Year Zero (2000), page 13
She trailed off again.
"You need a rest, dear," said Lilith. "It's late. We can talk again in the morning, after you've had a good night's sleep."
"I suppose I do," Molly agreed, although had a nasty suspicion that her dreams might require some time to work their way through the nightmarish revelations that Astarte had just gifted to her. "If I'm going to start flat-hunting tomorrow ..."
She stood up, her head still spinning with bizarre possibilities. Robbed of the support of Lilith's armchair, she felt weak and dizzy. She wondered if a little fresh air would do her good, and turned reflexively towards the window, which had been behind her while she was telling the demons what she had learned.
Two full lunar months had elapsed since Molly had first gone off to Peaslee, leaving behind the letter that still stood unopened on Lilith's mantelshelf. The moon was full again now, its entire face clearly visible through the thirteenth-floor window, slightly rose-tinted by the atmospheric pollutants that captured the glare of the capital's myriad electric lights.
"Oh shit," said Molly, softly, as another piece of the jigsaw fell belatedly into place. "That's what it was—what we were doing."
"What is it dear?" Lilith asked.
"Dear Humanit, " Molly quoted. "We're very sorry that we couldn't be here. Please wait until we come back. Then we can talk things over and figure out what to do. We're your mother-race, and we love you very much."
"What?" said Mephistopheles.
"It wasn't Venus," Molly whispered. "It was the moon." "What was?" Mephistopheles demanded, his voice sharpening with impatience and incomprehension.
"That other world I saw through alien eyes," Molly explained. "It wasn't Venus—it was the moon, before we wrote the message on its face."
"You can read a message written on the moon's face?" Mephistopheles's tone suggested that Lilith had spoken too soon when she accused him of never having mastered the art and science of doubt. "I never heard of anyone who could do that."
"No," Molly conceded, still speaking very softly. "I don't suppose many others would be able to read it, even if they understood the alien alphabet—but I don't have any difficulty at all. You see, it's my own handwriting."
30
The first-floor flat Molly rented with the Peaslee windfall was in Barnsbury, just off the Caledonian Road. Some people of her acquaintance might have found it a little too close to Holloway for comfort, but Molly preferred to think of it as just a short walk from Camden Market, which had been one of her regular haunts in the days when she was young and not so very far from innocent.
Even the estate agent hadn't dared to describe it as a luxury flat, but it had two bedrooms, one of which was an ample double, and several fixtures that Molly would have put in the luxury category, including the kind of non-bedroom that she felt she could call a sitting-room without feeling silly and a telephone. The wallpaper was fairly new and unblistered by damp, the kitchenette only seemed overcrowded because the fridge-freezer was so big, and the sitting-room furniture hadn't been slotted together from MFI kits whose screws could never be retightened because you could never find the Allen key.
In brief, it had the potential to become a comfortable family home, with all the privileges and responsibilities that concept implied.
The first thing Molly did after the gang's joyrider of the day had helped her transfer her meagre possessions from Arcadia House and bid her a cheery goodbye was to phone the Jarvises. She knew that it was tempting fate, but she couldn't help it. The year was half way through and she felt that she was now making solid progress in the vexatious business of redesigning her life.
"Have you seen her?" screeched the wildly sobbing Mrs. Jarvis, as soon as Molly identified herself.
"Christine?" said Molly. "No, she ..."
"Not Christine," Mrs. Jarvis yelped, as if no one but a deranged madwoman could have leapt to that conclusion. "Angie! I mean Angie!"
"Oh shit," Molly murmured, swiftly inferring that her younger daughter must have followed the elder sister's bad example. Her first impulse, inevitably, was to blame the Jarvises—to lose one foster-daughter might be excused as a misfortune, but losing two reeked of carelessness—but she knew from past experience that all verbal mud flung Jarviswards inevitably rebounded on her. She contented herself with a strangled inquiry as to how long Angie had been missing.
