34.
Sometimes I doubt whether I fit for this kind of work. It’s just I grew up with it and didn’t want to disappoint Jabar, but in my opinion I’m only granted a short life. If an otherkind that wants to get back on me doesn’t kill me someday, my heart will probably chuck it at an early age. Still I have to admit the adventure is keeping my life variable and exiting and the fulfilling feeling, after a successful mission, can’t be compared to anything.
The gate indeed opens when I push on the remote control. I drive inside flexibly and park the car next to Ed’s one. Immediately Bass comes walking along, apparently his mate is still dozed off. Probably he smells it’s me and not Selena, because he comes to me, wagging his tail and jumps up so his legs land on top of my chest. Look, and that’s just the advantage of my transformation into a dog first. He would never have accepted me otherwise. It could of course be he liked Selena very much, although I doubt that. Or at least I’d rather don’t believe it.
‘Hi, sweetie,’ I say and pat his head.
I open the window with the card and enter the house. The living room is deserted, so I immediately walk to the cellar. Noël’s office door is open and I take a look inside. He’s sitting at his desk, leaned over a pile of documents. Quickly I bring back all the information on Selena, how she interacted with Noël and how she talks.
‘I’m back,’ I say, leaning nonchalantly against the doorpost.
Noël barely looks up. ‘Do you have the extra champagne with you?’
Yes, of course. Selena needed a reason to drive off. So she was after champagne.
‘Yes,’ I say quickly thinking. ‘In the trunk.’ I can’t remember it was in the backseat of the car, so the bottles need to be in the trunk.
He looks at me for a while. ‘You only need to be pretty tonight, welcome the guests and start a conversation with them. Ed takes care of the rest.’
I nod.
‘Well? What are you waiting for? Put the champagne in the fridge or let Ed do it.’ He gets rid of me with a nervous motion of his hand.
Pff, working on top of it. Nah well, I need to participate in the game. I bump into Ed in the living room. Ed’s face spells trouble and the seeing of ‘Selena’ doesn’t make it better. His mouth tightens to a failed grin.
‘Hi,’ I just say then. I almost said ‘Ed’, but restrain myself right in time. Although Noël also said Ed a moment ago, which means they’re using each other’s pseudonyms.
Surprised he raises his eyebrows. ‘Since when do we greet each other?’
Whoops, mistake. Apparently there’s a lot of bad blood between those two.
‘I’m in a good mood.’ I make an effort to make my look come around as hard and cool.
‘Well, I’m not, so piss off!’ He walks past me.
‘Want to help me a hand with the champagne?’ I ask. I hope I can question him a bit in the meantime.
He stops and then turns around slowly. ‘Alright then,’ he says.
We walk together to Selena’s car. I hope I’m able to open the trunk immediately and don’t mess about it. That would betray my disguise.
I didn’t lock the car just now and pray the trunk is still open. Apparently self-assured I put my hand underneath the edge of the trunk, feel a little handle and click it up relieved. Except for a cotton bag with tubes of suntan oil hanging out of it and a pair of shoes with stiletto heels even I would break my legs with, are four crates of champagne. La Grande Dame of Veuve Clicquot. Go ahead, at least one hundred Euros per bottle. Ed takes two crates for his account and I do the same.
I need to pretend I’m stronger than I really am, since it’s not because I look like the vamp Selena I also have her strengths. Unfortunately not. Two crates of champagne would weigh just as little as two bags of wads of absorbent cotton to her, but not to me. I therefore walk with squeezed lips from the effort behind Ed.
‘Say, why are you so grouchy?’ I ask.
He looks backward for a while. ‘A client cancelled.’
‘Ah, no. Who?’
‘The Arab. Apparently he’s in the hospital for one or another emergency operation.’
‘Noël shall be enraged.’
‘He surely is. I feel like burning something down again.’
Filthy firebug! I make a guess. ‘Just like Oded’s pub?’
‘Indeed,’ he answers grimly.
The bastard! So it was him. Well, it shouldn’t really surprise me anymore.
My arm muscles hurt when I put the crates on the counter. I might practice fighting, but not weightlifting. A good fighter isn’t only determined by just his physical power, but especially by his mental strength, how well he can assess his opponent, speed and skills.
As soon as Ed places his crates on the counter he leaves the kitchen and takes the stair to the cellar.
After putting the champagne in the fridge, next to the already present bottles, I decide to follow him. I hear him in the room at the end of the hall, where the glazed tubes stand. I suck my breath inaudible and walk inside. I’m especially scared I won’t be able to keep my reaction under control when I’ll find Lucas.
Nothing seems to have changes in the room, at least at first sight. Ed walks to the computer and puts it on. I try to see which password he uses, but he turns around with a tug to me and asks: ‘May I?’
‘Oh, erm, yeah, sorry.’
Apparently Selena never excuses, because he looks gauging at me for a while and then turns his look to the screen again.
I look around a little and see to my great dismay something has indeed changes. All heads are open now, scalped. The woman with grey hair has her eyes closed and her face is twisted in a painful grimace. She even looks paler than she already was. What I see is too horrible to be put in words and almost instinctively I shrink back, just knowing to suppress a scream.
Then I see Lucas and blurt a fairly hard ‘oh’ out.
Ed looks at me. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Oh, damn it, I forgot something,’ I save myself and disappear from the room.
