Mist (Sapphire & Steel fanfic) 3/?
Steel was in the other ground floor room, which had originally been a dining room or second lounge and was now the bedroom of an extremely untidy person. It retained the proportions of a reception room, which did not match with the unmade single bed marooned against the tall windows. A Royal Shakespeare Company poster was pasted over a sheet of fibreboard covering the fireplace, the mantelpiece above was jammed with coffee mugs and candles melted over wine bottles. Sapphire picked her way carefully over scattered books and tangles of clothing.
Steel was at the far end, opening the wardrobe. One of the doors came partly off its hinges in his hand, and he stepped back hurriedly as a cascade of balled-up shirts, jumpers and trousers - and more books - tumbled out on top of him.
“Since we’re cut off, the trigger has to be somewhere in the house,” he said. “It should be easy enough to find, though in this mess - can you see anything in here?”
Sapphire scanned the room again, in more detail, letting her senses reach out delicately in all directions. There was no barrier in here, nothing befuddling. It was a relief to know that her mind was still working properly, and that she could trust her own judgement that the obstruction she had encountered earlier had been a genuine phenomenon and not a disastrous failing of hers powers. “The room belongs to Andrew Fullen, he’s twenty-five years old, but he hasn’t been in it for eight days.”
“Where is he then?”
“I can’t tell that, not just from physical objects. Most of the things in this room were fairly new, manufactured within the last twenty years or so. There’s… something older over there - “ She went in search of it and found it to be a leather covered Bible, stacked in a bookcase alongside some cheap paperbacks. Steel intervened and picked it up for her. She ran her hand over the surface without touching it. “One hundred and sixty-one years old.”
Steel flipped open the front page. “Edward Fullen, 1819. There are other names written underneath - “
“A family Bible. People recorded marriages, births and deaths on the flyleaf.”
“Could this be it?”
She shook her head. “Steel, the human girl was awake. She saw you arguing with Jet.”
He replaced the Bible on the shelf and turned away abruptly, to examine the chipboard covering the fireplace. One corner had come loose and was gaping slightly.
“You know that’s not - “
“Well?”
“You know that’s not the way to encourage them to trust us.”
“I thought she’d put the girl to sleep. Anyway, I wasn’t arguing.”
“Oh?”
“I was giving her instructions. Maybe there’s something behind here. This was a fireplace, wasn’t it?” He ripped off the plywood with unnecessary force, and a shower of ancient soot spilled over the carpet.
“Steel, what’s the matter?”
“What?”
With you, with our partnership, with us. “Between you and Jet. I thought you were - “
He paused in trying to brush the coal dust from his hands and shot her a warning look.
“I thought you two were close,” Sapphire pressed on, determined. “Has something happened?”
“No,” he said shortly.
“Then what is the problem?”
“Well - for a start - there’s the question of professional, as opposed to unprofessional behaviour - “
“No,” she said, feeling herself flush hot. “What happened back there was about the most unprofessional behaviour I have ever seen.”
This was much harsher than she had meant to be, and she realised how near the surface her own feelings of frustration and hurt were. If Steel now exploded into one of his rages that would be better than this sustained, impenetrable coldness.
Instead, he sighed, threw aside the broken fire screen, and wandered over to sit on the bed. His hands were still covered in grime, since his attempt to clean them had spread it further. “I said I’d never work with her again.”
“Again? I didn’t know that you’d ever worked with her.”
“A long time ago, before you and I met, before you’d even finished training, I think. After Quartz was destroyed, they tried me out with different partners - Jet was one of them.”
“But surely, your skills aren’t complementary.”
“She is a sensitive. Not a very good one - she won’t push herself.”
Sapphire, who knew just what it meant to push herself for Steel, felt inclined to sympathise with Jet here, but she said nothing. She was so relieved that he was talking.
