The Music of the Machine (The Book of Terwilliger 2)

by Michael Stiles

  He walked up to the front entrance of the building. It was a low, ugly bunker of a building—part laboratory, part prison. The door was ajar. It should have been locked.

  Nosgrove, feeling the first signs of rage building inside his gut, opened the door and went inside. There was no guard. No one at all, not even the old man who mopped the floor. Someone was always mopping the floor. Worst of all, the whole place was silent. This complex was never supposed to be silent. Not ever. It was supposed to be humming with the sound of the machine. The fury in Nosgrove’s gut came closer to boiling over.

  In search of any sign of life, he went to check the cells and the medical rooms. All were deserted. The cell doors were all standing open. “Kajdas,” he muttered. “Witherspoon. Whitehead.” He went through the list of everyone who knew anything at all about this place. The list was short. It included the guards and the man who mopped the floor. That man knew nothing about the nature of this complex. Even so, the janitor would not be walking the earth in another twenty-four hours. Nosgrove would see to it that not a single person would be able to lead anyone to this place.

  Then a thought occurred to Nosgrove that made him stop in his tracks. The machine. If the lab rats and staff were gone, what about the machine? He hurried through two sets of doors, shoving them open so they hit the concrete wall with a satisfying crash. He wound through the twisting corridors to the room where they kept the machine.

  The room was empty. The machine was gone. Someone had packed up everything and moved it. Nosgrove bellowed with rage. He shrieked and howled every expletive he knew, including many that hadn’t been heard by human ears in generations. And then, after it was out of his system, he set the anger aside and took a deep, calming breath. There had been four men, besides himself, who knew the whole truth about this place. With Wensel dead, only three remained. He said their names to himself, slowly. One of those men had betrayed him. Nosgrove clenched his jaw and took a silent vow to make them all pay.

  3

  Garbage Men

  “I’m going to shave it off,” said Ed, shouting to make himself heard over the roar of the subway train.

  It was the first thing he’d said since they had left the Chans’ house. Sarah, who had been looking out the window at nothing at all, turned toward him. He was scratching at his beard again. “Why? I like it.”

  “It’s uncomfortable. Itchy.”

  “But it looks good on you.”

  “The only reason I grew it was to hide from Kajdas and Driscoll. But Driscoll’s seen me in it, and anyway, it’s not much of a disguise.”

  Sarah sighed. “Well, I don’t think Agent Driscoll is coming after you anymore. I wish you’d keep the beard.”

  They rode a while in silence in the nearly empty late-night train.

  “Ed, what’s bugging you? You were pretty sullen during dinner.”

  “I’m never sullen,” Ed replied. “I just don’t always have a lot to say.”

  The train stopped at Christopher Street. They got off, walked up the stairs to the exit, then down Grove Street toward their apartment. Sarah had moved out of the place she’d been living in; too many bad memories haunted her there. The new place was a nice, clean studio with working heat and hot water, which wasn’t always the case in the city. The entrance to the building was secured by a metal door, painted bright green, with a sturdy deadbolt.

  “Well,” Sarah went on, “if that’s the way you’re going to be when we visit them, they won’t be inviting us over for dinner very often.”

  “They didn’t invite us. We invited ourselves.” Ed walked a while in silence. “I should never have sent him,” he said finally.

  Sarah slowed her pace a bit. “Danny? Is he in trouble?”

  Ed kicked at a crumpled-up newspaper at the edge of the sidewalk. “It’s dangerous. He’ll be lucky if he survives long enough to find the green monkey. If the monkey’s even real. It was probably just a bad dream from too many painkillers. I sent him into hell to look for my bad dream.”

  Sarah sometimes had a soothing way of talking to him, a tone that made him feel like everything would be all right. Tonight was not one of those times. “You know,” she said, “the time to change your mind about all this would have been before you talked him into enlisting.”

  “I know.”

  “But I saw you after you had that dream. You were all shaken up. It was not too many painkillers. You said it had to be him, no one else could find this stupid monkey, whatever it is. So stop torturing yourself.”

