Spiral (11 page)

“I’ve taken the normalized readings,” he announced. “Now for the purge.” He jabbed a button.

Drake twitched several times. Then he cried out at the top of his lungs, his body arching in the chair and his muscles going into such severe contraction that Will thought he might actually snap the bindings around his wrists and ankles.

The humming of the boxes seemed to resonate through everything in the attic. A small amount of purple light was leaking from around the edges of the eye pads, which meant Will found it difficult to look directly at Drake’s face.

Chester muttered, “Oh no,” as he saw the sweat coursing down Drake’s face and soaking his shirt.

“You can tell that he’s had quite a degree of conditioning,” Danforth noted drily as if he were commenting on the weather. “I’m going to increase the amplitude now, to complete the purge.” He twisted a dial.

Drake’s mouth was open, but there was no sound any longer, no scream. The tendons in his neck and wrists were stretched so tight that they looked as though they might burst through his skin. Then he began to babble.

“My God, listen . . . that’s Styx!” Chester exclaimed. “He’s speaking in Styx!”

Will listened in astonishment as Drake’s lips moved, and the bizarre sounds came from the back of his throat in short bursts, like the tearing of dry paper. It was so strange to hear a non-Styx speaking in their tongue. “We should be recording th —”

“We are,” Danforth interrupted, pointing at the apex of the roof directly above the chair, where a mirrored dome was fixed.

“Elliott might be able to tell us what he’s saying,” Chester suggested as the Professor waved his hand through the air in a flourish.

“And that should be it,” he announced.

He flicked a switch. The humming reduced and the purple light in the eye pads dimmed as Drake slumped loosely forward.

“Take it all off him now,” Danforth ordered Chester, who quickly did as he was told, removing the harness and the sensors from Drake’s dripping skin.

Will undid the straps binding him to the chair, then stood up. “Drake? Hello?” he said, his voice concerned as he took hold of the man’s arm and shook it. “Are you all right?”

Drake didn’t move, his head slumped onto his chest. He appeared to be out for the count.

“What do we do now?” Will asked, stepping back.

“Slap him,” the Professor said, kneading one hand with the other as if the thought of doing it himself was abhorrent.

“You mean it?” Chester quizzed him.

“Yes,” Danforth confirmed. “Slap him.”

“OK, then.” Chester propped up Drake’s head, then struck him.

Danforth hissed, “Put your back into it, boy. Hit him harder than that.”

But Chester was spared the task as Drake’s head jerked up. “He’s awake,” Chester said gratefully.

“Tell me how many,” the Professor asked as he thrust three fingers in front of Drake’s face. “How many do you see?”

“Four and twenty blackbirds,” Drake answered drunkenly, squinting through his half-lidded eyes.

“Slap him again,” Danforth said.

Chester swallowed and went to do it, but Drake caught his hand before it made contact with his face.

“I was joking, for God’s sake,” Drake exclaimed as he sat up straight in the chair and mopped the sweat from his brow. “I’m perfectly all right.”

Will was looking at Drake with disapproval.

“I know, I know,” Drake said, then drew in a deep breath. “In normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have taken the risk. But with what’s facing us, I have to do everything I can to improve the odds.”

“Are you sure you don’t feel any different?” Will asked, scrutinizing him. “Your voice sounds funny.”

“No, I’m fine. Really. I’ve bitten my tongue — that’s all,” Drake replied. He did sound slightly odd, and perhaps it was because of their relief that he’d come through unharmed, but Will and Chester couldn’t help themselves — they both began to laugh helplessly. “Thanks a bunch, you two,” Drake said, feeling the end of his tongue. He smiled, but then his expression became serious. “I suppose we won’t know how well it’s worked until we run into the Styx again.”

“Ye of little faith,” Danforth said testily.

Drake groaned as he lifted himself from the chair. It took him a few seconds to find his legs, then he turned to examine the boxes of electronics on the trolley. “Can you miniaturize this kit? We need it to be portable so we can deprogram subjects in the field.”

“Already made a start on a handheld version,” the Professor replied. “Now, who’s up next?” he asked, looking at Will with cold detachment.

“Well . . . me . . . I suppose,” Will gulped.

“Shouldn’t be too bad,” Drake tried to reassure the boy as he took off his jacket and climbed into the chair. “Remember, we’ve already negated the death wish they planted in you.”

“Yes, that’s true, Will,” Chester agreed, trying his best to sound upbeat. “You don’t want to throw yourself off buildings anymore, do you?” he said as he put the harness on his friend’s head and made sure the sensors were in contact with his temples.

“Not until this moment,” Will said under his breath.

Drake finished buckling the restraints on Will’s arms and legs, then rolled up a handkerchief and placed it in the boy’s mouth. “Here . . . bite down on this,” he advised. “I don’t want you losing the tip of your tongue.”

“Thanks,” Will said through the handkerchief. He could hear the Professor clicking switches, but he couldn’t see anything with the eye pads in place. “I just know this is going to be horrible,” he tried to say.

“Be quiet and keep still,” Danforth scolded him. “So I’ve taken the normalized wave pattern . . . and now I . . .”

As he threw the main switch, the darkness became an intense purple, gushing into Will’s head. Then there was severe pain, but not from any particular part of his body — in fact, he wasn’t aware of his body as he pitched forward into a huge space where there were bursts of white light, precisely as if camera flashes were going off. The flashes came more and more frequently, and between them Will caught fleeting glimpses of dark figures. He realized that he was seeing the two Styx from the Dark Light sessions he had been subjected to all those months ago after he was captured in the Quarter. But what was most bizarre was that everything seemed to be playing backward.

