Existentially Challenged, page 27
“Right,” said Adam, nodding slowly.
She frowned at his unconvinced response. “You have new evidence?”
“Well, it’s just this.” Adam fingered his way to a specific tab. “Me and Alison found a file for a Megan Arkwright in the school database. Graduated two years ago.”
“Ah?”
“Except it doesn’t look anything like Miracle Meg.” He brought up the photograph. “And it says she’s nineteen years old.”
“Well, it . . . can’t be the same person, can it?” said Rana, shrugging.
“It can’t. But it has to be.” Adam rested his chin on his hand. “And there’s still that tunnel Alison found in the woods. Where she found the El-Yetch shrine. And the third victim. She says she saw Miracle Mum there as well. Which would suggest that Miracle Mum is the vampire. But . . .” He waved his hands.
“I’m pretty sure Miracle Mum’s not a vampire; she makes me packed lunches,” said Rana, smiling nervously. She leaned over the screen again. “So that database, you’ve got a file for everyone who’s been through magic school, right?”
“Some of them haven’t been digitized yet, but most of them, yes,” said Adam. It occurred to him that this was probably information the government didn’t want being passed to civilians, especially ones working for suspect organizations, but he was finding it hard to care that much.
“Have you tried searching for Miracle Mum’s name? Or Miracle Dad’s? Just to completely pin down who does and doesn’t have superpowers?”
“Yeah,” said Adam. “No luck.”
“Oh yeah, I guess that would’ve been obvious,” said Rana, leaning back into her chair. “Probably the first thing you do in official investigations, right? Look up every person of interest on all the government databases and make sure all the facts line up?”
“Pretty much,” muttered Adam.
Rana gave him an encouraging half smile. “Well. I should get back to work. Hey, do you want to hang out after this is all over? Go over your notes properly? This is actually really interesting to me.”
“Sure.”
She touched his shoulder as she walked away, but he didn’t react. He was back to fiercely staring at the screen. He didn’t look up until her footfalls had entirely faded into the background noise, when he glanced around to make sure she was out of view.
Then he hurriedly opened the database application, flipped over to the records for the school, and began searching for names. He started with Miracle Mum, which a moment’s beating the side of his head with a fist caused him to remember to be Sarah Arkwright. No results found. Then he tried Augustus Arkwright. Nothing.
So, there were no conduits or vampires among the Miracle parents, at least none the government knew about. Could they have honed their powers by themselves without help from the school? Without getting possessed? Unlikely. Adam dropped the thought. That was just more speculation. From now on, he worked only with hard facts.
He was about to settle back down, disappointed, but he determinedly kept his shoulders tensed. He wasn’t going to let this little trickle of momentum go. All the government databases, Rana had suggested. She was right. There were a lot of nonextradimensional records he could pull information from as a government employee.
Shortly, he brought up the online database for the most recent UK census and searched for the name Augustus Arkwright. There were several, but only one based in Worcester.
“Arkwright, Augustus Peter,” read Adam aloud. “Caucasian. Male. Two children. Sep—”
He froze up as that relevant nugget of information shot up his conscious mind and pinned it to the top of his skull. Two children. Miracle Dad and Miracle Mum had two daughters, according to this. Megan Louise Arkwright, nineteen, and Phoebe Rose Arkwright, eleven. Eleven felt a lot closer to a feasible age for the girl who was currently being presented as Miracle Meg. So if that was Phoebe, where was . . . ?
Adam pressed his palm against his forehead. This was it. He could feel it. He was tumbling down the hill toward the truth, and now nothing could stop him. He had the last piece in his hand, and any moment now he was going to rotate it the way it was supposed to go to fit in the space. He was going to figure it all out.
THE NEXT DAY
45
At just after seven o’clock in the morning, Adam figured it all out.
“Oh shit,” he said, sitting bolt upright in his ridiculously large hotel bed. “Rana’s about to be killed.”
MEANWHILE
46
Alison was also having a moment of revelation. She was realizing she’d accidentally left her phone on silent for the entire night.
She discovered this only by pure chance, when she was lying half awake just before seven and saw it on the charger on her bedside table, lighting up with an incoming text message. Adding to a lengthy ladder of text message prompts that had already arrived.
Alison thrust out an arm to grab it, knocking a glass of water all over the thick hotel carpet, and sat up in bed with her knees drawn up to read the messages.
The last few were from Roger. Just after midnight, he’d sent a text asking Alison if she’d heard from Beatrice, as she hadn’t returned to the van. Every text after that was just the phrase see above, with about an hour between each one for politeness’s sake.
Above that, there were two messages from Beatrice. The first one read Check your email :) and had been received at around nine o’clock yesterday evening. The second, just a few minutes later, read simply: Help :(
Feverishly, Alison navigated her way to her email app. Sure enough, there was something from Beatrice. No text, just a link to a video file on the cloud.
It was a low-quality cell phone video taken in profile, which showed only darkness for the first few seconds before a strip of whiteness slid into view. After a moment for the camera to balance the light and find the focus, Alison was looking at the interior of a hotel room extremely similar to her own. The image was sandwiched thinly between two strips of dark brown, implying that the video was being recorded from inside a cupboard with the door slightly ajar.
