Black Jack (6 page)

Shekina nodded in agreement.

‘Good, now go back into the mind,’ he said, and made the keying gesture to send her away. He let a moment pass, and then he touched the girl in the hollow of her throat. ‘I call Winter to come to the front.’

The first thing Winter did was cross her legs and fluff her hair, her movements those of a woman supremely conscious of her sexuality. Smoothly, as if she had done so hundreds of times, she reached forward and lightly rested her hand on Schooner Klaus’s knee.

Ignoring the small white hand on his person, Schooner Klaus looked at her sternly. ‘Listen carefully to your instructions.’

Winter took her hand away from his knee and put it primly in her lap.

‘When Shekina instructs you to hold the body your job is to make the man or the woman you find before you fall deeply and hopelessly in love with you. Be outwardly shy and innocent, but do whatever is necessary to achieve your objective. If you fail all the sand will fall into the bottom bulb of the hourglass and you know what that means. The end of Dakota. And when it is the end for Dakota it is the end for
all
of you. Do you understand what is expected of you?’ he asked sternly.

‘Yes, Daddy.’

‘Remember also that your contribution is a matter of national security not just for any one country, but for the survival of the entire human race. Your role is a holy mission, a crusade of utmost importance. Are you ready to give up everything, even your life, in the performance of this duty?’

‘You know I’d do anything for you, Daddy.’

‘Good girl. When I pull your strings, you will speak my words. There is no room for error.’ He stroked her forehead gently. ‘Now go back into the mind.’

Next Schooner Klaus used his finger to write on the forehead of the sleeping girl, a code - so secret it used the Enochian alphabet.

‘Key, come forth,’ he invited softly.

Key came. Her eyes were a void, for she was not human. Key was a stage three reporting alter, created through such terrible torture that she had left the body to hover over it like a mist. Totally invisible to all the other alters, she played a very important role. She was the watcher of the entire system. There was nothing that she did not know. Created to have excellent rapid recall, she alone knew every alter and kept a record of everything that had happened to Dakota’s body. In the unlikely event that Key was compromised there were six back-up alters who could be accessed by more secret codes known only to Schooner Klaus.

The procedure was very strict. ‘Hello,’ said Key, and waited for the standard response format, which was ‘Hello, Princess’. If ever that did not come, she would instantly disappear.

‘Hello, Princess,’ said Schooner Klaus. ‘Who is the brown-skinned woman from Dakota’s dreams?’

‘She comes when Dakota is asleep so I am unable to monitor.’

‘You are certain she is not a previously unknown alter Dakota might have created while in the sensory deprivation tank?’

‘No such alter exists.’

‘Thank you for your help. Return the body to Dakota now.’

Schooner Klaus took a syringe from his pocket and placed it on the low table. Then he took a few steps toward the one-way mirror over the fireplace, bowed deferentially, and left the room. Outside the door Miss Monroe was waiting.

‘Her medication is on the table. Take her back as soon as she wakes up,’ he said. Always, his voice reminded Miss Monroe of ink being poured into a glass tank, of elegant swirls and coils. ‘Good night, Dr Klaus.’

He looked at her strangely. Something about the way she had bade him goodnight. A lost memory broke free: his mother bending down to kiss him, her mouth soft on his cheek. ‘Good night, Beautiful Klaus,’ she whispers.

He had been so small. So innocent.

Schooner Klaus turned resolutely away from the memory and made his way toward the other end of the mansion where a masked ball was in progress. Here, all depravity and excess were not only encouraged, but celebrated. He would drink a cup of blood and temporarily forget about the dangerous brown skinned woman until dawn.

The Brown-Skinned Woman

London, England

Bumi awakened on her sofa bed, distressed, having dreamed of her dead father. He had been sitting on the steps of her childhood home in Calcutta, looking unwell and unhappy, but no one else other than her had appeared to be able to see him. He had vanished when she had tried to hug him.

