The Illusion of Coincidence

 

Chapter 2

Regeneration

 

Unbeknownst to one another, neither V nor Edward slept well in the last shank of the night.  Only Nelson, with that sweet self-possession that, it seemed, only a blessed lack of sapience could bestow, had dozed peacefully, if not in his usual spot.  He normally slept in a well-worn basket at the foot of Edward’s bed but, for reasons known only to himself, had elected not to leave V’s side.

 

Edward, as was his habit with a farm to run, rose well before dawn and set to milking the goats.  V sat before the cool ashes of the previous night’s fire, wrapped close in the blanket in one of the straight-backed chairs, silent, unmoving, except for one hand that idly and slowly stroked the dog’s silken head.  Nelson, too, was still and pensive aside from his tail, which described occasional slow sweeps on the stone flags behind him.  The thump and clank of buckets rang through the back door from the goat pen outside as the day moved onward and, eventually, a blinding white line of sunlight painted itself across the floor from a gap between the curtains.

 

After a time, when the goats had given of their all, Edward nudged the door open with his foot and entered, a steel bucket of milk in each hand.  He nodded to the back of V’s head then, fetching a ladle, poured a generous dash of milk into the bowl on the floor.  Nelson, obviously placing a higher priority on warm goat’s milk than on having his ears rubbed, trundled over and dipped into it.

 

Edward was at a loss.  Events that had seemed strange enough in the hind end of the night were looking little less than outlandish on a bright autumn morning, and in one helpless moment, he began to wonder whether he hadn’t taken a madman into his home.  For want of anything else to do, he switched on the lamps on the dresser.

 

It was only then that V raised his head and turned, only a slight stiffness in the gesture betraying any discomfort at all, let alone the vicious pain that, Edward assumed, he had to be racked with.

 

“Good morning,” V observed, his voice a little clearer than last night.  Perhaps the damage to his vocal cords wasn’t permanent, after all.

 

“Morning, lad,” Edward countered, massively relieved that his patient was now talking although, as a vet, this was in fact something of a novelty for him.  “Did you sleep all right?  I gave you a fair whack of that codeine.”

 

“Everything was well, I thank you.  I wonder if I may ask a delicate question?”  Edward, who was industriously wringing cold water from a couple of kitchen towels, covered the milk pails with these, and nodded.

 

“You seemed apprehensive last night, when I declined to have my face bandaged.  I must ask,” he went on, “is it that disturbing?  If so, I shall submit.  I’ve no wish to alarm you, least of all in your own home.”

 

“No, it’s not disturbing, I’ve seen some injuries in my time, but…”

 

“But never on a human being,” V finished for him.  Edward saw those bright sapphire eyes soften, and he elected to try for honesty.

 

“No, you’re right,” he murmured.

 

“May I see a mirror?”

 

The question had come in from left field, and Edward had to reel in an automatic response and begin over again.  It wasn’t much improved the second time around.

 

“Are you sure about that?  It might be a bit of a shock, and…”

 

“Edward.  Listen to me.  Barring the complete and total extinction of mirrors from our world, I imagine I shall have to enjoy a showdown with my reflection again at some point in the future.  Whether that ‘shock’, as you put it, takes place in five minutes, in five weeks or in five years is not of that much import, is it?”

 

To give him due, Edward did not attempt further debate, but simply opened a drawer in the dresser and took out a cheap white plastic mirror.  It was a two-sided mirror that, V realised, must once have belonged to the lady of the house.  Maintaining a neutral expression with some concerted effort, Edward handed this to V, and then retired to the table to busy with decanting the milk.

 

A minute passed in silence until, eventually, he set the funnel aside with exaggerated care, and capped the bottle he’d been filling.  Only then did he glance up at V, and what he saw took him aback.  He’d anticipated horror, hysteria, even the slightest gasp of pain from the man.  What he hadn’t expected to see was this…fascination, this almost besotted interest, as V turned the mirror this way and that, even turning it around to study his distorted features in closer detail in the magnifying mirror.

 

“Lad?” he said, when he could stand this no longer.  V seemed to emerge from a heady reverie, and turned his attention to his host.  “Are you all right?”  Edward added.  V cocked his head, first to the left and then to the right.

