The Actuality Read online

  Ignoring him, hoping he goes away, she feels her extremities for damage. The fall was a short one, and miraculously she can find only a single tear to her skin, albeit it is on her elbow, an area of wear.

  She clambers to her feet and works the door handle uselessly. She throws herself against it, but there is no space to get any momentum and it remains rigid.

  She discovers a light switch along the splintered beam above the door and the room is revealed by a dim bulb to be a windowless hole. Mouldy collapsing cardboard boxes lie scattered on the floor but in these she finds only old books and clothes and heaps of damp papers; nothing substantial to use as a tool to help her escape or a weapon when she does.

  She sits on the steps to conserve energy, her cheek against the wood of the door.

  Maplin’s actions don’t surprise her in the least but she is angry that she did not take the potential seriously. Always having had people to look after her, she is still far too trusting. Even though she thought she was learning, she has obviously a long way to go.

  She loses track of time but refuses to put herself into standby so as to remain ready for whatever is required.

  After an hour, she hears Maplin’s snivelling voice on the other side of the door. Their heads are less than an inch apart. ‘I’m so sorry Evie,’ he whispers.

  She can feel the vibration of his breathing, the wood panel minutely resonating.

  ‘I didn’t want to have to do this but I just couldn’t let you go, let you take the horrible risk.’ He goes quiet, waiting for her answer. Seeking reconciliation and reassurance.

  Evie hears him gulp. She calculates whether it will help her position to answer, promising him what he wants in an attempt to win him over. She should try it, she knows. But no lies come from her mouth.

  ‘It’s for your own good,’ he continues, weakly. ‘You will see that when you’ve had a chance to reflect. Then everything can be as it was.’

  His steps retreat and she knows that she should have done more to overcome her rage.

  Later – it could have been just hours, it could have been a day – the door quietly opens. She is lying on the floor, her hair in the dirt.

  Maplin bends in the low doorway, peering down at her. The shadows behind his head make him appear hunchbacked.

  Evie stirs, turning her head towards him, raises herself on an elbow and gazes into the bright light behind. And starts to get up.

  He withdraws. The door closes.

  ‘No,’ she shouts. On her feet and up the few steps in a heartbeat. She throws herself against the wood, a second too late, as the lock clicks.

  He is waiting for you to weaken, run out of power, Simon says, startling her. Since the loss of Daniels, he has provided little in the way of companionship or useful advice. You ought to have feigned system failure . . .

  No, Evie snaps. If that is what you think, you should have said so before, not now, not after, not clever after the event, any fool can do that. They could have been an old married couple, staring and speechless. She feels Simon struggle to reply but she is determined to have the last word. I hate you, she thinks inwardly, as venomously as she can. Stay away!

  23

  Evie is roused again by the sound of bolts sliding across.

  This time she is ready and raises herself upright so that she is flat against the wall, fists clenched.

  The door squeaks open and she steels herself to knock Maplin aside.

  But instead, she finds herself looming over the monkey.

  ‘Come with me,’ he says, backing along the hall, beckoning her to follow.

  Wary of being tricked again, she peers around for an ambush. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He is out.’

  ‘How long will he be gone?’

  The monkey shrugs. ‘Let us not wait here to find out. There is something you must help me with.’

  As she climbs the stairs behind him, amber bars, indicating critical charge, pulse on the edge of her vision.

  At the end of the landing he opens a door, sparking a scurry of shadowy movement. He clambers onto a chair and flicks on the light.

  A collection of human-scaled figures, sprawling on the bare boards, stare up at them. They are female in shape but simple in representation, with narrow waists, glossy lips and pill-shaped heads as bald as eggs. Their airbrushed shells are gouged and dented, with several missing hands, feet, arms and legs.

  The nearest raises herself on her elbows, her forearms short and chubby as a child’s. She reaches out a male hand.

  It is as if Evie has come upon a Frankenstein’s workshop.

