Chapter Forty-Four

What Have I Done To Deserve This?

Ever since the nurse had sedated her upon admission to the child psychiatric hospital, Kay had been experiencing changes to her vision. The most obvious symptom was a sensitivity to light that pained her eyes and seemed to clog her brain, so that she couldn't concentrate. Recently, shutting her eyes had failed to bring relief because the images remained; initially as sharply defined as when her eyes were open, only gradually blurring and reluctantly fading. It had got to the point that she only knew that she had closed her eyes by paying close attention to the muscles needed to draw together the lids; there was no change to her vision. This would make life rather difficult under normal circumstances, but Kay’s present circumstances were far from normal. She was detained in the hospital; kept under fairly heavy sedation and isolated. Her only human contact was with the three nurses who shared the 24 hours in shifts and the psychiatrist; Dr Corner.

There were other unusual optical experiences. In dim light, as she moved her head towards an object, it did not grow in her field of vision smoothly, but flicked from image to larger image like a sequence of still photographs shown too slowly to form an animation. Also, when reading she suffered from a strange form of double vision, as she received the words at slightly different times from each eye. This in turn produced an echo in the narrative which stopped her from immersing herself in the text. Overall she recognised that the changes were not solely in her eyes, but also in her brain and the nerves connecting the two.

And then there was the way this all related to her nightmares; which would now be tormenting her whilst both sleeping and waking were it not for the sedation. As if upon a second surface, mostly obscured by the insistent screen of reality, the old malign characters prowled about her, accompanying the nurses who attended her, and most tightly bound to the thin form of Dr Corner himself. The drugs kept her from a terrifying world, but she knew she could not remain in this somnolent suspended space forever. She needed help and she needed to fight for her own sanity, and the only help to hand was Dr Corner.

Except that Dr Corner was already known to her before he had manifested himself as her psychiatrist. For some years he had been one of the most evil of the creatures who moved through her broken nights. How could she trust him to cure her when he had spilt so much blood before her? He seemed to stand above her, as he had countless times before, holding the tiny golden cup of black blood, his lips smeared with it, already browning with oxygen. He pressed her back against the bed and anointed her forehead with the liquid. He whispered in a language which she did not know; but she felt the meaning and was afraid.

“Talk to me Kay”.

Why could she understand him? He always used the other language. She closed her eyes, but of course his image hardly flickered. If she could understand him now was she becoming one of them; losing her humanity?

“Talk to me. I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me”. Frank managed a slight encouraging smile. Behind him the diagonal lines, shadows of blinds, turned on the wall. She felt the breeze. With the breeze came the dark flapping wings, carrying the others: the black-haired, uniformed dwarves, the zombies, with transparent skins, and always, the wolf.

“You can’t help me. You can only harm me,” she muttered.

And with the extension of the sentence came the really important question, which she did not voice: “why have you not killed me?” And with this came the sensing of a protector. She was, for at least a while, safe here. As long as she did not give away some information which they needed, or as long as someone outside lived; she would be safe.

She opened her eyes and regarded the psychiatrist. She saw his bald head and thin features, and yet she also saw an older face, the cheeks red with consumed whisky, and another, like that of a clown, and more. She turned her head and the items in the room fractured and spun against the shifting origin. The bed upon which she lay seemed a dentist’s chair. The breeze that entered the room bore icy precipitate. Above was infinite space, and the greenish whorls of the Northern lights.

This wasn't an eye disease, it was a power of a greater vision, and she needed it in order to understand and survive.

Chapter Forty Three

Banna Strand

The opening of the garden door was carried out with a discretion that meant only one thing: Professor O’Connell was meeting with one of his co-conspirators. Frank polished the interior of the phial until it glowed, and having examined his reflection, which appeared huddled against the interior surface, secured the airtight cap. He did not want any stray bacteria compromising the transfer that was to take place; to mar O’Connell’s Easter Offering of his mind and knowledge. The phial was carefully set down beside the tools that had been selected from the professor’s own collection. These would open the skull and remove the required substance. He felt his heartbeat quicken in anticipation of the energising ritual that lay ahead, rather as the diner relishes the flowing blood in a rare steak. He could taste the cerebral foam and the musty assurance of the quivering nutriment.

