Chapter Twenty-Two

 

Janus turned over onto his back and groaned. He grappled with the black ivy tendrils around his neck until they fell away. The front door was ajar so he scrambled to his feet, pushed it slightly and waited as it creaked open. He glanced back over his shoulder, but the driveway was deserted. As he stepped over the threshold, he found himself in a warm, inviting parlour.

 

Ornately carved furniture was dotted around the spacious room. A cherry-wood staircase led up to the first floor. A chimney skulked to the right. The fireplace was massive. On the right, next to a double set of heavy oak doors, was an old, dusty, broken-down sofa. Nothing in the room was under two hundred years old. On the far side of the room were doors leading to rooms at the back of the farmhouse. The whole place was a warren.

 

As Janus stepped forward, the door slammed shut. He spun round, expecting to find the owner or perhaps Don himself finally ready to greet their unwelcome visitor, but the room was empty.

 

A bloodcurdling scream echoed off the walls. He frantically tried to work out where it was coming from, until he realised that the yelling emanated from the stonework. The house was shouting at him. The bang of a shotgun pellet made him jump.

 

Janus watched in horror as an outline of himself stepped forward. He was physically exactly where he’d been standing a second earlier, but a shadow version of him leapt out of his body and walked on into the parlour. The fire, which had been dying into embers, flared up out of the hearth and shot across the room, the heat of the flames singeing his cheeks.

 

The flames engulfed this second self. The shadow Janus ran screaming around the parlour with his clothes and hair on fire. Falling to the floor, the real Janus followed suit: rolling around frantically, convinced that he, too, was on fire. By the time he got a hold of himself enough to realise that none of this was real, his shadow self was reduced to an outline of ash. A breeze drifted in through an open window, blowing the ash away.

 

Much as he longed to flee back down the track he’d laboured up just a few minutes earlier, there was nowhere to run to. A cruel death at the hands of the Master lay at the end of any journey south. Part of him wanted to face Don, to admit his wrongdoing and mistakes, and to ask for the boy’s forgiveness before the end came.

 

To his left was a heavy walnut wardrobe with carvings of cattle and sheep around the sides of the door. The doors featured intricate patterns of the farm, the barns, the fields and the uplands where the sheep grazed. The wardrobe tottered and swayed, and he flung himself onto the floor and rolled over just as it crashed down beside him. A low chuckle vibrated out from the walls as the wardrobe fell.

 

Janus struggled to his feet. The ash from the fire clung to his soaking clothes. His face was grimy with mud from the potholes on the walk up, and he could barely see through all the dust hanging in the air. He coughed as he staggered on into the parlour. Behind him, the wardrobe scraped against the floor as it hauled itself back up into position. When he spun round, it was precisely back in place.

 

It appeared to all intents and purposes like a completely normal piece of furniture. He opened the door, but inside there was simply a row of tweed jackets, some boots and a few waxed jackets. Some old riding crops hung from a nail driven into the left side of the wardrobe.

 

He tried to remember everything Don and Ivy told him about Gerald and the Flint family. He was unconvinced when they first identified Gerald as a fledgling asset. Don tasked Ivy with watching Gerald because he was much closer to the inner circle of power through his father than anyone else they identified. But Janus was very sceptical about Gerald’s potential. It seemed highly unlikely that someone who led such an apolitical life could be encouraged to turn against his family in the interests of a resistance cause he showed no signs of believing in.

 

Don had done more research into the wider Flint clan, concluding that the whole family were oddballs. Ian was a virtual outcast because of his conventionality, and Don believed that the sheer amount of time Gerald spent with his cousins and uncles in the north made them an important part of his psyche, too. Don concluded that they could turn Gerald, and he had been proven right.

 

Every Flint except Ian seemed as mad as hatters. Standing here under its roof, Janus could now understand why they all seemed so loyal to Blackacre. The farmhouse was as bizarre as the people it sheltered. They were all weird, but together they were strong.

 

He crept further into the parlour. The fire next to the stairs died down until only a few embers glowed, but as he approached smoke billowed out from the fireplace and hung in a dense cloud just below the ceiling. The smoke swirled around until it formed the shape of a bull. Every detail was perfect, right down to its nose ring and its angry snorts as it pawed the ground.

 

As he backed towards the door, the bull lowered its head and its nostrils flared. It pawed the ground again before charging towards him. It galloped across the parlour and thudded into the front door, its horns stuck in the wood. He was thrown clear by the force of the impact, and he struggled up and staggered against the wall.

