Mist (Sapphire & Steel fanfic) 1/?
(Don't mind me again, flist. Just posting some more fanfic, this time for a Sapphire & Steel comm.)
Fourteen days.
Time had become her enemy, Josie thought, as she opened her eyes to the haze of light suffusing through the curtains. Time measured, not by clocks, but in days.
She had been dipping in an under the surface of sleep since before dawn, unable to drift back into unconsciousness but reluctant to acknowledge that another day had begun before daylight made it inevitable. Now, she had to face it. Lying here was only going to make the thoughts worse.
Forty weeks, and fourteen days. Last week, at eight days overdue, Dr Wilkes had threatened to induce at ten. She had been in hiding since then, more or less. Christmas was over, and she had failed to keep her appointments.
As she swung her legs over the edge of the bed, it moved. In fascination, she put her hand on her stomach and felt, under the thinness of flesh and skin, some unidentifiable protrusion shift from one side to the other. If the baby was moving so strongly, then surely it was safe. It was happy where it was, this hidden creature of jutting elbows and knees, a quantum child of neither sex and no personality.
They hadn’t bothered to track and track her down, Josie reflected as she drew open the curtains. They were made of a flimsy, faded peach material, ill hung on a cheap rack, so that they sagged and didn’t quite meet in the middle. On a clear day she could see across the walled garden to the trees and distant chimney pots of the house beyond, but today there was a mist and she could see almost nothing.
Nobody had tried to call her. She wondered if eventually the midwife - Janine - or Dr Wilkes himself would phone, or even present themselves on her doorstep. But it was that dead week between Christmas and New Year, and everybody was on holiday at home with their families - probably, even midwives and doctors. She had a respite from attention, while time ticked up its tab against her.
Josie slipped into the only clothes that fitted her now - maternity leggings and the enormous jumper her mother had knitted her last Christmas and she had never worn before the last few weeks - and padded carefully down through the empty house.
There was still a faint smell of Audrey’s incense on the second floor landing, though Audrey had been gone since the week before Christmas. Andrew’s bicycle was still cluttering the entrance hall and Louise’s cookbooks were stacked higgledy-piggledy outside her room on the first floor. It felt as though her housemates were here in spirit. Only Josie, whose physical presence moved slowly down the four flights of stairs to the basement kitchen, was not.
Another day that shouldn’t exist, she thought as she unlocked the back door of the kitchen. Another day snatched from time, another day of life before its.
Still no milk - not the sort that was left outside the back door in bottles, anyway - so she was going to have to go on an expedition to the corner shop to get some if she wanted any breakfast. There was a peculiar chill about the basement yard. Josie glanced up at the railings above the sunken patio area and realised that it wasn’t possible to see anything of the garden beyond them; they stood stark against a creamy, rather eerie wall of white mist.
The unmistakable sound of the letterbox rattling upstairs had her hurrying, as best she could, back through the kitchen and up what would have been the servants’ stairs to the ground floor.
There were three items of post on the worn quarry flagstones behind the door. It took a bit of effort to ease herself down to retrieve them. Two seemed to be straggling Christmas cards, one for Audrey and the other for Andrew. The third envelope was an official-looking communication, long and brown, bearing her own name.
With very little hope, Josie ripped it open. A single glance at the letterhead dissolved the faint expectation she had been unable to suppress. It was a letter from the college library, complaining about overdue library books.
She put it and the Christmas cards in the letter rack in the kitchen, filled and switched on the kettle, and began the arduous climb back upstairs to the first floor bathroom.
It had been the first post after Christmas, and she had kept herself going over those three blank days with the idea that he might have sent her card too late to catch the post. Even now, that was a possibility.
In the bathroom, she leaned over the sink and let the disappointment settle in her like a hard, physical lump. Odd that there was room inside for anything more. The creature stirred again, a corner of it running visibly under the surface of her naked, distended stomach.
She finished washing. The soap smelled sinister, like something decaying. It was the perfumed stuff from the Body Shop that Audrey was always buying, a little musky but usually pleasant enough. Josie suddenly gagged on it, and threw it into the small bathroom bin.
That wasn’t going to be enough to get rid of the smell. She had to remove the bin and empty its contents into the outside rubbish sacks, or she was going to feel sick every time she came into the bathroom.
Gagging, Josie took a carrier bag from one of the many stuffed in the understairs cupboard, tipped the contents of the bathroom bin into it, and scrabbled for the half-used bottles of bubble bath and body lotion in the same perfume which were sitting on the window sill. Then she leaned over the sink again to open the window and let out the smell.
