ON BOARD THE
PHILANTHROPY EXPRESS
I
In the course of a successful career which had spanned a decade and a half – and which had necessitated the violent deaths of thirty-three individuals – Miss Josephine Galligan had trained herself to need very little sleep. That she was able to survive (indeed, to flourish) on this bare minimum of rest had saved her life on several occasions as surely as it had eased and facilitated the unfortunate fates of others. On this particular afternoon, however, something unprecedented had occurred.
Having boarded the train at Little Rock, Arkansas, and having been shown to her cabin by a nervy, rather clumsy boy of not more than eighteen with a shock of ginger hair and a pronounced (almost stagey) Brooklyn accent, Galligan had lain down upon her narrow bed with her single valise still unopened before her, meaning to take no more than fifteen minutes of brisk and dreamless slumber, only to slip immediately into deep sleep.
By sheer force of will, Josephine managed generally to dream either not at all or else very slightly, waking on instinct at the first sign of any unwelcome image. Yet today, lulled, perhaps, by the rhythmic rocking of the train upon the tracks, she went much deeper than usual and she dreamed a dream of near-hallucinatory clarity.
She was upon a distant beach in a lush and sun-drenched place where she had never been in her life before. She was drowsing there too but was woken by a disturbance in the water beyond, something moving, rising from the waves. As she got to her feet in the dream, there came then a deep, thoughtful voice which spoke directly to her mind and to impart a flow of warnings and instructions. The precise words that were spoken she forgot at once upon waking but the urgency of them stayed with her, that and their awful quality of calculation. The heat on her back, the voice in her head and, then, something waking her from this dream within a dream: the smell of smoke, the sounds of screaming, the promise of violence on the breeze…
Aware now on some level that she was dreaming, Galligan forced herself to wrench open her eyes. She found – again, most uncharacteristically, for a woman of such self-control – that she was struggling, almost wheezing for a breath, like a glutton at the top of a steep flight of stairs or a baby whose head had slipped momentarily beneath her bathwater. She was shivering too – a writer of popular fiction would have called it “shuddering”. Galligan lay still. She forced herself to regulate her breathing. She assured herself that she had been merely dreaming and reminded herself with patient and clear-eyed practicality of her surroundings.
The cabin was a small one, if opulently appointed: a crimson rug, a bedside table, a small mirror and a piece of tasteful artwork on the wall, a bland seascape which was no doubt intended to be soothing. A small window afforded a view of the darkening country, a smooth, regular blur, the nation glimpsed as through a picture frame. Galligan rose and stretched, her fingertips grazing the roof of the cabin. She was a tall woman and strong with it; at forty-three, something in her manner was still suggestive of the athlete. In a few swift motions she filled almost the whole of the cabin.
Space was at a premium on board the Express and this room was only moderately priced, by no means the cheapest but still a long way from those more generous quarters which were intended to cater for the very rich. Of course, Galligan’s employers could well have afforded such accommodation, though it was generally preferred by all involved that she travel as discreetly as possible, drawing as little attention to herself as she could.
Unsettled by the depth of her sleep and (though she would be most unlikely ever to have admitted it to herself) by the weird clarity of her dream, Galligan stretched out her arms and took three short breaths, just as she had been taught, long ago, to bring the world into focus once again.
A knock came at the door, barely audible over the rattle and surge of the train: three soft beats upon the wood. It had a quality of repetition, as though whoever stood outside had been there for some time. Was it this which had woken her? Galligan thought it most likely.
The tall woman stepped towards the door and stood, unspeaking, beside it.
“Who is it?” she called out, in a hearty tone which was most unlike her usual speaking voice. Her employer, the presumably pseudonymous Mr Parabola, had often remarked that Josephine might have made a fine actress if only she had troubled herself to learn the craft. “Who’s there?”
A voice came from the other side. “Got a parcel for you, miss.”
“I don’t doubt you do. But who are you?”
