Fourth Horseman (5 page)

When Dad came back with the papers, Mr Davenport took them and left immediately, ignoring the offer of tea and sandwiches. The rest of us sat for a long time in a kind of daze, like mice crouching among the weeds long after the shadow of the hawk has gone. It was creepy.

Mr Davenport had insisted that absolutely nothing pertaining to him or to the project should remain at our house once the lab complex was ready. So Dad took Alex and me along to help him move the computer and all the other stuff that had been delivered to the house by the office suppliers. He had to make three trips because there was no way it would all fit in the car.

After a couple of miles we entered a network of tiny, leafy lanes, and it seemed to me so unlikely that there was a lab down there that I began to think Dad was pulling our legs. I had done a lot of cycling on the country roads around Worcester but I’d never discovered this area before. There were very few houses, and those we did see blended into the countryside as though they were still part of it. It felt like a real backwater. Eventually we stopped at a pair of old gates that looked as though they led into the farmyard of some ramshackle old estate. Which was, in fact, exactly what they did. Now we were convinced that Dad was having us on, and Alex told him so. The gates looked as if it would take a weight-lifter to open them, but Dad showed us the keypad ingeniously concealed in an old wooden post beside the entrance. He punched in the number and the huge gates swung open on oiled hinges and then closed silently behind us. Round the corner of the gravelled driveway was a range of old brick outbuildings. The ones at the front were decaying, their slate roofs collapsing and their windows fallen out. Inside them old wooden mangers dangled from rusting nails and the black sludge of ancient manure covered the floors. But behind them was a second yard and here the buildings were in far better condition.

Dad parked his car round the back, beneath the cover of an old Dutch barn. It was hidden there and wouldn’t be seen by anyone if they came snooping around. We walked back to the better of the two yards. The windows and most of the doors were firmly boarded up. The buildings still looked like farm outhouses, but in the dark corner of a lean-to hayshed was a discreet but very solid wooden door, and beside it, blending ingeniously into the brickwork, was a card slot and a fingerprint recognition pad.

Inside, there was a whole complex of rooms. The first one was huge; a long hall lined with sturdy metal cages, ready and waiting for the arrival of the squirrels. Beyond that was an office, which was where the computer and all the other stuff was going to go, and beside it a kitchen and a bathroom. None of the rooms had any natural light because windows, even skylights, would allow a curious passer-by to look in and they had all been boarded up. So once you were inside you might have been anywhere. The walls were freshly painted and plasterboard ceilings concealed the wooden beams of the old buildings. The built-in desks and work units were brand new and the whole place was clean and sparkling. Further on again we came to the quarantine room with its showers and decontamination chambers. Only one of its doors would open at a time, which meant that you couldn’t accidentally leave a passage through which a virus could escape. Everything that passed in or out of the virology lab had to be sterilized or quarantined in a special sealed box. Even people had to be scrubbed, on the way in as well as on the way out, and that was why Dad didn’t take us any further that day. It would take too long for everyone to shower and change, he said, and there wasn’t much to see in there anyway. The inner lab was a sealed chamber containing the machines and chemicals he needed to test blood and to isolate, identify and manipulate viruses. There was a second computer in there, and all manner of specialist equipment. There was another tiny kitchen and bathroom area as well, where he could smoke well away from the sensitive machinery, and a sealed room where the virus would actually be tested on the animals. There was an incinerator built into the outside wall for all the rubbish. It burned with a ferocious heat but it was well insulated, and its flues were lined with filters that prevented anything that might be dangerous from entering the outside air.

‘You won’t even see smoke when it’s operating,’ he told us. ‘Just a heat shimmer above the chimney.’

It wasn’t until we went back out that we realized how truly bizarre the set-up was. Outside was Victorian England, red brick, the remnants of a forgotten kind of agriculture. Inside was cutting-edge genetic engineering.

When we had finished unloading the car Alex and I left Dad to set up the office and went exploring. The yards had once been contained by a low stone wall. In some places it was still standing, but most of it had fallen. Beyond it, and surrounding the whole complex of buildings, was a combination of old woodland and younger scrub. The air in the woods was cool and fresh, the way it always seems to be under old trees, no matter what kind of day it is. Coincidentally, or ironically perhaps, there were squirrels in there. We saw two of them, grey ones, both hurtling through the branches away from us. It was a beautiful, peaceful place, but there was something about it that made me uneasy. I think Alex felt it as well, because he didn’t show his usual adventurous spirit. We were both reluctant to go out of sight of the buildings, and we turned back long before we found out how far the woodland went.

