The vulpine, p.22
The Vulpine, page 22
“But—” She tried one last time, and I held up my hand. “I have to do this, Ivy. OK?”
She looked at me for a long moment, then nodded. “All right,” she whispered.
The others came back, and I saw that Silvan had regained some more colour in her cheeks.
“I found some painkillers,” she said. “I’ll be all right for a while.”
Nurse Emmeline’s jaw was set. “It’s time,” she said.
“OK,” I said. “Let’s do this.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Flare handed me his Taser, and I tucked it into a pocket of the lab coat. Silvan gave me the syringe.
“It’s a strong anaesthetic,” she said. “Inject it into an arm or leg muscle. It should paralyse him quickly.”
“His usual injection is in his arm – we must not deviate from our usual routine and arouse suspicion,” Emmeline said. “You must be confident. He can sense weakness.”
“If anything happens to me—” I began.
“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” Ivy said firmly. “We’ll be right here.”
I nodded. “OK,” I said to the nurse, taking a deep breath as if we were about to dive underwater. “Let’s go.”
The nurse pressed her pass to the lock and the light flashed green, the door swinging open. As one, we all peered into the gap. Beyond it I could see a brightly lit corridor.
“You mustn’t come any further,” Nurse Emmeline whispered to the others. “He thinks there are only two people on shift.”
We stepped into the corridor. Behind us, the door slowly closed, and I glanced back. The last thing I saw was Ivy’s face, bleached in the bright, clinical light. She tried to give me a supportive smile, but it looked more like a grimace, and then the door clicked shut.
We started to walk. It felt warmer in here, a sweetness in the air that reminded me of overripe fruit, and a bead of sweat collected on my brow. Walking the length of the corridor felt like it took a lifetime, as if it was the pathway to my own execution.
As we reached the door, the nurse turned to me. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
I studied her face, trying to work out if I could trust her. She was not on our side, and yet I knew now more than ever that no war was black and white. I could sense her regret, but she was also frightened. And fear was a dangerous, powerful thing.
Taking the Taser from my pocket, I levelled it at her. “I’m not going to inject him. You are. Do you understand?”
Her eyes widened, but she nodded.
“I’m going to untie your hands now. Turn round.”
She did as I asked, offering her bound hands up to me, and I loosened the belt, every nerve ending in my body screaming at me not to trust her.
“Ora,” she murmured. “That’s your name, isn’t it? I heard one of the others say it. It means ‘prayer’, doesn’t it?”
I didn’t answer. It was true; this was my name’s meaning. But since meeting the Vulpine, I had come to understand that a name didn’t need to have any meaning other than one I wanted to give it. The belt fell away, and I took a step back, the Taser still pointed towards her. Emmeline brought her hands round, flexing her fingers and rotating her sore wrists. Slowly, to demonstrate she was not a threat, she lifted a trembling hand, placing it on my arm.
“Thank you,” she said.
I passed her the syringe, bracing myself for her attack, but she only took it, turning it in her hands.
“Are you ready?” she said, raising her eyes to mine, and I realized that she was just as frightened as I was, perhaps even more so, for she had seen this monster before.
I nodded, my mouth too dry to speak.
She touched her pass to the lock and the door swung open. With a panicked ringing in my ears, I followed her across the threshold.
The room was small, and so dark I could barely see in front of me. A night light glowed in one corner. Then the smell hit me. It was a cloying, airless warmth, the smell of a bedroom where the window has not been opened for years. Of breath and body heat and changing cells, and I staggered back at the force of it.
This felt wrong. Whatever was in here couldn’t be human. No human could live like this. Had she been right, this nurse? Was the manager really something more than human? Fear and confusion twisted like snakes in my belly.
Emmeline went ahead. “Medication time,” she said, trying to muster a brightness in her voice, but beneath it, I could hear the terror.
I sensed movement at the back of the room, a slow, torpid stretching, and I gripped the scalpel tightly in my hand.
“What do you bring me?”
The voice felt ancient, yet deep within it I detected other notes, as if the sound was being dragged up from fathoms beneath the earth. Something in it plucked at my memory, a voice I had heard somewhere before. But then the familiarity was lost, overtaken by a confusion of other sounds layered one on top of the other. A child laughing and the cry of a baby, the wheeze of an old woman and the sigh of a young, carefree man, as if the lost voices of all those genes he had stolen clung to his vocal chords.
“I bring you your medication, of course,” she said, the syringe in her hand shaking, and I was glad for the lack of light, for I realized I did not want to look at what this man had become. Whatever he had done to himself, it had worked: I could sense it in the way he spoke, the way he moved. He was deadly.
“Come closer,” he murmured, and I wondered if he was already sensing my fear, my panic.
As one, the nurse and I stepped forward.
“Look at me,” he demanded, but I kept my eyes determinedly to the tiled floor, not daring to look up at his terrible, superhuman face. A great wave of disillusion came over me. I had been foolish to think that I could defeat him.
The nurse’s resolve was not so strong. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her head jerk up, and her eyes fix upon the being before her. I saw the fear and revulsion in her face, and something else too, something that surprised me.
