Something Coming Through

31. Ugly Chicken

England — France | 10–11 July

‘I still don’t know if I made the right decision,’ Fahad said. ‘But Rana says that he’s happy with it. So there’s that.’

Rana had consulted Ugly Chicken in a Burger King on the A13, after Chloe had called the emergency number that Sandra Hamilton had given her, and had been told to sit tight and wait for pickup. The little girl had mumbled into the microphone of her fist and cocked her head as if listening to a reply, sometimes with a grave expression, sometimes smiling and nodding. ‘It’s private,’ she’d said, when Chloe had wondered what they were talking about. And, ‘He’ll tell me if he has anything to say to you.’

Chloe asked Fahad if Ugly Chicken ever spoke to him, but he ignored the question, saying, ‘Maybe it’ll come good in the end.’

They were sitting at a pine table in the kitchen of a safe house somewhere in Kent. Fahad was absent-mindedly sketching on a pad of paper that Sandra had supplied. Rough outlines of the usual landscape done in swift confident lines with red and black Sharpies, each image torn from the pad and crumpled when it was done. He was left-handed.

He told Chloe that the need to draw came over him like a fierce hunger. The first time, he’d stayed up all night, growing ever more frustrated because he couldn’t get down on paper what pressed inside his head. The raw urgent need had frightened him, but he’d learned by trial and error which drawings eased its grip.

He was scribbling with the black Sharpie now, outlining the shape of the alien space he’d tried to reproduce in the squalid bedroom at the sea fort. Chloe asked him if it was the interior of one of the spires; he said he wasn’t sure.

‘I call it the black room, but I don’t know if it’s really a room. Rana shows her drawings to Ugly Chicken, but he won’t talk to her about my stuff. He won’t say what they are, or why he makes me draw them. Maybe he doesn’t know how he affects other people.’

‘I think he had a pretty good idea about what he was doing, at the Reef.’

‘We can’t control it. It just happens.’

Fahad hadn’t seen the manifestation at the Reef: he’d never seen Ugly Chicken in any guise. And although Rana drew her starburst pictures over and over, she wouldn’t ever draw her imaginary friend. It was one of the things he didn’t like, according to her. After showing her pictures of all kinds of birds, Fahad believed that Ugly Chicken looked a little like a cross between a pelican and a turkey vulture. Sort of squashed and mostly naked, patched with bright colours. A big crooked beak for a mouth, eyes of different sizes and number, not all of them on its head. He spoke directly to Rana and they had created a world of rules and customs, things that had to be done in a particular way, things that were forbidden. Fahad said that she’d always liked to order her family of dolls and stuffed animals and robots about, explaining their relationships to each other, refereeing their squabbles. She had incorporated Ugly Chicken into those games; it used those games to communicate with her. And it put pictures in Fahad’s head, and he felt that he had to get them down on paper or die.

He ripped out the half-completed sketch of the black room and smoothed the next sheet of paper and picked up the red Sharpie, drew the outline of a spire in two swift strokes, dashed lines on either side to indicate the rounded hills at the horizon. Looking up at Chloe, smiling. ‘At first, I thought I had gone crazy. Now I know it has a purpose.’

Chloe picked up one of his crumpled sketches, flattened it on the table, and said, ‘You know what this is, where this is?’

‘Do you believe in fate?’

Fahad had a way of abruptly changing the subject when she asked him a question he didn’t want to answer.

Chloe said, ‘That depends on what you mean by fate, I guess.’

‘I mean, do you believe that we were supposed to meet? That something ordered the world so that our paths would cross?’

Chloe took his questions seriously. She thought of how she’d walked out of the rehearsals for the select-committee appearance. How she’d decided to justify it by chasing up Mr Archer’s Facebook announcement. Had it been no more than a whim, or had she unconsciously responded to the background landscape of that announcement?

She said, ‘You think Ugly Chicken makes you draw that stuff because it knew I’d see it?’

‘You found me, didn’t you?’ Fahad said.

He had a nice smile, but rarely used it. He was serious and suspicious, with that mix of vulnerability and arrogance particular to teenage boys. He’d barely said more than a dozen words while they’d been waiting for Sandra Hamilton. Even Gail Ann hadn’t been able to crack his shell. And now that he was talking, it was clear that he wanted to steer the conversation in particular directions, to reveal only what he chose to reveal.

Chloe played along, saying, ‘Mr Archer’s meeting just happened to be taking place when I needed an excuse to be somewhere else. And anyone could have seen that announcement. Some other scout could have decided to check it out.’

‘But you did,’ Fahad said.

‘Me and Eddie Ackroyd.’

She thought of Eddie’s mysterious client. If he had been aimed towards that breakout, why not her? A shivery thought.