 

“I’m very well,” he replied, sagely, “but really, I’d been expecting far worse, to be truthful.  No great handicaps.  I have kept sight, smell, hearing and taste.  As you observe, I’m unlikely to win any modelling contracts but then,” he managed a small grin, “I am going to assume that this was probably not the case before the fire, too.”

 

By this time, Nelson had finished the milk, and lay at perfect peace under the table, swiping at a creamy moustache with a steady flap-flop of his tongue.  Edward reached underneath and tugged him out, gently but firmly, and fixed V with a curious look.

 

“I’m going to have to head into town for a few things,” he said at length, “but would you like some breakfast before I go?”

 

“Thank you, yes.”

 

Seated at the kitchen table, V watched with interest as Edward donned a pink apron.  Slightly self-effaced, Edward explained that this was a habit that his wife had drummed into him in more than thirty years of marriage.  Then, his face almost as pink as his new attire, he sawed a slice of bread from a fresh loaf and trimmed a hole in its centre.  This went into the frying pan, where it crackled fitfully for a moment.  Presently, Edward cracked an egg into the hole, and flicked hot oil over it with the spatula.

 

“What’s this you’re making?”  asked V.  Edward spoke without turning from the task at hand.

 

“It’s called ‘egg in the basket’.  Yvonne showed me how to make it,” he replied, turning the slice over once the egg had solidified, raising a fresh, hot sizzle.  This delicacy was transferred to an earthenware plate, which Edward sat before V.

 

“This looks splendid,” he commented, before sampling it carefully.  Though V was intimately aware that his tongue and throat were still swollen from the smoke and the charring air of the fire, the slight discomfort of eating was well worth it for the first decent food he’d tasted in…he checked himself.  It might well be that he’d never eaten decent food, for all he could recall.  Certainly, the mush they’d served him at Larkhill did not qualify.  It was perfectly nutritious mush; hadn’t he been their star guinea pig, after all?  However, this sterling quality was the only one it had possessed.

 

For his own part, Edward tidied the kitchen in the meantime and, with the occasional furtive glance at his guest, wondered exactly when and why God had paused in His mysterious workings and said to Himself, “This man needs something surreal in his life right now.”  And my goodness, if serving a hot breakfast to a man who looked like something fresh from a Universal Studios horror film didn’t fit that description, he had no idea what might.

 

After breakfast, Edward fetched V a nightshirt from his own drawer, explaining that little else in the wardrobe would spare those burns of V’s that still remained uncovered.  Then, modesty satisfied, he pulled the reluctant Nelson out of the door, installed him in the farm’s tired old Land Rover, and set off for Larkhill and its one rather paltry supermarket.  It was not well-stocked, and he doubted that he’d find everything he needed.  Under normal circumstances, he’d have made for Salisbury, but, Edward mentally added, these were certainly not normal circumstances, and he would much prefer to be back as quickly as possible.

 

V, meanwhile, was quietly exploring the farmhouse.  The building was inordinately old, possibly sixteenth century, and jealously guarded many of its original features.  These included a sturdy, blackened wooded staircase that creaked quietly but fitfully as he climbed and, at the top, ended in a finial in the shape of – he double-checked this – yes, St. George.  He wondered why there wasn’t an identical figure at the bottom or, possibly, George’s dragon, before deciding that there may well have been such at one time.

 

The landing was narrow and, as was customary in such ancient structures, low of ceiling as well.  V, six feet two in his bandaged feet, barely had clearance.  Still, a stained glass window at the far end was capturing and kaleidoscoping the morning sun, trapping it in the window’s portrait of yes, once again, St. George.

 

Four doors opened off the landing.  V hesitated in a pure dilemma of ethics and propriety; the kitchen may have been the heart of the house, but these rooms were its soul.