“Jimmy, miss. We met earlier.”
Carefully, Galligan opened the door. The young man from before – the gawky red-headed adolescent – stood on the threshold, dressed in the neat pink uniform of the railway and swaying indecorously with the motion of the train. There was a slim brown parcel beneath his left arm.
“Is that for me, Jimmy?” The tone was calm now, friendly but not overly so, designed to be forgettable.
“Yes, miss.” The young man passed over the parcel. Galligan squeezed it once, briefly, and surmised that its contents were paper.
“Thank you, Jimmy.” She produced a single dollar and gave it to the boy.
“No, miss. Thank you, miss.” He looked beyond Galligan, into the cabin. “Everything okay? Are you enjoying your journey so far?”
“Very much, thank you.”
“That’s good, miss.”
“Can you tell me where we are now?”
“We’ve just passed by Dallas, miss.”
Gilligan blinked in surprise. “Already? This train is faster than I’d expected.”
“Top of the line, ain’t it? The most advanced of its kind.”
“Impressive. So far.”
The boy looked awkward, eager to get away. “Is there anything else, miss? I should say that supper will be served in an hour and forty minutes. The dining car have your reservation.”
“Thank you, Jimmy. You’re most useful.”
Jimmy grinned gratefully and nodded. “Always do my best. Oh and miss?”
“Yes, Jimmy?”
“After the food, the guest of honour will give his speech. Though don’t worry, they’ll keep serving drink all the way through. No alcohol, of course.”
Josephine winked. “Glad to hear it.”
“Thought you might be.” The boy turned left and continued down the carriage. Galligan watched him go, then closed the door, locked it and went to the bed with her parcel.
She opened it swiftly and found inside a single folded newspaper, the Daily Herald, its pages filled with talk of various European disruptions and upheavals. These stories she ignored.
At the middle of the paper, folded inside, was her expected gift from Mr Parabola. A single photograph, black and white, showed a plump, grey-haired man, dressed in a black suit and bow tie, facing the camera with what was presumably intended as a look of sombre gravitas.
Josephine recognised the man at once. There were few in the English-speaking world who took even a moderate interest in current affairs who would not.
She took one further glance at the photograph, picked it up and moved towards the window. With a single, swift motion she pushed down the glass. A sudden howl of cold air billowed into the room. Galligan crumpled the photograph into a ball, threw it outside then closed the window.
She went to the suitcase which still lay on the ground, swung it up onto the bed and opened it. There were inside a set of new clothes, a volume of short stories (Kipling which, although antique, she often found to be to her taste) and the tools of her trade: a revolver, a sheathed blade and a length of strong rope. There was also a fountain pen and a pocket notebook, cream-coloured and with her initials – J.R.G. – embossed on the front cover.
Galligan opened the book and flicked through it. On each page there was a name. There were thirty-three in total, twenty male and thirteen female. Beneath each name was a date and a line or two of detail.
On the next blank page Josephine wrote the following, underlining it with a firm black line.
“Albert Edgington. 08/24/35”.
II
An hour passed in which Josephine Galligan prepared herself for dinner. She was a naturally smart woman, ordered and precise in almost every aspect of her life. Her mode of dress was representative of these essential traits and she looked immaculate, if a little aloof, in a light green dress which only just was starting to look old-fashioned.
She had a small, crimson handbag with her in which she felt the weight of her revolver. In Italy, Argentina, Switzerland or any of the other foreign countries in which she had carried out her unforgiving work the possible discovery of this item might have caused her concern. Yet this was Texas and, although they were only passing through the state, the rules of the realm still applied. Here it would most likely seem suspicious if she were not, however discreetly, armed.
Galligan took a breath, feeling the familiar surge of giddiness which she experienced at the outset of any fresh commission. It was popularly supposed that persons in her line of work had no feelings to speak of, that they made themselves as best they could into soulless automatons in order to do what they were paid to do. There may be some truth in this but most certainly not in the case of Miss Galligan. She often felt a great deal, a considerable spectrum of emotion, of which this flurry of excitement was only a small part. She leant for a moment upon the door handle until the dizziness subsided, then stepped briskly outside.
