Stiletto (16 page)

“I — yeah, okay,” said Felicity, still slightly taken aback. “Um, you said this is a hospital? What hospital? Where are we?”

“This is the William Harvey Hospital,” said Cedella. “In Ashford.”

“Ashford?” repeated Felicity in bewilderment.

“In Kent,” said the nurse helpfully.

“Kent. Why —
how
are we in Kent?”

“Him,” said Cedella, patting Pawn Chopra gently. “This is the room that Sanjay was born in. I was here twenty-one years ago when he came into the world. And now, periodically, he comes back.” Felicity stared at her.

“It was about four times the first year, and don’t even ask me how much fuss that caused when he started popping up in the hospital bed with no explanation. For a while, people thought he was being kidnapped.” She draped a tactful towel over Felicity’s lap, and then started rubbing her shoulders and back dry. “Although I don’t know what kind of kidnapper would keep delivering a child back to the one place,” the nurse sniffed. “Especially since no one ever saw him being brought into the building. One patient woke up to find the baby crying in her lap.

“But then I saw him arrive here. He just appeared back in the bed where he was born, wriggling out of nowhere.” She smiled and shook her head. “I didn’t know what to do — no one was going to believe me. They might even think
I
was the kidnapper. The police had already asked me some questions because I kept finding him. Thank the good Lord another girl once found him when I was away on holiday.” She draped another towel around Felicity’s shoulders, then undid her braids and began vigorously toweling her hair. Felicity was reminded of being a child and having her hair dried by an Estate nurse after a bath. It was that same brisk, comforting intimacy.

“So, a hospital administrator sat me down, asked me what happened, and I was so tired of being interrogated that I told him the truth about what I’d seen,” said the nurse. “A couple of days later, I heard that the little baby had died. And word came down that room four was not going to be used anymore.

“Then I was called up to the office of the chief of the hospital. He welcomed me and then he left the room. Two ladies came in, dressed very smart. They explained that the baby was not dead, that he was in the care of the government, and that there would be some more duties for me here at the hospital. If I took on those duties and kept it all secret, then I would receive a good deal of money and the gratitude of the nation. If I didn’t — well, they never actually said what would happen. But I understood it wouldn’t be nearly as nice.”

“So you agreed,” said Felicity, fascinated. The children of the Estate were rarely told how they had come to the Checquy. “And you... never talked to the parents about it?”

“No, that would have led to the ingratitude of the nation,” said the nurse flatly. “Anyway, that night, men moved the furniture out of room four and put in a sports mat and the electrical eyes.” Felicity looked around and saw the little red blinking lights in the corners of the room. “Those let us know when he’s arrived. Otherwise, this room is kept empty. And you wouldn’t believe how inconvenient that is — it’s right in the middle of the hallway.

“Still, it’s added something interesting to the job,” Cedella said. “For the first few years they’d call us when he’d be coming through. I expect they found him missing and knew he was on his way. Me or one of the other girls would go in with a blanket and a bottle of hot milk for the baby and wait for him. He’d arrive, we’d warm him up and care for him for a bit, and then someone would come along and take him off in a car.

“Then, when he got a little older and could talk, they’d send us schedules for when he’d be coming. It was clear they were training him to do it on command. The little lad would pop in a couple of times a week, we’d put some pajamas on him, make a note of his vitals, and they’d come and get him.

“Sometimes he’d appear without any warning,” she remembered. “I think he’d come if he got in trouble or wanted some company. Middle of the night, the bell would ring, and I’d go in to see him sitting there, shivering, wiping the ice off his arms. I’d call them, let them know we had him, and he and I would have a chat. I’d give him a bit of advice about school, or girls, or whatever was bothering him.

“Now that he’s grown, he doesn’t show up as much. And it’s never easy when he does. He’ll come through with wounds, and that makes it much worse. We’ve had to defibrillate him a couple of times. And the journey here isn’t good for injuries either. But he’s never brought anyone else through with him.”

“The journey,” said Felicity, trying to remember. “We were... somewhere else. He took us away from the fire, and there was a place.” It all seemed like a dream that was fading away even as she thought about it. “A dark place. And cold.”

