Prisoner of Fire (12 page)

“Scotland?” suggested Vanessa. “I don’t know why, but I have been thinking about Scotland quite a lot recently. It’s ridiculous. I’ve never been there; but I feel I know the Highlands. There aren’t many people there. I’d love to see the bare mountains and the deer forests and the glens and the lochs… Strange, isn’t it?”

He shot her a curious glance. “Scotland is it, then? Well, I’m sorry about that, Vanessa. I was thinking of Cornwall or maybe Wales. Anyway, there’s time enough to reach an amicable agreement before tomorrow.”

Vanessa suddenly
shivered, as if a chill wind was blowing. “I loved Dugal,” she said. “I loved him very much.”

Oliver took her hand in his. “And now I love him also, little one. He has bought some time for you. The price was high. Let us not abuse his gift. Tomorrow we will go to a place that is really safe. Do not ask me where it is.”

Hand in hand, they walked across the carpet of bluebells, making their way back to the cottage, not knowing that tomorrow was already too late.

T
HE LAST NIGHT
in the cottage in the South Downs was one that Roland Badel would remember in great detail for the rest of his life. It was the first and last time that he and Vanessa went to bed together as man and woman. It was also the end of a brief idyll, the end of a poor charade.

They had gone to bed late, after carefully packing all the clothes and personal things they would need in the hovercar; and after Roland, still in his assumed role as Oliver Anderson, had selected paints, brushes, a couple of unfinished canvases and his easel. Then, for a while, he had drunk whisky and pored over maps.

He had also encouraged Vanessa to drink some whisky. She was still in a state of acute depression. She needed something to dull her misery and, perhaps, shut out the malign thought-invaders who seemed determined that she should get no rest at night.

In fact, that, rather than any overwhelming sexual compulsion was the reason he took her to share his bed. He wanted to reassure her with his physical presence. He wanted to put his arms round her, enfold her, tell her the unconvincing lie that there was nothing to fear.

Vanessa did not like the taste of whisky, even when it was mixed with water. She shuddered when she tasted
it; but she drank it dutifully because Oliver said it would probably help.

She was half tipsy when they went to bed. The agonising experience of Dugal’s death appeared at least to have been temporarily enshrouded in alcoholic mist. Besides being half tipsy, she was very tired.

He knew that she was a virgin. He knew that she was less than half his age. He knew that his real duty was to protect her and make her feel secure.

But when she lay beside him and snuggled close, none of that seemed quite so important as the living, exciting body that pressed against him.

He tried to sleep, tried to shut out all desire, all erotic thought. But Vanessa was restless; and her restlessness caused her to turn and sigh and moan. The invaders came with their sinister whisperings. They penetrated the mist and tried to hurt her. She pressed hard against him for comfort.

He tried to remain detached, tried to distract her, help her repel the intangible presences that seemed to have crept into the bed. But he found himself touching, stroking, caressing. He found himself kissing and holding with passion.

Sex, he rationalised wildly, was at least a kind of diversion. In the darkness he could visualise her wide open eyes, her open and responsive mouth.

Vanessa, her tension eased a little by the whisky, was amazed, excited, gratified by the strange sensations surging through her body. She felt with wonderment the liquid revelations of desire, the way her small breasts ached almost as if they were independent of her, the way her skin became supersensitive, somehow magnifying every touch and caress.

When she was a child, she remembered feeling snowflakes for the first time. The snow had seemed to chill
her skin and at the same time bring it strangely alive. The snowflakes she felt now were not cold. Not cold at all. They were snowflakes of fire. But the fire warmed, gave life, rather than consumed.

Vanessa, at seventeen, was totally innocent. It was as if Nature had played a trick on her, had created a strange practical joke. On the one hand she possessed paranormal powers. Unlike ordinary human beings, her mind was not locked inside her head. It could receive messages directly from other minds. It could reach out. On the other hand, it seemed that Nature had compelled her to pay for this talent with physical retardation. Until the time when Roland Badel/Oliver Anderson held her close, she had never known desire.

Now, she discovered that it was a wondrous thing. She wanted time to savour it, to examine it. But the woman locked inside her knew that there was no time left at all.

In the darkness, Oliver said: “Perhaps I should not hold you like this. I am more than twice your age. I have known other women. You are still a virgin. Dear Vanessa, my only excuse is that I love you.”

