Бен Ааронович - Lies Sleeping

‘ Voila ,’ said Dr Walid.

He twitched the sheet off Richard Williams’s leg to reveal a large abstract tattoo – almost one of those faux Maori sleeves, but not. The lines were too angular and yet very familiar. I thought one patch looked fresher until I realised that its darkness was not fresh ink but burnt flesh.

‘Burnt down to a depth of two centimetres,’ said Dr Walid. ‘We were just about to excise it so we could have a closer look.’

‘You can watch if you like,’ said Dr Vaughan.

I barely heard her because I’d just recognised the shape of the tattoo. A long upright stroke with two right-hand strokes going diagonally up.

‘ G for Gandalf,’ I said.

Specifically G in Tolkien’s imaginary Dwarvish runes or actually, as I learnt from a bit of googling, his imaginary early Elvish. I explained this to the doctors, which at least had the effect of wiping that sinister smile off their faces.

‘And I suppose you’re fluent in Elvish?’ said Dr Vaughan, by way of retaliation.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But G is what Gandalf stamps on his fireworks. Gandalf is the wizard, by the way.’

‘I know who Gandalf is, thank you,’ said Dr Vaughan.

‘I think we can assume that this is Martin Chorley’s work,’ said Dr Walid.

He was right. Martin Chorley really did have a sick sense of humour. He’d once labelled a demon trap in Elvish script.

‘And the rest of the tattoos?’ asked Dr Vaughan.

‘It’s all Dwarvish iconography,’ I said. ‘From the films, though, not the books.’

‘We’re still waiting on the lab work,’ said Dr Walid. ‘But Jennifer here thinks there may have been metallic particles under the skin.’

‘A small demon trap, I was thinking,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘Or something working along the same principles. I’d like to see if your boss knows something about it.’

I said I’d set up a meeting.

‘If there was a remote trigger of some kind,’ I said, ‘it must have quite a short range. Why else would Chorley sacrifice his killer nanny as a distraction if he didn’t have to get close himself?’

Which meant someone was going to have to go back over the hospital CCTV looking for Chorley. More work for some unlucky sod in the Annexe, or perhaps lucky sod, if they had no social life and needed the overtime.

‘We’re calling her Charlotte Green,’ said Dr Vaughan primly.

‘What?’

‘Well, it’s a bit unfeeling to keep referring to these young women as “killer nannies” and the like,’ she said. ‘Whatever they did in life they’re in my care now and I don’t think it’s too much to expect a bit of respect.’

‘Why Green?’

‘Because I didn’t want to use Gamma as a category name,’ she said. ‘And Charlotte because she’s our third Jane Doe.’

The first being the young woman with the unusual teeth who’d died at the Trocadero Centre.

‘Alice Green,’ said Dr Vaughan.

The second being the weird half-man, half-tiger person who’d tried to kill me on a roof in Soho and got himself shot in the head for his trouble.

‘Barry Brown.’

‘You’ve started a new classification system, haven’t you?’ I said.

‘Well, we couldn’t go on with what we had, could we?’ said Dr Vaughan.

Dr Jennifer Vaughan had taken one look at the various cataloguing methodologies for the fae and come to the same conclusions I had – that they were bollocks. She’d been threatening to devise her own system ever since. Now, for solid historical reasons, I’m not comfortable with dividing people up into groups. But the medical profession cannot sleep easy until it has a category for everything.

‘It’s all about instilling confidence,’ Dr Walid had explained once.

Apparently patients much preferred doctors who sounded like they knew what they were talking about – even when they didn’t. Perhaps especially when they didn’t.

‘If it helps, think of it as provisional,’ said Dr Vaughan.

So Brown for the chimera – the cat-girls and tiger-boys, and God knows what else Martin Chorley’s sick little brain might have come up with.

‘Brown for Beta, right?’

‘Just so,’ said Dr Vaughan.

‘And Green for Gamma.’

‘Oh, he is bright, isn’t he?’ said Dr Vaughan to no one in particular. ‘Subjects that are not the product of modification, or at least modification of their phenotype.’

‘So she was born the way she is?’ I said. ‘How can you tell?’

‘Why don’t we have a look?’

She tweaked the sheet back to expose poor Charlotte Green down to her navel. The horribly familiar Y incision had been sewn up, although I noticed the cut had wiggled slightly to avoid bisecting any bullet wounds.

‘We won’t have the genetic results back for a week or so, but I’m willing to bet good money that we won’t find any evidence of chimerism,’ she said.

So no genetic manipulation at the cellular level.

I asked her how she could be so sure, which got me an approving nod from Dr Walid.

‘From this,’ said Dr Vaughan.

I watched, wincing, as she reached into Charlotte’s mouth and pulled her tongue out to its full extent. It was at least twenty centimetres long.

‘Now, as you can imagine,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘You can’t just a fit a tongue like that into someone’s face – there’s no room for it. If you detach her lower jawbone and have a good look down her throat you’ll see it’s substantially different from the human norm.’

Which didn’t necessarily mean anything, since the human norm was a spectrum that went from smaller than you’d expect to larger than you can imagine.

‘Vastly different,’ said Dr Walid, who’s had this argument with me before. ‘But very similar to Molly’s. As is the dentition.’

‘Molly let you look in her throat?’

‘Not me,’ said Dr Walid, who had never got close to Molly with so much as a tongue depressor.

‘She’s perfectly reasonable if you explain yourself properly,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘She let me have a quick look with a bronchoscope. Admittedly, it took a little while for her to get used to it, and I did have to get a second bronchoscope after she bit through the first one.’

‘Did you get a tissue sample as well?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ said Dr Walid. ‘That’s what we’ll use as a comparison for genome sequencing. But at an anatomical level, the positioning of the hyoid bone and the larynx are identical between Molly and Charlotte.’

‘Longer tongue, more control, and extra room to keep it in,’ said Dr Vaughan.

And if Charlotte the killer nanny was the same as Molly, then the chances were that she was the same as the so-called High Fae I’d encountered in Herefordshire. We couldn’t call them gammas. It made them sound like bad guys in a cheap first-person shooter – and what if they found out?

‘In that case,’ I said, ‘can we change the surname to Greenwood?’

‘Whatever for?’ asked Dr Vaughan.

‘Because one day we might want to share this data with them,’ I said. ‘And it will be slightly less embarrassing.’

So I spent the next couple of days seeing if I couldn’t find where Charlotte Greenwood had come from.

Some say there is an invisible line in the world that separates the demi-monde, the world of magic, from the mundane world of everyday existence. They say that if you step over that line, however unknowingly, your world will be changed for ever. They say that once you have taken that fateful step you can never go back, never unsee what you have seen, never unknow what you have discovered.

This is of course total bollocks.

Of course you can cross back; you can move to Burnley and become a hairdresser, or to Sutton and work in IT. You can go caravanning in Wales and never see a single dragon, and go swimming in the Severn and never meet the goddess Sabrina.