Kristin Read online

  His inadvertent hint prompted a stampede, and the crew surged past him.

  She was sitting at the dining table, and they bared down upon her, filtering busily around her static figure. Lights were set up, a microphone pinned to her blouse. Somebody cracked the back of her head with a hard piece of metal and she glared at the technician, then at Thom in bewilderment, disbelief: Why had he done this to her?

  ‘Can you tell me your name?’ Johansson asked her.

  She turned her head slowly to face the pretty presenter.

  ‘ ... Kristin.’

  ‘Kristin who?’

  ‘Kristin.’

  ‘Quiet everyone! Going live in five ... four ... three ... two. Hello, this is Greta Johansson, for the BBC, coming to you live this morning from Greenwich, London. Acting upon information received from an official source, I’m here to speak to a woman, known only as Kristin, whom we believe may have somehow played an instrumental part in the psychological and sociological breakdown that began in London a few days ago, and is now spreading rapidly across the rest of the country, and the world.

  ‘Kristin? It’s unusual not to know one’s second name, isn’t it?’

  Kristin stared hard at her.

  ‘How long have you been in the country?’

  She glared at Thom.‘A few months.’

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  ‘ ... To find work,’ she replied, fidgeting uncomfortably.

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Did I what?’

  ‘Find work ?’

  ‘No.’ Beads of milky sweat formed on her forehead.

  ‘Where are you from, Kristin?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ she asked, curtly, relighting a half-finished cigarette.

  ‘Please tell me where you’re from?’

  ‘I am from hell.’

  ‘ ... Sorry?’

  ‘The Czech Republic.’

  ‘Whereabouts in the Czech Republic?’

  ‘Rakovnik!’ she shouted, sending a cup skating across the table and smashing onto the floor.

  ‘ ... Are you aware of everything that’s been happening in London?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘France, Brazil?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know nothing about the siren?’

  ‘What siren?’

  ‘The high pitched tone — three days ago?’

  ‘What are you talking about you moronic bitch!’ she bristled.

  The presenter stopped, scrutinized her. ‘Government scientists have pinpointed the origin of the sound to this exact location.’

  ‘So what?’ she scowled, knocking off some ash onto her interrogator’s notes.

  ‘Is it true the siren can affect peoples minds, brainwash them?’

  ‘How should I fucking know?’

  ‘Have you been influencing people’s minds, Kristin?’

  ‘Influencing?’

  ‘Have you been ... ?’

  ‘Questions, questions, questions.’

  ‘You’ve had your five, get out of here,’ Thom insisted.

  Johansson held up her hand. ‘Have you been willing bad things to happen, Kristin?’

  ‘Bad things? Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t catch that?’

  ‘I said no. Are you deaf ?’

  ‘You are denying any involvement, absolving yourself of any blame?’

  ‘I am involved, but the blame is not all mine.’

  Johansson frowned as Kristin leered at her duplicitously.

  ‘Has anything that’s happened been caused, either in part, or in whole by any unusual powers you may possess?’

  ‘Powers? Ah, you’ll see those soon, last things you’ll see.’

  ‘ ... What do you mean ... ?’

  ‘Anger.’

  ‘Your anger?’

  ‘My anger, Greta.’

  ‘And what should I do, when you become angry?’

  As Kristin glared at her inquisitor her tormentor placed a vile, psychotic thought in her mind, willed terrible things upon Johansson.

  ‘You should fear me, Greta.’

  ‘ ... Do you ... have anything more to say?’

  ‘More to say?’ She looked past the Swede’s shoulder, into the camera trained upon her from an oblique angle, but far beyond the shiny lens and the electronics inside. ‘More to say?’

  Johansson saw a mercurial flash of brilliant white light within the void of Kristin’s eyes, and her malignancy streamed, unstoppably, into the minds and souls of the millions watching the early morning programme.

  ‘ ... What happened?’ Johansson asked. ‘What have you just done?’

  ‘What needed to happen, what had to be done.’

  ‘ ... And what ... what do you mean by that?’ she stuttered, disrupted, physically compromised.

  Kristin smiled insidiously.

  ‘Can you explain the white light, it didn’t come from our equipment?’

