The Disappearance of Katie Wren (27 page)

Katie is still shouting, but her words are just an incoherent cry now and she seems to be in constant, unrelenting agony. She pulls again and again on the chains, and blood is running from thick wounds at her wrists, but at the same time she's starting to let out a strange, gurgled cry as more blood erupts from her mouth. Shocked, I realize that she actually seems to be laughing.

***

I dip the sponge back into the bowl of warm water. As soon as I squeeze, I see a cloud of blood, so I quickly pull the sponge out and place it back on Katie's ravaged belly. My hands are trembling, but I can't stop my work. I have to clean her. I have to fix her up so I can get her out of here.

The wounds are real. That much is clear. I can't explain what caused them, but my best guess is that they were somehow faked during the ceremony and that these monsters then inflicted them for real while she was being carried back here to the recovery chamber. There was no resistance when I insisted that I should be the one to clean her, and now I can see that the ruptures in her flesh have left the muscle exposed. At least the worst of the bleeding has stopped, and Dominic Stewart told me that a solution had been added to the water that would hopefully encourage her to heal faster. In the circumstances, I have no option but to believe him.

“Mum,” she whispers suddenly, struggling to open her eyes.

“It's okay,” I tell her. “I'm here. You're not in that awful place anymore.”

“Did I...”

She lets out a faint, pained gasp, but she's trying to smile.

“Did I do okay?” she asks finally. “I
did
, didn't I? I felt him. He was getting closer. I feel him still.”

She raises her trembling right hand and places it on her belly, fumbling to find the splits in her flesh.

“Katie, be careful,” I whisper. “You must -”

She lets out a gasp of pain, although I think she might also be laughing.

“He's never managed to do so much before,” she continues. “That's a good sign. It means he's getting closer and closer, and he's finding it easier to break through to the corporeal world. The schedule is perfect. I saw his shadow in the darkness.”

I shake my head.

“You still don't believe me?” she gasps. “Really? After what you saw?”

I
can't
believe you,” I tell her. “I just can't.”

“You will.”

Again, I shake my head.

“You have to,” she continues. “It's only going to be stronger next time.”

“I'm going to clean you properly,” I tell her, trying to stay calm, “and then you and I are going to get out of this awful, wicked place. Do you understand? You need to see a doctor. These wounds could become infected, and I can't let these people keep doing this to you!”

“But I want -”

“You're in no fit state to judge!” I hiss.

She laughs again, although after a moment she winces.

“Look at you,” I continue. “Look what they've done to you, Katie. I can't bear to see you like this.”

“It's not
them
,” she says with a grin, turning her head to look at me through half-open eyes. “It's Hiirux. This is the most wonderful sign, Mum. There's no doubt that he recognizes me as the chosen one. No doubt at all. It's all happening precisely as the ancient texts foretold, and as the High Priest promised me. First the dark visitors came to me in my apartment. Then the black birds tried to stop me. And now Hiirux himself is close.”

“You're deluded,” I tell her. “Utterly, utterly deluded. We can fix this, Katie. We can get you back on the straight and narrow, but the first step is to take you away from this awful place.”

“You can't do that,” she whispers, closing her eyes. “I just need to rest now. I need to be ready for the next time. We'll have to do it again soon, so that he's still close. We must be...”

Her voice trails off. She continues to mumble to herself for a few more seconds, but clearly she's losing consciousness and finally she falls quiet. My first instinct is to wake her, and then to get her onto her feet so we can leave, but I know she's too weak. All I can do right now is continue to clean her wounds and then wait for her to regain a little more of her strength, and then I
have
to find a way out of this place. I certainly can't let her go through anything like this again.

No matter what it takes, Katie is not spending another night at Knott's Court.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Harry's Choice

“I need to know the plan for getting her out of here!” I whisper as I sit next to Annabelle in the gallery room. “These people are insane and they've somehow infected her mind! She can't stay here, they're doing awful things to her and she seems willing to go along with it! You need to tell me what to do!”

Leaning forward, I close my eyes and put my head in my hands. For a moment, I feel as if I might scream.

“She looked crazy,” I add, struggling to hold back more tears. “Her eyes... I swear, she looked utterly deluded, like she really believes all of this.”

I wait for a reply, but Annabelle says nothing. Since I found her in here a few minutes ago, she's been sitting completely still and she hasn't uttered a word. Finally I turn to her. She's staring down at the floor, her eyes wide with shock, and she seems almost catatonic.

“Did you hear a word I just said?” I continue, nudging her arm but still eliciting no response. “You said you had a plan! We don't have any time to waste!”

Again I wait, and again she says nothing.

