Year Zero (2000), page 20
Judging by your expression when we gave you the tour last Sunday morning they'd got you into a condition where you were prepared to believe absolutely anything. When you're dressed, I'll take-you around again, so that you can see the dull reality that the drugs wouldn't let you see before."
Molly put the mug down and took another long, hard look at the palms of her hands. Then she raised the duvet so that she could look down at the line where Hyde had appeared to slit her from throat to vagina before drawing her two halves apart.
It hadn't been real. None of it had actually happened—and now she knew that it hadn't been real, it seemed absurd that she could have been deluded into thinking that it was happening. She had thought that she was feeling pain, but how could anyone have stood the kind of pain that such horrors would have generated? How could she have been so foolish?
It had been going on since the very moment she resolved to make her "new start." What an understatement that seemed, now! She had made a new start all right: her mind had been cast adrift in year zero, to fall in with Elvis and an angel, greys and gargantuan octopuses, demons and fays and cats in human form. She had swallowed it all, hook, line and sinker, even while she had felt dutifully bound to inform the Devil that he was nothing more than a projection of humanity's fears and moral anxieties. She had been in the grip of the ultimate chemical Antichrist, from which she had now been delivered by Chiliad Science Incorporated.
Or had she?
The only real evidence she had of former delusion, she realised, was that which had accumulated since she had set foot inside this strange building. Her vivisection had obviously been a delusion, and what she had seen on her tour of Chiliad Science might indeed be far too difficult to swallow—but what if she had only been given the psychotropic when she stepped across Dr. De'Ath's threshold? Or—and this was, in its way, an even more ominous thought—what if everything Dr. De'Ath said were true, except for the allegation that Chiliad Science and Francine's Adam were on opposite sides. Maybe this was just one more phase in the experiment, one more insidious attempt to fuck with her mind?
Dr. De'Ath must have seen the uncertainty in her face. The old woman reached out and pressed a bell-push situated in the wall above the bedhead. Within half a minute a much younger woman appeared, carrying Molly's clothes. They were the same clothes she had seen cut to ribbons while she lay pinned to the dissecting-table, but they were whole, and they had been recently washed and ironed. They were very faintly scented with lavender. The mobile phone and the miniature camera were, however, missing.
Molly got out of bed and dressed herself, slowly. She didn't feel giddy or weak—her "not bad" had carefully underestimated her feeling of well-being—but she did feel more than a little paranoid. That wasn't entirely surprising. After all, whether Drs. De'Ath and Hyde could be trusted or not, somebody was definitely out to get her.
Dr. De'Ath was as good as her word. She took Molly on a tour of the building, showing her all the doors that weren't in the least like bank-vaults, and all the busy people behind them, working away in all apparent health and happiness. There were a few areas marked with biohazard signs, where methodical young men were using big gloves and mechanical manipulators to work with cultures in sealed containers, and there was an animal room full of caged rats and mice, but there were no monsters, no chimeras, no obscenely detached body-parts and no dead superstars. The only laboratory Molly had previously spent time in was Wingate's, but those of Chiliad Science looked exactly as she might have expected the labs of a thoroughly reputable, honest-to-goodness, cutting edge biotech research establishment.
"Okay," said Molly, when she had wound her way through the corridors of all three subterranean floors. "I'll buy it. Who's the opposition? Who, exactly, was Francine's Adam working for?"
"All we're certain of," said Edward Hyde, who'd just emerged from an office to join them outside the steel-clad lift, "is that they're local and relatively small-scale. They're not agents of any foreign power, and they're not tied up with any major player in the global cartel. They're obviously not amateurs, but they're not true professionals either. They have their own agenda—and we're as enthusiastic to know what it is as you are."
"Am I?" Molly countered. "Maybe I just want out."
"Don't be silly," said Edward Hyde. "While Christine's in, you're in. Your interests and ours coincide. It's just a matter of your agreeing to play it our way." The lift doors opened and Hyde politely ushered Molly inside.
"And your way is?" Molly wanted to know.
"The double bluff. We'll probably have to let them take you again, without them realising that we want them to take you. We'd have to persuade them to think that you're completely under their spell—but you'd have to resist the worst effects of the drug. You'd have to play along, but you'd have to hang on, in your heart of hearts, to the knowledge that none of it is real. You'd have to get all the way to the inside—and then you'd have to let us come in after you. I don't say it wouldn't be dangerous, but it might be the only chance you have of getting out of this in one piece, with your daughter by your side. " The lift ascended while he spoke, and by the time he had finished the doors were opening again. He lingered long enough to add: "But there might be a way of avoiding that necessity, if you don't mind helping us to activate another agent provocateur."
Molly had been expecting something of this sort, but she put on an act of mulling in over as they moved into the corridor and paused again. She wasn't certain whether all this really was a double bluff, or whether it might amount to a triple or a quadruple, but she figured that once you got that far into a tangled web of deception there wasn't much point in trying to keep count. The one thing she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was that she wanted out of here with all her options intact.