  ‘Transference of thought.’

  ‘Your thoughts?’

  ‘The siren wasn’t completely effective, I’m afraid.’

  Johansson felt pressure build behind her eyes. She closed the lids, traced the abnormal bulges with her fingertips and gasped. ‘ ... What will happen ... to the people who’ve received these thoughts?’

  Kristin flashed a furious glance at Thom. ‘Why have you foisted this rabble on me, this prying heap of faeces, this fucking slapper?’

  ‘What did you call me?’Johansson blurted.

  ‘You’re nothing but an intrusive, overbearing whore!’

  The presenter lunged, grabbed her subject by the throat — it was cold to the touch, like snakeskin, and she caught her breath. A technician intervened, separating them, and she recomposed herself.

  Kristin leaned forwards. ‘ ... Thy nose bleeds, Greta.’

  Johansson shrank from the execrable voice, dabbing at her nostrils in alarm, her stomach aflame. ‘ ... What are you ... ?’

  ‘Thy future.’

  ‘ ... What have you done to me ... ?’

  ‘Nothing thou didst not deserve.’

  From below came the sound of smashing glass and splintering wood, the hurried, clumsy clop of heavy boots on the bare wood of the stairs.

  ‘POLICE!’ reverberated the alert, as the men filled the room. ‘NOBODY MOVE!’

  Three of the officers closed in on Kristin, nudging her thin, fragile skull with the muzzles of their cold, black, Heckler and Koch carbines. A short, burly officer stood back from the rest. He removed his peaked cap and tossed it aside, uncovering a sweaty mat of thinning hair. He cocked his Glock 17 pistol and aimed directly at her face. ‘Mooney, SO19!’ he barked, looking at Thom. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Sharman, or the rest of you — whoever the fuck you are! We came for the girl, she’s all we’re interested in!’

  ‘Thy nosebleed worsens, Greta,’ smirked Kristin.

  The trickle turned into a steady flow, running aroundJohansson’s ruby lips, off her chin. She tipped her head back and stuffed her notes beneath her nostrils, but blood began to seep from her ears and eyes and she wailed.

  ‘YOU, DON’T MOVE A FUCKING INCH!’ Mooney shouted, forcing her head to one side with his gun as she continued to observe the distress of her beautiful prey with muted fascination.

  ‘Look ... poor Greta!’ the demonic voice cackled. ‘Greta, Greta, Greta ... bleeding, bleeding, bleeding.’

  Johansson’s slender wrists and neck swelled rapidly, until they were corpulent. Her face, arms, stomach, followed, inflating like rubber balloons filling with water. Her skin started to smoulder and split.

  ‘WHATEVER YOU’RE FUCKING DOING, STOP IT NOW, YOU FREAK!’ Mooney yelled, cringing.

  Johansson screamed — a scream born of desperation to live, in the realization she would not.

  ‘Time to die, Greta!’

  The presenter’s body went into violent spasm. Extremities — fingertips, earlobes, turned black. The charring spread, peeling off her skin in sheets. Her crisp, beige suit, h
er white blouse combusted. Her tongue fell from her open mouth and her eyeballs pushed their way free of their sockets. One exploded with a phutt. Then the other.

  Kristin’s eyes watered, her face twisting with momentary remorse. But her pity for Greta was short-lived. Greta had entered the lion’s den and would have to pay the price. ‘Holes ... just ugly, bleeding holes where once there were eyes with which to see!’ she laughed.

  Johansson bubbled blood and her smoking corpse rocked back in the chair. Its mandible fell away, discharging an internal gas — a final breath, and then deflated.

  Kristin slumped forwards and her head crashed into the hard wooden table.

  Mooney covered his face to quell the repellent odour of the burnt flesh, as Johansson’s crew vomited, or fainted, or ran screaming from the lounge. He’d seen a human being burn to death once before, whilst working on the pylons as an electrician. But this? It was abnormal, incomprehensible, unearthly.

  He nodded at his men. ‘ … Take her.’

  Fourteen

  The emergency parliamentary session had been called for by the Prime Minister for nine-thirty on the morning of the fifteenth of February, ignoring normal procedure in neglecting to consult his own ministers, and protocol, in failing to inform either the leader of the opposition or his shadow cabinet.