The mist was pressing hard against the window. She hadn’t been able to see it through the frosted glass, but now it was open there seemed to be nothing at all beyond. It had come down very suddenly. Surely she had seen sunlight filtering through her bedroom window, not twenty minutes before?
Holding her breath, she edged uncomfortably down the steep cellar steps back down to the kitchen, clinging onto the rail with one hand and the offensive carrier bag with the other, and made for the back door.
“Please don’t go out there.”
Josie’s hand froze on the door handle. Her reactions were too sluggish for her to spin round, but the shock of being suddenly spoken to in the empty house washed over her in a cold rush after a moment’s delay. The carrier bag slid from her fingers and she shifted round awkwardly.
A woman was sitting at the kitchen table. She had been looking through the pile of post from the letter rack - in fact, she had been opening it, making one neat pile of letters and cards and another of envelopes - but she had paused in doing this, and was looking directly at Josie.
“It may not be safe any more,” she said.
Josie backed against the door. The woman was smartly dressed and immaculately presented overall, like the representative of an upmarket lawyer’s firm. She looked quite out of place in the tatty, frowsy muddle of the shared kitchen, but she seemed nonetheless entirely at ease.
“You must be Josephine Mitchell,” the woman continued, in the same pleasant brisk tone. “I’m pleased to meet you. Come away from that door, please.”
“How did you get in?” Josie stammered. Her own voice sounded forced and rather too loud in her ears.
“I told you, it might be dangerous. The other people who live in this house - I take it they’re not here?”
“There’s - nobody here but me.”
“When are you expecting them back?”
“Soon. Any moment now actually. Who are you?”
The woman looked beyond Josie, and then round, to the stairs. Her hands squared the as yet unopened letters against the table and made a third pile of them, then she stood and watched the stairs for a moment.
“What are you doing here?” Josie said again. “How did you get in?”
The woman broke her attention away from the stairs and went back to stand behind the table, balancing her fingertips on the pile of letters. “None of the letters to Audrey Jones, Andrew Fullen or Louise McAllistair had been opened in over a week. That suggests to me that they’re not here, that they’re away. Are they really coming back any moment now?”
“What business is it of yours? And why have you opened those letters? They’re private.”
“Tell me the truth, please,” said the woman, a sharpness entering her voice. “It will save time and I’ve got a lot to do.”
Josie had moved away from the door when the woman had told her to do so, and now she realised that there was a strong natural authority in her manner that had made her obey her almost unconsciously. She sank onto one of the kitchen chairs and said, “They’re all away until after New Year.”
“Which is when?”
“What do you mean?”
“How many days from now?”
“How many - four, of course. But Audrey isn’t getting back until next Wednesday and Andrew and Louise are touring Scotland, so they - “
But the woman was no longer paying any attention to her. She had gone to the bottom of the stairs and was gazing directly upwards. “Where does this lead to?” she asked.
“The rest of the house.” The woman must have come in through the back door, then, which was accessible from the street down the side of the house. It just seemed odd that she had managed to do so, silently, during the short time that Josie had been in the bathroom.
The woman continued to stare upwards for a while, then appeared to make a decision and started to mount the stairs with neat, brisk steps. Everything about her was expensive, Josie noticed in a daze, including her glossy tights and elegant high heeled court shoes.
“Stop!” said Josie.
The woman paused and turned to look down at her.
“You can’t just go barging through the house! You’ve got to tell me what you’re doing here, or I’m going to phone the landlord. Did the landlord send you?”
“No. The landlord didn’t send me.”
“Then I’m going to phone him.”
She got two paces towards the wall-mounted phone when her legs and arms froze. She struggled, terrified, pins and needles flashing under her skin. Then the baby shifted, and she was free again. She dashed herself against the wall and seized the phone.
The line was dead.
She stabbed at the receiver hook, toggling it frantically up and down, but there was nothing but chilly silence in the earpiece.
Josie looked round at the woman, whose calm polite expression had broken into a frown. She came down the stairs slowly, took the receiver, listened to it briefly, replaced it on the hook, and with strong, cool hands supported Josie and guided her to a chair.
“Now then,” she said, suddenly speaking with the gentle firmness of a doctor, or a nurse, “there’s no need to get upset. In fact it will make my job much easier if you don’t get upset.” With great authority, so that Josie hardly thought to resent it, she laid a hand on her stomach. “It must be nearly due?”
