The Man Who Would Be Kling by Adam Roberts

Author:Adam Roberts
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781912950058
Publisher: NewCon Press
Published: 2019-03-11T22:00:00+00:00

Four

I went down, yawning, and shook the doctor’s hand, and the two of us went up to where Mabel was. Except that she wasn’t there any more. I searched the whole house in a hurry, but she was gone. I apologised to the doctor for calling her out on a wild-goose chase, and described Chillingworth’s physical condition so vividly that she insisted we had to locate her and get her medical attention.

Downstairs, her kitbag was on the table; when she had gone she had decided not to take it with her. I was still not ready, yet, to look inside it.

With Alí’s help the doctor and I did a quick sweep of the local area, but did not find her. I went to the lodgings she and Dallas had taken in Chicken Street, but there was nobody there. At lunchtime I took a break; Alí fixed me some couscous and fried vegetables, and I discovered I was very hungry. After eating I discovered I was very tired, so I slept for an hour. The ringing of the landline woke me, and I stumbled down to answer it with a gummy mouth.

‘We found her,’ said the doctor, though the whizzing and creaking of the telephone line. ‘But it’s not good news. She was wandering bare-headed in the midday sun for hours, and her face is badly sunburned and blistered. She died almost as soon as I admitted her to the clinic.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

Later the body was shipped, by land, to Peshawar where an autopsy was performed. The strange mutilations to her hands and feet aside, and disregarding the mess that she had made of her ears, there was nothing unusual about the body.

I screwed my courage to the sticking point, and opened her kitbag. But where I expected to find Dallas’s severed head, I found instead a prop, or some kind of object: metal and plastic, head shaped and with rudimentary features and a fuzz of black hair, but with yellow eyes, and pore-marked yellow skin. I handed this object over to the authorities. I’ve no idea what they did with it.

I went to Peshawar myself, and filed as detailed a report as I could manage. It was altogether an unusual case. Some of my superiors were minded to dismiss it: the whole thing a scam, or a mistake. Maybe Chillingworth and Dallas had holed up just outside the zone, conceivably even just inside, where the effects weren’t too bad – or maybe they’d enjoyed a kind of blind luck and that was why they hadn’t died. All the other stuff was too fanciful. None of it matched the satellite surveillance data. But there were people in the higher echelons who were persuaded that this was worthwhile data; or at least were persuaded that it was worth their time coming down in person to question me.

I was in a very nice Peshawar hotel, and three people came to debrief me about the whole thing: two women and one man, both much more senior that the people with whom I was used to interacting.

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