The corridors of the train were narrow and swaying. The lights had been dimmed a little in honour of the evening. Outside the great flat contours of the desert moved by with a strange, paradoxical kind of languorous rapidity.
Josephine turned right, her tall frame almost scraping the ceiling. She had almost reached the door which led to the adjacent carriage when she saw it open and a familiar figure step through.
“There you are, miss,” said Jimmy. “I was just coming to find you.”
“Why, thank you. But there’s no need. I do believe I’m capable of finding the dining carriage all by myself.”
“Gee, I know you are, miss. But ain’t you running late?”
“No,” Galligan said, “that can’t be right,” but something in the boy’s tone had unsettled her and so she consulted her wristwatch. “It’s a few minutes before seven,” she said with moderate irritation. “I’m right on time.”
“No, miss, it’s well past eight. Your watch must be slow. Or broken.”
Galligan looked again at the face of the device. She held the second hand in her gaze and saw it was unmoving. “You’re right.”
“Sorry, miss.”
“No harm, I suppose,” Josephine said, though, at this minor disruption, she felt a distinct prickle of unease. “I’ll have to get it fixed.”
“Give it to me, miss. I can do that for you. It’ll be working just fine again by the morning.”
“Thank you,” Galligan said and she found herself taking off the watch and handing it to the boy almost without thinking. Jimmy pocketed it.
“This way now, miss,” he said, turned around and went back through the door.
Josephine followed, moving through another three identical carriages, as the desert spooled by. They passed no other passengers and Galligan, unsettled, made no further conversation.
At last they came to the dining carriage. The contrast with what had preceded it was vivid to an almost uncomfortable degree.
Like so much of that remarkable train, it was a considerable feat of engineering. It was a narrow space, but a long one, with room for dozens of guests. It had something of the air of a cocktail bar (officially, of course, no liquor could be served here, not while the path of the railroad curved through dry state after dry state) and it was a long, surprisingly expansive space, with plentiful tables crammed in to make artful use of the available room. The carriage was full, with dozens of diners, all dressed expensively and for maximum effect. Food had already been served and the passengers were eating busily. The sounds were of thoughtful conversation, the chink and clink of railway cutlery, the pouring and slurping of fine drinks, all underscored by the insistent bass of the train’s forward motion.
There was a part of Josephine, buried but palpable, which was repulsed by this scene and by the people within it – a side of her personality which went some way to explain her choice of career. An expert alienist (someone like Mr Vaughan, perhaps, in the earliest days of his career before his long descent) might have found her to be a most interesting case study.
For a moment, Josephine allowed herself a rarity: a piece of imagination. She saw all of the guests at this high supper as pigs, oinking and snuffling at the trough. That this image was both a familiar one and, arguably, somewhat judgemental, need not detain us; as they did not cause Josephine to slow her stride they should not be permitted to impede our progress.
“Here’s your place, miss.” This was the boy again, gesturing now towards a small table at the furthest edge of that long carriage. “Nice and discreet. Just the way you like it.”
There was something most curious in the way in which he spoke this second sentence which gave Josephine reason to look at him more closely.
“Why do you say that?” she asked as she took her seat.
The boy shrugged. “Your reputation precedes you, miss.”
“How can it?” she asked, rather sharply. “You’ve surely never heard of me.”
He grinned. “Everyone here knows you, Josephine.”
“What did you say?”
He winked. “Mr Parabola says hello.” The boy turned and came back in the direction that he had come. By the finish of his speech, Josephine thought, the child’s Brooklyn accent had all but vanished to reveal something less certain underneath. Something European?