“I was thinking we had to wait until she's well enough to walk,” I mutter, “but now I'm starting to wonder whether it'll be easier to move her while she's weak. At least when she's unconscious, she can't stop us. We just have to find some way to carry her out through the front door, but I'm quite certain these lunatics will try to interfere. They say she can leave whenever she wants, but that's rot. Perhaps we need a distraction, although...”

I pause as I turn and look around the room. There are no windows, and to be honest I've lost track of exactly where we are in the house. There are so many corridors and different rooms, the whole place is somewhat like a maze. I think we're on the ground floor, but I most certainly don't know how to make a quick exit. After a moment, I turn back to Annabelle and see that she's still just staring down at the floor.

“Well?” I whisper. “What's the plan?”

No reply.

“Annabelle?”

“I thought he was dead,” she says after a moment, her voice sounding hushed and fragile. “He taught me everything I knew about the world, and then he died. Or that's what I thought. Now it turns out he was alive all this time, and everything he told me was a lie.”

“We can discuss that later,” I say with a sigh, “but right now -”

“He was full of shit,” she continues, interrupting me. “He told me we had to fight against corruption and power wherever we found it. But it was just a facade. He was pretending to be the man he wanted to be, and all the while he was secretly working with these bastards. He couldn't even explain it to me properly.”

She turns to me.

“He said he knew it was wrong, but that he couldn't leave the cult. He said he was railing against injustice and against the evil in the world, but that Knott's Court isn't part of that evil, not really. I think he's got it all worked out in his head, but he can't put it into words. He's insane, and he's wrong, and he taught me to build my whole world based on a lie. Even the cancer that was supposed to have killed him... He faked it so he could disappear and spend all his time here at the house. And do you know what else? He -”

She hesitates, and now her bottom lip is trembling.

“He told me he's proud of me. Can you believe that? He's proud of me for listening to what he said, and now he wants me to see things from his point of view. He wants me to join this dumb, evil, cruel cult.”

“I'm sorry you've been let down,” I tell her, “but there'll be time to deal with that later. Right now, we have to focus on getting out of here. You said you had a plan. I need to know what it is.”

“The plan?” She stares at me, before furrowing her brow. “The plan was to throw ourselves into this mess and figure something out once we were right in the middle. The plan was to have a microphone transmitting our every move back to Bob, but they found the damn thing on me. By now, Bob's hopefully getting away, 'cause there's a real good chance they'll go after him. Either way, we're on our own now.”

“But we must have a plan!”

She shakes her head.

“You told me you could always come up with a plan,” I continue. “When I first met you, one of the first things you said to me was that you could always figure out how to get out of a difficult situation.”

“That was then!” she says firmly. “That was before...”

Her voice trails off for a moment.

“Fuck him,” she continues finally. “Fuck him for lying to me, and fuck him for thinking I'd understand.”

Getting to my feet, I make my way over to the doorway and look out at the corridor. I pause, waiting for some sign of movement in the distance, and then I turn back to Annabelle.

“Tonight,” I tell her.

“Tonight what?”

“They're going to put Katie through that awful ordeal again. She seems keen, she says she can handle it, but it'll undoubtedly leave her weak. She'll probably sleep again, and that's the only opportunity we have to force her out of here. Plus, I noticed that in the immediate aftermath of the ceremony earlier, the staff here were very busy. They barely came and checked on Katie once. It's not much of a chance, but it's all I can think of.”

“You want to carry her out?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“How about we just give up?” she asks. “How about we just accept that we lost?”

“Never.”

“It's too late. We can't fight this. I was wrong about everything.”

“Don't talk like that!” I hurry back over to her. “Ever since the day I met you, you've always -”

“I've always been a fool!” she hisses. “I was tricked and deluded! I hero-worshiped Harry, and look where that got me! My whole life was built on a lie! I thought we could fight people in power, but we can't. They'll just crush us.”

“We're going to get my girl out of here!” I tell her.

“It'll never work!”

“It might!” I continue. My mind is racing as I try to come up with some more details for the plan. “We just need to know the layout of the house. You said there's a rear entrance, so maybe we can go that way instead.”

“We're near the rear right now.”

“Are you sure?”

She nods. “I don't know the exact layout, but we're definitely near the kitchen area, and that's where there's a rear entrance that opens out into the yard. I'm sure it's guarded like crazy, but it's gonna be a damn sight easier to use than the front. At least there aren't doormen. At least, I hope there aren't. But there's no point even talking about this, 'cause we don't have a hope in hell.”

“Harry lied to you,” I reply, “but that doesn't mean you have to give up.”

“I'm too tired.”

“You believed him because he appealed to the part of you that values truth and justice. That part still exists, even if it's taken a knock. You don't need Harry Plume, Annabelle. Not to be yourself.”

