Pandaemonium (10 page)

Marky’s next to get a warm noseful of the bouquet.

‘That smelly bastard’s like one of those animals that has to mark oot its territory.’

‘If it’s territory he wants, he can have a fuckin’ room tae himself if he keeps that up,’ says Fizzy, but he’s laughing as he says it. They all are, with a cumulative effect on Beansy, who can feel himself starting to lose the place. There’s tears coming out now and everything.

‘Oh fuck, this is serious,’ Marky observes. ‘He’s managed to make his
own
eyes water.’

Beansy lets himself fall back on to the bed, the laughter tightening his guts and making him cough with it now. It’s not so much the carry-on in here, as this coming on the back of what just happened along the hall, which gets funnier every time he pictures the moment again. He and Deso clocked that Liam and Jase had nabbed this big four-bedded room to themselves, so the pair of them wandered in to claim the spare berths just to see the disgusted and disbelieving looks on their coupons.

‘Yeah, right,’ Liam said, once he had got over the initial horror and slipped his fanny-pad back in or whatever.

‘Whit?’ Deso asked, face like butter wouldnae, actually starting to take stuff out his bag, the mental bastard.

‘No fucking way,’ Jason gives it. ‘Find somewhere else. Now.’

‘There’s nowhere else,’ Deso told him. ‘It’s a full hoose. If you wanted a room to yourselves so’s you’ve got peace to poof each other, you should have taken thon two-bed effort up the hall next to the swing doors.’

‘Handy for the lassies’ toilets as well,’ Beansy added. ‘Case you need spare tampons or that.’

‘The male section isn’t full,’ Liam replied, arms folded so he looks even more like a lassie in the cream puff. ‘There’s more girls than guys on this trip, or can you retards not count?’

‘That why you two have overspilled into the boys’ corridor.’

Jase just sighed at this point and looked at the ceiling, like this was just boring the lacy pink panties off him now. The game was a bogey, as he’d finally sussed that they were only doing it to take the rise.

‘Come on,’ Deso urged, packing his stuff back into his bag and lifting it again.

‘Aye,’ Beansy agreed, then turned to Liam on his way out the door. ‘As if me and Deso actually wanted to share with you two up-yourselves boring bastards anyway. We’d get better conversation oot the lassies - and less of it about clothes and make-up.’

Liam closed the door behind them with a highly satisfying slam, which is when the giggles started to set in.

Lying on his bed, Beansy’s still coughing and wiping his eyes when big Kirk fills the door frame, Rocks and Dazza at his back. He’s got that game face on, serious as fuck, which kills the laughter. Beansy recognises it as the put-on game face, as opposed to the genuinely-on-the-brink-of-bleaching-some-cunt game face. This is potentially more dangerous, because in the case of the latter, you’re probably all right as long as you’re not the one who’s pissed him off. When it’s put on, it’s because he’s about to lay down the law, and any challenge to his authority must be met with full force, or else every fucker would be taking liberties.

‘Right,’ Kirk says. ‘Get yourselves tae fuck.’

‘Aw, come on, gie’s a break, big man,’ Deso appeals. ‘There’s four of us, and we were here first,’ he adds, looking to Rocks and Dazza, who can occasionally be appealed to when they know the big man is out of order. Dazza is glancing to the ceiling, looking fed up. He’s not exactly ready to die for the guy right now, but doesn’t look like he can be arsed arguing either.

Kirk responds by simply staring at Deso, nary a word spoken. Deso stares back, not feeling defiant, simply unable to restrain himself from conveying his anger at this moment. Kirk is a cunt for doing this: not just for muscling them out, but for bringing the threat of violence into their midst after what happened to Dunnsy.

He remembers a fight on the beach on a school trip to Girvan in second year: him and Beansy, a square go. Cannae mind what it was about, just shite that had been building up for weeks. Shook hands a wee bit later, mates again for the trip home: back when a fight ended in a burst nose and a squiggly walk from getting a boot in the sack. Violence is something else now, not wee boys incompetently trying to panel each other.

