Organ Music (4 page)

‘He was dead,' repeated Harley. ‘And not only that ...'

He fell silent. David did not want to think about what Harley had started to say. Before entering the previous room, they had looked in at the beds, and those beds had certainly been empty.

As if it were feeding on David's fear, the music grew louder and louder. The darkness rang with it, and David felt that he was ringing with it, too.

Then it faded again.

‘I hate that music,' panted David.

‘Bach!' whispered Harley.

‘Bark?' David turned his head towards Harley, but could see only blackness. ‘Woof woof?'

‘Bach! You know. Bach, the composer. They've been playing that ever since we came in here. And Mozart, I think. Nothing but organ music anyway.'

It vaguely surprised David that Harley knew about composers and organ music. But he had probably heard a lot of music from his mother.

‘What
happened
?' Harley sounded stern, like someone struggling out of a nightmare, desperate to take control of life once more.

‘Quinta yelled “Run!” and we ran,' David said. He took a deep breath. ‘Harley ... you know that street where we found the car? Forbes Street?'

Harley nodded.

‘Quinta's name was sprayed on the wall there. “Where's Quinta?” it said. Well, Quinta's
here
. But what's she doing here?'

He felt Harley shrug in the darkness. ‘What are
we
doing here?' he replied.

‘It's not the same,' said David. ‘Not yet, anyway,' he added, shuddering as he spoke. ‘We've just arrived, and she must have been here for a long time. She knows her way around.'

‘She knew about the car too,' Harley agreed.

‘We were tricked here. That car was a trap,' said David. ‘I think it's sent out into Forbes Street to catch people. When people see it with the keys in it, they're tempted. Maybe that's why Forbes Street has such a bad name. But why? I mean, who'd spend a million dollars on a car with a brain of its own, just to catch kids like us? It's like a dream: some moments I feel like I almost know what's going on, but then it fades before I can grab hold of it.'

He waved his hand in the dark. ‘I mean, when you mentioned organ music a minute ago it seemed like you'd said something really important – but I don't know why. Ghostly!'

‘Sshh! Don't talk about ghosts in here,' said Harley. His voice was still trembling, but he was beginning to sound more like his usual sharp self.

‘I don't believe in ghosts,' David retorted. ‘I never have! All the same ... ' he began, and stopped. It was mad, but he had to say it. ‘Talking about ghosts ... '

‘Yeah, yeah!' Harley interrupted him, leaping to his feet and kicking something that rang like a tin bell. ‘Where are the lights?'

David heard him scrabbling around the wall beside the door.

‘There must be lights somewhere. Ah! Here we are ... '

The burst of powerful white light made David feel he had been struck in the face.

They were in a large, bright room, hemmed around by stainless steel benches, sinks and steel-doored refrigerators. The floor and even the walls were covered with white tiles, though one wall was patched with big gleaming drawers. In the centre of the room stood two spotless steel tables with channels in them, and beyond these was an alcove largely closed off by pleated plastic screens. David had never been in this room before. All the same, he recognized it. It had appeared on the waiting-room television set. He looked up at the ceiling and, sure enough, there was the camera's familiar black eye staring down at them. David remembered that the plastic screens had been on the edge of the eye's field of sight, and Quinta had said that there were some spots in every room which the camera could not see.

‘Let's hide behind those screens,' he said. ‘Come on.'

‘Why would anyone come all the way out here for an operation?' Harley asked. ‘I mean – why would they?'

‘I don't know,' said David, as they edged uneasily towards the screens. ‘Maybe because they don't want to go on long waiting lists at ordinary hospitals. But hang on, this isn't an operating theatre.'

‘It must be. Those tables ... '

‘It's more of a ... a mortuary,' said David. ‘I've seen them on TV.' He grimaced as he glanced around, then lowered his voice in case he disturbed some intangible presence. ‘They pull out one of those drawers and there's your wife or someone they've dredged up out of the river,' he whispered.

‘A mortuary?' Harley muttered back, his voice alive with new alarm. ‘Why would they want one out here?'

David edged behind the screens, listening to the music.

