Year Zero (2000), page 11
Because he was one of the demons charged with the duty of shopping for the little community, Belial got out more often than his companions and had a more accurate notion of the value of money, so he was less affrighted by the prospect of work. "I could do that," he observed. "Do you suppose they might give me a job?"
"I'm not sure there are any openings for people in your age bracket," Molly told him, "let alone for demons." She didn't bother to point out that he didn't even have a national insurance number. None of the demons was registered with the DSS; they supported themselves entirely by magical means, and they tended to be careful in eking out their mundane resources.
"I don't suppose he'd approve, in any case," Belial said, regretfully. "I wouldn't want to attract attention." Like his companions, Belial had taken only slight reassurance from Molly's heroically-calculated lies about the Devil's lack of illwill towards his former minions. The demons knew only too well that even if the Father of Lies had said exactly what she'd told them he'd said, his word couldn't be trusted as far as you could throw a feather into a headwind.
Molly's own anxieties about her new job had less to do with the possibility that she might suffer horrific side-effects than the attitude of Social Services. In theory, having any kind of job was a great leap forward in the direction of respectability, but if and when a case conference were called to decide whether she was ready and able to take charge of Angie—and Christine, if Christine ever condescended to return—the decision-makers might think that being a guineapig for unspecified experiments in biochemistry was not quite the kind of work that a good mother ought to be doing.
"It's just a stopgap measure," she told Lilith. "Once I've got something solid on my CV and a better address it'll be a lot easier to get steadier and safer work."
"No good will come of it all," Mephistopheles prophesied—but it was hard to take him Seriously when he was wearing spats.
25
The next day, Dr. Wingate collected Molly from the office-building and led her to one of the others via a subterranean passage full of doors that had to be unlocked with a swipecard. He told Molly that the results of her medical had been very satisfactory, and that she seemed like a perfect subject. He asked her sternly if she had any reservations about continuing, carefully adding that there was no earthly reason why the trials shouldn't be a great success.
Molly was still treading carefully, so she didn't make any sarcastic remarks about unearthly reasons; she just rolled up her sleeve and let Wingate's assistant get on with it. She didn't like injections, but she managed not to faint.
They made her hang about for an hour to make sure that there was no immediate adverse reaction, and then Dr. Wingate took her back to the office building.
"As you know," he said, "I can't tell you exactly what effects we expect, but I can reassure you that they won't be immediate and shouldn't be troublesome—or even unwelcome when they do make themselves evident."
Well, they say you can never be too rich or too thin, Molly thought, even more convinced than before that the treatment must be something to do with slimming.
Wingate saved his final admonition until they had passed out of the main door on to the forecourt. The furious way he blinked his eyes against the glare of the afternoon sun suggested that he didn't see a lot of daylight.
"No Thank God it's Friday, mind," he told her.
"Remember what I said about alcohol and so on. Just eat normally, and be back here Monday morning, at eleven o'clock sharp. You'd better bring an overnight bag, just in case. You've got the emergency number, haven't you?"
Molly nodded. She hadn't told anyone at Peaslee that the chances of any occupant of Arcadia House getting to a working phone in any kind of emergency were a bit slim. All the resident gang members had mobiles, but the one thing gang members had in common with policemen was that there was never one around when you needed one, especially on the thirteenth floor.
As it turned out, though, the emergency number was quite redundant, because that brief nod of the head was the last thing Molly remembered until she woke up at home in bed, naked except for her knickers.
She immediately fished out her wristwatch, and saw that it was nine o'clock. Puzzled by the loss of an entire evening, not to mention the bus trip back from Peaslee, she got up.
A set of clean clothes had been set out, neatly folded, on the kitchen table; there were no dirty ones visible, although the plastic bag she used to ferry her stuff down to the launderette was displaying a slight bulge. There wasn't a dirty dish in sight—not even a coffee-cup—and the last lot of clean ones, which usually hung around in the draining-rack until they were needed again, seemed to have been put away. Molly, who was not normally so tidy, frowned as she put the clean clothes on, wondering if Dr. Wingate's wonder-drug could possibly be intended to turn women into Stepford wives.
Her suspicions were further intensified when she went to the cupboard to get the instant coffee and found it fullystocked, even though she usually did the weekly shop on a Saturday. The tins were all positioned so that their labels faced outwards, and there was a big packet of bran flakes where the corn flakes usually sat.
When she opened the fridge, she found that it had been so comprehensively tidied up that there was no ice on the element. Six eggs had been taken out of their box and placed in the plastic rack that she had always considered superfluous. When she noticed that the oven had been cleaned and that the kitchen floor had been washed, she realised that the situation was far more serious than she had thought. Apparently, she had been converted into some kind of superefficient household robot.
As soon as she had steadied her nerves with a cup of coffee Molly went to knock on Lilith's door.
"Hello, dear," Lilith said, brightly. "Shouldn't you be on your way to work?"
"Not till Monday," Molly said, finishing the sentence before the horrible sinking feeling hit her in the stomach like a soggy fist. The expression on Lilith's face was enough to tell her that today was Monday.
"Oh shit," Molly murmured. "Have you seen me at all since Friday morning?"