Suddenly Deso’s back at school, looking at the spreading, lapping pool of blood on the grey tiles in front of the lockers. It disappears again. Feels like he didn’t even have to shake the image himself; like something else kicked in and blocked it. The flash was so vivid one second, then the next, he couldn’t picture it if he tried.

Deso sighs and turns around, muttering as he begins repacking his bag.

There are several resigned ‘fuck’s sake’s emitted around the room as big Kirk and the boys step proprietorially inside. Beansy meanwhile makes his protest felt by means of his own specialised silent form of emission.

‘Aw, in the name of fuck,’ blurts Rocks, closing his eyes like it’s stinging them. ‘It’s bowfing in here.’

Kirk tuts, shaking his head. It’s only a fart, they all know, and the smell will be gone in a minute - maybe ten minutes; fuck it, half an hour - but it’s provided the excuse Dazza and Rocks need to back out of this.

Dazza taps Kirk on the shoulder. ‘C’mon. Let’s leave these clatty bastards to gas themselves,’ he says, offering Kirk an out that won’t look like a climbdown.

‘Good shout,’ Kirk says, accepting. He knows everybody is under no illusions regarding the fact that he would prevail if he chose to, but it’s not worth it, especially not with that niff to contend with. ‘Don’t know how these fannies are gaunny be able to sleep in here without firefighters’ breathing apparatus,’ he adds, walking out.

There’s silence for a few seconds, everybody bursting to laugh but calling canny until the big man has moved a respectful distance away, hopefully out of earshot.

Marky breaks first, falling on to his bed and shaking it as he buries his face in his pillow to stifle the sound.

‘I never thought I’d say this . . .’ Fizzy begins, but Beansy shushes him, finger over lips.

‘Wait for it,’ he urges. ‘Listen.’

They hear Kirk’s reprised order from down the hall: ‘Right. Get yourselves tae fuck.’

Jason’s response echoes after it, muffled by distance and intimidation: ‘Fair’s fair. We were here first.’ His voice sounds as pathetic as his reasoning.

The third voice is Dazza’s, low, harsh and unequivocal:

‘There’s two of you fuds in a four-bed room. Don’t give us your shite.’

Beansy steps into the centre of the room and takes a bow.

‘Who da man?’ he asks. ‘Who da man?’

‘You da man,’ they all reply.

He high-fives Marky and Fizzy, but extends Deso a hand to shake, reducing it to a single index finger as Deso reaches to grip. Deso knows what’s coming, but figures Beansy has earned it. He grabs the offered finger and pulls.

Five years in study and training, seven years a priest. Wasn’t he supposed to be over this by now? Or was it an ongoing test of strength, commitment and character? Rome to Royston, South America to South Lanarkshire: he had always been around so many people, all day, every day. He was immersed in their lives, in their works, in their troubles, their aspirations, their pain, their losses, in their celebrations and their joys.

He had once been a shy person, skilled at secretly keeping his distance, able to communicate without engaging, without risking himself. To do what he did as a priest, though, he
had
to engage, had to open himself and share all of those other people’s emotions, heedless of whether he might get hurt. It felt like he was giving each of them a little part of himself, and there were times when he would be exhausted but amazed that he could still find something more to give. Those, in fact, were the best days. So why, at the end of even those days,
especially
at the end of those days, upon being faced with a small, neat bedroom, did he feel the way he does now: that the room seems empty? That there is something missing, and missing from himself?

He takes out his little green toilet bag and checks inside to make sure his can of shaving foam hasn’t burst open and covered everything. It only ever happened the once, but after tasting it on his toothbrush for a fortnight, he’s always afraid of unzipping the top and finding himself facing a repeat. All is well, despite the minor collision endured by the bus. He goes to stick it in the bathroom, and reminds himself that a further consolation for not being an excited teenager this evening is that he won’t need to go creeping down any darkened corridors if he wakes up in the night and needs to pee.