‘But he isn’t here, and you are.’ Fahad had sketched the intricate latticework of the spire; now he began to add the little spurs that ornamented its flanks. Quick precise tick marks. His tongue pressed into a corner of his mouth. When he was finished, he looked at Chloe and said, ‘I expect you think you rescued me. Me and Rana. But suppose we didn’t need to be rescued?’

‘I know you can look after yourself, that you can take care of your little sister. But there are some bad people looking for you, Fahad. Not just the police.’

‘We escaped from the bad people. All on our own. I found a place to live, got a job stacking shelves in a supermarket, Rana was back in school…But then Mr Archer started up his thing, and it seemed like a good idea to help him. Even though I sort of knew it wasn’t my idea. You found us, because of that, and then that weird sweaty guy in black…And I thought, maybe the bad guys could find us too.’

‘That’s why you ran away again.’

‘I didn’t run away. Rana and me moved in with some people I know. Friends, sort of, from the cage-fighting scene. And then you found us again. Maybe you could call it fate, but I don’t think so. I think he wanted it to happen.’

‘And what does he want now? What do you want?’

Fahad didn’t reply at once, but bent over the pad again, using the black Sharpie to cross-hatch the spire’s shadow across rocky ground evoked by spare dashes and scribbles of red ink. At last he said, ‘I suppose you know that my father is dead. Killed by the people he was working for.’

Chloe nodded. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘He wasn’t a good man. He wasn’t even there for me most of the time. But he was trying to be good. When I was very young, in Pakistan, the government decided that intellectuals were enemies of the people. Both my father and mother worked in the University of the Punjab. She was a mathematician; he was a pharmaceutical engineer. There were pogroms, riots, against people like them. People were murdered. I had a sister, two years older than me. She was killed. One of my aunts had taken her shopping with our cousins, and they were all killed by a car bomb.’

Fahad had stopped drawing. He spoke quietly and precisely, as if reciting from memory. Retelling a story he’d been told many times.

‘A few days later, after the funerals, people shot at our house. So my father decided that it was no longer safe for us, in our country. He used his connections to send my mother and me to England. The university had been closed down by then, but he had a consultancy with a pharmaceutical company, and he stayed on so that he could send us money. You need a lot of money to come to England and live here. Six months later, my father was denounced by one of his former students and thrown in prison. Along with many of his colleagues.

‘He was in prison for eight years. Meanwhile, my mother brought me up. We lived in Oxford. She worked in the university, as a secretary. And then there was an amnesty, and my father was released. He went to Germany, as a political refugee, and then he came here. You can imagine how it was for me. This man, this stranger, claiming to be my father. Coming between me and my mother, who collaborated in the charade. But my father worked hard to win my affections, and he got a job with GlaxoSmithKline and we moved to Uxbridge. We had a nice house. My mother made a lovely garden, and Rana came along. I remember that we were very happy.

‘My mother went back to work after Rana was born, with an insurance company in Wembley. One night she stayed late because a colleague was leaving and there was a party. She was driving home, it was raining, and a lorry ploughed into her car and killed her. My father took it badly. He believed that my mother’s death was a judgement. There was a payment from my mother’s life insurance. My father called it blood money. By then, he had begun to drink heavily. He fell in with some bad people and started to gamble. Cards, high stakes. He lost all of the insurance money, and then he lost everything else. He owed a lot of money to the wrong people, and to cover the debt he started to steal from his job. He was found out, and fired. And his gambling debt was bought by the McBride family, and he was told he would cook drugs for them, to pay it off. He refused, and Rana and I were kidnapped. Held as hostages until my father gave in.

‘So we moved to a little town in East Anglia, on the Flood. You saw what it was like. My father cooked shine. He was so good at it he was sent to Mangala, to cook meq. Rana and I stayed behind. We were hostages again. We weren’t treated badly, but the man and woman who looked after us were crooks. Thieves. My father got into the Elder Culture artefact business. He wanted to make enough money to buy a ticket to Earth. He sent things back to us, too. Things we could sell to make a little money. The people looking after us stole most of the stuff, but they let us keep a few things, including a little bead. And perhaps,’ Fahad said, ‘that was also fate. And perhaps it wasn’t.’

‘This was Ugly Chicken’s bead,’ Chloe said.

‘Who can say if it found its way to us by choice or by accident? You might say that it doesn’t matter, because by whichever path it arrived the destination was the same. But I think that it matters a great deal whether our lives are shaped by the choices we make, or whether they are shaped by the choices of something that stands outside of our ordinary experience.’

‘You’ve thought about this a lot.’

‘Wouldn’t you, if you were in my situation? Our guardians thought that the bead had no value, and gave it to Rana. I believe that the thought wasn’t their own. And I don’t think it was my father’s decision to send it to us, either. I began to draw my pictures. Rana began to talk to her new imaginary friend. And a few weeks later I found out that my father had been killed.

