The Spirit Box

by Stephen Gallagher

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Horror; Noir

Synopsis

Rachel's in trouble. She's a ticking bomb. A couple of co-workers bullied her into stealing a radical new drug from their employer, and now it's lodged inside her. They're watching her like hawks and her time's running out. John Bishop runs security for the company. As a father who once lost a teenaged daughter to an accidental overdose, his drive to hunt down the thieves and rescue their victim grows more intense with every lost minute. He can never bring his own kid back. But he can save someone else's. Which is fine until the company realises that if the swallowed package bursts and Rachel dies, their secrets are kept safe and their problem goes away. Though Bishop's on the trail, he's an easy man to cut loose and discredit. But now he's Rachel's only hope. Either the package will burst, or the boys will cut her open to get it. They're so convinced it will make them rich that they'll kill anyone who tries to take her, and hunt down anyone who succeeds. It can't end well. For somebody.

Release date: May 7, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 293

Sample

THE YOUNG black security guard came out of the booth, took the card from my hand, turned it the right way around, and swiped it through the reader. When the barrier started to rise she said, “There you go, Mister Bishop,” and handed it back.

“Thanks,” I said. My voice sounded scratchy.

The smile that she gave me was professional and courteous. No editorial content in it at all. If my appearance startled her, she didn’t show it. If my minute of dumb persistence with the card had aroused her curiosity, she didn’t show that either. She went back into the security hut and I drove on into the parking lot.

Macdonald-Stern. The company I’d spent three years helping to set up.

The plant stood in a recently re-zoned piece of open countryside to the south of the airport, out beyond the Vietnamese church. Six years ago, there had been nothing here but woodland. Four years ago the state had put in roads and basic services. All over the USA they built these research parks like cargo cultists laying out airstrips on the beach, hoping to attract the spirits of prosperity. In some areas it didn’t work, and you’d see some road named Technology Drive running off into nowhere with nothing along it but weeds and broken fences. Here it was different. Here they laid out the roads and the money came down out of the sky.

I cruised the Lexus around the parking lot. We had parking for a thousand cars in two secure areas. The lots were surrounded by woodland and had video surveillance around the clock. The plant was a short walk away; you could glimpse it from here, looking like a Mayan temple buried deep in the jungle. From the roads outside you couldn’t see anything of it at all.

We were a contract house offering analytical service to North Carolina’s medical industries. They’d create the interesting-looking molecules and we’d tell them what, if anything, each new substance might be good for. The Mayan temple was one big state-of-the-art lab facility sitting on top of The Spirit Box, an enormous climate-controlled underground vault. In the vault were the test materials belonging to our various clients, kept under conditions of rigid security. Apart from the need to avoid cross-contamination, we based our procedures on the assumption that any one of those client substances might turn out to be the cure for cancer.

Something registered in the corner of my eye, and I felt a sudden shock. Christ, was that me? I’d caught sight of myself in the rear view mirror as I was backing into a vacant space. I managed to brake about an inch short of the Taurus in the next slot.

Then I had to take a moment.

When I’d locked the car I walked along the campus-style pathway to the admin building. There I went through the double doors into our entrance hall, and approached the desk.

“Hi,” I said to the Security Man behind it.

He said, “Good morning, Mister Bishop.”

I looked down at myself. I’d been wearing casual clothes to begin with, and now they were creased and rumpled from a day and a night’s wear. There’s casual, and there’s casual.

I said, “You have to excuse me. I didn’t get time to change.”

“You look fine to me, sir,” the Security Man said. “Can I get you anything?”

“Isn’t there somewhere I can get hold of a razor and stuff?”

“You can tell me what you need and I’ll have it brought to your office. Or there’s a vendor in the second-floor men’s room in the west building.”

“What kind of things does it have?”

“Razors, toothpaste, shoeshine … everything you need except the alibi.”

“Thanks,” I said. “And while I’m taking care of that, can you call Mickey Cheung in the Spirit Box and tell him I’ll be with him in ten minutes?”

He reached for his phone.

“I’ll do that,” he said.

I said, “Thank you,” and set off toward the west building.

I knew I looked bad and I probably looked as if I was hung-over. I caught myself walking unsteadily, and I wouldn’t have blamed anyone for thinking I was drunk. But it was sheer physical tiredness. I’d gone around twenty-six hours without sleep and I wasn’t about to stop.

