Dispossession (36 page)

There was the light, and there was Luke outlined against it,
a silhouette of dark but flaming at the edges; and now, at the door, it seemed
that he turned to find me and found me gone.

But took only a moment to see or sense me, there in the gate’s
twisted shadow. His arm beckoned, and I went to him. Slowly now, not hurrying
in any sense at all, and cravenly afraid.

Again he didn’t speak, he only led me inside through high
glass doors that stood open but seemed bent out of true, so that they never
would close properly again even if you had the strength to drag them against
broken hinges and force them into their distorted steel frames. The kids had
spoken of sledgehammers to smash the doors, but Luke had found a better way.

I wondered why there weren’t alarms shrieking against the
silence of the campus at night, why the place wasn’t lit in strobing blue and
swarming with police. But all the lights flickered above Luke as he passed, one
of the neon tubes imploded in a shower of glass that he seemed not to notice at
all, and I remembered how even the most unsubtle machinery in my car had been
affected by his presence. What chance the sophistication of a contemporary
alarm, against a spirit or a field or an atmosphere so discordant it could
disturb the engineering in a Volvo?

But I still wanted to know why no one had noticed the
lights. Didn’t they have security at the university? In the med school
particularly, at a time when animal-rights activists were raiding and bombing
like proper little terrorists?

There was blood in here also, tracks on the tiled floor and
a little smeared across the glass of the doors.

Not all the tracks looked human. There were bare feet marked
out, Luke’s for sure, and prints of many shoes leaving; but there were
paw-prints also, and a couple of unstraight lines as if some bloodied thing had
been dragged on a string to leave a snake’s path behind it.

Could’ve been snakes, of course, I thought. Bleeding snakes.

Did they keep snakes in medical labs? I didn’t know, nor why
they would have been bleeding.

Nor why anything had bled that night, only that there was
too much, way too much blood. The foyer stank of it, and that was only the
foyer. There was nothing there that bled.

Correction. Something scrabbled in a corner as I walked
behind Luke; my whole body jerked, and I was cold again despite the sweat on me
as my head twisted round to see.

It was a rabbit, only a rabbit. White once, a pink-eyed
cutie of a little lab rabbit; not white now. Not cute. Smeared with blood and
filth it was, and its hind legs didn’t work. It must have clawed itself into
the corner there on its front paws only, and its blood-soaked belly had left
another of those drag-trails along the wall.

And now it stared, it glared at us, pink eyes shot red; and
it yickered with long yellow teeth, and it screamed high and gasping, and it
looked and acted entirely mad.

Must have been the pain, I thought, driving it loco. Someone
said once, there’s nothing so frightening as a mad sheep; but believe me, mad
rabbit runs it pretty close. Anything shy and docile, I guess, turns scary when
it turns.

I was scared, at any rate. I wasn’t going anywhere near the
thing, even to put it out of its lunacy.

Luke neither, he fixed his eyes forward and marched along
the corridor, and me I was like a dog in his wake, tail between my legs and
whining softly in the back of my throat. I’d have been dragging hard at the
leash, if he’d had one.

He did have one, only that it wasn’t material. Every step I
took into that building, I didn’t want to go one more; every step I took I
followed with another, only because he was there ahead of me. And he’d come for
me, he needed me although he wouldn’t say it; and that was a first, and I owed
him.

But God, I paid that night. I followed him, I dogged his
heels like a good boy; and he led me along the corridor, along the tracks of
blood to where more doors stood open and stairs and blood ran down into light.

A basement, of course a basement. Where else would a torture
chamber be, where else keep your horror?

Down we went, two wide white tiled flights down; and not
only blood on the stairs, there were animals here too. Dead animals, or as dead
as makes no difference. Rabbits and rats and a cat I saw, and looked away from;
and wondered what the hell more there was to see, what kind of hell it was that
Luke had led me to. I could hear it, or something of it, unhuman screams and
moaning, but the sounds shaped no pictures in my mind.