"She set off for school as usual yesterday morning," the calmer but equally censorious voice of Mr. Jarvis reported, "but she never registered, and she didn't come home afterwards. We've notified the police, of course—they should have been to see you by now."
"I'm not at Arcadia House any more," Molly said, numbly. "I've just moved into a new flat." She gave Mr. Jarvis the address, hoping to hear a sharp intake of breath when he heard the postcode, but he was too distracted by what he thought of as his own problems to be astonished by the fact that the mother of his foster children was now living north of the river. "Well, that's not much help," was his only comment.
Molly would have continued the conversation if the doorbell hadn't rung, but when it did she immediately leapt to the conclusion that it must be someone who had been told where to look for her by her thirteenth-floor ex-neighbours—possibly Angie, or even Christine, or at the very least a concerned policeperson. She made a hasty excuse and hung up.
When she opened the door she barely had time to notice that the caller was one of the men in black from Croydon before his fist came hurtling into her face. She hadn't time to duck out of the way, although she did manage to lower her head enough to take the blow on her left brow-ridge instead of her nose. That had to be reckoned fortunate, give that her nose would certainly have been broken, but she didn't have time to count her blessings while the momentum of the punch was slamming her back against the corridor wall.
After the second time she had been raped—not counting foul-ups with business procedure at King's Cross and various houses of ill-repute—Molly had taken self defence classes, but one thing they had taught her was that all the tricks in the book can't help you if your opponent is five inches taller, four stone heavier and once did a similar course himself. When the man in black put his massive right hand about Molly's windpipe and shoved her so far up the wall that her feet were no longer touching the ground, Molly knew that she was helpless. She made a token attempt to knee him in the balls and stick both her thumbnails into his eyes, but he was ready for both moves. He used his left hand to seize both her arms and twist them around, and leaned forward to pin her securely and suffocatingly against the wall.
"That was very stupid, Molly," he hissed. He didn't mean the knee or the thumbnails—he meant moving away from the thirteenth floor of Arcadia House. Even he would have hesitated before throwing his weight about up there, although he probably didn't have a clue who it was that he'd have had to reckon with if he tried.
He was the senior of the two men who'd come to collect her after her abduction by the greys: the one who thought he'd been clever when he left the biochip in her breast first time around, and twice as clever when he fished it out again after she'd been up to the mothership. He was also the first one she had infected with the new DNA that the greys had tucked away inside the protein coats of resident viruses which the men in black had already tagged, and the one to whom she had given the slip when the aliens had taken her on the galactic cruise they'd promised her as a reward. Given all that, Molly figured that she was in for a pretty torrid time. Being a civil servant, he probably wouldn't allow himself to break anything more substantial than her nose, but when she looked into his angry eyes and saw the Devil there she figured that she was all set up for her nastiest raping yet.
"Thought we'd forgotten you, did you?" the man in black sneered, squeezing just hard enough to cut off her breath. "Or maybe you thought that getting into bed with that sparrowfart Wingate would put you out of bounds? Guess again, whore."
Molly had to close her left eye against the blood that ran into its corner but she knew that it would probably close of its own accord when the bruise was ripe. She tried to keep the right one steady, but it wasn't easy. The man in black pulled her off the wall and stepped back, presumably intending to close the door that still gaped open behind him. When she made a second attempt to jab her knee into his groin he hit her in the stomach, and then let her fall into a breathless heap—but when he turned away the door didn't slam shut.
When Molly was able to look up her one-eyed vision was blurred with tears, but she could see that there was now someone else standing in the doorway—someone every bit as tall as her assailant, though not as heavily-built, and likewise dressed entirely in black. She might have taken him for another of the same kind, had he not been wearing a broad-brimmed hat that no officially-sanctioned man in black would ever have been seen dead in.
