The Glass House

by David Rotenberg

  “Yes . . . and no, Ms. Hicks. I think I believe, as you are learning, that there is something else at work in the universe. Something that Hamlet sensed when he saw the ghost of his murdered father, something that great artists see—something other.”

  “I see.”

  “Not yet you don’t.” He smiled again then added, “Do you?”

  “No. Not personally. No I don’t see ‘something other.’ ”

  “That’s why you are here, isn’t it, Ms. Hicks. You could read my writing online—everything I’ve written is immediately in the public domain. You see, I’m not allowed to charge for anything I write in here—am I?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I’m not.” This last was very hard. Angry. “So I ask again, Ms. Hicks, be honest with yourself and answer my question: Why exactly are you here?”

  “To understand what I can about how you worked.”

  His surprisingly thin tongue licked his lips, leaving a glistening sheen as he whispered, “Liar.”

  “Tell me how it works, Mr. Armistaad.”

  “Fine,” he said. Then just as Yslan was about to speak again, Armistaad added, “I close my eyes, Ms. Hicks, and the clearing comes into view, then I am there and this world aligns—with the other world, that is.”

  She snapped off the video and closed her iPad as Emerson pulled the car to a stop in front of a smallish whitewashed building.

  “This the hospital?”

  “No.”

  “No? I thought we—”

  “As I said before, it’s a long-term facility.” He looked at Yslan’s grim face. “At least it’s not a hospice.”

  After taking a deep breath, Yslan said, “Yeah, we can be grateful for that.”

  Emerson nodded and got out of the car.

  13

  VISITING HARRISON

  FIVE YARDS OUTSIDE HARRISON’S ROOM, Yslan smelled the sharp aroma of cheap antiseptic. She breathed through her mouth and opened the door.

  Leonard Harrison was propped up by pillows in a wheelchair facing the window of his small room. A thick leather belt around his upper chest that buckled behind the backrest stopped him from falling forward. He had a large bandage on his forehead. There was a food tray attached to the wheelchair. Like a highchair tray, she thought.

  A large African-American nurse was finishing cleaning Harrison’s face with a soft cloth.

  The baby food on the tray—apricot—brought the terrible reality home to her. Apricot baby food for Leonard Harrison’s lunch. She recalled periodically sticking her head into his office around noon—he always ate at his desk, wearing a large linen napkin around his neck to protect his Savile Row shirts and ties. He ate nothing but organic food that he prepared at home. He was careful, fanatical, about anything that entered his body.

  Except for his 9:00 p.m. cup of Seattle’s Best coffee, which he picked up on his way home.

  When she started at the NSA, on occasion she would get him his coffee when he worked late. Hardy blend, tall, no milk, no sugar—organic, fair trade only.

  As the nurse finished her work and removed the tray, Yslan heard Harrison pass gas, then she heard him strain as he passed a stool—into a diaper, no doubt.

  She turned, not wanting to see his face. “Can’t you help him?” she demanded.

  “Yslan, don’t—” It was Emerson, stopping her from making a fool of herself.

  “That’s right. You tell your girlfriend to watch her manners in here,” the nurse said.

  As Yslan left that antiseptic-tainted room, the image of her boss—her mentor—Leonard Harrison catatonic, apricot baby food fed, diapered, poisoned, rose in her head like a cobra ready to strike. Then a new thought hit her—slugged her. He was on a different path—just a different path. Where had she heard that?

  She passed by Emerson. He was looking a little grey around the gills. Tough.

  14

  IN HARRISON’S HOUSE

  THE DRIVE TO HARRISON’S HOUSE was twice again as long as it had been to get to the hospital or long-term care facility or whatever it was. Neither spoke. Both still had the image of Leonard Harrison shitting in his diaper in their heads.

  Emerson finally pulled the car to the curb in front of a neat Georgetown row house, now festooned with yellow tape and watched over by two young cops. A forensics truck was parked across the road. Two middle-aged techs were taking in the sun and smoking.

  “There’s no number.”

  “Yellow tape, two cops, forensics truck—I’d guess this is the place.”

  “But you don’t know? He was your boss.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve never been here before.”

  She got out of the car before she had to elaborate, badged her way past the cops and entered Leonard Harrison’s home.

  A taped outline marked the spot where Harrison had fallen. The photos that the cops had given them as they entered showed him stretched out on his side in the front hall, a blood patch on the hardwood floor where he must have banged his head.

  “If he fell here, how did they know to come for him?”

  “He managed to call nine one one,” Emerson said.

  Yslan nodded and said, “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “Get the nine one one tape. And tell the cops outside to stay there.”

  “And the techs?”

  “Outside till I call for them.”

  Emerson went to the door and told the cops. When he came back into the hallway he was surprised to see Yslan standing in the midst of the living room, dead still.

  “What exactly—”

  Yslan held up her hand, stopping Emerson’s question. She walked slowly down the hallway to the kitchen in the back. She was literally following her feet. The kitchen held few surprises—except for its excessive cleanliness. She didn’t know that pots could actually shine like that.

