Airship Nation (Darkworld Chronicles Book 2)

by Tom DeMarco

  What Mr. Cavanaugh had called ‘the Mansion’ was an enormous estate—early twentieth century—set in its own park. Even to a man who himself lived in a palace, the place was stunning. Loren wandered through the grounds, marveling at the sweeping spaces, the lawns, the huge mature trees. While most of the world, in the absence of motorized aids, had fallen behind on lawn and garden care, everything here was in a state of near perfection. The grass was neatly clipped, the hedges trim, the fish ponds clean and thriving, the brick walkways newly pointed. Wherever he walked, he came upon black suited maintenance men. He supposed they were Jansenists. What was more exciting, though, than the efforts of the present day workers, was the achievement of whoever had designed the grounds. He wondered who that long dead person could have been, and what vision had propelled him.

  The park was full of people. They were family groups, many with baskets of lunch, with children in tow, dressed for a holiday outing. Shortly after three, they began streaming toward the Mansion. Loren followed at a distance. He had no desire to arrive too early. He would watch from the back of the congregation. By the time he found his place on the westward sloping lawn behind the main house, there was a huge crowd. The rear of the house had a terrace that was bordered by a stone wall, as high as a tall man. The crowd was on the far side of the wall. A stage had been erected on the terrace and on it was a pair of jugglers. There were clowns in circus paint on the corners of the stage, and others running through the audience as well. Loren could hear the shrill laughter of children interacting with the performers.

  By the time she came on the stage, the sun was down close to the horizon. In shone on her like a spotlight through a cut in the clouds, golden and bright. She could not have made it better if she had arranged it herself. When the sun set there were arc lights focused on her. She spoke for nearly two hours.

  Loren was so far away, he could not have sworn in a court that the Lady was Sonia. He knew it was, but not from what he could see or hear that day. The loudspeaker system was poor, full of distortion and static. He could not even identify her voice with any assurance, though again, he had no doubts. And he could not make out all of what she said. But what did come through was her mastery of the audience. The thousands seated beneath her on the lawn were in thrall. She spoke on the two themes that Mrs. Cavanaugh had mentioned: Evil at large in the world, and errors of the flesh.

  She gave them no good news, no comfort. They were thoroughly bad in their hearts, she said, and they believed her. They had to struggle against themselves, to suppress their pride and their worldliness. They would fail again and again; “Saint Paul tells us that a just man falls into sin seven times a day,” she quoted; they would have to pick themselves up and try once more, and then once more again, and then again, and again and again. They could not save themselves from their own frailty, she said, except with her help. She would help them rise above the flesh, but only if they were prepared to sacrifice. Their salvation was to be through sacrifice. What she would require of them would push them beyond their limits to endure, but they would endure if they put their trust in her. She was going to call on them to dedicate their lives to good, not good in the abstract, that would be too hard for them, poor ignorant humans. They would achieve good through the simpler expedient of pitting themselves against evil. They would atone for errors of the flesh by sacrificing that flesh in the war against evil. The unholiness that was arrayed against them was a Dark Presence, shutting out the light of the sun, shading over the happiness of the young and the innocent. The Dark Presence was a force, an island nation of evil. It had conquered them, and they had never even fought back. It had taken their power away from them, subjugated them, made them live like animals. But she would lead them against the Dark Presence. They would strike and destroy and overwhelm, and thus attain their salvation.

  At the end, the audience stood up, almost totally silent. They walked out in orderly fashion along the tree-lined exit road. Loren could see that most of those around him had been much moved by what they had heard. Some of them were crying.

  On the road back toward town, He found himself in conversation with an older couple. The woman was silent, but the man drew him out, asking questions about his origins and his accent. It was all very friendly. They even offered him dinner and a place to sleep for the night, which he accepted. He got into the bed as soon as the meal was over and was instantly asleep.

  His dream was of Sonia. She was praying over him, at his funeral. He looked up at her from the casket. She was standing immediately over his head, and he could see up her robe, her bare legs rising into the darkness. She had her legs apart over him, one foot on either side of his head. His eyes were locked open, unable to move from their point of focus between her legs. She was speaking, not to him, but to the assembled masses. She was lecturing them on errors of the flesh. They were worshiping her, he could feel their adulation; she was for them the essence of purity and of virtue. He was afraid that they would notice where his eyes were fastened, only he could not blink and could not look away. He could only hope his open gaze would escape detection, but it did not. There were cries of outrage from the assemblage, at first from just a few and then from everyone. They were furious. They surged forward to take hold of him. Their hands were on him. They were wrestling him out of the coffin.

  “Get his feet. Get the line on him!”

  “Sleeps naked, just what you’d expect.”

  “Wha…?” Loren tried to sit up. There were hands on his chest pushing him back into the bed.

  “We’re not taking him in in his birthday suit. There’s the woman of the house we got to go past, a good god-fearing woman. Here, put these on him.”

  He could feel hands holding down his upper body, while others were pulling something over his legs, lifting him up and working the fabric down over him. There was a light, a single bright spot of light that blinded him, a flashlight. Half a dozen men were in the room with him. The zipper of the pants was slashed upward, and the belt fastened at his midriff. The hands were lifting him off the bed.