 

He noticed that one of the far doors was already standing ajar, and made his decision.  Approaching it cautiously, he looked through at the room beyond.  Thankfully, it appeared to be a workroom of a sort.  A sewing machine stood shrouded and idle in one corner, a headless dressmaker’s dummy in similar solidarity beside it.  Various cross-stitch embroideries hung upon the walls; here a working of Winnie the Pooh, there are pair of budgerigars, here an intricate map of Wiltshire, there a swallowtail butterfly.  It was all formless and haphazard and, V considered, quite beautiful in its artlessness.  The lady had clearly had a great talent when it came to art for art’s sake.

 

Looking down under his feet, he found another small joy – a hook-rug bearing the pattern of a morose and cartoonish owl.  He turned to close the door behind him, wanting to see the whole of the room laid out.

 

When he saw what lay behind the door, however, everything else fell forgotten, and he simply caught his breath in the back of his throat and held it prisoner there.

 

In the town of Larkhill proper, Edward was discovering that his suspicions about the supermarket were bang on course.  He went back over his list.  Perhaps not too bad, after all; twelve of his fifteen items were checked off.  The rest could go hang for the time being – none of it was vitally important, anyway.

 

He loaded the shopping into the Land Rover, avoiding Nelson, who seemed to believe that the world would come to a fiery end if he didn’t lick his master’s face, and was just about to drive away when he stopped and swore virulently, getting out of the vehicle again.  It was his brother’s birthday in a few days; he’d have to send a card straight away.  Thankfully, there was a Post Office just across the main road.

 

Edward waited for a prudent gap in the passing traffic before crossing, realising as he did so that this brought him right alongside the garrison.  God, soldiers were the last thing he needed to see right now, his nerves were unravelling with indecent haste as it was.  Ducking his head and quickening his pace, he stalked past the garrison gate and on to the small parade of shops.

 

With a small, satisfied sigh of released tension, he pushed at the door of the Post Office.  He knew that Maureen employed some younger staff around the place from time to time but today, the redoubtable lady herself was behind the counter.  She beamed at him.

 

“Hello, Ed, love.  What can I get you?”

 

“Hello yourself, Mo.  Just looking for a card.  I almost forgot my brother’s birthday, I had that bad a time of it last night,” he added, knowing full well that Maureen would safely and confidently make her own assumptions about the nature and extent of his nocturnal disturbance, and she didn’t disappoint him.

 

“Of course,” she nodded sympathetically.  “You’re right on top of that blasted detention centre, aren’t you?”  Maureen stopped, aware, all at once, of the irony inherent in her use of the word ‘blasted’.  Still, she ploughed on.  “Were you out?  I know you walk Nelson late of a night.”

 

“I was, but,” here he hesitated fractionally, concocting a small lie with a mental agility he’d never suspected he possessed “there was nothing I could do, and nothing they’d have wanted me to do.  Whatever went on up there, it’s the military’s mess, they can mop it up, and to hell with them.”

 

“Too bloody right.  Anyway, love, you wanted a card?”

 

Edward allowed Maureen to select a card for him, with a married man’s unerring instinct for those things at which women show a natural excellence.  He filled it out and addressed it, and left it behind the counter for Maureen to stamp and send.

 

When he walked back into the kitchen, Nelson snaking past his legs with puppyish impatience, he found it empty.  He paused in incomprehension, passed through and checked the lounge.  Empty.  He returned to the hall, stood with one hand on the back of his neck in puzzlement, and called out.

 

“Where’d you get to?”

 

“Edward,” was the muffled reply.  Upstairs.  Edward mounted the protesting staircase and made his way to the sewing room.  Finally, locating V behind the door, he scratched his head, thoroughly bewildered.  The lad was gazing at something as if he’d lost his mind, or his heart, or possibly both in one fell swoop.

 

“Edward, what is this?” he asked, his stare still fixed.  Edward glanced behind the door; his memory of what lay where in this room was now patchy, at best.  He’d had little cause to come in here since Yvonne died.  It had been her sternly defended sovereign territory even when she was alive, he recalled.

 

“Oh, that?  My wife made that for our son when he was a kid.  I used to take him out round Salisbury collecting pennies for the Guy.”  Edward, realising very shortly that he would have to carry the conversation for the time being, pressed onward.

 

“See, that boy always had an artistic streak in him, even at that age, and he wanted to show all the other kids up, so he had his mum run this up for him.  She was a bloody miracle worker with a needle and thread, that woman.”  Edward smiled fondly, but the gesture played to no audience, or at least to no audience currently prepared to pay him any attention whatsoever.

