The Girl With All the Gifts(27)

It takes longer than the shower in the block. The shower heads actually move, sliding down the walls on metal tracks, angling as they descend to spray every inch of their bodies from every direction.

Sergeant endures this with his head down, eyes tight shut. Melanie, who’s used to the pain and knows her eyes will sting just as much whether they’re shut or open, keeps watching. She sees that there are steel shutters at the end of the shower area through which they’ve just entered. A simple ratchet-based mechanism allows them to be raised or lowered by the turning of a handle. This building can be sealed off from the base outside, can become a fortress. What goes on here must be very, very important.

All this time Melanie is trying hard not to think about Marcia and Liam. She’s scared about what might happen to her here. She’s scared of never being able to go back to her friends, and the classroom, and Miss Justineau. Perhaps it’s that fear, as much as the novelty, that makes her so acutely aware of her surroundings. She’s registering everything she sees. She’s also doing her best to memorise it all, especially the route they’ve taken. She wants to be able to find her way back, if she’s free at any point to do that.

The chemical spray dribbles and sputters to a stop. Sergeant wheels her forwards, through a double swing door, along a corridor, to another door over which a bare red light bulb shines. A sign on the door reads: NO ADMITTANCE TO UNAUTHORISED PERSONNEL. Sergeant stops there, presses a buzzer and waits.

After a few seconds, the door is opened from the inside by Dr Selkirk. She’s in her usual white gown, but she’s also wearing green plastic gloves, and around her throat there’s a thing like a white cotton necklace. She raises this now with a tug of her index finger and thumb. It’s a mask, made of white gauze, that fits over the lower part of her face.

“Good morning, Dr Selkirk,” Melanie says.

Dr Selkirk looks at her for a moment as though she’s deciding whether or not to answer. In the end, she just nods. Then she laughs. It’s a hollow, unhappy sound, Melanie thinks. The laugh you’d make if you rubbed out a mistake in a sum you were doing and accidentally tore the paper.

“Postman,” Sergeant Parks says laconically. “Where do you want this?”

“Right,” Dr Selkirk says, her voice muffled by the mask. “Yes. You can bring her in. We’re ready for her.” She stands aside and pulls the door wide so Sergeant can wheel Melanie inside.

This room is the strangest thing Melanie has ever seen. Of course, she’s starting to realise that she hasn’t seen all that much, but there are more things here of more baffling variety than she would have thought the whole world could hold. Bottles and tanks and jars and boxes; surfaces of white ceramic and stainless steel that gleam in the harsh radiance of strip lights overhead.

Some of the things in the bottles look like parts of people. Some of them are animals. Closest to her is a rat (she recognises it from a picture in a book) suspended head down in clear liquid. Thin grey strings like shoelaces–hundreds of them–have exploded from the rat’s body cavity and filled most of the interior space of the bottle, wrapped loosely around and around the little corpse as though the rat had decided to try to be an octopus and then hadn’t known how to stop.

One bottle along from the rat is an eyeball with gaudy streamers of nerve tissue attached behind.

These things fill Melanie’s mind with wild surmise. She says nothing, drinks it all in.

“Transfer her to the table, please.” It’s not Dr Selkirk who says this, it’s Dr Caldwell. She’s standing at a work surface on the far side of the room, arranging shiny steel objects in a precise order. She touches some of them several times over, as though the distance and angles between them matter a great deal to her.

“Good morning, Dr Caldwell,” Melanie says.

“Good morning, Melanie,” Dr Caldwell says. “Welcome to my laboratory. The most important room on the base.”

With Dr Selkirk’s help, Sergeant transfers Melanie from her chair on to a high table in the centre of the room. It’s a complex manoeuvre. They untie her hands from the armrests and handcuff them in front of her. They lock her feet to a restraint bar. Then they undo the neck strap and lift her on to the table. She weighs almost nothing, so they don’t have any trouble carrying her.

Once she’s sitting on the table, they strap her feet into harnesses low down on its sides, which Dr Selkirk adjusts carefully so that they’re tight. Then they remove the restraint bar, which is no longer needed.

“Lie down, Melanie,” Dr Caldwell says. “And hold out your hands.” The women take one hand each, and as Sergeant unlocks the cuffs, they carefully set her wrists in two more harnesses. Dr Caldwell ties them up.

Melanie is completely immobile now, apart from her head. She’s grateful that there’s no neck strap like the one on the chair.

“You need me?” Sergeant asks Dr Caldwell.

“Emphatically not.”

Sergeant wheels the chair back to the door. Melanie takes this in, and reads it right. She won’t be needing the chair again. She won’t be going back to her cell. Tales the Muses Told is lying under her mattress back there, and she crashes head first into the realisation that she may never see it again. Those pages that smell of Miss Justineau are now, and perhaps for ever, inaccessibly distant.

She wants to cry out to Sergeant to wait–or ask him to carry a message to Miss J. She can’t say a word. Misgivings are crowding in on her. She’s in uncharted territory, and she fears the blank, inscrutable future into which she’s being rushed before she’s ready. She wants her future to be like her past, but knows it won’t be. The knowledge sits like a stone in her stomach.