Something Coming Through

23. The Chapel

Norfolk | 9 July

The airboat was fast and surprisingly quiet, cutting through the mist that hung over the water, passing the headland of the island and a clutch of half-drowned roofless houses, entering a channel between stands of tall reeds. A maze of gravel shoals, mudbanks and salt marsh where there’d once been open water, created by shifts in tides and currents that had transported material eroded from the flooded margins of the coast and deposited it here.

Henry Harris perched in the chair in front of the airboat’s fan, using a lever to steer the little craft. Sandra Hamilton, on the bench seat with Chloe and Jack Baines, called out directions to him and told Chloe about the drug business.

‘It’s a small-time operation. They grow Cthulhu’s claw out here, process it at the shrimp farm, send it on to their bosses in London. We’re going out to the centre of their plantations.’

It was an old sea fort, Sandra said, built in the Second World War to defend the east coast from German mine-laying aircraft. It had been decommissioned in the late 1950s, and sold to an eccentric property developer. He had rented it to a series of pirate radio stations in the 1960s and 70s, and later it had been used as a film set, the location for a reality TV programme, and a platform for servers of a website that enabled peer-to-peer sharing of every kind of data. After the death of its owner in the first decade of the new century the government had seized it in lieu of payment of inheritance tax; it was now rented to a group of Flemish nuns, Les Recluses Missionaires, a renegade contemplative order which had quit Belgium during the civil war.

There had been eight of them once; now there were only two, Sandra said. ‘Or at least, that’s what our friend would like the authorities to believe.’

Chloe said, ‘Two sisters. You didn’t look very far for your cover story, Mr Baines. Do they really see sea devils?’

Baines shrugged. He was hunched at one end of the bench, handcuffed to its handrest.

‘Mr Baines and his wife are the caretakers of the sea fort,’ Sandra said. ‘But their real business is growing patches of Cthulhu’s claw in various spots in the marsh.’

Baines started to say something, then thought better of it. Chloe felt a little sorry for him.

She said, ‘Sahar Chauhan was their cook, wasn’t he?’

Sandra said, ‘He lost his wife, got a bad gambling habit, lost his job. The people who run the London end of this thing bought his debt and sent him out here to cook shine. Call it a kind of apprenticeship. He passed with flying colours, and was sent to Mangala. Probably to help out with their meq business. You can manufacture shine here, because Cthulhu’s claw grows in saltwater marshes, but to synthesise meq you need fresh biochine blood and a skilled biochemist. Isn’t that right, Mr Baines?’

‘I didn’t have anything to do with it,’ Jack Baines said.

‘Of course not,’ Sandra said. ‘You just grow a psychotropic alien plant, and smuggle cigarettes on the side.’

‘Sahar must be a hell of a chemist,’ Chloe said.

She remembered a TED talk that Daniel Rosenblaum had once given. He’d argued that human consciousness could be enlarged and transformed by alien drugs. Many users would be killed, yes, but evolution was neither kind nor cruel. Individual fates did not figure in it. According to Daniel, those who survived the new psychotrophs would become the first astronauts of a new kind of inner space, and their explorations would slowly but surely turn humanity into something beyond ordinary imagination. Chloe had never taken Daniel’s ideas seriously. The man came up with this wicked mad stuff because he liked to provoke — liked being the maverick, the outsider, a wizard conjuring outrageous theories. If ideas about the Jackaroo and the Elder Cultures don’t seem crazy, he liked to say, they can’t be right. But now she wondered if Fahad Chauhan’s visionary pictures might have been inspired by something glimpsed when he’d used some kind of drug supplied by his father. Something new and even weirder than shine or meq. And she also wondered if she had become involved in a turf war between Sahar’s employers and Ada Morange. It was not a good thought.

At last a shadow loomed out of the mist. Henry throttled back the fan and turned the airboat towards it. Chloe leaned forward on the bench seat, straining to see details as the shadow resolved into a rectangular platform supported by two fat, rust-stained concrete pillars. It stood at one end of a long mudbank crested with marram grass. Up on the platform, flat-roofed buildings huddled inside a low perimeter wall of raw breeze-block. Several wind turbines reared into the streaming mist, blades turning slowly.

The airboat nosed towards a landing stage at the foot of one of the pillars. Sandra jumped out and made the little craft secure; Henry told Jack Baines to be a good boy, and unlocked the handcuffs that fastened him to the bench.

