Ash (42 page)

‘Surely there must be a way of controlling the Inner Court’s influence?’ Kate was aghast.

‘Well, one of their plans hasn’t worked out –
so far
. Tony Blair hasn’t become President of the European Commission. However, he’s still relatively young, so who knows?’

‘Even with his track record: three wars in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan? Surely, despite the success in Bosnia, too many people feel he was dishonest in sending our troops into Iraq and Afghanistan.’

‘Sometimes these things are forgotten. As I said, he’s a comparatively young man still. But you’ll notice both Blair and Brown were ignored when they left office – virtually all past prime ministers have been awarded the Order of the Garter. Normally it goes with, but after, the job. And Blair and Brown weren’t even invited to Prince William and Catherine’s huge wedding at Westminster Abbey, while dignitaries from around the world attended.’

Finally, Gloria raised her arm to catch the attention of a passing taxi. Before it pulled up, she turned to her friend. ‘I’m trusting you with my career, here, Kate. If what I’ve told you ever gets out . . .’

‘I promise. There’s no fear of that.’

Gloria hugged her old friend, then turned to the cab which had pulled up beside them. As she settled into the back seat, she called, ‘Thanks for the wonderful dinner – we must do it more often. But next time, my choice and my treat.’ With that, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Gloria Standwell pulled the door shut and the taxi merged into the flow of traffic, leaving Kate with much to think about.

She was extremely worried for David Ash, and she damned herself for ever having persuaded him to go to bloody Comraich Castle.

‘David! David, turn the light away from him!’

Delphine rushed past Ash, knocking him sideways roughly as she ran through the doorway and fell to her knees, her arm sweeping over the hooded creature’s back as if to protect it.

Ash thought he heard a faint whimper as the hunched form on the floor huddled itself into the psychologist’s embrace.

‘Turn on one of the lamps – the light’s softer.’ Delphine’s voice was calmer now, but firm, as she called back to the shocked investigator.

Numbly, Ash shone the torch around the semi-circular room and found the nearest lamp set on a small cabinet less than two feet from him. He quickly reached beneath the shade and switched on the lamp; the room was instantly bathed in a soft light. He looked towards the two figures crouched beside the small, comfortable-looking bed. Delphine’s head was close to the cloaked figure’s and she was making soft crooning noises to as she cuddled it.

‘I’m sorry, Delphine . . .’ Ash began to say as he snapped off the torch, but she silenced him with a brief look back over her shoulder.

‘It’s all right, David,’ she said, her voice still low, ‘you weren’t to know. Perhaps I should have explained, but there’s been no time today.’

‘Is . . .’ he took a chance and guessed, ‘is
he
all right? I didn’t mean to . . .’

‘It isn’t your fault. But you frightened him more than he frightened you.’ She gently helped the figure sit on the edge of the bed.

She stroked his back gently. ‘It’s all right, Lewis. This is David, a friend of mine. He means you no harm.’

For a second, the bent figure looked past Delphine at Ash, who caught just a glimpse of one staring eye of the palest blue he’d ever seen. Even though pallid, there was a youthful clearness about it that told the investigator his first impression of old age had been wrong. The figure had seemed almost spindly as he’d chased after it. Apart from brightness, the eye was filled with the electricity of fright.

Delphine tenderly pulled back the hood so that Ash could see more of the trembling but docile young man. Now he observed the whole head and had to suppress the nausea that rose in his throat.

It was like looking at an X-ray, for the tight skin was translucent, almost indistinguishable from the skull. It was as shocking as it was pitiful, and the investigator had to force himself not to look away. Delphine sat on the bed next to the strange creature, who shuddered every few seconds, her arm around his shoulders, the other reaching across his chest to the top of his elbow so that he was embraced like a child.

‘What – ’ Ash stopped himself. ‘Who is he?’ he asked Delphine.