But first he must complete the other steps in his march to a perfect rebirth. He had to ensure that none of O’Connell’s colleagues lived to threaten in any way his new existence. He turned to the rows of test tubes and proceeded to fill each with the greenish gas. This resembled the bone gas in every respect but one: this gas would not melt the bones of its victims. Instead Frank had added a substance that would enrage the subject and cause them, if under stress and bearing arms, to inflict the maximum harm upon their enemies. The test tubes all full and sealed, he packed them carefully into the rough sacks which Clarke’s boys used to deliver the Sunday papers. This was the agreed method for getting the gas into the strategic locations which the committee had identified. The committee expected the gas to kill hundreds of British soldiers, police and informers, leaving them free to take over the major buildings and proclaim the new state.

Frank had already identified the British informer who most concerned the committee, and had used that connection only once: to impart the name of a diplomat and a beach in Kerry to the authorities, and to arrange for O’Connell to be unavoidably late leaving his house when the rising occurred. The door slammed, and the sound of a bottle of single malt being dragged from the press, opened and then heavily set upon the desk in the room below followed with the same fortissimo. Frank wiped his brow to erase any hint of foreknowledge from his appearance and went to meet O’Connell.

The professor was pouring a second large measure when Frank entered the room. “I take it you have received some intelligence. Is this drink a celebration of the day to come?”

O’Connell lifted the cut glass tumbler to his lips and drank with a sharp hissing sound before looking at Frank.

“Hardly a celebration. That liberal idiot has been taken in Kerry. The German’s are not going to help us. The Lord alone knows what Casement will tell the British now.”

“Surely this cannot stop the rising?”  Frank sat down opposite the doctor. “Are we not agreed that he nation will rise once Dublin is secured?”

“That is the hope, no, the belief of the committee, and many men have died to bring us to this point. However, German arms and German troops to cower the constabulary across the nation would strengthen us in our resolve.”

“But we have the gas. I can manufacture a great deal more by the morrow. All we need are couriers who know how to use it and the British forces will be more easily routed than by rifles in the hands of the idealistic but inexperienced.”

O’Connell shook his head, not in disagreement, but in an effort to dispel the fumes of whiskey that filled his head. “Is that possible, Frank? I thought it took weeks to make the vapour.”

“Indeed, it took weeks to develop the system. However, the system now exists and I can produce as much gas as necessary. Please tell Pearse. I will work through the night if it will further the great cause.”

He professor stood and grasped Frank firmly by the hand. “By God, I will. Mr Kørner. I thank you; the people of a free Ireland thank you. This will not be forgotten.” With that he was gone. Frank poured himself a small glass of the whiskey and enjoyed its cloying aroma and heat on the tongue. Now his only concern was that O’Connell would return here and not remain with the others until the rising began. In that case he planned to tell whoever came to collect the gas that here was a problem that required immediate attention from the professor. It would give him less time, but he was still confident of success. It would be a long night, and he needed to be alert. He had a book on the relative motions of bodies in space by a German physicist. Ideas that he knew were to be imminently developed in a new paper. He wanted to be able to grasp its burden and so set to the pleasant task of revision. His thinking passed from English to German, and from mundane strategy to cosmic processes. He was content.

Frank’s attention was wrested from the calculations, based on familiar stuff by Poincaré. Someone was shuffling beyond the garden door. O’Connell or a street urchin, come to collect the sacks of bone gas? For a second Frank shared the fears of discovery with the conspirators. Then he heard the heavy breathing of the professor; the professor alone. The game could now begin in earnest. The key grated in he lock. Turning, the cuboid of an iron alloy murmured in response and gave ingress to a dishevelled but ecstatic academic. Ice, familiar Arctic ice crystallised in Frank’s blood as he rose. One hand offered in greeting, the other weighing he knife.

Air, blood and digestive enzymes gurgled as Frank slit the throat. He manoeuvred the body into a chair and applied the device to the left nasal passage. A single upward blow with the mallet sent the blades into the brain. The pages of “Zur Elektrodynamik Bewegter Körper” rustled as Frank set the blades spinning at higher speeds than the lobotomising process they were designed for demanded. Now he broke through the other nostril and inserted a thin rubber tube. He placed the other end of the tube in his mouth and sucked until he tasted the bitterness of cerebral matter.

