).

It
was the code Mantik had used to warn of the disappearance of a member of the
staff. Carver’s iPhone had given it as a games clue,
Clue up
being the
signal, the
2nd Clue
the code. That morning the second clue had read
Always Justified Marketable
Value
. You took the
first letter of each word, in this instance AJMV – and that gave you,
conversely, on the 1 to 9, 1 to 9, 1 to 8 principle, the numbers/letters A – 1,
J – 1 and M – 4, V – 4.

The
code’s numbers and letters presented showed all the
other
alphabetical
instances – while leaving out all remaining letters that themselves would be
numbered 1 or 4. They were then S and D. The subject therefore had such
initials. In other words, Silvia Dusa.

A
very straightforward code, transparent enough, and one of hundreds Carver had
had, over the years, to learn. Strange therefore, really, he had not, until
now, picked up on its recent reissue –
here
, both on his mind-screen, and spoken
aloud to him by the blue-eyed black woman who had had sex with him in the bed,
and later, out in the woods, grown her fingernail, and finger, and one coil of
hair, like an effect in a movie.