Wake (35 page)

Thinking on this, while stroking her daughter's cooling forehead, it struck Kate that she was exempt in another way. She'd felt under the weather—not ill, only drowsy—and on Holly's and Jacob's advice had gone to bed straight after Lily's funeral. Holly had brought her some cereal to go with her usual little handful of medications for her heart and blood pressure and thyroid—but that was all she'd eaten, two juice-softened Weetbix. Kate stroked Holly's hair, brooding about this, and when she was next downstairs, she visited the kitchen. It was clean. Oscar always cleaned up after every meal and, presumably, had after today's lunch. There was only the big stew pot soaking in the sink, a slick of fat on the surface of its water, and bits of transparent onion partially blocking the plughole. There was nothing unusual.

Later, when Kate caught up with Sam, and they had a quiet moment, Kate asked the young woman what everyone had had to eat after the funeral.

‘I don't know,' Sam said.

‘You ate, didn't you?'

Sam turned away. ‘I don't remember.'

‘And I suppose you don't recall who served either?'

Sam shook her head.

Jacob felt the cold, rough touch of a towel on his cheeks. He opened his eyes and discovered a piece of paper before his face. Light lanced around its edges. On the paper was a list of names, and series of numbers. Sam said, ‘Their heartbeats are all too slow. I don't know what medicine to give them. Please wake up, Jacob, and tell me.'

Jacob tried to sit. He was helped. He told Kate to be careful of her back. Sam's clumsy handwriting swam in front of his eyes. Jacob saw that she had made a note of the time too. ‘Good girl,' he said to her.

‘There's a name for it, isn't there?' Sam said. ‘For when your heart goes too slow.'

‘Bradycardia.'

Sam looked relieved, as if learning the term might help fix the problem. Her curls were damp and matted. She smelled of vomit and Dettol. ‘Your heart's slow too,' she said.

Jacob was having trouble thinking. Time seemed to stop with a little hitch then proceed again in a surge. ‘We need atropine,' he said. There had been some in a weak solution—one of the Mary Whitaker residents had it to control excess salivation. But that wouldn't do; it was too dilute. ‘Wait,' he said. ‘I'm not a pharmacist, but I know this.'

He had spent several evenings going over the collected medications—sorting those he was familiar with from the others—alternative and weaker versions of the drugs used in intensive care and emergency medicine. The sorting had been difficult. He had kept looking at bottles and packets and flipping through the pharmacist's many manuals, trying to digest paragraphs of exhaustively informative small print. ‘I know I came across something that worked like atropine.'

Kate raised the pen and paper she had ready. She looked like someone preparing to catch a fly ball.

Then Jacob had it. He took the pen from Kate and wrote
Orciprenaline
. ‘They're tablets,' he said. ‘They're in the third file box in the cabinet.' He dropped his head back on his pillow and closed his eyes.

Warren's feet and hands were cold and pale. Kate tried to warm them with hot towels. She worked at it assiduously for nearly an hour, but her efforts made no difference. Eventually she left off and simply slipped several pairs of socks onto his hands and feet, then left him. She went outside to try Theresa's loud hailer once more. Later, near 10pm, she checked on William and found that his bucket contained only a little bit of grainy bile. The Lucozade bottle by the bed was empty. Kate shook him. When he opened his eyes she asked, ‘Did you regurgitate the Orciprenaline?'

‘Yes. But I swallowed it again, and it stayed down.'

Kate went and rinsed out the bucket. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. The lower half of her face looked strangely slack and sunken, like the face of a friend of hers who'd had Bell's Palsy. ‘My girl, Holly,' Kate whispered to her reflection, trying to make Holly's passing more than a mere fact. Holly was down the hallway, dead, but all the other Hollys—the Holly who came back from a holiday in Vietnam and brought Kate embroidered silk pyjamas; the Holly who'd kept company with that nice but ultimately insufficient soil scientist Gavin; the Holly who had been to secretarial school, back when there were such things; Holly the schoolgirl, who'd played netball, goal-defence—all those girls, those daughters, though they weren't anywhere to be found, weren't dead. How was it that a plain fact could fail to be true?

