Existentially Challenged, page 31
“When he had been given a clean bill of health, I went to interview him. That was the first time I met Doctor Diablerie. The voice, the mannerisms, the . . . poses. He has changed very little ever since.”
Alison stared in bafflement at Elizabeth’s walking cane, leaning on the side of her desk. “And after everything . . . you hired him?”
Elizabeth rotated her chair until she was staring at the wall. “Somewhere, deep inside Doctor Diablerie, the mind of Nicholas Fisk holds certain information, vital to the security of the human race. He knows how the shadow was driven away. He knows what happened to Mr. Teapot. This is information I need. Eventually, I will find a way to extract it. Until then, it is important that I keep him close to hand.”
“Can I . . . go?” Alison was already half risen out of her seat, bracing herself on the armrests. “I have to . . . dinner.”
“Dinner by all means,” said Elizabeth, snapping out of it and returning her attention to the work on her desk.
As Alison walked slowly to the door, one foot at a time, confused thoughts swirling in her head, she began to realize that there was something she needed to ask, and that if she didn’t ask now, she might never work up the courage to do so again. But at the same time, she knew that Elizabeth’s answer would change things in Alison’s mind. Perhaps in ways that could never change back.
She was three steps from the door. Behind her, she heard Elizabeth begin typing something and heave the light sigh of someone moving on with their day.
Two steps.
One step.
Alison thought about what Diablerie had said to her.
She stopped, and felt the tension in the air begin to grow. The sound of typing paused.
“Who were Diablerie’s other assistants?” asked Alison, turning around.
Elizabeth had been watching her, fingers splayed out and paused in the act of typing. “Hm?”
“You told me that you gave Diablerie assistants before me,” said Alison, embracing the point of no return. “Could I ask . . . who they were?”
“Does it matter?” said Elizabeth. “None of them lasted nearly as long as you have, Alison.”
The door handle was cold beneath Alison’s grip. “I suppose it’s not important.”
Call between Victor Casin and Adam Hesketh beginning at 1:18 p.m.:
victor: Adam.
adam: Hey, Victor. Uh. Thanks for picking up.
victor: Whatever. I could spare you a few minutes between my busy schedule of doing bugger all.
adam: How’re you feeling?
victor: Perfect. Peachy keen. Just grins and smiles the whole day long over here.
adam: That bad?
victor: I mean, it’s not like I just got dumped by my archnemesis who very nearly killed me and burnt most of my hair off so I look like Dr. Robotnik, is it? What do you want?
adam: Oh. I just wanted to know if you’d be interested in coming back to work soon.
victor: Oh no. Is my seat in the cafeteria getting cold? Did all my sugar packet sculptures fall over?
adam: Actually, Mr. Danvers wants us to be partners again.
victor: Seriously? What about you and Investigations?
adam: It, um. It didn’t really work out. I’m getting reassigned either way.
victor: Aw, poor Adam. Well, I suppose if you desperately need my shoulder to cry on, I might as well come back.
adam: Great. So, what’s going on with you and your archnemesis now?
victor: We’re not archnemeses anymore. Probably gonna kill them if I see them again, but it’ll be more of a casual thing.
adam: Sorry it didn’t work out.
victor: You know what, I don’t really care. I was gonna break it off soon anyway. I’ve decided I’m not really an archnemesis kind of person.
adam: Hm. And, er, how do you feel about teen sidekicks?
THE NEXT DAY
57
The police and DEDA presence at the convention center had finally thinned out enough that Rajesh Chahal felt it safe to retrieve his car. He had managed to fade away in the chaos after the events of Sunday morning, but he was certain that the police and the media were going to have pointed questions for anyone close to Modern Miracle for some time yet.
He had made it through the outdoor parking area without being stopped, and as he made his way past the ranks of empty parking spaces, he concentrated on walking in such a way that successfully balanced “nonchalant” with “too busy to talk about recently unveiled murder conspiracies.”
Why the hell had he agreed to be on a TV interview? He should have stayed behind the scenes. It was just that Miracle Dad had gotten cold feet about doing a “serious” debate without backup, and there might not have been a better chance to escalate the situation, so he’d given in.
Rajesh reached his car, tucked away in the nice big shadow created by a pillar and a broken ceiling light, and grimaced at the memory of his own actions. He’d been played masterfully of course. Somehow, even after all these years, he was back to throwing himself into trouble just to please . . .
“Hello, Raj.”
. . . him. The man who was sometimes Doctor Diablerie. He was leaning against the dark side of the pillar.
Rajesh froze, then slowly straightened his posture and folded his arms. “How long have you been waiting for me there?”
“I was here on another errand. I saw you arrive.”
“Just admit it. You stood there for hours hoping you’d get to see an impressed look on my face.”
“What do you make of the incident onstage?” said the man, taking a step forward to punctuate the way he was stabbing directly to the heart of the matter.
“I’ve been going back and forth between horror and self-loathing,” said Rajesh, slowly circling around the car to the driver’s seat, not taking his eyes off the man in the shadows.