Josephine considered. It seemed strange to her, that her employer should have placed another agent in the scene, especially one who was so small in years and stature. Still, it was not entirely unprecedented. There were rumours, amongst the community of those who plied the same trade, that Mr Parabola had done similar things in the past, though only rarely and strictly in cases of the utmost significance.
Why was this job so important, Galligan wondered, what made this man’s life stand out amongst so many others?
The arrival of a waiter interrupted her thoughts. A tall, bearded fellow, dressed in the uniform of the railway, there was something distractingly unruly – almost leonine – about him.
“Good evening, Miss Galligan.”
Another accent. This time: Australian. It had a broad, rather coarse twang.
“You’re late, miss.” This was said with an implication of reproof. “Would you still be wanting the starter?”
Galligan glared at the interloper. “Have I paid for the starter?”
“Oh yes, miss. Most certainly, miss. Or at least, Miss Galligan, whoever paid for your ticket has paid for the starter.”
“Starter, please,” Josephine said, adding with a snip of disdain: “if you’d be so kind.”
The waiter did not speak again but only nodded and withdrew. At the sight of him, Galligan received another odd, unexpected image: that the man resembled nothing so much as a dark chess piece being pulled backwards on the board, something sliding slyly into place in order to protect the queen.
No observer would have been able to deduce it, so solidly imperturbable was Josephine’s demeanour, yet at this she felt a further spasm of unease. What, she wondered, was wrong with her? Why was she thinking such strange thoughts?
At the front of the carriage, on the table that was raised a little from the rest, there was some activity. Four men were seated around the table. The oldest (and the plumpest) of them had risen, on well-fed legs and was hitting the side of his glass (containing a substance which looked like water but almost certainly wasn’t) with a fork.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” the stout man was saying in an accent which hinted at the South. “Your attention, please!”
Amid some joshing and good-natured complaint, the occupants of the carriage fell obediently silent.
“How fine it is to see so many of you here tonight, all crammed into the most capacious carriage that money can buy!”
There was at this some polite chortling.
“I hope and trust you are enjoying the ride so far. So much to see as we cross this great nation, and so much top-drawer service to relish on board. To that end, ladies and gentlemen, why don’t you join me now in thanking the good folks on board this train who’ve made our journey so very smooth and luxurious?” The stout man held up his hands theatrically and began to clap.
Many of the other passengers joined in and a ripple of applause passed around the carriage. Blending in, Galligan did the same. A waiter returned with a drink for Josephine – not the leonine man from before but rather an older, dark-haired woman who seemed, somehow, oddly familiar.
“Your drink…” she murmured, the words almost lost in the tide of applause, before withdrawing into the shadows.
“Now then,” the plump man said once the clapping had subsided, “I know very well that you haven’t paid what you’ve paid for tonight to listen to me jawing. Or even for this very fine food.”
More polite laughter.
“No, what you’ve come here for is to listen to the words of one man. To listen to the truth, ladies and gentlemen – the truth they don’t want you to hear!” All around Josephine, the audience were nodding in agreement and stating their support.
“One of the most courageous and remarkable Englishmen of his age. A man who it is my pleasure now to introduce to you. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Mr Albert Edgington!”
On cue, another diner at the table rose to his feet. He was the kind of man, Josephine thought, who might be considered average in every way: a solidly built man in his fifties, dressed unremarkably and showing no obvious signs of charisma. He looked like the popular conception of a bank manager or a small town doctor, someone almost comforting in his very ordinariness.
Having got to his feet, Edgington bowed his head briefly to acknowledge the applause.
“Hello,” he said, “my name is Albert and I very much hope that all that applause isn’t meant for me. I’m really nothing special, you know.”
Some smiles at this, a smattering of additional applause, a few jocular rebuttals.
Meanwhile, Josephine Galligan leaned back in her seat, drank her drink and thought to herself that it really was a pity that Albert Edgington had to die.