“Oh, Beatrice,” muttered Alison to herself in frustration. “Nobody was telling you to hide in their cupboard!”
The first recognizable figure was Miracle Meg, or at least the girl most of the world knew as Miracle Meg. She was sitting on one of the two beds in the room, wearing silk pajamas and greedily attacking an elaborate dinner on a room service tray. The camera moved slightly to get a better look at the other bed, on which Miracle Mum was daintily bent over a dinner tray of her own. She was wearing one of the hotel bathrobes.
The phone centered on Miracle Meg again as she scooped up the last few specks of something chocolatey. The moment her dessert bowl clattered emptily to the tray, she locked her gaze on to the as-yet-untouched dessert on Miracle Mum’s tray and stretched out a hand. “Can I have your cake?” she said, still chewing the last mouthful.
Miracle Mum flinched. “What?”
“I want more cake. Can I have your cake?” It was voiced more like a demand than a request.
“Oh, but . . . I was actually going to have that,” said Miracle Mum in a weak voice. “I was looking forward to it.”
Meg slapped her hand against her dinner tray in anger, grabbed the knife from the wreckage of the main course, then held it in front of her face. “I’ll cut myself.”
Miracle Mum was frozen, apparently in terror. She slowly brought up her hands and held them out to placate. “Please. Don’t.”
The knife didn’t move. “Can I have your cake?” Her voice was more plaintive, less threatening.
Miracle Mum looked down sorrowfully. “You’ve already had your cake. You had—”
Miracle Meg stabbed herself in the head with an unflinching force that made Alison’s jaw drop. From the way the camera jiggled, Beatrice had been taken aback, too.
The knife clattered down, and blood began to pour down Miracle Meg’s face, mingling with the free-flowing tears. Miracle Mum, panicked, was trying to press her dessert bowl into Meg’s hands, but Miracle Meg was only clutching her face and howling.
A few moments later, there was the sound of a hotel room door opening. Beatrice tried to move the camera to capture the newcomer, but there apparently wasn’t much space to shift position inside a hotel wardrobe. Not that it mattered.
“What’s going on here?” came the unmistakable voice of Miracle Dad. “What’ve you done to yourself?”
“I fell!” wailed Miracle Meg, barely intelligible through a foam of various bodily fluids.
Miracle Dad clicked his tongue. “Oh, dear. We can’t have Miracle Meg looking like that for her big day tomorrow, can we?”
“No,” agreed Miracle Meg, at full volume.
There was a meaningful pause, after which Miracle Mum hung her head. “You . . . you said I wouldn’t have to anymore,” she said, on the verge of tears herself. “She did it to herself!”
“Come on, love, this is for family,” said Miracle Dad. “There’s nothing more important than family. It’s just a little cut, you’ll barely feel it.”
From Miracle Mum’s slumped posture, it was clear that she knew there was no point in arguing. She reached over and placed the tip of her index finger against the part of Miracle Meg’s brow that she wasn’t covering with her hands.
Even through video footage, Alison could sense the magic at work. There was an ethereal glow about Miracle Mum’s fingertip, and the garish red line on Meg’s brow disappeared like a pencil mark being removed with an invisible eraser.
“Now, what do you say?” prompted Miracle Dad.
“Thank you,” said Miracle Meg tokenly, already helping herself to the second dessert bowl. Miracle Mum appeared to have gone into a state of catatonia.
“All right, we’ve got to be up nice and early for the big show,” said Miracle Dad. “So you can only play games on your handheld for two more hours, okay?”
“Yes, Dad.”
The video abruptly ended there, and Alison slowly lowered the phone from her face with shaking hands. She had been right. She had seen the face of Megan Arkwright before. It was the face of Miracle Mum. And that’s why she hadn’t quite been able to grasp that in her memory, because the photo in the file was of Megan before she had been prematurely aged by about twenty years.
The screen on her phone powered off, but she couldn’t stop staring at it. Too many thoughts were crowding in her head. Had it always been Miracle Mum doing the healing? How? Could she be a conduit as well? And what had happened to Beatrice after she’d recorded and emailed this? Was she all right?
Her hands were shaking so hard that it took a few moments to realize that her phone was vibrating with an incoming call. It was from Adam. Who wasn’t high on Alison’s list of who she should probably talk to at this point, but she took the call anyway.
“Alison, are you awake?” said Adam, flustered.
“Um, possibly,” replied Alison, equally so.
“I think I might have figured this whole thing out. I just need to—”
“Miracle Meg isn’t Miracle Meg,” interrupted Alison. “Miracle Meg is Miracle Mum. Miracle Mum isn’t Miracle Mum. I don’t know where the real Miracle Mum is.”
“. . . Yeah, I figured something along those lines,” said Adam, after a surprised pause. “I looked up the census. Miracle Dad has two daughters, and he listed his status as ‘separated.’ I think the real Miracle Mum’s been out of the picture for years.”