“She’s more interested in the investigative side of things anyway, that’s what she’s good at. We didn’t work well together. She always had her own ideas and they were usually different from mine. In the end, she did something incredibly stupid - nearly got herself killed - and I was forced to sacrifice three humans to save her.”
It was obvious that his anger over this incident was still raw, however many years afterwards. Sapphire sat by him on the bed and looked at him seriously. His hands were extended fastidiously over the edge of his knees, so that he did not get the coal dust on his clothes. “Did that seal the time break?” she asked coolly.
“Yes.”
“And would more lives have been lost if you hadn’t?”
“There were twenty-seven people altogether in the place. It was a kind of small hotel on a mountain. Also, if things had gone wrong, we might have triggered an avalanche and buried a village below.”
“And Jet’s action on its own would have sealed the break?”
“Yes! But at the cost of her life! I would have found another way, those people needn’t have died if she hadn’t ignored my direct instructions - as it was I had to make a choice and what other choice was there? After that, I couldn’t work with her any more. She wouldn’t do what she was told and I couldn’t trust myself to be - objective.”
“But you would have done the same thing if it had been any of us, if it had been me.”
Steel stood up suddenly and made for the door. “You would never have got into that situation. Or, if you had, it would have been me who put you there. There’s nothing in here. Let’s look upstairs.”
Sapphire looked at her own fingers, now smeared with soot. “There’s a cloakroom on the ground floor, under the stairs.”
Josie drew her legs up as far as she could, curling defensively into the corner of the sofa, trying to collect her scattered senses. The curtains were drawn and it felt dark all around. Had she somehow slept through the whole day and into the evening?
The door closed behind the tall blonde woman with a quiet, careful click.
“Now then,” said the other woman. “How are you feeling?”
“How do you think I’m feeling?”
“Have you fainted before?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“May I take your pulse please?”
With the feeling that she was going to have to comply anyway, Josie surrendered her arm up. Somehow, there was something authoritatively medical in the woman’s manner, though she did look like a City trader. Her fingers, she noticed as they pressed lightly around her wrist, had perfectly manicured, clear polished nails.
“Well, your heart-rate and temperature are normal, and so is your blood pressure, which is the important thing here.”
“You can’t possibly tell that just from taking my pulse - “
“Have you eaten anything this morning?”
“No, because when I came down to get breakfast my kitchen was full of strange people.”
“That’s probably why you fainted. You need to keep your blood sugar level up. Is there food in the house?”
“Yes… there’s no milk though.”
“All right. Let’s go and get breakfast.”
Again, Josie found herself allowing the woman to help her to her feet, with a hand so steady that it felt like being lifted lightly by some powerful machine. She felt stable. That frightening giddiness in her head did not come back. Emboldened, she snatched her hand away from the woman’s grip and said, “No. Not until you tell me who you are and why you’re here. You’re something to do with the police, aren’t you? Those other two, they’re searching the house and you’re supposed to keep me out of the way. I heard.” She sat down again, deliberately.
The woman gave her a long, serious look then joined her, folding her hands in her lap. “We are like the police in some respects. Your house is under attack, and we’re here to track down and eliminate the danger.”
“Attack… who by?”
“Not by a person. Don’t be frightened, Josephine. We are equipped to deal with it, whatever it turns out to be.”
“It’s Josie. I’m called Josie.”
“All right, Josie, and I’m Jet. My colleagues are Steel and Sapphire.”
“Is he your boss?”
“No. That isn’t how we work. Now then. Breakfast.” She stood up and held out her hand.
“I’ll have to go and get some milk.”
“You can’t do that. There’s a barrier around the house.”
“What - you’ve sealed it off?”
“We haven’t. It has. Nobody can go out there, for now. We’re just going to have to make do without milk.”
She was smiling, relaxed and unabashed. Josie’s heart quickened to a thump as she heard a thudding sound from across the hall, from the direction of Andrew’s room, as if the other two intruders had started to pull things in the house apart. With this simple escape plan foiled, she tried to appear calm and casual. “There’s bread, I can just have toast.”