Blake opens the bathroom door, and walks inside, which is when he discovers that it’s not the bathroom door. He has come through what turns out to be an adjoining door into the next room, in the centre of which Heather is in the process of changing her clothes. Her bra and midriff are exposed, but her face is obscured by the rolled-up polo-neck she is pulling on, which is why she didn’t see the door opening.

She hasn’t heard either, which provides a moment during which Blake could just possibly withdraw again unnoticed. He doesn’t seize it, though. He’s afraid it would look even worse to be caught like a peeping Tom, grabbing an eyeful and then scuttling away.

‘Oh, Jesus, sorry,’ he says, by way of announcing himself and owning up just before she gets clear of the polo-neck and sees him.

She doesn’t start, just laughs a little with embarrassment, though this embarrassment seems more to do with how the polo-neck has left her hair plastered to the side of her face than at being caught underdressed.

‘Thought this was my bathroom door,’ he explains.

‘Well, now we both know,’ Heather replies.

Having done the honest thing and let himself be caught red-handed, Blake retreats and closes the door gently but firmly. He stares at it, his heart thumping so loud he’s afraid she’ll hear it, already feeling the conflict and confusion get revved up as her words keep looping in his head. Christ. Had she just screamed, had she just tutted with annoyance, had she just muttered ‘For God’s sake’ in rightful indignation, he’d have gotten a light sentence: maybe ten minutes beating himself up over an accidental moment of mutual mortification. Instead she had batted him something sufficiently ambiguous as to condemn him to spending at least the next hour dissecting her reaction, at the end of which he would be none the wiser.

Then he’d have to say mass, with her watching.

He’s been working through a lot of things of late.

Avedon steps away from the microscope and makes towards the supply cupboards that take up the full length of one wall, the other three lined with sinks, workbenches, machinery and a fume cabinet.

‘Can you throw me some Brufen out of there?’ Merrick asks him. He needs something for his head, though the water he swallows the tablets with will be just as important. The bottle beside his PC is empty, and he recalls there was barely a mouthful in it when he sat down. This prompts him to look at his watch. He’s been at the computer for nearly four hours. His clothes are damp from sweat, so he must be pretty dehydrated. Who would have thought you could spend so long in the north of Scotland without ever feeling cold?

Avedon chucks him a blister pack of pills. He pops two into his palm and goes to a sink, where he pours some tap water into a glass beaker.

Avedon remains at the supply cupboards, evidently perplexed.

‘Is there a problem?’ Merrick enquires.

‘We’re out of oleum.’

Merrick feels the headache become that bit sharper as an involuntary tension seizes him. He’s clenching his fist around the pills with one hand, gripping the beaker too tight with the other. He feels threatened. Avedon is getting at him.

Then he realises that Avedon is merely looking for oleum. It’s his own conscience that’s pushing his buttons.

Oleum. Hazardous material. He can picture the decal on the jar: the little hand, the test tube, the descending droplets, the cartoonish wavy lines indicating a harsh, corrosive reaction with organic material.

Warning. Avoid contact with skin.

Danger.

The test tube. The droplets. Little wavy lines. Looked like the hand could just be giving off a smell, a 2D depiction of perfume. And in truth there had been a smell. Wavy lines too: of smoke, of gases. Screaming. Screaming he
couldn’t
zone out. Screaming he’d be hearing forever.

If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, then what did it say that he had been tempted down that path by holy water?

What he witnessed in the test chamber had spooked him on a number of levels, so much so that it took him days just to make sense of his memories. He felt like he had to sift through the data collected by his own senses, disentangling and interpreting it like any set of lab results until a coherent picture could be assembled. He was still so reeling from the fear, shock and astonishment that he needed time to get his analytical head back on.

Holy water had burned the creature’s skin: real Hammer horror movie stuff, and it had happened before his very eyes. The fact that the skin belonged to a horned demon bolted to the table did make this particular sub-phenomenon seem minor to the point of incidental, but the utter enormity of what they were dealing with was too huge to compute, so he had, almost by scientific instinct, homed in on one detail that he
could
try to make sense of.