"I'm afraid not," Lilith replied. "Belial said that he bumped into you in Kwik-Save on Saturday but that you seemed to be in a world of your own. I knocked on your door a couple of times, but if you were in you were dead to the world."
Those words seemed more ominous than they should have done, but there was no time for Molly to follow up her enquiries, because she knew she'd have to sprint for the bus if she were to have the slightest chance of getting to Peaslee on time.
"Watch out for Christine," she said, as she hurtled on her way.
26
While the bus made its slow way south-west Molly conducted a brief-survey of her state of body. She was neither hungry nor hungover and had no suspicious itches or scratches. There were no nasty aftertastes in her mouth and no unwonted fluids leaking from her other orifices. All in all, she was in astonishingly good condition for someone who had lost more than sixty hours. She had obviously been looking after herself as well as her flat.
When Dr. Wingate asked her whether she'd suffered any noteworthy symptoms since receiving the injection Molly hesitated for a moment, but saw no practical alternative to telling him the truth. She half-expected him to nod sagely, because it was exactly what he'd expected, but his astonishment was blatantly honest.
"You can't remember anything?" he echoed, excitedly. "Nothing at all?"
Once it was established that the lost weekend had not been on the official list of expectable side-effects Molly expected the doctor to be extremely displeased, on the grounds that total amnesia was a pretty serious side-effect for any kind of drug, but he was obviously a back-room boffin whose contacts with Marketing were rare and slight. He was fascinated by her account of the unnaturally tidy flat.
"You gave not the slightest indication of distress as you left the building," he recalled, wonderingly, "and you obviously caught the bus without any difficulty. You've presumably taken adequate nourishment, and you seem to have kept yourself very busy, although you must have gone to bed as normal and slept . . .and you did everything without being conscious, like a sleepwalker. Fascinating! Absolutely fascinating! "
Molly wondered briefly whether the greys might have anything to do with it, but rejected the hypothesis. She could hardly have been abducted again if she'd been hard at work scrubbing floors and scouring ingrained stains from her work-surfaces. It was more likely to be a result of her resolution to turn over a leaf and become the kind of mother of whom the Social Services and people like the Jarvises could approve. Perhaps the only way she could bear to do those sorts of things was to go into a trance and blank it out of her memory. She had never quite understood how anyone could do those sorts of things without going into a trance and blanking them out of consciousness.
"Did you bring the overnight bag?" Wingate asked her.
Molly shook her head. In her haste, that instruction had slipped her mind.
"Never mind—we'll improvise. We'll have to keep you in from now on, of course. It's quite remarkable! Has anything like this ever happened to you before?"
Molly hesitated, but again she decided that she might as well tell the truth. "Not exactly," she said. "I used to do some stuff, way back when, and I sometimes lost a few hours, even a couple of days—but I used to wake up feeling a hell of a lot worse than I woke up feeling this morning."
"What kind of stuff?"
Molly shrugged. "You name it. More than I could put a name to—the quality control wasn't so hot once the demand for Es began to exceed the supply, and my suppliers weren't the kind to pay much attention to the Trades Descriptions Act."
"Heroin? Amphetamines? LSD?"
"I tried all of them," Molly admitted. "Also poppers, a little angel dust, coke once or twice . . . but I'm clean now, honestly. The people at the Maudsley, last time I was sectioned, told me that my brain chemistry might have been permanently fried, but ..."
She left it there, regretting that she'd mentioned the Maudsley. She realised that she might have said more than enough to get her booted out of the trial as an atypical subject, but Nathanael Wingate still seemed to be possessed by an altogether unwarranted excitement. Obviously, the experiment hadn't been fucked up too badly by her unusual reaction.
It occurred to Molly then that cosmetics wasn't the only field of research that paid much better than medical. Suddenly, the agency consultant's remark that Peaslee were looking for "single women in her age bracket" began to seem a trifle understated. What other specifications, she wondered, might the job description have contained?
"Are you happy to carry on with the trial, Molly?" Dr. Wingate asked her, his eyes all agleam with recently-glimpsed possibilities. "I'll understand if you want to drop out."
Molly thought about that for a couple of minutes. Any ordinary person, she knew, would have said "No thanks" and resumed the search for that oh-so-elusive cleaning job, but Molly was anything but ordinary. Even if Dr. Wingate were working on something whose primary applications were military, he couldn't possibly be looking to do her any serious damage. In any case, she thought, the greys would probably pull her out if she got into real trouble. They might not need her active involvement in their own schemes any more, but they still owed her a debt of gratitude.
"If I did agree to carry on," she said, slowly, "we'd have to renegotiate the fees. When I signed on, I was only planning on spending a couple of days a week here. If this going to mop up whole weeks, including all the unsocial hours and the weekends as well—especially if I'm going to lose sixty hours of memory every time I shoot up—I really think we ought to consider the question of double time ..."
"We'll keep you under close observation, of course," Wingate assured her. "We'll make sure no harm comes to you, and ..."
