Author's Note: This story was written for Mood-Y: Challenge 5 on LiveJournal's Section VII community.
The key mood is: spooked.
For this story, I have returned to the scenario of my trilogy: CHIMERA, IGNIS FATUUS and OF ILLUSION AND DELUSION. I do recommend reading those tales (in that order) to get a full grasp of the setting for this one.
As an additional note, the references to the little Norwegian albino girl and Napoleon's loss of his appendix as the result of a recent mission scenario involving her derive from the flashback sequences in my story THE WAVES OF CHANGE AFFAIR. However, those background references can stand on their own in this tale.
"I saw her, in the fire, but now I hear her in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night," returned the haunted man.
~~~ Charles Dickens
Three
by LaH
Spring 1965
"What on earth, or rather in hell, did you do?" Alexander Waverly demanded, with noticeable irritation, of the defected Thrush scientist on the other end of the phone line.
That former Thrush inventor was the supposedly dead Dr. Rimheac, a man very much alive but in secret protective custody by the Command. Custody indeed so secret, the Number 1 in Section I Northwest had kept that information from even his own Chief of Enforcement.
In what could only be described as something of a whine, the presumed dead man now sought to explain the situation with which his protector was taking issue. "I warned that the results might be unpredictable. That… Well, it's all rather difficult to control."
"I beg to differ, Doctor. Your initial warning was obtuse. Vague in the extreme is the only way it could be categorized."
"Still I warned you!" responded the scientist defensively, his voice noticeably rising an octave in pique. "It wasn't possible to be more specific because—"
"Yes, yes, I know," conceded Waverly. "It was all too unique to accurately detail in words."
"Thus the demonstration," reiterated Rimheac.
"You mean the experiment," Waverly corrected tersely. He was less than pleased what had been assumed to be merely a form of show-and-tell had metamorphosed into an unapproved trial run of something so patently perilous.
"What would you have had me do, Mr. Waverly? I was well aware your agents are trained for hazardous work, and you pledged to send your best. Thus—"
"My agents are also trained to assess inherent risk versus possible reward in all such dangerous situations," interrupted the Continental Chief of U.N.C.L.E. Northwest. "In this scenario my best operatives were not given any such opportunity."
"It had to be as it was," insisted Rimheac.
"So you say," Waverly challenged icily. "No prior information was made available that would have permitted me to knowledgably gainsay that opinion."
"Well, it's all over and done with now."
"Not for my two men."
"Yes, it's done. I've managed to leverage some control," Rimheac revealed unexpected good news.
"About time," Waverly stated bluntly, even as he inwardly breathed a cautious sigh of relief.
Act I: Ghosts of missions past
Autumn 1966
Napoleon Solo tried unsuccessfully to suppress a yawn. Truth be told, he was exhausted. And there was no excusable reason for that as he was currently on a fortnight of desk duty after a run-in with another Thrush mad scientist that had in the end cost him his appendix. Thus he could not claim that any hectic assignment was interfering with his regular patterns of sleep as he was for the nonce mired in naught but the more boring part of the CEA job: paperwork.
Yet, if he was honest with himself, he had to admit there was indeed cause for his undeniable exhaustion: the nightmares.
It was not unusual for a Section II enforcement agent to suffer from an occasional bout of bad dreams and sleeplessness due to something that had happened during a mission scenario. They were all only human after all, and some of the things they witnessed and endured would drive the sleep from the eyes of the very Sandman. Yet again if Napoleon was completely honest with himself, he also had to admit the nightmares preoccupying him of late were of an entirely different variety and thus infinitely more disturbing.
For in his chilling night visions, she was always there: the lonely young girl with the sad, golden eyes. He hadn't consciously thought of her in over a year. Not since that strange incident in the spring of last year when he had slashed his hands and arms breaking through a window in a Thrush prison cell. At least that was what supposedly happened. His personal recall of the episode was… well, hazy at best.
Anyway that was the very last time she had come into his mind at all: the forlorn little girl with the woe-filled golden eyes. Until recently, that is, when she had started to constantly invade his nightmares. And now she inhabited not just his sleeping hours. Even waking he sensed her… everywhere.
His most recent Command mission had indeed involved a rather strange young albino girl who was part and parcel of an unfathomable Thrush experiment. But that child had been five or six at most, and the girl of his nightmares was more like twelve or thirteen: a juvenile on the cusp of adolescence.
Both children were haunting, no question. Both seemingly victims in Thrush's never-ending quest for world dominance. Yet the golden-eyed girl was different: in the main because he wasn't sure she really even existed. She was there in his mind like a memory, and yet… Surely she was nothing more than a hallucination generated by the electrical shock he had received in Dr. Rimheac's lab two years before? Anyhow that was his first recollection of her… if it was actually a recollection.
Napoleon rubbed his forehead, somehow hoping the gesture would relieve the ache in his very brain. He knew he likely should discuss these particular nightmares with a professional of some sort, but he had a Section II's natural loathing of shrinks. It was all fine and good for such medically trained individuals to hear and assess, confidently assuming they understood the mental shadows that plagued an enforcement agent. Yet the truth simply was that they could never really understand. They had never been in the field; they had never experienced the real-life terrors such operatives faced on a seemingly regular basis. Thus they were, in the most fundamental sense, clueless.