 

V was marooned in some faraway land which, for the moment, contained only himself and the thing of beauty before his eyes.  The details filled the entire scope and breadth of his being.  Someone had created a life-size calico rag doll, and then dressed it in the most exquisite manner possible.  It wore a high-necked tunic, britches, flowing cloak and soft leather knee-boots and gloves, all in a dense, velvety black.  It bore a fine wig of shoulder length black hair, and a tapering, broad-brimmed hat.  However, this wasn’t what kept dragging V’s attention back, back, and back again.

 

It was the mask.  Amongst this saturnine garb, amongst this ensemble of Erebus, the mask was an angel’s face with a demon’s smile.  Its eyes were creased, frozen in some lascivious pleasure beneath artfully arched black brows.  The face bore an obsessively neat moustache and goatee beard, as any self-respecting Elizabethan dandy surely would.  This wasn’t Guy Fawkes, to be sure, but V recognised that if one wished to romanticise any given image, then it ought to be done with an eye for the artistic and a flair for the dramatic.

 

“It’s wonderful,” he managed, at last.  Hardly adequate, but then, what would be?  Edward, merely pleased that his guest was at last displaying signs of life and sanity, took him gently by the shoulder.

 

“It ought to be, Yvonne was well proud of it,” he laughed.  “Anyway, come on downstairs.  We ought to change those dressings and have a look under’m while we’re about it.”

 

V left the room with well-kept reluctance, and played the model patient as Edward carefully peeled back the gauze pad on his back.  After a long and tense silence, the lack of comment from behind him prompted V to speak up.

 

“Is something amiss?”

 

“Er.  That depends on your point of view,” was the reply.  Edward’s voice carried the tiniest suggestion of a quiver.  “There are collagen and keratin fibres forming here.”

 

“Is that not a good thing, then?”

 

“It is, yes, but…” here, he swallowed, hanging onto his composure by a fingernail, “…but overnight?  Never seen that before.  Never.  And never on burns as bad as this.”

 

V remained silent as Edward continued to study the damaged flesh before him.  It was all true.  He’d tried to reject the conclusion his eyes and his medical training were forcing upon him, but with no sign of success.

 

A fine spider’s web of pink and white gossamer strands, barely visible to anyone who wasn’t looking for them, were creeping across the wasteland of melted flesh from the edges of the wound.  Almost two inches had formed over the course of the last eight hours, and so – Edward’s brain turned over in a brief calculation – at this rate, the lad could expect to have his full complement of scar tissue within seven days at the most.

 

Seven days?

 

Although malicious cruelty was blessedly rare out here in the country, Edward had once had the unlovely task of treating a tabby cat that had had a Roman candle tied to its tail by some gang of young troglodytes.  The animal had spun and danced in its terror, and the firework had whipped against it as it writhed, scorching fur and skin in equal measure from its back and sides.  The poor creature had struggled through, though there’d been a few times in those first fraught days that Edward had found himself keeping the barbiturates on standby; concerned, as he was, that all the cat’s formidable will to go on wasn’t worth the awful agony it was in.

 

He recalled the injuries well enough.  Viciousness of that nature did not fade so easily from anyone’s mind, let alone from the mind of one as tender as Edward.  The cat’s flesh had looked almost as bad as this; purple with exposed muscle, wet with mucus and fluid, and crisped here and there.  The beast had spent the better part of a month in his surgery, and at the end of that time, its scars had still been livid pink and brand new.

 

A week?  Forget it.  This is bizarre.  This is wrong.

 

Nevertheless, he realised that no fit purpose would be served by explaining all or indeed any of this to his patient.  He was, in all probability, just as deep in the dark about this as Edward himself.  Nobody was in charge of their healing processes.

 

Even so, Edward’s hindbrain refused to let things go, and he worried at this mystery and he finished changing the dressings on V’s arms and legs, noting, as he did so, the same eerie regenerative process at work there too.  Nerving himself to look the other man in the face, he saw the same accelerated regrowth on his forehead and in the hollow of one ruined cheek.

