What do I say? What. Do. I. Say? ‘Hi, remember me? Your one and only friend from when we were children? We bonded over the weird shit we could see that no one else could and then I watched you get dragged away by men in blue coats which coincidentally has just happened to a friend of mine so it turns out, you’ve shown up just as I need your help! Oh, and how have you been?’ Cherry rubbed her face with her hands and muttered, ‘Just knock on the door,’ and walked up to the front door.
There was no door handle or knocker so she pulled her cardigan sleeve over her fist and hammered on the wood. She was certain she could hear footsteps approaching the door but nobody opened it. Smoke started to pour out of the rectangular hole where a letterbox flap used to be.
‘Peter? That… that is you… isn’t it?’
‘Who is it?’ replied a low, gravelly voice.
‘Erm… Cherry. Cherry Redgrave. Do you remember me?’
‘Cherry?’ A sooty hand appeared through the letterbox hole and it pulled the door open just enough so that an eye could peer through the crack.
‘Yeah, I’m Cherry. We went to school together. When we were like… seven, I think.’
‘Cherry… Redgrave? I did know someone with that name once.’
‘Well, that was me. I’m Cherry Redgrave.’
‘Prove it.’
‘Prove it? How?’
There was a pause and then he said, ‘I told Cherry something when we were kids that I haven’t told anyone since. I shared a name with her. A name for something. What was that name?’
Cherry nodded. ‘It’s a name I still use today. Meddlum. You and I can see Meddlums. I saw yours earlier – that’s what led me here – and it’s terrifying.’
Peter flung the door wide open and pawed at Cherry’s shoulders until she was in his embrace, smoke engulfing them both.
‘I,’ he sobbed, ‘thought,’ another sob, ‘I’d never,’ more sobbing, ‘see you again.’ Sob. His chest heaved against Cherry’s and his fingers dug deep into her neck. She hugged him back, hard.
‘I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, either.’
The moment Peter had been dragged from school and bundled into the back of a van flashed through Cherry’s mind. She remembered the rush of fear that had coursed through her veins that her fate may be the same, but most of all she remembered the icy touch of Loneliness as it plunged its hands into her stomach and tied it into knots. It had kept a firm grip on her heart for months and had given it a firm squeeze each time she had turned to where Peter used to sit and seen his empty seat. Cherry had been certain her friend had been lost to her for ever but now he was here, a man so unknown to her but there was a familiarity there too that made her eyes sting with tears she didn’t know she’d needed to cry. Loneliness tried to reach out for her but its fingers fell short.
‘Why are you wearing pyjamas?’ he said, sniffing.
Cherry rolled her eyes over his shoulder and ignored the question. ‘What happened to you? Where did you go?’ she asked instead.
‘The Guild. It’s a long story. Come inside, quickly.’
Peter let go of Cherry and pulled her inside. He leaned out of the door, looked left, then right, before slamming the door closed. Cherry found herself standing at the foot of the smoking Meddlum. It looked down at her with less fire in its eyes than it had done earlier. The ceiling to the bottom floor of the house had caved in, Cherry guessed, due to water damage, as half the roof was also gone. This meant Peter’s Meddlum could stand upright in the house. It was quite the sight to behold.
‘This way.’ Peter walked past Cherry, through his Meddlum’s legs and disappeared into the smoke.
‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you smoking is bad for you?’
‘You’re hilarious! I’ve been trying to quit for years.’ His voice was getting further away.
‘Where have you gone? It’s kind of hard to see around here, Peter, and this house is a bit of a deathtrap.’
‘Safest place for an escapee!’ he said, his hand appearing through the black cloud. Cherry took hold of it and he gently guided her through the house and into a back room where his Meddlum was too big to follow and he closed the door behind them, tendrils of misty smoke sucking at its edges like tentacles.
‘She’s a little monstrous but… she’s actually quite friendly,’ Peter said.
‘She?’
