Pastworld (22 page)

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Chapter 43

FROM EVE’S JOURNAL

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Recently I’ve had moments of feeling strange, as if my mind would suddenly flip and slip a gear and it frightened me. I had once told Jago that odd images came to me unbidden. I had told no one else of this before. I am sure that whatever happened to me before I was in that attic room with Jack, the something, the mystery that had caused my memory loss, is coming back now to haunt me.

The first night out in the forest I went to sleep in the wagon, while Jago and Caleb slept outside under a lean-to tent. I lay for a long time listening to the noises of the night and thinking about Bible J and Caleb. I had felt shy with Caleb but also comfortable. Now we were apart, surrounded by the night noises of the forest and by the stars and the wide sky.

There was a heady perfume in the air, the smell of leaf mould and woodsmoke from the dwindling fire. The wagon moved, as if someone had stepped on the little iron foot rest by the canvas opening. I sat up in bed. A breeze stirred the cloth and lifted my hair. It was Caleb. He stood in front of me all wrapped up in one of the velvet cloths. He was shivering. I could see gooseflesh across his pale shoulders and his upper arms. I reached out to him.

‘Are you all right, Caleb?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just had to come and see you.’

His face was near mine and I could see him trembling.

‘I understand, Caleb. Don’t be sorry.’

‘I can hear your heartbeat.’

‘I can hear yours,’ I said.

I reached out and took his hands in mine and raised them up and then I pressed them to my throat so that his hands were wrapped tightly around my neck. He kept still, his hands warmed my skin. I closed my eyes and tilted my head back and I waited. So did he.

‘Tighter,’ I said quietly.

He relaxed his grip then, and took his hands away.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t that hurt you?’

‘I don’t understand either,’ I said. ‘I need you to hold me there tight. It’s almost as if . . .’

‘As if you want to be hurt? I don’t want to hurt you, Eve,’ Caleb said.

He looked into my eyes.

‘You have oddly bright eyes, Eve,’ he said. ‘People often comment on my eyes being so bright.’

‘It’s true your eyes are like mine,’ I said, ‘and they crinkle at the edges when you smile, which isn’t often.’

‘I don’t have much to smile about,’ he said.

I reached my hand up and stroked the soft skin at the side of his eyes and then for some reason I moved his hands over to cover my mouth and suddenly I called out, ‘No,’ and pushed him away from me. Something very odd was happening, and I felt impelled to make it happen, whatever it was.

He moved back from me, shocked. I had shocked myself. He had a frown across his face; his blue eyes were no longer smiling.

He pulled a velvet cushion into the centre of the space. He sat down on the cushion.

‘Sit with me here, Eve. I won’t hurt you. Did you think I wanted to hurt you? Do you want to hurt me?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think you want to hurt me. I don’t know why I did that, Caleb. I don’t know why.’

I flung myself down on to the cushion beside him, down near to the ground. I could smell the intense scent of the earth with the grass and the leaves. I lay on my back and looked up at Caleb and his narrow chest and his skin, blue-white in the near darkness.

‘There’s a painted moon behind your head. You look like the man in the moon from one of Jack’s nursery books,’ I said. He lay down beside me and I cradled his head in both hands, and I looked into his eyes and said, ‘In a strange way I feel for you, you know, but it is so different from the way I feel about Bible J. I don’t want to kiss you or anything.’

‘Yes, I do know,’ he said, ‘because I feel the same way about you.’

Caleb looked down at me right into my eyes and then I put his hands around my throat again. I felt his thumbs pressing down.‘Like that,’ I whispered.

I closed my eyes and his hands rested there. He gradually relaxed his grip on my throat and then he lay his head on my breast and listened to my heartbeat. He pulled the warm velvet cloth about the two of us and I nestled against his shoulder and we lay still together in our strange new friendship in the warm darkness under the trees. Nothing else happened between us. As I drifted comfortably in his arms I thought of Bible J and his easy laugh and his smiling eyes. I remembered something else suddenly and very clearly. Another forest, and a bonfire, the smell of leaf mould, and rockets and fireworks bursting above the tree canopy, and then a line of people watching me jump over the sparks and remnants of a dwindling bonfire and I saw Jack there standing and clapping his hands and laughing, in celebration, but of what?

