Death in the Black Wood by Oliver Davies (epub read online books .txt) 📕

me much, Con.” Shat shrugged. “As Aldous Huxley said, it’s not a bad thing to open those doors every so often and I’ve trained myself to handle the effects. Brady bought everything I did as if of course I must be some alien creature. What else could I be? He thought he was working for a ‘good’ alien, saving the fucking world from the ‘bad’ ones. Anyway, that’s when he decided to see if the torc did anything. He put it on me when he came back down last night.”

“And?”

“And, suddenly, hey presto, I could both understand and speak English. That didn’t even make him blink. Neither of them seemed very happy with what I had to say though. I told Brady his pal shouldn’t be here.” Shay fixed me with a serious look. “That Alter is totally psychotic. It hates the entire human species so much that it’s convinced itself it really is an alien. Anyway, I played to that delusion. I told them that this was our world, and nobody else was supposed to come near it. I fed them a real load of nonsense about how their full moon rituals in ‘our’ places were making our ‘gates’ here go on the fritz, and that I’d been sent to find them to warn his friend to pack it in and piss off back to wherever it came from. We’d deal with any other aliens that came here, like we always had.”

He tilted his head. “Brady lapped it all up, no problem, but it pissed his Alter off no end. He kept insisting I was a lying little snake and made Brady keep zapping me with that fucking taser gun and a nasty stinging cattle prod he had too. I just kept pretending it didn’t hurt, and as I wasn’t showing any fear, I didn’t trigger anything worse than that. Once it was clear I wasn’t going to change my tune, the Alter made Brady take the torc off me, and they went off for the night.”

That had been last night. “What did you do then?”

“Once my muscles finally stopped quivering? I opened up the armband and got my little lockpick set out.”

The armband, like the torc, was an ingenious bit of decoration for hiding things in. You had to press on various parts simultaneously with different fingers to spring the catches that opened them up. The inside of the armband had recesses in it that the picks could clip into.

“I’d practised on the manacle and the cell door the night before so I was pretty quick with them by then. Brady had left both the torc and his taser gun on the table out in the main cellar. I retrieved my little wrapped up bundle of tools from the torc and dismantled his taser gun.”

Last time he’d used it, the torc had a tracker wired into it. They’d been bulkier back then. I could still remember the look on McGill’s face when we broke the door in.

“By the time I’d done meddling with the voltage amplifier circuit and put the thing back together, I knew I could get the better of him the next time he came into that cell. I just hoped he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Would it make the same noise or would it be quieter? Would he notice?”

“And if he had?”

Shay just shrugged. “I was chained up in a locked cell. Maybe he’d decide that it had just malfunctioned. He’d been using it a lot. I reckoned he’d figure he’d worn a part out. In that case, I’d just wait until he came down again, with the locks already picked, and try to get to him before he realised what I was up to. It was a good job he’d never thought of fitting any cameras down there though,” he added thoughtfully.

“So when he came in this morning? What happened?”

“He’d decided to try the torc again. I expect he’d thought of a lot more questions to ask me by then. He shot me with the taser, I did my fall over twitching routine and when he bent down to put it on me I hit him with a vagus nerve strike. Not hard enough to kill him but he dropped like a rock. He’s locked in my cell now.” He looked over at me anxiously. “What do you want us to do with him, Con?”

I didn’t have to think it over.

“We need to put him down,” I told him. Brady O’Hara had an illness that wasn’t his fault and might even be curable. I knew that, rationally, but it wasn’t enough to make me hesitate. Not after what he’d done and might still do again if we didn’t end this. Even locked up, he might still manage to kill a doctor, a nurse or another patient. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened. It just wasn’t worth the risk.

“Alright then.” He sounded relieved that I thought so. “We might as well go and get it over with.”

We went down to the cellar, and Shay unlocked the cell. Now that I could see it all for myself I was having an even harder time understanding how anyone who’d been locked in here, knowing what O’Hara was capable of, could just shrug it all off as calmly as Shay seemed to be doing.

Brady was tied up, but in a way that wouldn’t leave any marks. Those knots couldn’t be loosened but they wouldn’t tighten up either and his clothes padded the bonds, protecting the skin of his arms and legs. His hair was longer and dyed a darker colour than before and he had a full beard now too. I doubted anyone would have recognised him on sight from the picture we’d put out.

“Unconscious,” my cousin said, staring down at him. “Another of those blackout headaches, perhaps? Get behind him and sit him up please. Hold his head still. I need to hit exactly the same spot again.” Shay