‘I think she’s a she, don’t you? And she was a feisty lady, from what I can remember.’
‘From what you can remember?’ Cherry asked, frowning. She didn’t understand.
‘I can’t see her any more.’ Peter pointed to his eyes. ‘I wear these lenses that —’
‘What? Why do you have a pair of those?’ Cherry cried.
‘You know what the lenses do?’ When Cherry nodded yes, Peter said, ‘Please, sit down. We’ve got a lot to talk about.’
Cherry looked around her and saw that the room they were in was mostly bare. A few dustsheets lay in the corner along with a large rucksack and there were small puddles of melted wax from where Peter had been lighting candles just as he was doing now. He struck a match, lit five candles of varying size and then carried them over to Cherry on two halves of a broken plate.
‘I try not to let the wax get on the floor.’ He shrugged, letting wax drip onto the floor. ‘Please. Sit,’ he said again. Cherry was about to ask where when Peter crouched and sat cross-legged on the floor, placing the candles in front of him, so Cherry did the same.
‘You said you were in the Guild?’ Cherry asked.
‘That’s right,’ Peter said. ‘You’ve heard of it?’
‘Yes, but only recently.’
‘Lucky you,’ Peter said. ‘My brain still buzzes from time to time.’
‘What do you mean?’
Peter regarded Cherry for a second. ‘How much do you know about the Guild?’ he asked. ‘Do you know what they do?’
‘Only a little bit. I don’t know much, to be honest. Just that it’s a kind of headquarters for people like us to keep an eye on people like us.’
Peter shook his head sadly. ‘That’s not strictly true. The Guild isn’t so much a HQ for our kind. It’s more like a laboratory. The Guild want to know why we are the way we are, so they conduct tests on us. It’s genetic, they know that much. We inherit it.’
‘We inherit it? Genetically? From a parent?’ Cherry asked.
‘Mm-hmm. Always from the mother,’ Peter said.
Cherry didn’t have a mother. Biologically she did, of course, but the woman who had given birth to Cherry had decided to give up her baby from the moment she found out she was pregnant. Cherry had never known her and had never had any need to, but with those four words, Peter had changed that.
‘Do you think that’s why your mum left, because she didn’t want to see you go through it?’
Peter shrugged. ‘Maybe. That could be why your mum put you up for adoption too.’
‘You remember that about me?’
Peter nodded. ‘And I remember your dad’s amazing cherry pie!’
‘That’s sweet of you, to remember.’ Cherry smiled at the thought of her father.
‘Your dad and his baking are hard to forget.’ Peter’s eyes glinted with the memory.
‘Can you tell me more about the Guild?’ Cherry asked. She wanted to talk about her father some more but she needed to find out as much as she could about the Guild if she was going to help Chase.
‘Why are you so curious?’ Peter cocked his head to one side. ‘What’s got you so interested?’
Cherry thought of Chase, unconscious, being dragged away from her. Did she tell Peter straightaway? As much as their reunion seemed amicable, Cherry couldn’t be sure if Peter could be trusted immediately. Not when his hate-filled Meddlum was quite literally as big as a house. She needed to tread carefully until she could be sure about Peter.
‘I’m new to this,’ she said. ‘I only found out there were more people like you and me about forty-eight hours ago. And I had no id
ea the Guild existed before then either. I figure the more information I have, the better.’ She shrugged, trying her best to look unconcerned and nonchalant.
‘Well, the Guild isn’t for people like us. Not really. That’s how it started, I think, but that’s not how it carried on. The Guild was founded by people like us centuries ago and its aim was to help people learn how to use their ability, so they started conducting research to understand us better. They thought finding out why we are the way we are would be the first step. Took them years to figure out it was genetic, and then over the years they stopped trying to help us. It just became about finding out as much as they could about us, and then it became about stopping us. They thought what we could do was dangerous so they decided to track down everyone who had this ability and began building a database. Then their children were tracked and their children were tracked and you can see how it evolved. You and I were never off their radar, Cherry. They’ve always known about us.’