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We spent two more days and nights in the forest. Caleb did not visit me again but stayed in the tent with Jago at night. We were completely relaxed with one another. I spent most of our last morning lazing, dreaming. I sat, or rather lolled, oh so dreamily, high up in a great oak tree. No one bothered me even when a storm came. There were dark thunderheads over the forest.

‘A rare thing,’ Jago said, ‘in an age where the rainfall is carefully managed.’

I stayed up in the tree, hidden among the dense leaves. I wanted to feel the storm, feel real, wild nature.

I was both thrilled and terrified as the thunder crashed around the forest. ‘Oh marvellous tree, keep me safe,’ I said in my mind, and my hand went at once to my throat where I had put Caleb’s hands. I watched the real storm. Huge bolts of lightning sizzled in the wet, somewhere far over the trees. Below, seemingly undisturbed, Jago carried on working with his ropes. The rain fell in solid torrents, spilled across the leaves and scattered them. I put my face out from my deep shelter and let the rain fall on my skin and listened to it as it rattled on the leaves all around me.

I waited, high among the leaves, while the rain diminished. It was the tail end of the storm, and the remnants of the once boiling sky around me flew through the leaf spaces as wind on my face. The sound of the wind tearing through the yellow and orange leaves gave me intense pleasure. Occasionally, one or two big drops of rain fell through the leaves and splashed on to my neck, made me shiver.

If I concentrated hard enough, I found I could slow the drops of rain down just as they hit the leaves. I could watch them fall in a slower motion, I could study the light refracting through each one. There were little rainbows on the curve of the water. This was a new marvel. I decided at once to lock it away, deep inside myself; away even from Bible J, Caleb and Jago. I have surrounded the idea of it with a dense black box in my mind. I know instinctively that I should somehow shield it, that it shows once again that I am not the same as others.

I remembered something about that first visit to a forest. When the trails of smoke drifted up from the bonfire on the ground, and I breathed in the smell of the woodsmoke and the wet forest floor, I saw cadets in red all lined up to watch me jump the flames of the bonfire. Perhaps that was why I enjoyed the smell of Jago’s woodsmoke. Had that smell caused this memory to come bubbling up, and when would all this have been? It seemed somehow very distant but it couldn’t have been.

I decided it was time to find Caleb and Jago.

I slid round the wet trunk and walked along the rope. The ropes linked all the smaller, younger trees, so that this, the old oak, was at the centre of a tree city that seemed as dense and populated in its way as that other city.

I climbed down the ladders, and when I hit the wet grass I ran with my arms wide. My long skirt billowed, and my feet kicked up little sprays of clean rainwater.

I ran straight into the arms of Jago, lovely kind Jago. He swung me up and round and laughed at my wet hair and face. Now it seemed was the time to return. Jago needed to get back. There was to be a celebration of Pastworld’s tenth birthday. Fireworks, a demolition, and Jago saw the chance to earn a lot of money in a few hours. It was too good to miss.

‘I had a memory return to me,’ I said. ‘I was here in a forest just like this once before, perhaps in my lost childhood. The leaves were yellow and orange, vivid like these, and there was a bonfire and I jumped the flames and there was a celebration, a firework display.’ Suddenly I spun round and spread my arms wide. ‘You shouldn’t have hidden away from the storm. It was a blessing from the sky. We should have lifted our faces up to the sky and let the rain fall joyfully upon us. We should have savoured it, drunk it in while we could. And just listen to that music, the last of the storm now rolling away.’

Jago went to fetch Pelaw, and Caleb said, ‘Eve, about the other night, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let those odd things happen. I don’t understand. I don’t want to hurt you, Eve, but you know that.’