The psychologist looked up at him, her expression showing no pity, just a firm pragmatism. ‘His name is Lewis. He was here when I first arrived at Comraich. Apparently he’d been taken into the castle’s medical unit as a baby. He nearly died, but the staff here managed to save him. Years later he was treated as a kind of guinea pig. You can see that his skin is more or less transparent. Imagine being able to see details of internal organs and blood vessels, or actually watch the effects of drugs and chemicals in a live patient. Mercifully, Dr Pritchard put a stop to such experiments when he came here. It took a while for Lewis to trust me – he’d received little sympathy from anybody else – but now there’s a close affinity between us.’

‘Does he . . . does he have a family; a surname?’

‘Not that I’m aware of. I’ve know him for three years. Most people just call him “The Boy”.’

She pulled Lewis’s head down onto her shoulder and he leaned willingly. Her free hand gently stroked his hairless scalp.

‘He’s one of your patients?’ asked Ash.

‘Lewis is more than that to me. We’re good friends. In fact, I’m one of the few people he comes into contact with.’

‘I saw you earlier from my window, heading towards the gardens.’

‘It’s Lewis’s favourite time of day. The sunlight’s not too strong and there are few people about.’

‘Does he still require medical treatment?’

She managed to shake her head, although her charge clung tight. ‘Just a moisturizer, but he applies that himself. The doctors examine him once a year or so, but he’s frightened of them and creates a fuss.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Ash.

‘As you might imagine, with his condition, Lewis is extremely shy. And bewildered by it all.’

‘What
is
his condition? Have they never discovered the cause?’

Delphine was quiet for a moment, then seemed to make up her mind.

‘Lewis,’ she said softly to the man in her arms, ‘I want you to be brave for a moment. David is a friend of mine and he wants to be friends with you also. I know I’m asking a lot, but you must trust me. You know I’d never let anyone harm you?’

The strange man-boy – his age was impossible to guess – pulled his head away from his comforter’s shoulder to stare into her face. Uncertainty was in his eyes (it came as a relief to Ash that the eye he’d seen did indeed have a partner, even if their tissue-thin lids seemed to render them unnaturally large) and Delphine smiled and kissed him on the forehead.

‘It’s all right, Lewis, I promise you. Now let’s both stand, then I want you to slip off your robe.’

Delphine turned to Ash and he saw anguish in her expression, the distress a mother might feel when her child was suffering.

‘His cloak is made of the softest cashmere, because any other material would be far too rough on his skin. At night, he wears a special silk gown.’

‘Really,’ said Ash, ‘there’s no need for him to—’ but the youth was undoing the knot of the belt that held his cloak together, though he kept his eyes on the psychologist, as if seeking reassurance.

Delphine smiled encouragingly and helped him slide the robe off his narrow, limp shoulders. Then, naked but for silky white shorts, Lewis faced Ash.

Ash gaped, speechless, at what he could only think of as the apparition before him, who stared back at him nervously. The figure’s limbs continued to tremble, but not from the cold, for the room was very warm. The investigator took in the wiry muscle behind the clear bones of the ribs and chest, the chambers of the heart pulsing, pumping life’s blood quickly through the main arteries into the lungs, which showed as gossamer-like sacs. Taking up oxygen from the lungs, the blood was being siphoned into the left side of the heart, where the muscular walls were even thicker, darker. The process of observation was both fascinating and disturbing, perhaps something no layman could appreciate – the workings of the human body that no one should ever see.

‘It’s a shock, isn’t it?’ said Delphine. ‘When I started at Comraich, I was briefed on some of Lewis’s background and on his condition. I think it was a way of helping me bond with him and to become a kind of confidante and companion to him. I was told he’d been at Comraich for over twenty years. He was born prematurely at eighteen weeks, weighing less than two pounds.’

‘Eighteen weeks? And lived? Is that possible?’ Ash asked distractedly, for he was finding it difficult to take his eyes from the rarity before him.

‘Of course he was expected to die – at that stage the chance of survival is no more than twenty-five per cent, even today. That he managed to pull through is little short of miraculous, considering his skin’s abnormality. I’m told the best gynaecologist and obstetrician in the world were at the birth. Would you believe he measured just six inches?’

Ash was even more amazed. Whoever Lewis was, his parents must be either very rich or very important – probably both – to afford such care and then to maintain him at Comraich for nearly thirty years.