Kate left the bathroom and took a seat on William's bed. She said, ‘Sam isn't at all sick. Why do you suppose that is?'

‘She was at first,' William said. ‘She was pale, and had stomach cramps.'

‘But she's not ill now. Might her earlier signs of sickness have been an emotional reaction? Or perhaps it was feigned?'

‘You're not sick either, Kate.'

‘I didn't have any of the funeral breakfast. Did Sam?'

‘Yes. But this isn't food poisoning.'

‘That's what I'm saying. The food wasn't contaminated, it was
poisoned
. I didn't have lunch. And Sam did, but isn't ill. Did she serve the food? Did she eat what you ate?'

‘She helped Holly serve. She sometimes does, just as she often helps Oscar with the dishes.'

Kate said, ‘There's a disease where a person will make other people sick in order to nurse them—to be a hero, and elicit sympathy. What's its name?'

‘I think you mean Munchausen's Syndrome by proxy.'

‘I knew you'd know.'

William shook his head. His hair was plastered to his neck and his dark skin was pallid yellow.

‘My daughter is dead,' Kate said.

William reached for her hand. Kate snatched it away. She didn't want William's commiserations. She had imagined she could rely on him to follow her thoughts about who was culpable—Sam, on whom he had already closed his door. Sam, who was making a martyr of herself, and who refused to say who had served the food. Lying Sam, who had been mad, and who had mutilated half the residents of Mary Whitaker rest home. ‘She's being shifty,' Kate said.

William shook his head again. And Kate cried, ‘Why won't you listen to me?'

He tried to sit up. He was so weak that she was able to push him back against the pillow. She put a finger to her lips. She hushed him.

They both listened. Someone was coming up the stairs several at a time. Then they heard Sam calling in a fierce whisper, ‘Kate!' She shot past the door then doubled back and looked in at them. She said, ‘It's him. He's come.'

‘Who?' said William.

Kate got up and edged past Sam.

‘Yes, you go talk to him, Kate,' Sam said. ‘I don't know what—what my relationship is with him.'

Kate regarded Sam a moment—her thin nostrils flared, her mouth clamped, then she walked out.

William called Sam to him, he drew her down so that their faces were level and close. ‘Is this food poisoning, or poisoned food?'

‘You mean bugs or bad chemicals?'

‘Accidental or deliberate, is what I mean.'

‘Jacob said I wasn't to tell Kate. He said I needed her to help me.'

‘Tell Kate what?'

‘About Holly. Jacob said he thought it was Holly. She made lunch. Oscar said the bread tasted funny.'

‘Kate thinks it was you.'

Sam's face crumpled; she began to cry. William tried to soothe her, stroking her arm and speaking to her gently. Finally she managed to choke something out. ‘I don't know that it wasn't,' she said. ‘I don't know what she's been doing. She hasn't left me any notes.'

‘The other Sam?'

Sam looked at him, her eyes wet and desperate. Then she nodded.

‘The other Sam was sick,' he said, reassuring her. But then he thought, ‘How does that work? Simple Sam might be able to refuse knowledge, but how can she refuse the effects of poison?'

When the man in black finally arrived, Kate discovered that she wasn't afraid of him. She knew there was possibly information the rest of them had about him that she wasn't party to, because she'd missed the meeting, but she didn't mind. He couldn't hurt her. She was beyond harm. What did she have left that could make her vigilant about own safety? She had only to keep these strangers in decent order till they were well. She would do that. She wouldn't let any of them, or herself, down. And she had to defend Holly, who was dead.

‘Sam poisoned us,' Kate said. ‘She's making a meal of running around after us all now.'

He looked puzzled, and Kate realised that ‘making a meal' was a rather problematic use of idiom when one was talking about poison.

‘But she didn't poison you?' His voice was like his face, so dark it was indistinct.

Kate tried again. ‘I didn't eat what she served.'

His expression was gently sceptical. He didn't believe her, but he thought her feelings were more important than the truth of what she was telling him.

‘Just so you're warned,' she said. Then, ‘Jacob asked me to call you. We need another pair of hands.'

‘Tell me what you want me to do.'