Blissfully intruding upon Solo's uneasy ruminations, the pneumatic door to his office slid aside, revealing the person of his partner, Illya Kuryakin, newly returned from a lone assignment.
"Glad to see my not-quite-smiling face, Napoleon?" teased the other man with a small half-grin.
"Glad to see you back in one piece from Australia," conceded Napoleon as he indicated with a casual hand gesture for his partner to take a seat in one of chairs set before his desk.
"It was a rather tame mission honestly," conceded Illya in turn.
"Which is why I still don't understand that I couldn't be released to join you."
"Napoleon, you only recently had your gut sliced open without benefit of anesthesia while a madman removed a perfectly viable organ from your body. Mr. Waverly was right to sideline you for a bit."
"I'm fine." Napoleon used Illya's standard line with just as much nonchalance as the Russian usually did.
Kuryakin cocked his head and assessed his friend. "Are you, Napoleon?" he queried pointedly. "You do look rather peaked for someone who has been on desk duty more than a week."
Solo gave the other man a smile, but it was irrefutably a rather wan one. "Just bored," he hedged.
Illya was quiet for a few moments. Then he ventured, "I will admit paperwork is boring and therefore rather enervating, but I get the feeling it's something more than that."
"It's nothing." Napoleon attempted to dismiss the matter. "Nightmares. You know the deal. Sometimes they can be rather intense."
Illya's expression changed, became somewhat distracted. "Yes, I know the deal."
Now it was Napoleon who silently assessed his partner. "You've been having them too, haven't you?" he finally asked.
"We all have them from time to time." Illya made his own attempt at dismissing the issue.
Napoleon shook his head. "Not like this. Has she been invading your dreams too? The girl with golden eyes?"
Kuryakin uncomfortably shifted his body position in the chair. Yet it was truly not a physical discomfort that assailed him. "She never existed, Napoleon," he stated firmly, almost as if he would convince himself as much as Solo.
"She doesn't need to have actually existed to be part of our nightmares, Illya."
"We recently completed a very stressful assignment," Kuryakin endeavored to rationalize. "During that very stressful assignment we came in contact with an unusual young girl who, under the influence of Thrush, could be perceived as evil—"
"She wasn't evil," interrupted Solo. "She was used. She didn't understand half of what she was doing."
"We don't agree on this, Napoleon, and we never will." Illya was well aware his partner had a form of sympathetic empathy for the Norwegian albino girl. Kuryakin, however, had a less romanticized view and, from personal experience during the Great Patriotic War, knew that children weren't always innocents. "Be that as it may; it is perhaps only natural that she recall to mind that incident in Rimheac's lab where we thought to have encountered another seemingly Thrush-victimized child."
"I wish I could just conveniently tag it like that, Illya, as a perfectly natural mental correlation. But…" Napoleon sighed as he ran a hand through his dark hair, though whether in frustration or confusion Illya couldn't say.
"It's not just the dreams… nightmares…" He subsequently revealed. "I see her eyes in the glow of an incandescent light; I feel her presence whenever I'm alone; I hear her voice in the softest whistling of the wind."
"How can you know it is her voice when she never spoke?" Illya chose to focus on a logical caveat.
"How can you know she never spoke if she didn't exist except in our minds?" submitted Napoleon in turn.
"In the manifestations," Illya tried to backtrack, "her lips never moved."
"But we heard her voice in our heads nonetheless, didn't we?" pressed Napoleon.
Kuryakin released an exasperated sigh. "Yes," he acknowledged, albeit reluctantly.
"I never understood what we experienced in Rimheac's lab," Solo expressed his dissatisfaction with the supposed facts of that previous event.
"There was an electrical short that caused a complete blackout of the facility and an arc of sufficient magnitude to knock us both unconscious," declared Kuryakin sensibly.
"That is all we actually remember," pointed out Napoleon more intuitively. "I think there was more that happened that we don't remember… except as supposed hallucinations." Solo now eyed his obviously discomfited partner. "And so do you."
"This is all pointless speculation," determined an exasperated Illya.
"It isn't pointless if it rids me… us," he then corrected with another assessing look at his partner, "of the nightmares. Of our fixation with this… illusion… or whatever she is."
"Delusion," proposed Illya, "for we are sadly deluded to account her in any way real."
"We are sadly deluded if we do not pursue what further information we can," steadfastly attested Solo. "We owe ourselves that much leeway, Illya," he pressured persuasively. "We owe ourselves that peace of mind."
Reluctantly, after a rather long moment of pause, Kuryakin nodded his agreement.
Despite his initial acquiescence to the idea, Illya remained unsure whether acceding to Napoleon's resolve regarding further pursuit of whatever might have (but more than likely didn't) happen in Rimheac's lab two years before was a wise decision or not. It was all over and done after all. And Rimheac himself was dead; so there could be no clarification of any sort from the source. The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that it would all lead back to the same dead-end it had at the time.