I don’t know what it was that made us feel like that about the woods. We were country kids, born and bred, and had no fear of the natural world, even in its most quiet and ancient places. Thinking back, I wonder whether we had some kind of premonition of what was going to come. Maybe the horsemen were already there, watching us from the deep, cool shadows, seen only by the curious squirrels.

A
BOUT A FORTNIGHT LATER
the squirrels were delivered to the lab. Dad had gone there early on a Saturday morning to take charge of them and I was still in bed when he phoned me. I had nothing in particular to do that day and I was luxuriating in the lie-in.

‘I need a hand,’ said Dad. ‘I can’t manage them on my own.’

‘Manage what?’ I said, trying my best not to sound grumpy.

‘The squirrels. They’re all babies. Tiny little things. They keep biting me.’

I had to laugh at that and it lifted my mood. I promised to come to his rescue as soon as I’d had breakfast. I wasn’t sure what I could do to help him, other than get myself bitten instead of him, but I was dying to see the baby squirrels. I gobbled my breakfast while I was getting dressed and ran out to the shed. Alex’s bike was gone and I remembered that he was away for the night. Not only had our family adopted Javed, but Javed’s family had adopted Alex as well. He had been especially invited by Javed’s mum to stay for a day or two because her mother and sister were visiting from Shasakstan and there were going to be all kinds of parties going on.

It took me exactly half an hour to get to the lab on my bike. I couldn’t get in through the gates so I cycled on a bit further to see if there was another way in for someone on foot. There wasn’t. An old wall ran along beside the road for about three hundred metres, then turned inland and ran along the side of a cornfield. It was a good two and a half metres high at its lowest point and impossible to see over. On the other side of it was the woodland Alex and I had begun to explore a couple of weeks ago. I couldn’t tell from there but I guessed that the wall went all the way round the old farm buildings and their woodlands. The top of it was concrete embedded with chunks of glass, their sharp edges pointing upwards, and it looked to me as if some of it had been recently replaced. The lab was clearly well protected.

I went back to the gate and phoned Dad on my mobile to get the numbers for the keypad. 7686. I committed them to memory as I punched them in, then cycled through the open gates and round to the back yard. I wondered who had done the conversion, and how they had managed to keep it quiet. There was no sign of them left behind—no piles of rubble or drifts of plastic and polystyrene. No empty milk cartons or crisp packets lying around. Healthy weeds were growing through the gravel of the drive and between the old paving stones of the yards. It was all just a little bit too perfect, and as I passed beneath the overhanging branches at the edge of the yard I got that uneasy feeling again. Something about this was wrong.

Dad opened the door for me and led the way into the cage room. It was completely silent—no sign of squirrels anywhere. But on the central island where the feed and cleaning tools were kept several square shapes were standing, covered by a dark grey blanket.

‘They’re in there,’ said Dad. He lifted the blanket and all hell broke loose. In six small hamster cages three dozen young squirrels burst into frenzied activity, hurling themselves at the sides and tops of the cages with surprising force.

‘Look.’ Three of Dad’s fingers had plasters on. He pulled one of them off and showed me a tiny wound. ‘They’re all very cross for some reason.’

‘Wouldn’t you be?’ I said. ‘Cooped up like that. Where have they come from?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Dad. ‘Mr Davenport said they were bred in captivity but he didn’t say where.’

‘Who would be breeding squirrels in captivity?’ I asked. ‘They’re not normally used in lab experiments, are they?’

‘No,’ said Dad. ‘And they don’t behave like lab mice or rats either. Whoever bred these hasn’t tamed them at all.’ He waved his bitten fingers again and I laughed.

‘I was going to put them into the big cages,’ he went on.

‘We can just pour them in, can’t we?’ I said.

‘We could, but how would we ever get them out again?’

I could see his point. I didn’t have any experience of small animals. Some of my friends kept hamsters or gerbils but I never had.

