Free Janus by John Park Page B

silence. She winced and sat down with her elbows on the table.
    It was there where she had left it, next to the pepper grinder, the silvery box she had found in Barbara’s pocket. An audio recorder. She wasn’t sure why she had taken it and said nothing to Charley, but it had felt urgent at the time to have something of Barbara’s that no one else could handle or take away.
    And like too much else it had turned out to be a cheat. The thing worked: it would produce a window of quivering black bars showing how much noise was in each of six frequency bands; it would display a set of numbers identifying the very second when each burst of sound had been recorded. But of Barbara herself . . .
    In the clinic she had seemed calmer; though she muttered to herself, she seemed unaware of Elinda or anything around her. The sounds she made, if they really were words, were almost meaningless: “Do. What remember. Do. Do.”
    Elinda thumbed the replay button again. And again came the empty hissing, and the few muttered syllables, hardly even recognisable as her voice, “Testing, testing . . .” Was that to be the last coherent thought to come from her lips?
    Elinda’s eyes closed. She let her head sink onto her forearms. Just for a moment, rest.
    Darkness flowed past her, through her. She twisted in the current and was standing on stone at the edge of the water. Her shadows forked behind her, and the moon in the water drew her eyes. It blurred and warped and began to grow. The moon rose towards her, to meet her at the boundary of air and water. It changed. Its mouth gaped and its empty eyes stared.
    She was bolt upright, pushing down on the table top as though she had to hold it in its place. She choked. “Christ. Jesus fucking Christ. What was that?” She lurched to the window and clawed back the blind.
    The light beat at her. She made herself stare at the mountains and the lurid sky until the ache in her eyes had driven some of the nightmare away. She smiled grimly. “Yeah. Gonna be a long night.
    “Shit. Oh, shit. Barb, what’s happened to you? Are you taking me with you, wherever you’ve gone?”
    She went into the living room, then into all the rooms, snapping on lights. At Barbara’s study she stopped and looked in, her hands on either side of the doorframe. It was unusual to find the door ajar. Barbara had been—was,
was
—meticulous about things like that. Elinda pushed the door fully open and went in.
    There was a small, stiff-backed brown notebook on the table. It was closed, and she did not feel ready to violate its secrecy. She could find no signs of whatever Barbara had been going through. The room was meticulously tidy.
    Except for the waste bin, an empty paint can covered in local tree bark. It was full to overflowing with sheets of paper, more than Elinda could remember seeing in one place. She plucked at an exposed corner. A wad of paper shifted and a couple of sheets fell to the floor. They were data sheets from the lab where Barbara worked, crumpled so that Elinda could see Barbara’s quaint, backward-slanted copperplate in green ink covering their backs. Some of the phrases seemed familiar. She picked up one of the sheets and, smoothing it on the table, sat down to read it.
    After a few moments she picked another sheet off the floor and compared it with the first. Then she examined the others. There were lists of names, and comments she could not understand on some of the sheets, but three were clear enough. They were a rough draft of the leaflet that had appeared two mornings earlier.

FOUR
    Grebbel left the treatment room and closed the door behind him. In the lobby, he checked the room number he had written down and followed a short corridor to a room smelling of solvents. He knocked on the open door and went in. A lab and storeroom. He found he recognised fume hoods and petri dishes, a centrifuge, a microbalance, among other glassware and instruments. Near the door was a desk that looked to have been