These reports were received by Checquy operatives who had special training in sounding sympathetic and not at all skeptical. The notifications were dutifully transcribed, checked, analyzed, reviewed, and passed on up the line. Many were identified as false reports or duplicates, but some continued to ascend through the ranks of influence until they were given the tick of approval and an official response was authorized. It wasn’t Myfanwy’s responsibility to approve anything other than the most exorbitantly expensive of activities, but at the opening and closing of every day, she received a summary of recent events, a distillation of the supernatural in the United Kingdom.
The reports before her included the previous night’s fatalities at the Italian restaurant. The corpses had been carefully moved to the morgue in the Apex, although one more had torn open during its trip down the stairs, with horrible results. The scientists were not clear on the nature of that black liquid and hadn’t yet determined whether it was dangerous, but it was unlikely that the restaurant would be reopening anytime soon. However, that massacre was not the only event that had occurred since the end of business yesterday.
There was a boy in Cornwall whose eyes had changed color overnight.
Salvage divers had examined a cargo ship that sank two weeks previously near the Port of Immingham and found tears in the hull that appeared to have been made by huge teeth.
All the reptiles in the Edinburgh Zoo had begun molting at the same time, and their shed skin was evaporating off the ground.
Two VW Beetles that had been reported stolen in Thetford had been found in a field outside town after nearby residents heard loud, increasingly frantic horn-beeping and the sounds of grinding metal. The police observed that one of the vehicles appeared to have mounted the other.
And there, at the bottom of the list, in red ink, was the one she’d been dreading. Another one, she thought. Damn it. And unlike the mating cars, which could just be a student prank, there’s no doubt that this is genuine. She flipped through the photos.
Just like the others, it had occurred in one room of a house, this one a bedroom in the town of Wellingborough. It was a normal-looking room — double bed, framed Monet prints, a vase of dried flowers on the chest of drawers — except for the score of large crystals that had erupted from the walls, ceiling, and floor. They were meters long, razor sharp, and all projected out to the same spot in the room, in front of the chest of drawers, where they had transfixed the seventy-four-year-old Miss Audrey Dudgeon, owner and resident of the house. In the photos, wearing a nightgown and a bathrobe, she was slumped over but held in place by the shining blades. The crystals were murkily transparent except near her body, where they were stained red on the inside. No autopsy had yet taken place, but Myfanwy knew that Miss Dudgeon’s blood would be found to have crystallized inside her body. Just like all the others’.
The Checquy had been pursuing this case since the very beginning, two years ago, when a man and his son had been found impaled by crystals in the dining room of their house in Daventry.
Initially, there had been two theories. Some had thought the phenomenon might be linked to the locale — there were precedents for that sort of thing. There was an estate in the West Country, Yalding Towers, where the statues were said to walk at night. In Herefordshire, Ryhope Wood was apparently impossible to get through — the place would simply turn you around and deposit you firmly where you had begun, although there were rumors of some very strange things coming out of it on occasion. Even the old Deptford Power Station in southeast London had, for a while, appeared to be controlling the local weather before it was tactfully demolished.
The other possibility was that one of the victims had caused it, perhaps suddenly manifesting an ability he or she could not control. There were precedents for that as well — Checquy statisticians advised that a small but significant percentage of people who died from aneurysms were actually spontaneous telekinetics who’d accidentally tried to move something heavy with their brains. But then, over the next two years, five more crystal-skewering deaths occurred, two in London and the rest of them in the county of Northamptonshire. It was those two in London that had really put paid to both theories. The Checquy had decided that, indeed, an individual or an organism was causing these deaths, whether knowingly or unwittingly. Myfanwy was really hoping it wasn’t deliberate, because otherwise she was dealing with a supernatural serial killer. Questions were being asked, not just from within the Checquy but also at the highest levels of the British government. Pressure was beginning to be applied.
And they’re happening more frequently, she thought grimly. Before, months could go by between them, but it’s been only five weeks since the last one. We need to stop this. She made a note to allocate more resources to that investigation, and then she snorted. Every so often, she caught herself, startled at the power and authority she wielded. Especially since, technically, she wasn’t the Myfanwy Thomas who had been made Rook.
The Myfanwy Thomas who had been brought up by the Checquy and elevated from Pawn to Rook had been a shy woman, frightened to use her supernatural power or her authority. In fact, that was one of the reasons she had been promoted, so that she would not pose a threat to certain parties. Instead of taking command, she had focused her attention on being an excellent bureaucrat.
Then, to her bewilderment, she had begun receiving warnings from a variety of sources, each of them predicting that she would lose her memory, that it would be torn away from her. Most people would have scoffed, but this was the Checquy. People who scoffed at the impossible tended to look stupid fairly soon afterward. Instead of scoffing, she had responded like a true bureaucrat, allowing herself a few moments of grief and then preparing a series of briefs for her future self — the woman who would wake up not knowing who she was or what kind of life she had inherited.
In due course, the predictions had come true. Her memories had been stolen, and her amnesiac self had woken up in a park with no idea what was going on but with a couple of extremely informative letters from her old self in her pocket. The letters had outlined the situation and given her the choice of leaving the country or assuming the identity of Myfanwy Thomas without telling anyone she had no idea who she was. Possibly against her better judgment, she’d picked the latter option.
Armed with the notes of her pre-amnesia self, she had slid into the role of Rook. It hadn’t always been easy, but so far, she had not caused any catastrophes, despite the fact that she was effectively masquerading as herself — a role for which she was not terribly qualified. Unlike her old self, she was not shy, and she was perhaps a little too eager to say what she thought and do what she wanted. The change in her personality had been noted by the organization, but only two people knew that she had lost her memory.
The first was Linda Farrier, the Lady of the Checquy, who had the advantage of being able to walk around inside other people’s sleeping minds and poke into things that interested her. The second was Myfanwy’s executive assistant, Ingrid Woodhouse, because there was really no way of concealing that sort of thing from your EA. Myfanwy suspected that the pet rabbit she’d inherited was also aware of the change, but she had not been able to establish it for certain.
“Rook Thomas?”
Myfanwy looked up with a start. She’d been musing on the oddness of her life and lost all track of time. Ingrid was standing at the door with a steaming beverage balanced on a saucer.
“Oh, thank God,” said Myfanwy.
“You’re going to need it,” said Ingrid grimly. “Bishop Attariwala has sent down word that he’d like to meet with you in his office as soon as possible.”
“Did he say what it was about?” Myfanwy asked. She had a sinking feeling in her stomach.
“I’m afraid not.”
“So that means it’s going to be bad.”
“That means it’s going to be very bad,” agreed Ingrid.
“Fine,” said Myfanwy. “But I’m bringing the coffee.”
“Do you want me to see if I can find something alcoholic to add to it?”
“Probably best not. But I may want something for afterward.”