Submersion (26 page)

‘I’ll leave you then?’ I said, realising he wasn’t warming to my presence. I’d find out what was really bothering him another time, maybe employ Tristan’s charms to do the job for me.

‘Yes,’ he muttered, only his second attempt at communication, picking up one of the trains that had jammed in the tracks. As he held it in his hand and set it right, something caught my eye. For a second or so, I was petrified to the spot – the ability to breathe vacuumed from my lungs in a single spine-tingling extraction. ‘Aunt?’ Billy inquired, suddenly alert, my odd behaviour causing him to shed his indifferent skin. ‘You okay?’

‘Fine,’ I told him, forcing a smile and descending hurriedly to the ground floor, where the old man met me in the hallway with a small black oblong gadget the size of my palm. He held it out in his open hand. A long, skinny lead was wound around it, with two small buds attached to the end. A Walkman. Had it not been for what I had seen in the playroom above me, I may have smiled in recognition.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked, once I was redressed in outdoor gear. ‘It was quite a thing to hear her again, wasn’t it?’

I assured him I was fine and he left me to let myself out, scuttling out to his machines and experiments in the rear of his home.

But I wasn’t fine. You see, what I’d seen, it couldn’t be a coincidence. It had to be a connection. It was such a rare name, so uncommon, that it couldn’t simply be a quirk.
Xavier.
Painted on the side of the train Billy had held in his hand.
Xavier.
The lettering in gold paint. And I’d quickly looked over the other trains. It was written on all four.
Xavier.
There was no denying it.

I sat at my kitchen table in turmoil. Should I go back and question the old man direct?
How do you know him? Tell me what you know, where he is?
Or should I try a more subtle approach, begin to visit more regularly and snoop. I was going to snoop at work, after all, what would adding an old man’s messy house to my list cost me? Nothing much, just a bit of time. I willed Reuben to come calling. He’d know what to do, he’d advise me. But that was the thing with Reuben; he wasn’t just turning up on demand. I was having to wait. And so I did, at the kitchen table – through lunch and the afternoon, until Tristan came home to find me slumped across it, where I’d fallen into a fitful day-sleep.

‘What’s this?’ were his words that woke me. To the right of me, on the table, was the reconditioned tape machine the old man had given me. I’d fallen asleep with the earphones in place, but they’d slipped out.

‘From the old man down the road,’ I offered, adding
Merlin
so there could be no mistaking who I meant.

‘Oh, has he been by?’ Tristan asked, following it up with an excited, speedy: ‘Is this it? Is this the tape? He’s finally sorted it?’

I shook my head. ‘Just a bit of it. Elinor. And you.’

‘So it was hers? And me, you say?’

I managed a smile, despite how weary I felt.

‘You and one of your horror stories.’

‘Ah, I suspected she’d recorded me a couple of times on the sly.’

A smile from Tristan, but it faded when he saw something else in me. Something he couldn’t quite recognise.

‘What?’

I’ve found a connection between that crazy old man Elinor visited and her father, Xavier Riley.

Oh, how I wanted to unburden this discovery, share the load and talk it through. Ransack the chest of hopes and fears the day had unearthed. But I couldn’t. I’d made a promise to myself, to Elinor – she would be the next to know about Xavier, then Tristan. No, Elinor had to come first.

‘It’s nothing, tiredness. And I’ve work tomorrow – so I’m a little anxious, too. I guess.’

I shrugged, as if to show I wasn’t entirely sure myself, and Tristan bought this. To demonstrate his conviction, he changed the subject with ease, brushing my vague behaviour aside.

‘Found out something interesting today. On a job with Jessie.’

I looked up and he shook his head, reassuring me.

‘Not
that
kind of job. Above board. Repairing a flooded church, of all things. One of the other guys on the team reported another incident on tug-boat day. Several of his neighbours had put their bags out the night before – earlier than authorised, but not unreasonable – and discovered their river road strewn with rubbish. The authorities had to send out nets again, scooping up the mess.’

‘It wasn’t Peter Ashworth on the rampage further afield, then?’

Tris laughed at my joke a little too heartily; he was surprised by its appearance and overdid his appreciation.

‘One of the tug-boat workers came into the church, after hours,’ Tristan continued, sobering abruptly, his tone back to serious. ‘He came looking for the priest. Seemed a bit worried, so we asked him a few questions. He was a bit cagey, didn’t really want to speak to us – he’d come to confess to a priest, not some labourers, but we got a bit of info out of him.’