III
“Thirty-four years ago today,” said Mr Albert Edgington to his well-heeled, casually extravagant audience, “what has since come to be known as the City of Dr Moreau was first brought to the attention of the wider world. Run for more than a decade as a kind of rich man’s playground and pleasure garden, the revolution of the peoples who were kept there against their will resulted in the overthrow of that tyrannical regime.” Edgington paused, leaned down to the table, reached for a glass and took a sip. He was an accomplished speaker; the interruption served only to heighten the interest of his audience.
“I was there myself that night,” he went on, “as many of you here will know.”
Josephine found it hard to believe that there was anyone amongst this crowd who did not know this very well indeed.
“By sheer bad luck and misjudgement, I found myself at the heart of one of the great events of the twentieth century. And, my friends, I do not think that it is any exaggeration for me to say that those of us who witnessed the city in flames and the noble supremacy of its former captives believed with all of our hearts that great change had come to the City.” He paused again, took another sip.
Josephine herself leaned back a little further in her seat and took something of her own drink.
“In part, of course, this has most certainly happened. The City acquired its own independence in law and remains a thriving hub of both industry and tourism. The many scientific advances which have been dreamed up by some of the deep thinkers of that place have secured huge advances for the world at large. And if you need proof of that, just take a look at this miracle of engineering on which we’re presently speeding through the American night.”
Polite laughter at this, the sound of an audience being coaxed with acumen and skill into feeling good about themselves.
“Yet independence,” Edgington went on, “was not as complete as it first seemed. Governments around the world have done all they can to make trade difficult for the peoples of the City, just as they have discouraged at every stage the emigration and travel of those self-same people. Had it not been for that torrent of desirable scientism from that tiny but indomitable nation I don’t doubt that the City would long ago have had to seek sanctuary in the arms of one major power or another. The outrageous and tragic assassination of Anta’Nar, the first true leader of the City, only exacerbated this state of affairs.”
Sombre nods all round at this, together with much surreptitious eating and drinking. Sounds of indolent chewing. The eyes of Josephine Galligan flicked around the room, scanning for possible obstacles, looking for entry and exit points, understanding what might be practicable. Her gaze passed over the other diners without taking in the detail of them until she was brought up short by the sight not of a guest but of a waiter, an older man dressed in sombre black like something from the last century.
“In part, of course, the fact that the City has been able to maintain its independence for more than thirty years is down to the generosity of you and to people like you, who have, through unstinting donation, kept the City solvent.”
Without drawing the least attention to herself, Josephine peered before her, trying to get a better view of the man she’d seen in the shadows. She squinted, winced, hesitated, then looked again. Could it be him? After all this time?
“So,” said Edgington, “why not give yourselves a round of applause? Go on. After all, you deserve it!”
A burst of eager clapping broke out. To Josephine the diners seemed to bathe in the sound, wallowing in self-approbation. The man across the room whom Galligan believed she had recognised did not clap but he seemed now to be aware of the gaze that was upon him. He turned his head. Their eyes met. At the sight of her he showed no visible reaction. You would have to have known him very well indeed – as Josephine once had – in order to see the shock in the subtle adjustment of his stance.
At last the applause began to die down.
Across the room, Josephine and the waiter gazed at one another. Something passed between them, something which the crowd, settling again in their seats, eager for the next phase of the evening to begin, did not appear to recognise. Then the man was on the move, bustling, hurrying away, towards the end of the carriage, going at speed towards the front of the train.
Albert Edgington went on. “Nonetheless, my friends, the City remains free only in the strictest and most pedantically legalistic interpretation of the term. In spite of the bounties that it has given to the world, in spite of all that it has wrought, in spite of the example of good governance that it has provided, still it is shunned and ignored. Still it is not given its due. Still the peoples of the City are confined to one small patch of the English coast. Still the wider world refuses to change in order to accommodate us. Still it sticks stubbornly to the old ways, when everything around it continues to evolve.”