  “Get a line on his hands now. Behind his back.”

  “What is this…?” A hard cuff on the side of his head

  “Shut up, you. Or you’ll get more of the same.”

  “Not around his ankles, stupid. Or we’ll have to carry him. Around his middle. Here, get his shirt too. Put it over him, right over the ropes.”

  “Who are you?” His own voice sounded raspy and frightened.

  A face thrust immediately into his, lit up by the light: “Shut your fucking mouth. Do you hear? Shut it!” And a punch to his midriff, hard enough to double him over and expel his breath. A sudden rush of nausea.

  They were pushing him out the door and then along the corridor toward the stairs. At the head of the stairs, the elderly man and his wife were standing in robes in a bedroom door. They had hard, unfriendly expressions. Loren felt hands pushing at him, and suddenly he was overbalanced over the stair. He thought he was going to tumble down it out of control, down the steep hard flight of stairs. He fell to his knees to lower his center of gravity, hoping to be able to roll rather than fall flat and unprotected. The force of the fall, he thought could break his neck either way. But the men had grabbed him again, holding him from falling and wrenching him back up to his feet. In the light of the hall he could see they were all dressed in black. A moment later he was out the door. They lifted him and threw him like a sack into the back of a flat-bed wagon. He could smell the horse or horses. Some of the men were climbing into the back of the wagon with him. They had their feet on him, keeping him down. It was bitterly cold. There was a lurch and the sound of hooves as they began to move forward.

  After an interminable ride, he was pulled out of the cart and propelled toward the door of a low white building. There were stairs leading down from the entrance, half a flight. He stumbled down them under the force of a push and sprawled onto the floor of the brightly lit room. The floor seemed to be made of packed earth. He
raised himself to his knees to look around. There was a heavy wooden table in front of him with a black suited man seated behind it. The man was lifting himself partway out of his seat to peer at Loren over the table. There were perhaps ten other men in the room, all in black. None looked friendly. One of them, the youngest looking, had a face deformed with hatred. As Loren looked up stupidly at him, the man spat full in his face.

  “Here none of that,” the one behind the table said. “We’ll only have to clean him up. We’ve got better things to do. Hold his head up.”

  Hands in his hair, wrenching backward, holding his face in the light where the man could see.

  “Let’s see which of our friends this one is.” He had a stack of what looked to be large format photos in front of him. The hard paper was wrinkled, as though the prints had been dried carelessly. The man took one photo at a time off the top of the stack, held it up to compare it to Loren’s face, and then after rejecting it, put it onto the bottom of the stack. Loren could see there was writing on the backs of the photos. There were perhaps fifty of them.

  “Aha,” said the man at last. “Here we have him.”

  He turned the print around to read what was on the back. Loren saw his own face in the photo. It was a picture of him in uniform, not the old jumpsuit uniform, but the new white and gold. So it was a photo from sometime in the last two years.

  “Captain Loren Martine,” the man read. His expression was suddenly cruel. “Well, isn’t this a nice catch? So good of you, Captain, to come to us, to save us the trouble of coming after you.”

  He returned the photo to the top of the stack. Then he placed all the photos down on the table, tapping the edges to neaten the stack.

  “Take him out.” It was a barked order.

  Someone was moving up behind him. Loren felt a sudden need to know who else they had photos of, who else was in the stack. As he was lifted to his feet, he stumbled near the end of the table. The man behind him cursed. Loren lifted himself, then pushed hard to his right and got a knee under the end of the table. He lifted it, upsetting the table and sending the stack of photos skittering over the floor. The pictured faces he could see were those of Edward, Kelly, Adjouan, Elgar Klipstein, Gordon Buxtehude. There were a lot more, all familiar, but his mind had no chance to register them. The cursing man was advancing on him, his two hands together as a sledgehammer, swinging furiously at his head. Loren tucked his head, tried to roll away from the blow. It hid him hard under the shoulder. He felt himself falling, then crashing up against the side of the upset table. The table was heavy and didn’t give at all. His head was full of sudden bright spots of light. He came down with is left cheek on top of one of the photos. When his vision cleared he could see something, but not all of the photo beneath him. He could see only the eyes. All the rest was out of focus. The eyes seemed to be Kelly’s. But he thought he had seen Kelly’s picture go flying further off to the right. This should not be hers, unless perhaps there were duplicates. He was still groggy.

  He felt himself being lifted up off the floor roughly. In that second, he looked again at the photo. Looking back up at him were the soft rounded features of his daughter, Shimna.

  14

  WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD

  The place where they put him was a tiled bath in the basement of the mansion. It had several stall showers, some curtained dressing rooms and four enclosed rooms with toilets and sinks. There was a tub room to one side with a large, old fashioned bathtub. Aside from a locked closet, that was it. The main door to the baths was barred from the outside. The windows were high up the wall and small. The whole area was full of a damp pervasive cold.

