Pax Britannia: Human Nature (30 page)

After the pheasant there came a magnificent dessert of crème Brule and chocolate chestnut truffles, and after that the cheese platter, the crackers and grapes as well.

Just as he was savouring his last mouthful, a telephone rang in an adjacent room.

"If you'll excuse me, sir," Molesworth mumbled before departing the dining room to take the call on his master's behalf. He returned only a few minutes later.

The butler approached the table and coughed politely.

"Yes, Molesworth?"

"Doktor Seziermesser is ready for you now, sir."

"Excellent," Umbridge said, dabbing at the corners of his mouth with his napkin before laying it beside his empty plate. "Excellent! The time has come, Molesworth. The time has come at last!"

"Yes, sir."

Umbridge let out an almost girlish giggle. "Tonight I say farewell to this feeble flesh, this mortal coil. Tonight I become immortal. Tonight I shall ascend to godhood!"

"Yes, sir," Molesworth said impassively and wheeled the wizened old man, hunched in his bath chair, from the room.

Chapter Twenty-One

The Doktor Will See You Now

Cautiously, pistol cinched close to his waist, Nimrod peered around the cracked plaster corner of another bend in the passageway. "This is more like it," he said to himself.

The corridor ahead of him was the most modern-seeming and clearly the most regularly used of any they had come across so far. The lights were brighter here, gently humming fluorescent tubes placed at regular intervals so that nothing was left in darkness. The floor, rather than being made of compacted earth, or sand-dusted brick, was tiled. Tiles also covered the lower half of the walls, while above that they were painted a dull hospital blue.

Not that there was much blue to be seen. The place still didn't look like it had been cleaned recently, a thin veneer of grease and grime covering everything. One beneficent consequence of this was that Nimrod could clearly see the footprints of those who had passed along here most recently as smeary marks on the sticky floor tiles.

Three doors led off from the clinical corridor to the left, another to the right, and at the end of the brightly-lit passageway, a flight of steps led up to, what Nimrod imagined must be, the ground floor of the house.

Jacob waiting patiently behind Nimrod, happy for the more experienced man to lead the way into whatever danger might await them here.

Nimrod listened. He could hear unsettling sounds, a muffled sobbing from behind one of the doors, the rattling purr and rumble of an engine somewhere and, clearly audible above them all, the insidious dentist-drill whirr of an electrical cutting tool being put to use.

Nimrod took a step forward - feeling suddenly very exposed under the neon glare of the lights - feeling the adhesive resistance of whatever it was that covered the tiled floor with its sticky residue. He decided not to spend too long dwelling on what it might be; it had a greasy sheen and when he moved the smell of rancid fat rose from the floor.

He paused at the first door on his left. Over the other noises coming to him down the passageway he could hear a plaintive moaning.

He tried to handle. It wasn't locked.

He opened the door a crack. Dirty yellow light spilled out. The moaning voice became louder. Pistol at the ready, Nimrod pushed the door open fully.

The sight that met his eyes shocked him far more than anything he had so far witnessed within this den of vivisection and madness.

Master Ulysses lay huddled on the sparse straw mattress of a pallet bed. He was rocking from side to side, his eyes tight shut, hair plastered to his head with sweat, his abused body wet with it.

From the waist up he was naked - his jacket and blood-stained shirt had been laid carefully over a wooden stool. The dark blooms of bruises were visible over his ribs, his chest, his back. His face was pale, his eyes grey-ringed hollows, the bandages bound around the stump of his left arm crimson with blood.

Without pausing to check whether the coast was clear, Nimrod ran to his master's side, and fell on his knees beside the shabby cot. Encircling him with both his arms, Nimrod hugged him close, rocking backwards and forwards in time with the deliriously moaning man, tears streaming down his face.

"It's alright, sir. I'm here now. It's alright," he whispered softly, into Ulysses' ear. "It's alright. They can't hurt you anymore. I wouldn't let them hurt you anymore."

He manoeuvred his right hand and examined the stump of his master's arm by touch alone. He could feel the nub of clean-cut bone beneath the folds of skin that had been roughly-stitched together over the severed humerus.

Ulysses flinched at Nimrod's touch, his constant moaning becoming more pained, but still his eyes remained closed.

"It's alright now," Nimrod repeated, stroking the delirious man's sweat-slick hair out of his face, his own freely-flowing tears splashing onto Ulysses' eyelids. "It's going to be alright."

Hearing the scraping drag of clubfeet on the tiled floor of the cell, Nimrod looked up and for a moment appeared almost surprised to see the lumpen-headed Jacob standing there.

The lips of the freak's sagging mouth moved, as if he was about to speak, and then he seemed to think better of it. He had no words for what had happened here.

Nimrod stared at the other plaintively, with an expression of desperation, as if pleading with the malformed young man to help, to do something - anything. And then his features took on a terrifying aspect, tightening into a look of unadulterated hatred, the eyes hardening to diamond, cold and piercing, the tears blinked away in a moment.

"Someone is going to pay for this," he hissed with barely restrained fury. "Someone will pay!"

Jacob took a nervous step backwards in the face of Nimrod's rage.

Carefully laying his master back onto the sweat-drenched mattress and pulling a discarded grey blanket from the foot of the bed over his shivering form, Nimrod sprang to his feet.

"Watch him," he instructed Jacob, in a voice that brooked no debate, and strode from the room.

Pistol in hand, Nimrod proceeded along the empty passageway and stopped outside the second door. Putting his ear to the unsmoothed wooden planks, he listened.

The sound of sobbing came from beyond. Nimrod had little doubt who it was making them, although as to her current condition, that was another matter altogether.

