The God of the Hive (8 page)

He met her gaze then, grey eyes locking on green, and in a moment, she surprised him. Her eyes began to dance, and her mouth twitched, and then she was laughing, with full acceptance and good humour and not a trace of the hysteria one might expect of a woman in her situation. She laughed so hard, the basket jumped out from underneath her and left the doctor sitting on the grubby deck.

“Oh, my,” she said, fishing out a handkerchief. “My, my, my. And to think that mere minutes before you arrived in my surgery, I was making an inventory of supplies that I’d counted ten times already and wondering if it was too late to take a position of public-school nurse that I’d been offered in Edinburgh.”

“Yes, well,” Holmes said, “my wife does not tend to complain of boredom.”

“I can see that.” She stretched her legs out straight and clasped her hands on her skirts, a gesture of decision. “Very well. I should tell you that I happen to have a relative on the Dutch coast. Would you consider that ‘safe haven’ for your son?”

Chapter 16

I
coasted through the darkness on silent wings for a time, and then snapped back into a confusion of pain and terror and the stench of petrol. Some furious creature was struggling against me, a knife was buried into my kidneys, and my head felt like a football: kicked about and swollen with air.

Directed less by thought than by animal instinct aimed at making the noise and pain go away, I patted at the furious struggling creature. After a while its noises and struggles diminished somewhat. Nothing I could do about the vacant pounding inside my skull, but, continuing the patting motion, I eased the creature off my belly, which reduced the stabbing of the knife.

I had no idea where I was, but I emphatically did not want to be there: topsy-turvy with walls pressing in on me, the crackle of broken glass accompanying my every motion, noises of distress beating at me. And not only noises—the enclosure was jumping in time to a pounding from outside.

My unoccupied hand came up of its own will and looped my dangling spectacles back onto my ears. With clarity came awareness: The panel in front of my nose had a hole in it. A bullet hole?

Suddenly the heavy reek of petrol was intolerable, and my entire body was seized by the need to be away
—away!
Whatever this enclosure was, it moved alarmingly with every blow from that person on the other side.
My mouth formed some words—
Stay there
, perhaps?—and my body convulsed with the effort of turning the right way around.

On my knees was better than on my back. And my hands could grasp the lower (upper?) edge of the enclosure and tug: heavy, but it moved. The pounding and noise cut off abruptly, and I tugged again, but it was impossible to brace myself, crowded into this tiny space with another.

I would have more room to move if the small creature were not pressing against me—but what to do with it? I returned my grip to the lower edge of my cage, and said, “Get out when I lift this.”

And I lifted, straining with all my might and biting down on a scream of pain. The gap between hands and ground grew: two inches, then five, and now on a level with my hips. Quivering with effort, my skull near to explosion, I gasped, “Out!” and felt the creature squirm past me, beneath the dangerous weight of this structure, wailing in protest but obeying. A tiny pair of shoes gave a final kick against my knees, and then I was alone in the trap. I let the impossible weight settle down around me and collapsed against the side, panting and near to blacking out again.

The pounding started up again, with renewed urgency. A few of the accompanying words began to register:
Petrol
was chief among them, then
fire
.

A child’s voice from without joined the chorus, twining around the fire-person’s masculine bellows. My head—oh, my head! If they would only be quiet for a moment.

Estelle
, that was the small creature’s name. And with her gone I could—just—manoeuvre myself into a half-standing, hunched-over position, my back against what was, in fact, the upturned floor of the enclosure. Which did me no good, since I couldn’t very well lift the weight and crawl out at the same time, but perhaps—

“Estelle? Estelle!” Shouting sent a bolt of agony through my head; it took me a moment to notice that she was no longer wailing and the man no longer shouting.

“’Stella, I need you to find something to prop under the back of the ’plane”—yes, there was an aeroplane in the equation—“when I lift it up. Can you find a big, heavy stick, about as tall as you are?” Could she? She was a mere child; I had no idea what she could do.

