CW; transformation; mind alteration; body modification; pheromones
There's an odd sort of sensation that runs through you when you walk into a house you've inherited. It was a beautiful five-bedroom house in the Lake District, up in the hills a ten minute drive from the nearest village, and another forty five from the closest town. Sturdy and rustic, it should have been awe-inspiring to me, but as I held the keys in my hand and looked up at the face of it, all I could muster was sadness.
Afterall, this wasn't a
new
building to me. It was home, and had been since I was four. But cancer had finally taken Ardy, and his will clearly stated that, with my parents long-dead, and with no one else of significance in his life, the house and every possession therewith was to be left to me.
A twenty year old idiot without a hope in the world, now a worth-north-of-a-million property owner.
And truly alone.
I cracked my neck, swallowed a sob, and unlocked the door like it was any other day. Since I was seventeen, I'd been driving myself home after school and, later, work, so coming home to this quiet building wasn't new to me. Often Ardy would have been asleep on the sofa, one of his documentary series playing with the sound turned absurdly low. If he was awake, he'd be in his basement - his 'lab', as he called it. He made all manner of things, and had been a secret prodigy of digital technology back in the seventies when it was barely invented, so even now he had a habit of developing an app that he'd sell without mentioning it to anyone, netting himself a new half-million for a month's work.
I'd only discovered this, of course, when the lawyer talked me through the matters of his estate that I was inheriting, as he gave me the name of a few trusted accountants he suggested I contact. Ardy had taken care of everything himself, but I didn't know which way was up in terms of the tax, managing his investments, anything like that.
Even in his later months, as the cancer riddled him, I'd find him down there squirrelling away at something he called his 'first idea', not that I ever found out what it was.
But this time, I knew the den would be empty. I knew that when I walked past the living room, with its library wall and dvd selection, the TV would be black and even more quiet than usual. I knew the door to the lab would be unlocked, lights off, vacant.
I felt a little sick.
At some point, I apparently made it up to my room, and had laid down, because I woke up with dried tears on my face, and a weight in my chest. I checked my phone, and saw texts from people I barely knew hitting me up to say they'd heard, and how sorry they were. A few of them were callous to mention my parents, and that if I needed company I could go over, that I must be lonely.
Which, of course, I was. But how dare they think they were the solution to that. How could anyone think they would replace the man who raised me? The person who took me in, only used his - apparently
vast
- wealth to raise me, educate me.
In flashes, I mourned his quizzes, our documentary nights eating the bad pasta I cooked using a recipe book he got me. I mourned the dark hallway outside my room, and learned for the first time how big this house really was.
It had been a mad two weeks; organising his funeral was technically my responsibility, but an old colleague of his - Hallie, a woman in her fifties who seemed all too comfortable helping out - knocked on my door and offered to help. With her, we'd done the wake, the funeral, all of the burial requests he'd included in his will - all of it had been organising, thinking,
distracting
.
But that was all over now. All I had now was a hole in my chest.
DING DONG
.
I sat up. Who the
fuck
was that?
If it was a friend, I wouldn't let them in. I had a good group, but not the kinds of friend who you'd mourn with, unfortunately. Well, maybe one - Kaz. If it was Kaz, I'd let her in.
I forced myself to the window at the top of the stairs, which looked over the front door, and saw someone there. Not Kaz, but not a stranger, either.
I opened the door to Hallie, and after she grabbed me in a thick, strong hug, I let her in. She'd brought spaghetti bolognese in a tub for me.
'Food's the last thing on your mind,' she said, her soft irish tones automatically comforting. 'But you still need to eat. Eat it cold, eat it straight from the tub, I don't care, but
eat
. Promise?' I nodded as we walked in, through to the kitchen, and she put it down on the central island. 'Now - you might not want company, but I received something in the will I thought you should know about.'
I looked up at her. 'Ardy left you something?'
'From our work, way back,' she said. 'I... I don't know how much you know, but the work we did in the nineties - I was barely out of school, and he wasn't much older, but it was intense work. The kind of stuff we had to sign NDAs for, you know? Anyway, you don't need to know all that. I only tell you because he left me a note that he'd finished something he and I started, and... without wishing to sound harsh, my dear, I have no interest.'
'No interest?' I asked her, and she looked up at me with those soft green eyes of hers. She was an older woman, but it wasn't hard to see how beautiful she must have been in her youth. Hell, she was beautiful now, but in her twenties she would have been a killer. 'Must have been boring work.'
'Not at all,' she laughed. 'Dangerous, in fact. And, if he finished something down there, me even knowing about it might bring some heat on my back.'
'Heat?'
'Like I said - NDAs. If he completed work that was bought off us decades ago - which I believe is what he meant - then I should absolutely
not
know about it.' With that, she placed a card on the island, next to the tupperware. 'Plausible deniability,' she said, a glint in her eye. 'Anyway - he left everything to you, right? That makes this none of my business.'
I looked at the key, and recognised it; it was the same type he used to get into his basement lab.
What did he
have
down there?
'Why did he leave it to you, in that case?' I asked, a little lost.
Hallie shrugged. 'Maybe he thought that, because we worked together on it way back, it was
morally
right. Which is fine, but legally?' She laughed. 'Well, a man on his deathbed probably doesn't see much incentive to take his secrets to the grave. But his secrets aren't
just
his, Will.'
I nodded, and looked down at the key. 'You're not going to tell me what it was you were doing, are you.'
She shook her head, a smirk on her face. 'No. But I can't stop you from finding out what it was we did all those years ago. Just as a warning - it's not all pretty.'
I almost mentioned the fact that he was working up until the day he died, and that he was often working on that 'first idea', but something stopped me. It felt like a taboo - like a final secret between me and Ardy - something I shouldn't share with someone who obviously didn't
want
to know.
So, I thanked her for the food, hugged her, let her turn on some lights and the TV so I wasn't in the dark and quiet, and let her leave. Not even a minute after she'd left, I followed the urge to pick up the key card and hurry to the basement door.
It was a distraction, after all. Something to think about - to
do
.
The door was open, so I followed the sturdy wooden staircase down. Lights came on as I pulled the cord at the bottom of the steps, illuminating the workspace. It was a broad range, from his computer set-up on the left with dual monitors and undoubtedly housing all of those apps he'd sold over the years, to the right. It had always fascinated me, this side of the room - even as an old man, he'd been working with power tools up until the week he died, cutting metal, soldering, working with a mix of materials that he'd load in from the delivery vans outside. Most of the time I spent down here was helping him lug the heavier stuff down those steps.
His latest work sat on the workbench, looking like a Frankenstein combination of a drill base and handle, a screen from a smartphone on the top, and where the drillbit should have been was some amalgamation of sensors and lights, currently dark. Wires sprouted from its surface, twisting through the air before vanishing back into the body of it, and at least two circuit boards were on the outside of the plastic casing, held in place by the wires themselves.
The card was
almost
like the one he'd use to get in here - but it was obvious once I compared it to the one he'd left on the computer desk how different it was. Not by much, but enough to be noticeable. For one thing, it had a scan-bar, whereas the door lock ones were contactless, and the sizing was
slightly
different.
I sat at the computer and compared the cards, and managed to nudge the desk enough to jolt the computer to life. The screen lit up, and the bright blue glow illuminated the whole room enough for me to notice something.
On the computer stack, there was a custom input slot, which was