Ash couldn’t help but continue to stare. He’d never come across anything like this before. The grey but solid bone structure, the strings of tendons and muscle like stretched rubber, the very living organs – God, the lengths and lengths of intestines. Again, he felt nausea rising inside him but he quickly controlled it.

Ash returned his gaze to the boy-man’s transparent head. While the brain itself was partially hidden behind the bone of the cranium, Ash could see the nerves that sent impulses to different sectors of the brain, the ear canals, the epiglottis at the back of the throat, and the vocal cords inside the larynx, the muscles that moved his eyeballs. Then the fat muscle of the tongue itself, revealed whenever the jaw was opened. All this held within the grotesque, grinning
danse macabre
of the cruelly exposed skull.

For a moment, Ash felt he might faint, but he steadied himself as Delphine carried on talking.

‘Even worse for Lewis, he has an epileptic condition known as Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, though we can control the seizures with medication, and he’s also a haemophiliac, which is so dangerous because the merest cut to his body means it’s almost impossible to stop the bleeding.’

Delphine had paused, hoping Ash was managing to compose himself.

‘There are certain breeds of amphibians that have translucent skin like Lewis,’ she explained. ‘The olm, for instance, a blind South African salamander. Japanese scientists have created transparent frogs for medical study, allowing them to see details of internal organs and blood vessels. Organs of the frog can be studied throughout its lifetime and for instance, they’re able to examine how certain chemicals influence bones. And of course, in the depths of the oceans are countless see-through species like jellyfish, sea-worms, sea snails, and octopuses which have evolved transparency as a form of camouflage. In the oceans’ very deepest regions are species so sheer they’re practically invisible, which is their way of coping with the immense pressure around them that would crush an unprotected human being or normal fish.’

The investigator’s next question surprised her with its simplicity. ‘How does he sleep? His eyelids seem like thin tissue. Does it make any difference if he closes them?’

‘Not really,’ Delphine answered. ‘He just sleeps in a darkened room. Bright light is anyway uncomfortable for him; you’ll notice all the lamps in this room are of a low wattage. Even when I take him for a walk in the evening he wears sunglasses. Naturally, because of his ultra-sensitive skin he avoids bright sunlight.’

‘Do other guests know of him? How do they react?’

‘They rarely see him, but after so many years, most have become used to him.’

Sympathy for the young man only just trumping his revulsion, Ash glanced around the room. He noted its spare plushness, the space hardly large enough to take much furniture, but what was there conveyed a sort of minimalist opulence – the bed with its silk sheets, the wall cabinets, loaded bookshelves, a wardrobe (though Ash couldn’t imagine it contained much), a small, delicately carved table and lush chairs, as well as a beautifully cushioned armchair with curved arms and legs. There was an expensive-looking radio, but no television. And no mirrors.

Delphine was still speaking. ‘Lewis’s skin is missing two natural layers. The top layer, the epidermis, comprises a protective shield of dead skin cells right at the surface, and the layers below continually produce new cells and push them up to that surface. As the new cells force their way up, they continue a cycle whereby old cells are shed and renewed every fourteen to twenty-eight days. The epidermis loses somewhere in the region of thirty thousand skin cells every full day . . .’

It dawned on Ash that Delphine was drawing out her explanation so that he could adjust to the sight before him. He was still finding it difficult, but her method was slowly beginning to work. He was starting to see Lewis less as a freak, more as a dreadfully unfortunate man.

‘Underneath these layers should be two others: the dermis, which is mostly made up of protein fibres known as collagen and which gives the skin its firmness, and beneath this is the subcutaneous layer made up of muscle and fat that protects the body from the harsh outside world. In Lewis, the last two are almost entirely absent, and no one here has ever discovered why.’

‘But there must be other places Lewis could be sent to; specialists who could find out the reason, and maybe even offer a cure?’ Ash protested.

Delphine almost smiled. Her efforts to humanize her patient to Ash were working: for the first time, David had used Lewis’s name.

‘Believe me,’ she replied softly, ‘Comraich has the means to bring in the finest medical scientists from anywhere, and Dr Pritchard has combed the world for someone who might be able to cure Lewis, but with no success.’