‘What?’

‘They found something when they trawled the river. It wasn’t just the litter they caught with their nets.’

I didn’t need to ask him
what,
it was clear in the sudden drain in his face.

‘He wouldn’t say for definite, but he didn’t deny anything.’

‘Jesus, Tris.’

‘It was dead, he confirmed that. There’s nothing else out there.’

‘How do we know that?’

‘It’s just unlikely, Agnes. And no one has been hurt, have they? No one has reported
that
?’

He was right, I had to agree. ‘But who
would
report it, Tris? The authorities? If their attempts to protect us have been failure, if those dangers are still at large, would they really tell us?’

‘No, Agnes, they wouldn’t,’ he conceded, with a solemn shake of the head. ‘But it’s unlikely.’

A sudden, terrifying thought struck me.

‘What if that’s what happened to her? What if I’m wrong about everything I’ve assumed? What if one of those creatures took my lovely-.’ I couldn’t complete the sentence, but I couldn’t shut out the horrific possibility. Tristan did his best, enveloping me in his strong embrace, squeezing the pain away gently, but the thoughts continued. What if the authorities had completely failed us and those evil, rabid creatures were slowly creeping back onto our streets, savaging our loved ones. ‘Maybe that’s why they tried to blame it on the platform collapsing, maybe this is what they are covering up.’

Tristan squeezed me tighter, his voice dropping low, the tone deeper and soothing.

‘It’s just a bit of rubbish, that’s all. And a dead puppy, at worse. You know she’s alive, right? You can feel it in here?’ My eyes were shut, tears pushing through the closed lids, but I knew where he was pointing.
In here.
‘She was taken, Agnes, but not by a pack of dogs. We’ve made some disturbing discoveries, yes, but nothing like that. We’d have heard, we’d have seen. A broken speedboat stop couldn’t cover up something like that. But.’

He stopped; his sentence a single syllable, but incomplete.

‘But what?’ I asked, lifting my head, using my hands to wipe my eyes, pull wet hair from my dampened cheeks.

‘You’re not ready, are you?’

Ready for what, I wondered, still caught in the clinging web of my thoughts.

Then I realised.

‘No, I need to go back!’ I cried, almost desperate, as if Tristan was threatening to lock me in to stop me going.
I have to go! I have work to do! Work I
must
do! I have to trawl the archives and find evidence! Reuben thinks it’s my best chance of getting her back!
I wondered for a second if I’d spoken all this aloud – Tristan’s features were perplexed by my reaction, but I realised, quickly, he was simply concerned by the rapid change in my demeanour.

‘Okay, okay,’ he said, softly defensive and I was suddenly conscious of the level of my anxiety. I forced myself to calm down, if only on the outside.

‘I just need to give it a go,’ I managed, sounding almost serene. ‘You may be right, I might not be ready, but even if I just make it to the office and have to come right back, it’ll be progress. So, please don’t try to stop me.’

His arms squeezed in on me again and the calm I felt was finally genuine – I felt it hum under my skin and into my bones. Had I really told Reuben that Xavier was the love of my life? That was a statement I would surely have to rectify.

As Tristan hugged me tight, cocooning me in his muscly hold, I gave my missionary friend a little thought. I wondered if he really would come back. Our last meeting had been awkward; an unexplored tension had arisen.

You’ve broken the rules.

What if I didn’t see him again? And what if my returning to work itself restricted our opportunity to meet. Maybe I would have to come clean and tell Tristan about his visits. I considered this for a moment, but I knew the answer; knew it deep in my bones.

What Reuben and I had was just between us; it could happen no other way.

‘How about I run you a bath?’ Tristan offered, breaking my thoughts and his embrace. ‘I’m certain we’ve plenty of our water ration left.’

I nodded.

‘Not too deep,’ I warned him gently and he slipped away.

Minutes later, a luxury scent wafted from our small, cold bathroom. Something florid mixed with something citric. Drawn to the unexpected scent, I went in search and found a grinning Tristan standing before a tub that was brimming with meringue-like foam. Tiny candles were balanced all around the lip of the bath, their little flames reflected in the millions of bubbles that frosted the surface of the water.

‘Where on earth did you…’ I began, but I knew. Our old friend. But I didn’t say. I didn’t want to ruin the moment by inviting old lovers onto the scene. Instead, I said something very different. ‘Shame to waste it on just one of us.’