I went through the connecting hall and into the west building, where I took the glass elevator up to the second floor. Four other people were along for the ride and not one of them betrayed any sign of having noticed me. They studied the floor, their wristwatches, the view outside.

In the men’s room, to the sound of running water, I stood by the washbasins and emptied all of the money out of my pockets and onto the marble. I was able to scrape together enough change for a little vendor pack containing a toothbrush, a comb, floss, breath mints, a sachet of cologne, and a tube of toothpaste that was sized for a doll to use. The men’s room lighting was discreet and the mirrors had that gold-tinted glass that makes you look tanned and better than you’ve any right to, but to my own eyes I still looked like a wreck. I shaved in hot water, washed in cold, combed my hair, cleaned my teeth, did whatever I could to tidy myself up. Someone came in and vanished into one of the toilet cubicles. I never saw who it was. He was still inside there when I left.

Everyone was going about their lives as if nothing remarkable had happened.

Heading back toward the management block, I did my best to walk straight and look steady. The cold water had done something for me. It had dragged me through the sleep barrier and into the new day. Not that the new day was a place I had any great wish to be.

From behind me, I heard, “John!”

I stopped and turned. I saw the boyish figure of Rose Macready. I’d just walked past her.

“Sorry,” I said.

“You were walking along in a daze.” Then she took a moment to study me more closely. “What happened?”

I wasn’t sure what to say, so I just said a lame-sounding, “I had a bad night.”

“You should have called me. I could have made it a better one.”

“Rose …” I began, half-wanting her to be the first one I’d tell, but not even wanting to approach the moment where I told anyone at all.

“I’m teasing you, John,” she said. “Come on. What’s the order of the day?”

Rose Macready was only one step down from the top job in People Resources. In the old days it would have been called Personnel. She was single, around thirty-five years old, and was the only woman other than Sophie that I’d slept with since I’d been married. Rose and I had agreed to forget it. But I’d found that you don’t.

The order of the day?

“I don’t know yet,” I said.

“Want to meet me for lunch?”

“I think I’ll be out,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, and then as she was turning to walk on, she added, “Talk to me later if you change your mind.”

THE ELEVATOR reached the bottom of the shaft, and I stepped out into the Spirit Box.

Actually, what I entered was the foyer to the vault’s Master Control Suite, a subterranean room with the lighting plan of a flight deck and more processing power than a NASA mission. From where I stood I could see into the suite through three walls of glass that were variously angled like the facets on a diamond.

These places always look the same to me. It doesn’t matter what they’re controlling—a theme park, an Imax cinema, a couple of hundred channels of cable TV—they always have the same hardware, the same feel, the same one guy sitting in the middle of it all reading a newspaper.

Except that today, Mickey Cheung was already on his feet and waiting to buzz me through.

I don’t know if it was his black-rimmed glasses or the fact that he spent so much of his working day underground, but almost everything about Mickey made me think of a mole. I reckon that nature had it in mind for him to be small and round, but a twice-weekly workout kept him slim-waisted and chunky like a little Stretch Armstrong.

The doors slid open and as soon as I was through them I said, “You left a message on my service last night. eYou played me a recording of a girl crying. I didn’t imagine that, did I? Yes or no?”

But he was staring at me.

“What happened to you?” he said.

“Never mind that. You did leave me a message?”

“Only after I spent most of the evening trying to get hold of you.”

“Well, I’m here now. What was it all about?”

“Security got an anonymous tip-off,” he said. “The caller said, if you want to know who’s been stealing client samples out of the Spirit Box, take a close look at an employee name of Don Farrow. I checked on Farrow, he’s just one of the kids, basically a janitor. I got a master key and looked in his locker. His phone was inside. He had a dozen missed calls and a voicemail waiting. That was the message I played out to you.”

“It was a girl’s voice.”

“I noticed that.”

“It sounded like my daughter,” I said. “Did you notice that?”

He looked at me strangely. “Not to me, it didn’t,” he said.

“Where’s this Don Farrow?” I said. “I want to talk to him.”

“Nobody’s seen him since the weekend,” Mickey said.

“How much substance is there in this?”

“Let me show you.”

One of Mickey’s assistants took over in the control suite, and I followed him through to the vault itself. The connecting tunnel was narrow-sided and round-ceilinged, and it was lit with an orange-white glow from stripes recessed into the walls. Walking behind Mickey, I found myself looking down at a pale scar on the crown of his head. It made a white L-shaped mark where the hair didn’t grow. Mickey’s hair was cut short, and it was dark like velvet.

