Strangers in the Night (28 page)

They were few and far between.

Transport—at present—was impossible.

There was just no way to span the great distances.

They relied on satellite communication.

Matching up data; comparing information.

Drawing conclusions.

But, as far as Mitts could tell from his time at the Facility, there were—
really
—no definite conclusions to draw.

Finally, when he plucked up the courage, he asked after his family.

If the Facility had known about Doctor Heinmein.

Carla had to clear permission to share such details. She got the go-ahead from her superior.

She informed Mitts that his family had been delivered to the Compound under the orders of the Facility.

Theirs, though, had been a different programme.

One which had been set for a ten-year observation period.

They never got past Year Seven.

Mitts had made sure of that.

Carla even showed Mitts graphs.

Charts drawn up as a result of the studies.

From the
data
Heinmein had fed back to the Facility.

“When you grew ill,” Carla told him, one day, in one of the top-floor laboratories, “we had Heinmein give you a dose of serum—
untested
. It was taken from the Strangers. We’ve found, in our experience, that their blood has certain
healing
properties in humans.”

“Heinmein told me I would die in a week.”

Carla nodded. “That happened in all the other cases.” She smiled gently. “But the batch administered to you seemed to get the balance just right.”

Mitts kept his thoughts to himself.

About how he had snuck through the air vents.

Come into contact with one of the Strangers.

How he believed
that
had been the factor which’d led to his healing.

In fact, he
hoped
that would be the case.

He didn’t want to feel thankful to the Facility for anything.

He didn’t want to feel thankful to
Heinmein
for anything.

Often, when Mitts glanced at Carla, he observed a faraway look in her eyes. He believed it to be a signal to whoever was watching them.

That they should be ready.

On standby.

Weapon drawn.

He also asked Carla why the Facility hadn’t stepped in to save his parents.

Carla looked away then.

As if ashamed.

She mumbled something about Heinmein having lost his mind.

An ‘unanticipated’ variable.

Mitts had held himself back.

But only just.

Because he knew the truth.

Even if Carla wouldn’t spoon feed him that particular morsel.

In the Facility, someone—
somewhere
—had surely taken the executive decision that it would make an interesting ‘experiment’ to observe Mitts’s attempts to integrate with the Village.

They had known beforehand—
somehow
—that Mitts possessed the same ‘Gift’ as Luca.

Carla claimed this phenomenon was present in one in a thousand.

Or so said their data.

They had wanted to observe how those who possessed the Gift reacted in group situations.

How they functioned with a community surrounding them.

At the end of their conversations, he asked Carla if what Samantha had told him had been a lie.

If it had indeed been Dag who had placed the explosives.

But Carla only pressed her lips together. Shook her head. “No, he really
did
hate us—all of
you
. He wanted to burn down everything. Finish it off.”

Mitts shook his head, almost unable to absorb the idea.

But, he supposed, it might not be the truth.

Why should they tell him the truth when he would take a lie just as easily?

Mitts pressed his back up against the stone seat in the garden.

He could hear the
hum
of an engine closing on him.

The
crunch
of gravel passing beneath the heavy weight of approaching tyres.

He bent his head back. Stared long and hard at the soaring blue sky.

The neat, bright blur which was the sun.

Some days he thought about running away.

Some days he thought about
finishing
it all.

He looked to the truck as it pulled up.

Its tyres locked.

They slid along the loose gravel.

A series of escorts, all dressed in navy-blue uniforms, stepped out.

An elderly man emerged between them.

He was stick thin.

Dressed in a pin-striped suit.

He wore a cravat with a silver pin.

One of the escorts helped support his weight.

The man looked frail.
So
frail.

It was hard to believe this was him.

The man who would peer into his mind.

* * *

Mitts lay down on the examination table.

He heard the paper sheet beneath him crumple.

The air smelled strongly of disinfectant.

Mitts hadn’t had a sense of this level of
clinical
cleanliness since he had been a young boy.

He’d fallen over. Scraped his knee . . . only it wasn’t a normal scrape.

The blood had just kept on flowing.

He’d required stitches.

His parents had taken him down to the local doctor’s surgery.

A GP had swabbed his cut.

That swab smelled like the air here.

There was something about
disinfectant
which made the hairs stand up at the back of his neck.

A substance specifically existing to neutralise something invisible to the naked eye.

Something which might not even be there.

Mitts glanced about.

His feet stuck up at the end of the table.

The floor beneath him was all laminate tiling.

It reminded him of the flooring back at the Compound.

He looked to the elderly man. The scientist who’d arrived from the other end of the country . . . what had
been
the country.

A
special
visitor.

The elderly man had a poor bedside manner.

With the help of a deferent escort, he shrugged a lab coat on over his shoulders.

Next, he tapped away at a touchscreen.

The gateway to a large bank of hard discs; computers.

Whatever
it was.

The escort remained standing in the doorway.

Mitts tried to get a look at the touchscreen display. He could make nothing of the constantly moving charts. The numbers which flickered up and down the screen.

