36.
‘Manon.’ I’ll never forget the expression on Noël’s face. I wish I brought a camera.
‘What did you do to them?’ I ask brusquely.
‘They’re just anaesthetized,’ Noël answers.
‘What for? For the operation?’
Noël roars with laughter and his sidekick, Ed, is happily joining him. Also the doctors and the nurses seem to find what I’ve just said very funny.
‘Where is Jabar?’ Noël asks. The laughing wrinkles make place for an irritated look.
‘On his way to this place and he isn’t alone. Why?’ I look at the exhausted clients on the ground.
‘You really don’t get it, do you? Nothing of all of this.’ Noël grins. ‘You’re still so naïve. Really cute.’
I aim at his balls. ‘Then explain it to me, so I don’t have to waste a bullet on your crotch. And don’t transform, a shot will reach you in less than two seconds.’
Noël sighs. ‘We need them to do tests on them.’
‘What do you mean with tests?’
‘What we are deceiving them, isn’t possible yet. Not at all.’
‘So you want to use them as human guinea pigs?’ I ask surprised.
‘Exactly.’
‘Then why don’t you take tramps or people without companies and family?’
‘Because they’re filthy rich and they won’t only serve us with their body, but also with their money.’
‘You still haven’t enough then, filthy murderer?’
‘The more money you have, the more you want, Manon, haven’t you learned that lesson yet? Well, at least I’ve thought you that.’ The sarcasm drips from his words.
‘They’ll be missed. People that lead multinationals just know a lot of other people.’ Although I have a big suspicion he has taken care of that.
‘You see them?’ He points in Sophie’s and the nurses’ direction. ‘They don’t know a bit of medical conditions, but they’re an ace at transforming.’
Transformers! I could’ve known. He wants to replace the four clients by them. At least until they’ve flown back to their country, met their family or visited their company and then they’ll of course disappear all of a sudden. Then no one will be able to link it with Noël or Belgium. Clever, very clever and unusually nasty.
‘I see you’re starting to understand. Maybe you are smarter than I thought,’ Noël grins.
I watch quickly at the door opening. Where the fuck are the others?! They weren’t parked that far.
‘If you’re expecting Jabar, you can still wait for a while,’ Noël says. ‘Because you see, when I found the sleeping Doberman, I already suspected something wasn’t right.’
This can’t be true, goes through my head, did he knew it all along it was me?
As if he can guess my thoughts, Noël continues: ‘I didn’t know whose place you would take, but I know now. After I found the dog I made security take place at the wall, without someone knowing about it. Even not he.’ Noël nods in Ed’s direction.
The panic starts to increase. Stay calm, Manon, stay calm. Maybe Jabar, Diedie and Oded will find something to it. With the three of them and their gifts they’ve got a lot more to offer than simple human guards. At least I hope so.
‘Have you always been a transformer then?’ I ask as calmly as possible, but I feel my heart beating in the tips of my fingers and have a difficult time keeping my grip on the Glock.
‘Just think about it for a while,’ Noël says in a teacher-tone. ‘What did I just tell you? Pay a bit more attention, Manon!’
‘Yes, you’ve always been one.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But why do you want to experiment with the implantation of brains of otherkinds into human beings? And why all those lies against me before?’
‘You don’t have to play all your trumps, Manon, lesson number two for today. Too bad you didn’t want to become my wife. We could have been a perfect couple and you still could have learned a lot from me, more than from Jabar. You do know there aren’t many transformers? Not as many as vampires or witches?’
So that’s the reason he wanted to marry me. Killing two birds with one stone, his favorite way of working. Play a dirty trick on Jabar and because we’re both transformers, give him children. Hey, yuck! I can’t think about it.
Jack starts to snore loudly and in such a comical way I would burst out laughing if the situation wasn’t so threatening.
‘I wanted you to believe I was an ordinary human, so you couldn’t be prepared to that, in case you succeeded to escape. And you did, so it was a considerable clever stroke of me, wasn’t it?
I refuse to answer. ‘You didn’t answer my earlier question. Why the experimenting? Aren’t you an otherkind after all?’
‘The four clients are a foretaste of the actual work. A test to find out how many people are willing to pay, and if they can indeed keep their mouths shut and if we can take their places temporarily without causing suspicion. Imagine how rich you could become if suchlike procedure would indeed work. Doc here is doing his best to find that out and one day time will be ready. Then I’ll sell the gifts of otherkinds to the highest bidder and the real game can begin. We anaesthetized them at the same time, so we could put them in tubes at the same time, without one of them able to accidentally discover it was his turn.’
I notice Noël is as pleased as Punch now he can finally reveal his brilliant plans to me. If he thinks I find him super-intelligent now, he’s wrong. Well, okay, it’s of course all very vicious, but even more disgusting and inhuman. And that last one is the most important. From time to time I hear puffing, a heavy cry and a fully-fledged Oded-curse through my earplug.
