Ellie Quin - 04 - Ellie Quin in WonderLand (20 page)

Ambient light flooded in now the blind was up. Not bright enough to examine this place forensically though. He pulled out a flashlight, snapped it on and swung the harsh beam around. This main space looked like it had been used by the cell as a prayer room. There were cushions on the floor in rows and copies
of the Rebornist holy book scattered amongst them. The walls were pasted with more of the various posters and pages torn from their books. Here and there was the symbol of their last prophet, the very symbol of their faith - the spread-eagled androgynous figure.

So far, not so very different to other captured cell houses he'd witnessed. He stuck his head into one of the bedpods and panned his torch around quickly. This one he guessed was probably used by the cell's 'teacher'; presumably he was one of the corpses lying out there in the passage. A modest and sparse interior. Just a bed. A lamp. Some clothes folded tidily on a shelf and a small plastic figurine of the arms-and-legs-spread prophet on a bedside unit.

He stepped back across the prayer cushions of the main room, pushed the door in on the other bedpod and stuck his head and flashlight inside.

He gasped.

'Good God,' he whispered.

The walls of the small space were filled with hundreds of photographs of babies, toddlers, children, teenagers. It took him a few moments to realise that they were in fact all pictures of the same individual. A person growing up, a person photographed,
observed
at every stage of childhood.

Ellie Quin.

Some images seemed to have been taken close up, presumably by family or friends, but many others seemed to have been taken from a remote camera; taken from a distance and magnified. He shone his torch at an image of Ellie as a child of eleven, maybe twelve. She was at some kind of dusty rural market or fair, gazing wide-eyed at a market stall selling cheap plastic trinkets, clearly unaware that she was being observed. Beside it, another of her, this time aged four or five….playing on some sort of net hammock with another younger child and grinning up at the person taking the photo.

Deacon stepped into the bed pod and closed the door behind him. The pictures were all the way around, on the back of the door too. And there were notebooks and data tablets with her name handwritten on the spines. Copious volumes of information about the girl, observations about her behaviour from the cradle right up until, he guessed, very recently.

They've been watching her for twenty years!

He picked up a data tablet, switched it on and looked at a screen full of writing. Garbled thoughts spilled hastily onto a page. A very recent entry.

…
She is everything I expected and hoped. Fiercely intelligent. So preceptive. And yet she is also so very sheltered and naive. I do worry for her. I'm worried she's still not quite ready to fulfil the role the Rebornists have for her. Despite my concerns, these others have their faith that God will keep Ellie, the Last Prophet, completely safe from harm. I envy their blind faith and certainty in a
God who actually gives a damn…what they don't understand, as I do, is she is just a girl. There is no God looking after her…
.

CHAPTER 28

'Hey, Hufty, so would you believe it, I'm going to be…a General! Yay! In command of my very own army of evil teddy bear soldiers! (That's not something a person gets to say very often, right?)

'I saw Jez last night and asked her what army she's come up with, but she just winked at me and said she's designed something pretty wicked. Knowing her she's come up with an army of crazy beanies or something equally stupid
.

'So, apparently, there's a bit of a delay, it's going to be several more days before we get to play our big war game. Jez's army needs to use some special growth chambers or something and she said she wanted to make some final tweaks. I hope she's not cheating. Shelby will throw a complete loopie if he finds out she and Gray are cheating. He's taking this so-o-o seriously!

'By the way, Shelby and Gray have selected the world 'template' and are now organising how its going to be built…sorry, I believe the correct term is 'fabricated'
.

Ellie paused her voice dairy and looked out across the sun-drenched piazza at the pair of jimps tending the gardens. At candybliss bulbs rustling and swaying in the light artificial breeze. A vision of perfection. A vision of Heaven even; albeit a man-made one.

'Fabricated,' she whispered.

She wondered if it was possible to stay in one place all of your natural life and not lose your mind. She'd met those children at the Oxxon refinery, they were never going to see anything more than that tired old creaking structure. Those girls had seemed okay, hadn't they?

But here? In this incredible do-it-yourself paradise?

Although it
was
beautiful here; although a person could build whatever heavenly environment they could imagine and populate it with creatures and even people (well,
caricatures
of people) they could hold an intelligent conversation with, none of it was for real.

It was all fabricated.

She wondered if knowing that simple fact made a difference eventually. Sent you insane. Not for the first time she wondered about Shelby and Gray. Both of them had been friendly and welcoming enough, but how long had they been here? Living in absolute solitude, away from each other in their own artificial bubbles, both playing God?

Gray worried her just a little; that world of his that she'd glimpsed…?

He's not right in the head. Surely
.

And Shelby? He didn't worry her as such. He was just…peculiar. But…?