Chloe was the last to climb the rusty ladder to the fort’s platform. A man was waiting there, tall and young and alert, dressed in tunic and trousers in grey and white camo that matched her jacket. He was cradling a matte-black shotgun with a pistol grip and a wide bore: a riot gun that fired non-lethal beanbag rounds. Chloe had been shot by one once, years ago, when she had been part of a protest against building a shopping mall at the edge of the memorial zone in central London. It had hurt like hell, and the resulting bruise, across her hip and half her back, had been spectacular.

The young man, Leo Halifax, led them through a junkyard clutter of coiled steel hawsers, oil drums, packing crates and rusting machine parts, everything dripping wet in the mist, to the cluster of buildings. Prefabricated huts and shipping containers jammed together, raised on footings of crudely mortared concrete blocks, heavy tarpaulins lashed over flat roofs with spiderwebs of ropes.

A warped plywood door opened onto a square room with a floor of pale driftwood carefully fitted together and mortared with black tar. A second man in camo clothing was sitting on a kitchen chair, watching a screen tiled with windows that showed different views of the fort’s platform and the misty marshland around it. As they crowded inside, he turned around and said, ‘Nothing showing.’

‘Any trouble getting in?’ Henry said.

‘Their security system was full of holes,’ the man said. ‘The drone took it down without breaking a sweat.’

A dumpy woman in her fifties sat on an old brass bed in the corner of the room, under a framed picture of the Virgin Mary rolling her eyes and clutching her chest like the ‘before’ picture of an antacid ad. The woman wore a moth-eaten cardigan and a headscarf; her sandals didn’t quite touch the floor. A pectoral cross crudely welded from steel hung around her neck. For a moment, Chloe wondered if she was one of the nuns, then saw that her wrists were fastened with plastic strip. Jack Baines stepped towards her, asked if she was all right.

‘You had to get involved,’ she said. She had a heavy accent, German or Dutch or Flemish.

‘And you had to tell them everything.’

‘You expect me to keep quiet? This is not one of your stupid films.’

‘Gert was very cooperative,’ the first young man, Leo, said.

‘Sit by your wife,’ Henry told Jack Baines. ‘We won’t take up much more of your time.’

The man sat down slowly, staring at Henry with a mixture of unease and defiance; Henry, Sandra and the two young men held a brief conference, their backs turned to Chloe, who failed to not feel excluded.

On a desk made of a length of plywood and a couple of trestles, a big monitor was showing the ancient starfield screensaver, triggering a memory of her mother’s study. For the longest time, she and Neil had kept the room as their mother had left it. Chloe had liked to sit in there, sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep. A narrow fourth bedroom with a wooden clerk’s desk and her mother’s ancient desk computer under the window, a chaise longue with lumpy upholstery, two steel filing cabinets and shelves of books, posters for old exhibitions in cheap frames, hundreds of photos and clippings Blu-tacked to one wall. Neil sat in there sometimes, too. It was the guest bedroom now. Chloe and Neil had cleared it out over a hot summer’s weekend a couple of months before he married. Had taken down the collage and packed the books and the old posters in plastic boxes they’d stacked in the roof space, loaded everything else into a hired van and taken it to the recycling centre. It had been liberating, actually. Not from their mother’s memory, never that, but from the hopeless weight of their own past.

Chloe stepped over to the desk and moved the mouse. The screensaver vanished and the monitor filled with icons tiled over an image of Sylvester Stallone, bare-chested and toting an unfeasibly big gun.

‘Don’t touch that,’ Jack Baines said.

Chloe smiled at him, said, ‘You’re a film fan. Me too.’

She totally didn’t go for those old films full of explosions and macho posturing, but the first thing you did in an interview was try to establish some common ground. The ploy didn’t work on Jack Baines, though. He ignored her, returned his attention to Henry Harris and the others, huddled in their private conflab.

Chloe studied the small tapestries hung on the wall over the desk: a sleeping cat, a dolphin caught in mid-leap, a starburst of lines stitched in different lengths and colours on black velvet. She said to the woman, ‘Are these yours?’

The woman’s gaze was dark and suspicious. ‘What if they are?’

‘Don’t talk to her,’ Jack Baines said. ‘She’s trying to play good cop.’

‘I’m not a cop,’ Chloe said.

‘Oh really? Because I saw what you did, when that bloke knocked off that avatar.’

‘Did you also see the police arresting me afterwards? I’m a civilian,’ Chloe said. ‘A researcher concerned about two missing kids. You were looking after them, I bet you’re concerned about them too.’