  ‘What are they?’ she asks, wary of getting close.

  ‘Shop mannequins,’ the monkey replies dismissively, ‘used to display clothes and provide customers with directions. He took them from skips. He performs tests on them.’

  As the mannequins shuffle towards her, she spots a young girl, lying on her side in the corner, being trampled. How did she get here? Is this why the monkey brought her? Evie steps between the mannequins, her heart in her mouth, and bends down to touch the child’s face. Her skin is cold. Nooo, she moans inwardly, she is just too small, too young! She lifts the hair from the child’s cheek to reveal a face with no mouth and eyes.

  ‘You’re wasting your time; that one is broken,’ the monkey says. ‘Any fool can see that.’

  The pain builds behind her eyes as the tears back up. ‘W-what d-do you w-w-want of me?’ she asks, the stuttering a side-effect of her charge entering the critical zone.

  ‘I want you to free him.’ He points to a cage in the shadows. The creature inside limps forward, a monkey like him. It crouches on its haunches.

  ‘Are there k-keys?’

  ‘If there were, would I be asking you for h-h-help?’ He is openly mocking her, even while expecting her to assist. Her weakness is that transparent.

  The caged monkey presses its cheeks against the bars.

  ‘How do I open it?’ Evie asks.

  ‘You are strong, do something.’

  Evie goes over to the cage and tugs on the lock. The steel of the latch is as thick as her little finger. She takes hold of the bars and pulls. At first nothing gives, then feeling her indignation surge, she manages to bend one an inch. The monkey stretches out its arm and touches her elbow with a fingertip.

  Forcing the bar alongside, she makes a wide enough gap for it to squeeze through.

  Hearing movement behind, she turns quickly and sees one of the mannequins crawling towards her, staring up at her with a glazed smile. Its feet are bolted to its knees and it hauls itself along on its elbows.

  Evie retreats until her back is against the door.

  What can she do here? Freedom for these creatures could never end well.

  The monkey holds up a leather collar attached to the wall by a chain and a pair of cuffs. ‘He was getting these ready for you.’

  ‘I would never have let him.’

  ‘I don’t see how you would have prevented it.’

  Her head swims. Her energy levels are so low, she is close to collapsing.

  She hears the front door close.

  ‘He’s back,’ the monkey says. ‘You need to be smarter this time, or he will outwit you again.’

  24

  Evie leaves the room and stands in the shadows. Maplin sees the open door to the cellar and rushes around the ground floor searching for her. He races up the stairs. His head is down so he doesn’t see her in the doorway of his sister’s room and she swats out, catching him on the shoulder, and casts him back, so that he tumbles in a flailing bundle of arms and legs to the centre landing.

  She descends slowly, holding onto the rail. She is still getting used to stairs after all those years in the apartment, and her arm is trembling from exhaustion. Her fingers have almost no grip. She tries to step over him, but as she does so his eyes flick open and he grabs her ankle and pulls her onto him.

  With her last strength, she levers herself free, but as she clambers past he snatch
es her wrist and drags her back so that she loses her balance again and topples down the final flight, her forehead thudding on the tiles of the hall floor.

  Evie is sitting with Matthew at the table in the garden on a cushioned chair, her legs tucked comfortably under her. It is a summer evening and insects circle the candles that float in coloured glass jars placed on the wood. She has been reading to him from One Thousand and One Nights. Scheherazade, the sultan’s latest wife, living under the daily-renewed threat that she will be beheaded in the morning (as a thousand and one wives have been before her) has managed to survive by making her storytelling too captivating for her husband not to want to hear the ending. It is all about the art of the cliffhanger and, like Scheherazade, Evie closes the book before the story is finished. Matthew glances up sharply, jarred by the interruption. The flames flare across his face. Keep ‘em wanting more, she thinks, gazing back at him mischievously, knowing exactly what she is up to . . .

