The Gender Game by Bella Forrest (motivational novels .TXT) 📕

sensed a change in his mood. Perhaps he thought she was scared. Perhaps he was right. She remembered crying in the back of a taxi after Simon, her boyfriend, had thrown the pasta pot at her face. The boyfriend that never was. “Are you trying to scare me, Andrew?”

He laughed and turned away. She could not see his expression. “Where is the interface with the computer?” she asked.

“Over here.”

He clambered across the room towards a doorway in the left wall. The plaintive cries of the rats became more audible. So did their smell. Why were there so many? What did they have to eat down here? Each other? She stepped through the gap in the wall.

The room was small. There was a certain power here: it was a room in a room in a room, buried deep in the earth. It had lain in wait for twenty years before Bruce Shimoda arrived. Saskia was struck by the thought that, after she and Garrel completed their underground tour, and this place was capped, its silence would be preserved and its power – the fear it could generate, just this small, concrete-lined room – would grow again. An Egyptian tomb would feel the same.

“It has a creepy feel, don’t you agree?”

Saskia cleared her throat. “It is certainly dusty.”

“Look over here.” He trained his light on the wall to their immediate right. There were two alcoves. On her first sweep, Saskia had mistaken them for shower cubicles. The transparent doors were broken. One was discoloured. She sniffed and there it was: dried blood. “That’s where Proctor killed Caroline Benson, the soldier assigned guard duty.”

She walked tentatively to the booth and peered in. She saw only pieces of meat. There were no impurities. Caroline had died naked. She took another picture. “Tell me how she died.”

“The computer interface works like a dust-storm,” Garrel said. She was struck by the casual interest in his voice. He was not, she realised, the technophobe she had taken him for. “It uses tiny flying robots to simulate surfaces. If you change the arrangement, you change the apparent surface. A small army of those little robots could form a very solid edge. A sharp edge. Or very many sharp edges. That’s how she died. There were safety mechanisms built into the program. They were turned off. For technical reasons, Shimoda did not have the power to do that. Proctor did. He turned that booth into a giant blender.”

Saskia nodded. There was another smell. Decay.

“That what you want?” asked Garrel.

“Please?”

“You wanted to get into Proctor’s head. Are you close enough? You can almost smell him, can’t you?”

“I-I would,” she stammered, “I would like to leave now.”

“It has atmosphere, doesn’t it? My little Magical Mystery Tour.”

“I would like to leave.” Her voice was firmer. Her hand rested on her gun. “Now.”

He laughed. She saw, despite the darkness, that his expression hardly changed. This man was strange. But what power did he really have? What was he compared to the Angel of Death?

“Of course,” he said. “Let’s go.”

They retraced their steps through the debris. When they reached the corridor, Garrel was quick to attach himself to a rope. “Going up is more fun than coming down,” he said. He connected the decelerator and climbed upwards in a caterpillar-like motion, alternately grasping the rope his hands and feet. After a few metres he looked down at her. “Are you coming?”

“Yes. I just need to check my recorder took those pictures. I don’t want to get to the surface and find there was an error.”

“Well, don’t stay too long. I heard some noises just now.”

“What kind of noises?”

“Just noises.”

He caterpillared upwards. His breath echoed down the shaft and sounded close. She was alone. She willed herself to picture a summer’s day and her fear withdrew. On with the job. She gazed at the luminous screen on her recorder. The first picture, being the last taken, showed Caroline’s remains. It was monochrome and crisp. It showed every detail and more. The room had contained an upturned filing cabinet, three broken chairs and large chunks of masonry. She had not seen them. In fact, she had imagined that part of the room to be empty. Next, she checked the picture of the main laboratory. Next, the corridor shot.

The blood fell from her head. She did not collapse quickly. She fought hard. She sank into a curtsey.

No, she thought. Impossible.

The picture showed the corridor – this corridor, right now – in almost perfect brilliance. She saw wreckage, charcoaled furniture and loose paper. But on the wall immediately to the left of the doorway, someone had written a message.

Impossible.

It had been intended for her. It had been written in German. It had been written on the wall where she took the infra-red photograph, where it appeared white on the grey surface. Carefully, she played her torch over the wall. Nothing. She looked again at the recorder. The text was clearly visible in the picture.

She swallowed. The writer had used a form of paint that was visible only in the infra-red portion of the spectrum.

The message read:

Das Kribbeln in meinen Fingerspitzen lässt mich ahnen, es scheint ein Unglück sich anzubahnen.

Her heart sucked and pushed. She could hear its valves. She looked back at the text. Translated into English, it would read:

The pricking in my fingertips lets me say

(it seems) bad luck is on the way.

It was a translation of a line from Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth. By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. It was horribly familiar. And yet she had no memory of the play itself. Macbeth was a play, wasn’t it? Didn’t it have three witches? The Fates? Clotho, she spins the thread of life. Lachesis, she determines its length. Atropos, she cuts it.

Spin, measure, snip.

A tear ran down one cheek. Her mind had bent under two personalities (though she felt whole) and now, like an overloaded bridge, it had snapped.

“No,” she said firmly. The word echoed. The darkness sent it back.