“No. What purpose would it serve? This agreement secures your safety. If we expose the government, that will remove the incentive to protect you. We certainly don’t want any repeats of what happened yesterday. Or worse. And I assure you, the government will continue to deal with Malignant Ones, no matter how much we expose this particular arrangement.”
I said, “So we just let them continue.” As soon as I’d said it, I wished I could take it back. I felt so ungrateful.
Ms Birkett said, “I’m afraid so, Ms Pierson. We take the victory we can get.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I mean, thank you.”
Paul asked, “How can we trust the SDA? They could say they’re protecting me—us—and do nothing.”
Ms Birkett said, “Of course. That is why I have demanded that my own team monitor the entire depossession process. And remember, the threat of exposure will remain.”
My father asked, “What’s to stop them just—getting rid of all of us? If we’re gone, we can’t expose them.”
“They would have to get rid of me as well. And I have created various information-dumping routines ‘in the event of my untimely disappearance’ as they say in the movies.”
“Wow,” I said.
Paul said, “What about afterwards? How do I know she’ll leave me alone?”
“Because of the protection the SDA will give you. And because it will suit the government for you to remain unharmed. And the government will make sure it suits the Malignant Ones.”
Daddy asked, “But can the Malignant Ones themselves control her?”
“Oh yes. The Bright Beings, the Benign Ones and the Malignant Ones together, actually form something of a single entity. The individual Beings appear to us as separate, like people, but we might describe them better as branches of that one entity. Configurations, to use the proper term.” She paused. “The point is, they can control her, and they will.”
Paul said, “What about my job? Am I going to have to walk past the damn temp agency every time I go to work?”
“Certainly not,” Ms Birkett said. “All traces of Lisa Black Dust 7 and her agency will vanish from the building.” She smiled. “When you return to work, your colleagues will no doubt tell you of the week the government shut down the building. ‘Resanctification of an architectural landmark’ I believe they will call it.”
We stayed in her office a little bit longer, talking about what would happen, what the SDA would do, how they would reseal our house and purify Paul’s apartment, how they would take us to a depossession centre, how we’d have to sit around in quarantine for a week but nothing would hurt.
Finally we had to leave. My folks shook her hand and hurried out of the office. Paul shook her hand, too, but he didn’t look at her. I think he was crying.
The escort team, two women without any masks but carrying government sanctified electronic spirit dispersers, waited in the doorway. They looked bored. I got up last and shook her hand, trying to do it as strong as she did. I was halfway to the door when she called to me, “Ellen,” she said, and I turned. She was smiling. “I’ve enjoyed meeting you,” she said. “If you find yourself downtown, please feel free to drop in on me.”
“Oh yes,” I said. “Yes, I will. Thank you. Thank you very much.” And then I left.
The depossession took five days. To be honest, it was mostly kind of dull. We had to go to an SDA safe house upstate, along the Hudson. It was very pretty, with views of the cliffs and lots of woods. Except we didn’t get to look around much. We chanted and sweated and wrote things on paper and made “substitutes” (dolls, that is; you should have seen my father’s!). At least we got to do some stuff down by the river, at night. Most of the time, however, I had to sit in my room, or else lie down on a surgical table while people in lab coats and sanctified masks (I kept looking for the crocodile woman but she never showed) smeared creams and smelly oils on me and wiped them off, or painted pictures and wrote words on my belly, or else ran tests with electrodes attached to my head, lights shining in my face, and so on.
I don’t know what I was expecting, maybe the building shaking, slime pouring out of the walls, shrieks and wild laughter—you know, the kind of thing you see on TV shows.
Only once did something really weird happen, and it wasn’t the kind of thing you expect. It was night time and they’d taken me down to the river again, a small cove with a ring of metal poles near the edge of the water. My caseworker tied a black silk blindfold around my eyes and then directed me to sit down in the centre of the ring. The poles gave off a low rhythmic hum.
For a while I just thought about school or something. Slowly, the hum got louder and my head started to hurt. Suddenly, I heard giggles behind me. I turned my head, frightened. Why were the techs giggling? But the sound came from somewhere further back, somewhere in the woods.
I reached up to pull off the blindfold. “No,” my caseworker said. “Leave it on.” My hand didn’t move, just held on to the cloth. “Leave it alone,” the caseworker said. I let go.
The giggling got louder, then changed to moans and sighs. I could hear voices, though I couldn’t hear what they said. Until a voice I knew said, “Two is lovely, but three’s a feast. Ellen?” I pulled off the blindfold. Outside the circle of poles, beyond the stupid techs who didn’t seem to notice anything at all, Lisa Black Dust 7 and Alison Birkett lay naked together at the edge of the trees.
“No!” I shouted, or something dumb like that, and covered my eyes with my hands.
“Don’t leave the circle,” my caseworker told me. I could hardly hear her, the roaring in the poles had gotten so loud. It ran from pole to pole, round and round the ring. “What do you see?” the caseworker asked. I shook my head. Alison Birkett’s voice called my name again.
When I looked again, she and Black Dust 7 were kissing each other and doing things with their hands I don’t want to describe. And suddenly I could feel them touching me, sliding invisible hands all over my body. I thrashed around like someone slapping away a swarm of bugs.
“Don’t leave,” my caseworker said again, but I just shouted at her, “Shut up!” Okay, I told myself, don’t panic. Trying to ignore the laughter and those horrible hands all over me, I closed my eyes, took a breath—and said all the formulas and prayers the techs had been teaching me over the past few days. The laughter died away, the hands became feathers.
And I wanted them back. I wanted to stop the chants and the formulas, I wanted to bring back the voices, the hands. I felt so lonely, so ashamed. Alison Birkett would hate me, no one would ever love me. No one ever had loved me. But now these two wonderful beings had come to rescue me. Why was I driving them away? Didn’t I know they only played a game, pretending to be enemies so they could trick the idiots, like my parents and the SDA? They couldn’t fool me, they knew that. I was much too smart for any of that. Why was I driving them away? If I joined them the three of us could do anything. They needed me, Alison Birkett needed me. If I turned her down now, she’d never speak to me again.
Thank mine and everyone else’s guardians that the caseworker didn’t say or do anything. I’m sure if I’d heard that whining voice I would have given up the protections just to spite her. Instead, I clenched my fists and said as loud as I could, “Ferocious One, I beg you to release me. I know that nothing I have done deserves your Malignant Intervention.” I repeated it twice more, louder each time. Inner conviction, they say, is half the working. When I opened my eyes again, they were gone.
I wondered a lot what Paul was going through. If the monster could do that to me, what would happen to my poor cousin, the only one of us who’d actually given in to her? I only saw him once during our time in the safe house. I saw him at the other end of a corridor. I called to him but he turned away, and then my own caseworker pushed me into another lab room.