"Okay," she said, finally. "What do you want me to do, exactly?"
46
This time it was Wingate who had got to the Atlantis Book-shop ahead of time and was deeply immersed in scanning the shelves when Molly arrived. He was still carrying his black-clad lethal weapon, but he looked perfectly harmless. Without the sunglasses his weary eyes seemed uncommonly pale and watery, and he blinked hard when he turned to look at her.
"Thank God," he said. "I thought they might have done something to you. What happened?"
"Thanks for worrying," Molly said, taking some comfort from the fact that the thanks were sincere even if sincerity had to stop at that point. "Nothing much. A thorough examination and a few more samples. I think they've got all they need, now."
"I didn't dare go back on Monday," Wingate confessed, unnecessarily. "I caught the first train back to London. I've been staying with my ex-sister-in-law."
"Did you get the pictures?" Molly asked.
She already knew that the reason Hyde and De'Ath hadn't stopped her taking the pictures was that they knew full well that they'd show the labs as she had seen them on Friday, not as she'd seen them in the early hours of Sunday. So she wasn't in the least surprised by the contents of the file that Wingate eased out of his briefcase and didn't bother to pretend.
"There's nothing I can take to the embassy," he said. "Which isn't altogether surprising, given that they knew we were coming. Even if they didn't know about the second download, they had time enough and sense enough to hide anything incriminating. Did you find out anything at all? Anything I can use?" He sounded like a man who knew that his hopefulness was absurd.
"Even if I had," Molly pointed out, "Who would believe me, after all that stuff I told you on the train?"
Wingate nodded sorrowfully. "But something's going on!" he complained. "They're hiding something."
"Well, " said Molly, following her instructions to the letter, "it seems to me that you've only one chance left to find out what it is."
Wingate had to consider the possibilities for a few minutes, but he was a methodical thinker and the conclusion was foregone. "I've got to hack in again," he said. "I've got to go back to Peaslee in the early hours of tomorrow, and I've got to get through those firewalls. It's possible. It's desperate, but if I don't try, I'm finished. I'll never get back on track. No credit, no glory, no patents, no share options, no rejuvenation. I've got to strip what I can out of the systems and shop around for a higher bidder."
Molly was deeply impressed by the accuracy of Edward Hyde's psych-profiling. She had always thought that forensic psychology was fashionable mumbo-jumbo, but Hyde had Wingate's reactions mapped like those of a lab rat. All Molly had had to do was press the trigger; the rest would follow like a row of tumbling dominoes.
Molly knew that she didn't owe Wingate anything. He hadn't been exactly scrupulous in persuading her to serve as his camera-carrier. On the other hand, he hadn't taken advantage of her mental absence while she was under the influence of his serum to have his wicked way with her, and he had actually blushed while feeding the camera-lead through her sleeve. He was, after his own pathetic fashion, a gentleman—and, she supposed, a scholar. Given that she had no idea who was who in this war of illusions, Molly didn't want to be one more nail in the poor fool's coffin.
"Don't do said, mentally tearing up the script and throwing it away.
"What?" Wingate was suddenly very uneasy. He had obviously picked up on her confusion, perhaps even on the fact that she had been sent to prompt and provoke him. Three words could convey a lot, if spoken in the right tone of voice.
"They want you to do it," she told him. "They have a booby-trapped package all wrapped up and waiting for you. They want you to take it to the opposition. They want the opposition to think you're worth hijacking. You're bait in a trap, just like me. They're even playing us off one against the other. I don't know if we can save our skins, but I feel fairly certain that they only way we'll save our souls is to opt out of the game. Don't go back to Peaslee. Wherever you do decide to go, don't go there."
She saw as she stared at Wingate's furtive eyes that it wasn't going to work. She had no credibility. It didn't matter whether she told him a pack of lies or the truth, he couldn't believe her. All he could do was react to the triggers she provided—and her mere presence was probably trigger enough. If she had stayed away ... but she hadn't dared or wanted to do that. She had been worried about him, too—and she had needed to see the pictures, just in case. No one as paranoid as she was could have left such a tempting stone unturned.
Edward Hyde must have known that, Molly realised. He and De'Ath were quite a team.
Molly leaned a little closer to Wingate. "They don't know everything," she whispered. "They don't even know as much as they think they do. They're convinced that Francine's boyfriend is local, but their whole theoretical edifice might be founded on the wrong brick. What if it's the greys who are real, Wingate? What if the greys are calling the whole bloody tune?"
He looked at her as he'd looked at her once before, like a man who wanted to look at her as if she were mad but couldn't quite contrive the requisite expression with his facial muscles. She didn't need to be an expert psych-profiler to know that he was never going to believe that the greys were the real players behind the scenes, the real choreographers of the whole bizarre fandango. He was a scientist, and he wasn't mad. He needed rules, and imaginative boundaries. He needed sanity, and intellectual safety. He needed to believe that the truth was manifest, if only one could hack through the firewalls. He would never in a million years be able to read the writing on the moon.
