They were then led out of the van and in through the back door of the restaurant. The kitchen contained several white-suited people bustling around, taking samples from all the cooking pots and industriously sealing vegetables and plates in evidence bags. There were also two white-suited people standing in unoccupied corners. Odette eyed them warily. They didn’t appear to be doing anything but staying very still and being very large.
In the main dining room, the tables were still laid with plates of food and half-drunk glasses of wine. Even more Checquy techs were doing their thing. As Odette watched, one of them chiseled paint off the walls while another appeared to be laboriously jarring samples of the air. Again, some figures stood around, not doing anything. It was hard to tell with their bulky suits, but they had an air of extreme alertness.
“I’m sorry, may I ask who the people standing still are?” Odette inquired timidly.
“They’re security,” said Gadenne after a pointed pause that implied she was wasting his valuable time. “Manifestation sites are not always safe. Even if an event seems to be over, there may be residual threats. Our scientists cannot do their work while worrying that eels are suddenly going to come squirming out of the ceiling or that the furniture is going to come alive and try to trample them to death.”
“I see,” said Odette. “And does that sort of thing happen often?”
“Yes.”
“Ah.”
“You — Garden — where are the civilians?” asked Graaf Ernst abruptly. “The ones who were present when the event occurred?”
“Erm, well, everyone, of course, gets questioned,” said Pawn Gadenne. His tone was less snooty than it had been with Odette. There was something about Graaf Ernst that made people more polite. Possibly it was his air of authority or the undeniable weight of centuries that hung around him. Or it might have been his rudeness — he was in the habit of barking out commands and questions. “We have commandeered rooms at the local hospital and kept those who saw the bodies separate from those who were simply present in the building at the time. We’ll take statements and blood samples. Those who saw the bodies are being x-rayed. They’ll all be advised to contact us if they feel odd or if any symptoms appear. In six months, unless we have definitively identified the problem, we will reinterview them and take more blood.”
“Six months?” said Odette, and she mentally kicked herself for asking more questions.
“Generally, we have found that if something is incubating inside a human being, be it a disease, an organism, or a psychosis, signs will begin to appear within six months. Of course, the people will also be flagged in the government computer systems so that if they are hospitalized or die, or if they are arrested or abruptly change careers, we will be notified.”
With this cheerful assurance ringing in her ears, Odette continued on with the rest of the group. The entrance to the staircase was sealed off with a plastic curtain that Gadenne unzipped to reveal a narrow and steep flight of stairs. They squeezed up and had another curtain unzipped before them; it was closed as soon as they’d passed through into the dining room.
The scene was not pleasant.
As a woman of science, Odette had seen human bodies before. And as an apprentice of the Grafters and a frequent attendee of Parisian nightclubs, she’d witnessed her fair share of the unexpected and the disturbing. But what she saw in that room was unlike anything she had encountered before.
Do not show weakness, she told herself. Not in front of the Checquy. Do not bring shame upon your family and your brotherhood. You must be strong and you must —
“Jesus Christ!” exclaimed Rook Thomas in horror. She turned her head away for a moment, and her shudder could be seen even through the coverall. She pressed the back of her wrist against her mask and breathed hard.
Odette thought she had been prepared for this. Gadenne hadn’t pulled any punches in his description, but this was gruesome. Corpses everywhere. And these were not corpses laid out tidily on examination tables. Some of them were slumped over on the ground, their bodies curled up tight, but others looked as if they had been turned to stone in mid–death throe. The people were frozen. All their features were caught in a moment of torment. She could play out in her mind exactly how it had happened.
People had been eating and chatting, and then suddenly they had all been struck by the most dreadful pain. A few must have expired almost instantly. They were still seated in their chairs, clutching at their stomachs or their heads. One man was slumped over, facedown in his meal. The ladies on either side of him had their heads thrown back, mouths gaping, teeth bared, fingers curled into claws. Their eyes were still open, staring blankly.
Other people had taken longer to die.
One woman had crawled across the table, dragging herself over the plates and food. She was now half hanging over the edge, spaghetti and sauce dripping down her hair.
There was a man on his knees; his body was upright, his hands pressed against his head. It appeared that he had been tearing at his own face, although there was no blood coming from the ragged skin.
Another man had clawed his way across the floor to the stairs and then arched his head and spine back as he died. His face was twisted in agony, and his mouth was petrified in midscream.
Gadenne said that no one had made any sound, a clinical part of Odette’s mind thought. So this man must have been screaming silently. The nonclinical parts of her mind were doing a little silent screaming of their own.
There can only have been a few seconds of pain, she told herself. Even from the farthest table, for him to get this far would have taken fifteen seconds at most. Judging from the expressions of the dead, however, fifteen seconds must have seemed like a very long time.
What on earth could have done this? she thought helplessly. Was this place built on an ancient Pictish burial ground or something? And how many more things like this are happening every day? She realized that her hands were shaking. The restaurant was so mundane, so commonplace. She could have eaten there herself. And yet, in this normal place, something unfathomable had taken the lives of sixteen people.
For much of her life, Odette had loved living in a secret world. It was delicious, knowing things no one else knew. And while there had been the distant, theoretical awareness of the Checquy, the monsters from her childhood, they had been tucked away in history, on a little island.
Then, in the past few months, another secret world, that of the supernatural, had begun to impinge forcefully upon her life. Now it was right in front of her, and it was horrendous.
“We pulled everyone out so that you could see the bodies in situ, Rook Thomas,” Pawn Gadenne said.
“Thank you, Roland,” said the Rook absently. She appeared to have gotten over her initial horror, although her fists were still clenched tight. Her eyes had gone distant, and her brow was a little furrowed. Then she blinked and focused on him. “Well, they’re all dead,” she said definitely. “You can bring the team back in now, unless — Ernst? Anything?”
“I don’t think I can add anything,” said the graaf. “This sort of tableau is outside my experience. But Odette is more the scholar than I.” He turned to her. “Do you wish to examine them?”
I’d rather take a cheesegrater to myself, Odette didn’t say. Really, there was little on earth that Odette wished to do less than get closer to those bodies. Diseases and poisons caused no fear in her, but this was something else entirely. The Grafters’ knowledge and abilities were based on science. Unorthodox science, admittedly, but at least they had an explanation for how everything worked. Odette was painfully aware that there might be no scientific explanation at all for what she was looking at.