  The refrigerator proved predictable for a food nut. All organic, all organized, all labeled with dates.

  “What’s with the dates?” Emerson asked.

  “You ever bought organic produce?”

  “No. Can’t say I’ve ever indulged.”

  “Well, if you had you’d know that it goes bad quickly. Sometimes it feels like it’s bad before you get it home.”

  “So they’re best-before dates?”

  “Yeah,” Yslan muttered but she had already bent down and was pulling out the packaged vegetables, fruits and exotic grains, putting them on the counter. “Write down the dates, Emerson, then get them to the lab. I want them tested for toxins.” She turned from the kitchen and headed up the narrow staircase to the second floor. Halfway up she stopped and looked back at the first floor. What bothered her about it? She couldn’t say, but something was wrong.

  A bedroom on the right, prim to the point of prissy—perfectly made bed, toiletries in the en suite bathroom, all made from natural products and lined up with military precision, lamps on either side of the bed, no overhead with the low ceiling. Even the oval hooked rug at the foot of the bed was perfectly placed so that it was dead centre in the room. She lifted the rug and pulled it to one side. She ran her palm along the floor to check for ridges that could indicate the presence of trap doors, but there were none. Besides, there was so little space between this floor and the ceiling below. Is that what bothered me on the stairway? she wondered.

  As she backed out of the bedroom an odd image popped into her head—herself coming out of the en suite bathroom wearing nothing but a pair of men’s boxer shorts and approaching the bed. But it wasn’t Harrison on the bed—it was Decker Roberts. And somehow she was watching herself approach Decker. And as she did she sensed someone else watching Roberts from the other direction. She turned towards the shadowy figure. “Seth,” she said aloud, but before the figure could turn to her, it evaporated. The room stabilized.

  She had no name for what had just happened, but had she mentioned it to Decker he would have told her that she’d just experienced what he so often experienced—sliding.
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  She took a long slow breath and approached Harrison’s armoire. Six suits all pressed and ready to go, ten pairs of pleated, cuffed slacks, eight pairs of shoes all polished to a high gloss. She parted the clothing and pushed against the back panels. “Lion, witch and wardrobe, here we come,” she whispered—but nothing gave under her pressure.

  She quickly went through his dresser drawers—folded underwear, correctly matched socks, a single widow sock to one side. She picked it up. It was torn. Harrison had kept a torn solo sock.

  She closed the drawers of the dresser and headed back into the hall.

  Across the way was a closed door. She tried it. Locked.

  “Let me,” said Emerson.

  How he’d managed to sneak up on her was a matter of concern, but she just nodded. With surprising expertise he manipulated his pick and probe with his long, tapered fingers. It took him some time but eventually the door popped open. He stepped aside and she entered.

  The small bedroom had been converted into a study. The antique desk was as neat as the rest of the house, his Lenovo laptop dead centre.

  “Why’s his computer still here?”

  “The techs got everything they needed from it without having to touch it.”

  “What did they get?”

  “Not much; apparently it’d been monkeyed with by experts.”

  “Dust it.”

  “I’ll call a tech.”

  “Okay.” She waited until Emerson had left the room and closed the door behind him, then she opened the desk’s two drawers. She found nothing but high-quality writing paper, an expensive pen, a box of chalk and a well-worn family Bible that was printed in Edinburgh in 1691. She looked at the family trees on the front four pages and was surprised to find that Harrison had a twin who had died almost thirty years ago.

  Beside the date of the brother’s death were the words “We’ll meet again at the End Time.” Yslan recognized Harrison’s beautiful penmanship.

  She stepped back and looked at the window. An overhanging willow tree obscured the view, but the window itself was so thick that it blurred her vision. She tapped the glass—bulletproof. The locking device on the side, the best money could buy. Harrison evidently didn’t want anyone in this room. She assumed it was because of what was on the computer and turned to go.

  A tech entered.

  “Your guys really found nothing on his computer?”

  “Not nothing, but what we found was pretty much useless.”

  “Why?”

  “Usually people try to erase things—that we can almost always undo. But whoever worked on this computer used a completely new strategy.”

  Yslan prompted him. “And?”

  “How computer literate are you?”

  “Some.”

  “Well ‘some’ isn’t enough to understand what happened to that computer. Look, think of it as a crime site.”

  “Okay, I can do that.”

  “Good now think of a crime site where someone imported a herd of five thousand cows to walk and shit all over it for a year—then you’ve got what we have with that computer.”

  “Explain ‘imported.’ ”

  “Someone got access to that computer from an external source, that much we know.”

  “So the lab can—”

  “Find out who that someone is? No, we can’t. Not a chance of that happening.”

  “What—”

  “Sifting through the five thousand cows and cleaning it up? Probably not. They say maybe—which usually means no.”

  “But maybe sometimes means maybe.”

  “Sure. You want me to dust that thing or not?”

  “Yeah, dust it.”

