D. Mitchell - The King of Terrors

Lambert-Chide moved over to Gareth, who had been stunned into silence by all that he’d been hearing. He did not want to believe any of it, but that was becoming impossible with every minute that passed.

‘But of course,’ he continued, ‘I can afford to do that now, can’t I, because I have a back-up. I have your son.’ He saw Gareth open his mouth to speak, then close it again, the words left unsaid. ‘You are first and foremost a little miracle, do you know that, Gareth? But of course not! How could you? How innocent you have been all this time, believing one thing yet the truth being another.’

‘The drug is wearing off,’ warned Tremain, standing close to Erica. ‘We need to get her back to her cell.’

‘Cell?’ echoed Gareth.

Tremain removed the gun from his jacket as a silent warning, and Gareth sat back, helpless.

‘She has lived a long time,’ said Lambert-Chide. ‘You cannot comprehend how long. But in all that time she has never been able to have children. Perhaps an unfortunate side-effect of not aging. Perhaps the key makes you infertile. Our experiments using a range of select donors over a two year period eventually proved successful. She became pregnant, not with one child but with twins! Twice the insurance should anything happen to her. Three times the possibility that the project would succeed in its aims.’

‘And when they were born you would have used them like lab animals,’ said Erica. She rubbed her eyes, as if she were clearing them of sleep. ‘You are little more than an animal yourself, David. It’s not enough that you’ve had money and power all your life.’

Lambert-Chide ignored her feeble protest. ‘But Project Gilgamesh was all but put on hold when Evelyn was helped get away by someone we thought we trusted. A rising young star in the industry, or so I thought. But you cannot trust anyone, can you, Gareth?’ He bent down on his haunches to stare at Erica’s face. ‘Your savior, Doctor Stephanie Jacobs, destroyed all tissue samples, all notes, as many records as she could lay her hands on, and then she took you from me. You and my miracle babies. And for over thirty years I’ve been searching for you. You are clever, Evelyn, I will grant you that; managing to stay low for so long, obviously a well-practiced art of yours. In the end, though, it was simply a mother’s love that brought you to the surface again, winkled you out of hiding.

‘The way I picture it in my imagination, you’d always kept a discreet and distant watchful eye on Gareth as he was growing up. I’ll bet you were never very far away from him. If only we’d known that you left your baby in Cardiff station; that would have made our work a lot easier! What happened? Was Doradus getting close to capturing you? That’s it, isn’t it? You were on the run and they were hot on your heels. Only he didn’t know about the baby, did he? I mean, it wasn’t possible for someone like you to have a baby. So it was very noble of you, Evelyn, to abandon your baby rather than have him taken by Doradus; how painful a choice it must have been, to decide whether you kept him and so watch him suffer the same fate as you if you’re captured; or to let someone else have him instead, to know he will hate you for the deed you did but he will at least live in relative safety for a while, till he too realizes who he is. Because he must, you know. You could only postpone the inevitable. But what of the other twin? What happened to it?’

‘She,’ said Erica. ‘It was not an it .’

‘A girl? What happened, did she die at birth? She can’t have lasted long, I think. I am of the mind you only had Gareth at the time you left him in Cardiff. It is unlikely you would abandon one child and risk the other being caught with you. And even less likely you dropped them off like so many parcels in different places. No, the twin died, of that I am certain.’ Erica remained tight-lipped and silent. Lambert-Chide looked to Gareth. ‘Yes, Gareth, you see, you really did have a sister, albeit briefly, it appears. Died in childbirth, I suspect, or soon afterwards. Which made Gareth all the more special to you, eh? Precious, you might say.

‘He may belong to another, but you were irresistibly drawn to him, weren’t you, Evelyn? The son you never even heard speak; the boy you didn’t see cut his first teeth, or had the joy of seeing him take his first steps. You could not keep away. You had the world to choose from but all along you were here, almost under our very noses. All through Gareth’s life, a distant, ghostly presence he never knew existed, a shadow in the distance, watching him. You even dared to attend an exhibition of his in London a matter of months ago, treating yourself to two of his prints. But recently you were also afraid Doradus was getting close to discovering the truth about who he was and so you sought to warn him, to protect him. You sourced false documents, something you have been doing for decades. Of course, you had to pretend to be his sister, for now, because the truth would have been too much all at once. Yet we both know it was always more than that, wasn’t it? More than simply trying to warn him. You may be immortal, Evelyn, but you cannot escape the timeless bonds between a mother and her child. You had to get even closer. You just had to meet him, didn’t you? Oh, you had a valid excuse, but in reality you were brought into the open by an inescapable physiological urge.

‘The brooch was the link,’ he said, turning to look at Gareth. ‘The only piece she took with her when she left Gattenby House. Why, I thought? Why this one thing? I bargained on the fact that she could never let that brooch leave her; it was the last emotional connection with my father. It had nothing to do with cost and everything to do with one lover giving another a special gift. I’m impressed; to have kept a candle burning for him for so long she really must have been telling the truth about her feelings for him. So I knew that if I found the brooch I would find Evelyn. So it proved to be. That I would also discover the whereabouts of one of the missing twins into the bargain was my great fortune! I knew from the moment I saw you, Gareth, that you were Evelyn’s child. She is in your very eyes. It is such a shame we don’t have the girl, too. We would have had the full set.’ Lambert-Chide rose to his feet, his weight taken by the cane.

‘You get some kind of perverted pleasure out of all this, don’t you?’ said Gareth. ‘It’s all a big game with no rules.’

‘Oh, it’s no game, Gareth. Far from it. Have you any idea how old she really is? How many years you, sharing her genes, have the potential to live? Gareth, look at her. We know from the confessions she gave back in the 1970’s that she is more than four hundred years old! What you see here is proof that some people are born without the trigger that causes ageing. They cheat death. They cheat the King of Terrors. And you too, Gareth; you, as her son, have this potential to be immortal.’

Unexpectedly Evelyn was up and out of the chair. She grabbed Lambert-Chide around the neck from behind. Gareth could see now that she’d been largely feigning the effects of the drug, for she seemed to move pretty fast and decisively. Tremain swung the gun around towards Erica. There was no slurring of the voice when she next spoke.

‘Drop that, Tremain, or I’ll wring his neck like a piece of rope!’

Tremain, his nostrils flaring, glowered at her. ‘I told you it was a big mistake!’ he said to Lambert-Chide. ‘She needed to be put under again.’

‘Cut it, Tremain,’ snarled Erica, her arm squeezing tighter around Lambert-Chide’s neck as if it were some kind of slender python. ‘Drop it, now!’

He hesitated, and instead of doing as he was told he brought the gun to rest against Gareth’s temple. ‘Let him go,’ said Tremain. ‘I’ll kill him.’