The foam that was O’Connell’s forebrain was carefully siphoned into the phial. This was then placed in a larger thermal flask, purchased by the former Frank from an excellent Parisian purveyor of household goods for Meursault’s mental matter. Café Délice was a label that hardly did justice to the liquid it contained, but for Frank this was as precious as life itself: in fact it offered him he morning jolt of immortality. He removed the body to a large trunk in the basement, bathed and dressed in clothes more suited to his destination. Equipped with his precious cargo and a diplomatic letter, the reward for the information supplied to the British informer, he walked from the asylum towards the docks as he sun rose on the day of the Easter rising.

chapter forty-two

Jeux d’avril

Cleїs and her guests were seated at an enormous round table. All were women in their twenties and thirties, but they were dressed in extravagant silk creations of an earlier, pre-revolutionary era. The clothes shimmered with precious metals, the revealed flesh bedecked with ivory pearls and fine golden latticework. The place settings sought to compete with the calm elegance of the Ancien Régime and the youthful high spirits of the women. Champagne had already been served, and now the waiting men brought silver tureens of kedgeree, and from behind each seat gently ladled the golden, steaming rice mixture onto spectacular plates. At the same moment, with even greater delicacy, they pinned a paper fish to the back of each dress; all that is, save the host’s. The princess could hardly contain her laughter as the men completed the task, and had to press the heavy champagne flute against her lips to avoid alerting her companions to the trick.

Frank shut the French windows. The shrill humour of the ladies distracted him from his painstaking annotation of the details of Katt. He had promised Cleїs a result by Sunday, and indeed on Sunday he had taken the crucial step. He had, however, recognised the princess’s love for the marmalade cat, and so spared her the experience of seeing him bleed it out into the nutriment. He stirred the black liquid. The two cat bodies curled around each other and turned like yin and yang: the one vividly orange, the other a yellowing grey. He removed the grey now, dropping it into a wheelbarrow and covering it with a tarpaulin in case the princess or one of her guests should come onto the balcony.

Experiments with insects had assured him that the new cat would waken, but he was unsure when this renaissance would happen. Beetles took on average 30 hours to show signs of life. He assumed the number of cells in the subject was the deciding factor, and a cat had far more cells than a beetle. However, the blood systems were completely different, and the beetle had an exoskeleton that could delay the absorption. It was now approaching 1 pm on Thursday. Frank had to admit that he was experiencing the discomfort of impatience. The orange island turned slowly and lodged against the side of the tank. Frank made a note of the time in his log and returned to the main room.

The laughter had subsided, which was calming. Frank liked silence.

Human silence.

Frank needed the tiny sounds of the massive progress of geological time: the creaking of continental plates, the shifting of ancient dust, the turning of bacteria in old wood. Arctic wind and waves and Sami whispers.

Now he heard a female voice uttering quiet open vowels in a language which belonged to no nation. He glanced into the dining room and found it deserted; the plates still splashed with kedgeree and the champagne still hissing in the flutes. He moved towards the withdrawing room and found the source of the voiced breath. One of the women seemed to be praying to her pearls, which slipped like a rosary between her fingers, and then, unlike a rosary, between her parted lips. Meanwhile the others stroked her hair, breasts and shoulders as Cleїs kissed her dark triangle and then parted the lower lips with her tongue. The gentle penetration seemed a signal to the others, who now let fingers slide into the finest brocade and hence to the cunts and asses barely concealed beneath.

Frank felt cleansed by the limitations and sincerity of the physical acts he witnessed. They were simple and pure: decorative even; nothing like the pagan rutting of his parents on the permafrost. Neither were they like his own brief but intense ecstasies, obtained as he accepted the burning semen into his porcelain body, and felt his own cooling between his flat stomach and the surface against which he was pressed.

He turned his back on the confection of pink and pearl. His mood was lifted, even spiritual, and he took a long mouthful of slightly fizzing champagne before returning to the balcony. The cat rubbed itself against his leg and mewed its hunger. Frank lifted his marmalade child and looked deep into its still, seeking eyes. He knew he should note the time of awakening, but it would now be but a rough estimate. The final part was much, much more important. What he needed was in the withdrawing room, and he was not to be delayed by respect for the acts of wild tribadism that were taking place within. Keeping the cat firmly pressed to his chest he stepped over the writhing bodies and gently used his free hand to move a slender foot from the door of the cabinet which held the cameo.

Cleїs was amazed to feel her face being firmly pulled away from the spread buttocks of her prize guest, although that place was instantly invaded by the tongue of another daughter of the aristocracy. Cleїs sat utterly still and unaware of the sounds and movements behind her as Frank silently placed the cat upon her naked lap. She let her hands rest against each flank as he revealed the cameo; and as he did the cat curled and slept in her arms.

“Vous aurez votre petite fille,” he whispered. She smiled. The lovers beyond sighed their assent in a unison shudder of satisfaction, like a terrible, rumbling, feline purr.

chapter forty one

The Evil Empire

The room was large and filled with the lateral light of an early March afternoon. The shadows of the few skyscrapers that matched the one within which they sat scribed irregular flat parallelograms across the table, while the three dimensional spaces between sizzling with amber sparking dust and tobacco smoke. The portrait of the president hovered behind the moving motes. His moving image meanwhile dominated the television screen towards which every face was turned.