“So they were sisters this whole time!” said Alison. An absurd random thought told her that this was no conversation to be had while wearing pajama bottoms, and she began hunting around for her clothes while keeping the phone pinned to one ear. “Does this mean Miracle Mum . . . I mean, the girl we thought was Miracle Mum . . . was she doing the healing?”
“No! I don’t think she was!” said Adam. “That’s the other thing I figured out. But I need to confirm. You’ve got eidetic memory, right?”
“Um, yes, still.”
“That cave you found. In the woods behind Modern Miracle’s street. How far, exactly, was it from the street?”
Alison felt suddenly energized, as she often was when someone actually wanted her to provide exact details about something. “The cave was one hundred and forty-three yards from the street.”
“Right. Now. After you entered the cave. How far did you travel down the tunnel before you got to that little shrine where the third body was?”
Alison thought about the answer and opened her mouth to reply, but then her words died as the two broken grandfather clocks being smashed together in her head both began ticking like dervishes. “Oh. I think I just figured the whole thing out.”
“Right?!” said Adam.
“So that must mean . . .”
“Yes!”
“And that’s why Modern Miracle insisted on . . .”
“I think so!”
Alison was fastening the button on her jeans, holding her head sideways to hold her phone against her shoulder. “So . . . that must be how Miracle Mum . . . I mean, Megan, was doing the healing!”
“No no no no no,” said Adam excitedly. “She can’t have been. She’d have been completely aged to death by now. See, I had this idea to look up all the suspects on all the databases we have. That’s how I found out about the two-daughters thing. But then, late last night, I thought of looking up the two victims as well.”
“And what did you find?” Alison was now fully dressed and searching for her room key.
Adam told her.
Alison was in the process of finding her room key in the back pocket of the jeans she was currently wearing, and Adam’s revelation made her freeze in midpat. “Rana’s about to be killed,” she realized.
“I know! I’ve tried calling Mr. Danvers, but—”
“Everyone’ll be busy,” said Alison, now hurrying down the hotel corridor. “They’ll have started letting the audience in already. But maybe if we can just get to Rana before the contest starts . . .”
“Right,” said Adam. “Let’s meet up in the basement.”
47
The contest was due to begin at eight o’clock, and both levels of the Pelican Theatre’s main auditorium were already full to capacity. There hadn’t yet been a major violent incident, largely because the two sides of the debate had been requested to queue up at opposite entrances. Now that they were all in one room together, peace was being maintained by a rather conspicuous fence running down the middle of the auditorium, manned by plainclothes police officers.
It was a fragile peace. Richard Danvers had done his best to screen out the audience members with protest signs that were a touch too bellicose or had too many misspellings, but there was still an audible tension crackling between the two sides of the grumbling theater. It was like standing on a floor covered in primed mousetraps, waiting to erupt into chaos at the slightest disturbance, and he flinched every time someone yelled a slogan or threw popcorn over the dividing fence.
He tugged the curtain aside and stepped out onto the stage. The house lights were still up and there were no spotlights on, and no music played to signal the beginning of the event. For the sake of everyone’s safety he was going to do his damnedest to make this whole morning as bland and dispassionate as possible. He was, after all, a civil servant.
“Erm, good morning, everyone,” he said. He gave his lapel mike a few taps, and the bustle of the audience swiftly died down. “My name is Richard Danvers, I am the head of operations at the Department of Extradimensional Affairs.”
“sucks,” yelled someone from the pro-magic side of the audience.
Danvers directed an admonishing glare toward the source of the sound, and to his surprise, the initial titters of the oncoming wave of mocking laughter instantly died. He had spent his entire life being raised by one stern overseer after another and had a natural gift for tapping into the primal part of the brain that doesn’t want to be sent to bed without supper.
“As I’m sure you’re aware,” he continued, “we are here today to conduct a . . . comparative effectiveness test. Of the healing services offered by Modern Miracle and the North American Evangelical Fellowship for Christ.” His eyes rolled back for a moment as he mentally checked that he had said all the words in the right order. “We will be approaching this as scientifically as possible. Both representatives will be assigned one patient, each suffering roughly equivalently from chronic physical difficulties related to old age, and who will be fully assessed by a medical team both before and after the healing. There will also be a third subject, as a control.”
He glanced into the wings, where Jake the junior administrator was holding a bucket of warm water and a sponge.
“The event is being recorded and livestreamed from multiple angles.” He nodded to the front row, which was a forest of lenses of every shape and size. “But those of you in the live audience should feel free to make your own recordings; we are inviting total scrutiny here.” Privately, he hoped this would keep a few more restless minds occupied. “I’d also like to take a moment to acknowledge the online audience watching the streams from all over the world, who number in the several millions, I’ve just been informed.”
He blinked silently into the camera lenses before him for a few moments, fighting the urge to let his thoughts dwell on the situation, as he feared he might never come back mentally. He fancied he could sense the children of the future watching this moment in school history class for centuries to come. And then cutting clips of it to make into hilarious memes he didn’t understand.