‘I’m concerned you lot want to use them like lab rats.’

The little huddle broke up. Henry dragged a chair across, sat close to Jack Baines and the woman. ‘You’re in a corner, Jack. You and your charming wife. Your bosses can’t help you now. Only I can. So how about telling me why they are so keen to find the kid.’

‘And if I don’t, you’ll what? Hurt me?’

‘How about this. Tell me what I need to know, and I won’t tell anyone about the nuns.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

Henry looked over at Sandra. She said, ‘We used infra-red imaging to check out this place, Mr Baines. It showed your wife, no one else.’

Henry said, ‘What happened to them, Jack?’

Baines looked at his wife. ‘You told them, didn’t you?’

‘They already knew,’ she said.

Henry said, ‘Your wife claims that they died of natural causes: that you buried them in the marshes. I’m prepared to believe that if you cooperate. Look at me, Jack. Look at me so I can see if you’re telling the truth. Why do your bosses want the kid?’

‘She told you everything, I bet,’ Baines said, staring at his wife, who stared right back.

‘And now I want to hear the story from you,’ Henry said. ‘To see how your version tallies with your wife’s. If they do, we’ll let you get on with your lives. Such as they are. If not, we’ll let the police know about those two poor holy women. And when your bosses find out you’ve been talking to the police…’

‘It’s nothing,’ Gert Baines said.

‘It means something to your bosses,’ Henry said. ‘That’s why the kid ran away from this place, isn’t it? And why he ran off again, when my friend Chloe found out about his pictures. So, and this is the last time I’ll ask nicely, what does he have that your bosses want?’

‘Don’t say anything,’ Baines told his wife.

‘I already tell them,’ she said. ‘I tell them it is nothing. A worthless little trinket.’

‘What kind of trinket?’ Chloe said.

‘Why don’t you tell her, Jack?’ Henry said.

‘What’s the point, if you already know?’

‘The point is, I’ll know if you and your wife are telling the truth.’

‘It’s just this little bead,’ Baines said. ‘Okay?’

‘Where did she get this bead? And don’t lie, because I’ll know.’

‘Her father sent it to her.’

‘From Mangala.’

Baines nodded, a tight jerk of his head.

‘What kind of bead? Describe it.’

‘Small,’ Baines said, holding this thumb and forefinger less than a centimetre apart. ‘Sort of like green glass.’

‘I’ve seen it,’ Chloe said, remembering with a quick spark of excitement Rana Chauhan’s bracelet.

Henry looked over at her, asked if she thought it could be the source of Fahad’s inspiration.

‘There are plenty of Elder Culture artefacts that look a little like stones or beads. Tesserae from tombs in the City of the Dead on First Foot and elsewhere. Sea glass from the factories on Yanos. Fragments of the shadow mosaics on Tian or Syurga…’

Chloe was remembering the red string and its green bead, remembering the little girl mentioning what might have been an imaginary friend or a favourite toy, might have been something else. Ugly Chicken says she’s nice.

‘And it might contain one of your alien ghosts.’

‘An eidolon. Yes, why not?’

Henry thought about that for a moment, then turned back to Gert and Jack Baines and asked them how Sahar had managed to smuggle it back to Earth. Gert said that Sahar had bribed one of his fellow employees to post letters and presents to his son and daughter.

‘So Sahar sent this Elder Culture bead,’ Henry said. ‘The kid, Fahad, started painting these pictures…What then?’

‘You think you know everything,’ Jack Baines said.

‘I need you to tell me what happened.’

‘Fuck you.’

Sandra said, ‘You were looking after Fahad and Rana. Keeping them here.’

‘So?’

‘Be patient with me, Mr Baines. I’m trying to understand the situation.’

Gert Baines said, ‘They couldn’t go with their father. Too expensive. And anyway, the little girl, she was far too young.’

‘Because no one under sixteen is allowed to go up and out,’ Sandra said. ‘But didn’t they have family? Uncles, aunts, grandparents?’

‘We were told to look after them,’ Gert Baines said. ‘Make sure they don’t talk to people. So that’s what we do.’

Henry said, ‘They were kept as hostages.’

‘We treat them good.’

‘Too good,’ Jack Baines said.

‘Because they escaped,’ Henry said. ‘A couple of kids got the better of you.’

Baines shrugged.

