HUSH Read online

  Liam hefted his jemmy and beamed. “Every boy’s dream!”

  They each chose a door.

  Click. Clock’s ticking.

  Some of the puppies woke up as soon as Jacob opened his door, which was bad. They were held in tall rudimentary cages, wire cells with only the most basic amenities--bowl of water, concrete floor, handful of scattered sawdust for bedding. He could see that the dog nearest to him had been shitting blood, and another was heavily strapped with bandages around its shaved abdomen. Jacob’s stomach rolled. The dogs that had woken wagged their tails excitedly, yapping, yapping. He couldn’t believe the blindness of their trust; it brought tears to his eyes. It was a lengthy, harrowing walk to the procedural rooms beyond.

  The first room was lit by banks of stuttering strip lights, and contained high benches with smooth glossy surfaces flush against every wall. On top of the benches sat all manner of equipment that he didn’t recognise and didn’t understand. Jacob allowed himself one grim smile before beginning.

  He kicked the supporting leg away from the first bench, and imagined himself back in the argument with Maria, smashing shelves, crying. This didn’t make things any easier, but somehow made the violence and destruction more satisfying, more justified. After a very short while he began to feel dizzy, but it was a sensation he enjoyed.

  The second room was identical. The third room, however, was dominated by what appeared to be the glass-fronted cabinet of a large mainframe computer, and networking station. Three or four judicious crowbar blows opened it up for him, several more smashed the computer casing. Sparks flew everywhere, shards of delicate circuit boards swung down like ruptured guts. He checked his stopwatch: five minutes to go. Suddenly he heard Morris calling.

  He froze. Footsteps were approaching. Morris appeared in the doorway, his expression indecipherable.

  “You gotta come see this,” he said very firmly.

  “There isn’t time!”

  “For this, there is.”

  Cursing under his breath, Jacob tailed Morris back the way they’d come and into the second corridor. A clutter of stocky metal canisters plastered with ominous biohazard warning stickers stood just inside the door. The cages here were much the same as Jacob had just seen, but smaller--rabbits and cats. Thoroughly gruesome, but that wasn’t what Morris wanted to show him. They ran on.

  Past the cages, instead of procedural rooms there was only a dense warren of diminutive offices, most with their chipboard doors kicked in, jagged splinters strewn beside their burst locks. Morris led him to the centre of the labyrinth and a short, metal-panelled corridor. At the end was a recessed steel door with no porthole. It had one long vertical handle which Morris used to haul sideways. The door gasped on oiled grooves and slid into the wall with a pneumatic sigh.

  Morris stomped through, but something brought Jacob up short and made him dawdle in the doorway, restless and confused. The atmosphere was wrong. Something about the room didn’t scan and he couldn’t pin down what it was. He thought maybe it was the aftershock suddenly hitting him.

  The anger that Maria had warned him of--ultimately been driven away by--had been graphically exposed tonight. This terrifying lack of control had unseated his humanity. He couldn’t avoid the fact that less than half an hour ago he had almost beaten a man to death. It was a crippling realisation, a dunk in artic waters. He thought of aggravated GBH and assault charges. Attempted murder. Maria. He found himself trembling with indecision.

  “Whoa! Hold up, I’m n-not sure about this one.” He stammered. His mouth was desert dry.

  It was obviously some sort of conference room, but in marked contrast to the rest of the complex this area seemed luxuriously appointed. The phrase nerve centre came to mind as Jacob surveyed the interior. It looked like a presidential war room in some buried nuclear bunker.

  A huge oak table stood beneath a crystal glow ball, which bathed the room in subdued, buttery light. The ceiling above was gently curved, black, and set with tiny fibre-optic lights, like a night sky glittering with stars. Morris went straight to the table and shoved a chair impatiently out of his way. It ran on coasters, skidding back towards Jacob.

