CLONER : a Sci-Fi Novel about Human Cloning (A Captivating Story about Reproduction Outside the Womb and Identical Humans) (35 page)

CHAPTER 30

‘Are you sure you want to go through with this, darling?’

‘There’s no other way to convince you. You’re not going to believe me unless I
show
you.’ Lisa tried to sound reasonable, practical. Inside herself she felt a fear, a terror even. Alec had sprinkled Multiplier around the fruit trees. A ghostly shroud formed in her mind, then split in two, two into four, then... Wraiths dancing in dark branches, she told herself. Flashes of torchlight flittering reason away. She bit her lip, drew blood.

‘Sort of ghoulish, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know what you’re worried about.’ Lisa forced herself into a matter-of-fact response. ‘You think I’m off my head, that there’s no toddler’s body there. It’s all a figment of my fevered fertile imagination; a chimera. No need to worry then, is there?’ she finished up triumphantly.

‘Just as you like, Lisa. Between the apricot and the nectarine, you said?’

‘Right. You planted them in early spring last year, if you remember.’

‘Of course I remember. Saunders dug the ground really well; said Moorpark and Lord Napier would be the ideal cultivars for this area. What makes you think Don chose the ground between those two trees? Because prunus species grow so fast?’

‘Nothing to do with the trees. I expect he noticed the ground had been dug recently. He probably thought it wouldn’t show up new disturbance. And that border is the farthest from the house.’

Alec was striding down towards the stone wall facing south, with the rhyne on the west separating Mark Ditcheat’s field from their property. It was already getting dark. They carried a Tilley lantern.

‘And he probably thought no one would be digging this bed again for years,’ she added. ‘It must have seemed the perfect place.’

‘Here?’ Alec turned to her. ‘You’re quite sure? I don’t want to disturb the soil for nothing.’

‘There!’ Lisa insisted. ‘The last two trees before the rhyne. It’s not hard to work out the right place. It was the nectarine leader which was damaged.’

‘Leader?’ Alec said, emphasising the word sarcastically. ‘Leaders, you mean! I suppose I should have guessed it couldn’t just be the dog. Peregrine was also damaged.’

‘Don never went near the peach, I’m sure. That wretched Duffers must have done the rest, just as I said.’

Alec began to clear the topsoil. ‘I hope that’s right. I hardly want to dig up the whole row!’

What state would the body be in? Would there be a whole skeleton, the skull’s sockets accusing her? Had the little boy, his life so short, rested in peace? She choked back feelings.

‘I know where he buried it - him,’ Lisa insisted. ‘I’m not likely to forget.’ She shuddered as she remembered what she’d gone through that day: her horror at hearing Don’s voice, the realisation that he was digging a grave in their garden. And now retrieving the body was just as important. Without it Alec wouldn’t believe her. She would once more have to manage on her own, considered seriously deranged, conveniently set aside as unable to distinguish between fact and fiction. Until the time that Janus cloned again. Next time it might not be possible to protect Janus, and her family, from disaster.

‘Mark Ditcheat was in his field, counting his cattle. Don was right by the end of the wall, otherwise Mark probably wouldn’t have noticed him.’

Alec began to dig. Slowly, methodically, he spaded up the compacted soil and placed it on the path. It took energy and time to lift off the top spit.

‘According to you this is where we should find the first clues,’ he said, wiping his forehead, looking from Lisa to the clumps of earth. ‘If you’ve got it right I should come across something any minute.’

They stood in silence, green boots trampling in soil, looking at one another across the moths flickering around the lantern light. Bats swooped up insects. “Bats be demons”, Lisa remembered Meg telling her. “Them spirit away souls of folk dying at night. Them’s not about during daytime.”

‘Positive you want me to go on with this?’ Alec said softly.

‘Want?’ Lisa suddenly sat down on the grass beside the path. She felt enervated, unable to support herself. ‘Of course I don’t
want
you to do it. But it’s the only way you’re going to be satisfied.’

Alec changed spade for fork and placed it into the second spit of the shallow trench he’d been digging. ‘Right, then. Here goes.’ He hoisted earth again; searching, careful, one slow forkful after another, soil spreading black on to the path. Stained earth. ‘Was he wrapped in anything?’

‘Two pillowcases were missing.’

‘Rotted by now, I suppose.’

‘I would have thought there’d be large bits and pieces,’ Lisa said tremulously. ‘Is that a bit of something?’ Lisa could see a dim reflection among the dark earth.

Alec stooped down. A glint of white; hard and brittle. A piece of broken china. Squeaks of metal against metal as Alec hit a small tin. A ring of silvered paper caught on a tine, then reflected gold in the lantern light. Lisa was momentarily reminded of the earrings; had she put…? She bent down to pick it up. Just foiled paper which undid itself into a strip.

‘Saunders said there was any amount of junk when he was digging here. A previous owner must have used it as a dump.’ Alec hesitated his fork into dense soil again. Clod after clod of rich loam methodically enlarged the growing mound already on the path. There was no sign of anything but earth, interspersed with a few pieces of broken crockery and glass, some bottle tops.