I heard her voice, although I couldn’t make out her words. She seemed to be moving towards my right, which indicated some kind of response to my command. The voice stopped, then started up again. It did this two or three times. A conversation? Did small children hallucinate? Or was it normal to converse with imaginary friends at times of stress?

“Estelle, can you find a stick, please? It’s really important, honey.”

“No, I—”

But her protest was cut off by a shudder in the enclosure, and without stopping to reflect on the unlikeliness of a child of forty months (even if she was Holmes’ granddaughter) understanding the fulcrum principle, I responded by pushing upwards with all my strength against the floorboards.

The machine rose, tail-end first, leaving the heavy engine off to my left. Tentatively, I let my knees sag a fraction; when the load remained up, I dropped to the ground and dove out from under the remains of the ’plane.

“Good work, Estelle,” I started to say, but then I saw her, thumb in mouth, staring towards the tail end of the machine. I took three steps forward, and saw the person responsible for lifting the burden.

I say
person
, but my concussed brain knew full well that it was indulging in a few hallucinations of its own, and that I had conjured up the creature of my recent thoughts and mythic dream. The being on whose shoulders our tail assembly was resting might have been spawned by the trees all around us: a wiry figure, all beard and hair, clothed in dark brown corduroy trousers, a lighter brown tweed jacket with an orange patch on one sleeve, a once-red shirt, a lavender tweed waistcoat, and a cap the green of the branches behind him. The cap had a feather in it. I glanced down, half-expecting hooves or fur where his trousers stopped, but he wore boots, their leather the colour of the soil.

I met a fool in the forest, a motley fool
, my mind recited idiotically.

I became aware that he had said something. This creature of the woods had made speech. I blinked at him, and he repeated it, more loudly, but I was distracted by a presence at my side. A small child—Estelle. Estelle had both arms wrapped around my leg, as if clinging to a
rooted tree in a hurricane. My hand smoothed the back of her head; I was dimly aware that she was sobbing, and only the woodman’s urgency forced a key word from his thrice-repeated warning into my awareness.

“Petrol!”

Petrol. Fire. Javitz—and the poor devil already bore the scars of flame.

Some dim awareness of a long-ago situation that had involved a child in need of distraction penetrated my mind, causing my hand to reach for an object that I didn’t know was there until I drew it out: a delicate porcelain dollies’ tea-cup, slipped into my pocket days before. I pressed it—miraculously unbroken—into the child’s hand. She looked at the familiar toy and unwrapped her arms from my leg, making sounds of exclamation while allowing me to usher her away
(away! from the fire!)
and settle her on the ground. I then moved with alacrity back to the remains of the machine.

The wreck was little more than a cigar-shaped tube—both wings had shredded, the propeller was gone, and the whole thing had flipped over. I squatted to look underneath, and blinked at the sight of Javitz’s head and shoulders, upside-down on the earth while his legs disappeared upwards. He worked to turn his head around.

“My foot’s caught,” he gasped. “Get out of here. The petrol will go up any moment.”

It was already dripping down the control-stick and across the pilot’s clothing.

“What can I do?” I asked him.

“Let me have your revolver, and then run.”

My thinking processes, far from clear, failed to connect the weapon with a means of freeing a caught foot. However, I could think of another weapon that might do it.

I dropped my jacket and the gun on the ground, then called to our hirsute rescuer, “Can you keep the machine absolutely still? If it shifts and makes a spark, we’ll both be trapped.”

“I can,” came the reply.

Javitz protested furiously all the while I was inching my way in beside him.

His right boot was caught on something invisible in the broken belly
of the aeroplane. Ignoring his furious commands, I slid the knife out of my boot and walked both hands up a trouser leg sodden with petrol: knee; calf; ankle. When I reached his boot, my fingertips found the bit of metal snagging the laces. He had fallen silent, rigid with dread; I needed only whisper my warning: “Brace yourself.”

The knife point slid under the laces and the tough cord parted. He grunted as his full weight settled onto his bent neck. I held his foot away from the metal snag, waiting for him to pull away.

