Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [33]
Ace suddenly felt her stomach go cold. She turned away and ran back to the Mazda. The interior lights of the car came on automatically as she threw the door open.
Chick was gone.
* * *
Chapter 6
It took Russell three hours to die.
It had been the older Mayan’s idea. He was smarter than Creed had given him credit for. He obviously had some grasp of warlock’s potential, even if he had no understanding of the mechanism that made the drug work. ‘They have an interesting ritual in Miss Winterhill’s country,’ he said. ‘It’s called sending someone to Coventry. You know what that means?’
Miss Winterhill was quick. Creed could see she immediately had some idea of what was going to happen. And she wasn’t happy about it.
The Mayans handcuffed Russell and made him sit on the floor in the corner of the room. The younger brother sat down in an armchair nearby, holding a gun and keeping a casual eye on him. Miss Winterhill glanced nervously at Russell and Creed saw a look of anticipatory pain on her face. ‘Yes, I know what that means,’ she said.
‘What are you talking about?’ said the hooker.
‘It’s something they do at school in England,’ said Miss Winterhill ‘If you don’t like a kid you all agree not to speak to him. You completely ignore him. Like he doesn’t exist.’
‘Like freezing him out.’
‘Exactly.’
The hooker shot a glance over at Russell, then looked over at the older Mayan who was busy pouring more glasses of cava.
She leaned over close to Miss Winterhill. Creed could see a sheen of sweat on her face. She spoke quietly, as if she didn’t want the Mayan to hear. ‘All that stuff about dropping off the edge of the world, that’s just bullshit, isn’t it?’
Miss Winterhill cleared her throat. ‘Not necessarily. Every human being depends on millions of tiny subliminal clues from their companions. We are constantly registering whether we are winning other people’s attention or not. We use these signals to guide our behaviour and gauge our own existence. In fact, to reassure us that we exist at all.’
The women both glanced over at Russell in the corner and he stared back. Their voices had drifted down to a whisper so he couldn’t hear them. But you could see he knew they were talking about him.
Miss Winterhill leaned closer to the hooker. ‘It seems this drug has an effect on group perception.’ She nodded at Russell. ‘If we make him the focus of attention and then cut him out of our area of shared reality –’
The two women looked up to see the older Mayan handing them frosted glasses of cava. He poured a glass for Larner and Creed then clinked them with his own in a toast. He looked at the kid who sat in the corner of the room, motionless on the carpet. The kid’s eyes were the flat, frightened eyes of a condemned man.
‘Goodbye, Russell,’ said the Mayan. Then he swallowed his drink and sat down to watch.
Oddly, Creed had seen something similar before. When he was a teenager he and some college friends used to travel into Buffalo. It was the nearest big city and they came sweeping in from rural roads, intoxicated with the promise of their young lives and the long night ahead. No sleep. Just drinking and loud music and the possibility of girls.
There was a club they went to regularly which had a red neon sign. Real neon, not a hologram. It was a hangout for students from a nearby teaching hospital and they played vintage rhythm and blues live on authentic instruments. No samples. And if you had the nerve you’d cross the dance floor to the side where the girls, mostly nurses and a few trainee paramedics, waited in a tight clique.
They sat at the tables in groups of two or three and if you liked the look of a girl you had to walk up to her table and try and break in on the conversation of her group. There was always this moment when the guy had to start talking to the girl and the girl would have her shield of resistance up, that cool reserve. Maybe she would make it easy for