This time, she accepted the woman’s hand and made as if to go back down to the kitchen with her. At the top of the stairs she stopped and said, “I’m just going to the bathroom.”
“Show me the bathroom.”
Josie’s heart started to thud again as she indicated the downstairs cloakroom, which was just beside the entrance to the kitchen stairs. It had crossed her mind that going upstairs would give her the opportunity to put a greater distance between herself and the intruders, but there was no way of getting out from upstairs and anyway, if Jet had already realised that there was a downstairs toilet, she might be suspicious. Josie watched in uneasy disbelief as Jet seemed to search the tiny room by sweeping her hands briskly over the walls. She picked up the coral paperweight from the narrow shelf that ran underneath the sloping part of the roof and examined it with a frown, then replaced it precisely. “Seems safe,” she said at last. “I’ll go and put the kettle on.”
Josie went into the cloakroom and closed the door without locking it, listening to and counting the steps going down into the basement. When she judged that Jet had descended at least halfway, she slipped back out into the hallway. There was no sign of the other two, though she thought she could hear low voices coming from Andrew’s room. They could emerge from there at any moment. She grabbed her coat, which was hanging from the hat stand next to the door and had her purse and house keys in its pocket, and fumbled open the catch as silently as her shaking hands would let her. Once outside she used the key to ease back the latch so that it would not click.
It was very cold, and very quiet.
Josie blinked into the mist and pulled her coat tighter around what little of her body it still covered. Her impulse was to run as fast as she could away from the house, down the street and round the corner to the main road where there were people around. Even if there were no buses running today, she could walk to the centre of town where there was a police station.
Though she wanted to run, she forced herself to keep a steady fast walking pace. Her heart was still racing. The fog was so thick that it was impossible to see anything further than an arm’s length ahead, and she had to feel her way along the path to the front gate. She glanced back when she had taken only a few steps, and she could no longer see the house behind her. When she reached the gate, it was as if she was the only thing - living or inanimate - in the world.
She pulled at the latch of the gate, but it caught. She had wrenched it up and down a few times before it struck her that there was something fundamentally wrong with the gate, which she flipped up and opened at least twice a day. Its familiarity was so extreme that she had no idea what it was supposed to look like, except that it was not like this. The gate had changed.
In place of the chipped, peeling bars, partly held on at one side with some blue twine, was an elaborate, glistening black ironwrought construction. The latch was heavy and made of scrolled metal. It was also firmly stuck, though she could not see how it had been secured.
Was it possible that she had somehow lost her way in the fog and wandered into a neighbouring front garden? Although she was almost certain that she had taken only a few steps straight down her own front path, that explanation seemed less implausible than the idea that the landlord had suddenly replaced the gate.
She gave up trying to open it, and looked at the wall the separated the front garden from the street. It was low and easily scaleable, or it had been before someone had put a row of tall iron railings where none had been before. Beyond the new railings, she could see absolutely nothing of the street. Nor could she hear any sound of people or traffic.
She shivered, and the baby moved something hard and painful against her ribs. She was going to have to turn back to the house and hope that she could find another way out.
Right alongside the path was a high hedge of close-meshed, prickly foliage, where there ought to be access to the driveway. There was no question now that somehow, she had got lost.
She tried the other direction, away from the gate, across the front garden, using the wall and railings as a guide. Where there should be paving there was grass underfoot. After a few paces she came to another hedge similar to the one bordering the path. She felt her way along it and came up against the wall of the house.
A footstep crunching on the gravel path made her turn, and she saw a tall figure dressed in a long black coat and a hat making its way to the front door. He did not notice her. She stopped still, the baby somersaulting. He lifted what looked like a silver-topped cane and rapped three times on the door. From where she was standing near the window, Josie could not see who answered, but she heard a woman’s voice and the man stepped in. He was carrying an old-fashioned medical bag in his other hand.