Devotion. A thread of allegiance joining her to the manager, and a bolt of dread plunged through me.
“This is not my usual medication,” his voice came again. “It smells … wrong.”
The nurse took a tentative step towards him, raising the syringe.
Do it, I urged her silently. Do it now.
But as she drew closer, the manager spoke again, his voice calm, gentle.
“What are you doing, Emmeline?”
“I…” she began.
Her eyes were filled with a glittering reverence as she gazed at him, as if the horror of what she was looking at had driven her to the edge of madness. The syringe in her hand wavered, then tumbled to the floor, and she looked down at her empty hand in confusion. I saw a tear collect in the corner of her eye. It swelled, spilling down her cheek.
The manager took a step towards her, and still, I kept my eyes from his face, not wanting to see, not wanting to know the depths of his experimentation. He lifted a frail hand, the skin so ghostly white it glowed in the darkness. Tenderly, he wiped away the tear, and then he lifted it to his lips. I watched in mounting horror, unable to look away, as he sipped it like nectar, and as I took in his face for the first time, I gasped in surprise.
He was not, as I had imagined, a vast and frightening monster, or even some grotesque inhuman creature. He looked instead just like a stooped, frail old man. A man who had gone so far down this path he chose that he believed that the blood of these innocent people was somehow making him immortal.
Men can be overcome, I thought. And hope spooled through me.
Then his hand shot out, closing tightly on the nurse’s arm.
She let out a frightened cry, and I raised the scalpel shakily, pointing it in the man’s direction. He lifted those weak, milky eyes to me.
“You are not my usual nurse,” he said, his voice low and dangerous. “You are no nurse at all. You came here to hurt me.”
I tightened my grip on the scalpel, daring myself to lunge towards him. But then, so quickly I barely registered it, he twisted Emmeline round to face me, flicking her into position like a spinning top. For a split second, I saw the horror in her eyes, before it melted into a look of acceptance, defeat, as if she had always known that it would go this way.
And before I could react, her body was thrust forward, so fast she was barely more than a blur, propelled towards me and the glinting scalpel blade that I clutched in my hand.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
I felt the nurse ram into me, knocking my breath from my lungs. Slowly, she crumpled to the floor at my feet, and for a moment I stared at her, not comprehending what had just happened.
I crouched down, putting a hand to her shoulder, shaking her gently. “Emmeline?” I whispered. “Emmeline.”
She was so still, her hands cupped to her chest, and between them, I saw the blade I had been holding, lost somewhere in her heart.
“No,” I breathed.
The hiss of a match being struck, a small light flaring, the glow of it moving closer.
“Look at me.”
His voice was a dangerous whisper, but I continued to look down, refusing to be bullied.
“LOOK AT ME!”
That voice. I had heard it before, I was sure. Slowly, I raised my head until I was looking directly at him.
The candlelight illuminated his ancient, skeletal face. And in it, I saw for the first time the echo of a man I had seen once before.
He staggered towards me, the movement ungainly, like a toddler only just learning to walk. As he drew closer, the skin round his left eye pulsed briefly, and I knew then that I had been right.
I forced myself to stand tall, meeting his gaze. “When did you stop using your real name?” I said, my voice sounding far stronger than I felt.
He stopped, looking at me quizzically. “I have no name,” he hissed.
“Yes, you do. Or you did once, anyway. Maybe you shed it when you decided you were no longer human.”
He stared at me, but did not reply.
“When was that, by the way? When you first started stealing your patients’ blood, believing in this impossible science? Or later, when you got so addicted to what you were doing you forgot who you were? Do you really believe what you told the nurses, Ernst? That you were making yourself superhuman? Or was it just smoke and mirrors, to get everyone to do exactly as you say?”
At the sound of his name, unspoken for so long, he stilled, and I wondered if I was the first person who had dared to speak it in decades.
“Your name is Dr Ernst Carroll, isn’t it?”
The same doctor who had founded this very Hospital. Who I had watched in class only a few short weeks ago, though it felt like so much longer. A name that had been respected and revered by many for years, though it was clear now that any good in him had been lost long ago.
For a brief moment, I felt the doctor falter, but then resolve fell over his features once more.
“Perhaps that was my name once,” he said. “But no longer. Now, I am simply the manager. I manage everything. Every person in this city, from the Leader of the Government down to the pathetic little Imperfect in their dark little cells.”
“You don’t manage me,” I whispered. “I’m not under your control.”
Ernst Carroll seemed to swell. “You are wrong,” he said, taking a step towards me.
“Do you really believe that what you’re doing is making you superhuman?” I said, standing my ground.
“What does it matter what I believe, as long as everyone else believes it?”
“You’re deluded! Look at you: you’re nothing but a lonely, frail old man.”
In the candlelight his eyes filled with a glittering hatred, and despite myself, I felt a surge of his dangerous power. Not the superhuman force that the nurse believed in, but a frightening ability to manipulate. I took a step back, stumbling over something on the ground.
The syringe.
It was still miraculously intact, the liquid inside glistening like quicksilver, and in that moment I knew that there was only one thing I could do. This man had destroyed so many lives; I couldn’t let him destroy any more.