The newcomer didn't say a word. He simply met the gaze of the man in black, staring him in the face. Molly figured that even someone army-trained was going to have difficulty meeting the disapproving eye of someone who'd just caught him in the act of beating up a woman, and so it proved. The staring-match had barely begun before it was over. The man in black obviously thought about launching his mighty fist at the new target, but just as obviously decided against it, perhaps because he was intimidated by such knowledge as he had of the kinds of company Molly had been keeping lately, and perhaps because he figured that a man in his position could only beat the shit out of so many civilians before endangering his pension.
"I'll see you again," he spat at Molly, over his shoulder. Then he pushed past the man in the broad-brimmed hat and left.
31
The man in the hat came in, shut the door behind him and offered Molly his gloved left hand. She took it and levered herself upright. She used her right hand to wipe away the blood and tears so that she could look at him properly—or as properly as was possible with one eye so badly bruised.
Unlike the bully boy from Croydon, the newcomer wasn't wearing a sharp suit. His black jacket and trousers were leather, but not biking leathers—and no biker would ever have worn such a delicate silk shirt, let alone that absurd hat. His boots were leather too, but they looked as soft as his gloves. The reason he hadn't offered her his right hand, apparently, was that there was something wrong with it: the forearm was stunted and the hand itself seemed to be shrivelled, although it was difficult to judge the nature of the injury while he had the gloves on.
"Thanks," Molly said.
"I'm sorry I didn't get here sooner," her saviour said. "You're Molly, I take it? Lilith told me where to find you."
Molly had to wipe her eyes again, but the cut on her eyebrow didn't seem too bad—not bad enough, at any rate, to need stitches. "You know Lilith?" she said, warily.
"Not very well," he admitted, taking off his hat and placing it on one of the hooks set in the wall beside the door. His hair was jet black. "It's more that we have acquaintances in common—as you and I also have."
It was then that Molly remembered the meagre details of what Elizabeth Peach, her social worker, had told her about Christine's disappearance. Christine had allegedly been seen talking to a man in his fifties who wore a broad-brimmed hat. Molly squinted, trying to figure out how old her visitor might be. Anywhere between thirty and three hundred was the answer that sprang by mysterious means to her mind, but she supposed that an observer as limited in his imagination as Mr. Jarvis might have decided that fifty was a safe compromise. "Who are you?" she asked, sharply.
"Call me Tom," he answered lightly. "Most people do." The addition seemed more than usually gratuitous. His eyes glinted green for a moment, like cat's eyes, but the pupils were round and human.
"Where's Christine?"
"Safe," he assured her, in the manner of a man who expected that his word would be trusted without elaboration. "It's not Christine we have to worry about. It's Angie."
"Okay," said Molly, using the frost in her voice to signify that all the moral credit he'd gained by seeing off the sharpsuited man in black had just been cancelled. "Where's Angie?"
"She's been kidnapped by the Queen of the Phase," he said. At least, that's what Molly thought he had said, until he added: "That's eff-ay-why-ess. Some people call them fairies, but they don't like it."
Molly opened her mouth to protest but hesitated, then shut it again. She had to admit that her licence to object to statements like that had accumulated more than enough endorsements to render it invalid. "That being one of the mutual acquaintances you and Lilith have in common, I suppose," she said, after a reasonable pause.
"Just so," he confirmed.
"And that would make you Thomas the Rhymer rather than Puss-in-Boots, I suppose?"
She actually caught him slightly off guard with that one, but he was quick to suppress his smile, which would have been entirely inappropriate despite its ruefulness.
"I wish I could be as specific as that," he said, "but at this point in time, I'm only a mysterious tall dark stranger. I hope that we'll both find out in due course exactly who I am, but for the time being I'm as much at a loss as you are."
"I've had amnesia myself," Molly confessed. "I hate it—my guilt-ridden subconscious always takes advantage of the absence of my ego to make me do housework. Why has the Queen of the Fays stolen my twelve-year-old daughter from her loving foster-parents? Is it just that random abduction's the sort of thing she's into, or has she some specific motive for targeting my daughter rather than someone else's?"