‘Organ music.' His teeth which had been clenched until now began to chatter. ‘Organ music,' he repeated. ‘And something being done secretly. There's something creepy going on ... '

They turned and found themselves facing an arched doorway and a little room with narrow beds where two people lay – alone, but not unattended. Each bed was so surrounded by machines and screens that the room was like the setting for a science-fiction game. The occupants lay like dead people, but the looping lines on the screens beside the beds seemed to indicate that some sort of monitored life was being lived by the people stretched out there.

‘Think about it,' he said slowly, staring at the screens. ‘What if Dr Fabrice does secret medical deals for rich people – swapping organs or whatever. Some people have to wait a long time for a new heart.' Then his mind made another jump. ‘And what if ...'

‘Shut up!' Harley snapped. ‘Let's just get out of here.'

The patient in the nearest bed was the young man they had already seen in the bed further down the hall. There was no doubt about it. Though he now had a mask on, with various tubes and wires plastered into his neck and arms, the blue tattoos on his hands and forearms were unmistakable. His skin was pale but lacked the horrid transparency it had before. David felt suddenly sure that he had materialized in front of them to give them some sort of warning. And in the next bed ... the next bed ... He must see who was under that sheet, wired into the machines. He felt sure it was Quinta.

‘Don't look!' Harley guessed what David was about to do.

And then they heard a quiet sound. Beyond the screens the door had opened.

‘Are you there?' someone asked in a loud whisper. ‘You can come out now.'

Harley put a finger to his lips. But feet were crossing the tiled floor. ‘Don't be worried,' said the voice. ‘I'm on your side.'

Someone peered around the screens, and beamed at them. ‘Oh, there you are!'

It was the gatekeeper, Winnie Finney.

‘A lot of people are looking for you two,' he remarked. ‘I thought I'd join in the hunt. You seem to be causing a bit of trouble, and I have a soft spot for trouble-makers. I was a bit of a tearaway myself, way back when.'

‘Something's going on,' said David. ‘Something really freaky.'

Winnie Finney looked around the room, rather as if he too found it unpleasant.

‘After all, it
is
a research establishment,' he said, half to himself. ‘No wonder people like you and me find it all a bit strange ... a little bit bothering, I mean to say. And I can't believe you kids mean any harm. So if we get to my room you can hide out there, until the daytime staff come on duty. You'll have more chance of getting away when there are a lot of people around. They won't pick you out in the same way.'

David could have kissed him. He sounded so ordinary and easy going ... so
reliable
.

‘I'll check the corridor,' said Winnie Finney. ‘The elevator's almost directly opposite.'

The boys watched as he opened the door, peered right, peered left, and then beckoned them forward.

‘Are you ready? Then follow me. Now!'

Sliding furtively after him, a little way along the blue corridor, they stopped beside a dark blue grill. Winnie Finney pressed a button. First the grill, and then the door behind it, hissed open. The three of them piled through, Winnie Finney pressing buttons. The elevator shot down (though how far down David could not tell), then came to a stop. The door slid open once more, and they stepped out on to a deep red carpet. The warm colour was a relief after all that chilly blue.

‘My office is along here,' said Winnie Finney. ‘And no one bothers to bother me. I'm the mechanic – the odd-jobs man. So come and sit down and have something to eat. Then you can tell me what's going on.'

‘I'm starving,' said Harley, which amazed David, for he couldn't imagine ever wanting to eat anything ever again. The mere thought of meat made his stomach heave painfully. He was thirsty, but all he wanted to drink was water. More than anything else, he wanted things to be simple and ordinary once more.

Winnie Finney led the way along the red carpet to a polished door which opened into a book-lined room, worn and homely. He had an untidy desk, an overflowing wastepaper basket, and an old-fashioned bar heater. There was a table in one corner of the room, on which sat an old electric jug. Shelves rose behind it with cups and saucers and a tin that looked as if it might hold biscuits.

‘Sit!' said Winnie Finney, as if they were dogs. ‘Just for a moment. Are you cold?' He leaned behind his desk to turn on the heater. ‘We'll be warm as toast in a minute.'

David slumped gratefully into a cane chair filled with soft, floppy cushions.

‘I'll lock the door,' said Winnie Finney. ‘Then no one will be able to burst in on us.' And he did.

‘Now tell me everything,' he said to David, ‘while I make coffee.'