  She comes to on a rigid surface. The sudden sensation of solidity under her back, in contrast to the soft chair of her imagination, is like being slammed onto hard ground. She holds her breath as the backdrop happiness of the too-lovely memory leaks away, revealing the bleak foreground of her situation.

  Her head is on its side, giving her a view through French windows onto a narrow, overgrown garden ending with a shed. The sun is low in the sky, the light breaking through the trees behind its flat roof and piercing the glass to fall on her face.

  She must be in a room at the back of the house, she thinks. One she hasn’t been in before. Through her cheek she can feel wood under a gritty patina of dust. A dining room table, perhaps. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the door to the hall and that it is closed. She appears to be alone, although she can’t be sure of it. He could be watching from a corner out of her restricted line of sight.

  She has very little strength, only what she is receiving from the morning sun. It must have been its heat that brought her around.

  Evie closes her eyes to concentrate on her body. She tries to lift her hand but it will not rise. She strains, hoping that it is not because of something that has been broken by her fall, and becomes aware of a strap holding down her wrist. Her legs are lifeless too, but lifting her chin an inch, she sees that they are restrained similarly, bands buckled around her ankles, giving her no room for movement, no leverage to free herself even if she had the strength to begin to try.

  From the same glance, she sees that he has removed her outer clothes, leaving her arms and legs bare. Her pale skin gleams fragile and defenceless. She tries to rock from side to side, to loosen something, but it is hopeless and she is merely consuming precious charge with no return.

  Weak as she is, there is not even enough energy for Simon to join her, to help relieve her loneliness, although he probably wouldn’t have been prepared to share any of this. Fear throbs behind her eyes. The monkey’s final words before her encounter with Maplin on the stairs surface – ‘you need to be smarter this time’, he had said. But unfortunately, despite her one thousand core processors, she was not.

  When Evie comes around a second time, the throb in her head has increased but her body is also warmer and a little less weak. A faint high-pitched scraping comes from inside her chest, like from a flywheel not running true. Not that she possesses any such old-fashioned mechanicals. So what could it be? It’d better not be that her gyroscope is cracked. That’d be the end. That’d mean she was truly done for.

  She opens her eyes and catches her breath: he is leaning over her. He withdraws a little as she twists her chin to face him. He has grown wise of what she is capable of, learnt to be mistrustful. Even though, fixed down as she is, she can be no possible threat.

  She is conscious of something clinging to her scalp, pressing her head at multiple points, restricting the lateral movement of her neck. Wires rise from behind her ears into a cluster taped together in the air above her forehead, just within her field of vision if she rolls her eyes. As she lowers her head back to the wood, electrodes tug on her skin. She follows the tangle of bunched wires to a steel machine. On its plain facia, it has only an on/off switch, a pair of black knobs calibrated with white markings and a couple of needle dials. It resembles a little the vintage ‘hi-fi’ Matthew kept in the library for listening to his precious collection of antique disks and which Daniels made an elaborate fuss of delicately cleaning around with a feather duster, exaggerating his carefulness just to make her laugh.

  Evie turns back to Maplin’s face. His expression combines doses of self-pity and injured pride. A youth whose feelings have been hurt. It is a face that wants to inflict pain and be told at the same time that it is in the right. The sort of face that belongs to a boy who plucks the legs and wings from an insect and fries what is left under a magnifying glass.

  ‘I was hoping you’d wake soon,’ he says, sounding gleeful and spiteful both. ‘I’ve been trickling you some juice.’ A sliver of snot, like a slug’s trail, has slid from his nostril and glistens above his lip. His eyeballs bulge larger than ever behind his glasses.

  She is conscious of her charger connected below her rib. This explains the lucidity in her limbs, although its impact is less pronounced than normal. She can also feel the sharp pinch of the wrist and ankle restraints.

  He’s using a second level transformer, Simon mutters, surprising her with his unannounced arrival – how long had he been there? He’s giving us just enough charge to revive us. Just enough but nothing more.

