Sin (35 page)

Barry had seen the drawers full
of money. Too much money. There were ten counters, eleven if you
counted the foreign exchange. He dismissed that. You couldn't buy
fags or booze or be that man with funny money. Barry was a brain
and, as such, wasn't greedy. One drawer full would do. Two at the
most.

He didn't know that the woman,
Maureen, behind the desk would sneeze in shock at the gun suddenly
pointed at her, a sneeze that would make him jump and pull the
trigger and empty the magazine before he'd had time to swallow that
first spoonful cereal at breakfast. He didn't know that, even if he
hadn't killed all those people, and shot his own foot, the cameras
had seen it all and would grass him up to the police.

None of that mattered because
I'd found a two pence coin and, after a simple flip and catch, the
number five bus came to Barry instead of him going to the stop
outside the newsagents and waiting until ten past the hour.

Each time there was something.
Each time a wrong that needed righting or preventing. Even with the
earthquake in Turkey. It wasn't just villages that had been buried
under the trees and rocks and earth, or that had fallen into the
crevices that opened and closed like a dragon's teeth. There had
been a base. A storage site. A weapons cache. Not so much weapons
of mass destruction, but still weapons of a huge amount of
devastation. Much more than was originally thought and planned for.
Much more than was caused when the Earth shrugged her shoulders and
I tossed a coin.

The price of that something,
that righted wrong, was enormous. Collateral damage was never
acceptable, was it? Was it better for the family members of those
who would have died at the hands of a terminal waster to mourn
siblings or parents or children who had been murdered, or those who
had died in an accident? Were the earthquake survivors better for
receiving the world wide aid that came with a seemingly random
natural disaster, or would they have preferred to be the nameless
remnants of bomb and missile attacks from insurgents, possibly
making one of the secondary headlines on the 24 hour news channels
or page sixteen of a lesser read broadsheet? Did the needs of the
many outweigh the needs of the multitude?

I couldn't answer. I couldn't do
or say anything. I was frozen in the moment, rooted by the
revelation. If the owner of the arm had come through the door right
then, I was sure he would have taken me for a shop mannequin, one
that he could move and dress and style, and all for only £99.99. I
wasn't right, I wasn't wrong, I just was. Flip and catch went the
toss of the coin. Heads or tails. Good or evil. Whichever I was, I
couldn't help feel that a greater good was being served. Even down
to the boy in the car in the trees.

I'd never had that before. The
whole reason I had ventured into the grasp of Dr. Connors was
because I felt I needed to stop myself somehow. I needed to numb
the pain I felt when it happened, the pain of everything that had
gone before revisiting me, saying 'Hi', taking my hand and ripping
my heart out. Yes, I'd come to prevent it reoccurring but, being
the honest man I tried to profess to be, I'd come here for more
selfish reasons. I had admitted to myself into the insane asylum to
keep myself sane. The jury, those good men and true of whom I’ve
mentioned on occasion, were still debating on whether I'd
succeeded.

It probably wasn't going to be a
unanimous vote.

I wiped away the tears that
drenched my face, not knowing where they'd come from. Had I cried?
Was it Caroline? No, she was still unconscious. Anyway - in fact
anywho-be-do - the moment had passed. Beautiful, to me, and
profound, epiphany had returned to reality, passing the baton on so
smoothly I barely noticed. I had changed. I
was
changed. Why
then, why there? Why the moment had come at
that
moment I
had no idea, but it had and I was no longer 'Sin-sin-sirree,
there's no place for thee,' I was Sin. Not a superhero but... but
good. Yes. I'd plead my case to that jury and I'd convince them. I
wasn't a big bad wolf, ready to eat the little piggies.

But, Dr. Connors, I was going to
blow your house down.

I pushed. The door opened
smoothly and silently and I passed through the same way. I hoped
that a plan might evolve, my mind making decisions whilst I was
otherwise engaged, but it appeared that my mind was busy doing
other things. Sudoku or something. I had no sense of what I might
do next, but that was fine. I didn't have a bowl of Frosties to
ponder over. I would take one step and follow it with another and
see where they took me.