‘You don’t have a way to go, Manon, with the seven of us we’ll overpower you right away. The fact our little devil here hasn’t manipulated you mentally yet, is only because I didn’t ask him to so do yet.’
‘At least I’ll take you with me, bastard, if I need to die.’
‘Tut-tut-tut,’ Noël soothes and shakes his head. ‘You really think that?’
I cock the pistol and stay persisting with my cool attitude. But in reality I’m wetting myself.
While I keep looking at Noël I snap at the transformers: ‘How for fuck’s sake can you join in this? You’re killing people and your own kind!’
In the corner of my eye I see how Sophie is taking her eyes aside to the ground, but the three men are looking provocatively at me, as if they want to say: mind your own business. Doc’s face is as stoical as can be.
‘Join us,’ Noël says suddenly in a friendly tone. ‘How can you still trust Jabar now? He knew I was a transformer the entire time.’
‘No!’ I cry out very loud to my own surprise. ‘He would have told me that.’
‘Jabar has more secrets for you than just this one, Manon, I already told you. But do you believe me? No. You’d rather believe a filthy elf than someone of your own kind.’
‘I’d rather believe a politician than you!’
‘And me who could tell you whom your real parents are. Really too bad.’
I refuse to let myself get blackmailed by that promise, although there’s still a desire to know it burning somewhere deep inside. I do believe him, oh yes, certainly. The fact he has found four transformers that want to join in his nasty murdering game, while transformers are indeed rarer than the other otherkinds, is already a prove of that. It therefore seems plausible to me he also found my parents.
Concentrate, Manon, don’t let yourself get distracted by slick talk. But it’s very tempting to give in to it. Not to join him, I’d rather die. Nevertheless, I could pretend and then…
Noël sees my doubt and puts in another word: ‘I can take you to them right away. I know where they live and what they’re doing now.’
‘No,’ I say.
I can hear it myself; I already sound a lot less confident. Damned!
A loud shot rings out from somewhere outside. Jabar!
Because I’m distracted for a while, Noël sees his chance to transform into a fog bank. I shoot, but he’s too quick and the bullet narrowly misses him. The scrap of fog zooms past me, with a disgusting eau de cologne smell attached to it, inside the hall and upstairs. I have the choice: go after him and let the rest go or the other way around. Ed and the others use the sudden uproar to fly at me. I can aim at Ed in the nick of time and shoot. He tumbles backward. Apparently I’ve hit him straight in the chest.
‘Not a single move anymore!’ I yell at the others.
Except for Sophie, they all look at me as if they want to eat me alive. They take a few steps backward, but their attitude gives away they’re staying ready to jump or transform.
‘If one of you transform, I’ll shoot the others!’ I just add to it.
Ed lies moaning on the floor. That doesn’t look good. The blood trickles out of his chest and the pool in which he’s lying only gets bigger. I find it horrible I had to shoot him, but it’s actually better like this. Now Noël has escaped Ed would probably have brainwashed me and then I would have been completely defenseless.
Loud footsteps and yelling come from upstairs.
‘Manon?’ I hear Oded yelling. ‘Where are you, goddamnit?’
‘Here downstairs!’ I yell back. ‘Last door on the left.’
I hear stumbling and then Oded: ‘Godfuckingasscuntdamnit on top of that!’
I think he almost tumbled down the stairs in his hurry. With a big scratch on his face that bleeds a little he appears in the operating room, a pistol in his hand. He takes in everything at a glance and keeps the transformers covered.
‘Who are this bunch of persuaded nitwits?’ he asks, while his eyes become totally black.
‘Transformers that are part of the plot, I’ll tell you later about that. And on the ground is a devil.’
‘Nice shot,’ he grins.
‘Over there,’ I point at Doc, ‘is the doctor and according to me a human.’
‘Indeed, he is,’ Oded confirms who of course has read his mind. ‘And those others on the ground? The clients?’
‘Yeah, they’re asleep. They’re anaesthetized.’
I hear another two persons descending the stair and pray they are Jabar and Diedie.
‘Where’s Selena?’ I ask Oded.
‘Diedie has set free her magic on her,’ Oded smiles sardonically. ‘She’s been released, but with a completely new identity. From today onwards she’ll do everything to lead a celibate life. I’m curious about which monastery she’ll choose.’
Jabar and Diedie indeed enter the room.
‘Light punishment for a murderer,’ I still say to Oded. He opens his mouth, but I’m ahead of him: ‘Yeah yeah, I know, it can’t be otherwise.’
Diedie sees the wounded Ed and immediately walks towards him. She even has compassion with monsters.
‘Poor man, what a wound,’ she says.