I lunged towards the syringe, rage growing in me like a tempest, and launched myself at him, aiming the needle at his neck. As I reached him, I felt it pierce his paper-thin skin.
I had expected a fight, but as the needle stabbed into his throat, I felt him drawing back into himself like a snail into a shell. He began to scream, the sound unwinding into the room like the mewl of a baby. He reached out his hands, clawing at my arm, and I pushed him away from me in revulsion, my skin crawling at his touch.
He staggered back, his movements slow and sluggish as the anaesthetic took effect. Lifting a hand, he pulled the syringe from his neck and looked at it quizzically. Somewhere far away, I thought I heard running footsteps. At the sound, Ernst lifted his head too.
And then the door burst open.
“Ora!”
Casta was standing in the doorway, his chest heaving. Behind him, face flushed from the exertion of running, stood his father. Mr Clare pushed past his son and into the room, and I saw that he had a gun in his hand.
And it was pointed straight at us.
CHAPTER FORTY
Casta and his dad stared around the room, taking in the frail old man slumped against the rock wall, and the nurse, lying still and silent on the floor.
“What on earth is going on here?” Mr Clare breathed.
Up close, I could see that he had lost weight. There was a grey pallor to his skin, his bright eyes dulled and bloodshot.
Ernst was still leaning heavily against the wall, his chest heaving in and out as the drug coursed through him. But as his gaze fixed on the gold chains about Casta’s and Mr Clare’s necks, something in him seemed to rally. With great effort, he lifted his head, holding it steady.
“It’s not often I see anyone Perfect in my Hospital,” he said, his voice no more than a scratchy whisper. “This place is for the dregs of society. Surely men of your breeding know that?”
Casta’s dad tightened his hold on the gun again, raising it higher, and I lifted my arm to protect myself, only to realize that he was pointing it, not at me, but at the doctor.
“This is your Hospital?” Mr Clare said. “You are responsible for it? The manager everyone speaks of?” His voice was controlled and quiet and humming with intent.
“It is,” I said. “This is Dr Carroll, Mr Clare. The same Ernst Carroll who founded the Hospital.”
Mr Clare stared at me in shock. Then his face cleared, as if he was seeing me for the first time.
“Ora,” he said. “Are you all right?”
Before I could answer, Ernst Carroll cleared his throat. “I don’t mean to interrupt this little reunion, but why exactly are you here?”
Mr Clare spun back, the gun trained on him once more. “Because I have recently discovered what truly happens to the Imperfect children who are brought here. I always knew it wasn’t pleasant, but I naively believed the laws were there for the greater good. Yet now I discover something far darker, that the children are brought here for you to … feast upon.” He looked sickened, incredulous. “Is that really all they are to you? An endless supply of nourishment, a carousel of delicacies?”
He paused. When Ernst didn’t reply, he said, “Do you know what it’s like to have your own flesh and blood torn from you, Dr Carroll? Of course you don’t. You wanted to take my daughter, to do monstrous things to her, to strip her of her dignity and her freedom.” His voice caught, and he closed his eyes for a moment, as if gathering his courage. “There was a time when I believed in what this government was doing. I was part of it – I strove for perfection in our world. But do you know what I have come to realize? Perfection, flawlessness – they all mean nothing.” He swallowed. “Do you know what my vision of perfect is, Dr Carroll?”
“Tell me,” the old man said. He sounded bored. Tired. He was bent double now, barely standing, a hand to the wall to hold him up.
“Having my daughter back with my family,” he said, his voice breaking on that last word, and the grief and the pain in it were so visceral that I felt tears stinging at my own eyes, too.
I lifted a hand to wipe them away, but at the movement, Ernst’s head shot up, turning to me like a snake sensing prey.
“You,” he whispered. “You started this.”
He took a faltering step towards me. Every inch of me wanted to jump back, to get away from him, but behind me there was only roughly hewn rock.
“Dr Carroll, don’t,” Casta implored, but the man ignored him, continuing forward. Lifting a papery finger, he trailed it down my cheek.
“You are Imperfect, are you not, little one?” he said. “How did you escape my web undetected? Why are you not in those cells?”
I stood, frozen, staring at him in revulsion.
“Yes,” he breathed. “I could use pieces of you. Your bravery. Your charm. Your sheer doggedness. Perhaps I was wrong after all. I never realized an Imperfect could be so … interesting.”
“You’re a monster,” Casta said. “What happened to you?”
Ernst looked up, and his eyes were deep blue pools of desire. “Progress,” he said, a look of pure ecstasy coming over his face. And then, so quickly I barely registered it, he lifted his arm, something grasped in his fist, glittering menacingly.
“Ora!” Casta shouted.
In the candlelight, my eyes took in the syringe, poised high above me, its needle sharp and glinting.
There was a muffled crack, ricocheting dully around the walls, and then the doctor slumped forward, the syringe clattering to the floor. The three of us stood, staring down at the scene before us.
The monster who had once been a man, nothing more, lay curled on the floor, like a babe just born, his knees drawn up to his chin. In death, his eyes were the blue of a fading night sky, as if the last of his life still clung there, trying and failing desperately to hold on.