Our romantic bath was followed by a fitful night’s sleep – but better than I could have expected. I did my best as I dressed for my return to work to banish my new theories concerning Elinor’s disappearance. Tristan was right – I knew in my heart that she’d been taken, I knew it so deep down it had become the truth. I just needed to find out how and why – and where she was. Reuben had been right too – the government office was my window into that world.

Resolved to face any obstacle I encountered – emotional or regulatory – I pulled on my protective gear, slipped away without a final farewell to Tristan and stepped out into the street, back into our little boat and rowed south - my way to work.

Rowed my way back to Elinor, I hoped.

And all the way there, I kept looking into the waters that surrounded me. What if? As I caused ripples and tiny waves in the murky stream, what if there was something in there? Something we thought was gone forever; something, instead, that had simply slipped under the inky surface, out of sight, submerged.

Waiting.

Reaching the south of the city, I moored my small wooden boat and felt a sense of relief, rather than the dread I expected, as I left the waters behind and stepped over the threshold into that government office, back on dry land.

‘Welcome back, Agnes,’ Jerry said on my entrance, greeting me with a melancholy smile he had clearly practiced, hoping it was appropriate.

PLAY

‘I want to know more.’

‘More?’

‘About what they did to people, the tricks they played. About the way they got to people – hurt them, got them to confess!’

A gruff chuckle.

‘What makes you think that kind of thing happened?’

‘You saying it didn’t?’

A pause.

‘They could get into your mind. Work their way inside your head and make you think something was happening, when it wasn’t. When it couldn’t possibly.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Exactly that. They had ways – hypnosis, drugs and other kinds of tricks – that fooled you into believing certain things. Deception that gained your trust – made you talk. Made you confess things.’

‘But what did they make you think?’

‘The impossible. They’d make you think the impossible.’

‘But like what?’

‘Like someone had come back from the dead – someone you loved. And then they’d get you to confess all to a ghost that only existed in your altered state of mind.’

PAUSE

10. Tristan

After the burning of the government laboratory and the faceless threat of the video posted to Jessie’s house in the days that followed, Monty Harrison appeared to keep his distance. I had watched that
security
tape over and over at Old Merlin’s, that grainy image of us raiding the place, taken from a distance. If it had come from Monty, he certainly wasn’t owning up to it that easily. I had expected a follow up visit – or at least another short film through the post, maybe one that showed us further along. Maybe even one of us starting the fire.

‘I hate this waiting, not knowing,’ I confessed to Jessie one morning as we prepared to leave his house. He had sourced us some new
legitimate employment,
as he was calling it.

‘No point in you fretting about it, Tris. Monty will come forward when Monty is ready. And if there are any rules to his games, only he knows what they are.’

‘But what if he-?’

‘What if he
whats
? Nothing you can do. You can always leave town, take Agnes with you.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘No, you can’t – but equally you can’t predict what Monty may or may not do – it’s just wasted energy. And now we’ve got us a new job, I could do with you concentrating that energy elsewhere.’

He was right. Whilst my worrying wasn’t needless and fear of being in Monty’s bad books justified, it was a wasted exercise. Nothing would be gained.

‘So, this kosher job you’ve got us – can I have the details now?’

Jessie split his face open with an ocean wide grin.

‘It’s your perfect location,’ he said, stepping into his protective gear.

‘Oh yeah?’ I responded, suddenly suspicious.

‘Nothing to worry about,’ he added, zipping up.

‘No?’

‘Nah, and no handcuffs or blindfolds, either.’

Another pacific grin.

‘Then what’s the catch?’

The building itself was not the issue. In fact, its architecture, its stubbornness to resist the decaying rinse of the flooding was something to admire. It was sturdy, an ox of a building, standing strong against the constant wash of corruption that lapped around its foundations. And it wasn’t the idea of faith I objected to, either. I understood its value, felt the hope it had to offer, how it could be the one thing that took you from day to day. I got that, and wasn’t going to deny anybody that particular desire. I understood what it was to find yourself with nothing to keep you going forward; no, I understood its true value, without a doubt.

But it was the shallow hypocrisy I despised. Behind the dense veil of sympathetic smiling, happy clapping, good deeds and promise of unearthly rewards, there was a truer face with narrowed eyes, a turned-up nose and a persisting blush of disapproval.

‘Okay, so it’s not your thing,’ Jessie stated, as the speedboat took us north-east in the direction of
St Mary’s.
‘But it’s good money and Esther will be pleased.’ He paused, considered something and shook his head, a hint of exasperation in his next question. ‘Is that it? Is Esther’s connection the problem? Look I know-.’