She stroked his shoulder. The skin felt soft and the muscles felt hard. There was strength and softness all mixed up together.

“My love, do what you want to do. That is what I want most of all. Already you make my body sing.”

She hardly felt it when her hymen broke. She was too filled with wonder at the mysterious thing that leapt and pulsed inside her, making her body arch and throb with almost unendurable pleasure.

Vanessa, her mind and body intoxicated now with physical ecstasy as well as with a little whisky, did not even notice when the invader came, quietly exploring the labyrinth of her mind, probing, watching, gloating;
avidly absorbing all the sensual experience that came from the act of love.

But when it was all over, when Roland and Vanessa lay entwined with passion spent, Janine could not resist a telepathic shout of triumph.

‘He screwed us well, didn’t he, dear?’ There was dreadful, silent laughter. ‘What a pity he couldn’t know he was having two trollops for the price of one!’

Vanessa cried out, shrank away from Roland, lay there shivering, feeling exposed, dirty, horrible. Trying desperately to drive the invader from her mind; but lacking the strength, the clarity and discipline to do so.

“What is it, love? What’s happened? Did I hurt you?” Roland was perplexed. One moment Vanessa seemed on the edge of restful sleep, the next she was a shaking wreck.

She managed to speak calmly, “Someone has probed me. She’s there still. She was there when—” Vanessa could not say it. For what had been wonderful was now humiliating and dirty.

Roland, now wide awake, tried to draw her close once more. “Don’t panic, darling. Can you reject her? Can you get her out?”

“I’m trying,” Vanessa said desperately. “I’m trying.”

‘Tell him I like his shoulders,’ whispered Janine maliciously. ‘Tell him I think he’s got a big future—chiefly between his legs—for girls like you and me.’

Vanessa thrust away from Roland, and rolled to the edge of the bed, retching.

‘Not much of a woman, are you, girlie?’ whispered Janine. ‘Never mind. I’ll console him. I’ve got better tits than yours… We know where you are now, sweetie, and we’re coming for you soon!’

Vanessa was physically sick. She began to vomit uncontrollably on to the bedroom floor. It was—though
she did not know it—the best thing she could have done.

Janine could not endure the experience. She fled.

Roland Badel turned on the light and gazed in consternation and pity as Vanessa, who, not long ago had enjoyed the pleasures of love, now lay with her head over the side of the bed, her slender body racked by convulsions as she simultaneously wept and vomited.

“Turn off the light!” she managed to gasp. “I don’t want you to see me like this.”

He laid his hand gently on her back, stroked it, patted it as he would have stroked and patted a child. “I will not turn the light out,” he said gently. “We will share suffering and humiliation as we share love.”

Soon the horrible knotting and surging in her stomach was over. Vanessa lay on the bed helplessly, gasping for air, while tears fell from her eyes into the steaming vomit.

Now that she was over it, Roland went into action. Still naked, he dashed into the bathroom, found towels, brought them and cleaned up the helpless Vanessa Finally, as she lay on the bed, he cleaned up the mess on the floor and sprayed the remaining damp patch liberally with an aerosol air-sweetener.

“She was inside me,” said Vanessa dully, “feeling you as I felt you, watching, prying.” She shuddered. “Even enjoying… I can’t think about it anymore. I shall be sick again.”

“Don’t think about it, then,” he said firmly. “Don’t think about anything that has happened tonight. Think only that we are going away tomorrow—far, far away. And we are going to devise a way of getting rid of this kind of torment for good. I know a surgeon—a very good man—who has done a lot of work on paranormals with head injuries. When the furore has died
down, I’ll contact him. If I understood rightly, there is a fairly simple operation that will—“

“Oliver, please,” she said faintly. “Not now. Tomorrow or the day after you shall tell me, but not now.”

He cursed his stupidity. “I’m a fool. Forgive me.” He gave a grim laugh. “I’m supposed to be the clever one. Forgive me. Tomorrow we will put a lot of miles behind us, and then—”

“Charming,” said a male voice. “So informal, but quite charming. What is that dreadful smell?”

Roland whirled and saw a man standing in the doorway of the bedroom. “Who the devil are you? How did you get in? What do you want?”

“Rest easy, Dr. Badel. Don’t try anything foolish.”

“My name is Anderson.”