Josie bit her lip and nodded. “Did Dr Wilkes or someone send you?”
The woman dipped her head with a faint smile. “Certainly not. Now listen to me, carefully. I’m here to help. Don’t be alarmed, but there is some danger, perhaps quite a degree of danger. Before I can do anything, I need to find someone. You came from upstairs just now, didn’t you?”
Josie nodded again.
“Did you see anyone while you were up there?”
“No!”
“A woman, taller than me, slender, with curling fair hair, probably dressed in gold or brown?”
“I told you, I didn’t see anyone. There’s nobody here but me and there hasn’t been for over a week.”
“That phone, does it usually work?”
“Yes!”
“Have you been paying the bill?”
“Yes, of course I have. It was working last night, I phoned my mother. What are you talking about when you say danger?”
“It doesn’t matter at the moment. Really. I want you to sit there quietly while I look upstairs. Don’t move. It’s very important that you don’t try to go out the back door. Do you understand?”
Josie stared at her, suddenly noticing that the woman had fascinating, clear blue eyes. She felt at peace, soothed, and she smiled her assent.
She realised it was a kind of light spell with a jolt, and as soon as the woman turned her back to go towards the stairs. Down near the bottom, the baby jabbed sharply.
Josie started to rise from the chair in protest, then froze in alarm when she heard footsteps in the entrance hall above.
The woman also reacted quickly. She darted back, took Josie’s arm, and pulled them both into the recess behind the foot of the staircase where the fridge and the washing machine were. From there, it was possible to see round the corner when the basement door opened without being immediately in view from above. There was just enough insistent pressure in the woman’s grip, which was surprisingly strong and firm for such a small hand, to keep Josie still and unprotesting.
The footsteps stopped. Nothing happened for a few very long moments., then the basement door was flung back. A man, plainly dressed in a business suit, stepped out onto the top of the stairs, closely followed by another woman.
The first woman exhaled sharply, dropped Josie’s arm, and moved out from the corner.
“Steel!” she said.
“Jet,” said the man, frowning and coming slowly down the stairs.
“Well, what are you doing here? This is my assignment.”
“No,” said the man, stopping halfway. “No, it’s mine. Ours,” he added, glancing back at the woman who had come with him.
Next part
Fourteen days.
Time had become her enemy, Josie thought, as she opened her eyes to the haze of light suffusing through the curtains. Time measured, not by clocks, but in days.
She had been dipping in an under the surface of sleep since before dawn, unable to drift back into unconsciousness but reluctant to acknowledge that another day had begun before daylight made it inevitable. Now, she had to face it. Lying here was only going to make the thoughts worse.
Forty weeks, and fourteen days. Last week, at eight days overdue, Dr Wilkes had threatened to induce at ten. She had been in hiding since then, more or less. Christmas was over, and she had failed to keep her appointments.
As she swung her legs over the edge of the bed, it moved. In fascination, she put her hand on her stomach and felt, under the thinness of flesh and skin, some unidentifiable protrusion shift from one side to the other. If the baby was moving so strongly, then surely it was safe. It was happy where it was, this hidden creature of jutting elbows and knees, a quantum child of neither sex and no personality.
They hadn’t bothered to track and track her down, Josie reflected as she drew open the curtains. They were made of a flimsy, faded peach material, ill hung on a cheap rack, so that they sagged and didn’t quite meet in the middle. On a clear day she could see across the walled garden to the trees and distant chimney pots of the house beyond, but today there was a mist and she could see almost nothing.
Nobody had tried to call her. She wondered if eventually the midwife - Janine - or Dr Wilkes himself would phone, or even present themselves on her doorstep. But it was that dead week between Christmas and New Year, and everybody was on holiday at home with their families - probably, even midwives and doctors. She had a respite from attention, while time ticked up its tab against her.
Josie slipped into the only clothes that fitted her now - maternity leggings and the enormous jumper her mother had knitted her last Christmas and she had never worn before the last few weeks - and padded carefully down through the empty house.
There was still a faint smell of Audrey’s incense on the second floor landing, though Audrey had been gone since the week before Christmas. Andrew’s bicycle was still cluttering the entrance hall and Louise’s cookbooks were stacked higgledy-piggledy outside her room on the first floor. It felt as though her housemates were here in spirit. Only Josie, whose physical presence moved slowly down the four flights of stairs to the basement kitchen, was not.