Chloe said, ‘You let the kids keep stuff that Sahar sent, didn’t you? Letters and little presents and so on.’

Gert Baines said, ‘Why not? We are not monsters. We do the right thing by these kids.’

Chloe said, ‘And you didn’t tell your bosses about it.’

Jack Baines said, ‘Like Gert said, we did the right thing by them. Let them keep in contact with their old man.’

Henry, catching on, said, ‘Out of the goodness of your heart? Bullshit. Sahar bribed someone to send this stuff, and he bribed you, too.’

‘Sahar was my friend,’ Baines said, looking offended. ‘So I helped him out a little.’

Chloe said, ‘He sent this bead. What else?’

Baines shrugged. ‘Scraps, mostly. A pebble. Shards of some kind of plastic stuff. Something that looked a bit like a feather.’

Henry said, ‘Is any of this stuff still around?’

‘The kids took it all.’

‘Or you sold it,’ Henry said.

‘Think what you like.’

‘So why, if you were so nice to the kids, did they run off?’

‘If you find them, you can ask them.’

Sandra said, ‘We found the video clip, Mr Baines. We know what your bosses did to Sahar Chauhan.’

‘Them up there aren’t my bosses.’

‘But they sent the clip to show you what happened to people who stepped out of line,’ Henry said. ‘Am I right? How did Sahar step out of line? Why was he killed?’

‘Maybe you should ask his bosses.’

‘Maybe I should tell the police about those two nuns,’ Henry said.

Baines looked at his wife, who gave a fractional nod.

‘Sahar was a good cook,’ Baines said. ‘The best. But there was a problem up there. His boss was put away on some bullshit charge. And meanwhile, Sahar was involved with these other people, smuggling things out. The stuff he sent the kids was only half the story. I think he was trying to earn enough to buy a ticket home. I don’t know the details. But the guy that was sent up to sort things out found out about it. And yeah, I saw what happened to him, afterwards. I saw it and I deleted it.’

‘You put it in your browser’s recycling bin,’ Sandra said. ‘Not quite the same thing.’

Chloe felt something cold grip her from head to foot. She said, ‘What did they do to him? To Sahar?’

Sandra hesitated. Henry said, ‘They crucified him, basically. They nailed him to a wall and they shot him in the head. And they videoed it.’

Chloe looked at Jack and Gert Baines. ‘When was Fahad’s father killed?’

‘About three months ago,’ Sandra said. ‘That’s the date of the video, although it could have been altered. We can check it out more thoroughly when we get back.’

Chloe said, ‘Fahad saw it. He saw it, and he realised that he might be in danger too, and he took off with his sister.’

Gert Baines said, ‘The computer we have here, it is a piece of shit. The boy knows something about these things, and my husband is cheap, won’t pay anyone to fix it. So he lets the boy. I told him, no. But he doesn’t listen. And now look what happens. They steal our money and run away, and bring all this trouble on our heads.’

‘I fucking deleted it,’ her husband said.

Henry said, ‘Dragging it to the recycling bin doesn’t delete it. Even I know that. The kid found out about his father, didn’t he, and he ran away. Him and his little sister. Because they were scared they might be next.’

‘We wouldn’t have done anything,’ Jack Baines said.

‘Like you didn’t do anything to those two nuns,’ Henry said.

‘We didn’t tell anyone when they died, that’s all. And fuck you for thinking otherwise.’

Baines’s anger seemed genuine.

Henry said, ‘Are your bosses looking for Fahad and Rana?’

‘Why should they? Sahar’s dead, they don’t give a shit about two kids.’

‘And they don’t know about the Elder Culture stuff and Fahad’s pictures because you didn’t tell them. Because if you did, they’d know you’d been taking backhanders for delivering the mail.’

‘You try to be nice,’ Baines said. ‘And look what it gets you.’

‘Your idea of “nice” being to keep two kids prisoner,’ Henry said.

‘We fed and clothed them,’ Gert Baines said. ‘We made sure they went to school.’

‘I hope you find them,’ her husband said, with sudden force. ‘You fucking deserve to find them. And good luck when you do. Because you’re meddling in things you have no idea how bad they are.’

Henry said, ‘Oh, we’ll find them. Count on it. And we’ll take better care of them than you and your charming wife.’

Sandra said, ‘You’ve been very helpful, Mr and Mrs Baines. Chloe, I said there was something you needed to see. Henry, why don’t you go with her while I wrap things up?’