  It took him an hour to free himself of the lines he’d been tied with. His left eye was swollen partly shut from impact with the table. He ran cold water over it at one of the sinks. There was an angry bruise on his cheek underneath the eye. Loren stared at himself in the mirror in the dim light. What was there in that face to hate? What had kindled the disgust of the black-suited men? He felt nothing toward them, how then could they have built up so much rage against him? The pale frightened face in the mirror seemed an unlikely object for so much feeling. Of course, the face wasn’t the object at all, Loren himself wasn’t the object. It was his misfortune to stand in for what they hated. He was just a symbol, as everything is a symbol. He was the enemy, the unholy, a soldier of the Dark Presence.

  The white tile floor felt icy against his bare feet. In one corner of the room was a pile of dirty towels, not too damp. He wrapped himself in them and tried to get some sleep. His mind was not functioning very well, he knew; perhaps sleep would help. He did seem to drop off, but then woke with a start almost immediately, shaking with cold.

  There was still no light coming in from the windows, only the faint glow of the one safety light in the ceiling. If there was electricity, he thought, there must be more lights than that. He went back over the room again, groping in the dark, paying particular attention to the side of the door through which he had entered. Sure enough, there was an ancient electrical switch up high beside the door jamb. He rotated the switch and caused fluorescent lights to flicker on overhead. There had not been much electrical power in evidence near Asheville, and he wondered what source they had found for this. If there was power, there was perhaps heat as well. He looked around for a thermostat. Failing to find that, he checked the hot water in the shower. After a moment it did indeed run warm and then hot. He stripped off his clothes and got in. After the shower, he left the water running to warm the room. It gave him a grim satisfaction to think of using up all the hot water and letting his stone-faced captors start their morning with cold baths. Feeling much better, he bedded down on the pile of towels and slept deeply.

  Around noon, the door opened briefly, long enough to shove in a tray of food, a plate of some hot cereal with honey poured over it and a glass of milk. A few more hours of waiting after that. There could be no way, he suspected, to anticipate what would happen next. He knew he ought to be frightened. He was, a bit, because of the obvious rage of the black-suits at his presence. And because of Sonia. ‘There is no excess that unreason can’t lead her to.’ But by the time his captors came for him, he was more bored than frightened. He got up and followed docilely where they led.

  The upper floors of the mansion were filled with museum pieces: carved wooden furniture and tapestries and Chinese vases and long, silk upholstered divans with incidental tables made of ebony and tall baroque lamps. The rugs underfoot were oriental, all in perfect repair. The rooms looked like the setting for an historical film. There were garden flowers in vases in each of the rooms. Loren saw domestic servants in white livery, cleaning and carrying trays of glasses and plates.

  They passed through the main part of the house and up a wide curved stair to the third floor. Loren followed the lead black-suit, and two more followed behind him.

  There were skylights the full length of the corridor he was prodded along. A double door at the corridor’s end led them into an ante-room, as ornately furnished and decorated as everything else. One wall had a row of suits of armor, standing under colored shields with swords and maces tied across them. Standing by the far door were four young women in short black dresses, almost like cocktail dresses. All four were dark-haired and pretty. They seemed to be seventeen or eighteen, no older. They were grinning, as though with anticipation. He had been able to hear their giggles all the way down the hall. As he approached, all of them were staring at him, fascinated. Their eyes were shining. It occurred to him that they might be on something, some drug. As soon as he was past, they burst out into girlish laughter.

  The black-suits behind him, grabbed him now and pushed him through the door into a kind of library office. Loren pitched forward onto the rug. He had no doubt the sudden show of force was for the benefit of whoever was in the room. One of the men kicked at him as he began to rise. He stayed put on the floor and looked up.

  Sonia was seated at a library table underneath a hig
h arched window with leaded panes. She swiveled around in her seat to face partially toward the middle of the room. She glanced momentarily at Loren, without interest, and then up at one of the men.

  “This is the captive, Martine, Milady.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “As you instructed.”

  “Yes.” There were some papers on the table in front of her. She turned back to them for a moment, as though considering returning to her work and ignoring them. Then she sighed slightly. “Stand him up,” she said, “and we’ll have a look.”

  Loren was lifted so forcefully that his feet left the floor. The two men who had raised him, remained holding him tightly, one at each side. Sonia stood up and crossed the room to him. She gave no sign of recognition. She looked at him directly, unsmiling. Her hand reached out to touch the swollen part of his brow and cheek. The hand was icy on his flesh.

  “What’s this?”

  “He acted up, Milady. Needed some correction.”

  “But you have bruised his pretty face.”

  “Yes…” The man looked uncomfortable.

  “We’ll let it pass,” she said. She patted Loren twice on the cheek, just below the injury. “Put him on the ring.”

  Another burst of giggles from the girls, who were watching from the door. Loren was pushed, more gently this time, toward an alcove between the bookshelves where a thick circular metal ring, as big as a man’s head, had been set into the wall. There was a heavy chain run through the ring with a wrist shackle connected to either end. A small key had been left in one of the shackles. As the others held Loren firmly, the head black-suit clicked the two shackles closed over Loren’s wrists. Then they stepped away from him and handed the key to Sonia. She took it and dropped it into the pocket of her skirt. He was fastened to the ring by the chain, able to move only a few feet in any direction.