Another day that shouldn’t exist, she thought as she unlocked the back door of the kitchen. Another day snatched from time, another day of life before its.
Still no milk - not the sort that was left outside the back door in bottles, anyway - so she was going to have to go on an expedition to the corner shop to get some if she wanted any breakfast. There was a peculiar chill about the basement yard. Josie glanced up at the railings above the sunken patio area and realised that it wasn’t possible to see anything of the garden beyond them; they stood stark against a creamy, rather eerie wall of white mist.
The unmistakable sound of the letterbox rattling upstairs had her hurrying, as best she could, back through the kitchen and up what would have been the servants’ stairs to the ground floor.
There were three items of post on the worn quarry flagstones behind the door. It took a bit of effort to ease herself down to retrieve them. Two seemed to be straggling Christmas cards, one for Audrey and the other for Andrew. The third envelope was an official-looking communication, long and brown, bearing her own name.
With very little hope, Josie ripped it open. A single glance at the letterhead dissolved the faint expectation she had been unable to suppress. It was a letter from the college library, complaining about overdue library books.
She put it and the Christmas cards in the letter rack in the kitchen, filled and switched on the kettle, and began the arduous climb back upstairs to the first floor bathroom.
It had been the first post after Christmas, and she had kept herself going over those three blank days with the idea that he might have sent her card too late to catch the post. Even now, that was a possibility.
In the bathroom, she leaned over the sink and let the disappointment settle in her like a hard, physical lump. Odd that there was room inside for anything more. The creature stirred again, a corner of it running visibly under the surface of her naked, distended stomach.
She finished washing. The soap smelled sinister, like something decaying. It was the perfumed stuff from the Body Shop that Audrey was always buying, a little musky but usually pleasant enough. Josie suddenly gagged on it, and threw it into the small bathroom bin.
That wasn’t going to be enough to get rid of the smell. She had to remove the bin and empty its contents into the outside rubbish sacks, or she was going to feel sick every time she came into the bathroom.
Gagging, Josie took a carrier bag from one of the many stuffed in the understairs cupboard, tipped the contents of the bathroom bin into it, and scrabbled for the half-used bottles of bubble bath and body lotion in the same perfume which were sitting on the window sill. Then she leaned over the sink again to open the window and let out the smell.
The mist was pressing hard against the window. She hadn’t been able to see it through the frosted glass, but now it was open there seemed to be nothing at all beyond. It had come down very suddenly. Surely she had seen sunlight filtering through her bedroom window, not twenty minutes before?
Holding her breath, she edged uncomfortably down the steep cellar steps back down to the kitchen, clinging onto the rail with one hand and the offensive carrier bag with the other, and made for the back door.
“Please don’t go out there.”
Josie’s hand froze on the door handle. Her reactions were too sluggish for her to spin round, but the shock of being suddenly spoken to in the empty house washed over her in a cold rush after a moment’s delay. The carrier bag slid from her fingers and she shifted round awkwardly.
A woman was sitting at the kitchen table. She had been looking through the pile of post from the letter rack - in fact, she had been opening it, making one neat pile of letters and cards and another of envelopes - but she had paused in doing this, and was looking directly at Josie.
“It may not be safe any more,” she said.
Josie backed against the door. The woman was smartly dressed and immaculately presented overall, like the representative of an upmarket lawyer’s firm. She looked quite out of place in the tatty, frowsy muddle of the shared kitchen, but she seemed nonetheless entirely at ease.
“You must be Josephine Mitchell,” the woman continued, in the same pleasant brisk tone. “I’m pleased to meet you. Come away from that door, please.”
“How did you get in?” Josie stammered. Her own voice sounded forced and rather too loud in her ears.
“I told you, it might be dangerous. The other people who live in this house - I take it they’re not here?”
“There’s - nobody here but me.”
“When are you expecting them back?”
“Soon. Any moment now actually. Who are you?”
The woman looked beyond Josie, and then round, to the stairs. Her hands squared the as yet unopened letters against the table and made a third pile of them, then she stood and watched the stairs for a moment.
“What are you doing here?” Josie said again. “How did you get in?”
The woman broke her attention away from the stairs and went back to stand behind the table, balancing her fingertips on the pile of letters. “None of the letters to Audrey Jones, Andrew Fullen or Louise McAllistair had been opened in over a week. That suggests to me that they’re not here, that they’re away. Are they really coming back any moment now?”
“What business is it of yours? And why have you opened those letters? They’re private.”
