Oktober

by Stephen Gallagher

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Horror; Noir

Synopsis

An apparently fatal incident occurs when schoolteacher Jim Harper is skiing near a small research station owned by the giant multinational Risinger-Genoud. Even treatment with their new, untried and experimental superdrug cannot save his life. Or so it seems. For Jim Harper, though left for dead, has survived. But in the long haul back to health and sanity, he begins to realise that something terrible has happened to him. Now the only way in which he can unravel the mystery in his mind is to go back to the point where it began to develop - back to Risinger-Genoud and their Oktober programme. And Risinger Genoud are going to be very interested to see him. Oktober is a frightening journey into a world of greed and lies, a world in which the cover-up is not only a way of life, but something planned ahead of time. Step by horrifying step, Jim Harper unravels what has been done to him, and then designs the perfect act of vengeance, an act that teeters on the brink of madness...

Release date: February 28, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 260

Sample

SEVENTEEN WAS being a bitch, as usual.

If there was any irony in the thought, Bruno didn’t see it. The dogs inside the pens always grew jealous of the dogs that were still outside in the yard during the daily hosing-out, but he’d been noticing for some time now that the number seventeen animal took it worse than most. She’d lope back and forth from shelf to floor and back onto the shelf again, and the other five huskies in there with her would crowd back wherever they could to give her space. Two of them still had shaved patches and scars, souvenirs of their failure to get out of her way when Bruno had come within reach of the wire.

She hated him, it was as simple as that. She could read him in some way that the others couldn’t, and she found plenty to be afraid of. Bruno leaned on his brush in the half-swept last pen of the row, and he listened to the even bump-bump-bump of her pacing on the other side of the rough wooden wall. Draining water lay like eels on the concrete floor, glistening in the light from the overhead fluorescents; the day never made it this far inside.

Down the row and around the corner, one of the dogs was crooning gently to itself. Only inches above Bruno’s head—the ceiling was barely six feet high—there was an almost continuous scratching of claws on boards. The six bear-like Eskimo dogs in the roof space were getting restless, as if messages of tension were running along invisible lines.

The Siberian in the next pen paced from floor to shelf, from shelf to floor, on and on.

She hated him. “It’s mutual,” he said out loud, surprising himself with the sharpness of his voice in the cold air. The pacing continued without missing a beat, as rhythmic and as powerful as a steam-driven machine.

We’ll need another dog for a lab sacrifice in a couple of weeks, he thought. How’d you like to be the one to get it?

Everything stopped.

The only sound was the slow drip from the hose coiled over its standpipe, halfway down the access passage and below the roof-space trapdoor. Even the animals in the yard outside had stopped their snuffling against the hatch.

Bruno waited, but still nothing moved.

“Four-footed bastards,” he said, and carried on with his sweeping-down of the floor.

A couple of minutes later, he threw the broom out into the passageway. There was still some straw and ordure that he’d missed in the corners, but he’d had enough. Unshipping the juiced-up electric baton that he kept on a loop at his hip—better than any amount of affection when it came to guaranteeing obedience, in Bruno’s experience—he winched up the hatch so that the dogs could come thundering back into their pen from the yard outside. They leapt onto their shelves or slunk into the enclosed dens beneath, and even before they were settled he let the hatch fall. They watched him, pig-eyed and glittering with malevolence, as he stepped out of the pen and secured the door behind him.

There was still a silence from number seventeen’s enclosure.

Whoever had built the place had gone for solidity rather than finesse. The woodwork of the pens was like that of a log barn, and the door of each cell was held in place by double-bolted iron hinges. With the baton held easily by his side, Bruno put his face up to the wire mesh look-through alongside the frame.

It wasn’t too light in there, but he registered nothing out of the ordinary. Three of the hulking Greenland dogs lay on the platform, and another could be seen half-in and half-out of the den underneath.

Bruno leaned closer to get a look into the corners.

An artillery shell of bone and muscle exploded in his face.