Molly knew, however, that she was different. She had spent the greater part of her life embracing the unembraceable, and thinking the unthinkable was only one small step beyond. It had been proved to her that some of what she'd seen and thought these last few months wasn't real—but some of it was, and she didn't have to accept anybody's word for which was which.
"Don't play their game, Nat," she said, softly. "Leave it to the experts."
"What experts?" he asked.
"Those of us who've been to Hell and back at least a dozen times. Those of us who know that anybody who isn't paranoid in a year that doesn't make sense is crazy. Those of us who've touched base with the mother-race of the Orion Arm civilizations and the big wheels in the land of Faerie. Let me be the Judas goat, Nat. I don't need you. I can do it on my own."
"You don't understand," he said, with all the confidence of a man who couldn't even conceive of the possibility that he might be the one who didn't understand.
Molly took a psychic self-help book off the shelf, barely pausing to check that it wasn't the same one he'd bought before, and thrust it into Wingate's hand. "You'd better pay for that," she said. "The lady at the till is giving us funny looks again."
Nathanael Wingate blinked, and then said: "I don't suppose you fancy a pizza, by any chance?" The tone of his voice seemed to have turned to boyish jelly.
"You have to steer clear of me from now on," Molly told him, sternly. "It really isn't good for you. You're just a pawn, but I'm a piece. You have to let me tackle this in my own way. Can you do that? Can you let it go?"
He didn't answer. He hadn't made up his mind—but at least he didn't protest that he wanted to stay with her, to save her from whatever worse-than-death fate was lurking around the corner. He was prepared to let her go. He was a scientist, after all, and by no means mad.
Wingate went to the till to pay for his book, and Molly went home to await the Apocalypse of Evil at her leisure.
47
Given that the world was due to end in a matter of weeks Molly didn't think it was worth knocking herself out searching for the kind of job that might lead to better things. Elizabeth Peach had made it abundantly clear that she stood no chance of recovering custody of Angie before the end of the year, so Molly figured that she might as well fill in as best she could until she found out exactly what the Devil had planned for the week after Christmas. In keeping with the spirit of her new start, however, she decided to work behind the bar in a brand new pub in Camden rather than one of the older establishments on the Caledonian Road.
Following the ignoble precedents set by others of its ilk, the pub bore the mock-ironic name of the Laydownyer Arms. Its clientele consisted almost entirely of the kind of young unmarried professionals who used their flats solely for bedding down, spending all their waking hours at work or "networking"—a mysterious process which always seemed to involve getting drunk. The institution of this new way of life had gifted a minor economic boom to the likes of brewers, distillers, publicans and white van men.
Molly had entertained hundreds of yuppies back in the 1980s and had naively supposed them to be the ultimate dregs of corporate humankind's devolution, but a fortnight in the Laydownyer Arms revealed depths of imaginative degradation whose existence she had never suspected. The shock of its discovery appalled and discomfited her, but her coworkers were so completely inured to the new reality that they did not even notice the advent of the zombies.
At first, Molly wasn't absolutely sure about the zombies herself, all the more so because Drs. Hyde and De'Ath had warned her to be on her guard against the inevitable return of her paranoid illusions. Eventually, however, Molly plucked up the courage to ask the bar manager whether a particular group of closely-huddled patrons seemed as unusually pale, dispirited and waxy of complexion to him as they did to her.
"It's a bug that's going round," he assured her. "Some kind of flu. The symptoms aren't severe but it drags on a bit. Dulls the mind, but looks worse than it feels. Hardly noticeable by day, apparently, but muted light enhances the look and makes sufferers more emotional."
"Emotional?" Molly queried, eyeing the huddle sceptically.
"Not amorous, if that's what you're thinking," the manager said, with a slight hint of regret. "Huggy, not sexy. We'll both catch it soon enough—working in a place like this, we come down with everything that's in the neighbourhood. Like I said, the word is that it's not serious. Just lingering."
It seemed unnecessary as well as impolitic to introduce a word like "zombie" into that sort of conversation, so Molly didn't.
The bar work soaked up all of Molly's evenings and some of her days, but it left her free to start trawling charity shops and market stalls for second-hand books. Given that the world was approaching its end she could have started hanging out in Compendium and buying at full-price, but she figured that she ought to make some attempt to keep her principles intact and she couldn't quite bring herself to take it for granted that money would be valueless once the Apocalypse of Evil got into full swing. It was one invention that had never let the Devil down in the past, so why would he abandon it if and when he were able to usher in his Millennium of Malevolence?
Occasionally, as she was walking home from work after midnight, Molly would catch sight of the pencil-moustached man in black she now knew as Mr. Wilson watching her from the driving seat of a black Volvo—a car that would have been far more discreet than his usual choice in a more suburban environment but which still tended to stick out a bit in Barnsbury. If she chose to wave to the man in black he would offer her a mock salute by way of reply, but he was no more inclined to approach her and strike up a conversation than she was. He obviously had his orders and was sticking to them.