I couldn't take Caroline back to
her room. I wanted to, to keep her out of harm's way, but it was
too far. The risk of discovery grew with every second passed and
with every step taken. I had to keep her with me. The injection had
ensured that she was away making daisy chains with the fairies so I
had no fears of her waking and causing a scene. He weight, though,
seemed to be growing in direct proportion to the risk and I needed
to get somewhere out of the way quickly.

For the first time in so long,
if ever, I wished I had the coin with me. The two pence piece that
had turned my life upside down, and me along with it, and which I'd
tried so many times to rid myself of. I knew, now, that it wasn't
the source of the things I could do, but I longed to feel its
comforting footprint in my palm.

Oh well.

The corridor I was in now was
dimly lit from bulbs hidden in the suspended ceiling. It cast my
shadow in three directions at once and I was worried that, even if
I wasn't seen, my grey-black partners would be. The corridor bent
in either direction, curving away sharply. To the left were the
rooms and padded cells that contained the patients - caged animals
that were only allowed out at feeding or play times. The right
curve led to the administration wing, a collection of store rooms,
offices and treatment theatres. Right was right.

I might not have had a plan, but
I did have a destination. The office of our illustrious leader. I
wondered if there'd be an escape route from his office - a wardrobe
with a secret passage at the back that led, if you stepped through,
to the Seven Hills, our own version of Narnia. Chances were that it
didn't. Joy had still not reappeared either, so she wasn't there to
open a mystical portal for me to exit through. My own
teleportation, on the other hand, didn't seem too far beyond my
capabilities. Something
had
changed about me. The suspicion
had begun with the bully in the street and his girlfriend. The rage
built but I kept it on a leash, like a Rottweiler straining to
attack a passing granny. In the nursery I had stopped Jersey from
his desecration of Caroline and she had suffered, I hoped anyway,
just a bloody nose in the back-draft. I didn't believe for one
second I could control this, but I had an idea that it was no
longer entirely uncontrolled.

I walked as quickly as I could,
passing doors that I knew would be locked. Store Room 1. Store Room
2. Locker Room 1. Ladies Locker Room. Doors with similarly
inventive names. I tested the locks on none of them. What would be
the point? I only wanted one particular door and, before very long,
that was the door I stood before.

Of course it was locked and, in
lieu of a coin, I wished for a wand so I could cast a Potter-style
spell. UNLOCKIARMUS! I didn't have a wand, obviously, because magic
didn't really exist, did it? I didn't even have a toothpick to wave
about. A splinter wouldn't have been any good either. Magic was the
fantasy of those who wished for more than that which they had. The
desire for a greater power than that which turned on the TV
magically at the press of a button on a remote control. Did I
believe? I think I could be classed, based on my life story, as a
convert. At the least an agnostic. Who was to say, in a world of
teleportation, death by thought and infra red controllers, that you
really couldn't wish upon a star?

The door was locked and I had no
way to get inside. I swore at myself and Caroline. I ignored my
self-deprecation and she didn’t even hear it. Then I actually
looked at the lock and had to stifle a laugh.

It was keypad entry. A
combination lock with the numbers 0 to 9 and the letters A to D. A
star, which was really an asterisk, and a hash were thrown in for
good measure. It's strange how you can look at something once and
see one thing, then look again and see something completely
different. At first glance, with the weight of Caroline and the
thrill of the chase rattling my heart in my head, this door was an
impenetrable blockade, purely because of that locked lock. I hadn’t
thought about the code when I’d come this way with Joy, and I
realised that it was nothing more than a temporary barrier - a
brief respite and a chance to take a breath.