What if, he pondered, it was water itself that caused the reaction? As far as he could ascertain (access to the holding area remaining highly restricted, with an information seal almost as tight as those on the mag-locked doors), the specimens were being given water to drink. That suggested there couldn’t be a complete aversion, but internal tissue could react differently from external. He knew from painful experience that chopped chillies, for example, could be swallowed without damage while the fingers that carried them to the mouth could suffer a chemical burn from the contact, to say nothing of what happened if you rubbed your eyes or worse, went for a piss.

He took a skin sample from one of the expired specimens, then tested it against a number of substances: tap water, holy water, an acid and an alkali, these last two of corresponding pH. The results were even more perplexing than he had anticipated. Both the acid and the alkali inflicted visible damage to the skin, while neither water sample - sacred or profane - produced a reaction. Not only did this suggest that simple water wasn’t responsible for the damage he’d witnessed in the chamber, but it indicated that holy water only reacted with
living
tissue. The ramifications of this were dizzying, but he knew he couldn’t draw any conclusions without comparison tests on a live subject.

The term TLV - The Little Vatican - had initially been coined by Steinmeyer out of ill-tempered flippancy, but it was more accurate than he could have anticipated. If the Vatican was indeed a state, then its outpost here was like an embassy, accorded full diplomatic status. The US Government might hold the note on this facility, and it might be sited in Scotland, but when you stepped through those doors on the opposite side of the central corridor, you were as good as on Roman soil. Cardinal Tullian had even consecrated the ground, carrying out some ritual at what had to be a record altitude below sea level. Sacred ground didn’t have to be the high ground, it seemed, but whether that went for the moral distinction as well as the physical was a matter for debate. Certainly, nobody would be calling any of The Little Vatican’s house guests to supply endorsements.

Gaining access to a live subject proved a prolonged and delicate process of negotiation, the key to which was keeping his frustrations in check. It might seem surreal to Merrick that the facility’s scientific personnel were having to go cap-in-hand to a bunch of priests in order to gain access to specimens procured through their own experiments, but not only was he quickly learning to redefine his concept of reality on a daily basis, he had also learned to accept which realities around here were genuinely unalterable. Chief among those was the way the military operated. Their purpose was, first and foremost, security. Therefore, as they saw it, the moment the first of those creatures was brought forth into this world was the moment their role here ceased to be the running of an R&D facility and transformed into a threat-containment operation. Priority number one, at that point, was garnering intel on what the full scale and nature of that threat might be.

To that end, as well as consulting the science personnel, they had called in the base chaplain, who immediately declared it to be way above his pay-grade, in respect of
either
of his employers. Neither the chaplain nor the scientists were in the position to offer any kind of informed assessment, but in the padre’s case, he was at least able, as he put it, to ‘point them in the direction of a man who could’. With the world of science incapable of similarly recommending someone with comparably superior credentials, it was the American Cardinal Terrence Tullian who swiftly became the US Army’s senior adviser on what they considered to be potentially the greatest threat they might ever face.

To be fair to the military brass, it wasn’t a difficult choice. For their part, the science personnel offered, at best, frank admissions of ignorance and, at worst, in the case of Steinmeyer, histrionic displays of outrage. By contrast, Tullian offered information, experience and cold, measured certainty, which had been in far scarcer supply than the military could tolerate. Unlike everyone else, he was able to assure them that he knew precisely what he was dealing with, which was always going to be music to their ears, but he played an even sweeter tune when he offered to bring in his own personnel and effectively take charge of the threat. This gave the military a role they were far more comfortable with: they were content to let someone else accept responsibility, as long as they knew they had ultimate control. They were used to peacekeeping, used to securing borders and maintaining stability while a reliable, autonomous infrastructure was established beneath them. Tullian gave them that, and in exchange they gave him complete control of the specimens - at least while they were alive, after which they became official (if ultimately disavowable) property of the US Government.

Tullian insisted that only his people were permitted to be in direct contact with the specimens, and was anxious to restrict circumstances that would bring non-Vatican personnel into close proximity. This was to prevent what he described as ‘spiritual contamination’. Merrick had encountered some unusual, uncommon and improbable Health and Safety stipulations in his time, but this was the first time he had seen the threat of possession cited as an occupational hazard.