Josephine hardly heard this speech, so lost was she in the past and in the awful, bewildering incongruity of the sight that she had seen. Then, seeing the attempted escape of the man, she too found herself upon her feet and moving in pursuit, her target and assignment all but forgotten.
“But this can – and it will – come to an end. My friends, we’ll make the world finally understand. We’ll make them acknowledge the City and make them permit free travel of its peoples all over the globe. My friends, please be in no doubt when I say this to you now: we will make them afraid!”
More applause at this but Josephine paid it no heed. She was almost at the side of the hurrying man. He stepped ahead of her, out of the carriage and into the next. She followed without once looking behind her, the cheers and whoops of the crowd at her back.
The next carriage was, unexpectedly to Josephine, almost entirely empty. It was, she supposed, a kind of library. There were shelves filled with books, though all of them had the same blue spine with no lettering at all. There might, for all she knew, have been hundreds of identical copies of the same volume.
The man whom she had been following was waiting for her, leaning between the shelves and the window. Outside, the desert flashed by.
From the adjacent carriage could still be heard the sounds of cheers and well-fed approval.
The man looked at Josephine and she looked at him. How old he has become, she thought, how bowed and weary.
“It is you.”
He had the good grace at least to look sheepish. “Hello, sweetheart.”
She rubbed at her eyes, trying to persuade herself that what she saw before her was real. She blinked. For all that the day had taken on the unreliable quality of a dream, the fact of his presence seemed irrefutable. “Dad,” she said at last. “Whatever are you doing here?”
IV
The old man (and he was now an old man, this she had to concede) waited a long while before he replied to her question. Next door, the sounds of applause were over and the warm, persuasive tones of Mr Albert Edgington could once again be heard.
“They told me I could see you,” he said. “They promised.”
“Dad?” she said, and moved towards him very carefully, almost gingerly. “Who are ‘they’? What’s happening here?”
He smiled as she approached. “You look well, Jo. Very well. You’ve become quite the lady.”
“Dad, please. You shouldn’t be here. I don’t think this is a safe place.”
“Oh, I dare say it’s not,” said the old man. “But where exactly is safe nowadays?” He screwed up his face, as though he smelled something bad. “You know, if they get their way, I don’t think anyone’s ever going to be safe again.”
Josephine reached his side. “Dad, what are you talking about? What do you mean?” She reached out and touched him. He was hot, she realised, almost feverish and practically shaking.
“I shouldn’t have left you both,” he said, speaking of things which, so far as Josephine was concerned, had ended many years ago for them both. “I know that. It was wrong of me and I was a coward. I should have stayed. Tried to do better. But, you see, your mother…”
Josephine, who had been only sixteen when she attended her mother’s funeral, said nothing to this. Instead she was listening to what was going on in the adjacent carriage. It seemed to her that nothing at all was being said. There was no sound of any kind emanating from that adjacent space.
“Dad,” she said. “What exactly is happening here? Why did you lead me in here?”
When she looked she saw that the old man’s eyes were brimming with tears. “Please,” he said. “It began as quite a coincidence.”
“I’ve come to mistrust coincidence.”
“They said they didn’t know who I was when they hired me and I believe them. Some days…”
“Dad.”
“I wanted to see you and they gave me the opportunity. Just once they said.”
It was not quite contempt in Josephine’s eyes but neither was it any especially soft emotion. “Why?”
“So that I could say sorry,” said her father, before adding with an unbecoming sniffle: “And you could forgive me.”
Although Josephine remained profoundly troubled by the persistence of the silence on this train of the foolishly rich, she turned her attention in full towards her father. She appraised him in a single glance: a sad, broken-down fellow whose every movement spoke of regret and self-loathing. For a moment she considered telling him the truth – that she had thought very little about him in all of the years that they had been apart, that her memories of him were neither good nor bad but mostly indifferent, and that her mother had considered them better off without his presence in their lives. To have done so, however, struck her as needlessly unkind, and so she said: “I forgive you.” She kissed him once upon the cheek in a kind of benediction.