Still, he had to admit his own nightmares were of late as beset by the image of the golden-eyed girl as apparently were his partner's. That the same imaginary manifestation had simultaneously invaded both their subconscious minds was profoundly perturbing and palpably eerie.
Their actual nightmares, from what little Solo had willingly revealed of his, did not seem to be at all the same, though they were all rooted in unsettling happenings from their past lives. Yet into the mix of those often reality-stretched and macabrely exaggerated memories had come the golden-eyed girl: a central figure and yet not. An inserted presence of which one could not help but be viscerally aware.
She stood like a sentinel on the outskirts of every shattering reflection. She said nothing in the dreams themselves; both of them agreed on that. Napoleon though insisted he heard her voice elsewhere: in the wind, in music, in any form of ringing whether it was the insistent chime of a telephone, the intrusive peal of an alarm clock or the boisterous clang of a church bell.
For himself Illya could not say he had experienced the same phenomena. Or at least he couldn't say for certain. Instinctively his more analytical side fought against accepting any such unscientific notions. But now, as he forced himself to ponder on it, he realized the undeniable truth there existed the distinct possibility he had indeed sensed the same. And that possibility left him even more disquieted and definitely uneasy in his mind.
So perhaps a bit of investigation, just to allay those mental distresses, was indeed the sensible solution.
"The mission report for THE RIMHEAC/CHIMERA AFFAIR isn't part of Central Records, Napoleon," Illya informed his friend three hours later after an initial forage in the U.N.C.L.E. archives.
"And I managed to glean from Dr. Pirelli's very pretty and rather sassy assistant that the psychological evaluations we underwent after those incidents last spring – when we couldn't recall the exact causes of several injuries we'd suffered? – are no longer part of the good doctor's medical records," Napoleon informed his partner in turn.
"That might not be related," stubbornly suggested the pragmatic Russian.
"Yet we both mentioned the Rimheac mission to Pirelli during those interviews, didn't we?" insistently forwarded the intuitive American.
"Yes," Illya reluctantly conceded.
"Then my gut tells me it's related."
Illya let out a huge sigh. As little as he liked to acknowledge it, Napoleon's hunches turned out to be spot-on nearly all of the time. It was a rare occasion when his friend's perceptual instincts failed him. "So what then do we do next?" Kuryakin instead pressed rather than questioning the reliability of Solo's inherent sixth sense.
"Well, my guess is, if those reports continue to exist at all, the one place to find them would be in the Old Man's private files."
"Napoleon, we can't!" protested an emphatic Illya.
"Why the hell not? We are spies, aren't we?" stressed Napoleon in turn.
"We are talking about the confidential files of Alexander Waverly, the Continental Chief of U.N.C.L.E. Northwest." Kuryakin reminded the other man pointedly.
"We are also talking about our potential sanity," batted back Solo just as pointedly. "Look Illya," he then softened his stance, "we don't intend to use anything we find against U.N.C.L.E. or Waverly or the Queen of England, for crissake. All we are after are answers to assure our own peace of mind. We are entitled to that."
"And I don't disagree with that in theory," Illya allowed. "However, in reality we would be doing something highly debatable with regard to the tenets of our service with the Command. Less you forget, we are bound by rules we agreed to by contract."
"If you don't want to be part of this, tovarisch," suggested Solo, "I'll understand. Still, with you or without you, I am going to do this. Frankly, I need to know. I need to halt the nightmares. I need to cease seeing, hearing and sensing that golden-eyed girl everywhere and in everything. And just as frankly, I won't be of any further use to U.N.C.L.E. if I can't somehow free myself from this haunting."
"Now you're bringing ghosts into the equation?"
"Why not?" Napoleon badgered. "Oh not the booing, floating-down-staircases and disappearing-through-walls archetype, to be sure. But ghosts in a very real sense nonetheless: mental specters of missions past."
Illya was silent for a long time, a time long enough for even Napoleon to wonder what thoughts were going through his friend's head. What moral scales was the Russian utilizing to weigh the positives and negatives of what Solo was proposing?
"You don't have fingers light enough to pull this off without me." Kuryakin finally voiced his acceptance of the plan in an acerbic manner very much in character.
Napoleon broke out in a patented, teeth-flashing, eye-crinkling smile. "Is that an offer of assistance, I'm hearing?" he queried teasingly.
"For someone who manages to catch the sound of hidden voices in the wind, your auditory processes leave much to be desired," grumped Illya, again very much in character. "Yes, that was an offer of assistance."
Napoleon clapped his partner companionably on the back. "We'll do it right, Illya; never fear. Once we have some credible intel to go on, we'll confront Mr. Waverly in person. I'm not hankering to become a wolf in sheep's clothing."
"I think all the female personnel here in HQ would disagree about the wolf part," gibed Kuryakin.
"But it's you who owns a shearling overcoat, I.K.," Solo good-naturedly gibed right back.
…continued in Act II…