 

The bull yanked its horns free. The door splintered all the way down, but it healed instantly until the wood was smooth again. As it galloped around the parlour, the clatter of its hooves rang out on the stone flags. Janus tried to run to the other side of the parlour, and yank at the door handle leading towards the back of the house, but the handle burned him, and he cowered in the corner holding his injured hand into his body protectively. The bull lunged him, and its horn pierced his flesh just below the ribs. As it gored him, he cried out, "Help me! Help! I'm sorry for everything!"

 

Janus didn’t expect the house to heed his pleas for mercy, but Don might be moved by his repentance. Don was the most forgiving person he knew. The boy was everything good that was lacking in their world. Hot tears of shame ran down his cheeks, and he curled up in a ball and sobbed, "Don! Please let me a make amends for everything I've done."

 

The smoke bull dispersed, and the air in the parlour cleared. Janus coughed as he struggled to sit up. Leaning back against the wall, he gathered his thoughts. Crawling across the floor to the front door, he dragged himself up and tried the handle. It rattled and turned, but the door still wouldn’t open. He leant his forehead against the oak door and sobbed. The wooden shutters on the windows slammed shut, plunging him into darkness. He felt his way along the wall, past the wardrobe, until he found another door. He turned the handle, and to his relief it opened. In the half-light, as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom of stepping into another room, he realised that he was standing in the Blackacre library.

 

A voice in his head chuckled, "Janus Fidens, your problems are only just beginning!"

 

*

 

As Ivy tiptoed inside the room, she could make out a figure chained to a white metal-framed hospital bed and she crept over. Henry was lying on his back. His eyes were closed, and he looked very pale. When she gently touched his arm, he stirred only slightly. However, when she murmured his name he moaned in reply.

 

The room was small. Apart from the bed, there was a toilet in one corner and a metal trolley with pill bottles and syringes in another corner. The walls were bare except for a clipboard hanging from a nail by the light switch giving details of his admission.

 

They had brought him here yesterday evening and sedated him very heavily. The regimen here might be cruel, but the asylum kept a full record of what it did to its patients. She hung the clipboard back up and went over to look at the contents of the medical trolley.

 

The main drugs were sedatives, but there was another designed to keep him disorientated. The doctors intended that he would appear psychotic to anyone who objectively assessed him. She shook him awake, but he was too drowsy to recognise her. She tried to help him sit up, but he sank back onto the bed and lay there. One of the vials on the medicine table was adrenalin to counter any overdose of sedatives. She unwrapped a syringe and stuck it into the vial, drawing back the liquid, but she hesitated, terrified in case she gave him too much.

 

When she injected him, he shot up, eyes wide and arms flailing. She restrained him as he panicked, dreading him yelling for help, but he calmed down. Finally, he sat on the edge of the bed, looking at her. “I know who you are. I think so, anyway,” he said, rubbing his temples.

 

She smiled. “Come on,” she said. “We need to get you out of here.”

 

*

 

Hendra found Ursula sitting on the sofa. Gerald was asleep, curled up with his head in her lap. She tiptoed in and perched on the arm of the sofa looking down at him.

 

Ursula stroked Gerald’s cheek. “Thank you for bringing my son here. Ian always wanted him to go into politics. He was decent about the whole medical school rubbish, but it cut him to the core our son didn’t want to follow in his footsteps.”

 

Hendra nodded. “Really, the last five years should be wiped clean. Medical school was a mistake that wouldn't have happened if Ian was serious about Gerald being his political heir.”

 

Ursula glanced at Hendra in surprise. “Gerald has a vocation to save lives.”

 

Hendra pondered their options. No matter how much love and kindness she poured into rehabilitating Gerald, re-educating him so that he thought in the right way, they’d never be able to persuade him he didn’t want to become a doctor. “I think perhaps the answer is to tell Gerald he applied for medical school but failed to get in. He’s always struck me as being very modest about his intelligence.”

 

Ursula looked down at Gerald for a long time. Finally, she nodded. “That would involve taking him back five years at least. He was eighteen when he applied for his place there. Could you do that?”

 

Hendra smiled. There were plenty of memory-erasing drugs. The authorities used them all the time when the subtler forms of re-education failed to bring someone round. She rubbed her hands eager to begin reforming Gerald into precisely the man she wanted him to be.