 

He continued to fret over this development through the rest of the day.  He fretted as he walked Nelson, as he fed the animals, as he swirled goat milk curds in the dairy.  All the time, his enigmatic patient sat in the kitchen, although now with a stack of books beside him.  They’d been Yvonne’s; Edward himself was no great reader, aside from a liking for John le Carre.  However, the pile of books beside the ancient sofa was nothing like this fare.  V had picked them himself from the shelves upstairs.  There was Dickens, and Shakespeare, and Dumas.  There was a tattered copy of Robinson Crusoe that had belonged to the boy, as well as a similarly foxed copy of Moby Dick.

 

Eventually, Edward’s concerns reached a definable and identifiable peak, and that evening, as he prepared some dinner, he turned to his guest, oven gloves held before him in the manner of a defensive shield.

 

V, for his part, was absorbed in the music pouring from the CD player, which Edward had switched on in a half-hearted attempt to distract himself from any further involved and involving thoughts about anything, let alone frighteningly rapid healing processes.  The words of the song enchanted V.

 

And it’s whispered that soon, if we all call the tune

Then the piper will lead us to reason

And a new day will dawn for those who stand long

And the forests will echo with laughter...

 

Edward was working on the framework of a question, but he found that V pre-empted him.  He’d set aside the copy of Paradise Lost that he’d been poring over, and was gazing at the ceiling, enraptured.

 

“What’s this music?”

 

“I…oh, that’s Led Zeppelin,” Edward responded, smiling weakly.  Never mind classic literature; classic rock was his particular forte.  “Best bloody band ever to grace the face of the planet.  This is ‘Stairway to Heaven’”.

 

“It’s operatic.  I like it.”

 

Operatic?  Not a word that Edward himself would have employed to describe the mighty Led Zep, but then again, not a word he’d have employed in many other contexts, either.  Maybe it wasn’t inappropriate, though.

 

Still, he remained loaded with a question that was scorching a deep hole in his brain and, distractions of great music all aside, he had to get it out and get it asked, right now.

 

“Lad?”

 

“Yes, Edward?”

 

“There’s no way of skipping around this,” Edward hesitated, and then plunged straight in, “but we both know that you’re not healing normally.  It’s fast.  It’s so fast, it scares the life out of me.  Can you tell me what they did to you in that place?”

 

A gothic silence descended over the room which Nelson used to apply a lugubrious sniff to the stack of books on the floor.  V’s gaze swept the kitchen as he considered how best to shape his reply.

 

“I do not know.”

 

“But you must have some…”

 

“Oh, yes,” V interrupted.  “I know that they came, night and day alike, and they dosed me and scanned me and monitored me.  They took swabs of the sores on my hands.  They dosed me again, et cetera.”  Here he stopped, and rubbed the dog behind one languid ear, while the animal snorted contentedly.  “However, if the gist of your query amounts to asking what, precisely, they injected me with…do you imagine that they supposed, at any point at all, to tell me that?”

 

Edward ducked his head, apologetic.  The lad was correct, of course.  Laboratory rats weren’t generally privy to the technical details of the study they gave their lives for.  But even so…

 

V snared the subtext of Edward’s line of questioning quickly enough.  The man was prickling with apprehension; the room was redolent of his fear.  It wasn’t the complex, professional fear of a medical man encountering something new and threatening, but the simple, primal fear of infection.  It would be better to set this to rest before that fear transubstantiated to outright panic.

 

“You’re afraid that I may be carrying some contagion,” he stated, evenly.  He watched Edward struggle not to back away at the open use of the word and, after a second, win out over this muscular spasm.

 

“Yes, I am.  I’m horribly afraid of that.”

 

“I am not a doctor, Edward, but if it will help to calm your fears, I will relate that for the last two months of my containment, the medical staff wore no masks or gloves in their dealings with me.”

 

Abruptly, the song on the CD player ended and, this time, the silence was absolute aside from a loud, self-indulgent canine belch.  Edward, teetering on a nervous precipice, collapsed in a fit of tearful laughter at this eructation.

 

V grinned too, although bemusedly.

 

 

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