  “It’s just not easy,” said Ed, “to sit down for dinner with his mother and sister knowing that he could be shot in the head at any minute.”

  They were almost home. Ed could see his followers camped out in their sleeping bags by his doorstep. There seemed to be one or two more than yesterday, although it was hard to tell in the dark. One of them got to his feet as they approached. He wore shabby bell-bottomed jeans and a gray sweatshirt with the hood pulled up. Was he hooded because it was a chilly evening, or to conceal his face?

  “Go straight to the door,” Ed said softly to Sarah. “I’m not sure what this one’s up to.” But she refused to leave his side.

  “Terwilliger,” the man said as they came closer.

  Ed stopped, gauging the remaining distance to his door. “My name is Blake,” he said.

  The man lowered his hood. Sarah gasped.

  “Go inside,” Ed told her again, and he gave her a light shove to emphasize his point. She took a few steps toward their building, then stopped a few steps away. Ed suspected she was prepared to do something nasty to the man in the sweatshirt. Of course, Ed was also in range—he hoped she remembered that.

  It was Agent Driscoll. He was thinner than before, and he looked older, but it was definitely Driscoll. “Hello, Lizzie,” he said to Sarah.

  There was a long silence as Ed, Sarah, and Ed’s followers stared at him.

  “Terwilliger,” said Driscoll, somewhat self-consciously. The whole group had come awake and was gathering around to watch. “Blake, I mean. There are two important things I need to discuss with you. You’ve been very hard to find.”

  Ed started sidestepping toward his building. “I wanted to be hard to find,” he said. The steps were only ten feet away. His chances of making it that far were mainly dependent, he decided, on whether Driscoll was armed.

  “I promise you,” said Driscoll, “I didn’t mean any harm to you in Toronto. I had no idea what Agent Kajdas was up to.”

  “Sure you didn’t.”

  Driscoll glanced around at the group of followers, who were starting to edge closer. They had the look of people who might, at any moment, turn into an angry mob. “Can we talk inside?”

  “No,” said Ed. “Please don’t come back here anymore.” He walked past Driscoll, took Sarah by the arm, and went up the steps to the green door.

  “He’s disappeared,” Driscoll said.

  Ed stopped at the door. “Who’s disappeared?”

  “Kajdas.”

  “Kajdas is dead,” Ed replied. He put the key in the lock but didn’t turn it.

  Driscoll took a step toward Ed. Ed’s devotees each took two steps toward Driscoll. “Can you call off your… people?” said Driscoll.

  “They’re not my people. Isn’t he dead?”

  “It would really help if we could talk inside.”

  * * *

  Driscoll sat carefully on one of the folding chairs while Ed and Sarah remained standing. Ed hadn’t noticed before how pale his visitor looked, but with the lights on it was clear that Driscoll was drawn and exhausted. Sarah got him a glass of water, which Driscoll drank down in six loud gulps. “Thank you,” he said after catching his breath. Sarah just glared at him.

  “Agent Driscoll,” said Ed. “I wasn’t expecting to see you again.”

  “Call me Ken. I turned in my badge after Toronto.”

  “Tell me about Kajdas.”

  Driscoll gazed into his empty glass. It had a picture of Yogi
Bear on it, but the glass had been washed so many times that Yogi’s eyes were empty sockets. “He came out of his coma about three weeks ago. It was a shock even to the doctors—they were sure he would never wake up again. But he did. Except… something was not right.”

  Ed felt suddenly weak in the knees. He sat on the other folding chair, which promptly folded up with him inside it. It took several minutes and some deft maneuvers to free himself. “What do you mean—not right?”

  “His daughter was there with him. Both his girls had been visiting regularly to talk to him. She said that when he woke up, he didn’t seem like himself.”

  “Well,” said Sarah, “whatever Ed did to his brain probably left him a little jumbled up.”

  Driscoll shook his head. “I don’t think it was that. They said he actually seemed to be someone else. He didn’t recognize his daughters. He just kept talking to himself and winking his eyes.”

  Ed frowned. “Winking?”

  “Yeah, winking. Like he was testing his eyes out, that’s what the girls said.”