He took a fast step backwards, cattle prod held at the ready, but there was no way that the dog could get through to him.
The Siberian was clawing and snarling and spitting, lips drawn right back and muzzle rammed up hard against the mesh with her eyes showing white rims of fury, but the wire was tough and it held. She fell away and jumped again. Now there were flecks of blood on the metal.

Bruno watched as she crashed against the mesh over and over, each impact a little less forceful than the one before. Dogs in the other pens were starting to growl, a low sound like a fleet of heavy trucks revving. Agitated skittering noises, claws on boards again, came from the roof space overhead. A couple more leaps, and then he’d reach out with the baton and stroke its live tip across the wire just as the dog was making contact. The burns would make her scream for an hour, if the shock didn’t snap her in two.

On the next one. He tensed himself, ready.

“What the fuck do you do in this place?” the astonished voice of a stranger demanded out of nowhere.

Bruno turned around.

IF THERE was one duty that Micheline Bauer disliked above all others, it was that of sitting up in the common room with a pair of binoculars and keeping an eye on the rich kids who turned up every now and again to borrow some of the sled dogs so that they could freak around on the glacier. But what could she say? Rochelle Genoud was the one who always brought them along, and Rochelle Genoud was the chairman’s stepdaughter. There was nothing that the station staff could do other than to put up with their presence and hope that their visits would be short and that they’d keep their noses out of the research facilities.

She tried to focus the binoculars. These things always gave her a headache. It didn’t help that her subjects were hardly more than specks in the blinding haze where the hard sunlight met the glacier. Beyond this were the mountains, razor-sharp and veined with ice against the sky.

There seemed to be somebody missing. There ought to be seven figures, but she could only count six.

Probably the heiress’s bodyguard taking a break, Micheline told herself, and deciding that it was time she did the same she
lowered the binoculars and rubbed at her eyes.

Not that the common room was much to look at, because its odd mix of tired old furniture and office throwouts gave it the air of a run-down youth hostel. The station was halfway up a Swiss mountain, a little-used railway stop on a line where thousands of ski nuts passed through but almost nobody ever got off. It had a staff of twenty, mostly Germans and French; it also had four good-sized labs, three operating theatres used mainly for postmortem dissection, a thousand or so rats, and about three dozen huskies that had been left over from the station’s previous existence as a sled dog breeding centre. They used the dogs in tests sometimes, but generally their cold-weather metabolisms were so slow that they distorted the results. No original research was carried out at the station; it was strictly product pre-testing only, a continuous one-way processing of animal life into data for other minds to assess.

Johnny Tostevin wandered across the room behind her, heading for the coffeemaker. She wondered if he’d bring her a cup, or whether she’d have to ask.

She raised the binoculars again.

The glacier didn’t seem so much like a slow-moving river of ice, more like a snow-filled basin with a gentle incline that was sheltered by the mountains above. It wasn’t as safe as it appeared, and crevasse and avalanche danger meant that none of the ski runs from the higher resort even came close.

“What’s going on now?” Johnny Tostevin said from just behind her. He hadn’t brought her anything.

“They’re only farting around,” Micheline said.

“Did they stop for lunch?”

“They had champagne in the hamper. Now they’re just running the sleds around in a circle.”

Johnny gave a disgusted grunt. “Fucking chairman’s daughter,” he said. “I hope she breaks a leg.”

Rather than ask him for anything, Micheline set down the binoculars on the table by the window and went over to get her own coffee. Johnny picked them up to take a look at the distant scene, and started fiddling with the focus settings that Micheline had spent more than half an hour getting just right. Suddenly she hated this place, a surge of fury against the isolation and the company and the lack of social life and the lousy TV reception and the tattered magazines passed from hand to hand.

Over by the window, the internal phone buzzed. She didn’t have to move because Johnny was already picking it up.

There was no more coffee. But the anger had all drained out of her now, leaving her bitter and spent. She had brains and she had ambition, more of each than a dozen Johnny Tostevins, and as soon as she’d put in an acceptable length of service on product research she’d be reaching for bigger and better things inside the organisation. Johnny, unlike her, had gone about as far as he would ever get. It annoyed her that she still seemed to dream about him at least once a week.

“You’re kidding me,” he said stonily into the phone, and immediately Micheline knew that there was some problem.