“Sounds like it,” the nurse said with a shrug. “Never been there myself and certainly don’t want to go. He always comes out of there freezing cold and stripped of everything that isn’t him. Clothes, deodorant, dirt, it’s all gone.” She finished drying Felicity. “On the bright side, though, your hair will never be cleaner.”

Well, that’s something,
thought Felicity. She hadn’t been looking forward to trying to get all the refuse-based camouflage out of her hair.

“What time did you go in there?” asked the nurse. “They like us to keep records.”

“About four o’clock?” hazarded Felicity. She’d lost track of time, but she vaguely recalled they’d entered the house late in the day.

“In the morning?”

“No, the afternoon.”

“Oh, my,” said the nurse. “Eighteen hours. That’s his longest journey ever. Poor boy.” She patted the sleeping Pawn Chopra gently.

“Eighteen
hours?
” repeated Felicity incredulously. “You mean it’s Wednesday?”

The nurse nodded. “Wednesday morning,” she said, fetching Felicity a soft robe. “Now, do you fancy a cup of tea?”

*

“And so, Rook Thomas, it appears that the man was strangled to death by his own beard.”

“
By
or
with?
” asked Myfanwy, frowning.

“By.”

“Well, that definitely sounds worthy of some attention,” she said, jotting down a note to get her hair cut. “Initiate a short investigation, and if anything serious emerges, we can up the priority.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The voice came from a speakerphone in the middle of the boardroom table.

“If that’s all you need at the moment, then I’ll hang up,” she said. “I’ll be here at Apex House for the rest of the morning, and then, once we’ve finished the formal greetings, I’ll come back to the Rookery. Call me or Mrs. Woodhouse if anything comes up.” A chorus of agreement came out of the speaker, and then the call finished. “Ingrid, can you book me in for a haircut, please?”

“Certainly, Rook Thomas. And a coffee?”

“Only if you want to live out the hour,” said Myfanwy. The previous night had gone far later than she had expected, and she’d had to be up early in order to reach the Apex before the morning traffic congealed. Now she was ensconced in the boardroom with a stack of papers, a pen, and a firm intention to get some work done.

She opened the folder that contained the overnight notifications. As always, she was amazed at the things that happened in the world. Every day, every hour, stories of the bizarre flowed into the Checquy. Reports came from a variety of sources — law enforcement, medical bodies, religious institutions, government departments, universities. All through the British Isles, people in authority were constantly confronted with unusual situations. Sometimes they saw things they couldn’t explain, things that made no sense. Or a subordinate would go to the boss, confused or frightened by an occurrence he could describe only as “unnatural.” At that point, the superior would remember the vague but disturbing briefings from the government and would dial the number officials had given out — a number that connected to the Rookery.

These reports were received by Checquy operatives who had special training in sounding sympathetic and not at all skeptical. The notifications were dutifully transcribed, checked, analyzed, reviewed, and passed on up the line. Many were identified as false reports or duplicates, but some continued to ascend through the ranks of influence until they were given the tick of approval and an official response was authorized. It wasn’t Myfanwy’s responsibility to approve anything other than the most exorbitantly expensive of activities, but at the opening and closing of every day, she received a summary of recent events, a distillation of the supernatural in the United Kingdom.

The reports before her included the previous night’s fatalities at the Italian restaurant. The corpses had been carefully moved to the morgue in the Apex, although one more had torn open during its trip down the stairs, with horrible results. The scientists were not clear on the nature of that black liquid and hadn’t yet determined whether it was dangerous, but it was unlikely that the restaurant would be reopening anytime soon. However, that massacre was not the only event that had occurred since the end of business yesterday.

There was a boy in Cornwall whose eyes had changed color overnight.

Salvage divers had examined a cargo ship that sank two weeks previously near the Port of Immingham and found tears in the hull that appeared to have been made by huge teeth.

All the reptiles in the Edinburgh Zoo had begun molting at the same time, and their shed skin was evaporating off the ground.