  Morris beckoned. At length, and with great reluctance, Jacob moved a short way into the room to stand at the foot of the table. His eyes strayed over the glazed wooden surface and snagged on a few of the most salient details: the fact that there were seven chairs and thus seven places set, plus each place had a fan of documents flared out in front of it and was provided with an inlaid electronic workstation. These were obviously PC terminals--state-of-the-art, multimedia--with combined video or DVD facilities, but by the looks of it slaved to a master unit at the head of the table.

  Jacob looked closer at this pre-eminent place. A claw of ice closed around his heart. Beside the master terminal was a digital camera.

  Seeing him stiffen, Morris plucked up a clear plastic wallet file and flicked it across the tabletop. With trepidation Jacob removed its contents.

  Photographs. Black and white blow-ups. His face in close-up, replicated time after time. Shouting. Yelling. Features distorted with rage, smudged by motion and emotion. Jostled by the crowd. These were stills from the demonstration. But more than that, as he flicked further back through the sheaf he found other locations. Different scenes. Places he barely remembered, clothes he no longer possessed. Some of these pictures were ten years old!

  His breath hitched. Comprehension dawned slowly, gathering from false light to eventual illumination.

  “Oh. My. God,” he breathed. There were duplicates of the photos by every workstation.

  “More to come,” said Morris quietly. He retrieved a high-density 3.5-inch diskette from the master terminal’s “A” drive and pitched it over.

  Jacob snatched it from the air and examined the label. It read “File 10: Jan-Jun, 1984”. Jacob looked up in bewilderment. There was a box full of identical disks next to the terminal.

  “What were you doing in 1984?” Morris asked, not entirely joking. Jacob stared at him.

  “What? Are you saying these are surveillance files on us? Dossiers they’ve been compiling all these years?”

  Morris shrugged. “These days, man, who knows? I mean, really, who knows? They’ve got computers now, face-match mainframes that’ll store you on file and pick you out of a crowd, on CCTV, anywhere in Britain. Anywhere you go. You get yourself classified as a dissident, a troublemaker, and you are going to be watched. And not just by the pigs, either. Private security networks got access to this stuff, plus less qualms over how to misuse it.”

  Jacob was dumbstruck. His whole world had fallen through a trapdoor into empty space. His grip on reality was becoming slippery.

  “I don’t believe it, any of it. I mean ... fuck, I don’t know what I mean. Jesus, will you look at all this stuff.” He flipped through the pile of glossies, becoming more and more agitated. Morris eyed him closely for a moment or two. Then--

  “That’s nothing. See here--” he held up a familiar-looking laminate tag with a bar code stencilled across it. Jacob couldn’t quite place its significance at first, but Morris quickly plugged the gap for him.

  “These are clipped to every one of the cages I’ve seen here. Guess it must be something to do with their drug admin.”

  Jacob merely frowned at him, even more puzzled. “Yeah, and so? Eyes on the clock, mate.” He was still stunned by the photos. How widespread was this surveillance? And just how far back did it go?

  Morris’s expression darkened, and Jacob realised that the big man was scared. Not just nervous, or tense, or concerned. Properly, truly, terribly, shit scared. It was almost as if he didn’t want to speak, in case voicing his terror would make it concrete, and bring it fully into being.

  “I found this tag in here. Beside a very special cage.”

  He backed away to the far wall, where Jacob recognised the dim outline of another door, roughly analogous to the one by which they had entered. This door, however, had a porthole which was much wider and deeper than the others. The porthole was currently obscured by some segmented metal blind, but this was only half-drawn. From where he was standingif the blind had been drawn back the whole wayJacob would have an uninterrupted view into the room. Morris lifted his hand and tugged the blind aside.

  And Jacob knew that his life would never be the same again.

  The adjoining room contained another cage, larger than the puppy cages, but not as large as one might have hoped, considering. It was moderately clean, with a bare concrete floor and a jug of water in the far corner, a night soil bucket next to that.

  A teenaged girl lay asleep on the floor.

  Astonishment shoved at Jacob, nudging one of his feet forward so that he took an involuntary step towards her.