“There is sin and evil in the world, and we're enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might. Our nation, too, has a legacy of evil with which it must deal. The glory of this land has been its capacity for transcending the moral evils of our past...” Frank cast a rapid glance over the other men and one woman at the table. None smiled at the rhetoric. He felt the old oppression at his throat once more, and also at his pocket. Driscoll was correct; the agenda had changed. The flow of government money was about to dry up in the area of narcotic supply to its citizens. Reagan was simplifying internal issues in order to move resources elsewhere.

“I urge you to beware the temptation of pride -- the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.” Driscoll ground out his Cohiba. It had been cold for some time. He shot a look at Frank, a look which conveyed panic, hopelessness and supplication at the same time. It was not possible to leave the table, so Frank merely brought his index finger to his own lips and closed his eyes as if in contemplation.

In reality he had already grasped both the new agenda and the way he could use Driscoll in maximising his future profit. He considered all the faces around the table once more, and sure enough, they all shared Driscoll’s palpable fear at the changing order of things. All, that is, except the one female. He made a mental note to discover her history. He returned his attention to the president’s face, constructed from fluorescing powders on a cathode ray screen.

“ ...our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual. And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man. For in the words of Isaiah: "He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might He increased strength. But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary."

Chairs creaked as the hardened government executives received the words of Isaiah coming from their president. As the speech ended the applause in the room was formal and restrained. The woman rose and switched off the television.

“I think you can all see where this is going, so I’ll cut to the chase. Our policy in regard to the control of narcotic supply has changed. The US government will in future seek to exclude all narcotic substances in the classes with which this group has dealt. We expect that any intelligence from this room that may help us eliminate supply lines will be promptly offered.” She allowed her gaze to linger on Driscoll.

“This operation is to be wound down and some of you will be redeployed to supporting the new initiative; the focus will be on missile defence systems. I will be holding a briefing on this later today. Just now I need to clear up a few issues with Mr Driscoll and his team.”

Frank had his eyes closed, although he sensed the sunlight fading as he heard the chairs push back from the table and the leather shoes squeak their charges from the room. Driscoll poured water into a glass and swallowed noisily.

“Mr Driscoll; we are not ungrateful for the efforts you have made in support of our policies in the past, but the future is not in biochemistry. We will assist you in regard to patents that will minimise the financial effects, but only if you cooperate by supplying intelligence.”

Driscoll crashed the glass to the table. “You remove my company’s income and expect me to give you everything I know about the trade for a promise of 5 cent on a pack of suppositories? Dream on sister! This is a multi-billion dollar industry.”

“A multi-billion dollar industry that is illegal and which represents what the president rightly called one of the moral evils of our past.” The woman turned her back on Driscoll and Frank and stood at the window, overlooking the lights of the evening traffic below. “You can help us and survive in business, or you can find yourself implicated in the supply of narcotics and face a jury. A jury chosen by the president. A jury that has American moral values at its core.”

Driscoll slumped in his chair. His breath became shallow. Frank waited for him to realise the utter powerlessness of his situation and then made his move. He coughed gently to remind the woman of his presence.

“Mr Corner?”

“I wonder if I may discuss the health effects of nuclear events in the upper atmosphere with some of your scientists.” Frank wrote some meaningless mathematical phrases on his jotter.

“I’m not sure I follow you, Mr Corner,” the woman replied, but at the same time she glanced at the jotter and waited for his response.

“We all know of the appalling health legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I believe that I may be able to help develop medicines that could protect American citizens from radioactive consequences of nuclear events in the upper atmosphere. You have researched the atmospheric currents that would apply to large doses of radiation being released at these heights, I assume?”

“I... I’m sure we have, but I will arrange for you to meet with General Abrahamson as soon as possible, in case you have something to offer.”

Frank stood. “You can get me through Driscoll Biochem.” He smiled as he heard Driscoll’s breath hit the air in the room, sensed his heartbeat change. He put his hand on Driscoll’s shoulder, bringing him to his feet. With his composure regained Driscoll turned and shook her hand. “I look forward to your call, Miss...?”

“Lamarche; and it’s Mrs Lamarche. We will talk soon.”

Frank and Driscoll left the room, but only Frank heard her pick up the telephone and initiate a call to her superiors. Driscoll’s mind was on the salvation of his company. He had only one man to thank for it, and he was determined that they would celebrate together in the finest possible style.