The fact that it actually seemed a
credible
threat nonetheless proved no deterrent to Merrick’s burning experimental quest. After much patience, greater delicacy and a degree of deference closer to grovelling than diplomacy, as well as the submissions, each in triplicate, of four different drafts of a formal experimental protocol, he eventually procured permission to carry out his live-subject study.

When he stepped through the door of what Steinmeyer was always bitterly reminding everyone used to be the Alpha Labs, he was left under no doubt that he was now on Vatican property. The fixtures and fittings were largely the same as in the Beta Labs across the corridor - even the initial layout was symmetrical - but from the logos on the keycards for the electro-locked doors to even the screen savers on their computers, the iconography served to stress that this was all under a very different - and some might say higher - jurisdiction. Tullian and his staff were using this part of their allocated area as office space, confirming what a priest once told Merrick at a friend’s wedding: that in day-to-day operation, the Catholic Church was more bureaucracy than theocracy. However, it wasn’t only the former Alpha Labs that the Vatican staff controlled; it was what lay beyond them, above them and beneath them that represented the true extent of the Cardinal’s delegated power.

Merrick was welcomed into the LV offices by two priests who were to be his escorts throughout the test, as agreed on the final draft of his experimental protocol. Monsignor Kharkov and Father Tanner, as their photo-IDs announced them, furnished him with one of their yellow suits and left him to put it on while they verified the agreed contents of his inventory. He declined the garb, a certain scientific chauvinism compelling him to point out that all Geiger readings taken around the creatures had been negative and the radiation suit was therefore unnecessary. That was when they reminded him that radiation was not what the suit was intended to shield him from.

They did not suit up themselves, he noted.

‘We will be remaining outside of the contamination radius,’ they explained.

It occurred to him to ask how they measured such things: a possession compass? He held his tongue, though. He didn’t want them taking the huff and cancelling the experiment; and frankly he had little right to be irreverent, when so far these guys had demonstrated a far deeper understanding of the phenomena they were all dealing with than anybody across the hall in the Beta Labs had managed.

They led him beyond the office complex, through a mag-locked door, into a wide, steel-walled corridor. He was inside the secure section, taking the same journey as the specimens, and would enter the chamber precisely as they had: from the Alpha side, accompanied by his own Vatican escort. At this point he was glad they weren’t wearing their yellow suits to complete the effect, not to mention the steel tethering shafts.

He passed a code-locked security door on his right, the top of its formidable outer frame bearing the legend: ‘Containment Pods - Extreme Caution’. Stealing a glimpse through the bullet-proof glass observation panel, he saw a wide aisle flanked on either side by a row of steel grids, each one securing the front of a small cell.

It was a long walk to that second mag-locked door, longer still as he understood that its distance corresponded to the length of the chamber housing the pods. It used to be a testing range for experimental weapons.

The original containment area had been the brig, on the opposite side of the corridor, consisting of a mere four cells. Merrick couldn’t get hard data on how many live specimens were currently in containment, or how many had come through the Dodgson anomaly in total. Steinmeyer estimated the latter figure to be upwards of a hundred.

On one wall of the corridor there was a small arsenal of Decoherence Rifles visible inside an electronically locked, keypad-operated cabinet. Kind of like ‘in case of emergency break glass’, except the glass was unbreakable and you needed code-clearance to get hold of the hardware. Merrick wondered whether the priests had it; he sure as shit knew the scientists didn’t.

When the countdown ended and Merrick stepped inside the chamber, he found that the experiment was already set up in accordance with the agreed protocol. Tullian was waiting a few yards from the subject, which was clasped and bolted to the cross-braced table. It was a smaller specimen, attended correspondingly by only two yellow-suited priests and a detail of a mere four soldiers. The subject was shorter and less muscular than Merrick had seen previously. Its horns were only budding, though there was the same snarling defiance and crackling aggression about its visage.