But…here she and Jez were. Two girls marooned with two very strange men in a very strange place. More than that…one little thing kept puzzling her, worrying her. Kept whispering to her.

What happened to the others? What
really
happened? Something about the way Shelby kept brushing away the subject aside was troubling her.

Absently she un-paused her diary.

'
Since the others all seem to have something to be getting on with except me. Maybe I'll go exploring…'

*

The elevator door opened with a soft purr and Ellie found herself looking out onto the gloomy mezzanine deck. Why she'd chosen this one, she wasn't entirely sure. Perhaps because since they'd first arrived weeks ago, she'd not been back to this particular deck. Yes, she'd visited the fabrication deck below several times and Shelby had given her a brief tour of the power reactor down on the bottom deck. But, she'd noticed every time the elevator had passed this deck, his face had given an little involuntary tick. She'd asked him why once…he'd replied, flippantly, that it was haunted.

Obviously that was his idea of a joke. But he hadn't elaborated on that. Just a throwaway remark, designed to hopefully to throw her off the scent?

So that was why she was here. Curiosity.

She stepped out into the corridor, her feet clanking noisily on the unwelcoming metal grid floor. She looked around at the dark, grimy bulkhead walls, lined with power conduits and drooping loops of tag-tied cables.

‘Haunted, huh?' Her voice echoed softly up and down the deck. To her right, was the way to the airlock and the shuttle hanger. Frasier had led her and Jez down this way to this elevator.

The other way then
.

She took a few uncertain steps along the passage, already wondering whether this was a particularly good idea.

Seriously
.
Why am I doing this?

Why? Because, despite the hospitality and welcome they'd been offered…she had this unshakable feeling that she and Jez were being misled. Lied to somehow.

It was a whole load of little things, each on their own an inconsequential nothing, but added together…enough to give her this uneasy feeling. The very last thing she'd picked up on was Shelby's contradictory story about how the others had died. First time of telling it, it had been that a sky panel had failed,
there had been a decompression and they'd been sucked out into the black. The second time, he'd said it was not a particularly pleasant or
quick way
to die.

Decompression and ejection into space? Thirty seconds? A minute at the most? Not quick?

Contradictory stories. That was what she was getting. Only one reason for that.

He's lying about what happened
.

She made her way slowly down the passageway not entirely sure what she was looking for, or why the mezzanine deck was the place to be looking for it.

She passed several bulkhead doors with 'storage' stencilled on them. Looking inside one of them she saw endless pallets of boxes. She opened up one marked 'guesthouse: soft furnishings'. And found exactly that. Pillows, sheets, cushions. The homely touches that had yet to be - and never would be - taken up and installed in the guest villas. She looked in several other boxes and discovered supplies of exclusive out-of-system luxuries; cosmetics and toiletries intended for guests that would never arrive. Maybe Shelby's contradictory account was just him simplifying a rather more complicated and technical explanation that he figured, her being a mere girl, she probably wouldn't have a hope of understanding? Sneezing on dust and starting to feel just a little bit paranoid, she was at the point of deciding this was probably a futile exercise and most likely driven more by boredom and an overactive imagination than any real need to be suspicious, when she found herself facing an unmarked bulkhead door.

Unmarked
. Unlike any of the others so far.

She grasped the latch bar and tried the door. Like the others, it was unlocked and wheezed open on pneumatic hinges. She poked her head inside. Soft, crimson coloured safety lights blinked on. Unlike the other storage compartments it was mostly empty.

Empty, except for a solitary storage crate right in the middle of the floor. She could see that a dark towel, or cape, or something, was draped over the top of it. She stepped over the lip of the bulkhead door and crossed the floor towards it.

Closer now, she could see that it looked like a bathrobe. There were a number of things placed on the quilted material. Placed carefully,
reverentially
, almost like exhibits of expensive jewellery, precious found artefacts. But they were just commonplace things; a hair brush, an engraved wristband, a pair of faux antique spectacles, an antique fountain pen. On one corner of the spread-out robe, she spotted a jumble of what appeared to be ID tags. She picked one of them up.

'Jonathan E. Kemble.' She picked up another. 'Dr. Diana J. Sembala.'

The caretaker crew?

Ellie looked at the other carefully placed items and realised that each of them was a personal possession that had once belonged to a member of the team. A keepsake. A memento.

A
totem
.

She felt her scalp prickling. That uneasy nagging, whispering feeling she'd been about to completely dismiss a minute ago had returned, and now it was screaming at her. She knew what this was. Thanks to Jez she'd seen enough grisly, slasher, serial-killer, horro-drams to figure out what she was looking at.

'Oh, crud,' she gasped softly.

This is some psycho's fregging murder shrine
.

TO BE CONTINUED IN…

Episode 5: Ellie Quin At The Gateway