‘It’s not that at all,’ I cut in. And it wasn’t. For all my annoyance with Esther and her peculiar ways of showing love and devotion to her family, she wasn’t the issue. It went deeper, further back than that. And suddenly I had the urge to open up - to tell Jessie a little more than I had before, to justify what must have seemed like an irrational objection to the work he had sourced us both. ‘There’s corruption in these stones, Jessie. Corruption you can’t even begin to imagine.’

‘What kind of corruption?’ he asked, but he wasn’t really interested and his voice continued with its tone of dulled exasperation.

‘They took him in and protected him, Jessie. They took in the most dangerous man I’ve ever known and hid him from his pursuers and they did it for money.’

But he didn’t hear the words I confessed, as they were swallowed up in the wind as we turned a corner, sped into open water and were caught by the suddenness of a breath-vacuuming storm.

‘What did you say?’ Jessie asked, his own words battling to be heard.

‘Just corruption,’ I responded, my resolve to confide in him waning. His demeanour told me he wasn’t in the right mind to listen properly. Not at that moment. ‘How about we just get on with it? I’ll put my principles aside and you can stop with the twenty questions?’

Despite the onslaught of blustery air, he must have caught some of my words and he nodded.

‘Just another five minutes!’ he shouted, pointing ahead to a small building with a steeple. A small building that rapidly grew in size the closer we got and, despite my offer to put reservations aside, I felt an age old anger rise up in me, pausing in my throat, where it gave me a bitter squeeze, punishing me for my impending betrayal.

The church was set right at the edge of the open water we had sped across. Behind it, I could see a community of tightly packed-in houses, spreading out to the left and right of the holy building, giving the impression that the church itself was leading the way, pointing out to the water, with the other less grand red-bricked constructions following on behind. There was no denying its beauty. Constructed of flint stones, its arched entrance soared the height of two-men and its arched door was almost as high, built from a sturdy oak that appeared to have survived the rotting you might have expected.
Protected by God,
Esther would no doubt have claimed, but I would have put it down to decent preservation work and good luck. And money – everyone knew the Church had money and paying for re-construction work on places like this had no doubt been its priority after the Great Drowning. If the building was protected by an invisible deity, it hadn’t completely escaped ruination. The waters were high on this side of the city and depth of the flooding was waist-high, rising over the pews where parishioners would once have prayed. Yet, the heart of the church was tall enough that a platform had been constructed that ran across the majority of the floor – much like the fated platform I had left Elinor on that day, awaiting her school boat. Only, this one was ten times the size at least, and it was lined with row after row of chairs, with rusting metal legs and orange, plastic moulding. At the far end of the platform was a lectern; it looked like an original, but up close it appeared water-damaged, suggesting that maybe it had been salvaged from the waters below it. Adjacent to this was another ancient item – a stone font that held a pool of holy water in its rock palm. The platform itself was accessed by a ladder that crawled up out of the water just beyond the arched entrance.

As we entered the church, we were approached by a man dressed similarly to ourselves – head to toe in protective gear. Jessie referred to him as
Father
and they shook hands.

‘Take yourselves up and I’ll shut these doors,’ we were told and so Jessie and I climbed the ladder and stepped aboard the extensive platform. ‘Careful how you go,’ came a mask-muffled call below. ‘That’s where those rotten boards are.’

The sound of large, thick doors slamming, followed by the clunk of bolts informed us the outside was shut out and we pulled off our masks and undid our outdoor clothing. Seconds later, the man I knew only as
Father
climbed the ladder and joined us.

‘Neil,’ he offered, holding out a hand.

I took it. ‘Tristan,’ I returned.

‘Oh, I thought I recognised you,’ he continued, shrugging off his own government-issue gear. ‘But I can tell from your expression that you don’t remember me at all.’

I studied him for a second or so. He was shorter than Jessie and I, slight, too – he didn’t have our build. He had grey hair, which aged him, but looking closer at his face, he was probably no older than me. But I couldn’t place him. Not at first.

‘Sorry. Have we worked for you before?’

Father
Neil chuckled.

‘It was a long time ago, Tristan, but I knew you from
Albert’s.’
He watched my face, checking if he had the memory correct himself. ‘
Albert’s Film Emporium,’
he expanded, in case that helped my recollection.

‘I remember
Albert’s,’
I eventually answered, after a longer, second glance at those salt-and-pepper, holy features, ‘but I don’t remember you. Sorry Father.’