There was more pain, as though his head were about to explode. Quite suddenly it stopped, and he found that Drake and Chester were leaning over him.

“OK?” Drake asked.

“Sure,” Will said, although his mouth felt bone dry and his arms ached.

“I thought you were going to burst my eardrums with all that screaming,” Chester said quietly. “You spat the hand-kerchief out and nearly blew the roof off. Thank God you’re all right!”

Will noticed how pale his friend was. “Why? What happened?” he asked. “And where’s the Professor?”

“You’ve been out cold for about ten minutes,” Drake told him.

The Professor appeared — he’d evidently been downstairs. “Ah, he’s come around. So we won’t be needing the smelling salts or the first-aid kit,” he said tetchily.

“You had us worried,” Drake said. “The Styx must have put more programming into you than I’d anticipated. We’ll probably never know what it was now that it’s been weeded out.”

Chester curled his lip as if he’d tasted something unpleasant. “You were speaking Styx — it was so creepy.”

“What? Me, too?” Will said. “Weird. I really don’t remember anything.”

Then it was Chester’s turn to be treated with Danforth’s Purger, as they’d begun to refer to the apparatus. At first he hardly broke into a sweat, but then his face was streaming and he, too, cried out and began to babble away in what sounded like Styx. And he was barely conscious at the end of the treatment.

“Suppose that means they stuck something in my head, too, while they had us in the Hold,” he said, once he’d drunk some water and had a chance to recover.

“I’m afraid so. They don’t miss an opportunity, do they?” Drake said. “The only consolation is that your reaction was less severe than mine or Will’s, so I assume you had less of it than we did.”

“Power down,” Danforth announced, as he turned off the last box on the trolley, and the humming faded away to nothing. “A very satisfactory outcome, I’d say.”

As they were leaving the Professor’s house, Drake turned to the peculiar little man. “And what about Jiggs — is he around?” he asked.

“We’re not talking at the moment,” Danforth replied. “He’s probably watching us from those trees over there. He spends the night up in them now, you know, like some baboon. He still can’t abide being cooped up after his tenure at Wormwood Scrubs.”

“Right,” Drake said, as if none of this came as a surprise. “Give him my best if you do happen to bump into him.”

“Not likely,” the Professor replied, closing the front door.

As Will and Chester trailed after Drake on the way back to the Land Rover, they were peering at the area of woodland and wondering what Jiggs had been in prison for, and also what sort of man would sleep in a tree.

“You won’t spot him, you know. Not even if he was ten feet away from us,” Drake said without looking at the boys as he strode over to the car. “That’s what Jiggs does. He hides. And he’s very good at it.”

BARTLEBY HAD FAILED
to return for two full days, and Will and Chester went on yet another outing to look for him, this time accompanied by Mrs. Burrows.

“He could be anywhere,” Chester said, walking on the muddy path beside the bulrushes at the edge of the lake. He stopped to peer at the water. “And if he’s fallen in and drowned, we’ll never find him. He might have been after the fish.”

“He’s not that careless — and anyway, he can swim. I’m sure he’s OK, wherever he is,” Will said hollowly. He was trying his best to remain positive, but Chester was unconvinced.

“If you say so,” he murmured.

Will was nodding slowly to himself. “I bet he just shows up at the house again, like nothing’s happened.”

“No,” Mrs. Burrows said abruptly.

Both boys looked at her as if she was about to deliver some bad news, but she was referring to her new sense, which she’d been using in an attempt to shed some light on the Hunter’s whereabouts. “Maybe a few echoes of where he’s been before, where he’s marked his territory, but I’m not picking up anything fresh.”

Turning to the east, Mrs. Burrows held her head high and then moved it slowly around until her unseeing eyes were gazing out at the island in the middle of the lake. She was wearing a long dress of white cotton that Parry had found in a trunk of clothes in one of the spare bedrooms. As the breeze caught it and also ruffled her hair, there was something saintly about her, standing there on the bank.

“So you don’t think Bartleby just dumped Colly and ran for the hills?” Chester posed. “He’s a cat, after all, and cats are sort of unreliable.”

“Like husbands,” Mrs. Burrows replied distantly, then suddenly turned her head to the west as if she’d heard something.

The boys waited, hoping she’d picked up on the Hunter’s scent, but she remained silent.

“Mum, is it him?” Will asked eventually.

“Something else . . . a long way off . . . can’t tell . . . maybe deer,” she said quietly.

Chester took hold of one of the bulrushes and broke it off. “Parry said Old Wilkie’s drawn a blank, too, while he’s been doing his rounds.” Chester was thoughtful for a second as he tapped the brown seed head against his open hand. “Say . . . you don’t think
he
might have had something to do with it?”

“There might be insects in that,” Will said mischievously, knowing his friend’s almost phobic fear of anything that crawled. “And what do you mean? Why would Old Wilkie do anything to harm Bart?”

Chester immediately dropped the bulrush and rubbed his palms together, then examined them carefully. “Well . . . Parry said Old Wilkie’s spaniel went missing, and you just know who was to blame for that.”

Will was dismissive of the idea. “You think he’d lie to Parry? Old Wilkie’s worked for him for years. That’s not likely.”

Mrs. Burrows was still facing in the same direction, to the west where the pine forest covered a small mountain like a green blanket. Where the Limiters had had their observation post. “Yes . . . deer . . . must be deer,” she decided. “I’m going back now,” she announced, turning toward the house and starting up the slope.