I was quickly answered, though, as we came to the foot of
the second flight. Laboratories and store-rooms made this hell, and a long room
like a corridor lined with cages. Pain and fear there must always have been
down here, blood and death also, that was what it had been made for; but
nothing on this scale, never before so much blood all at once, so terribly much
death.

Most of the cages stood open and empty, and most of their
former occupants lay dead on the floor there, or else in the labs or the
doorways. Some kind of killing frenzy must have taken them; I saw a rabbit with
its guts scratched out, its teeth still embedded in the throat of the cat that
had gutted it. I saw rats in tangles, four or five knotted together in a single
murderous tie, impossible to say which had killed which. There were mice and
guinea-pigs also, all the pets of my childhood, all dreadfully dead and all by
each other’s teeth and claws.

Luke
, I thought
desperately,
what have you done here, and why in
God’s name have you brought me here to see it?

He beckoned me from a doorway, and I went to him, and then I
thought I knew; because this was a seminar-room or some such, a table and many
chairs, and there were no dead animals in here.

A hell of a mess and two dead men, but no animals.

Lots of blood.

The dead men were in uniform; or half out of it rather, half
stripped, their clothes as ripped and shredded as their bodies. For a moment I
thought they’d been policemen; then I saw a shoulder-flash unstained, and
thought not. Security guards looked more likely. Ex-policemen, perhaps, or
ex-army: heavy men, the pair of them, or had been. Discipline gone to
self-indulgence, muscle gone to flab.

Everything gone now, gone to teeth and claws and tearing,
and for a moment I thought the rabbits and the rats had killed them too.

Stupid
, I thought. And
not in accord with what I saw, what the room said.

The room, it seemed, was of the opinion that they had killed
each other.

The table was upturned, the chairs were scattered and
tipped. The two men lay in the centre of the room, in the arena created by the
havoc round the edges, and they still had their hands on each other. I didn’t
go close, to see if their fingernails had been torn by all that tearing, if
their teeth were stained with biting. Not my job, not my problem.

“Luke,” I said, “how,” I said, “why did they ever...?”

“They went mad,” he said. “Like the animals.” His voice was
calm, neutral, unattached:
not my problem
,
it seemed to be saying. And if that was so, if that described his attitude,
then again the question came, why had he brought me here? Not to see it, that
for sure, and for sure not to report it; nor I presumed to clean up, to cover
up, to make it look like nothing had happened here...

“Where are the kids?” I asked dully.

“Gone.”

Well, no blame to them for that; they’d planned a raid, not
a nightmare. Not a visit to hell. And of course they hadn’t tried to clean up,
any more than I would. I only hoped they hadn’t left fingerprints behind them.
Later, though, I wondered a little; when he said ‘They went mad’, did Luke
actually mean the security guards? Or did he mean the kids? Maybe the kids it
was had gone mad, maybe they’d done the ripping and chewing when the guards
disturbed them. Maybe they had cleaned up a little, at least to the point of
making a half-hearted attempt at misdirection.

In that case, I really did hope they hadn’t left
fingerprints behind them. But all that came later. For now I stood with my eyes
fixed on those bodies, first I’d ever seen and worse than anything I’d ever
imagined seeing; and into the silence I dropped the only question left, the one
that had been stirring all this time.

“Luke, why did you want me here?”

“You have to help them.”

“They’re past my help, mate. I’m sorry, but...” I still wasn’t
going any closer, but sometimes you don’t need to feel for a pulse or
auscultate for a heartbeat. Sometimes even a rookie can tell. Particularly when
a head has been twisted entirely the wrong way on a neck or when a chest has
been opened manually, when that rookie can look at a mess of wet red organs and
see
that the heart’s not beating.

“The animals,” Luke said; and now there was some emotion in
his voice, now he sounded heart-wracked, with the weight of a world’s grief on
his shoulders. “I can’t help them, and someone must.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Look,” he said, and walked just a little way into the room
full of cages, where he’d let me go alone before.