“A girl with no infusion, no healing powers, nor the necessary maturity to have harnessed them, suddenly acquires them at an oddly convenient moment during a livestream to the world. What does that tell you?”
“That you’ve acquired a really weird fixation with dead young girls?”
“The Third Way, Raj. Our theory is confirmed.”
Rajesh’s hand was on the car door handle. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Not necessarily. It’s still possible that she did have the powers and was hiding it—”
“You don’t believe that,” said the man, adding a sharp edge to his normally placid voice. “This was the whole point of the exercise. Don’t resist the truth.”
Rajesh hung his head and bared his teeth. “Maybe I don’t want to live in a world where the Third Way is a thing. Maybe I hate that you were right. It’s not a rational feeling, but hey, some of us still have those, you know? Feelings? Some of us still feel a bit uneasy about manipulating people and getting innocent children killed for our science experiments?”
He was ranting by that point, with his hands balled into fists and his head jutting forward. The man in the shadows watched, unmoved, and waited for him to finish.
“There’s no walking away from this now,” he said eventually.
Rajesh released a sigh as his entire upper body went limp. “I know. God damn you, I know.”
“I’ll be in touch about the next phase,” said the man, carefully placing his hands in his pockets and beginning to walk away. “Alison is starting to ask the right questions. I want to move forward with her recruitment soon. In the meantime, drop out of sight.”
“Yeah,” said Rajesh, seething. He glanced up. “You’ve seriously still got business here?”
“Yes,” said the man, not looking around. “The last loose end, I hope.”
43
The contest of faith healing had been scheduled for Sunday morning, as this was a typical time for a religious service, and Miracle Dad was keen to give Pastor Barkler the best possible fighting chance. Or more accurately, the least possible room to make excuses because the conditions weren’t one hundred percent perfect.
In preparation, the Flash Microsystems Hotel and Convention Centre had been locked down since Friday night. Alison arrived on Saturday morning, enjoyed the usual thrill of self-importance that came of flashing her DEDA ID to be allowed through a police cordon, and started making her way through the car park.
The complex consisted of one tall building, the hotel, and a number of lower, broader, more architecturally creative buildings, and the convention center. The bland rectangle of the hotel combined with the other buildings’ artful diagonal lines gave the effect of an incomplete domino fall-over.
And then there was the Pelican Theatre, a Victorian-era building in the middle of it, which for heritage’s sake had been permitted to exist unmolested by present-day trends, except for a couple of covered walkways that connected it to its more modern fellows. Its somewhat more disheveled look gave it the air of a wiry terrier sitting in the wreckage of the domino fall-over pretending to know nothing about it.
The massiveness of the car park was emphasized by the small number of vehicles in it, most of which were clustered around the hotel entrance. There were a few of the “official” DEDA vehicles with the purple markings, and near those Alison recognized the expensive but sensible car belonging to Richard Danvers and a few of the flashy sports cars driven by those field agents who were less secure in their masculinity. Besides those, she hazarded a guess that the severe black town cars belonged to Pastor Barkler and his entourage, and the beaten-up family sedan with the hilarious bumper stickers was Miracle Dad’s transportation. Farther away from the hotel entrance were the vehicles belonging to the various media outlets that had been invited to set up for filming. The BBC was here, as were a couple of old, beaten-up cars that probably belonged to the tabloid reporters Miracle Dad had invited. And finally, in the farthest corner of the main car park, Alison found what she was looking for: the LAXA van.
Beatrice and Roger had left a few parking spaces of distance between them and the next vehicle, probably in accordance with Alison’s request that they be as discreet as possible. It was rather a futile gesture, however, as the huge, beaten-up van stuck out like a hulking, incontinent bloodhound at a dog grooming show. It still had some of the forest camouflage clinging to it.
Alison sidled up to the van’s side door, did a quick check for onlookers, and then knocked gently with two knuckles.
“It’s all right!” squawked the voice of Beatrice from inside the van. “We’ve got a press pass! We are supposed to be here!”
“It’s Alison.”
The van slid open, and Beatrice was there. She had either had a chance to launder her LAXA T-shirt or changed into a completely identical one, but the bags under her slightly manic eyes showed she was still sleeping roughly. Alison was able to take this in for all of about half a second before a large brown furry mass streaked across the space between the two women, causing Alison to fall back in surprise.
Roger immediately dived out of the van and was able to grab the end of Arby’s leash before it flew out of reach. Arby was forced to abort his quest to comb the hotel car park for bottoms to sniff and hands from which to solicit pets.
“Sorry,” said Roger, lifting an uncomplaining Arby back into the van. “He’s really excited today.”
“Did you have to bring him to this as well?” asked Alison, still sitting on the tarmac.
“Viewers like it,” said Roger flatly. “They keep saying, it’s not solving mysteries with a dog if you don’t have a dog.”
“Yeah,” said Beatrice. “Plus, I kinda, technically, still haven’t told Mum that we have him yet.”
Arby made another bid for freedom, forcing Alison to abort her attempt to stand up, and Roger had to haul on the leash again. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s the old people.”