Johnny listened for a few seconds longer, and then he put down the receiver. “Trouble in the pens,” he said, and he headed for the door. Her lookout duty forgotten, Micheline moved to follow him.

Trouble in the pens usually meant only one thing.

Bruno.

ABOUT HALF of the centre’s staff were already down in the pens when Micheline arrived about five strides behind Johnny, everybody talking at once and trying to be heard over a background of howling dogs. They moved aside to let him through, and it was then that Micheline got sight of a figure lying on the bare concrete floor. It was a youngish man in Levis and a ski jacket, someone that she’d never seen before, and he was stretched out on his back with his jacket and his shirt ripped open to the waist while Chantal, one of the lab assistants, crouched over him and seemed to be listening to his heart.

“I can’t hear anything,” Chantal was saying desperately. “I can’t hear anything at all!”

Johnny got down beside her and touched the man’s throat, looking for a pulse. There wasn’t much space here and everyone had to rearrange themselves around him, and as they moved Micheline got sight of Bruno. He was standing some way back from the others, arms folded and looking morose, and Micheline knew straight away that her first instinct had been right. She’d never liked Bruno much. He was tall and gangling, as unkempt as a polar explorer, and he had a habit of picking interesting little items out of his beard and inspecting them.

Johnny glanced up at Chantal. “Did you try resuscitation?”

“Right away.”

“How long had he been out before you started?”

“I don’t know. Not long. Ask Bruno.”

But instead of asking Bruno, Johnny looked up at the others. “Let’s get him out of this bear pit and into one of the treatment rooms,” he said, almost having to shout because the racket from the distressed dogs all around them was so loud now. Four of them each took a corner of the man and hoisted him up like a battering-ram. Micheline, having been the last one through the door, now held it open as they carried him out.

“I could have been doing it wrong,” Chantal was saying. “I only ever worked on dogs before.”

They got him into treatment room number four, which was like a fully-equipped operating theatre only three-quarter sized. When they knocked the straps out of the way and laid him on the table, his legs dangled over the end. Two of the men lifted him for as long as it took Johnny to get the ski jacket off. He threw this over to Micheline and said, “Go through the pockets, find out who he is.” And then, to the others; “What happened to him? What are we dealing with, here?”

The story didn’t take as long to tell as it did to get a muzzle-mask fitted over the man’s face. Johnny started heart massage while someone else worked the oxygen bag, and the man’s chest started to rise and fall in a semblance of life. It was weird to see, and it looked all wrong. As she sorted through the cards and papers that she’d found in an inside pocket of the ski jacket, Micheline realised that she was already thinking of him as a dead man. If more than four minutes had gone by before Chantal had started work on him, they might as well send him down to the market to be with the rest of the vegetables.

He’d arrived with Rochelle Genoud’s party, although nobody had ever seen him with the group before. Apparently he’d walked in from the glacier after taking a fall and wrenching his shoulder; Micheline thought it best not to mention that she’d seen nothing of this because she’d probably been messing around trying to adjust the field glasses at the time. Dagmar, the centre’s housekeeper, had directed him to the first aid room, but he must have taken a wrong turn because he’d next appeared in the dog pens. Bruno’s story was that he’d taken the intruder for a would-be thief or an industrial spy. His solution to the problem had been a quick zap between the eyes with the electric baton, and the man had dropped like a stone.

“He’s English,” Micheline said, looking at his passport. “James Harper.” She had a little trouble pronouncing the James. “He’s a teacher at one of the international schools in Gstaad.”

Johnny looked up at her as she said this, but he didn’t break his rhythm. “Just a teacher? Not one of the rich kids?”

“I’ve just been looking in his wallet. Definitely not one of the rich kids.”

Johnny kept on going, beginning to tire, but now he was thinking hard as well. Micheline could almost read his mind.

