D has just emerged from a Public Inquiry into an incident in Book One, The Last Changeling:
D made his way
towards Westminster Bridge
It bound his
entire existence. Everything he did to
keep people like those gossipers safe, depended upon it. Yet it was a fragile thing.
A single
snowflake fluttered down and alighted gently upon him. D paused and studied the
speck of white slowly melting into the black wool of his sleeve. Nestling there, it struck him as a good match
for his thoughts. Secrecy was like snow,
it built up in layers until you had a thick, seemingly stable covering. All it took for a disaster was for a weak
layer to be incorporated into the pack.
Then there would
be an avalanche.
Everything he
was facing now - the multiple public and private inquiries, had all stemmed from
one member of D9 breaking away and trying to force such a collapse. A torrent of news had hit the internet and
only extreme vigilance, together with some cunning misdirection, had buried the
most compromising information. The rest
had been left, hidden in Plain Sight for anyone to see. Stories so sensational, they openly invited
scornful disbelief.
D sighed, and
stood, looking out across the broad sweep of the Thames
at the skeletal ellipse of the London Eye. The Houses of Parliament were behind him,
still enshrouded in scaffolding following their bruising encounter with the
metahominid hordes. D wearily stretched
his neck, bending his head so his left ear touched his left shoulder, listening
as his bones cracked loudly.
A sparse
scattering of snowflakes fluttered and fell, and then no more. D raised his odd eyes to the heavens. The sky had taken on a greyer tint, and the
light was lemon yellow. The bulging
clouds were holding onto their payload of snow for now, but the strange
storm-light promised there was more to come.
He plucked
himself from his reverie, and started again across the bridge. A sudden scurry of wind whipped his straggly
black fringe away, and he noticed the young woman walking towards him, pushing
a buggy. Stranger still, she seemed to
have noticed him. She made direct eye contact for a split
second, before scurrying past, furiously stabbing the buggy ahead of her on the
pavement like a weapon. D continued but his pace quickened. In that instant
of what almost seemed like recognition, his precision memory had recorded her
every detail.
Late twenties. Medium height, slender build. Dark grey eyes.
Skeletal face, high forehead, long thin
nose, overly large mouth. No makeup. Thin, straight shoulder length hair, originally well cut,
now grown out. Natural mouse overlaid
with chestnut dye. Good colour, possibly a vegetable dye. Professional looking application suggests she
used a salon. Re-growth reveals she
hasn't been back in at least four months.
Thin, cotton summer dress, pale green print with white daisies. Pale beige knee length mac, belt
missing. Black leggings and grey
converse trainers. Size five. Well made clothes. All out of season, suggests she has not had
the money, or possibly, the inclination, to buy more. Bracelet style tattoo of stars in red and
purple on left wrist. Out of place with elegant clothes suggests
early error. Wild Child rebelling
against moneyed family perhaps? Further evidenced by two piercings on each ear,
no earrings. Unwashed hair and dark ringed eyes, but no obvious signs of drug
misuse. Creased boutique carrier bag beneath buggy suggests she's had money but
not now. Similarly, flexible pushchair
is expensive, and no older than two years.
Likely to have been acquired for this, her first child…
Then D's inner
analysis finally got to the meat of the matter:
…Except
the thing in that buggy is no human child…
As he hurried
away, D turned, carefully casual, to cast a glance back at her. She had stopped now and unaware of his
observation, was staring across the broad parapet. She was un-strapping the thing that was
lolling the pushchair.
He assessed his
options. He couldn't approach her, he
didn't want to spook her. He worked out
how long it would take to get into position.
Time enough.
He loped along
the bridge. In that time, she had lifted
the small body clear of the buggy, and had placed it on the parapet. The thin tide of people swept uncaringly
past. Londoners and tourists alike, no
one seemed bothered there might be a problem, much less a potential tragedy
unfolding with the junkie and her kid on the bridge.
D quickened his
already furious pace. If she threw that
thing into the water, she would never be able to get her real child back. He began to run.
He raced away
from her, in the opposite direction, off the bridge and down, barely
registering the distant rolling crash and rattle of skateboarders in the Queen
Elizabeth Hall undercut.