Just like a mole’s, in fact.

There was nothing supernatural behind the Vault’s nickname. A spirit box was the lockable case in which a Southern gentleman kept his expensive liquor. Once the name had caught on there were one or two attempts to attach urban legends to it—like a story of a construction worker killed and left buried down there during the excavations, completely untrue—but the name mainly stuck because of the vault’s tight security.

It was a clean area with a filtered air supply, just like the environment where they make microchips. Everyone in there had to wear paper suits and masks. A thumbprint reader checked our authorisation and then lasered each of us a wrist tag like a new baby’s, barcoded and single-use. We pulled on thin latex gloves and then clipped the tags on over them.

Once through the airlock, we’d have to show our tags for scanning at all the automatic doorways. Otherwise they wouldn’t let
us through. All movements in the vault were logged on a hard drive and observed by video. Try to cheat the procedure and you’d start a lockdown and a big alert.

We came into the central hub of the vault, a wide corridor with a tight curve to it, and here we moved aside to let one of the suited assistants pass. Her heavy trolley had an electric motor assist. It moved on gray rubber tires and the motor clicked on and off as she maneuvered it.

“Morning, Lucy,” Mickey said.

“Hey, Mickey,” she said.

She sounded young, and she was a slight figure. I glanced after her as she pulled the logged-out samples toward the lab exit. Seventy-five percent of the people in Mickey’s department were the sons and daughters of company employees or contractors. For many of them, it was a first job. For the company it was an unofficial family-friendly policy. For all that this was a high-tech environment theirs was essentially low-grade work, barely a cut above stacking the shelves in a Wal-Mart.

We passed on. In the white light and spacesuits we might have been in some slow-moving science fiction Art Movie. The storage galleries were off to our left, radiating from the corridor like spokes from the hub. There were five levels, all but one of them exactly like this one. We were heading for an internal elevator bank that would take us down to the lowest.

How was I feeling? In turmoil, to be honest with you. On the outside I was moving normally while my gut and all the way up into my chest felt like a tight bag of snakes. Part of me knew beyond all logic that it was Gilly’s voice I’d heard in that message. Logic suggested otherwise.

Another of the young interns went by with a trolley of samples for the labs upstairs. Most of them were bright kids, in my limited experience. They were straight enough, but I wouldn’t have called any of them committed. Push the wagon, pull the wagon. What kind of a career would you call that?

We rode the elevator down to sub-level five. The elevator car was an odd shape, with a bumper rail at knee height. I could feel a pressure in my head. I don’t know if it was real or imagined, but it wasn’t pleasant.

This level wasn’t quite like the others. It wasn’t as bright, it wasn’t as stark. It didn’t have the same feel as the rest of them, either. When they’d dug right down into the red Carolina dirt they’d taken it all the way to the bedrock, and the bedrock they’d reached wasn’t even. So the lowest level of the underground structure was fitted in with the contours of the substrate, which meant that there was less available space and its layout was eccentric. The main corridor wasn’t a circle, it was a snake.

The levels above us were like a space station. This was more like a space station’s crypt. Bare concrete, sealed. Bulkhead lighting. A painted floor. Of all the levels, this was the least-used. There was almost nothing down here but the old Russian stuff.

Lights flickered on as we stepped out of the elevator. They’d sensed our presence, and they’d power-down after we’d quit the area. Mickey knew where he was going, and led me around a couple of turns and into the second of three parallel galleries.

“Something here you need to see,” he said.

The ceiling was low and the walls had a slight kink to them, so that the far end of the chamber ran on just out of sight. There had to be a thousand or more client samples on the shelves in this one gallery. They were all in packaging that was basic and low-tech. I saw a varied selection of scruffy boxes and jars, each item placed on its weight-sensitive pedestal and underlit like installation art. I could see at least one brown-paper parcel that had been vacuum-sealed into a thick plastic envelope, string and address labels and all.

“You’re looking at the Soviet fire sale collection,” Mickey Cheung said. “When it came to us, it arrived in fifty crates without a scrap of documentation. Our deal with the client is that we work on it at cheap rate when there’s slack time in the labs. Barely two per cent’s been touched, and nothing in that’s been useful.”

We walked down the gallery, and Mickey said, “Each individual sample is logged with a number and stands on a pressure pad recording its mass. The theory is that if any part of any sample gets removed without authorisation, it shows up. I’ve got five samples down here that defied the laws of physics and got bigger. We got variations of up to half a gram over recorded weight. That’s too much of an increase for either oxidation or moisture to account for.”