Little Werner Risinger, Rochelle Genoud’s half-brother, attended one of the international schools. They were small, expensive boarding schools specialising in intensive tuition for the likes of embassy children. Staff were usually recruited through agencies overseas and were often low-paid and unqualified, but in the vacations they’d get to move in circles that they’d otherwise only ever see in Martini ads. If James Harper was a teacher and only along for the ride, and if none of the party missed him …

“I’m still not getting any heartbeat,” Chantal said. She’d brought in a cylindrical metal stethoscope from one of the other rooms and had put it against the pale skin of the Englishman’s side. Everybody else was watching with a sick expression as the Englishman gave about as much response to the rescue efforts as a side of meat.

Someone else took over the heart massage, and another of the technicians brought over an ECG trolley and tried to make a decent guess about where best to put the electrodes. Johnny shone lights into the Englishman’s eyes but it was obvious that he only had a vague idea about what he was doing. The ECG monitor, when started, gave a hopeful-looking blip every time the heart muscle was put under pressure, but when the massage was stopped for a moment the screen showed nothing more than a flat line.

“Any suggestions?” Johnny said to the mute crowd around him.

“Shot of adrenaline, directly into the heart muscle,” someone offered.

“Is there any adrenaline in the building?”

But this time the best that anybody could do was to give a shrug.

Micheline said, “What about the new EPL formula?”

Johnny looked at her. “What about it?”

EPL was the name of the reformulated drug that Micheline had been running tests on for more than six weeks now. “It’s a stimulant,” she said. “The formula doesn’t resemble adrenaline, but it has some of the same properties. Look at him. What are we going to lose?”

Everybody looked at the Englishman, white as a broken dove under the operating light.

“Get it,” Johnny said.

She ran up to her own lab and broke out two phials of EPL and the longest, toughest hypo needle that she could find. On her way back she glimpsed Bruno at the end of the treatment room corridor; he seemed to be hanging around trying to pick up some idea of what was going on without wanting to get too close, and when he saw her he drifted away like some kind of wraith.

They parted to let her through. Nothing on the table had changed. The six weeks of tests had told her very little about EPL that could be extrapolated into the case of a human subject, and it went without saying that they were on dangerous ground here.

Looking at Johnny, she said, “If this works, then we’re okay. But if it doesn’t, and someone spots the puncture site … ”

“Disguise it,” Johnny said. “Find a freckle, or something.”

She studied the Englishman’s skin for a moment. “No freckles,” she said. “I’ll go in through the nipple.”

Not even Johnny could bring himself to watch.

They worked on him for another half-hour, but by then it had become obvious that they were wasting their time. Everybody had taken a turn either on the oxygen bag or at chest massage, and the only time that the steady line of the ECG monitor had seemed to waver independently had been when someone had tripped over the wire.

Finally, Johnny reached up and switched off the operating light.

“Everybody listen to this,” he said. “I’m going to go upstairs and call Basle. I’ll tell them the problem and we’ll see how they want to handle it.”

“What about the police?” Chantal said.

“That’s not going to be my decision,” Johnny said. “Until we get told otherwise, none of this has happened. We’re all going back to our jobs and we’re going to carry on as normal. If anybody’s asked about a schoolteacher, no-one knows anything. Somebody find Bruno and make sure he gets that into his head. For now I’m going to lock this room and hold onto the key.”

They filed out into the corridor, silent in the aftermath of disaster. The passageway ran almost the length of the chalet and had glass bricks for windows which let in a pale, rainwashed-looking light without images. Micheline stayed to watch as Johnny locked the door behind them.

The Englishman lay as they’d left him, his arms and legs still overhanging the sides of the undersized table.

Micheline had used his ski jacket to cover his face.

JOHNNY WAS gone for most of the evening, and didn’t get back until well after twelve. A team from Special Projects had arrived in a Mercedes four-wheel-drive after a hazardous climb on ploughed tracks, and they’d taken away both Johnny and something that a stranger might have guessed to be a weighted sack wrapped in sheet plastic. Rochelle Genoud and her friends had departed a couple of hours before. None of them even seemed to have noticed that one of their number was missing; apparently the Englishman wasn’t a much-valued member of their set.

Bruno at least had the sense to stay out of everybody’s way. He kept himself down in the pens and probably spent the time wondering about his future; deep questions like, whether he was going to have any future when the company had finished with him.