  Winking. Ed was thinking of Toronto, when his body had been taken over by someone else. Stop winking at me, Ralph had said, just before Ed had shot him. “Nathaniel,” Ed whispered. “Kajdas has been taken over by Nathaniel.”

  Sarah gasped. “Ed, I thought you killed him.”

  “I did,” said Ed. “But he didn’t die. The gnome talked to me after I shot him, and then… Maybe he figured out a way to live without a body, after planting so much of himself inside other people’s heads.” Ed thought about this for a moment. He hadn’t seen any sign of Nathaniel since that day in Toronto when he’d taken control of Ed himself. But if he was still out there, and if he was looking for Ed… A sharp stab of terror gripped him for a moment. “How exactly did you find me?”

  Driscoll set the Yogi Bear glass down on the floor and rubbed his eyes. “How did I find you? I asked around. No one knew the name Terwilliger, but an awful lot of people in New York know about Blake. Your face is all over subway stations, in the graffiti. People know you because they’ve seen your face in their dreams.”

  “Lovely,” Ed muttered.

  “Why do they dream about you?”

  Would Driscoll believe him? There was only one way to find out. “Kajdas was planning to wipe my mind clean. Nathaniel taught me to protect myself, to save my memories by putting them in other people’s heads.”

  “Was one of those heads mine?”

  Ed shrugged. “Might be. Hard to keep track.”

  Sarah was listening silently, biting her lip. “Why did you come to warn us?” she said.

  “Because I want to know why people dream about Ed,” Driscoll replied. “Why I’ve dreamed about him. And because I’m afraid of what Kajdas might be planning to do.”

  “I don’t think he’s Kajdas anymore,” said Ed.

  “Right,” Driscoll said, clearly not understanding any of it. “He’s Nathaniel.”

  Ed got up and went over to the window. The people were down there, even if he couldn’t see them in the dark. Even at that moment, Kajdas might be following the same path that had led Driscoll here. “Nathaniel was one of Kajdas’ projects,” Ed began. “They trained him to kill, but he went off on his own program and didn’t murder the person he was supposed to.” Ed tried to swallow the lump that had formed in his throat. “He came after my wife instead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Ed grimaced. “Ken, have you ever heard of William Blake?”

  “Was he a poet?”

  “Among other things. He was a prophet, too. He predicted that there would be a great battle between two… beings. Urizen and Orc. That battle is about to happen. You with me?”

  Driscoll shook his head.

  “They’ve fought each other before, and they always do again. It’s a cycle. Urizen is always the oppressor, the corrupt government that wants absolute control. Orc appears as the revolutionary who wants to overthrow him. If Urizen wins, there’s no one to check his power. If Orc wins, he becomes the new boss in town. Then it all happens again, over and over. Except this time, the stakes are higher. Urizen never had nukes before.”

  “And what does all this have to do with Tom Kajdas?”

  “I’m pretty sure Tom was working for Urizen,” said Ed.

  “And so were you,” added Sarah.

  Driscoll started to lean back in his folding chair, but thought better of it when the frame creaked alarmingly. “I never knew who was calling the shots,” he said. “Kajdas reported up to Albert Wensel, and Wensel worked for Assistant Director Witherspoon. But Witherspoon… I never did find out who he was working for. I don’t think Director Hoover had any idea what Witherspoon was up to. I always had the feeling his orders came from somewhere outside the Bureau.”

  “They came from Urizen,” said Ed.

  “But what is Urizen? Is he a person?”

  Ed was still looking out the window into the dark street below. “I’m not sure what Urizen is. A demon, maybe. But he needs a human body to live in. He’s working through some kind of proxy, a person who does whatever Urizen makes him do. We don’t know who that person is. We know who Orc is—he’s a man in Los Angeles by the name of Arthur.”

  “Arthur? That doesn’t sound very demony.”

  “He’s scarier than he sounds,” said Sarah.

  Driscoll chewed on his thumbnail as he thought. “What about this Nathaniel? Which side is he on?”