“Tell me the truth, please,” said the woman, a sharpness entering her voice. “It will save time and I’ve got a lot to do.”
Josie had moved away from the door when the woman had told her to do so, and now she realised that there was a strong natural authority in her manner that had made her obey her almost unconsciously. She sank onto one of the kitchen chairs and said, “They’re all away until after New Year.”
“Which is when?”
“What do you mean?”
“How many days from now?”
“How many - four, of course. But Audrey isn’t getting back until next Wednesday and Andrew and Louise are touring Scotland, so they - “
But the woman was no longer paying any attention to her. She had gone to the bottom of the stairs and was gazing directly upwards. “Where does this lead to?” she asked.
“The rest of the house.” The woman must have come in through the back door, then, which was accessible from the street down the side of the house. It just seemed odd that she had managed to do so, silently, during the short time that Josie had been in the bathroom.
The woman continued to stare upwards for a while, then appeared to make a decision and started to mount the stairs with neat, brisk steps. Everything about her was expensive, Josie noticed in a daze, including her glossy tights and elegant high heeled court shoes.
“Stop!” said Josie.
The woman paused and turned to look down at her.
“You can’t just go barging through the house! You’ve got to tell me what you’re doing here, or I’m going to phone the landlord. Did the landlord send you?”
“No. The landlord didn’t send me.”
“Then I’m going to phone him.”
She got two paces towards the wall-mounted phone when her legs and arms froze. She struggled, terrified, pins and needles flashing under her skin. Then the baby shifted, and she was free again. She dashed herself against the wall and seized the phone.
The line was dead.
She stabbed at the receiver hook, toggling it frantically up and down, but there was nothing but chilly silence in the earpiece.
Josie looked round at the woman, whose calm polite expression had broken into a frown. She came down the stairs slowly, took the receiver, listened to it briefly, replaced it on the hook, and with strong, cool hands supported Josie and guided her to a chair.
“Now then,” she said, suddenly speaking with the gentle firmness of a doctor, or a nurse, “there’s no need to get upset. In fact it will make my job much easier if you don’t get upset.” With great authority, so that Josie hardly thought to resent it, she laid a hand on her stomach. “It must be nearly due?”
Josie bit her lip and nodded. “Did Dr Wilkes or someone send you?”
The woman dipped her head with a faint smile. “Certainly not. Now listen to me, carefully. I’m here to help. Don’t be alarmed, but there is some danger, perhaps quite a degree of danger. Before I can do anything, I need to find someone. You came from upstairs just now, didn’t you?”
Josie nodded again.
“Did you see anyone while you were up there?”
“No!”
“A woman, taller than me, slender, with curling fair hair, probably dressed in gold or brown?”
“I told you, I didn’t see anyone. There’s nobody here but me and there hasn’t been for over a week.”
“That phone, does it usually work?”
“Yes!”
“Have you been paying the bill?”
“Yes, of course I have. It was working last night, I phoned my mother. What are you talking about when you say danger?”
“It doesn’t matter at the moment. Really. I want you to sit there quietly while I look upstairs. Don’t move. It’s very important that you don’t try to go out the back door. Do you understand?”
Josie stared at her, suddenly noticing that the woman had fascinating, clear blue eyes. She felt at peace, soothed, and she smiled her assent.
She realised it was a kind of light spell with a jolt, and as soon as the woman turned her back to go towards the stairs. Down near the bottom, the baby jabbed sharply.
Josie started to rise from the chair in protest, then froze in alarm when she heard footsteps in the entrance hall above.
The woman also reacted quickly. She darted back, took Josie’s arm, and pulled them both into the recess behind the foot of the staircase where the fridge and the washing machine were. From there, it was possible to see round the corner when the basement door opened without being immediately in view from above. There was just enough insistent pressure in the woman’s grip, which was surprisingly strong and firm for such a small hand, to keep Josie still and unprotesting.
The footsteps stopped. Nothing happened for a few very long moments., then the basement door was flung back. A man, plainly dressed in a business suit, stepped out onto the top of the stairs, closely followed by another woman.
The first woman exhaled sharply, dropped Josie’s arm, and moved out from the corner.
“Steel!” she said.
“Jet,” said the man, frowning and coming slowly down the stairs.
“Well, what are you doing here? This is my assignment.”
“No,” said the man, stopping halfway. “No, it’s mine. Ours,” he added, glancing back at the woman who had come with him.
Next part