  The Prime Minister’s secretary, Nicola Dufferin, sat down at her desk and switched on her computer. She took a sip of her tea, opened the manila folder, took out the Prime Minister’s hand-written notes and began to type them up. But no sooner had she started than she was compelled to stop.

  She removed her glasses and reread the leader’s words. Then she read them again and stared at the heavy, closed door to the Prime Minister’s office. What he had penned — scrawled, was not a motion to put before the house, but an edict of horrific nature. Many in government had fallen under the degenerative spell of the siren, she knew this — weak men and women. But the Prime Minister? He’d appeared unaffected.

  Dufferin had formulated her own theory: the greater the intelligence of the individual, the less susceptible they’d been to the effect of the siren. After the ear-splitting tone she’d been momentarily debilitated. Staff in neighbouring offices had seemed confused, agitated, but had recovered in an hour or so. Others, including several senior ministers, had undergone permanent distortion of their personality and were now unapproachable. They’d become remote, withdrawn, vindictive.

  A large screen had been hastily erected in the House of Commons in time for the chilling interview with the enigma, Kristin. After the violent, incomprehensible death of presenter Greta Johansson, which Dufferin struggled to ascribe to the actions of the girl, after the peculiar flash of white light, ministers and backbenchers had laughed, cheered, punched the air. When she’d gone online later, Dufferin had discovered evidence of similar patterns of behaviour emerging from political administrations across the world.

  The brilliant light from the girl’s eyes had had a profound, far-reaching effect on the people Dufferin dealt closely with, people she’d worked alongside for fifteen years or more, people she knew and trusted unreservedly. She was beginning to feel isolated, unsafe.

  She turned her attention back to the notes and made a decision. Gathering the sheets together and slipping them back into the folder she stood, walked slowly to the panelled door and opened it without knocking.

  Prime Minister David Glenister sat hunched over the mahogany desk, burning a photograph of his children he’d removed from its silver frame. He watched, casually, as the image of the beaming faces scorched and faded, until the last of the celluloid melted away, then dropped the remains of the picture onto the plush, red carpet carpet and glanced up at her.‘Nicola?’

  Nicola. His tone was perfunctory, as if preceding a request for a photocopy, and yet she’d just seen him commit an unintelligible act of destruction, had stood over him as he’d wilfully cremated a picture of the children he adored more than life itself.

  She inhaled sharply and tossed the folder onto the desk. ‘I can’t type these up, David, I’m sorry.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Can’t, or won’t, Nicola?’

  She hesitated. ‘Won’t.’

  ‘I see. May I ask why not?’ he frowned, stamping the ashes out.

  She gulped. He was a decent man but he’d always been intimidating and the siren had transformed him into a monster. ‘Because they haven’t been written by ... ’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘By a person ... of sane mind.’

  ‘Who’s running this shit-hole of a country, Nicola, you or me?’

  ‘You never agreed with capital punishment, you always described it as legal murder.’

  ‘I don’t have a choice any more, it’s entirely out of my hands.’

  ‘No choice? Of course you have a choice, if you can’t choose, who can?’

  ‘She’s in my head now, tells me what to do.’

  ‘And the bitch told you to do this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened to the man I’ve known all these years, the good man? Where is David Glenister?’

  ‘Gone.’ He undid the cuff of his left shirt sleeve, rolled it up to the elbow and began to carve a name into the flesh of his forearm with a pewter letter opener. With horror, she made out the inverted first letter — “K”, as the premier’s blood trickled onto the leather surface of the desk.

  He looked up at her and smiled. ‘Why don’t you undress now, Nicola — show me your lovely breasts, your gaping sex?’

  She shuddered, stepping backwards.

  ‘We should fuck, Nicola, here on this desk, right now. You should take my bad seed deep inside you. It might bring me a new child, to replace the ones I’ve lost forever.’

  ‘ ... Please, David ... please, please, please ... say you haven’t hurt them?’ she sniffed.

  ‘Hurt whom?’

  ‘Your children.’

  ‘Oh, they’re dead. So is my wife, I killed them all last night, strangled them with a bath towel.’