I'd been here so often with the
doctor, for 'informal interviews and chats', that I'd seen him
unlock his office many times. Tap-tap, tap-tap. A monotone beep
accompanied each finger press to avoid recognition of the numbers
selected, but a good few times I had been in a direct line of sight
to the keypad itself. Dr. Connors was a brain. He actually was.
Though Barry Coombs might ally himself with my tormentor, he was
easily outclassed. Connors was, genuinely, a brain. Very
intelligent and clearly cunning. But he was also as arrogant as
Coombs. He thought he knew it all. He thought, especially in his
line of work, he had people sussed. The populace would assume, Dr.
Connors being so clever, that his entry code would be something
equally clever. It wouldn't be his date of birth. His wouldn't be
his credit card PIN number. It wouldn't be the number of times he'd
been kissed, which wouldn't reach four figures anyway. No, it would
be something that no-one would think of. Something random and
insightful. Which was why he chose none of those things.

I smiled, bizarrely under the
circumstances, and pressed 1-2-3-4. There was a soft click and I
let myself into the office.

* * * *

There were no lights on inside
but, luckily, my friendly neighbourhood gods were still smiling
down on me and, on this side of the building, Sister Moon, looking
big and looking blue, had joined the audience. There was getting to
be a bit of a group up there and some enterprising person could
make quite a packet with a refreshments stand, or one of those
boxes you put round your neck that had Cornettos and hot dogs piled
high for equally piled high prices. Maybe a burger van would pull
up selling tea, coffee and muddy liquid that passed as hot
chocolate to wash down the pseudo-meat cheeseburgers. The light of
so many spectators reflecting off the certificates adorning the
walls allowed me to move towards the desk with ease. I hesitated,
forever, at the chair that faced it. The chair Jeremy had been in
as he faced his interrogator and his killer. Choice, as was usual,
was not my friend and I had to put Caroline down somewhere. I
wasn't going to just dump her on the floor, so the chair it was. As
I stepped towards it, I thought I could still smell Jeremy, but it
could quite easily have been death. Or Death. Maybe they all used
the same deodorant or eau de lavatory. I wondered if, like the
bodaches of Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas books, my friends were
hovering in the shadows waiting for what was to come, drooling in
anticipation. Fate, her fickle finger raised ready to pick the nose
of my life and wipe it on her dress. Mr. Grimm, the Reaper, with
his scythe rocking back and forth in his hand like a pendulum
counting the seconds down to my doom. Or were the shadows clear and
I was in this all on my own?

As gently as I could, I lowered
Caroline down. The seat had groaned under Jeremy’s weight, but she
posed no threat to its stability. I hoped, by the end of all this,
she didn't suffer the same fate as its previous resident.

First things always seemed to
need to come first so, firstly, I needed to see. I had to take this
chance to find out what Dr. Connors had done to me. And to see if I
could use that to my advantage. As I sat at his desk I noticed
something I hadn't seen before. Next to the perfectly ordered
pencils was a new object. It was a clear cube of plastic or resin.
Possibly even crystal. It was empty except for a single coin. A two
pence piece. He'd turned it into a paperweight. I didn't know
whether to laugh to be angry. It
was
laughable, but it also
seemed a sacrilege. My coin was an object of such power. Not
innately of course, as it could easily, I'm sure, have been a pound
or a brick or a Big Mac. But it had woken me, the me inside that
had been dormant for so long. The me that had so tempted and
enticed Dr. Connors. To turn it into a desk ornament was...
wrong.

I lifted it up and could
practically feel the coin struggling to be free from its prison and
return to my hands.

Sighing, I replaced the
paperweight on the desk and moved my attention to the computer. I
put my hand on the mouse and clicked. The monitor sprang into life,
a taunting, teasing life. A 'you got this far, but you ain't
getting no further' life. A rectangular dialog box. The username,
Connors_H, already filled in and the cursor flashing beneath in the
field that asked for Password.

This I hadn't seen before. This
I had no idea of. I could try random words, his name again, the
name of the dog he'd had as a boy (he'd called it Dog - it was less
of a waste of thought apparently, even at ten years old) but I
didn't know if it was three strikes and you're out. Three wrong
turns and all the videos and documents would be lost to me forever.
My hands hovered over the keyboard, wanting to press something -
anything. I looked at the keys, hoping they'd leap out crying
'Press me! Press me!' I looked at the screen and the coin and even
at Caroline for inspiration.