“You're not my mother,” she says with a sigh. “I don't need a pep talk.”

“Don't you want to prove Harry wrong?” I ask. “Don't you want to show him that you were right all along? Life isn't about picking the stronger side and going with the flow, Annabelle. I tried to teach that to Katie, and now I'm trying to teach it to you. Life is about doing what you know is right, and I for one would rather fail at that than surrender. And even if you won't help, I'm still going to find a way to get my daughter out of here!”

She pauses for a moment.

“That's awfully tough talk,” she says finally, “for a country mouse. But you might have a point.”

“We'll have to act as quickly as possible,” I continue, pacing over to the far side of the room and then turning back to her. “As soon as -”

“Keep your voice down!” she hisses. “Get over here!”

I hurry across the room and sit next to her again.

“The walls have ears in a place like this,” she whispers. “You don't wanna be advertising your great plan, okay? If we're doing this, we're gonna do it right. We have to assume they heard what you just said, which means they won't be expecting us to go out through the front door. But that's what we have to do, because anything else is just suicide!”

“We'll have to be quick,” I point out.

“No kidding. We'll also have to figure out what we do in the unlikely event that we get Katie away from Knott's Court. She's still gonna wanna come straight back.”

“We'll take her to a hospital. Once we explain everything and show them her injuries, they'll have to take her in.”

“I get the feeling your darling little daughter is pretty good at telling people what they want to hear,” she mutters. “We're gonna have to figure out how they got into her head, and how deep, and then we're gonna have to find some real specialized help. I think you need to face an uncomfortable truth, Winnie. The real Katie, the Katie you thought you knew, might be gone forever. She disappeared when she came to London and she's still gone, and she might never come back.”

“There are doctors who can help her,” I point out. “They can do things to reverse everything that's happened.”

I pause for a moment, but I can tell from the look in her eyes that Annabelle doesn't believe me.

“What else am I supposed to do?” I hiss. “Leave her here?”

“Of course not, but...” She pauses. “I guess we've gotta cling to hope, huh? And your plan is better than anything I can come up with right now. But you've gotta realize that they'll come after her, and they won't stop, not ever. They think she's the key to something huge, and they're convinced that it's all coming to a head on October 31
st
. We'll need a whole new plan for what to do with her once we get her out the door of this place.”

“We'll figure that out when the time comes,” I tell her. “For now, the most important thing is to get her out of their clutches before they can hurt her again. We've got to -”

Before I can finish, I hear footsteps in the distance. Annabelle and I both turn just in time to see Katie stepping into the room with Harry Plume right behind her. Even after just a few hours of recuperation, Katie is all smiles again, although I can see that she's limping slightly.

“We thought that you ladies might like to join us for tonight's main meal,” Harry says, as if it's the most natural idea in the whole world. “We serve only the finest food here at Knott's Court. Why, they don't even eat so well at Downing Street or Buckingham Palace. As I know full well, from experience.”

“Traitor!” Annabelle hisses, getting to her feet.

He sighs. “If you'll just -”

“You claimed to be fighting everything that's wrong with this country!” she continues, stepping toward him. “You used to talk about how the monarchy was an outdated institution, and about how the corridors of power drip corruption on anybody who walks along them!”

“And I was absolutely right.”

“You were good at giving speeches, but now you're just part of the establishment!”

He shakes his head. “Absolutely not. We
use
the establishment to get what we want, but they're a means to an end. They think Knott's Court is just a club for a certain type of gentleman, but they're absolutely wrong. We're far,
far
more than that, as the world will learn on the last day of this month. I railed against the establishment because of their rotten, corrupt ways, and because they pretended to be pure. But the world here within the walls of Knott's Court
is
pure, and that's the key difference.”

“Funny,” she mutters. “You almost sound like you believe that bullshit.”

“Please,” Katie says, still smiling, “just join us for dinner. Then maybe you'll understand what we're doing here, and what'll come next once the great Hiirux has returned to us.”

“Virgins for everyone?” Annabelle asks with a raised eyebrow.

“This way,” Katie continues, gesturing for us to follow as she turns and heads out of the room. “If you can just put aside your hard-won cynicism, you'll see that we're all on the verge of a brave new dawn. Believers and non-believers alike.”

“The dining room is down the hall,” Harry adds, turning to follow her. “I do hope you'll join us.”

“She really believes in all of this,” I stammer, still struggling to accept that my daughter could be so deluded. “They've filled her head with so much nonsense.”

“Every little girl wants to be special,” Annabelle mutters darkly, watching as Harry walks away. “The key is to make sure you don't pick the wrong hero.”