Dragged into Darkness (18 page)

“
Clelland
, are you there?  Have you come to see me?”

Oracle’s unspoken words sloshed through
Clelland’s
skull.  He winced, closing his eyes, and massaged his sinuses.  It was always like this, at first.  But the jarring pain would pass.   The first time the creature had tried to communicate, he thought his brain had been cleaved in two.  But he had learned how to tune Oracle to the right volume and frequency so its thoughts would come through at a steady throb. 

“You know I have,”
Clelland
answered.

“A lot of casualties today, Captain.”

“Yes.  Let’s hope you can help minimize the chances of more.”

“I’ll do my utmost. 
As long as our arrangement continues.”

“You have my word. 
As always.”
 
Clelland’s
words tasted metallic on his tongue.  He kept his bargain, at the cost of others.  “I need to know the locations of the Japanese fuel dumps for
it’s
Pacific fleet.   And…”

“Don’t hang back
Clelland
, come closer.”

Clelland
edged forward and his foot brushed against pulsating flab.  He blocked out his disgust.  He had learnt to suppress his feelings in front of Oracle.  He couldn’t show his revulsion.  It would hear his thoughts and be offended. 
Clelland
retracted his foot.

Oracle was getting bigger, a side effect of living off others. 
Clelland
glanced up at the hold’s bay door.  Oracle could only have been ten feet from the top.  Soon they would have to find a bigger ship.  The creature wasn’t the twenty-five ton mass they had found in a dormant volcano crater.

Christ knew what it was.  Oracle had tried to explain, but either it couldn’t articulate itself or
Clelland
couldn’t comprehend it.  Not that it mattered.  It was of use to the Allied cause.  Beyond that, Britain had no further interest.

It was a creature though.  The
professor
who examined Oracle at the discovery site, had said that it was alive and pronounced it as such. 

“A creature is defined as an organism that possesses a mouth and an anus.”

Physically, that was all
Oracle
was—a gelatinous hillock of shit-brown flab with the ability to process food.  It possessed no eyes to
see,
or ears to hear and was incapable of movement.  But that wasn’t important.  What raised Oracle from biological curiosity was that it had intelligence.  It could communicate. 

The downside was that
Clelland
was the only one who could understand.  The creature was to be shipped off to the British Museum, until
Clelland
realized that Oracle possessed the power to read men’s minds.  Distance wasn’t a problem.  Oracle could tune in anyone on the planet like a radio and listen to their thoughts.  Its gift made up for all its physical shortcomings and the creature became a military deity and
Clelland
, its interpreter.

“You were saying, Captain?” Oracle prompted with its sickly sweet voice. 

“I need to know the location of the fuel dumps and the movements of the Japanese fleet in the Philippine Sea.”

Clelland
didn’t know why he did it.  He always spoke to the spout at Oracle’s peak, the opening that consumed food.  Oracle didn’t have a face. 
Clelland
was astounded at his reliance on convention.  He relied on the visual, the creature on the mental.  He needed a face to talk to, but there wasn’t one, so he spoke to the next best thing, its mouth.  He wondered if Oracle could sense his presence.  The hairs as thick as straw and just as rasping that covered Oracle’s mass might have been able to detect rudimentary shapes.  His theory was further reinforced by the heavy concentration around its mouth.

“Let me see what I can find out,” Oracle said.

Oracle scanned.  The creature breathed in and out, much more deeply than when it communicated with
Clelland
.  It inflated, pushing
Clelland
back,
then
deflated.  The creature expanded by at least ten percent when in deep thought.  Its mouth opened and closed in time with its swelling and contracting bulk.

After several minutes, Oracle responded.  “I have the information you need.”

“Good.” 
Clelland
wasn’t overjoyed.  He didn’t much care for the information.  The price was too high.

Oracle relayed the information and
Clelland
made shorthand notes for his superiors.

“Will London be pleased?” Oracle asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m their best agent, aren’t I?”

“Yes.  Yes, you are, Oracle.”

“My information has the best mission success rate in the Allied forces, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. 
Eighty percent.”

Always eighty percent.”
  Oracle exhaled and its spout opened then closed.  “I wish it could be more.”

Clelland
was shaking.  Oracle was tearing him apart.  It was hard to hold back the tears.  He insisted on showing Oracle was a brave front every time it teased him.  It was a futile gesture.  Oracle knew exactly how
Clelland
felt.  How much it all hurt.  How much he hated himself for being the one who had to deal with the informant. 
Clelland
covered his nose and mouth with his hand, holding in a cry.

“When do we arrive at
Wotje
Atoll?”

“Thirty-six hours.” 
Clelland
wiped away a tear and sniffed.

“Wasn’t
Wotje
Atoll one of my bad predictions?”

Clelland
nodded to a creature that couldn’t see.