  She was sixteenseventeen at a pinch, but surely no older than thatand achingly thin. Her body, inside a wretched grey smock dress, resembled a collection of bamboo canes loosely gathered by string.

  In spite of this she remained quite shockingly pretty, with magazine-cover cheekbones to offset the tear-stains and blurry bruises. She could have stepped straight off some Milanese catwalk. Her hair was black. True black, not some deep, dark mahogany. Midnight black. Black black. Her skin had turned sallow with the ravages of captivity, but its texture remained that of brushed velvet, unbearably smooth. A few freckles stood out in a diffuse band across her delicate retroussé nose.

  There was a metal cuff around her left ankle, attached to a long snake of chain bolted to the wall. Her skin was chapped and split around the manacle, crispy with dried blood.

  Jacob thought she had, perhaps, the look of an East European, and his mind immediately flew to refugees. The poor, shabby flood of war homeless, spilt willy-nilly out across the continent, dispersed by eth
nic cleansing and starvation, winter and death. Shorn of nation or culture, identity or history. Their history was being rewritten by the victors, back in the country they once knew as home, under a different name. And now... Human vivisection? Snuff science? He gasped in horror.

  The curious thing about the scene, though, was the single concession to decoration which had been made within the cell: a streaky, lopsided spiral of intricate, perhaps mathematical symbols, splashed in some luminous dye high up on the far wall. Glittering constellations. Perhaps it had even been daubed by the girl herself? Something alarmed him greatly about this whole scene, over and above its inherent cruelty.

  There was something wrong here, hidden in plain view.

  Morris stepped sideways to open the door.

  “No,” whispered Jacob.

  Morris took hold of the handle

  “No!” Jacob shouted.

  Morris tugged down hard.

  The handle went click -- a small, hard, mechanism sound -- but the door didn’t open. Instead there was a pneumatic rush and clank of gears from behind them.

  The other door was closing.

  Jacob spun around, the soles of his boots squeaking hysterically on the polished floor. But there was no hope of them making it in time. The door sprang across

  and crushed the chair which Morris had shoved aside with a splintering crack, leaving a small space at floor level. Not for long, though: heartbeats at most. Already the chair was little more than a jagged sculpture of plastic and chrome petals. Machinery howled. A tang of burning singed the air.

  Jacob dived for the gap. He felt Morris following close behind. They couldn’t both fit through at the same time! The floor thumped the wind out of him and he landed half in, half out of the room. The chair gave way. Jacob screamed. And Morris shoved him the final distance through the gap.

  The door crunched home, leaving one man on either side, with a sprout of shattered plastic leaves dangling rigidly from the join.

  Jacob rolled immediately to his feet, gasping and retching fit to die. An alarm was chiming somewhere, a rhythmic drone from multiple speakers all throughout the complex.

  He checked his watch: sixteen minutes. Somewhere far away he could hear Liam calling, but he couldn’t detect the slightest sound from behind the steel door. Only a fool would beat or kick at a door like that.

  Jacob went slack with fear.

  Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred pounds.

  Go directly to jail.

  4. One Step Down

  The scream is pure terror. He glances left, trying to locate the figure in the soupy gloom, but the woman has left the spiral and become little more than a shade upon the shadows. Soon, even her scream is just the memory of an echo.

  But the cacophony continues. Screeching explosions of timber whirl up into the night, while the ground vibrates like a vast drilling rig. He glances right and catches the eye of the young woman there, then wishes he had not. Fear is a great distorter of beauty: her mouth is a slack drooling flap, her eyes glistening oyster bubbles.

  Suddenly, the precious cargo he bears is jolted from his hands and tumbles to the groundhe hears the impact even above the wailing chaosand he feels the frightened, accusing eyes of his companions converge upon him. Quickly he gathers up the cool object again, holding the slippery cylinder so tightly that his knuckles turn a pearly white.

