CHAPTER 2: CHILDHOOD'S END

By Touch the Light

I nearly didn’t ring the bell. I couldn’t escape the feeling that by entering this house I risked bringing to an end the world I’d always known. But I reasoned that really bad news normally took you unawares; if you expected the worst, it probably wouldn’t happen.

I lifted my finger and pushed...

CHAPTER 1: TEMPUS FUGIT

By Touch the Light

You’re being stupid, I told myself. Plug had made all that up. If Testranol had those kinds of side-effects and they’d been exposed on national television, how was it that nothing had appeared in the papers? Why hadn’t the people who’d manufactured the drug been publicly disgraced?

Somehow I’ve been turned into a girl.

Stranger things have happened, I suppose.

Can’t think of one right now...

He uses the payphone by the fruit machine. The number he dials is preceded by no STD code, and the coins he inserts are purely for show.

When he replaces the receiver, Toby Cunningham is no wiser than when he picked it up.

Watch and wait.

Just for a change.

It wasn’t going to be like playing one of the ugly sisters. Nobody would be in on the joke. There’d be no knowing winks to the audience, no muttered asides in a normal voice.

And no way of telling how long it might be before the curtain came down.

I stand up and sweep every item in front of me to the floor. This has gone on long enough.

I have to leave now. Fooling these women into thinking I’m coming round to their point of view has become an indulgence I can’t afford.

Not when I’ve started hearing voices.

Kerrie hands me a mug and sits at the kitchen table, gesturing for me to join her. As I arrange the folds of my skirt I sense the vexation she’s been holding in check since we waved the boys away break free from its restraints. I haven’t told her everything about my encounter with Susan Dwyer and she knows it.

As we come closer to our destination it doesn’t comfort me to remember that Egerton and de Monnier were there less than a week ago.

Left the metropolis for deepest Somerset, called HQ to report ‘mission accomplished’ and received orders to head north without further delay.

What mission? Who gave them their orders?

Which other shadowy organisation is involved in all this?