“Have they fought yet?”

“No. 
Oh-five-hundred hours.”

“Do you think many will be killed?”

“You know it will be slaughter.” 
Clelland’s
words crawled out on barbed wire.  He fought the urge to scream.

“Do you blame me?”

“Does it matter?”

“Because London is happy with my successes and not
to
bothered by my failures? 
Because nobody’s perfect?
  
Because no one can be right all of the time?”

Clelland
was already walking away.  He had what he came for.  He didn’t have to listen to Oracle.  He wasn’t the creature’s friend or nursemaid.  He was just the message boy.

“I’ll relay your information to London.”

“I’ve given you five missions there.  One has to fail, to maintain my eighty percent success rate.  I’ll let you choose which one.”

“Bastard,”
Clelland
hissed under his breath.  He didn’t care that Oracle heard his thought before the word was out.

“Remember,
Clelland
.  We have a bargain.”

Clelland
slammed the cargo hatch.  The resulting clang rebounded off the hull and bulkheads.

How could he forget?  The bargain came after a string of successes at the expense of Oracle’s health.  In the Vulture’s hold, the creature had been dying.  London told him to keep Oracle alive at any cost…any cost.  The problem was its diet.  The food they fed it, the cows, pigs and sheep, were killing it.  It needed what it had always needed, what it had survived on in the volcano’s crater and what it needed to thrive to read the enemy’s minds—people.

London wasn’t about to sacrifice people to the creature, but they did have plenty of dead.
Clelland
fed Oracle the carcasses of soldiers that fell in battle.  The families of the dead didn’t need to know the final sacrifice their loved ones had to make for King and country.

Nobody was perfect, except Oracle.  But the creature had to be wrong, or it would never eat.  The flow of dead was drying up.  London had told
Clelland
to do whatever it took to keep the information coming.  Oracle and
Clelland
made a deal.  Every fifth mission,
Clelland
sent London the wrong time, location or position.  Thousands of soldiers died unnecessarily, just so Oracle could eat.

He never shared their secret.  Who could he tell?  The Lord Mayor’s Bucket Boys would have hacked him and Oracle to pieces.  London would have turned a blind eye, uninterested.  The cost was small compared to the
ten
of thousands that lived.  Acceptable losses, as they liked to say.

“Our bargain, captain,” Oracle reminded
Clelland
, as the officer headed for the radio room.

Not that its reminder mattered.  Oracle was finished.  The Pacific theater was at an end.  The Yanks had the bomb and intended using it.  And
Clelland
had his transfer papers.  He was an artilleryman again.  His destination was number three on Oracle’s list.  He circled it as the mission to fail.

As the image of her mother’s burning head seared Tammy’s mind, she laughed.  Her laughter contained no joy, only hysteria.  A squirrel quivered on a tree branch.  She studied the creature.  It knew better than to mess with her.  She looked away and the squirrel darted into the woods and to safety.

Tammy raced after the animal, but she wasn’t chasing it.  It just happened to be going her way.  The bridge was where she wanted to be.  The bridge was where it had all started and where it all had to end…

***

She always came to the bridge when life was too much, and tonight was no exception.  The moon overhead was bright and full.  The wind lacked the strength to tousle the green hair of the trees.  Tammy stood in the middle of the time-ravaged bridge, the wood so old it was no longer brown but a bone-gray.  She leaned over the edge and stared at her shimmering reflection in the flowing water.

Sometimes, she thought, parents suck.  Her mother was her
special
self again—the drama queen.  She was the downtrodden one, the oppressed one, the unappreciated one and everyone else was to blame.  If she hated her life so much why didn’t she just leave?  Tammy wished she would.

Moonlight reflected off something floating in the water, riding the current towards the bridge.  Tammy followed its path towards her, finding the activity soothing, taking her away from her frustrations. 
The object crept closer and in a second it would be under the bridge and out of her life.  But she didn’t want it out of her life.  She needed the curiosity—the complication.   She darted down to the riverbank and launched herself into the freezing water, not caring how wet she got.  For a second, she thought her foolhardiness had caused her to lose the object, but then she saw it bobbing on the surface and plucked it from the water.

***

Tammy dried her find with a hairdryer and placed it on her dresser.  Sitting cross-legged on her bed, she stared at it.  It stared back.  An ordinary girl would have tossed the thing back in the water, but not Tammy, she was different. 

Someone could have mistaken her discovery for a doll’s head.  But one touch of its leathery surface said otherwise.  It was a human head.  Its features were adult, possessing all the definition of maturity, but its extensive aging made it impossible to tell if it was male or female.  The eyes and mouth had been sewn shut.  She recognized it as a shrunken head similar to one she’d seen on PBS. 

Her mother knocked and came in without waiting for an answer.  Tammy reacted quickly and threw a towel over the head.