It was still dark outside, but she could see by the blue light that came from under the door of the boy’s room. Hooking her feet into her bedroom slippers she moved soundlessly to her cramped bathroom. There she switched on the little electric blow heater, and while the room warmed up, stood looking at herself in the mirror above the sink. Two years shy of forty, and already abandoned and alone.

Once, many years ago, at a banquet held in the manor where she had worked, an English lord had lifted his wine glass to her in an ironic salute. An offer of sorts, but certainly not, ‘Correspond in secret. I am in love.’ Immediately she had averted her eyes to the wallpaper–a Liberty pattern with peacocks, peonies, and pheasants. Better to be a wild bird in the falcon’s beak than to leave the servants’ quarters through that small, unadorned door of shame. As she cleared away his dinner plate, her gaze had been pulled to his fat, be-ringed fingers, drumming on the pristine linen.

She had understood that haughty gesture too.

She had been born in India, after her mother had decided that six children were enough and vowed that she would not lie with her beekeeper husband again, unless one of the wild monkeys that roamed the outskirts of their village entered their house through the front door. Two days later a bold monkey did just that. Three generations of her husband’s family had lived in that house and never witnessed such a thing. The baby’s arrival became an eagerly awaited, celebrated event, a miraculous gift from the monkey god, Hanuman.

She was named Bumi Devi, Goddess of the Earth. Her childhood had been a life cherished and untroubled by cares; running as wild as the monkeys, refusing to eat unless hand-fed, and sleeping with the safety of her parents’ bodies on either side of her. Then one day, when she was ten, she had looked out of a window, and seen the telegraph lines outside her home closely packed with still, silent crows. And every one of them was turned in her direction. Frightened, she had rushed her mother to the sinister sight, but by then they were all gone.

‘An ill omen,’ her grandfather had muttered, scratching his withered leg, but who could have imagined that the birds had come to call her beloved father to the next world. That Wednesday he had dropped to the floor with a heart attack. She remembered the funeral clearly, her mother wailing, ‘Take me too, take me too,’ and the cold, stiff feel of her father’s cheek when she had kissed it for the last time.

Her brothers had taken over the hives, unsuccessfully. They had never learnt to brush the bees aside with their bare hands. Life became hard. Then at seventeen a marriage broker had come a-calling. A London based accountant desired an odd thing- an ‘unmodernized’ bride who spoke some English. She fit the bill. A week after the wedding they had travelled to England. The black cab had stopped outside a two-story, semi-detached house converted into two one-bedroom flats. He had put his key into the door and gone ahead of her, up a creaking wooden staircase to his rented abode. He had crossed the threadbare carpet, thrown open a couple of windows to let the musty odor out, turned to her and made a surprisingly prescient prediction. ‘From this day on, this will be your palace.’

When he went to work she cooked and cleaned, and afterwards, walked up and down Hounslow’s high street until it began to shut down. His footsteps would sound on the wooden staircase about eight. He would immediately put his briefcase away, divest himself of his office clothes and present himself at their dinner table. Often they ate in silence, neither having anything to say to the other. She knew she was not in love, but she was not unhappy either. As soon as the Home Office returned her passport stamped with a two-year working visa, the Earth Goddess had found herself a job as an office cleaner.

One day she had come home from work and found him gone from their tiny flat. There had been no note. Just a missing suitcase, a bare space where his clothes had been, and toiletries gone from the bathroom cabinet. But there had been no argument, nothing in his manner to suggest that he was in any way dissatisfied, she had reflected, bewildered. Again and again she had thought of that dawn before she had left for work; of how he had lifted one end of the duvet, called her back into their warm bed, and had his way with her.

For many months she had gone about in an uncomprehending daze, too ashamed to even tell her mother. She would open the front door and head straight for the bedroom with the hope that he would be there. His return as mysterious as his departure.

To pay the bills she had worked two, sometimes three jobs. Then, through ignorance, but no real fault of her own, she had become an illegal immigrant. Her temporary visa had run out. Fortunately, by then she had already secured permanent employment in the kitchens of Lord Carrington’s manor. A year and a half later, when the housekeeper of his London flat left, she had been promoted to the post.