“So?” The man in the doorway kept his hand in his pocket and advanced into the room. “Then I am one of the Brothers Grimm.” He permitted himself the ghost of a smile. Then he frowned and looked disapprovingly at Vanessa. “You shouldn’t have done that, my dear. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

Vanessa sat up on the bed, her small breasts firm and compactly beautiful, her hair matted about her shoulders, her eyes dark with fatigue, her face stained with recent anguish.

She looked at Roland and said unemotionally: “His name is Denzil Ingram. He is a government man and he has a laser pistol in his pocket. He came here to kill us.”

I
NGRAM SAID:
“I’m truly sorry you did that, Vanessa. You should not have been able to do it. But, then, I am told you have exceptional powers.”

Now that he had at last found his prey, Ingram discovered with great annoyance that, for perhaps the first time in his professional career, he utterly loathed his task. He was a highly trained hunter, an expert in sudden death. In the course of his duties, he had been required to kill many people—spies, saboteurs, revolutionaries, would-be assassins. He had never enjoyed killing. It was like destroying a still functioning machine—like sending a perfectly good hovercar to the scrapyard.

But, formerly, killing could be justified by logic. It was necessary to take out spies, assassins and the like. He was paid and empowered to protect the security of the state. A grown man—or woman—who chose to attempt to disrupt the status quo was fully aware of the price of failure and therefore must be prepared to pay when the reckoning was presented.

But Vanessa Smith was not a revolutionary or an assassin. She was still only a child. All she had done was to escape from a school for paranormals. It was her tragedy that the Opposition was using her existence for political ends. It was her tragedy that Sir Joseph
Humboldt needed her non-existence also for political ends. As far as the politicians were concerned, she was not a person—just an explosive Parliamentary Question.

And yet she was only a child—no, half a child and half a woman—sitting pathetically naked on a bed where she had doubtless learned about sex for the first and, sadly, the last time.

Strange how vulnerable people seemed when they were naked. She and Badel seemed frozen by shock. Denzil Ingram hoped very much that they had enjoyed what had evidently just passed between them. Otherwise, it would be doubly terrible to die in such circumstances. But must they die? He needed time to think.

“Put on your clothes,” he said irritably. “You are sorry I’m here, and I am sorry I’m here. Put on your clothes, and we will all try to be civilised. But don’t do anything stupid, Dr. Badel. I am trained for this sort of thing: you are not.”

“I imagine,” said Roland, “that it will be easier for you to kill us when we are not looking at you.” He held Vanessa’s hand and stared unwaveringly at Denzil Ingram. “A small act of self-indulgence that will make you feel warmer. Right?”

“Wrong,” said Ingram. “Put on your clothes, Dr. Badel. Vanessa will tell you that I don’t intend to shoot while you are zipping up your trousers. She will doubtless confirm that I am also trying rather hard to think of an alternative.”

Vanessa looked at Roland and nodded. They began to dress. While they did so, Denzil Ingram went on talking.

“We have no time to speak delicately or—as they used to say when I was young—beat about the bush. My mission, as Vanessa knows, is to take her out. And, since you have become involved with her, Dr. Badel, unhappily that also includes you.”

“We
live in a nice world,” commented Roland, putting on his trousers and a shirt, but contriving all the time to face Ingram. “What has she done that is so terrible? Has she hit an old lady with an iron bar? Has she probed somebody in possession of state secrets? Has she tapped Joe Humboldt’s erotic dreams?”

Ingram sighed. “Let us take the bit about justice as read, Dr. Badel. Vanessa is not old enough; but you know and I know that justice is a chimera. All Vanessa has done is to jump school. Alas, in doing so, she has become a Parliamentary Question. Upon her existence or non-existence depends the fate of a Bill and quite possibly the fate of a government. I am paid to protect the state and the government. Do you see my problem?”

“Perfectly. But how do you sleep at nights?”

“Quite well, thank you. I have my anodynes… Incidentally, I have sent my men away. I tell you this, Dr. Badel, not to raise hope but so that you may understand my position before we talk. It is routine procedure these days. They found what I wanted them to find—but they did not know quite what I was looking for. A sensible precaution. If any of them are probed, they can reveal only that I sought a man with a disfigured face. They cannot reveal, subsequently, if that man lived or died, or even if he had a companion. Do I make myself clear?”