The sounds in there doubled and trebled instantly, manic
screaming and shrieks, and some were pain and some were not. I saw a rabbit in
a still-closed cage roll on its back and bite at its own belly; I heard thumps
and rattles, the sounds of bodies throwing themselves about, but I was only
watching that one rabbit, watching its fur stain darkly as it bit.

“You see?” Luke said. “It’s the madness. They are mad of
me.”

Sweet way to put it, but he was right. Just his shadow in
the doorway was enough.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Free them. Care for them.”

“We should phone the police, Luke, there are dead
men
through there.”

“You can do nothing for them,” and again his voice spoke of
his disinterest, his utter lack of concern. “And the police would cage again
here, those that they did not kill. You must help the animals.”

“Oh, for the love of God, Luke...”

He flinched at that, and I wanted him to. Laboratory
animals, rats and rabbits set against men and seen as superior, more worthy,
certainly more deserving of his time and mine. I had no sympathy; but it was
only Luke, it was all Luke and as before I couldn’t say no.

I did what I could, with fingers that trembled as they
unlatched cages and separated the dead from the living. If anyone came, if
anyone caught us down here—caught me, at least; they wouldn’t catch Luke unless
he were willing, no, determined to be caught—with the blood and stink on my
hands and the knowledge that I had, I’d be lucky to get away without a murder
charge.

But I set free every animal that could still run, and sent
Luke to stand in an empty store-room out of the way, to give them a swift run
up the stairs to freedom if they chose to take it. With him not in line of
sight, I was free also to despatch a few of the more cruelly injured, snapping
necks with that tricky little twist of the hands that you learn growing up in
the country.

Thinking myself all done, I called him out again and said,
“Let’s get the fuck away from here, can we?”

“There are more,” he said. “At the far end, and through the
door.”

“Well, the door’s locked.” I’d tried it, to be sure. “Nothing
I can do about that.” And he couldn’t go down to open that locked door for me,
because there were still a dozen small animals between it and us, free but
clinging to their cages none the less, and he would kill them if he tried to
walk that way.

For answer he jerked a fire extinguisher off the wall,
balanced it for a moment in his hand, and then threw.

Old-fashioned it was to look at, for all that this was such
a modern lab: big and red and heavy, seriously heavy. I could barely have
lifted it one-handed, never have balanced it on my palm, never in a million
years of trying have thrown it much further than its own length away from me.

Luke threw it, what, twenty-five metres? Thirty?

With one easy motion of his arm he threw it, and it burned
through the air as though it too had a memory of wings long lost. All down that
corridor of cages it flew, and it struck the door neatly beside the lock and
smashed it open.

“Let them out,” Luke said quietly. “Please?”

And for that “please” I went, I ran all those metres down to
the broken door and through, and found a pen littered with shredded paper, and
two mad sheep inside it.

God knows what had been done to them, those sheep. Each had
a shaved area on the neck, and a black box on a collar, and wires going from
the box into the skin. Whether it was that which had made them mad, or the
fever that Luke brought, I couldn’t say then and still can’t; but they glared
at me red-eyed, and they showed their teeth and wanted at me, no doubting that.

Given the choice, given any kind of choice I’d have left
them safely penned. Choice I didn’t have, though. I gestured to Luke,
get the hell back out of the way, these things are mean
and I want them safely past you, not turning and coming back
, and as
soon as he was out of sight I stood the fire extinguisher on end and unlatched
the gate of the pen. I swung it wide open, to stand as a barrier between the
sheep and me, and then I punched the button on top of the extinguisher. A jet
of water spurted out of the hose; I grabbed it and aimed it through the mesh,
straight into the face of the first sheep as it lunged at me, massive teeth
snarling the wire.

It choked and turned aside, saw the empty corridor and
charged off. I hoisted the extinguisher under my arm and directed the jet at
the other sheep, herding it out of the pen and after its companion. No way to
turn the flow of water off; I just dropped the extinguisher, slammed the gate
and got out of there. With any luck sheep could climb stairs, even mad sheep
could find their way out, to what I didn’t know and didn’t care.