And there was something else. Mingled with the stale disinfectant and unwashed bodies smell wafting through the corridor, another aroma seemed to ooze from under the door, the ammonia and dung smell of terrified animals.

He tried the handle. The door was unlocked, like the last.

Eschewing stealth for urgency now, he stepped boldly into the room. In was much like the last, except that a matted mess of rotten straw and faeces covered the floor here. It looked like it had been used as a holding pen for animals - before they were subjected to the incomprehensible whims of an over-eager surgeon. Another door in the far corner of the room connected the stinking cell to the room beyond, from which came the unmistakeable rattling whirr and squeal of mechanical cutting blades.

It was as he had expected; Miss Haniver sat sprawled against the wall on the other side of the dimly-lit cell, hands pulled up above her head, bound together with cord at the wrists which had then been tied again to a rusted iron ring hammered into the wall. The young woman's ankles had been bound as well, the cord cutting into the puffy flesh of her sprained right ankle in particular. And she had been gagged, but that didn't stop her sobs and couldn't hold back her tears of terror.

At first she pulled back, seeing Nimrod silhouetted there within the doorway, the brighter light of the passageway behind him, turning him into a shadow whose body language spoke of deadly intent. But then, as he entered the room, terror was replaced by a surge of relief and her sobs of resigned despair became gasping sobs of delight.

Unsheathing a pocketknife, Nimrod cut through the cords binding her wrists and her ankles. He helped her to her feet and then, putting a finger to his lips, he helped her pull the gag free.

The two of them stood there for a moment in the stinking cell, listening to the sound of the powered cutting blade, the young woman attempting to read Nimrod's intentions from his steely expression. Placing the knife into her shaking hands, he guided her back towards the door, from there into the corridor, and then to the cell where he had left his master. Before opening the second cell door, he fixed her with his sapphire stare and put a finger to his lips. Only then did he direct her through it.

Ignoring the involuntary sobbing gasp he heard, Nimrod re-entered the holding pen and approached the door in the far corner. With a dying whine, he heard the mechanical cutter come to a stop.

Pressing himself against the damp brickwork beside the door, he tested the handle. It turned with a click.

He froze. Had whoever was on the other side heard it too?

He waited, his breath shallow, his heart beating a tattoo of adrenalin-heightened anticipation against his ribcage.

He heard voices, and they were coming his way. Pistol at the ready once more, he prepared to meet whoever was approaching. Rubbing his eyes with the back of a sleeve he pulled at the handle and opened the door just a fraction, trying to get a glimpse of who, or what, awaited him on the other side.

From what Nimrod could see, it looked like the room beyond was decorated in the same way as the neon-lit corridor outside - all white tiles and blue paint - but here they were stained with the rust-red traces of dried blood.

The sour smell of disinfectant, the strong iron reek of blood, and something else - something strangely familiar, like aniseed mixed in with the rancid meat smell of the laboratory - permeated the place.

"Take him back to the cell," he heard someone say in a clipped German accent. "The anaesthetic will start to wear off soon." Nimrod didn't recognise the voice.

"Right you are, doc," he heard another man say. This voice he knew; it belonged to Rudge the gamekeeper. He had tracked him down at last.

"And if I were you, I'd make sure I wasn't in the same room as Mr Umbridge when he comes round," the German went on. "It might take him a little time to... adjust."

"Don't worry, I wasn't planning on being," Rudge replied, his voice receding.

Someone walked right past the door - grubby, once-white lab-coat, shock of untidy grey hair, long vulcanised rubber gloves, and strangely-lensed spectacles - their sudden appearance startling Nimrod.

He pressed himself flat against the wall, holding his breath. For a moment he considered simply bursting into the room and taking on the peculiar scientist. But whatever thoughts of vengeance he might now harbour in his heart - and he was not a man to let a trespass go unpunished - acting on them would have to wait. What was of prime importance now was finding a way of putting right the wrong that had been done to Ulysses Quicksilver.

He was going to have to choose his moment carefully. Someone had amputated Master Ulysses' arm with surgical precision and Nimrod planned to make that same someone undo the damage he had caused, ideally reversing the procedure, if he could. If not, then the faithful retainer's wrath would know no bounds.

There was the sound of movement, like something large - something very large - moving sluggishly around inside the room. There was a sudden crash as a tray of metal tools was sent cascading onto the tiled floor.

"Please be careful, Mr Rudge," the German's voice came again.

"I can't 'elp it, like. Its legs are 'alf asleep as well. How much of the knock-out juice did you give it?"

"Do I tell you how to do your job, Mr Rudge?"

Nimrod did not hear the gamekeeper's answer as the sluggish thing he was trying to shift bashed into a cabinet. But he heard the doctor's response.

"Then kindly do not tell me how to do mine. The rest of the subject should be anaesthetised enough that it can be guided but remains docile until Mr Umbridge can exert his will and take control of the body."

There was another crash.

"But I would not take too long about it. Anaesthesia is not an exact science in a case such as this."

"I thought you said you knew what you were doing," Rudge's complaining voice came again.

Nimrod heard the other reply with a
harrumph
of annoyance.

"Don't worry, doc. I know how to handle this thing."

The doctor sighed. "I know you do, and I do wish you would refrain from tormenting it so. I would prefer not to have to perform another skin graft."

"I thought you weren't going to tell me how to do my job."

"But you have Mr Umbridge in your tender care now. You would do well to remember that, Mr Rudge."

The gamekeeper muttered something in return that was subsumed by more grating scrapes as whatever it was that Rudge was trying to manoeuvre dragged a steel gurney after it.

"I shall just check on our other guest," Nimrod heard the surgeon say as Rudge, and whatever it was he had with him, left the operating theatre, the German's voice getting louder as he approached the door to the holding cell.