The elderly man jabbered in a low, gnarled-up voice to an assistant—a much younger man who had arrived with him.

The assistant, also in a lab coat, had frosty blond hair and a beer gut.

He worked quickly, smiling pleasantly at Mitts as he adjusted the wires and suckers arranged about his forehead and scalp.

Mitts didn’t feel like a patient.

He felt more like an audience member.

A
passenger
.

Soon enough, the equipment was in place.

The elderly man stood over the bank of computers. His fingers flipped over the touchscreen.

Precision which belay his otherwise frail demeanour.

He occasionally muttered to his assistant, but, mostly, he muttered to himself.

Mitts sensed the growing unease in the room as he observed the scientists at work.

As he lay there, on the examination table, he was dimly aware of another presence.

Of
something else
.

He attempted to look around.

“Stay still, please,” the elderly scientist scolded.

Mitts obeyed.

The elderly scientist made some minor adjustment to the suckers on his scalp.

“Doctor Smith?” the blond assistant said.

The elderly scientist—‘Doctor Smith’, apparently—crossed the room.

Mitts took the opportunity to get a better look at his surroundings.

The room was tight.

Clearly kept off to some nook or cranny of the Facility.

Whatever went on in this room, they didn’t want anybody stumbling upon it.

Then again, most of what went on about the Facility, wasn’t supposed to be stumbled upon.

He closed his eyes.

What he could hear—what he could
feel
—was a sort of low-level crackling.

Almost like static inside his own head.

It was like a night when he had woken from a nightmare.

It had been thundering outside.

He had shifted out of bed. Gone downstairs.

He had opened the back door. Stood in the rain for several minutes.

He could still recall the soaking sensation of the rain up against his skin.

Plastering his boxer shorts.

Smearing his hair to his forehead.

But it had been that
chatter
in the air which’d drawn his attention.

A radio tuned between stations.

A TV spewing white noise.

Something there . . . and yet
not
.

“Mr Thornestone?”

Mitts glanced up.

Until now, nobody involved with the Facility had admitted to knowing his surname.

He hadn’t heard it in a long time.

Not since he had been back in school.

Doctor Smith met his eye. He gave him a slender smile.

Did Doctor Smith have one of those earpieces snaking up his neck?

Was there someone in a darkened room informing him exactly what Mitts was thinking?

“Would you like to know,” Doctor Smith said, in his reedy, seemingly
weakening
voice, “how exactly it is that we can read your thoughts?”

Mitts had no idea how to respond.

Doctor Smith turned his back.

He looked to his blond assistant.

He gave him a firm nod.

The assistant flipped a switch on the wall.

Mitts expected it to be a light switch.

He thought that the whole room would suddenly be bathed in fierce white light.

In the distance, across the room, something illuminated.

Mitts strained his eyes.

He saw, in actual fact, that it was another room.

Adjacent to this one.

Identical in every way.

Divided by a two-way mirror.

He absorbed the sight beyond the glass.

One of those creatures.

One of the
Strangers
.

Like him, it was hooked up to a whole host of wires.

Propped up on an examination table.

Mirror images.

And yet they were destined to be bound together.

When Mitts’s eyes opened he wasn’t in the real world any longer.

He was
apart
from it.

No longer was he lying down . . . he was standing up.

Sulphur . . . in his nostrils, down his throat . . .
in his lungs
.

When he peered about, he realised he stood on a water-like substance.

It reminded him of the lake.

He stretched his mind back to those times when the creatures had come.

All of them hovering over the surface of the water.

He stretched his mind further.

Tried to work out how it might be possible.

And he came up with . . . nothing at all.

The air was a light-grey tone.

An overcast day.

And yet, different from any overcast day Mitts had experienced.

The air had a mystical quality to it.

A buzzing layer of static.

Invisible, and yet, when he reached out, he could feel it.

He thought of bumblebees. Crawling up and down his arms.

He knew he should panic.

But—
strangely
—he felt at peace with himself.

As if he might never have worries again.

Never in his life.

He gazed across the water.

Terrain sprouted up.

Dark-purple land masses.

Hills.

He could hardly believe it.

It was just like his dream . . . and yet this
was
a dream.

He only needed someone to wake him . . .

. . . UP!”

Mitts came to right away.

He felt as if his skin was melting.

As if the air itself was too hot.

“Come on now.
Wake up
, Mr Thornestone.
Wake up
!”

The voice was calm. Yet insistent.

Doctor Smith’s voice.

Mitts propped himself up on his elbows.

He felt a cool hand across his forehead.

“That’s it, that’s it.”

The tones of Doctor Smith’s voice were calming.

“Good boy,” Doctor Smith said. “You’re coming round now.”

Mitts allowed Doctor Smith to ease him back down flat.

Onto the examination table.

Mitts rested his head back on a too-thin pillow.

He blinked once—
twice
.

He tried to clear his eyes.

Clear his eyes of the landscape he had just seen.