‘There’s nothing, Lisa.’

‘There has to be,’ she whispered. ‘Don buried him here.’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘Perhaps we need more light.’

He held the lantern up and shone the bright torch round and over everywhere. No sign of cloth or body, no sign of bones.

‘You’re not going deep enough.’ Lisa grabbed the fork from Alec’s hand and began to dig. In her eagerness her strength increased. Careless of her ungloved hands, she levered the fork in deep and wide.

‘There’s nothing except good black loam, Lisa.’

She straightened up at last. The bed between the fruit trees had been dug out at least two and a half spits, three in some places. Don would have buried the infant well down, but not lower than that.

‘We’ll have to try the space between the next two trees,’ Lisa insisted eagerly. ‘Moorpark and Peregrine. Perhaps you’re right. It was quite dark, and I must have got it wrong.’

‘All
I
remember is that Moorpark was bashed about more than either of the other two. So it could have been on the other side of that,’ Alec said, starting to spade again. ‘This soil’s much harder going than the other site,’ Alec announced after the first spit, sour and tired. ‘It’s not even going to do the trees any good.’ He spaded great hulks of grey clay which covered the path.

Clay, Lisa remembered now - clay! The lower spit Don had dug had been clay. Grey solid clay which he’d heaved in chunks into the rhyne to disintegrate. So she’d been right. The first site had to be the place where Don had buried the clone, because there was no clay there. Had the little body already turned to earth? Even his bones? His skull? Could he really have disintegrated so quickly?

‘You might as well stop digging, Alec. I know it was between the last two trees in the row, the apricot and the nectarine. I know because the subsoil is heavy clay. Don dug great clods to make room for the body. He threw them in the rhyne to hide them. I saw them there. I noticed because of one he’d overlooked.’

Alec straightened, resting on his fork. ‘There was nothing there, Lisa. We dug the whole distance between the trees. Absolutely nothing! No sign, no vestige, of a body, or even of material. It couldn’t possibly decompose completely in such a short time.’

‘Don must have put the lime on it. You must remember that. You couldn’t work out what had happened to the lime.’

He smiled; a small wan smile. ‘I do remember that,’ he agreed with her. ‘But it’s hardly proof of a child’s body. Now is it?’

He got to work to fill the second hole, neatly cleaned the path and raked it level. ‘There’s something I should mention,’ he said. ‘Not very pleasant, but it is a point.’

‘You’ve found something?’

‘I don’t like talking about it in this way. We’re here to unearth the body of a human being - a child. It sounds so brutal.’

‘What, Alec? What are you talking about?’

‘Well, if there’d really been a body...’

‘Yes?’

‘It would have decayed.’

‘So?’ she almost shrieked at him. ‘So what?’

‘The soil would have sunk down.’

Lisa thought for a moment. There was something in what he said. ‘I expect Don wedged some of the clay around it.’

‘Think so?’ He looked at her, obviously startled. ‘Even so; the soil above it would have settled. There’d be a dip.’ His voice was low and sombre. ‘I’ll bring a load of scalpings down,’ he told his wife. ‘Tidy all this up.’

Multiplier; Alec had used it liberally. Perhaps, Lisa thought despondently, exhausted, unable to fight any more, instead of reproducing the body, the wretched stuff had reproduced the animals - the worms - which hastened its rotting. That’s why there was nothing there, that’s why the earth was such rich loam. What other explanation could there be

CHAPTER 31

‘Lisa! It’s good to see you. Come in, do.’

‘Thanks, Anne.’

‘All on your own? How on earth did you manage that?’

‘Trevor’s down for the weekend. He and Alec and the boys have gone to climb the Tor. They’re going to fly a kite Trev brought for them. And give me some time off!’

‘Cup of tea?’

‘That would be lovely.’

‘Milk and sugar? Or d’you take honey?’

‘No sweetening.’

‘It’s an acquired taste, I know, but I expect you’re used to it.’

‘What is?’

‘Goat’s milk in tea. Meg says you had it all the time you were carrying the triplets. Must be why they’re so sturdy.’

‘You use Meg’s goat’s milk?’ In her excitement Lisa had half risen from her chair, goggling at the milk jug Anne was pouring from.

Anne stared at her, surprised. ‘You didn’t know? Right from the start. Frank brings it over in the Landrover every morning, when he drops Phyllis and Paul off; and the cheese.’ She laughed, slightly embarrassed. ‘I didn’t mention it to you because I thought you knew - well, I just assumed it. Of course I use it. Everyone says it’s better than cow’s milk for young children. The mothers really like us to – ’

‘You’ve been giving them Meg’s goat’s milk all this time?’

‘Honestly, Lisa, aren’t you making rather a thing of it? It isn’t a secret, or anything. It’s supposed to be much better for the children. Quite a few of them are allergic to cow’s milk.’