‘I think we should leave them where they are until we can get them used to being handled. There must be a way of doing it.’

‘I’ll ask around,’ I said.

‘Carefully,’ said Dad.

‘Or I might find something on the Internet. Can I use your computer?’

‘No,’ said Dad. ‘Wait until you get home. There’s no rush.’

He tipped some hamster food into each of the cages, setting off the panic reactions again. The little creatures were really cute, even if they did bite.

‘Can I do it, Dad?’ I said. ‘Get them used to us, I mean. They’re gorgeous. I wouldn’t mind coming in and playing with them.’

‘That’d be perfect,’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Definitely.’

‘You have a deal,’ he said. ‘And I might even be able to find a bit of extra pocket money for you.’

We filled all the little dropper bottles with water and left the baby squirrels to themselves for a while. Dad was staying, but he came out into the yard to have a cigarette as I was leaving, and that was when I saw him. A man dressed in flowing white clothes, astride a white horse, shining in a patch of sunlight beneath the trees. My mind faltered. He couldn’t be there, and not only because of the wall and the gates. He couldn’t be there because he didn’t belong to the world I lived in. He was too big, too bright; like something that had walked out of the world of dreams. But he wasn’t a dream. He was there.

I turned to Dad, wondering whether he had seen him too. I don’t know which scared me most, the horseman or what I saw on my father’s face. I was shocked and frightened but Dad’s reaction was entirely different. He was mesmerized. He looked like a sleepwalker, or someone who has been hypnotized. He was staring at the rider with glazed, dreamy eyes, and he was swaying slightly on his feet. I turned back to the horseman, and saw that he was looking directly at Dad. I had the sense of being an observer in an intensely powerful but private meeting. However dreamlike the horseman might appear, the power he had over Dad was real. I might have been a shadow or a photograph for all the significance I had during that exchange.

I don’t know how long I stood, paralysed, staring. The horse was beautiful; a gleaming white pin-up of a creature. It was heavy, with big feet and feathered legs, but it wasn’t a carthorse. It had a handsome, noble head and soft brown eyes, and it stood quite still, strong and patient. The rider was tall and upright, with a noble bearing. His white robes flowed down over the horse’s flanks. Around them both, flies circled in the still air.

It was Dad who broke the long, tense silence. He gave a strange little sigh, or moan, and took a few swaying steps towards the rider under the trees.

‘No! Dad!’ I acted instinctively, ungluing my feet from the ground and lunging at him, grabbing him round the neck. His eyes opened wide. He looked like someone startled out of a doze in front of the TV.

‘Huh?’ he said.

‘Don’t go near him!’ I didn’t mean to yell, but I couldn’t help it.

‘Near who?’ said Dad.

I looked behind him. The woodland was silent and dark. There was no sunlight. There were no flies. There was no horseman.

‘Who was that?’ I gabbled. ‘What did he want? Why was he dressed like that?’

‘Who was who?’ said Dad. He still looked dazed; not quite with it, and I had a strong desire to shake him.

‘The rider. Over there in the trees!’

Dad looked vaguely into the middle distance and, a little unsteadily, took out his cigarettes. He lit one and stood smoking it.

‘You saw him. I know you did.’

He had started to shake. He sucked at the cigarette the way a man who was drowning would gasp for air.

‘Dad?’

He looked straight through me, and I saw something dreadful in his eyes. Something cold and distant and heartless that I had never seen there before. Then he shook himself, as if he was cold, and said brightly, ‘Weren’t you going home?’

I was speechless.

‘I’ll be along in an hour or two when I finish up here. You could peel some spuds if you have time.’

He didn’t wait for me to reply, but turned and walked rapidly back to the building, flicking his finished cigarette into the gravel at the corner. I stood, rudderless, staring after him. From a branch nearby a magpie cackled. It made me jump. I swung round, stared into the trees, expecting to see the horseman again. The woods were calm and innocent. And dark. It made me realize something that I ought to have noticed at the time. The sky had been overcast all morning with a cover of pale cloud. There had been no breaks in it at all: it wasn’t that kind of cloud. So whatever had made the white horse and rider shine as they stood beneath the trees, it hadn’t been the sun.