‘I know. There’s nothing to say sorry for,’ I said.

‘You forgive me then,’ he said with the first big smile I had ever seen on his face.

‘There’s nothing to forgive you for, Caleb Brown.’

‘Look at your wet clothes. You’re mad,’ said Caleb, laughing.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I am mad, madly in love with all of this life all around us.’

We returned to the city by the same route and parked up with the rest of the circus family. Caleb went back to Mr Leighton’s house. Dear Bible J came to see me. He stayed with me and now sleeps innocently beside me, with Jago in the back among the backcloths. I’ve been lying awake for a while, writing slowly across the paper. I was enjoying making the letters flow into words. My mind turns to the outside space under the trees and being there with Caleb and Jago. I think I would go there again with Bible J, although I can’t see him sitting among all the trees somehow. It was so pure and strange out there and so beautiful, so unlike the city.

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Chapter 44

Catchpole spent a fruitless few days waiting for news, impatient for Hudson’s reply. Then finally, in the early morning post, a brown foolscap envelope arrived from the Comms Centre. A hastily written note was attached to the file with a clip.

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Hey Charlie,

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Here it is, the very file you wanted. Appendix A. Sorry for the delay, but I had to steal it. There was no way that the records office at Buckland was going to let it out of their sight. However, with a little distraction and a swift substitution I copied it for you. You seemed that hell bent on it. What you do with it is up to you.

I didn’t even glance at it. I would rather not know what’s in it. They were mighty protective of it and all I will say is if they come looking, believe me, I will be in maximum denial mode.

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Your old friend,

Hudson

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PS Maybe you should burn it after you read it and go into denial mode too.

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Catchpole sat at the desk in his rooms and poured himself a little whisky in a heavy glass, an old single malt – he had a feeling he was going to need it – and then he opened the file.

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Appendix A File 2

STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL /CLASSIFIED

NOT TO BE REMOVED

ATTN. ONLY: A. Buckland / C.I. Lestrade / L. Brown / J. Mulhearn /

PROMETHEUS PROJECT

Minutes of a meeting of Prometheus Project management held on XX/XX/XXXX

Present all named above

Mr A. Buckland in the chair

Logged from Tape 1 by secretariat / D.I. Prinsep.

Buckland: I am sorry we had to have such a private, distant and low key celebration but the reasons should be obvious looking at what we have made. I trust we are all recovered from the champagne. The subjects certainly lived up to expectations in themselves. I was astonished. Such beauty and skills from Number 2, from our Eve, such perfectly judged jumps and leaps and such dexterity and fearlessness. Did you expect that too? That level of achievement, was that built in?

Murmured replies, inaudible mutters.

Remarkable, not a spark on the dress at all. As for our Gentleman, well, he looked the part all right, and I think he would have done everything we have expected of him there and then if he were allowed to. If left to his own devices. Quite a worry that one, if he got loose, eh?

Mulhearn: That’s the problem, Abel. Both Brown and myself are very uneasy indeed about the Gentleman, Adam, Number 1. We have nurtured both of these, what – ‘beings’ shall we call them? People? And now feel we cannot allow the proposed scheme to go ahead as planned and budgeted for in the original proposal and Corporation briefing. Not at all.

Brown: I agree with Dr Mulhearn. It cannot be right now under any circumstances. Not now that we have known these creatures, these beings, and particularly Eve, our charming girl. We cannot continue with this under any circumstances. We cannot now see her hurt.

Buckland: Suddenly you have developed moral scruples? It is a shame you did not express the same feelings while you were spending my money like water on this thing. Think for a moment. You have achieved so much in the past five years, and I have spent so much to enable it. You have both made an extraordinairy breakthrough in biological science and now you are prepared to let it all founder through your own frankly misguided sentimentality.

Mulhearn: We hear nothing from our tame policeman so far. Unlike him to be shy of commenting on such matters.