  He has never felt such fear. Yet he senses that this is simply a precursor of what is to come, a prologue for the tale of terror which soon will be told into his own small soul. His heart is thumping hard, as if in an effort to escape the horror he has subjected it to; sweat deserts his body beneath the tight, warm clasp of his clothes; his balls have receded, hiding themselves away. He feels an instant of irrational hatred for his body, but then remembers that fear is the old ally of his species, and cowardice is not a word you can apply to the primal urge of self--preservation.

  “Soon,” the tall man shouts, his voice little more than a whisper above the riot. “Get ready!”

  The line of trees explodes upwards, bursting like a wall of shattered glass. The falling black splinters seem to merge with what is being revealed behind: a darkness so profound, so harsh and fathomless, that it seems almost solid.

  A voice from his left: “Oh God, oh God, oh fucking God!”

  Ahead of him, the tall man: “Do it now! Now!”

  For a split second, he thinks he’s dropped the tube again. Then his hand finds the end, expertly twists it. His arm jerks backwards as its contents fly into the air.

  There is a thump, and he is lifted into the air. He staggers back, disorientated by the impression that the ground itself has taken one step down. The cylinder rolls away from him, spilling spent gleams, but it no longer matters. It is done.

  The spiral symbols have vanished, as has the trimmed grass and the moist soil. Instead he is sprawled on some strange surface, sinking slowly as he tries to lever himself to his feet. There is no pain, no feeling, just a scary sense of relaxation. He wonders if he will sink forever, descending until the porridge-like mess oozes into his nose, his mouth, clogging his lungs and damming up his blood ...

  Then he realises why he feels so serene. He puts his hand to his chest and looks around to see the others doing the same. They are terrified, but not surprised.

  His heart has stopped.

  **

  When Jacob woke up there was nothing. No feeling, no memory, no time. He didn’t even feel like he owned a mind. He was merely a blank space where thoughts should play.

  Tentative fingers of sunlight explored the curtains, and he opened the holes that -- he guessed -- must be his eyes. The sun dazzled him. For a few seconds he lay there as dream shadows gradually shook away. Then recollection flooded in, filling his brain with a million bright bits of thought that he no longer wished to claim. A lifetime that he wanted to disown. He was lying on a bed in the guest house.

  He groaned, sat up and flexed his hand. His knuckles were bruised, swollen, his left foot bloodied from the split nail of his big toe. He wondered how the security guard was faring. He seized the little radio next to the bed, fiddled with the dials until he heard the burble of the local station. He glanced at his watch: ten minutes until the news.

  Morris. Maria. The girl. Jacob could barely draw his thoughts into a coherent line, such were the shocks he had suffered over the last twenty-four hours. He began to tremble, even though the room was sweltering hot. Sweat soaked his sheets. A dog barked outside, a creature from another world. Jacob wondered if he could go back to sleep, dream some silly, ordinary dreams and then wake up to a more acceptable reality. One in which Maria was waiting for him at his flat, Morris was ranting to anyone who would listen...

  A reality in which teenaged girls weren’t kept in cages like dogs.

  “Oh Christ,” Jacob muttered. The dog outside answered him with another volley of barks. Naked, he walked to the bathroom to piss, hoping that if he eased the pressure of his bladder his mind would clear as well. He stood there for minutes after he had finished, holding his flaccid penis in one hand and staring into the toilet bowl as if he could discern the truth of all things in his urine.

  He was stirred from his reverie by the radio, the jingle for the morning bulletin. He dashed back into the bedroom, and dropped to the bed, grimacing as he stubbed his injured toe on the cupboard. The first story reported a traffic accident which had claimed the lives of three joyriders. Nothing about Morris, or the lab.

  He thought with relief that perhaps this was normality reasserting its grip. But the certainty of what he had seen still clawed at the back of his mind: there were surveillance files with photos of him from fifteen years ago; there was a fucking girl kept in a cage, for Christ’s sake; Morris had been trapped. Fuck normality. It had taken a leave of absence the moment they’d cut the wire last night. And he had physical evidence to boot: an innocuous square of plastic -- the stolen diskette -- sitting on his bedside table.

  As if in agreement, the newscaster moved on to the next story: