Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [40]
He had a pair of seats to himself – it was the off season, and he was leaving the English weather behind. He pulled off his shoes, balanced his Scotch on the aisle seat’s tray, and opened his black leather briefcase.
Macbeth was tall and red‐headed, with a speckling of red stubble just starting to crawl across his square chin. His nose had been broken some time in the past, lending a hint of thug to his face that was belied by his tidy speech, the Glaswegian accent kept rigidly under control.
Macbeth’s stomach did something odd as the plane levelled out, giving the hair‐raising sensation that he was suddenly falling. He gripped his whisky and spread out the files he’d brought.
The first was a neat folder of newspaper articles from the cuttings service. Eyewitness reports of the Hallowe’en Massacre – plus half a dozen tiny news items, a scattering of unrelated events. A riot in an asylum. The sudden deaths of a group of Indian midwives, cause unknown. The abrupt closure of a Mexican university’s research project on dream telepathy. All dated October 31, 1993.
The clipping from Fortean Times featured an article on the asylum riot. Apparently its timing had coincided perfectly with the massacre – they were calling it the one‐minute rebellion. Two attendants had been attacked, a dining hall had been smashed up, four patients had died suddenly. Cause unknown.
Nothing new to Lieutenant Macbeth, formerly of UNIT, who had seen the same thing happen in 1968.
He’d been there from the beginning, when the United Nations were looking for ways to deal with extraordinary events. Alien invasions. He’d stayed in London when the Yeti took over, taking holiday snaps and trying to rearrange his world view. All those hints of extraterrestrial visitors, all the rumours and confused reports, all the charlatans and flutters… and then they were face‐to‐face with genuine ETs in the London Underground.
The next file contained a hastily photocopied death certificate, Doctor Sullivan’s name inscribed across the bottom in a square hand. Sullivan had been one of those men closest to UNIT’s little secret. He seemed to have vanished altogether.
RSM Benton had chased Macbeth off his used car lot. Corporal Bell had been promoted to captain and had ended up brain‐damaged in a car accident. Captain Yates, who had retired under odd circumstances in the mid‐seventies, wouldn’t speak to anyone.
But he had managed to find one of Sullivan’s nurses. Bugger the Secrets Act, she told him over tea and scones, they’d killed that poor man. She spoke of secret tests and strange technology, and how Doctor Sullivan had made her write ‘heart attack’ on Hubert Clegg’s death certificate, even though she was sure he’d been the victim of some kind of experiment.
After Macbeth and UNIT had parted company, he’d still kept an eye on their activities. In fact, he had rather more information about them than they’d be comfortable with. Paranormal researchers had all sorts of ways of finding things out. There were those mysterious evacuations of London, the prison riot, something chemical in Wales, something nuclear in Cornwall, the church they’d blown up, for Chrissake.
Ancient history. In the paranormal, there was always this week’s special flavour‐crystals or levitation, synchronicity or Atlantis, Space Alien in Love Triangle with Two‐headed Woman.
Christmas 1968 had been his last chance to dip his toes in the ocean of the unknown before UNIT had thrown him out. Now he hovered on their fringes, picking up scraps of information, never coming quite close enough to find out what was going on.
Scraps of information wouldn’t be enough this time. ’68 was happening all over again, down Mexico way. And this time he was ready for it.
* * *
Mexico City, 1994
Someone nudged Cristián’s hip with their foot. He muttered into the pillow, breaking away from dizzying dreams where he listened to Magical Mystery Tour and watched TV and wasn’t afraid of anything.