  She let out a squeal of anguish and backed towards the door.

  ‘I bathed the boys, then finished them off. They seemed surprised, I can’t understand why. That’s why I burned their photograph — not much point in having a picture of my dead children on the desk, is there? My wife was in the kitchen preparing a meal for us when I struck. Her death was intriguing, prolonged. She put up quite a fight. Afterwards, I piled their bodies and urinated on them.’

  Dufferin stumbled slowly backwards through the open door, her cheeks wet. ‘ ... If you’re lost ... then our fate is sealed!’ She turned and ran, took the elevator to the basement car park, clambered behind the wheel of her black BMW and raced from the building, from the madness of London.

  Two hours later she pulled into the gravel driveway of her pretty cottage two miles north of Royal Tunbridge Wells, her right foot cramped, humming. She was still shaking as she ascended the narrow, stone stairs.

  In the bedroom, she phoned her husband in Reading, lay down on the king-sized bed and cried herself to sleep.

  At nine twenty-five the following morning, the Prime Minister loosened his tie and entered the House of Commons, flanked on the left by Chancellor Lord Burbridge and on the right by his deputy, Barbara de Jenkin. He’d given neither a reason for the session, nor revealed the contents of his speech and they accompanied him uneasily as he strode to the right hand side of the house and took his position in the centre of the front-most, turquoise leather bench. Seated adjacently, Nigel McKenna, leader of the opposition, acknowledged him in cursory fashion.

  At the end of the room Speaker Douglas Ormerod lowered his bulky frame into the broad chair upholstered in the same distinctive hide and called for order. His eyes roamed the assembly suspiciously for a while before settling on the premier. ‘Prime Minister ... ?’

  ‘Mr Speaker,’ he responded, standing. Memories of the previous night rushed into his twisted mind — startled faces ... choking ... vomiting ... fla
iling hands ... the sound of his own laughter ... bodies in the water ... bodies on the floor ... death ... loss ... terrible loss. He winced slightly and pulled himself together.

  ‘Much has changed since we last convened. Since the siren, the country, the world as we know it has altered and is, I believe, a more enlightened place in which to live. It is quite clear now that mankind has been misled for many centuries in following the teachings of Jesus Christ.’ He stopped, biting his lip.

  ‘I’m sure the house will agree that the television coverage of the death of the presenter Greta Johansson was intriguing viewing, and that the transferred philosophy, the will of Kristin’s mind has clearly shown the path humanity must take in order to survive. I murdered my family, my lovely wife and two young sons last night, not because I’m mad, or have lost my integrity, but because I can now see that love is wrong. I’m absolutely certain that it was the right thing to do.’

  Wails rang out, but around him, and on the other side of the house and in the speaker’s chair, heads nodded in solemn approval.

  ‘I won’t go back to my home. Their bodies will decompose in time, rot away to nothing, and I will move on with my life in a new world, a better world.’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ The heads nodded.

  Jennifer Styles, MP for Edmonton, stood. ‘This morning, on my way here, I stopped by the Lockwood Reservoir. I undid the belt on her seat and threw my baby daughter in. It’s funny, but her expression, her helpless splashing just ... made me feel good, empowered. Afterwards, in the car, I just felt so happy, so liberated.’

  On the other side a middle-aged, lady backbencher stood abruptly. ‘You murderous bitch!’

  ‘May God have mercy on your soul,’ Lord Burbridge muttered.

  ‘ORDER! ORDER!’ commanded Ormerod.

  Two male colleagues restrained the woman, pulling her back down to the bench but the anger, the recrimination grew. Ormerod started to lose control. ‘ORDER! ORDER IN THE HOUSE! IF YOU DO NOT EXERCISE DECORUM I WILL END THIS SESSION, AND IT WILL NOT BE RECONVENED!’

  The tumult waned.

  ‘ … Prime Minister ?’

  ‘Mr Speaker. I propose to introduce a law that all churches, of all denominations, be closed forthwith and that Christian worship, all worship other than the worship of Kristin, in public or otherwise, be prohibited. This law is to take immediate effect. The penalty for transgression of the law shall be summary execution.’