Chapter 7
She woke with the unbearable relief of knowing it had been a nightmare.
How much of it? Maybe all of it. Perhaps everything that had happened since they reached Enderby.
Creepy old house, only seen in the dark, who wouldn’t have a disturbed first night?
Or had they even arrived at Enderby? This wasn’t the plush, slightly mouldering four-poster she’d shared with Ross there.
The mattress was thinner. She could feel the cold of a metal frame against her calf where one leg was flung out at an angle.
More, there was a distinct smell in the air.
It wasn’t the dust and ages, floor polish and fossilised scents of cooking that she associated with the big old house.
It was something cleaner, more modern. Disinfectant. Chemicals. Hospitals.
A hospital bed. That was what she was in. She jerked to full wakefulness, sat up suddenly and felt a wrench at her wrist where she was manacled to the frame.
For a second she stared at the restraint, utterly bewildered. Not a plastic tie, not even a cop’s handcuffs, but a big clunky thing that Sherlock Holmes might have slapped on a perp back in eighteen-whateverthehell.
There was a very precise metal sound from nearby, the next room. A neat, clinical and above all nasty thing.
She let her eyes drift from the cuff, in the full knowledge that she was not going to like what she saw.
It was Enderby, of course. Some corner of the house she had never seen before—again—although in this case she reckoned it was because it had been most carefully locked away from any idle curiosity.
They had said that Neera had a laboratory on the grounds, and this was probably it, although the décor was an uneasy ceasefire between modern science and Victorian amateur natural historian.
There were half a dozen beds in the room Elena was in, crammed in close together.
They were canvas slung over hollow aluminium frames, painted in peeling olive green, and she wondered just which war they were military surplus from.
Her own had that thin hospital mattress over it, the others were bare. No sign of Ross. No sign of Melissa.
That finally brought home that what she remembered had happened, no mitigating nightmare to undo it.
Melissa, punched to the ground by the close-quarters roar of the shotgun.
Loaded with something solid, not buckshot.
Jeffrey had meant business, and Elena had the distance, now, to suspect that he’d had her in mind, rather than his own daughter.
Although he hadn’t scrupled, when his temper was tested.
She’d witnessed the final act of a bitter family snarl that must have been going on for many years.
She was shaking. She gripped the frame of the bed.
Given what had happened, she wasn’t sure why she wasn’t in the ground now, or tied to a stake out in the woods for the…
Well, she’d had a good look at the things now.
Not fairies, that was for sure. Weirdly familiar, even, save for the size and the habits.
A taste of home. They weren’t even supposed to have them in Britain, as far as she knew.
The room she was in was a kind of nook, off what looked like a complex of them.
The next one had the patent Enderby clutter, but with a more scientific bent, and better organised.
The shelves she could see were partly laden with taxidermy: a mongoose, a pangolin, a monitor lizard; with cases of pinned bugs, with the cracked spines of leather-bound books.
And partly with more modern reference works: stacked journals, ranks of CDs, three humming desktop servers ducted into a real Rube Goldberg arrangement of heat exchange pipes that vanished through a rough hole in the plaster ceiling.
The main light and fan above were cobwebbed enough to suggest that time had conquered them long ago.
The illumination came from three separate Anglepoise lamps, precariously balanced on shelves and tables, positioned to cast a stark white glare on the mortuary slab in the centre of the room.
Neera was there, wearing an honest-to-God white lab coat of a decidedly old-fashioned cut, yellowed at the sleeves with the sort of stains Elena associated with preserving fluid.
She was working on something. The sound had been her setting down a scalpel in a steel kidney dish.
A wheeled trolley of surgical implements was skewed beside her, and for a moment Elena was fighting a paroxysm of horror because surely it was Melissa on the slab.
Melissa being ghoulishly eviscerated because there was absolutely no logic or reason to these crazy, barbaric Brits, and they’d do anything and care about nothing because they’d been steeped in money and privilege since before the founding of the Union.
Then Neera moved, adjusting one of the lamps, tightening a clamp, and Elena saw that what was on the slab was one of the things.