Within three
minutes of first sighting her, he was beneath the bridge. It was low tide. He slid and skidded down a set of greenly
slurried steps. Then he struggled out of
his huge coat, cast off his big boots, and crunched painfully across the stony
debris field of the foreshore.
He hadn't time
to worry about what liquid-dwelling enemies might be lurking in the freezing
waters, he hurled himself in and struck out toward the centre of the
bridge. Much faster at swimming than
walking, he finned his huge hands and quickly battered his way through the Thames
choppy green wavelets. The elegant
flattened arches of Westminster Bridge
Leaping like a
sea creature, he exploded out of the water and caught the thing by its hooded
jacket. At his touch, it opened its
sickly yellow eyes and hissed. D quelled
his desire to dunk it and held it high above the river. It was struggling now, but he held it
firmly. As he turned to head back,
something bigger plummeted down and smashed through the surface just behind
him.
In one fluid
movement, D spun, stuffed the creature beneath his arm and struck out towards
the still foaming disturbance where the young woman had jumped in. Gasping, she popped up again almost beneath
him. Her wide eyes were fixed and
terrified, her frantically flailing arms betraying her as a non-swimmer. Instinct made her crane her neck to keep her
head above the water, but she was choking and wildly overcompensating. D calmly grabbed the back of her coat collar
before she could sink again and pulled her face clear of the surface. She responded by clinging to his arm with a
desperate strength. Hampered by her and
the squirming creature pinned beneath his other arm, D made slower progress
back to dry land.
By now, some people
above had spotted the vacant buggy and were staring down into the water and
pointing. D's feet hit the bottom still
some distance out, but the woman made no attempt to stand and he was forced to
drag her like a sack along the rough stones and shingle crusted mud to the
shore. He dumped her just clear of the
water. She didn't make a sound, she
simply lay shivering amidst the stinking river detritus. Before putting his boots back on, D grabbed
his coat and wrapped the thing firmly inside it. Already he could hear a distant siren.
He looked back
at the half drowned woman. There was
nothing he could say. They both knew she
hadn't tried to kill her child.
Her real child
had been taken from her months ago.
Out of the
sightline of the gathering spectators on the bridge, he clambered quickly back
up the steps. If that poor woman was
ever to be reunited with her lost baby, he would have to move quickly.
The yellow-eyed
thing swaddled in his coat was still moving, but D was keenly aware that
normally, he should have been barely able to hold onto it.
Something was
very wrong.
D loped back
across the bridge, heading towards his car.
Despite being clad in baggy wet clothes, and carrying a moving black bundle
beneath his arm, still his strange skill at not being noticed held and indeed, no-one took much notice of him. A
little way along the bridge, he skirted the gathering crowd. The attending police officers and bystanders circled
around the empty buggy, were too distracted watching the woman below them being lifted
onto a stretcher to register him passing by.
For his part, D
was too busy to pay much heed to them.
His mind raced ahead. Locating a
lost human child, stolen away and hidden in a hill fort or barrow normally
took weeks of careful research. By the
look of the thing in his coat, it would have to be accomplished far more
quickly. Before it died. If it did,
there could be no exchange. Assuming it
survived, then there was still the actual rescue mission to be executed - a swap
involving the restoration of the baby's sickly metahominid counterpart back
into its proper environment and the recovery of the human child it had
replaced.
D understood there
was no way of knowing how long it would take to accomplish. All he knew was that if the malign thing he
was now carrying beneath his arm through the busy London
crowds died, then the stolen human child would remain trapped in the wrong world
forever.
He returned to
his old battered Saab to find a parking ticked gracing its windscreen. That was the least of his troubles. Opening the boot, he dumped the dark bundle
inside, reconsidered, and grabbed it back out again. He needed to keep it where he could see
it. It was risky, but he put it in the
passenger foot well. Holding his breath,
he finally turned the ignition key.
Whilst the engine hummed into life, he tensed, waiting for a reaction,
but none came.
Too unwell to
react, the changeling lay motionless. © FRMaher 2013
That's your lot for now!