Lestrade: Numbers 1 and 2 are, strictly speaking, partly, or is it wholly, artificial? If so, they are not covered by the normal criminal laws. The Gentleman is powerful, and she is programmed to respond especially to him and to allow the events which he has been designed for to take place. Your plan, if I am right, is to revive the victim each time, to repeat the event?

Buckland: Yes, precisely. Wipe clean and restart each and every time.

Lestrade: The laws that apply here, don’t forget, are the old laws. There is no contingency or precedent for beings such as these . . . hybrids, clones, are they?

Mulhearn: Leave the description to us.

Lestrade: I am shy of calling them anything. After all, I have only seen them the once, at your secret celebration. If I were to witness as a paying customer what you have planned I would indeed be shocked. However, my belief is that once the word gets out that such a thing is available as part of a Pastworld visit, then you will make your research and development fortune back, and in my opinion all legally.

Buckland: You see, gentlemen, this is the secret desire, the dream that many people harbour. Especially about this time and this place and those crimes. The scenario has already been prepared, you have produced your miracle, albeit a secret one. Leave them to us now. Let us take care of them.

CONFUSED VOICES / SHOUTING.

Disc 1 RECORDING TRANSCRIPTION ENDS.
16:35 XX/XX/XXXX

Catchpole looked up from the pages of the transcript. He was troubled, shocked. It took him a little while to absorb what he thought he had just read. Hybrid people made as characters to enact a grisly tableau. Amusing automata were everywhere in Pastworld. Cheerful porters, stately butlers and flocks of picturesque pigeons were one thing; this was something else, clearly something of another order, and a revelation of the terrible greed and cynicism of a man like Buckland, a man Catchpole had always admired for his vision and his genius in re-establishing the great city of the past. He had finally read between the lines, understood all the hints that Lestrade had dropped, and it was suddenly clear. Lestrade had said only that the Fantom was ‘supernatural’. No wonder! The ‘Gentleman’ was a sick construct: a hybrid designed at his inception to kill and eviscerate. Dr Mulhearn, the blind man, had been a bio-engineer working with Lucius Brown on an attraction for Pastworld codenamed Prometheus. At the same point they’d realised they could no longer support it. They had drawn a line in the sand, a line they would not cross. They had grown attached to one of their creations – the girl, Eve, known as Number 2. Number 1 was obviously the Gentleman now known as the Fantom. Who had given him that name, he wondered. Had he chosen it himself? He was designed to play the Ripper, the notorious East District murderer, and Eve was created to be his perpetual victim. It seemed so far-fetched, such sick ridiculous nonsense, and yet? A fire had destroyed the Prometheus project building, presumably along with all the research. Jack was believed killed and the creations had vanished, supposedly burned in the fire and dead like him. Except they weren’t, any of them. Jack injured, in his own fire perhaps, took off into Pastworld with Eve to nurture and protect her. The Gentleman, built as he was, would have been too violent, too difficult for Jack to manage. He must have cut loose and become the Fantom. The Fantom who still searched for his intended, his perfect victim. And it seemed he had looked for his makers too, Brown and Mulhearn. He had dealt with poor Dr Mulhearn, and he had got his hands on his other maker now. Above all he was after this poor girl Eve, wherever she might be. She was in serious danger.

Catchpole did not burn the file as Hudson suggested. He tucked the sheets of typed paper back into the envelope and sealed it with the toggles. He went up to his room, took down his case from the top of the wardrobe and took out his police issue revolver. He checked the chambers and added the ammunition belt which strapped crossways under his cape. He replaced the case and went back down to the sitting room. The clock on the mantel read 8.15 p.m., nearly time for the big public demolition party. He could already hear the crowds. He turned down the oil lamp and the gaslight, so that the room was in half-light. It was time to pay a visit to Fournier Street.

Just as he was about to leave his lodgings there was a loud knocking at the front door.