‘I saw how he died,’ Fahad said, his gaze dark and steady. ‘Rana and I escaped. That was the first time Ugly Chicken showed itself to other people. I stole some money, but it wasn’t enough. I was still wondering how I could buy a ticket to Mangala when you found us. Do you see now how it all works out? You saw my pictures and wanted to know what they mean. And they led you to me, and maybe you will help me get what I want.’

Chloe said, ‘If you want Ada Morange to help you find the people who killed your father, to bring them to justice, you’ll have to ask her yourself.’

‘I don’t want them “brought to justice”,’ Fahad said. ‘I don’t want them handed over to the police. I was brought up to believe that we should forgive those who trespass against us. But you and I know that it isn’t enough, don’t we?’

He was right about one thing, Chloe thought. She had been like him once upon a time, back when she had helped to set up the LFM wiki, when she had been looking for the truth about what had happened to her mother. When she had been looking for someone to blame. When she had been trying to make sense of the horror show that had knocked her life completely off course. Yes, Fahad was very like she had been, back then. Scared and angry, boastful and defiant. She understood his bitterness and his hurt, and wished that she could tell him that it would heal, in time. That you live all your life in the presence of your parents, and they’re suddenly gone, and it’s like a raw wound in the heart of your being. You can’t imagine going forward without them, but you do. And, gradually, the wound heals. A poem she had once found spoke of a tree falling in a wood, and the gap it leaves. And into the gap falls sunlight and new life. But she knew that Fahad wouldn’t care to hear that. He was still too raw, too angry. He wanted justice. An eye for an eye, and all that Biblical shit.

She said, ‘If Ada Morange agrees to help you, you’ll have to give something in return. That’s how it usually works. You’ll have to tell us about the pictures, where they are, what they show. You’ll have to tell us what Ugly Chicken really is, and what it can do.’

Fahad turned the pad so that the spire was, for her, the right way round.

‘This is on Mangala,’ he said. ‘It was made by the people who made Ugly Chicken. He was asleep a long time. And now he is awake, and wants to go home. He wants to show us where he belongs and what he can do. But if you want to know more than that, you’ll have to take me to Dr Morange.’

Early the next morning a courier delivered Chloe’s passport, taken from her flat, and brand-new passports for Fahad and Rana. They were driven to a private airfield and boarded a little prop plane that hopped across the Channel to Normandy and landed on a strip mown into a meadow of a farm owned by Karyotech Pharma. Ada Morange and Henry Harris were waiting with a stout middle-aged woman: Rimsha Batti, one of Fahad and Rana’s aunts. She had been found by Ada Morange’s people in Pakistan, and they’d brought her to France to chaperone her niece and nephew.

Rana was shy with this strange woman; Fahad suspected some kind of trick, glancing indifferently at the pictures of his mother and her many relatives that Rimsha displayed on her phone, which she also used as a translator because she had very little English. She said that she had come of her own free will to help her nephew and niece; she had left behind her husband and her own children, her work as a librarian. ‘Dr Morange paid for my air fare, nothing else.’

Chloe was suspicious too. Not of Rimsha, who seemed like a sensible independent woman, but of the way this little family reunion had been arranged. Henry said it was mostly a legal precaution. Fahad was Rana’s brother, but as far as the authorities in Britain were concerned he wasn’t her guardian. Rimsha was prepared to intercede on their behalf, if it came to a battle in the courts.

Henry had evaded the police during the confusion created by Ugly Chicken, and had made his way to France after supervising a little distraction — dispatching lookalikes on a private jet to Shanghai and leaking to a friendly media outlet blurry CCTV of them boarding the plane.

‘It won’t fool Nevers for long, but it might give us a bit of breathing space,’ he told Chloe. ‘Time for you to decide what you want to do next.’

But Chloe already knew what was coming. She’d known ever since she’d seen, as the plane had come in to land, the Mangala shuttle balanced at the horizon.

‘What about you?’ she said. ‘Are you done yet?’

They were sitting in the dappled shade of a grape arbour while Ada Morange talked with Fahad and Rana inside the farmhouse. Henry had shed his down-at-heel private-eye impersonation, was clean-shaven and dressed in black jeans and a white short-sleeved shirt. He looked older. He looked his age.

‘You may be disappointed to know that I’m going all the way,’ he said. ‘If young Fahad agrees to our plan, that is.’

‘As if he has a choice.’

‘Of course he has a choice. We aren’t monsters. We’re trying to do our best for those kids.’

At last, Fahad and Rana came out of the French doors, past the wiry alert man who escorted Ada Morange everywhere. Ex-Foreign Legion, according to Henry. Rana ran off down a slope of glass towards the old apple orchard, arms extended airplane style; Fahad smiled at Chloe and said, ‘She wants to talk to you.’