That was when she had got the boy.

The boy. She would never forget the sweet day. When she had given in to a whimsical desire on her way home from work and followed a rainbow. Well, it had led to a dead-end full of overstuffed rubbish black bags, but turning away, she had thought she’d heard a cry. Later she would come to realize that it could only have been her imagination. She had moved toward the sound.

Amongst bin bags of restaurant waste she had found a black baby sleeping inside a transparent plastic covering. She had glanced around apprehensively. Her illegal status had made her wary of any situation that involved the authorities.

Not a soul in sight.

She had squatted next to the baby. Pinned to its clothes had been a hastily handwritten note, the ink smudged, the letters large and ill formed.

My name is Black Jack.
Please help me.

Strange - a black boy called Black Jack. He was so incredibly still; she had feared he was dead. But he had opened his eyes suddenly and stared steadily at her through the plastic. Never in her life had she seen eyes such as his. Tilted upwards like a cat’s, they were enormous with irises that glinted the way water inside very deep wells does. Looking into them she felt the same mysterious sensation she had once experienced gazing up into the night sky. A nameless, timeless, never-ending connection.

She had put her hand beneath the plastic and touched his hair. ‘Oh!’ She had expected it to be wiry. It was soft as a cloud. Her hand had wandered to his face. Poor mite was cold. On his chest she had found a small silver cross. A little Christian. When her index finger had skimmed across his palm, he had curled his tiny fingers around it so fiercely that her heart lurched. How could anyone abandon so beautiful a thing?

It had begun to drizzle and drops of rain fell noisily on the plastic sheet, the sound breaking the magic. A stray thought. What if his real mother changed her mind and came back for him? Hiding him in her clothes she had hurried away, to sit at the back of the bus, a thief. Heart racing, she had stared unseeingly out of the window and decided the story most likely to be believed for her sudden possession of a black baby.

As it turned out it was a problem she had never had to address.

Even warmed and fed, he had neither made a sound nor moved a limb of his own accord. How could it be? She had heard his cry and felt his tenacious grip. But those feats were gone, left amongst the rubbish and her imagination. Poor sod had been unable to laugh or cry, or even stretch his mouth into a smile. It had taken him a whole painful hour to drink half a bottle of milk.

Since medical assistance would have exposed her crime, she had detailed the symptoms that afflicted her boy to Lord Carrington and begged him to find the cure for the strange disease. His probing had led him to believe that it was probably a rare and incurable neurological disorder called locked-in syndrome. ‘He will never walk, talk, play, go to school or have friends. I’m afraid to say he probably won’t have a long life either,’ he had warned gravely from the depths of his great armchair. But the rainbow, she was convinced, had led her to the boy for a purpose. She would be his savior. Somehow she would sort it out.

When even the paltry capability of sucking at a teat had frozen she had learned to feed him with soft tubes inserted down his throat. In a year the ability to blink or close his eyes, even when sleeping, had been lost. Food had gone in, waste had come out - but for his eyes that followed her around the room with huge curiosity, he was a living statue.

Instead of buying a cot, which might have alerted her curtain-twitching neighbors, she had ordered a sofa bed for herself and moved the boy into her bedroom. She had always worked long hours, but that hadn’t mattered since he had needed nothing more than the television, left on one of the children’s channels. To feed him she had hired a woman to come in six days a week, at first three times a day, eventually whittling down to just once. Heather was chronically sullen, but, being a benefit cheat herself, could be trusted not to inform on Bumi. She had no love for the boy, but the weekly cash was a lot to her, and she had turned out to be a constant in their lives. The years had passed. The boy had turned six, then ten, and twelve, and yesterday fourteen.

All the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,
When they heard the bell toll for poor Cock Robin.

 - ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’,
Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book
(1744)

Bumi knocked softly on Black’s door before turning the handle and going in. Black lay propped up on three pillows, his eyes turned toward her. He could say many things with those eyes of his. Yes, no, joy, sadness, interest, surprise, pleasure… That moment, he was smiling broadly at her. She approached his bed.