‘Well,' David began, ‘we were walking home ... hours ago, it was –'

‘Last night,' Harley put in. ‘Or maybe it was tonight. Weird. Time seems to have stretched out or collapsed or something.'

‘Whichever it was,' said David, looking at the windows. Between a slit in the drawn curtains he saw what looked like a genuine night-time darkness, and, slightly darker and thicker than that darkness, branching fingers ... part of a tree. They must be close to ground level once more.

Between them they told Winnie Finney about finding the car with the winking, seductive key, and the way they had been carried along the motorway and over the hill. As they talked, Winnie Finney made the coffee, and set the low table with biscuits and three wide, flowery cups. He poured coffee into the cups, then, with a roguish look, took a silver hip flask from his pocket and added a slug of ginger-coloured liquid to each.

‘We're all men of the world,' he said. ‘We need something for shock. Help yourselves to milk and sugar.'

He sat back in what was obviously his special chair. It had lions' heads on the arms, and he hung his hands across them so that the lions seemed to be snarling out from between his wide fingers.

By now Harley and David were talking about Quinta, the ghost in dark glasses, interrupting one another as they talked, filled with the relief of passing on their fears, and the pleasure of being in an ordinary room filled with ordinary things. In between talking, Harley took his first sips of coffee quite greedily, evidently enjoying it, relaxing with feeling of grown-up, manly fellowship. David, too, took a sip of the coffee, but thought it tasted unpleasant.

Too strong
, he thought.
Too much of something
. He stood, wriggling his shoulders, and began moving restlessly around the room. Winnie Finney watched him curiously.

‘I feel a bit too screwed-up about things,' David said. ‘I can't just sit there! But can you tell me ... this isn't just a forestry place, is it? I mean it might be, but there's something else going on here.' He held his coffee cup in both hands, as if he were enjoying its warmth and comfort.

‘Transplants!' announced Harley, as proudly as if he had worked it out for himself. David looked over at him in surprise, for he didn't think Harley had even listened to his theory. ‘They pick up people on the streets, and David thinks they use them for spare parts. I mean, sometimes people just vanish, don't they? And no one's going to report that car missing. In a way, it doesn't exist. In an official way that is. It won't be registered. It's an invention, that car. You get into it and you disappear.'

Winnie Finney looked at Harley, his smile vanishing.

‘It is possible,' he said. ‘I designed that car, you know. My main work is unmanned machines – machines that are used in hard-access forestry areas. The car was just a hobby, a treat. And once I'd solved the problems, set it up with a homing device and so on, I rather lost interest. And it's true that some of the people I see around here from time to time don't look like your average tree lovers.'

Finding himself unobserved, David tipped his coffee into a pot plant.

‘What do tree lovers look like?' Harley asked with a faint grin, his first for quite a while. He sounded relaxed, even sleepy. At the same time, the coffee cup fell from his fingers, spreading what was left of the coffee across the floor. Alarmed, David took a step forward trying to check on Harley whose small movements seemed to have become enormously slow and ponderous. Winnie Finney nodded at Harley, and then swung sideways in his chair to look at David. Instinctively, David half-closed his eyes, and moved back towards his chair, pretending to stumble a little, while Winnie Finney beamed at him across his own untouched cup of coffee. This man, who had seemed so friendly, so much on their side, had offered them drugged coffee. David forced a thick, wordless sound between his lips.

‘Ah, I see you've caught on,' said Winnie Finney, leaning forward and peering intently at David, rather as if his face was the page in a book and he was reading it. ‘You
know
, don't you?' His mouth stretched into an even wider smile.

Harley was looking slowly from one to the other of them.

‘What's ... wrong?' he asked, and his voice sounded even slower and more smudgy.

David did not reply. Inside his head he felt sharp and in charge, but he must hide it. Best if Winnie Finney thought he was dealing with two drugged and dim-witted young men. He collapsed back into his chair.

Winnie Finney rose briskly and stood over them.

‘There are so many worthless people around,' he said, suddenly transformed: still beaming, but no longer kindly. ‘Yet these worthless ones – these trashy people – have perfectly good organs: lungs, hearts, livers ... while there are worthwhile citizens, people who have lived good, productive lives, or lovely youngsters with a world of promise ahead of them, who, simply through some silly accident of fate, find their bodies breaking down. Properly functioning organs should not be wasted on scum who are going to vandalize themselves with drink and drugs.'