Lisa sat down heavily in the chair just by her. She stared ahead of her. Was that why Janus had cloned again so soon after the cloning in the bath, had bloated up again so quickly after that? Because Anne was feeding him the goat’s milk loaded with Multiplier? No, that couldn’t be why. The fertiliser had been modified.

‘So how is Jansy? Any chance of your letting him come back soon? I never blamed him about Duffers, you know. That was Geraldine’s own fault. I told her Duffers could only come if he behaved whatever the children did. This is a playschool for young children, not a kennels. And you know he isn’t allowed here any more.’

‘I know,’ Lisa managed to say. A thought struck her. ‘What does she do with him?’

‘Frank always takes him when he brings the milk. Actually, he often did before. Duffers is locked up until then.’ She smiled at Lisa. ‘As for the eggs, that was just high spirits! My own silly fault for not keeping my eye on him every second. He’s a real challenge.’ She stopped, almost out of breath. ‘And I miss my little sessions with him.’

The incident with the eggs suddenly took on a new significance for Lisa. Did he know what made him clone? Was he trying to avoid contamination? But the eggs couldn’t be the problem, any more than Meg’s goat’s milk. Frank and Don had slaughtered all Meg’s chickens last year when cleansing the farm of the old strain of Multiplier. Perhaps the ground was still contaminated, the grass eaten by the goats, pecked at by the hens, carrying it into the food chain. But was that enough to trigger another cloning? Or was there something else?

‘Seb told me Janus liked drinking tea,’ Lisa brought up.

Anne laughed. ‘Extraordinary child. He always liked to pretend he preferred it black!’

‘Black? Jansy likes to drink it black?’

‘“No milk”, he always said. I’ve never heard of such a thing with such a little one before. Sat there, just like a grown-up, holding his cup and refusing to have milk.’ She smiled uncertainly at Lisa. ‘Of course it was very
weak
tea; practically hot water. Sometimes I put a slice of lemon in it for him, and I always added a large dollop of our own clover honey.’ She looked at Lisa nervously. ‘But of course I made sure he had his morning milk with the others,’ Anne hurriedly went on. ‘We didn’t let him get away with anything. I added a bit of honey to that, too. He didn’t seem to like it.’

‘What about the eggs, Anne? Do you get your eggs from Meg?’

Anne frowned. ‘I thought she was a special friend of yours? Are you trying to tell me there’s something wrong with her produce?’

‘I’m just worried about the bacteria in eggs,’ Lisa explained, her mind working through possible threats to Janus. ‘You know - salmonella. They say that free-range chickens are the most suspect. And there might be listeria in the soft cheese made from goat’s milk.’ She smiled pleasantly at Anne. ‘Did you use that, by any chance?’

‘You’re really worried about the stuff, aren’t you?’

‘Only as far as Jansy is concerned.’

‘You think Jansy may be allergic to the bacteria?’

Suddenly the word clover pushed itself into Lisa’s consciousness. Clover honey - Anne’s hives were set right next to Crinsley Farm. The real culprit among the foods Janus had eaten at school wasn’t Frank’s produce, it was the
honey
! That would be last year’s crop, made by Anne’s bees gathering pollen from Frank’s fields. So if Anne had been sweetening Janus’s tea with it, and even added it to his milk, it could be  – would be - what had caused the rapid bloating. Lisa’s heart began to turn as she thought of the problems young Janus had had to deal with. Perhaps that was the reason he’d stayed thin since he’d been at home. He’d peed the extra stuff away at Brean Sands, and because he hadn’t been to playschool he wasn’t imbibing any contaminated food. He’d stayed with her, safely consuming supermarket food.

‘It’s possible. Alec’s really concerned about his behaviour. He even thought Jansy might be autistic, but I know that’s absurd. After all, he’s usually very sociable, and very keen to take part in everything. It isn’t autism.’

‘He’s always easy with me,’ Anne insisted. ‘I’ve no idea why everyone’s so down on the little lad. Bright as a button, with quick reflexes. Means one’s got to be on one’s toes when looking after him.’

‘He doesn’t take up too much of the girls’ time?’

‘Swings and roundabouts. He’s demanding, but he entertains the other children. Why don’t you send him back next week? You really need time off.’ She looked uncomfortable. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, Lisa; but you look terrible.’

‘You think you could cope with him?’

‘Of course I can, my dear. No problem at all. We’re all longing to have him back. He’s such a leader, you know. He really brings the others along.’

‘He ought to stay off the milk, and the clover honey,’ Lisa said, her voice dropping low. ‘Some people are very allergic to clover.’ She hesitated slightly. ‘And the eggs and cheese. Maybe he can’t cope with the very stuff which is good for the others. I’d better send his food round with him. Can you arrange he only eats that?’

‘I’ll see to it, my dear; just as you like. If you think there may be trouble with bacteria I’ll drop eggs for the time being, anyway.’

As they were sipping tea Lisa noticed the sun had turned blood red. A huge globe hung in the sky above the Levels, an evening mist veiling it. Just after five; they’d all be back by now. She must go home, help get them tea, help bathe them.