Simon Toyne - The Key

The departure hall was pretty busy, thronged with tourists heading back home after having their souls cleansed. Liv checked out the lines and ended up opting for the longest one, purely because the customs officer at the head of it was grossly fat and looked as though he was about to fall asleep in the trapped, humid heat. She stepped in line and as the queue shuffled forward she watched him going through the motions of checking the passport against every passenger, gravity pulling his doughy face into an expression of perma-boredom. He barely glanced at anyone for longer than a second, so when it was Liv’s turn to step forward she was feeling much calmer.

He opened her passport and glanced at the name of the bearer, checking it against the ticket. Then he looked up, his humourless eyes flicking between the photograph and her. Liv swept the baseball cap from her head and stared back, doing her best to maintain a neutral expression. She could feel his scrutiny crawling over her face, like the feelers of some giant insect. He was taking his time. Studying her. He hadn’t taken this long on anyone else in line. The blood sang in her ears and she was sweating from a combination of stress and poor air-conditioning. His eyes continued to slide over her face, then dropped down to roam over her body. Ordinarily, Liv would have been outraged by this, but now she felt relief. He wasn’t some crack border guard with a hidden agenda and heightened instinct for potential fugitives after all. He was just an ugly, overweight man who liked to stare at girls. So she let him stare, comforting herself with the knowledge that, if asked about her later, he would not remember her face.

After what seemed like several hours he finally snapped her passport shut and placed it on the counter. Liv grabbed it and hurried away, subconsciously fiddling with the top button of her blouse. She joined another line of people shuffling towards the final security check and breathed a little easier. She was nearly home and dry. The queue moved forward, voices pulsed around her, she started to relax. Then a loud crash at the head of the queue set her heart pounding again.

Liv looked up, fearing she would discover the fat customs officer surrounded by security guards and pointing directly at her. Instead she saw a woman dressed in full hijab, her heavily pregnant belly straining against the material of her gown. She had dropped her plastic tray and was scrabbling around on the ground while a man stood over her, shouting down in angry Arabic as she frantically scooped up the spilled items.

Then he hit her, with the back of his hand, as if he was swatting away a fly but deliberate and hard. The woman’s head jerked to one side with the force of it, then she just carried on tidying the spilled items as if the blow had been nothing more or less than she was used to.

Liv didn’t know whether it was the sudden focusing of attention or the outrage she felt at the man’s hostility, but something happened inside her. It was like something giving way deep underground and rushing upwards. She could feel it flowing through her, almost lifting her off her feet as it rose, bringing the whispering with it, filling her head with its sound. It grew louder, roaring through her like steam through rock. Then she heard something else — something solid at the centre.

A word.

KuShiKaam

So stunned was she by this that everything else seemed to slip into slow motion. She watched with detachment as the security guard stepped forward and laid a hand on the arm of the man who had just hit his wife, his face reproving but not angry. The woman on the floor continued to gather the dropped contents and put them back in the tray. In the strangeness of all this, Liv’s anger began to slip, the force of the whispering lessened and the word started to drift away. She snapped to attention, jamming her hand into her bag, burrowing through the jumbled contents in her frantic search for a pen. She feared the word would be lost, carried away down to the dark place in her head where her conscious mind seemingly could not follow. She found a pen and wrote feverishly on her hand in the absence of paper. But even as she did this the pen took on a motion of its own and instead of a phonetic approximation of the word she had heard, she inscribed a series of jagged symbols instead, looking like no language she had ever seen.

She studied what she had written and it shifted in her mind, first to the sound she had heard: KuShiKaam then to the meaning at its centre: The Key

Liv looked up. The woman had now gathered her things and passed through the metal detector to join her husband. The security guards waved them through, ushering things back to normal as quickly as they could. They probably saw incidents like this every day, casual acts of domestic violence fuelled by stress and fatigue. Even so, they had stood by and watched a man hit a pregnant woman and done nothing about it. It made Liv sick to think of it, but there was nothing she could do. Starting a fight with a bunch of sexist pigs wasn’t going to help keep her profile low. Even so the hissing noise in her head would not go away and she felt a surprising and intense violence towards the man who had struck his wife. She wanted to hurt him and humiliate him in front of everyone. She wanted to kill him even, grab a gun from one of the ineffectual guards and shoot him in the head. The intensity of her hatred surprised her. It seemed to feed into the sound in her head until it whistled like a boiling kettle. Her skin tingled too, pricking all over with pins and needles. It frightened her that she felt this way. It was as if there was something dangerous inside her that she didn’t understand and couldn’t control. She looked up and discovered people in the line were staring at her. A woman in front said something but she couldn’t hear what it was through the noise in her head. She dumped her things in a plastic tray and stared in front of her, avoiding further eye contact as the line moved forward. What the hell was happening to her? She seemed to be losing her mind.

She passed through the metal detector and out into the concourse. It was bad enough she couldn’t remember anything, now she was hearing voices too. It annoyed her — Liv Adamsen the razor-sharp reporter, the ultra rationalist, the cynical disbeliever of anything remotely New Agey — that something so ‘out there’ was now happening to her. She didn’t like it and she didn’t want it. She was still convinced she’d been drugged in the hospital and all of this was some hideous side effect that would pass as soon as she got some sleep and a couple of gallons of coffee inside her.

She glanced up at the departure board. Her flight was already boarding but she hesitated. Her instinct whenever anything didn’t add up was to come at the problem from every angle until she had managed to make sense of it. Right now, her rational mind was telling her that the word she had scrawled on her hand must be something her scrambled mind had dredged up, some language she could verify and explain. She scanned the duty-free shops lining the walls of the terminal building and saw what she needed. It was in the opposite direction to her boarding gate. She hoisted her bag on to her shoulder and headed over. She’d have to be quick.

Gabriel glanced at the iPhone, the display bright in the dimness of the bar. He was in the mezzanine of the Sahnesi, the former theatre and opera house built for the European aristocracy who started arriving in Ruin en masse in the eighteenth century after it became a destination on the Grand Tour. These days it was a popular cinema and bar complex, and it had free Wi-Fi, which was the reason Gabriel had come here.

He pressed the browser icon on the screen and tapped HOSPITAL RUIN into the search window. Ajda had bought the phone from a secondhand tech store in the Lost Quarter specializing in all the stuff boosted from tourists. It had been expensive, but it came with a SIM card that could not be traced and gave him all the processing power of a laptop. The search came back with a phone number for the main reception which he dialled.