Beginning to feel light-headed and chilled to the bone, Josie suddenly decided that seeking help was more important than worrying about how she had got here. She hurried towards the door and reached it just as it was closing. She had started to call out, but she swallowed it in shock as the door swung shut and she saw, in the same brass numerals she looked at every day, the number fourteen.
Josie sank down on the top step, still staring at the familiar door. There was no doubt that it was the same one, though it was red rather than black. It also seemed to be smartly painted, and now had a handsome brass knocker and handle to match the numerals. The porchway, which usually had drifts of dust and garden debris in its corners, was immaculately clean and swept.
She fished in the pocket of her coat and found her keys. If somehow this really was her house, there was one straightforward way to be sure.
“What do you mean, she’s gone?”
“She was at the top of the stairs. I left her there. I came down here to get her some breakfast so that she wouldn’t pass out on us again. Now she isn’t there any more.”
“And why - why the hell did you leave her alone in the first place? I told you to stay with her!”
“She wanted to go to the bathroom. Sorry, I didn’t realise I was expected to interpret what you said quite that literally.”
Steel stared at her in disbelief. Jet seemed unabashed, though there was a hard undertone in her voice that he knew meant danger. She had perched herself on the kitchen table, tucking her legs into a chair and folding her arms across her knees, and was gazing back at him defiantly.
It was just the expression she had always met him with when they had worked together, and he thought he had forgotten the fury and frustration of being made to feel foolish by the very person who was supposed to support him. Until recently, the dark misery of that time - when, in effect, he had lost three partners in a year - had seemed far behind, buried in the past.
Instinctively, he glanced over at Sapphire. She had just finished rinsing her fingers under the kitchen tap and was drying her hands on a tea towel. She didn’t have to look in his direction for him to know that she was watching him to see what he would do.
She turned her eyes to him in sudden simple confirmation of the same thoughts. She thought he couldn’t control himself. She was waiting for him to lose his temper.
“All right,” he said quietly. “We’d better find her.”
“She’s not hiding anywhere in the house,” said Jet. “I’ve looked.”
“You searched the house? Physically?”
“Yes, briefly.”
“Without getting Sapphire to check for pressure points or triggers - we don’t even know where it is yet!”
“Steel, I was careful, I can handle that myself to some extent, you know. Anyway, she isn’t in the house. I’ve touched her, I’m attuned to her presence. She isn’t here.”
“Perhaps I ought to look too,” said Sapphire.
“Well, can you sense her?”
“No. I haven’t been able to sense her at all, ever since we got here.”
“How about you?” he asked Jet. “You said you touched her. Is she real?”
Her expression softened to reflective puzzlement. “Oh yes, she’s certainly real. I did a bit of a bioanalysis and all her systems are in place and functioning. She’s human. But there is something odd. I don’t know. Maybe it’s to do with the pregnancy. I don’t have much experience of that. You couldn’t sense her?”
Sapphire shook her head.
“And if I remember, you can sense practically anything.”
“Usually,” said Sapphire, with a small smile.
“You see, I couldn’t hold her. I tried, she snapped out of it almost straight away. The same with sending her to sleep. You saw that - I put her under, she bobbed up like a cork. Now normally I have good control over humans, very good in fact.”
“Under what circumstances could that control be diminished?” Steel asked.
“None that I know of. It’s never happened to me before. It’s very odd.”
“And Sapphire can’t use her powers on her either.”
“Strange, isn’t it.”
He sat by her at the table, suddenly enjoying the exchange of ideas.
“Steel, what is that all over your hands?”
“Ahm, some kind of dirt from an old fireplace - “
“Well, wash it off for goodness sake, there’s a sink over there.”
Sapphire smirked at she handed him the towel.
“We’ll search the house again,” he said. “Properly, this time. And if she really isn’t here, then Sapphire - you can take time back where Jet last saw her.”
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