  “Neither,” said Ed. “Nathaniel hates them both. He wants to break the cycle.”

  “That’s a good thing, right?”

  “Not the way he wants to do it.”

  “And now,” Driscoll continued that thought, “he may be impossible to kill. Do you have anything stronger than water?”

  Ed blinked. “Stronger than water?”

  “To drink.”

  Sarah stood and picked up his glass. “I have cranberry juice.”

  * * *

  Ed stifled a yawn. “It’s getting late,” he said, deliberately dropping a hint. He looked pointedly at Sarah and said, “We’d better speak to our friends about this.”

  “There was one other thing I wanted to talk to you about,” Driscoll said. “Something I need your help with. Actually…” He paused, thinking for a moment. Driscoll seemed like a man who chose every word carefully. “It’s Charles Witherspoon who needs your help. He’s in trouble.”

  “My help?” Ed smiled uncertainly. The man had to be joking. “Why would I help him, after everything you people did to me?”

  “Kajdas had a long history with Wensel and Witherspoon,” Driscoll explained. “They made plans together—lots of plans. Each plan had a codename. You’ve seen Daisy and Summit. Daisy was a plan to kill President Johnson, but they changed the plan and went after Bobby Kennedy instead. Summit was the one you stopped in Toronto. There was another project, something Agent Kajdas referred to as Novus. Agent Kajdas liked to talk a lot. I’m not sure what it was; a weapon of some kind, it sounded like. But the Bureau definitely wasn’t in on it. Kajdas knew everything about that program.”

  “If Nathaniel is living in Kajdas’ body,” said Sarah, “then he must know whatever Kajdas knows.”

  Driscoll nodded. “Whatever this thing is, it seemed like a pretty big deal to him. I can only guess that it was something very dangerous. This Nathaniel person will probably want to get his hands on it.”

  “Who else knows about Novus?” Sarah asked.

  “That’s the problem,” Driscoll said with a tired sigh. “Wensel knew, but his body was found in Rock Creek Park right after Summit turned bad. Witherspoon was in on it, too. I don’t know who else; maybe no one else—other than the one they were working for.”

  Sarah leaned forward in her chair. “Why not ask Witherspoon, then? Nobody’s killed him, right?”

  Driscoll paused and took a deep breath. “He’s alive.”

  “So?” There was a menacing gleam in Sarah’s eyes that Ed didn’t like. “Let’s go talk to him.”<
br />
  “He’s alive,” Driscoll continued, “but he won’t have much to say to us.”

  * * *

  Big John picked up the next can and flung its contents into the back of the truck. On the opposite side of the narrow street, Seymour Fleming was struggling with another garbage can. He was less muscular than most of the soldiers in the Society, and was having a difficult time. Arthur made them all take jobs in the community to remain humble and to earn their own living, and this was the most humbling of all the jobs John could think of.

  “Try to get it up on your shoulder,” John offered.

  Flem tried to hide his frustration, but it showed through anyway. He wrestled the metal can until he was able to lift it a foot off the ground. “I’m trying,” he muttered. “Do they have to throw out such heavy shit?”

  “Watch your language,” John warned.

  The driver, another Society man named Shigley, waited until Flem was just about to dump the contents of the trash can into the truck. Then he hit the gas and pulled forward two feet before slamming on the brakes again. Fleming’s can crashed to the ground, spilling its putrid contents all over the warm pavement. Flem began several colorful curses, but to his credit, he kept the worst parts of them to himself. John glared at the driver in the rearview mirror before bending down to help Flem pick up the trash.

  “Don’t let it get to you,” John told him, lowering his voice. “A month on this job and you’ll be twice as strong as when you joined us.”

  “I’ll be out of here in less than a month,” Flem replied. “I can’t take this bullsh—this garbage any longer. Lord Orc said he wants to build an army, but he never said it was going to be an army of garbage men.”

  John tossed a pair of dripping eggshells into the truck. “Easy. Everyone in the Society has to go through this.”

  “Everyone except Lord Orc.”

  True, John thought. “Don’t question the job he’s given you. You’re here for a reason. We all are.”