Oscar saw that it was the man in black who had come to help him. He was embarrassed. But this was his opportunity to ask for assistance getting to the toilet. He tried to work up his courage, but all that came out was the first part of his pep talk to himself. ‘In a crisis there's no time for embarrassment.'

The man in black said that it was his observation that there was always time for embarrassment.

‘Even for professionals?' Oscar said.

The man in black put his hands on his hips and just stood like that, staring at Oscar. Oscar felt his priggish little thought being pursued and wondered whether the man was a mind reader.

‘Do you need—how do you put it?'

‘The bathroom, yes. It's way over there, and I'm wobbly.'

The man picked Oscar up using the firemen's hold. He carried Oscar into the bathroom, put him down by the door to one of the stalls, and waited till he was done. Then he carried him back to the mattress.

Oscar was having a strange time with his body. It was like he kept hitting a switchback—one of the ‘sudden dips' of cautionary road signs.

The man knelt and repositioned the throw rug. Then he raised Oscar's head so he could drink. The Lucozade was flat and ferrous. Oscar pushed the glass away. ‘What's your name?'

‘Myr.'

‘Is there a monster, Myr? Sam says there is.'

‘Sam's talking about the monster?'

‘She thinks it's not finished.'

‘She said that?'

‘I wasn't at the meeting. But I heard some stuff because they were all shouting. And, before you abducted her, Sam told me the monster was like a tower, where each stone was a death. A tower going up and up forever. I think she meant it's not finished.'

‘I see,' said Myr.

‘I've been worrying about it,' Oscar said.

Myr twitched at the blanket on Oscar's chest, though it didn't need any adjustment.

Oscar said, ‘I've wondered whether this monster situation is something like when those guys playing
Dwarf Fortress
made a hole in the ocean floor so that the sea started draining into the fortress, and the game's physics engine couldn't procedurally generate enough space for the water at the rate it was draining, so it fatally froze the computer, which had to be returned to its factory settings.'

Myr sat down beside the mattress and took one of Oscar's hands. Then, much to Oscar's puzzlement, he didn't make a comment or ask a question. Oscar was forced to gather his strength and make another attempt to explain his fears. ‘If the monster is making itself out of the people it kills, or at least out of their deaths, then it probably won't pass us over. I don't want to die, but actually, that isn't what's bugging me. I don't seem to be able to believe that.'

‘You don't believe you'll die?'

‘No.'

‘Then what is worrying you?'

‘Where the monster is going with all this? What say it's like what happened with
Dwarf Fortress
?'

‘You mean—will it shut down the computer? The computer being the universe?'

Oscar nodded. ‘If it goes on eating faster than the universe provides it with people to eat.'

‘We have considered that. We've thought that these things might be a provision for the end of the universe. Or at least the universe of higher consciousness.'

Oscar relaxed. He was pleased that what was keeping him from getting some rest was something other people were thinking about and troubled by—even if those people were aliens. If someone else was thinking about it, then he didn't have to. He said, ‘Do you think you could get me upstairs to my room?'

‘Yes.' Myr took a careful grip of one of Oscar's arms, sat him up, tipped him forward, and settled the boy across his shoulders again. He straightened and, with great care, carried Oscar through the atrium to the staircase.

They met Sam on the stairs. She was going up with bottles of Powerade and L&P. ‘We're out of Lucozade,' she said.

Myr said, ‘Oscar will be more comfortable in his bed.'

‘How's his pulse?'

‘I haven't been briefed on that. But his hands aren't cold.'

‘Tell her,' the upside-down Oscar said, from the thicket of his hair.

‘Later,' said the man, and continued on up.

Oscar's bed was clean and cool. His door had been shut so his room was uncontaminated by the smells that were present everywhere else—of disinfectant and regurgitated soft drink. ‘I'm going to have a sleep,' Oscar said. ‘Could you tell Sam that my cat won't have had anything to eat. And the other cats will be hungry too.'

‘Cats can wait.'

Oscar was drowsy. He closed his eyes. ‘I still think you should tell Sam that end of the universe thing. Sam knows stuff.' There was no answer and Oscar felt his thoughts float off like spectres—the spectral Oscar who was worried, the spectral Oscar who was reassured that someone had listened to him, and the other one, no more solid, who had everything worked out.