Two VW Beetles that had been reported stolen in Thetford had been found in a field outside town after nearby residents heard loud, increasingly frantic horn-beeping and the sounds of grinding metal. The police observed that one of the vehicles appeared to have mounted the other.

And there, at the bottom of the list, in red ink, was the one she’d been dreading.
Another one,
she thought.
Damn it. And unlike the mating cars, which could just be a student prank, there’s no doubt that this is genuine.
She flipped through the photos.

Just like the others, it had occurred in one room of a house, this one a bedroom in the town of Wellingborough. It was a normal-looking room — double bed, framed Monet prints, a vase of dried flowers on the chest of drawers — except for the score of large crystals that had erupted from the walls, ceiling, and floor. They were meters long, razor sharp, and all projected out to the same spot in the room, in front of the chest of drawers, where they had transfixed the seventy-four-year-old Miss Audrey Dudgeon, owner and resident of the house. In the photos, wearing a nightgown and a bathrobe, she was slumped over but held in place by the shining blades. The crystals were murkily transparent except near her body, where they were stained red on the inside. No autopsy had yet taken place, but Myfanwy knew that Miss Dudgeon’s blood would be found to have crystallized inside her body. Just like all the others’.

The Checquy had been pursuing this case since the very beginning, two years ago, when a man and his son had been found impaled by crystals in the dining room of their house in Daventry.

Initially, there had been two theories. Some had thought the phenomenon might be linked to the locale — there were precedents for that sort of thing. There was an estate in the West Country, Yalding Towers, where the statues were said to walk at night. In Herefordshire, Ryhope Wood was apparently impossible to get through — the place would simply turn you around and deposit you firmly where you had begun, although there were rumors of some very strange things coming out of it on occasion. Even the old Deptford Power Station in southeast London had, for a while, appeared to be controlling the local weather before it was tactfully demolished.

The other possibility was that one of the victims had caused it, perhaps suddenly manifesting an ability he or she could not control. There were precedents for that as well — Checquy statisticians advised that a small but significant percentage of people who died from aneurysms were actually spontaneous telekinetics who’d accidentally tried to move something heavy with their brains. But then, over the next two years, five more crystal-skewering deaths occurred, two in London and the rest of them in the county of Northamptonshire. It was those two in London that had really put paid to both theories. The Checquy had decided that, indeed, an individual or an organism was causing these deaths, whether knowingly or unwittingly. Myfanwy was
really
hoping it wasn’t deliberate, because otherwise she was dealing with a supernatural serial killer. Questions were being asked, not just from within the Checquy but also at the highest levels of the British government. Pressure was beginning to be applied.

And they’re happening more frequently,
she thought grimly.
Before, months could go by between them, but it’s been only five weeks since the last one. We need to stop this.
She made a note to allocate more resources to that investigation, and then she snorted. Every so often, she caught herself, startled at the power and authority she wielded. Especially since, technically, she wasn’t the Myfanwy Thomas who had been made Rook.

The Myfanwy Thomas who had been brought up by the Checquy and elevated from Pawn to Rook had been a shy woman, frightened to use her supernatural power or her authority. In fact, that was one of the reasons she had been promoted, so that she would not pose a threat to certain parties. Instead of taking command, she had focused her attention on being an excellent bureaucrat.

Then, to her bewilderment, she had begun receiving warnings from a variety of sources, each of them predicting that she would lose her memory, that it would be torn away from her. Most people would have scoffed, but this was the Checquy. People who scoffed at the impossible tended to look stupid fairly soon afterward. Instead of scoffing, she had responded like a true bureaucrat, allowing herself a few moments of grief and then preparing a series of briefs for her future self — the woman who would wake up not knowing who she was or what kind of life she had inherited.

In due course, the predictions had come true. Her memories had been stolen, and her amnesiac self had woken up in a park with no idea what was going on but with a couple of extremely informative letters from her old self in her pocket. The letters had outlined the situation and given her the choice of leaving the country or assuming the identity of Myfanwy Thomas without telling anyone she had no idea who she was. Possibly against her better judgment, she’d picked the latter option.