That remark left Alison in a state of complete bafflement until she looked in the direction Arby was lunging and saw that a minibus had arrived on the other side of the car park, adorned with a logo for something called the Broken Boughs Retirement Hospice. A couple of elderly people of indistinct gender were being helped down by a pair of orderlies in white.
“Oh yeah, Arby loves old people,” said Beatrice conversationally. “We rescued him from an old people’s home originally.”
“Rescued him?” asked Alison, standing up. From the way Arby’s tail was wagging like the rotor of an attack helicopter, he didn’t seem to have any negative associations with elderly people.
“Yeah! Our first big exposé actually. There was some absolutely shameless magical appropriation going on there. Isn’t that right, Arby the Psychic Dog?” She fondly scratched Arby above the tail. “They let us have him if we promised to go away.”
“Anyway,” said Alison, brushing herself down to firmly signal a change of subject.
“Oh yes!” said Beatrice, clapping her hands together. “Thank you so much for sorting out the press pass. We sent a message to DEDA for one a while ago but didn’t hear back. Roger thinks using Twitter might have been too informal . . .”
“You understand what I need you to do here?” whispered Alison, checking behind her for spies.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Beatrice, nodding. “Keep investigating Modern Miracle.”
“Keep watching Modern Miracle,” corrected Alison, maintaining fierce eye contact to drive the point home, waggling her eyebrows as she emphasized the word. “Don’t confront them or anything. Just watch. And report back if they do anything . . . worth reporting on.”
“We’re not, like, new to this, you know,” said Beatrice. “We’ve done a whole, like, three investigations now.”
“I know,” said Alison uncomfortably. “I just don’t want to be responsible for getting you guys into danger again. Like what happened with that pyrokinetic.”
“Trust us,” said Beatrice, thrusting her chest out. “No one goes into online streaming without learning to live with a little risk.”
“But you will only keep an eye on them, right?”
“Sure, sure, we’ll be completely professional.”
“But only professional watchers of things,” pressed Alison, still trying to urgently maintain eye contact. “Not a professional anything else. Right?”
Beatrice seemed to have stopped listening and was now fiddling with the electronic recording equipment in the front half of the van. Alison noticed that there had been some additions since she had last seen the collection. “What? Yeah, totally.”
That would have to be enough. “I have to stay at the hotel tonight to be ready for the contest in the morning,” said Alison. “I’ll text you my room number once I’ve checked in. So you can get in touch at any time. Okay? If absolutely anything happens.”
“We’ve got it!” said Beatrice, looking up from her work with a hint of testiness. “We’re on the job. You can go do yours.”
“Just chill,” offered Roger.
Alison sighed. In her mind, the itinerary for the day stretched ahead of her like a crematorium conveyor belt, and it didn’t seem like “chill” was going to comfortably fit in anywhere. Unless she squeezed it in between “worry about riots” and “afternoon general worrying time.”
58
Beatrice Callum was none the worse for her kidnapping ordeal and had just been released from prolonged, exhaustive interviews with the police that had only ended when they had finally gotten her to stop talking. A police car dropped her off in front of the hotel, near where she had left Roger, Arby, and the LAXA van.
It didn’t surprise her at all that Roger and the van were still there. She knew Roger found it hard to motivate himself when left to his own devices, especially when the devices had a decent capacity for video streaming. Beatrice knocked on the van’s side door, expecting about two minutes of waiting time before he would summon the energy to stand up.
“Hey, babe,” she said, folding her arms and leaning on the van. “Phew. Sorry it took so long. Miracle Dad wouldn’t let me use my phone. And he tied me to a chair. Then the police gave me my phone back, but they said I couldn’t livestream the questioning. So we’ve probably got a lot of donations backed up . . .”
Something thin and white fluttered around her body and dropped to the ground. She glanced down, frowning, to see that she was now standing in a circle of white tape, adorned with a sequence of black symbols.
Runes, she realized, remembering her first meeting with Alison back at the Builder’s Arms. Before she had time to process this revelation, she heard a droning computerized voice chanting incomprehensible syllables from somewhere nearby, and then felt a sensation like a velvet foot pressing down on her brain. She promptly collapsed, snoring, to the ground.
The man who was sometimes Doctor Diablerie appeared unhurriedly from the van’s rear, holding up his cell phone as it repeated the runic chant. He scanned Beatrice’s sleeping carcass for a moment. The ritual he had used was a relatively harmless one, and she would wake up within a matter of hours with no lingering effect, assuming she hadn’t just concussed herself on the tarmac.
He silenced the phone with a brusque tap, then returned it to his hip pocket. At the same time he reached inside his jacket with his free hand and drew out the contents, examining it with interest.
It was a sausage. An individually wrapped piece of cured sausage he had purchased from a nearby petrol station. In cash, naturally. He ripped open the wrapper with his teeth as he fished around in yet another pocket, from which he produced a black extendable baton, and flicked it out to its full length.
He took up position at the van’s side door, his feet on either side of Beatrice’s oblivious form. He took a moment to hold the sausage and baton together in the same hand, then hauled the door open.