Then she turned and walked towards the carriage door.
“Good luck,” her father said behind. “I always loved you, you…”
The end of this sentence was lost as Josephine stepped into the adjoining segment of the train and then into the next carriage.
She was met by silence. Every face in the room seemed to be turned towards her, as though they had been waiting for her to arrive.
Then Albert Edgington called out: “Miss Josephine Galligan, ladies and gentlemen! Please. I give you: the herald of the new age!”
And the room erupted into cheers. Many of the diners rose to their feet, slamming their hands together with wild enthusiasm which dwarfed their earlier efforts.
She wheeled about in confusion. She took her revolver from her pocket.
At this the applause stopped.
Albert Edgington looked at her with mild disapproval. “No need for that,” he said. “It’s quite harmless anyway.”
Josephine pulled the trigger. The barrel was empty.
“Jimmy removed the bullets while you slept.”
The boy with the wandering accent stood across the room. He winked at her.
“Who are you people?” Josephine asked, disliking intensely the theatricality of the thing. “Why have you done this?”
“You sound affronted,” Edgington went on. “That’s really in rather poor taste, I should say, given what you came here to do to me.”
In a fit of fury, Josephine hurled her revolver to the ground where it skittered and spun into the shadows. “It’s my profession,” she said, after she had recovered her composure.
Edgington shrugged. “A standard enough response. Though we are all victims of circumstance in one way or another. Don’t you think? Speaking of which, I hope that you achieved some manner of understanding with your father next door. We all thought it would be a nice gesture. One last chance at reconciliation.”
“Why…” Josephine said again. She had started to feel most unwell. There was a prickling sensation in her scalp. Her eyes ached. Suddenly, she began to shiver. “Why have you done this?”
“For the good of the planet,” Edgington said. “For justice for Anta’Nar. We’re all on this train exactly what we appear to be: well-meaning, wealthy, philanthropists. We want to help the peoples of the City.”
“A fine aim,” Josephine said. Though she found herself feeling even worse now. Whatever was attacking her body was moving swiftly. “But how does that… involve me?”
“We want to make the world understand,” said a new voice. A dark-haired woman walked out from the crowd, towards Josephine’s side. She recognised her from before, the woman who had given Josephine her drink, the woman whom she now recognised as:
“Coral Mayfield!” Albert exclaimed and the room burst once again into applause.
The woman came close to Josephine now. “Poor girl. You must be feeling distinctly groggy by now, I should have thought.”
Josephine said nothing but her swaying gait and pallor gave away the truth.
“I am sorry that it will cause some pain but it was necessary to drug you for the first part of the procedure.” She smiled. “I want you to know, Miss Galligan, that you’re doing an awful lot of good for the peoples of the world. You will, in your own way, become something of a pioneer. Even, perhaps, a heroine…”
Yet Galligan heard no more of this. Her vision grew overwhelmed by fizzing crimson, she stumbled then fell backwards, for the first time in her life, into a swoon.
She was still on the train when she awoke, though in a carriage which she had not seen before – one, she soon suspected, which hardly anyone aboard could have seen for the sake of their sanity.
It was, amongst other things, a tribute to the scientific advances which had flowed out of the City since its establishment as an independent state. At the left-hand corner was a glass screen upon which a figure whom she recognised only from newsreels – the furred and uniformed new leader of the City – was seen to strut and pace. On either side of this screen, stood Mr Albert Edgington and Miss Coral Mayfield. It was what took up the bulk of the space in the carriage, however, which understandably seized most of Josephine’s attention.
It was a great tank of water in which something remarkable was being kept: a vast, dark, tentacular creature, something like an octopus, with blazing eyes.
Josephine had been bound to a chair. Every part of her ached.
“She’s waking up.” This was the voice of Albert Edgington. “Oh dear. What a pity. I really am so very sorry, my dear, that this is being done to you.”