The only direction he could move was out, under the hanging body of the aeroplane, both of us praying that the buttons and ties of his clothing did not create any friction. Head, shoulders, torso, legs, and finally his feet—one booted, one bare—were pulled past my own feet and disappeared from view. My face was mere inches from his toes as I followed, fast as my legs could scrabble.

Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the fur coat and rucksack, spilt from the compartment. As I rose to my feet, I stretched out a hand to snatch them up: The pack came without hindrance; the fur caught briefly on something before coming free.

As it did so, a faint clang came from the depths of the machine. I took three panicked leaps, halfway to Estelle, and then the
Whomp!
of igniting petrol shoved at me and I caught her up in a somersault that ended in a tangle of legs, leaves, and fur among the trees.

If the petrol tank had not been down to its last quarter, the explosion would have incinerated us all. Still, there was plenty of fuel to set the machine instantly ablaze.

I stuck up my head, taking a census. Estelle sat, wide-eyed, covered in leaves, shocked speechless. I threw aside the fur and went to pick her up, although on closer examination, she seemed less terrified than amazed. Javitz, on the other hand, had come to a halt with his back against a tree and was staring white-faced and shuddering at the flames. Our rescuer—our rescuer was nowhere to be seen.

I set the child down next to Javitz, thinking that comforting her might at least distract him for a moment, then scrambled in a wide circle around the pulse of flames. I expected to find our Good Samaritan either aflame or impaled—but the dirt-coloured boots came into view,
waving from the shrubbery beneath a slab of propeller quivering from a tree-trunk. The boots sank, and a head took their place. He stared open-mouthed at the propeller, the fire, and at me. His eyes, I noticed with the peculiar clarity of the concussed, were the very shade of Damian’s
Green Man
.

Then he laughed. “Ha!” he shouted, a bark of pure joy at the ridiculousness of life. “Ha ha!”

His head disappeared into the shrubbery, which convulsed madly until he emerged from their back side, brushing half a bushel of dried leaves from his clothing. He retrieved his cap from a branch, slapping it against his leg before pulling it onto his hair, then climbed onto the dirt track to stand, hands on hips, grinning at the dying flames. He looked like a village lad at a Guy Fawkes bonfire; I half-expected him to gather some branches to toss on.

“Ha!” he barked again.

Then his head turned to find the three of us and the beard parted in a wide grin, which seemed remarkably full of very white teeth. “Who knew this day would hold such drama?” he said cheerfully.

My brains were so thoroughly scrambled, I could only grin back at him. We watched the flames for a while—they were, in fact, remarkably interesting—until I reluctantly woke to my responsibilities and looked around me.

Estelle was patting our blood-soaked, terror-stricken pilot on the head, comforting him instead of the other way around as I had intended. His eyes were tightly shut as he struggled for control, and I kept my distance while this strong man pasted on a deathly smile, dismissing her services when what he wanted was to curl over and howl with terror. I gave him time, and when he was restored, I approached.

Estelle had sat down on the bedraggled fur. She was holding the tea-cup in one hand and an acorn-cap about the same size in the other, scowling between the two. I shook my head in wonder: I’d been in charge of this small life less than twelve hours, and I could already feel an ulcer coming on. How did parents survive?

I dropped to my knees beside Javitz. His face was contained, his left hand clamped around his upper thigh. Fresh blood oozed around the
fingers. The once-white scarf had all but torn free, but I did not think this patch of roadway was the best place in which to examine his injuries.

A pair of dirt-coloured boots came into the corner of my vision, and I said, “He needs a doctor. Is there a town nearby?”

“No!” Javitz protested. “If there’s a town, there’ll be police.”

I glanced upwards to see what impression this statement had on the bearded man—expecting, perhaps, that a man who reacted to flames with childish glee would be childish in all things—but his raised eyebrows spoke of a mind quick enough to put together the situation. Although he did not seem alarmed.

“Three master criminals fleeing the law in an aeroplane,” he reflected. “I have fallen into a
Boy’s Own
adventure.”

His voice. I peered more closely at him, trying to see beneath the herbage. He might look like a resident of the wilderness—a charcoal-burner, perhaps, or a rat-catcher—but he sounded like an Oxford don.