From her limited vantage point she reckoned that either the dissection had been conducted with extreme prejudice or the specimen had already been badly damaged before it reached the table.
As of course it had. It was surely the thing that had clawed its way out of Great-Uncle Godfrey up in the attic, that Ross had smashed with a chair.
Neera looked round at her. Without a hint of surprise.
Holding what Elena recognised as a small bone saw, though surely there were no bones in her subject.
And something of that weirdly analytical thought must have communicated itself because Neera glanced down at the implement and said, “They’re surprisingly tough, the inner connective tissue and the chitin.
Even in this early hatchling instar. Quite a marvel, honestly.
If the family would allow me to patent even a fraction of what we’ve learned…
But then people would start asking where we learned it all from, and…
” A level look, neither sympathetic nor cruel.
“You understand that secrecy is paramount. We have the resources to buy rather a lot of it, but we don’t take risks. ”
Elena swallowed, fought down another fit of the shakes, said nothing.
Certainly not Why am I still alive? Because that was the plain implication of what Neera had just said.
No witnesses. No inconvenient American who’d blundered into this grotesque family reunion where no outsiders were supposed to be.
None except the regular rotation of staff, none of whom, surely, would be going home with a nice tip for good service.
She wondered if there was some particularly vile agency that sourced and supplied people who were simultaneously polite enough to serve the gentry and sufficiently devoid of family and connections that nobody would ask questions.
Probably there was. Probably there were clandestine monied events both here and across the pond where things were done that the staff were never allowed to talk about.
Probably it wasn’t all that different from a regular employment agency, honestly, given Elena’s experiences with them in the working year she’d spent before going to Johns Hopkins.
There were very few reasons she could come up with to account for the fact that she, Elena Mendes, was not dead, and none of them were very pleasant.
It wasn’t like she had the US ambassador on the line demanding she be released.
It was, however, hard to ignore that the infirmary was right next to the dissection and that she was shackled to the bed.
Vivisection was the order of the day, perhaps.
Or they were going to turn her into a special living buffet so the fairies could grow up big and strong.
Or the Enderby four-decadely revels were always capped by a live human sacrifice—Colonial for preference, in revenge for the Siege of Yorktown.
She met Neera’s eyes and there was no indication there about what her fate would be.
Neera herself apparently read something very different there, a reflection of her own concerns, because she shrugged and said, “I know. It’s a pain having to do everything myself, here.
But what can one do?” So very urbane. And then a knock at the door.
Neera rolled her eyes apologetically, as though Elena was going to get cross by having her valuable prisoner time wasted by visitors.
When the door was opened, she felt a leap of hope that crashed instantly into despair: Will.
Her new friend Will, who was newly the stranger, Will. Or whoever or whatever he was.
And Ross, on his heels. And a frozen moment in which she waited for him not to know her, to cast her off, to have become like Will. The English upper-classness of him drawn about him like a cloak, the edges of which she could only pluck desperately at.
Then he almost shouldered Will out of the way and was at her bedside, hugging her fiercely.
“They wouldn’t tell me,” he said raggedly. “What they’d done with you. The bastards. They wouldn’t even say.”
“What did they do? I remember… I only remember Melissa…”
“Melissa,” Ross echoed. “The bastards. The F, the F… Fucking Jeffrey. F-fucking Uncle Jeff.” He cast a venomous look over at the others.
Elena saw that a solid, heavyset woman had come in with them, and Uncle Jas as well, standing by the door like Russian heavies in a Bond film.
They contrived not to hear what he said, but Will was looking over, and Elena could almost believe that she knew him again.
“Nobody wanted that,” he said. He had his shirt sleeve rolled up to the bicep, and Neera was rattling about amongst her implements, filling a big old syringe from a modern membrane-topped phial. “Jeffrey’s been… reprimanded. Everyone’s furious with him.”
“Furious,” Ross repeated. “Oh, well, in that case.”
“She was my cousin,” Will said. “She was my friend.”
“Was she?” Elena asked. “Yours? I mean, do you still… have his memories?”