Ada Morange sat straight-backed in her black wheelchair by the room’s stone fireplace. Heavy oak furniture, oriental rugs on the stone-flag floor, lilies pale as ghosts in a big Chinese vase on a side table. A grandfather clock ticking in a corner. The old woman thanked Chloe for her help, asked her opinion of Fahad.

‘He talked to you openly and willingly. Do you believe him? Do you believe this eidolon can lead us to something interesting, or is the boy spinning a story to get me to take him to Mangala?’

Ada Morange wore a black pencil dress with gauzy sleeves. Classic Chanel. Her white hair was brushed straight back from her forehead. A line taped to the back of her bony hand looped up to a pouch of clear liquid hung on a rod at the back of her wheelchair. A choker of red pearls gleamed like drops of blood against the corded tendons of her neck. In the wreckage of her health she was formidably elegant and commanding.

‘Fahad’s paintings and drawings, his obsession with that landscape…All of that is very real to him. And Ugly Chicken is real, too. No question about that. I saw it,’ Chloe said, with a tingling sensation of remembered panic. ‘A small part of it, anyway.’

‘Yes, when you escaped from the Hazard Police. We examined such CCTV footage as we could obtain, of course, but found nothing. The eidolon must operate directly on the optical nerves. Perhaps also the limbic system, where emotions and memory are regulated.’

‘I think it helped Fahad and Rana escape from their guardians in Norfolk, too,’ Chloe said. ‘Fahad said that it wanted to be found. That’s why, he said, it got inside the heads of Mr Archer and the others in that little cult. That’s why he let them use his pictures, even though he knew it might attract the attention of the wrong people.’

‘He told me that the eidolon wanted to attract your attention,’ Ada Morange said.

‘And yours too, perhaps,’ Chloe said.

‘Indeed. It may have a deeper agenda than we can know. We believe that eidolons like Ugly Chicken are fragments of something much larger. That they’re broken, damaged. But suppose they only appear to be damaged because we don’t really understand them? Suppose we don’t see them for what they really are? Suppose we don’t realise they are manipulating us in ways we can’t see or comprehend? But even if it is not some broken thing, even if it has potency, agency, it is quite possible that it is feeding the boy and his sister fantasies of a place that no longer exists except in its memory.’

‘We can’t know until we go there, can we?’

‘Yes. That’s exactly the problem.’

Ada Morange’s dark gaze reminded Chloe of a chimpanzee she’d once seen in London Zoo. Her eleventh birthday, just before things started to go bad, before chimpanzees had been wiped out by Texas flu. A different kind of intelligence, recognisable but unreadable.

She said, ‘Can your special friend help us?’

‘I have already asked him. Unfortunately, while Unlikely Worlds is not as wilfully enigmatic as the Jackaroo, on this matter he offers no opinion. I fear that there will be no neat ending to this, in the manner of the old Greek plays. Where the Gods descend, and all is explained, and tidied away. No, if we want to know more, we must discover it for ourselves.’

‘Fahad told you what those spires are, didn’t he? What he thinks they are.’

‘Yes, he did. He claims that they are the equivalent of a shuttle terminal, used by the spaceships of the Elder Culture that built it. If that is true, if any trace of them still exists, it will be a wonder. We are utterly dependent on the shuttles to reach the worlds the Jackaroo gave us, and have no control over their schedules or flight plans. And apart from a few disputed fragments around what might be the craters of crash sites, we have never found anything resembling a space vehicle, nor any depiction of space travel, anywhere in the fifteen worlds. We assume that either the Elder Cultures lacked the technology, or that it was as primitive as ours and was abandoned after contact with the Jackaroo. Or that if any Elder Culture once possessed the means for independent travel between the fifteen worlds, all traces have been erased by time. Most ruins are very old, after all, and little more than mineralised traces compressed in layers of rock.

‘That is why,’ Ada Morange said, ‘this will be in the nature of a preliminary investigation. I have rebuilt my company, but its resources are not what they once were. I must test the boy’s claims thoroughly before I mount a full-blown expedition. And Rana will stay here, of course, in the care of her aunt. We will talk to her, let her play games, and in general get to know her and her special friend. She is very charming, is she not? She has not been damaged by her guest. She is herself. That she sees it as a separate entity is very good. Very hopeful. But we cannot let her go with her brother. It would not be right to put her life at risk.’

‘I want to go,’ Chloe said. ‘I want to help Fahad and Rana. I want to see this thing through.’

It burst out of her. It was as if, yes, something else had spoken. But it was also what she wanted.

‘That’s good,’ Ada Morange said. ‘Fahad will help us to find where Ugly Chicken came from, but he has certain conditions. Very bold, that boy. I admire it. One of them you already know about: he wants us to help him find the people who killed his father. The other is that you must accompany him to Mangala.’