"Interesting question," said the man who most people allegedly called Tom. "Given the way things have worked out, I think we can take it for granted that it isn't a coincidence, and that you must have something the Queen wants badly enough to warrant stealing your child. You're probably in a better position to guess what that might be than I am."
Molly sighed. She used the fingers of her left hand to probe the sore spot on her abdomen while she stared at the blood that was streaking the fingers and back of her right. "If I were at my best," she confessed, "I'd be sorely tempted to grab the collar of your silk shirt and twist it hard while I demanded an explanation of what you mean by given the way things have worked out, but as things are, I think I'd better make a cup of tea while you explain. Would you care to come through to the sitting-room?"
Tall dark Tom not only came through to the sitting-room but casually made himself comfortable on the non-MFI settee while Molly went into the kitchenette to put the kettle on.
"What I meant," he told her, regretfully, "is that when I found out that the fays were staking out the house in Tooting, I assumed that it was Christine they were after. I ... well, I needed a claim, you see, to get into Faerie, and it seemed to me that if I could only get myself into a position where I had a claim on Christine, I'd be okay when they followed through. That was a mistake, of course. When Christine decided to go missing, I went after her—but the changeling squad went after Angie instead. Now I need a claim on you, because you're the only one with a strong enough claim to go after her. It might have been okay if Christine had been Angie's full sister, but this is one of those times when half isn't quite enough."
Molly thought back to the moment when she'd first seen Tom on her doorstep. He hadn't exactly thrown himself on the man in black like an outraged hero, but he had nevertheless saved her from a heavy mauling. She had to figure that he'd already established his claim on her, even though he hadn't gone out of his way to say so.
She put two tea bags into two mugs and watched the quietly burbling kettle pensively. If her visitor needed her in order to gain entry to Faerie, the need was probably mutual. It wasn't that she was too stupid to find any place that wasn't on the tube map, but this was one place where she definitely wouldn't be able to find her way around with an A-to-Z.
As for what she might have that the Queen of the Fays might want badly enough to warrant crude extortion—well, that could be any one of several things. She didn't have Elvis's address any more, but she probably had more of the greys' DNA than she'd infected anybody else with, and if she really were the only person in the world who could read what was written on the face of the moon she must be the only one who could read any other messages the planetoid-sized cephalopods might have left lying around back in the pre-Cambrian.
32
"I suppose you know," Molly called out to the tall dark stranger, as she poured boiling water into the mugs, "that you're not much different from the Angel, or Lilith—or the Devil himself for that matter. You're just one more projection of the human yearning for moral order. There are a lot of you about. I put it down to the Millennium, myself. It still has six months to run, you know, even though the mathematically challenged went ape last New Year's Eve."
"What if I am?" he retorted. "You're not labouring under the delusion that I'm just something your drug-fried brain conjured up, are you? Believe me, Molly, if there were a competition to decide who has the more meaningful existence, I'd win hands down."
"No you wouldn't," she told him, confidently. "The Devil would. I've met him, and I can assure you that he still has us all beat, even if his top arch-demons have gone AWOL. Do you want milk and sugar?"
"Just milk, please."
Molly fished the tea-bag out and dropped it in the sink. Then she added a dash of milk straight from the carton. Jugs, like trays and biscuits, were strictly for Jarvises and social workers.
She took the mugs into the optimistically-titled sitting-room and handed one over before sitting down for the first time in one of her newly-rented armchairs. He took it in his left hand, after pausing to remove his left glove. His useless right hand remained concealed.
"What do you want from the Queen of the Fays?" Molly demanded.
"That's my business," Tom parried.
"Not any more it isn't," she informed him. "You've just made it my business."
His eyes glinted green again, but he nodded to acknowledge that she might have a point. "l don't know, exactly," he confessed. "I suppose I'll find out if and when I find out the rest of it—but to do that, I need a claim on her attention. I have asked others for help, including Lilith, but they all told me the same thing. There are only two places where I might get what I need, and the other one is Hell."