The young man, Leo, led Chloe and Henry Harris through a kitchen and storage space fitted into a shipping container, down a narrow corridor walled with unpainted plywood.

‘It would appear that each of the nuns had their own chapel,’ Leo said, opening one of the doors at the end. ‘They took Mass separately, never saw each other. Mad. There’s a light switch here. Wait…’

A rack of fluorescent lights flickered on. The room was small, maybe three metres by two. There was a plain altar draped in white cloth with a crucified Christ hung over it and a kneeling stool in front. But that wasn’t what Chloe saw at first. The walls of the little room were lined with wood panelling, and every square centimetre had been painted over. A diorama of red rocks and red sand and a dark blue sky wrapped around the room. Cliffs, distant hills. The orange splash of a fat sun high in one corner of the ceiling. And along one wall were the spires, throwing short shadows across a stretch of ground where grey vegetation coiled around boulders and shelves of rock.

Chloe stepped close to study the fretwork of the spires, their thorny projections. Something crouched at the very tip of one, a bag-like body and several ropy limbs knotted around a spar.

She could see brush marks. She could see dribbles of paint. She could see paint spatters. A thickness or rim of pinkish paint outlined the rocky horizon. Rough stippling suggested shadows. But when she stepped back the imperfections and blemishes and exposed technique blended into a totality that plucked a wire inside her.

Leo said, ‘Gert Baines said that Fahad painted it just before he ran away. He used ordinary emulsion paint. The cans and brushes are over there, in the corner. Did it in two days, according to her. Barely ate, barely slept. It was like he was possessed, she said.’

‘I need a record of this,’ Chloe said.

‘I’m already all over that,’ Leo said. ‘Used our drone to take a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree hi-def panorama.’

His camo suit had taken on the red tones of the painted landscape; so had Chloe’s jacket. As if they were both blushing.

Chloe thought of a severe old woman kneeling here, dressed in a habit and the kind of winged wimple that Belgian nuns wore in old films, surrounded by this wild alien beauty. An image with its own strangeness. Then she remembered that the two nuns were dead, buried somewhere out in the marshes.

‘We have to tell the police about the nuns,’ she said. ‘I don’t care what you promised Jack Baines. He and his wife might have killed them. And their families should know what happened to them.’

Henry and Leo exchanged glances. Henry said, ‘We’re operating in a semi-legal area right now. And Baines and his wife and their little down-home drug-growing thing are a side issue. The kid who did this,’ he said, gesturing at the diorama that surrounded them, ‘is in danger. He could end up like his father if we don’t find him first.’

Leo said, ‘Sandra said that you should see everything? There’s stuff in the kids’ bedroom, too.’

It was a small square room with a high window blinded by dried sea-salt. Bunk beds, a wardrobe with oak-finish veneer splitting from its MCF carcass, a musty odour of damp and mould. And plasterboard walls densely covered with black lines and loops from floor to ceiling. Even the door was covered. Chloe thought of the thorny scribbles in Fahad’s tumblr, wondered if he had tried to reproduce the interior of one of his spires. Tried to imagine sleeping here…

There were drawings taped to the plasterboard walls. Sketches in red and black crayon of the spires and the desert landscape. A collage of images of cage fighters in outlandish sci-fi gear, pumped-up muscles glistening, faces contorted into snarls to show fangs or serrated shark teeth. Masks, body mods. And a poster, a fighter in silver shorts and a broad gold belt with a sunburst buckle that really worked its pulp sci-fi vibe, bare chest ridged with dermal armour, spikes jutting from elbows and wrists, standing with a bubble helmet tucked under one arm against a starry sky dominated by a ringed planet striped with Day-Glo orange and green. The fighter’s cheesy nom de combat, Max Predator, was scrawled in thick silver felt-tip across the lower left-hand corner.

‘Kid liked wrestling,’ Henry said, perhaps missing this major clue, or perhaps pretending not to see it.

‘We tossed the room,’ Leo said. ‘We didn’t find any artefacts—’

‘Because Jack Baines eBayed them,’ Henry said. ‘Or threw them out, when he found what happened to Sahar.’

‘—but we did find this.’

Leo unfolded a square of paper. A childish scribble, wobbly crayoned lines in a rainbow of colours raying out from a central point.

Chloe remembered Rana Chauhan, holding up a drawing for her to inspect. She thought of Gert Baines’s tapestry.

Leo’s walkie-talkie crackled. Sandra Hamilton’s voice said, ‘We have visitors.’