He wandered across his little office, studied a baro-meter on the wall and tapped it delicately. Then he turned back to the boys.

‘The two young men in the room off the morgue are what we call “brain-dead”,' he said. ‘They would certainly die if we disconnected them from the life-support systems you saw, but we are keeping them alive – technically alive. We need them fresh, you see. They don't deserve to live. They didn't respect themselves so why should someone like me bother to respect them?'

Winnie Finney laughed. ‘But so many organs can have a useful life, once they are taken from the parent body. A heart should be transposed within six to eight hours. A lung may last for twelve hours. Of course there are parts of the body that can be preserved. Freshly frozen skin can last for over three years. So can bone marrow. Heart valves last for five years and so does the cartilage of the knee. We'll use those young men with far more respect and dignity than they would have used themselves, even though comparatively little of them will be usable. Their corneas (from their eyes, you know), their lungs, perhaps ... Some sections of skin. Now
you
– provided you don't have leukaemia,
AIDS
risk factors, or anything of that kind – you are treasure troves. At your age you're not likely to have fluid in the lungs, or pancreatic malfunction.'

He frowned at them, looking a little troubled.

‘You see, once you're here there's no going back,' he said with irritation. ‘There can't be. Why on earth were you stupid enough to get into the car? It was a dishonest thing to do, and you both know it. What were you doing in Forbes Street, of all disgusting places?'

David did not answer. He felt sure that, if he did, Winnie Finney would realize he was much sharper than he was pretending to be. But there was some truth in what Winnie Finney was saying. He and Harley had deliberately climbed into a car that was not theirs. They had driven away in it: a dishonest thing to do. They didn't deserve whatever was about to happen to them, and yet in the beginning it had been their fault.
Never again
! He found himself thinking.
If we get out of this
...
well, never again
.

‘I was a Forbes Street kid,' said a voice – Quinta's. Yet she was not in the room. Her voice was in David's head. ‘I had my tattoos done in Forbes Street. I had my ears pierced there. I was trash – or that's what he would have called me. But I was tough trash. Too tough for him! He hasn't been able to see me off. I'm still hanging round, waiting for my chance.'

Winnie Finney seemed quite unaware that Quinta was speaking. He was still talking about organs: ‘There are better people than you who can use your corneas, your livers and tendons. You'll both have profoundly fulfilled lives. And, after all, it is immortality of a kind.'

He picked up his phone.

‘Call me! Go on, call me!' said Quinta's voice. ‘Make him see me!'

David could not speak, but he shouted with a soundless voice he discovered within himself.

‘Quinta!
Quinta!
'

‘I have with me the two specimens we mislaid,' Winnie Finney was saying into the phone. ‘They're in good condition except for a sleeping drug that will work its way through their systems quite harmlessly. But we've been a little complacent, haven't we? A little careless?' His words were mild but his voice was somehow menacing. He was being nasty to someone. ‘We must be careful,' he said.

David made himself shudder. He probably overdid it, trembling furiously, but Winnie Finney did not seem suspicious. And he did not seem to notice that behind him the air was swirling and thickening.

Quinta was forming herself out of nothing.

Of course!
David thought.
She really is a ghost. She isn't chained to any life-support system
. All the same, he definitely did not believe in ghosts. He had never believed in them, even when he was a little boy.

‘Stop thinking me out of existence,' Quinta's voice said. ‘Think at him!
At
him!
At
him! They can't monitor thoughts. They can't transplant ideas. Tell him
he's
the blemished one! Sullied! Disfigured! Load me with words. I'll use them like bullets! I can! You can! You
must
.'

Having that voice in his head was like looking into a dreadful mirror and seeing a monster smiling back at him. At the same time he felt a sense of power stir in him, and that power was his. Quinta's presence had set something free. He could use words, not just for fun but as if they were weapons. He tried desperately to think of fierce words he could invent.

‘Cantankerous! Cantakofulum!
Furioso
!' he cried, firing the words off violently, and sensing that Quinta would snatch them out of the air, give them mysterious force, and shoot them at Winnie Finney – who abruptly stopped his conversation and looked at him with annoyance.