  She heard a chuckle—it was Emerson at the door. She stared at him. Within the door frame his perfectly symmetrical body gave Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of the perfect man a run for its money. He gave her a big smile and a thumbs-up. But now she wasn’t watching him. He noticed. “What?” he demanded, but she was already past him and running down the stairs.

  When he caught up to her she was across the street looking at Harrison’s house.

  “So I repeat—what?”

  “How many storeys do you see?”

  “Two.”

  “Really?” She crossed the road and hurried down the lane at the side of the house. Emerson followed her.

  “And for the third time I ask, what?”

  “It’s a false ceiling.” And she was moving quickly again.

  When he caught up to her she’d dismissed the tech and was standing on Harrison’s desk, prying open an overhead panel. Then she leapt up and levered herself into the hole in the ceiling.

  It took her eyes several long moments to adjust—then the hair on the back of her neck stood up.

  “What?” she heard from down below. But she wasn’t ready to speak, not just yet. She took out her cell phone and turned it on. In the bluish light she saw the stars painted on the ceiling, then four numbers drawn in chalk, then further chalk marks on a map of the world that covered the floor. Chalk marks with vector arrows on them. All the lines converged under what was in the centre of the room. And what was there shocked her. A perverse shrine. At the very centre of which was a single nude photograph of her. She grabbed it and noticed there was writing on the back—what seemed to be a chemical formula of some sort followed by a Bible citation: Deuteronomy 34:1–4. She used her cell phone and snapped off thirty photos of Harrison’s “private place,” then pocketed the nude photo and called out, “Emerson, call your boss, he’s going to want to see this.”

  Two hours later the small room above Harrison’s study was awash with floodlights. Yslan stood outside the house with the head of Homeland Security at her side.

  “Did you know?” he asked.

  “Only what most women know.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “That some men find them attractive, want more from them than they are willing to give.”

  “Harrison wanted more from you than you were willing to give?”

  “Yes, that’s what I meant.”

  “Just that? Nothing else?”

  “Nothing more than that.”

  But as Mallory walked back to Harrison’s house, followed by a steady stream of techs in their white Tyvek suits, Yslan knew there was much more here than that. She was pretty sure that Harrison was trying to figure out the secret that she’d first sensed existed when she was twelve, standing in her grandfather’s tobacco field with locusts all around her, the otherness she felt every time she ran her fingers over her father’s name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and somehow smelled bacon—the otherness she’d felt when she was close to Decker Roberts. Harrison was after that—what she assumed he thought of as the End Time—when he would meet up with his dead twin.

  She checked her cell phone for the pictures she’d taken before she allowed Emerson up into the secret room. She went through them one at a time. Etched on the underside of the roof the Southern Cross with Scorpio just rising—the third star in its thorax bright red. Then the chalk lines on the floor map—one line to Leavenworth Penitentiary, another to a large circle in the Plains States and then a third line to southwest Africa. And numbers—beside southwest Africa the number 2, beside Leavenworth the number 4, beside the Plains States the number 3 and the number 1 with a question mark beside it beneath the red star in the body of the Scorpio constellation.

  Then there was the shrine. It had an old purse that she’d thrown away, an empty bottle of her perfume and a pair of her sneakers that she’d “lost” at the office and dozens of other personal items of hers, all neatly balanced to form a rough pyramid. She’d removed only one thing: the nude photo of her with the chemical formula, which she hadn’t yet deciphered, and the Bible citation on the back.

  That night she applied her considerable computer skills and found out, much to her surprise, that the formula outlined the use of a catalyst in a chemical reaction. On further searching she found the basics. A catalyst was
a freak of nature. An entity—an element—that needed to be present to allow a chemical reaction to take place between two or three or four others. The other entities changed—but the catalyst never changed. Yet without the catalyst the entities could come into contact, could be heated or mixed and nothing would happen. But put the entities together then add the catalyst and an entirely new entity would come into being—although the catalyst remained unchanged. The catalyst was simply used by the other entities to do their work. Moses leading the ancient Israelites to the promised land but never being allowed to set foot in it, she thought. He caused the change but would not experience the change. So she wasn’t surprised when later she checked the Bible citation from Deuteronomy 34:

  1 And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho. And the Lord shewed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan,

  2 And all Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim, and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea,

  3 And the south, and the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zoar.

  4 And the LORD said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed: I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither.

  She re-created the image of the room in her mind, then viewed it from the opposite direction and reconfirmed what she had seen before. All the chalk lines radiated from the picture of her. She was somehow the very centre, the epicentre of all this—whatever this was.

  That night sleep evaded her. Odd images of Decker and Harrison and the perverse shrine kept pummelling her like pop-ups on a computer screen.

  At four in the morning she’d had enough. She got into her car and just drove—although she knew where she’d end up.

  At dawn’s light she was by the Vietnam Memorial in D.C., her hand touching the name of the father who had died in the swamps of the Mekong Delta, the father she’d never met. As the sun peeked over the horizon a single beam of light crossed the memorial, and she was able to read her father’s dates—and realized that she was now exactly ten years to the day older than her father had been when bullets ripped through his body and pinned him to the thick mud of a South Asian river.