“How did they approach you?” asked Odette curiously. The role of the nonsupernatural Checquy employees was not something she had ever given much thought to.
“Actually, I approached them,” said Dr. Fielding. “Albeit unwittingly. I’m a marine biologist, and I thought I was applying for a research grant from some old foundation that dated back to Darwin’s time. I submitted all the paperwork, my CV, and a selection of my articles. I had to post them; they wouldn’t accept e-mail. I didn’t hear back for months, and then they called me down to Walmington-on-Sea for an interview in this dire-looking old building on a backstreet. I sat down, and they wheeled out a glass carboy of seawater. A massive thing, the size of my torso, with a light shining down on it. And they asked me what I thought.” She paused, her eyes distant, locked into that memory.
“And what was it?” Odette prompted gently.
“I saw fronds at first, moving about in the water. Red and gold and mahogany and ebony. Little bunches. And then I peered more closely, and I saw that it was hair. The trailing hair of tiny, naked children flying in the water.” Odette felt a shiver go down the back of her neck.
“It never crossed my mind that they were fake,” said Dr. Fielding. “They were too perfect. Undeniably real. Tiny, perfect babies that looked at me and smiled and swirled through their own hair. They were boys and girls, and then they were gone, out of the jar, swum away to somewhere else. Inexplicable.” She shook her head.
“They asked me again what I thought, and I replied that I didn’t know anything at all. From that moment, the Checquy had me, and I never looked back.”
“So it’s worth it?” asked Odette.
“Oh, absolutely. Of course, there are downsides as well. It can be so dangerous, you know. Horrendously dangerous. You get promoted in this job as much because someone has been killed as because of your talent. But the real downside, at least for an academic like me, is that you can’t publish. And you lie to those around you. My family doesn’t know what I do; they think I work for a corporation. Of course, I’ve done more, seen more than they could dream of, but they don’t know that.” She shrugged. “Anyway, let’s get a wriggle on here.” She led Odette to the base of the scaffolding, and they started climbing the steep switchbacking stairs.
Close up, the beast seemed somehow less authentic. Odette’s mind kept telling her that something that large could not possibly be real. Behind the sheen of polyurethane, its hide looked rubbery. Then, as they neared the top, Odette realized there was a massive gouge in the body. It carved open the back, and she could see the meat, honeycombed with bubbles like a fleshy sponge. There did not appear to be much blood. Perhaps it all drained out, she thought.
“Do we know what happened to it?”
“As best we can tell, it got in the way of a cargo ship, which, as you can see, tore the hell out of it,” said Dr. Fielding. “And I suppose it wasn’t happy about it, because it attacked and sank the ship before bleeding to death. Later I’ll show you its mouth. The teeth are huge, serrated, and made out of some calcium compound that doesn’t even chip when it’s cutting through iron.”
“What have you established so far about the creature?” asked Odette.
“Well, we’ve found that it’s made of flesh and bone.” She paused and looked at Odette. “I know that sounds sarcastic, but it’s actually a hugely important insight. Another interesting feature is multiple eyes all over the front of its head and several more scattered along the length of its body. Very peculiar, but the preliminary tests have revealed no unusual properties.”
“No unusual properties?” repeated Odette incredulously as she looked up at the wall of skin.
“Well, no radiation or internal toxicity,” amended the doctor. “Temperature, gravity, light levels, and the rate of time passing all remain normal in its vicinity. None of the attending personnel have reported any medical problems or abrupt shifts in their height, weight, or sexual orientation.”
“I see. Can you identify genus? Or even family?”
“We’ve found that it’s tricky trying to taxonomize these sorts of things,” said Dr. Fielding. “In the course of my years with the Checquy, we’ve added two biological kingdoms and identified several thousand new phyla.”
“I see,” said Odette, somewhat taken aback. “May I ask, Dr. Fielding, why does this fall within the jurisdiction of the Checquy?” She paused, trying to find the right words. “I mean, for all you know, this is a perfectly natural creature that has simply never been seen before.”
“It’s possible,” conceded the doctor. “Although the fact that it’s unlike anything ever seen, or even reported, makes us a little suspicious. The fact that it attacked a ship gives us grounds for labeling it malign, which is one of the things that brings it under the Checquy’s authority. But if suddenly a whole bunch of them turn up around the world, we’ll reclassify it.” They reached the top of the scaffolding and walked across the broad platform. In the middle, just above the curve of the creature’s back, several people were putting on oxygen tanks.
“What are they doing?” asked Odette.
“Ah,” said Dr. Fielding. “This is rather exciting. One of the interesting features of the subject is a line of blowholes along its back. They’re very big.”
“Oh?”
“Big enough for a person to climb into,” said the doctor.
Odette looked at her in awe and delight. “No!” she exclaimed.
“Yes.”
“Oh, you have to let me go in!”
*
I really hope that Leliefeld manages not to get herself into any messy situations while I’m doing this, thought Felicity. If something happens to her while I’ve got my brain stuck in a dead animal, I am going to get in so much trouble with Rook Thomas.
Pawn Roff, Dr. Fielding’s aide, was leading Felicity across the vast hangar to the front of the beast. She could just make out a low platform with a plastic pavilion on top.
“Pawn Clements, we’ve reviewed your file,” said Pawn Roff. “And I applied the risk-analysis template for your powers.” Felicity nodded. The Checquy had suffered a few disastrous incidents in which the vulnerable or vacant bodies of Pawns whose minds had temporarily left their bodies were taken over by supernatural squatters. As a precaution, an office in the Checquy had worked up a schema for the employment of abilities like hers. It described what precautions ought to be taken before someone turned his or her Sight on anything. The risk assessment wasn’t always carried out — it depended on how pressing the issue was — but Pawn Roff seemed to be one of those people who liked to have every box ticked.
“What’s the evaluation?” she asked.
“I’m afraid the fact that you’ll be examining a dead supernatural creature of demonstrated malignancy makes it an automatic category C,” said Roff apologetically. Felicity shrugged. Category C meant that she would be supervised by a doctor, a lawyer, and a guard, each of them armed with a handgun and a machete. Once the observation was over, she’d have to submit to weekly medical, toxicological, psychological, and religious examinations for a month. It was inconvenient, but she’d been through worse.
Category E would have meant she’d need to receive a series of nuclear-style decontamination scrubbings after the operation, while category F added mandatory exorcism rituals for all known religions and two weeks of an all-liquid diet. Category G required that all the aforementioned precautions take place on an isolated oil-rig facility in the North Sea with twelve marksmen pointing guns at her from a hundred meters away.