‘But Happy told me —’
‘You’ve met Happy?’ Peter growled. ‘She’s one of the worst!’ Smoke seeped in under the door and Peter coughed.
‘Happy told me they only find people when they start acting up. When they start making a scene and drawing too much attention to themselves. That’s how they find us.’
‘“How do you know whether someone is a serial killer until they’ve murdered six people?” I must have heard her say that a million times. Utter bollocks. They’ve known about us from the day we were born. I caused trouble from an early age which was why they took me away when we were in school. If you’ve only just found out about the Guild then you must have only just started causing trouble for them.’ Peter raised his eyebrows in question.
‘All I did was bake a few bloody cakes,’ Cherry huffed defensively.
‘Doesn’t matter. You started using what you can do in a way that attracted too much attention. The Guild are all about containing it. They bring people in who have been messing around with normal people’s feelings and they tell everyone they’re being taken to prison but that’s not true. They experiment on them, to try to make them normal.’
‘Normal? As in… not able to see anything?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘I don’t understand – why would they do that? Happy told us about those lenses that can prevent us from seeing the Meddlums. Isn’t that enough?’
‘They’re only temporary. They don’t last for ever and they don’t take away our abilities for ever. Not only that, but they’re linked to the Guild. Anything you can see, they can see. It’s a surefire way to get yourself caught if you’re doing anything… unsavoury. A few little twerps sit at their screens and just watch us all day long. Which is pretty gross when you think about it. They want to get as many of us wearing them while they find a better solution, something more permanent. Which is why anyone who gets dragged into the Guild wakes up with a pair already “installed”.’
‘Happy said there was a two-year waiting list…’
‘Sure there is. They just say that to make us want them more. It makes them sound more exclusive which means if you get a pair, you feel lucky to have them. It’s a mind game, and the Guild loves mind games.’
‘Can’t you just… take them out?’
‘Once they’re in, they’re in until either the Guild removes them or the system they’re linked to goes down. The Guild’s endgame is to find a cure and they’ve become more ruthless as time as gone on. They’ve tried splicing, dicing, cognitive behavioural therapy, electric therapy… you name it, they’ve already tried it. They hit dead ends and then kept hitting them as hard as they could just to make sure they haven’t missed something.’ Peter stared into the flames of the candles, his eyes bright in the glow. His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘For so long they thought it was something in the eye itself. So they kept taking them out. People would wake up and their eyes would just be… gone. They cut them open, trying to find anything that pointed to an answer. It took jars full of discarded and mutilated eyeballs before the researchers decided to try something new.’ Peter blinked furiously a few times. ‘It made me really appreciate my sight – normal and abnormal.’
‘Oh, Peter.’ Cherry wanted to reach over and take his hand but he crossed his arms, signalling that that part of the conversation was over. She thought it best to move the conversation on so she said, ‘So let me recap. You were taken away in a van as a child.’
‘Correct.’ Peter nodded.
‘And you were taken to the Guild.’
‘Correct.’
‘Where people like us are experimented on to try to find a way to fix our sight.’
‘Correct.’
‘So we can live normally.’
‘Yup.’
‘At least that’s what they tell themselves.’
Peter nodded.
‘But really they don’t understand us and think we’re dangerous.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And most of us end up blind, or worse, dead?’
Peter nodded again.
Cherry’s stomach dropped at the thought of Chase being held by these people. What were they doing to him? ‘How long were you there?’
‘Until yesterday.’ Peter dipped his fingers in the wax of the candle nearest him.
‘What?’ The word snagged in her throat.
‘Yesterday,’ Peter repeated.
‘So you’ve been in the Guild ever since you were taken away as a child? And they just… let you go?’
Peter raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Would I be sat in an abandoned house lighting crappy candles if they’d just let me go?’