As quick as I can I run upstairs and outside. With my hands leaning on my knees I try to recover and get rid of the image of the scalped Lucas. I suck in the fresh air until deep into my lungs and feel like puking out my meal until the last crumb. But I can’t afford all of this without coming around as suspicious.
Oh, Lucas, poor Lucas, if only you had never met me! Feelings of guilt force themselves again with great violence. I straighten myself and rub my face as if I can get rid of all the sorrow with that.
‘Manon?’ I hear in my ear. I jump out of my skin. It’s Jabar who’s talking to me through the earplug.
‘Yes?’ I whisper as quietly as possible.
‘Is everything still alright?’
I nod until I realize he can’t see me of course and then say: ‘Yes.’ I don’t dare to say more out of fear someone might accidentally see me.
I pull myself together mentally and enter the house again. Luckily no one has seen me. There’s nothing else to do, it all happens in the cellar, so I need to go back.
Noël isn’t present in his office anymore, but I hear his voice coming from the room with the tubes. I carefully try other door handles in the passing. They’re all locked, except the last door on the left. Should I risk it to walk inside?
Noël and Ed are only a few meters away from the room, but I decide to risk it.
It’s a more spacious room than I thought, at least ten meters in length and about five meters in width. In the middle stands an operating table and around it all kinds of apparatus that’s, I presume, reading the biological functions. On a smaller table are chirurgical working devices. The room smells so strongly of disinfectant I’m becoming nauseous of it. Everything looks spotless, the operating table, the white stone floor and the empty walls. Underneath the operating table I do see a few specks that look like drips of blood. I suspect that the piercing blood smell I smelled recently in the cellar originated from here. I’m terror-stricken when I think about the fact it’s possible that at that same moment an otherkind was been cut open. The assholes!
So it’s here the ‘clients’ get their new brains later on. I wonder where the doctors and nurses are, but maybe they’ll only appear when they need to operate. Anyway an entire team will be necessary to do a suchlike complicated transplantation. Which inhuman doctors participate in a kind of obscure business like this anyway? They really don’t have a soul or are extremely addicted to money.
I then see a glazed showcase cabinet standing at the end of the room. While I walk towards it I realize what I’ll get to see even before I can take a good look at it. And it appears I’m right. But it’s still a shocking image.
There are five glazed bowls in the cabinet. In each bowl floats in one or another liquid a pinkish body part. It can’t be anything else than that those things are the brains or at least a part of them. I suddenly realize one of those things might come from Lucas’s head! My stomach protests and I quickly run out of the room.
In the hall I look at the door of the tube room and still hear Noël and Ed being busy. Good, they didn’t notice I was in the room. Probably Selena can go into the operating room, but I don’t know that for sure.
‘Selena!’ Noël yells from the tube room.
I run towards it. ‘Yes?’
‘The clients can arrive any moment from now. You still aren’t dressed yet?’
Dressed? Ah, shoot!
‘Right away,’ I say and run away.
Where would Selena’s dresses hang? Logically seen in her bedroom and luckily I know to find that one. And what does he mean with getting dressed? Something festive, sexy or what? I will have to make a guess, there’s nothing else to do.
I hurry up the stairs and open Selena’s room door, the first on the left. The room rather looks like a hotel room than one of a young woman. I open the built-in closet. It’s completely empty expect for one dress that hangs in a plastic cover. That makes the choice luckily much easier. They have of course put away the rest of the clothes in moving boxes already. Relieved I rip it open and see a truly breathtaking, stylish, but still simple creation. It’s a long model, quite clinging and with only one sleeve. The color is really gorgeous: royal blue. I now also notice there are shoes with stiletto heels at the bottom of the closet and try them on. They’re a bit too big, but are walkable.
There’s one problem. As soon as I put out Selena’s black trousers and white blouse, they immediately change into my original jeans and sweater. I rumple them up and dump them in the corner of the closet. No one will probably know a thing, but you might never know.
Problem number two: where do I leave my pistol and blackjack? The dress fits perfectly, but leaves little space for hidden weapons. I could attach the Glock to the inside of my thighbone, it’s just I don’t have tape or a belt with me. Wait a second, the belt of my jeans of course!
It takes me quite a lot of effort to turn the belt around my thighbone in such a way it isn’t visible through the thin fabric of the dress, but I manage. With regret I have to leave the blackjack between my clothes in the closet.
So, I take a look at myself in the mirror that’s hanging in the room and reluctantly have to admit the dress fits Selena perfectly. Her black hair becomes even more intense by the blue of the dress.
Time for action!
I feel there’s a snag attached to my provision pistol holder, when I descend the stairs. The belt fairly cuts in my skin. Those will become serious slashes. But I would endure much more just to keep my Glock with me. For sure!
It’s a lot busier in the living room already. The Doc and Ed are busy with putting the champagne coolers and glasses ready. I notice in the low sun it has to be around eight already. The guest can thus arrive any moment. I can only hope fervently I’ll know what I’m supposed to do at the “moment supreme” and play havoc.
The Doc nods shortly at me. ‘Hopefully those stinking rich people leave some champagne for us,’ he says.
‘I’d like a glass,’ I say.
‘I still have to wait, but you just take one.’
‘She needs to wait until the guests have arrived,’ Ed snarls at the Doc.
I hear a car on the drive.
Doc looks at the door. ‘That will be my team. Send them downstairs, Selena. I’m already on my way.’
The Doc disappears to the cellar and I walk to the windows. Actually I’m curious about those Frankenstein monsters. How they look and especially how they are.