“Hush.” This was Coral. “Never forget how many she has killed.”
“None of us is exactly innocent,” said Albert mildly.
“What is this?” Josephine lifted her head to look her captors in the eye. “What are you doing to me? And what is that thing in there?”
Coral smiled. The great black octopus moved closer to the glass, almost as if it had heard and understood her. Not possible, Josephine thought. Surely?
“We had to do something,” Coral said. “We couldn’t let things go on as they are. We had to take a stand.”
“You were chosen at random,” Albert said. “Entirely at random from a list of very bad people. It seemed the fairest way.”
“There will be some pain,” Coral went on, “and I know that’s not a happy thing. But it will be necessary.”
In the tank, the octopus-thing stroked the glass with one of its tentacles. There was something so inhuman in the motion that Josephine could not hold back a yelp of disgust.
Coral looked witheringly at her. “There’s no need,” she said, “for such disrespect. Not for a being which has guided our actions for so long. A being which has always urged firm, decisive action. Events have proved them correct.”
“What is that thing?”
Then Josephine heard a new voice, one which seemed to speak only in her own head. “Josephine Galligan. What you see before you is what is speaking to you now.”
Josephine looked wildly about her but she saw no sign that the other two humans in the room had heard what she had heard at all.
The voice in her head went on. “I think it respectful for you to know exactly what they will do to you. My creator never offered me the same courtesy.”
“Impossible…” Josephine murmured. Albert and Coral looked over at her and smiled, as though they could guess what was happening.
“I have overseen the development of a viral agent,” the voice went on. “One which has the power of transmogrification. It is highly transmissible, highly contagious. It will be unstinting and without mercy.”
“What do you mean?” Josephine said aloud before, realising that she needed only to think these thoughts: What is transmogrification?
“You will all be changed,” the voice said. “You will become as are the children of the City. A whole new species. Something better. You should feel proud, Josephine Galligan, to have played so crucial a role in its forging.”
The voice ceased then to speak. In the tank the octopus moved away from the glass, sinking down towards the mirk at the bottom.
“You’re mad,” Galligan said, hopelessly but with fierce contempt.
Albert nodded glumly, as though accepting the truth of the charge.
Coral merely shrugged. “If we are then the world has made us so. I would have left it be, you know. I would have walked away. If not for what was done to my son.”
“No, none of this can be possibly be happening. None of it can possibly work. None of it’s even true.”
Coral smiled. For a moment a flicker of sadness crossed her face, an echo of the little girl she had once been. “It’s all real,” she said. “It’s all happening. And this is what has to happen if the City is to be allowed to reach its true potential.” A look of absolute zealotry came into her eyes. “This what my son would have wanted. For the truth of the City to spread out across the globe.”
And Josephine knew at that moment that she was lost.
VII
Much of what followed after this was darkness to Josephine Galligan. She was aware of faces (not all of them human) looking down at her, of the dark octopoid thing in the tank, of the relentless motion of the train, its inexorable hum and sway.
She did not see her father. Much in recent hours seemed to her to be so close to a dream as to be practically indistinguishable from it. They kept her drugged and she passed often in and out of consciousness. There were injections and copious other forms of treatment. Already, she could sense within her the first stirrings of transformation. She screamed often. She wept. She did not ask for mercy. She kept, in her own terms, true to herself.
And then, it was over. After one particularly long blackout, she found herself free, or so, at least, it appeared. She was sitting outside, no longer on the train, but on a bench in what was to her immediately recognisable as Central Park, New York. She had been dressed expensively. She wore a long white fur coat, the pockets of which were stuffed with cash.
Something moved within her. Something crackled through her system. There was in her jaw an ache, almost as though fresh teeth were growing. She had to fight back the urge to howl.
She rose from the bench and, as if in a trance, began to walk out of the park and towards the American city, to that destiny which was waiting for her there.