"... or even triple time," Molly continued, casually overriding the interruption. "If I were cleaning offices or stacking shelves, I'd be able to think while I was working, wouldn't I? For this job, I'd be giving up everything. That's really heavy, and it could be dangerous ..."
"We'll put you on a salary," Wingate said, his breathless tone revealing the depth as well as the breadth of his interest in Molly's presumably unique case. "Fifteen hundred a month, for a minimum of six weeks."
It was a big hike, but Molly figured that there was nothing to be lost by shooting for the jackpot. "Three thousand a month," she said, without batting an eyelid. Her math wasn't up to the calculation of whether six weeks of that was more than she'd so far earned by legal means in her entire life, but she figured that it must be close. It would surely cover the deposit and six months rent on a thoroughly decent flat.
"Twenty-two fifty," Wingate countered. Like any straight guy, he believed in splitting the difference—but Molly had never operated that way.
"When I say three thousand," she said, flatly, "that's just the basic price. Anything exotic that comes up as we go along will be extra. Take it or leave it. I don't haggle."
"I'll take it," Wingate assured her. "But the conditions remain in place. No questions, no comebacks, no lawsuits."
"I can live with that," Molly said, "but the insurance cover goes up too. The more I'm worth, the more compensation my nearest and dearest deserve—and I'm not talking tens of thousands. My kids may be in care just now, but if I'm not around as back-up, they need an adequate buffer."
"Okay," the mad scientist conceded, gracefully. "I'm confident that it won't be necessary. You'll come out of this as fit as you are now. All you stand to lose by continuing is a little time."
Luckily, he was very nearly right about that, as long as Molly wasn't disposed to quibble about the exact definition of "littlea. " He might have been entirely right if Molly's neighbours hadn't been the cream of Hellspawn, with more than a few tricks up their old-fashioned sleeves in spite of all the wrinkles in their faces.
27
The eight weeks that Molly eventually spent in Peaslee Pharmaceuticals' research labs went more quickly than any other comparable periods of her life—even the five weeks she had spent touring the galaxy. Relativity had only wiped out sixty per cent of that time, but Dr. Wingate's hypodermic cocktails erased more than eighty per cent. It wasn't quite the same, because the time she sold to Peaslee had only been lost subjectively—and not, as it turned out, forever—but from Molly's immediate point of view the days simply sped by, when they bothered to put in an appearance at all.
Most of the time she spent in full possession of her faculties was taken up by careful cross-examinations. Wingate brought in a whole fleet of psychologists in a fruitless attempt to get her to remember what was going on inside while she was under the influence of the drug. He even imported a couple of hypnotists who tried to put her back into the trancestate, but like the hypnotists she'd worked with before they found her unresponsive. She was very glad when they let her alone for a while so that she could slob out watching TV or reading, although that wasn't easy while she was continually hooked up to all kinds of monitoring apparatus, with her head covered in electrodes.
She tried to think of the job as a mere matter of working peculiar shifts, with long weekends in between. Once she got it into that perspective, all the prodding and poking didn't seem so very different from working at King's Cross, although there was a lot less wear and tear on her borrowed bedsprings.
When the experiment reached its conclusion Wingate agreed to let Molly watch some of the video footage of her unremembered activities. She realised then that most of the "work" she'd been doing had been more like office cleaning than honest whoredom, but she took what consolation she could from the thought that if you had to spend every waking minute of four or five days a week obsessing about the neatness and cleanliness of a room that was already almost bare and clinically sterile, it was definitely best to do it in a trance.
"You don't suppose that's the real me, do you?" she asked Nathanael Wingate. "If that's what I've been repressing all these years ..."
"I doubt it," Wingate told her. "It seems to me more like some kind of displacement activity. The EEG traces are all over the place—your brain's been astonishingly active, even while you were asleep, and the activity extends into every region. We're going to have to go back to the drawing-board on this one. It'll need a whole new set of animal experiments before we can even begin to figure out how these neurological effects are generated. After that ... you will come back if we need you, won't you?"
"That depends," Molly said. "If I experience any longterm effects ... now it's over you can tell me, can't you? What was the damn stuff supposed to do?"
"It's still confidential, I'm afraid," Wingate parried.
"In that case," Molly said, "You'll never see me again. From now on, it's informed consent or no co-operation."
Wingate didn't seem unduly surprised by that. He knew by now that Molly was no fool. "You've already signed a confidentiality form," he told her. "It covers everything."
"I won't tell a soul," Molly promised.
"Okay," he said. "The stuff was supposed to reverse some of the effects of aging. Not all, but some. If it worked the way it was supposed to as well as the way it wasn't, it might already have added a few years to your expected lifespan. If you're willing to come back when we call you ... who knows?"
Molly looked at him long and hard, but she couldn't tell whether he was telling her the truth, or whether the Devil had finally got into him.
The first thing Molly did when she got back to Arcadia House after opening her first bank account and depositing her massive cheque was to knock on Lilith's door. Lilith seemed genuinely glad to see that she was fit and well, and dragged her into the flat for a cup of tea.
"I'm sorry, dear," the arch-demon said, as she shuffled off to put the kettle on. "There's been no sign of her. Your letter's still right there on the mantelshelf. Do you want it back?"