It was almost one in the morning when Micheline found Johnny, exhausted-looking and slumped on one of the threadbare old sofas in the common room. The eyes that looked up at her were dark-ringed, but they didn’t have the bleak no-hope message that she’d been half-expecting.

“It’s fixed?” she said.

“It’s a long story. I’m going to call a meeting in here and tell it to everybody in the morning.”

“I’m the one who put the needle in, remember,” she said. “I want to know now.”

He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, but he was too beat even to argue.

“We took him back to his school,” he said. “There are about five or six staff on the premises right now, nobody else. We waited until the housekeeper left and the others all got into the school minibus to go down into Gstaad, and then we broke in. We got the body stripped and put it into bed, put the reading light on and left a book open by him, made it look as if he might have had some kind of seizure in his sleep.”

“So they’ll do a post-mortem, and they’ll find the EPL in him. They might even find the puncture wound in his heart and the shock-burn on his skin. What then?”

“We left a load of stuff at the back of his underwear drawer—speed, cannabis, cocaine, you name it. Nobody’s going to start puzzling over an EPL fingerprint on the chromatograph with so much junk close to hand. Anything they can’t explain, they’re going to assume it was self-administered. The rest of it, we’ll just have to take a chance. You did a good job on the point of entry. We wiped off one drop of blood and then nothing showed.”

“And that’s it? No report to the police, nothing to explain?”

Johnny looked at the floor, and rubbed at the side of his face as if it had begun to go numb. “The expression used was that we’re going to ‘keep this one in the family’. But I don’t think that means it will stop here.”

“Meaning what?” Micheline said, warily.

“Meaning that there’s going to be an internal enquiry, the present staff will be dispersed to new jobs, and the centre may even be closed down.”

Johnny looked anything but happy at the idea. As head of the facility, he was probably going to find himself carrying the weight for the disaster even though it had been Bruno who’d wielded the overjuiced baton. Wherever he went after this, it was bound to be downhill. For the first time ever, Micheline put a sympathetic hand over his; and, almost absently, he turned his own hand over and gave hers a return squeeze.

But Micheline hardly noticed. Johnny Tostevin was now yesterday’s news, her gesture hardly more than a reflex.

Micheline was already beginning to think about tomorrow.

AND ALMOST at that same moment, on the outskirts of one of the most fashionable of Swiss winter resorts, a Volkswagen minibus was crunching to a halt on the turning-circle in front of an empty chalet school. Its doors opened and three young men climbed out, their heads pleasantly buzzing with good times and imported beers.

“Hey,” one of them said. “Jimbo’s back,” and the others both looked up to where a single light burned in a window under the eaves.

“Let’s go see if he scored with an heiress,” one of the others said, and so laden down with cans of Stella Artois from the back of the van they clanked and stumbled their way into the building.

There had been four of them when they set out but Dieter, the young maths graduate from Mainz, had managed to pass himself off as a ski instructor and had been taken on to a party somewhere by a couple of American girls. Of those remaining, one was an Australian physics dropout and the other two were recruits who’d come to the international school via the same agency as Jim Harper. There wasn’t a single formal teaching qualification between any of them, but they got on well with the boys and the school’s end-of-year results were always good.

They made their noisy way up the back stairs past the empty dormitory level, burping and calling out Jim Harper’s name as they went.

“Shit,” the Australian said suddenly as he stepped onto the upper landing where the staff bedrooms were all situated. There was a loud crash as every can that he was carrying hit the boards. He leapt forward, his head instantly clear.

Jim Harper lay halfway down the landing, his body twisted in around the bedsheet that had dragged along behind him. The rest of his bedding made a trail back to the open doorway of his room, evidence of his slow and tortured progress towards the pay phone at the landing’s end. He’d made it about two-thirds of the way, but he wasn’t moving now. One hand was reaching out, braced hard against the boards like the pale claw of a fallen statue.

The Australian, who’d worked two summers as a lifeguard in a public pool, rolled Jim onto his side and, after checking that his airway was clear, started to put him into the recovery position.

He looked up at the other two men, who were gawking hel. . .