  Oh, she replies inwardly, ignoring the this-is-all-your-fault tone, just glad that she is not facing this alone. She is also learning fast from her mistakes. When Maplin had her locked in the cupboard, she should have engaged, she should have talked to him, told him whatever it was he needed to hear.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmurs, trying it now. It is herself she feels sorry for, but she will pretend for him, if that is what is required.

  She moves her head again to look up at him and is again conscious of the electrodes attached to her scalp. He has her pinned as helpless as a rabbit in a lab.

  ‘What are you doing to me?’ she asks, her voice weak.

  His face has a glow of superiority. ‘It’s a little experiment I’ve been trying on the others. I’ve adapted an EEG rig – an electroencephalogram. It’s intended to detect electrical activity of the brain in humans. But I’ve found that running things in reverse, passing a small charge, can have a calming effect.’

  ‘I can promise to be calm,’ she murmurs, her consciousness drifting again. ‘If that helps.’ Calm is something she’s always been. What he is really asking is for her to hide her feelings and intentions. She can do that too.

  He looks confused and a little irritated. He doesn’t want her to talk her way out of this. They’re too deep in this together to turn back now. His hand hovers over the knobs.

  He wants to make his experiments on me, she thinks, but he also wants to punish me. She is so weak that both thoughts, both shocking, float around detached from one another like petals knocked from the corolla of a lily, drifting independently on the surface of a pond.

  ‘We’re going to find out what’s stopping you from being happy.’ His voice is grown harder, as if he is bracing himself to do something he otherwise might not.

  ‘But I’m not unhapp–’ she replies, her answer cut off by a knife of light.

  Her head squirms on the table top. Her lids are firmly closed but the light emanates from within, from her imagination. A blast as intense as an old-fashioned camera bulb explodes repeatedly against the concave interior of her eyeballs.

  As suddenly as it came, it is gone. Night closes in, the afterglow fading until there is nothing more remaining than a firefly, batting its wings in the dark.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Maplin says. ‘I may have misjudged the setting. I’ve not done this on anything like you before.’

  He referred to her as a ‘thing’. So much for his belief in the rights of her kind.

 
; Maybe this is a way of distancing himself. How he can be so cruel.

  Evie feels his fingers on her face, poking around her eye socket. Gripping her lash, he raises the lid and from just a few inches stares into her eye. Into her. She sees in close-up that his forehead and cheek are bruised. She did that to him when she threw him down the stairs.

  Maplin’s ear is close to her mouth, almost close enough to reach with her teeth, but even if she could, where would that get her? Maybe the worst is over anyway. He has proved his mastery. Whatever the score of who has hurt whom the most, maybe they can agree on a draw. Call it quits.

  ‘Can you let me go?’ she asks in a whisper. She is prepared to promise that she won’t tell anyone about any of this, but there is really no one she could tell anyway.

  ‘I’m scaring you, aren’t I?’ he says, straightening and gazing down at her. He touches her arm gently with a fingertip, moving it to her shoulder and smoothing her hair from her neck.

  Evie nods, slowly lifting her chin within the radius possible. ‘A little,’ she says, by which she means a lot. What does he imagine she would be feeling, strapped to a table with her head wired to a machine?

  ‘There is nothing to be scared of, Evie. Once I’ve found the correct receptors, I can make the adjustments to help you. But you need to tell me what you experienced just then?’

  ‘Light,’ she replies. What is the point in not admitting this? ‘Bright light.’ If she does not answer, he may repeat the test.

  ‘Interesting. Evie, do you know what “qualia” are?’

  She mouths ‘no’. She’s prepared to put up with as much pseudo-scientific lecturing as Maplin can deliver, if it will prevent a repeat of the test.

  ‘Qualia are instances of subjective, conscious experience. They are what we are searching for with this machine. If we can map a response curve to varying stimuli, then we can begin to understand what may benefit you. Just so you know what is happening, with this knob I shift the balance of the charge between the electrodes, with the other I alter the intensity.’