Ed doesn’t moan anymore, his breathing comes out irregular and blood trickles out of his mouth.
Diedie leans down and puts her finger against his neck. ‘He won’t make it.’
‘Everything under control here?’ Jabar asks.
‘Yes,’ Oded answers.
Jabar looks surprised at the people on the ground. ‘We’ve combed out the entire environment and the house but there’s no one here anymore. Four guards, angels by the way, got to know us. Luckily we saw them right on time and they were set up scattered. Noël has probably put them there in the last minute?’
I nod. ‘He suspected something wasn’t right.’
It surprises me Noël has set up so little, four guards isn’t much. I’ve seen Jabar put four people down on his own, just through fighting techniques and without help of his gift. I can already imagine how everything went just now. Probably Jabar has used a natural element from a distance, like wind or fog, to make their sight more difficult so they could aim their pistols at them. Next Oded could come closer to manipulate their thoughts and made them believe no one was walking towards them. Then it was of course still as easy as falling off a log to bring them down with the two of them. Diedie has probably blotted out their minds.
‘He’s gone,’ Diedie then says in a sad tone and stand up.
I find it hard to admit, but I’m not sorry about it. I know I’ll still feel the consequences of killing him later on, but at this moment I don’t have the strength nor the time to give it a moment’s thought. And besides I have a lot to comfort myself; Ed burned down Oded’s pub, helped with my and the others’ kidnapping and made Sharon’s boyfriend kill people. Although it wasn’t with his own hands, it comes down to the same.
‘But…’ Diedie points at the carroty transformer. ‘That’s the one who pretended to be you, Manon, the one who scared the living daylights out of me at our home.’
The man grins and straightens his back, clearly proud of his performance. I can’t help it, run towards him and give him a kick in the balls.
‘What happened?’ Jabar asks. ‘Through the fights upstairs I couldn’t follow the conversations anymore.’
I tell everything in a nutshell and then ask: ‘What are we going to do with them?’
Diedie walks to just in front of the people and looks sympathetically down on them. ‘They’re wrong of course,’ she then says. ‘But let us just, like with those people who are awaiting them in their cars, blot out their memory from the last few weeks. What do you think?’
It’s all fine with me, I want to be done with this as soon as possible. The others also agree.
‘Oded?’ Diedie looks at him. ‘Do you want to look in their minds for a while until how far in time they’ve had contact with Noël?’
Jabar takes the place of Oded next to me and walks to the sleeping clients.
‘Where is Noël?’ Jabar says the name with a sour face.
‘Escaped as fog. He’s a transformer. Did you know that?’
‘Transformer? I already though I heard something like that through the plug, but couldn’t believe it.’ Jabar looks truly surprised. ‘No, I absolutely didn’t know that. Escaped hey? Annoying, very annoying.’
I nod. ‘What are we going to do with Doc?’
‘Doc?’ Jabar asks.
‘Frankenstein over there.’ I point at him.
‘I have an answer to that,’ Diedie thinks. ‘We’ll make him think he killed people, what’s even true, and burden him with such an immense feeling of guilt he’ll give himself up to the police.’
‘I even have a better idea,’ Jabar says who’s looking at Ed as if he’s the most disgusting creature he has ever seen. ‘When everyone’s outside, we’ll put the house on fire with the devil in it. But we let Diedie put an illusion around it, so it seems as if the house is still standing here for a few days. We’ll make Ed believe he committed the murder and burned down the house and later on he’ll give himself up for the facts. By then the illusion will be over.’
We all think it’s a brilliant idea, except Doc of course. He starts to lament and apologize himself in a clumsy way. Like a little child he begins to bed and says he’ll never do it again, never. Of course we’re not listing to his pleadings. We let the transformers go, they haven’t done anything wrong.
‘If I still catch one of you out on committing a crime or only just the mere thought about it, I’ll know to find you,’ Jabar threatens them in a calm tone.
First Diedie does her mojo on the foreign clients. Although they’re asleep, their unconsciousness registers her whispered words. After that she takes care of Doc. Oded needs to hold him tight, because he places his hands on his ears so he doesn’t hear Diedie’s words and struggles like a fish out of the water.
The clients are brought upstairs by Oded and Jabar one by one and dumped in their cars. Oded manipulates the chauffeurs’ thoughts and orders them to bring them back to the airport. Doc is being anaesthetized with the arrow from Ed’s gun and put down in the bushes at the end of the territory. Oded explains the guards have already left through the instructions he gave them. It seems all of the loose ends are being removed, except for Noël of course. In the meantime I transformed back into my own shape and I get so cold my teeth chatter lightly.
The only thing that’s left is the hardest task of all.
The otherkinds in the glazed tubes.
We don’t look forward to it, but descend for the last time the cellar stairs to the most distant room.