Cherry leaned forward eagerly. ‘You escaped?’
‘Yes. Like I said, this is the safest place for an escapee.’
‘I thought that was a weird joke that I just didn’t get!’ Something occurred to Cherry. ‘How did you survive in there for so long if so many people died in there?’
‘Well, it helps to have a mother who works there.’
‘Your mother?’
‘Turns out she left me to work for the Guild.’
‘Ooookay.’ Cherry stood up quickly, causing her head to spin. ‘Oookay. This is a lot to take in. I just need a second.’
She tried to organise her thoughts into some kind of order but there were too many of them clamouring for attention. She paced around the room and Peter simply watched her, his head swaying one way and then the other as Cherry moved from wall to wall. Eventually she stopped and turned to look at Peter. ‘Okay. All right. Start from the top.’
‘My mother left to work at the Guild. She’s one of the few who can see both good and bad Meddlums so she’s got more reason to want to switch off that kind of sight than anyone. When I was taken in, I guess her maternal side hadn’t been entirely eliminated by all of the Guild’s experimentation so she convinced the people in charge to leave me alone. I was put into a special unit instead. Solitary confinement, basically. It was a lonely existence but at least I was mostly untouched.’
‘Mostly?’ Cherry started to pace again, breathing in for three steps and out for the next three.
‘The solitude got to me every few months, I hated it, so I acted up now and then and they would take me in for electrocution therapy. It would… keep me calm, more docile, for a while. I was less trouble for them that way.’
‘Why didn’t they just remove your feelings permanently?’
Peter gestured towards the smoke that was still filtering in underneath the door. ‘Have you seen her? They couldn’t get her off me. They tried hacking her down like a tree at one point but she just wouldn’t budge. Our attachment is a little too strong. She loves me too much. That’s why they never let me go. She was too big. All they could do was return her to her original, less real form, lock us up and keep up the electrocution whenever they thought it was necessary. They didn’t care about the effect it had on me,’ Peter added bitterly.
Cherry looked at him with sympathy. ‘I can’t imag
ine it… what you went through. All those years, locked up. I’m so sorry that happened to you.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Peter said quietly.
‘But still, I am so, so sorry,’ Cherry said. ‘So how did you get out?’
‘After all those years locked up there, I eventually found a weak link. The Guild employees have to undergo electric therapy every three months to keep them numb and that takes its toll on their memories.’
‘Every three months?!’ Cherry gasped.
Peter nodded sadly. ‘They think feelings get in the way of their so-called law enforcement. Fewer real feelings equals better judgement, is how they justify it, but it’s another excuse to cover up the fact their “better judgement” means they’re bringing people in for the smallest “crimes” simply so they have more guinea pigs to experiment on. So many kids were brought in after accidentally making someone feel something they weren’t supposed to.’
‘They bring in kids?’ Cherry shouldn’t have been surprised, especially as she knew Peter had been taken away as a child, but she’d so been wishing that had been the exception rather than the rule.
‘Mainly teenagers. Kissing is a minefield.’
Cherry touched her lips and her mouth filled with Belonging. Chase.
‘Teenagers being free and easy with their kisses is a problem for the Guild, especially if the teenager hates the world. One misjudged kiss and all hell could break loose.’
‘I didn’t really do much kissing when I was younger. The little bit that I did do probably caused Confusion more than anything.’ Cherry shook her herself. She was getting off topic. ‘Tell me about what the therapy does to memories.’
‘The human body can only handle so much of it and continuous treatment meant that Feelers like Happy became more and more forgetful. One of the guards would bring me food three times a day and yesterday the guard who brought me my lunch forgot to lock the door to my cell. It was the first time it’s ever happened so I knew it was my one and only chance to get out of there. I found a spare uniform in one of the supply cupboards and then I just had to put on a gormless expression and leave. Once I was in the uniform, I looked like all the other workers and no one noticed me. I just needed to get out of there. They were starting to get desperate.’