We stopped before the samples. There were five different jars, all with screw-on lids, and I could see that each had been topped up with a white powder that didn’t quite match the contents of any of them. Something had spilled. I wiped a gloved finger across the shelf by the base of the nearest jar, and it left a clean mark.

“Talcum powder?” I said.

“At a guess,” Mickey said.

“Anything here that’s high-value?”

“The chemicals are probably worth less than the talcum powder,” He said. “You’d hear rumors about the kind of things the Russians were working on, but we’ve yet to find anything startling to back them up. I reckon it was mostly just Cold War propaganda. Bear in mind that all this stuff came from the labs that couldn’t hack it in the free market. All the promising research found commercial sponsors.”

“So the chances of pulling out a golden ticket are pretty slim.”

“I’m not saying there’s no possible chance of finding the chemical basis of a brand-new zillion-dollar product somewhere in here. The problem is that you’re looking at everything from bug spray to voodoo juice, and nobody knows which is which.”

“Voodoo juice?”

“Zombie cucumber from the parapsychology labs in Krasnodar. Imagine anyone being prepared to shell out a quarter of a mill for that.”

“So why pick on these to steal?”

“Because if you look around, you can see that this is the only area the cameras don’t cover.”

We were finished, here. He’d made his point and there was nothing more of use that we could do. I was glad to get out.

As we were going back up in the elevator, I said to Mickey, “How would Don Farrow get the stuff out of the vault?”

“He wouldn’t. Don Farrow’s never had access down here. So we’re probably talking about a team.”

“That still leaves the problem of getting the stuff through the searches.”

He sucked in and blew out a faintly exasperated breath, and the sides of his mask moved with the pressure.

“Well,” he said, “you’ve seen the procedure. You strip to walk in, you strip to walk out. My guess is that ingestion or body cavity would be the only ways to go.”

“You mean, swallow it?”

“Or stick it where the sun don’t often shine. Personally, I’d swallow it. I wouldn’t care to have a workmate stroll around the corner and find me in mid-insertion. There’s no easy quip for an occasion such as that.”

There was nothing more to see or say, so we returned to the surface. I was finding it hard to get my breath so I pulled my mask off in the elevator. I was aware of Mickey watching me. Studying me, even. I didn’t look up or meet his eyes.

“Rough night last night?” he said after a while.

“May you never know,” I said.

LET ME just take you back to the day before.

With luck it’ll explain everything. Why I was in the state that I was in, and why I went on to do what I did.

She stood at the top of the stairs and called down to me, “Daddy, I’ve done something stupid.”

And that really was the beginning of it.

I looked up from the box that I was packing. She was at the top of the big open-plan stairway that came down from the bedroom level and right into the living area. It was a huge house, the kind they mean when they talk about a place to die for. And rented, of course. We’d been in it for most of the three years. Gillian was holding the handrail and looking scared.

“No kidding,” I said testily. “What now?”

There was a lot still to be done, and she hadn’t been of much help so far. She’d been moody and obstructive in the way that only a fifteen-year-old can. My immediate guess was that she’d been kicking at the doors or the furniture, taking out her resentment on the fabric of the place, and now she was worried because something had been damaged.

“Seriously,” she said.

I can’t tell you if she took a mis-step then or if her legs just gave out, but I could see her waver and then her foot missed the stair. Her heel clipped the riser and she sat down heavily, all at once. One hand was still holding the rail and she seemed to have no coordination. She slipped down onto the second stair and looked for a moment as if she might lose her grip and slide all the way.

I’ve no memory of laying down whatever I was holding, or of crossing the room. All I remember is that in an instant I was up there with her, steadying her onto the third step down. She let go of the handrail and she held onto my arm tightly.

“What have you done?” I said. A pallor had washed out her tan, and I could see the blue of the veins through her skin. Her touch was cold and very damp. Her hand on my arm seemed small.

“I took some pills,” she said.

“What pills?” I said. “Where?”

“The ones you told me to clear out of the bathroom cabinet.”

I tried to make it all compute. But it just wouldn’t go. Pills. Bathroom cabinet. She’d done what? I tried to grasp the sense of it, the scale. But I was utterly unprepared.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said.