‘It’s Neil,’ he corrected, and added: ‘Well, never mind,’ shuffling ahead, trying his utmost to hide his embarrassment. ‘The damage is this way.’

‘Was that necessary?’ Jessie hissed at me, as we followed behind the priest. ‘I’d quite like to get paid for this job. Couldn’t you have gone along with him? Couldn’t you just have lied?’

‘I could have, yes,’ I responded, giving nothing else away. Truth was, I had now remembered him. As I’d stared into those eyes that were as grey as his thinning hair, I remembered only too well. But if
Father
Neil thought I didn’t – and he’d persisted, just to check, he really wanted to be sure – it might work to my advantage.

The job itself was simple enough. A number of the boards on the platform needed replacing and the rest stripping back and treating with a few coats of a protective solution.

‘A few rotters amongst the good ones,’
Father
Neil explained, leading on, pointing out the culprits as he spoke. ‘But quite a few days’ work here. And we are very, very grateful.’

‘That’s not a problem,’ Jessie replied, shaking the priest’s hand. ‘Happy to help.’

As the holy hand was offered in my direction – I shook it, I didn’t want to upset
Father
Neil any further than I had already – this final exchange struck me as odd. Then, as we headed back to Jessie’s boat to collect tools, it came to me.

‘You’re not getting paid, are you?’

Jessie read the exasperation in my voice and sighed impatiently.

‘But you are, Tris. Is that a problem?’

We were outside, back behind our protective masks. Yet, even through the steamed-up visor of his mask, I could feel the burn of his glare. Without intending, I had ventured into forbidden territory. This was for Esther. Jessie was doing this for Esther – the mother of his nephew, sister of his former lover. Hardy as Jessie was, occasionally he did things on sentiment, and this was such an occasion. Somehow, I’d found a raw nerve and pinched it.

‘No,’ I said, and my tone and the short nod I received in reply confirmed we were moving on. ‘So, where do you want to start?’

It turned out we weren’t the only workers on site.
Father
Neil had roused a whole army of helpers - men and woman parishioners who pitched in to do anything from stacking and removing the plastic orange chairs to sanding down the planks that we were keeping. Even some older children were roped in for carrying and clearing up. It took three of us to hoister the old lectern onto a set of wheels and roll it away from its original position, and five of us to complete a similar operation with the old stone font; it was underneath this latter item that the worst of the rot had occurred.

‘There’s a crack goes right through it,’
Father
Neil explained, warning us to be careful as we shifted the bulky relic. ‘A slow drip, drip, drip out of sight. Noticed the sponginess in the wood a few weeks back half-way through a Christening.’

‘You’re lucky it didn’t go through to the water below, Father,’ Jessie informed him, crouching, inspecting the damage once the stout font had been carefully wheeled off.

As we began the bulk of the work – ripping out the rotten wood and cleaning up the boards that remained – I couldn’t help but reflect on the dedication of those around me. Alien as it was to my own ways, there was something to be admired. Given what had happened – the years of terror as wild dogs had reigned the streets and the abduction of children in the name of progress; the relentless flooding and apology that the authorities eventually offered as the only answer to these the crimes they had committed – given all that, it was quite something that these people turned to faith to keep them sane, to see them through. Despite all the manmade calamities that surrounded them, that invaded their histories, and without a single divine intervention or celestial sighting along the way, they still put their fate in the hands of the something invisible. They still believed.

I usually saw this as short-sighted, a waste of effort – take things into your own hands and make change happen was the way forward, surely. But confined inside that building for so many hours across that week, surrounded by the hard work and genial chatter of those volunteers, I sensed that in their own way they were making a difference. And, whilst the authorities had taken away so much from them all over the decades, they couldn’t take their faith, couldn’t take their hope.

Of course, I kept this view to myself; couldn’t have Jessie Morton thinking I was going soft. Whenever he checked-in on how my morals were coping, I’d sneer and ask him when I was getting paid. I couldn’t let him down; he had defined expectations of me I had to meet.

Above all else, the hard graft and change of location the church offered was a welcome distraction for me. Whilst the ghost of Elinor continued to haunt every corner of our lives, I was also plagued by more recent activity. There were the tapes to begin with – the video posted through Jessie’s letter box and the recording we had found at the train graveyard. Old Man Merlin had still made little progress on the latter and I was anxious to know its content. Could it lead us to Elinor’s whereabouts, or at least her fate? Or was it just a false hope, a blind faith that kept us going a little further for a little longer?