I disengaged myself and left her there, and I went through the master bedroom to the bathroom. The bedroom had its own deck overlooking the lake, and a loft area which I’d been using as an office. The bathroom was carpeted, tiled, marbled, jacuzzied. The lighting alone would be enough to make you feel like you’d made it, that to live in a place like this you had to be up there with the rich. She’d left the lights switched on. The hidden fan was running.

The cabinet was directly above the basin. Its doors were wide open and the middle shelf had been swept clear of bottles and containers. As far as I could remember there should have been eight or a dozen of these, mostly over-the-counter remedies that had been bought as needed and then kept in case they’d ever be needed again.

All that remained on the shelf was the floss and the toothpaste, pushed over to one side. Most of the containers lay in the basin below, their childproof caps off. I sorted out odd ones at random, and shook them. Only one or two still had tablets inside. The rest were empty.

There were more medicines here than I could remember buying, and a few empty blister packs as well. Some we’d brought out with us from England. Others had the labels of various American drugstores. I’d never really kept track.

She surely couldn’t have taken all of them. Could she? But if she hadn’t, where were they?

I went back. She was still on the third stair down. She was hunched forward with her arms wrapped around her middle and her head almost on her knees.

I sat beside her and showed her the plastic bottle in my hand. It was a twenty-five capsule pack of painkillers and there was one lone caplet rattling around inside it.

“Where’s the rest of these?” I said.

“Don’t shout at me,” she said.

I wasn’t shouting. Or I didn’t think I was. But I needed her to feel some of the urgency that was beginning to overwhelm me. I was thinking that I wanted her to see it and remember it so that this would never, ever happen again.

I said, “I’m just trying to work out what you did.”

She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, and obviously not for the first time. They were teary and red and sore.

“I told you,” she said.

“You didn’t tell me how many.”

I waited.

“Oh, God,” I said. “You didn’t really take them all.”

“I’m sorry,” she said miserably.

Phone. Ambulance.

I tried to stand, and she clung onto me.

“No,” she said.

I was about to say something sharp when I realized that she wasn’t trying to prevent me from getting to a phone. She just didn’t want me to leave her alone on the stairs again. She wasn’t letting go.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you downstairs. Stand up.”

“I can’t.”

“I’ll help you.”

She wasn’t exaggerating. I genuinely don’t think she had the strength to stand up unaided. I had to take most of her weight as I walked her down the stairs while she moved her legs like a puppet does, brushing the ground and not really walking at all. We couldn’t move anywhere near as fast as I would have liked.

“I want to go to a hospital,” she said.

“I know.”

“I want to go now.”

“I’ll call an ambulance.”

Down the stairs, one at a time, me taking the weight, both of us moving in slow motion.

“I feel awful,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “it was a stupid thing to do.”

I got her down to the living room couch, where she rolled onto her side and curled up like a sick animal.

“Try to bring some of them back, Gilly,” I said.

“No,” she moaned.

“Put your fingers down your throat. If you don’t do it, I’ll have to.”

First aid? I had no idea. Who does? They used to tell you to make a child drink salt water to trigger the vomit reflex. Now they say don’t, because of saline poisoning. Throwing up helps. Or makes it worse. It all depends.

There had never been any time in my life when I needed help more.

My phone was out in the car so I picked up the house phone, and it was dead.

Of course it was. I don’t know why I was surprised. I’d arranged disconnection myself, less than a week ago. They’d asked me to pick a time and I’d said, off the top of my head, Oh, why don’t we make it ten o’clock. I’d been assuming that we’d be done and out by then.

In spite of this I dialed 911 anyway, and of course nothing happened, and so then like an idiot I dialed it again, and then I slammed down the receiver ran out to the Lexus.

I’D MOVED the car off the driveway to make a clear space for the movers’ truck in case they turned up early. Gilly and I were supposed to be closing up the house in the morning and then checking into one of those suite hotels later on in the day. Her mother had gone back to England ahead of us and Gilly had a ticket to join her in a few days’ time, while I was to stay on and work out the last weeks of my contract.

It had been our first time living abroad. As far as Sophie and Gilly were concerned, it was supposed to have been understood from the beginning that I’d be working at a burnout pace and they wouldn’t get to see too much of me. I’d argued that I was doing it for all of us, but I think we all knew that this was really for me. My moment.

I had no illusions about it. Landing this job had felt like finally making it into a team for the Olympics. In a perfect world, I’d be ten or fifteen years younger and it might have been the start of something. But I’d been around for long enough to know that it’s never a perfect world. This was my high point, not my debut. At least I’. . .