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

by Michael Stiles

  He got a glass of water and drank it down. Then he went back upstairs. His seven men were assembled in his bedroom when he returned, each one wearing his foil hat. They split into two pairs and one group of three: two men to deal with Larson, two for Lingelback, and three to handle Bowers. John would be going alone. He could only do what he needed to if he wasn’t distracted by having anyone else in the room. Nothing to coordinate, just John and Arthur facing each other alone.

  Arthur had guards posted outside the house at all times. He was sure the threats to his power would come from outside. Somehow he had never contemplated the possibility that his downfall would come from within his own Society.

  At a quarter after two, John nodded to the others and they split up. Litton took two soldiers named Franklin Adams and Jim Rokus to stand outside Bowers’ room. Burkholder and Fleming went to Larson’s room. Carpenter and Risinger went downstairs to Lingelback’s room. The general barracks were in the basement. Most of the ordinary soldiers slept down there and wouldn’t hear a thing until morning.

  John walked to the end of the hallway to the big French doors to Arthur’s quarters. It was Sunday night—Monday morning, to be precise. Arthur would have exhausted himself with his girls the night before, and would now be alone. No one to scream for help, no one to hear the struggle as John carried out his coup.

  At exactly twenty minutes past the hour, he opened the door silently and went inside.

  It was rumored in the Society that Arthur never slept. The men whispered that Arthur had gained such perfect control over his own body that he was able to function without needing any sleep. John knew this wasn’t true, but the rumor was based on the fact that Arthur always slept with his lights on, sometimes with his eyes open. His girls talked about that among themselves, and the men overheard. Even having heard the stories, though, John was quite unprepared when he entered the room and saw Arthur propped up on pillows, staring directly at him. John froze in the doorway and held his breath. Then Arthur made a soft snoring sound. He was asleep.

  John entered the room and shut the door. His shoes were silent on the plush carpeting. Very slowly, he pulled out a carving knife that he’d wrapped in a dish towel and tucked into his belt. His breath sounded awfully loud in his own ears—certainly loud enough to wake a sleeping person. But Arthur didn’t move. He continued to stare at the bedroom door with unseeing eyes.

  John unwrapped the blade and stuffed the towel into his pocket. Arthur shifted positions slightly and mumbled something in his sleep. After a few seconds he was still again. John held the knife in both hands and approached the bed. Halfway there, he hesitated when a question popped into his mind. What would Orc, the demon, do when Arthur’s body died? Was it even possible for the body to be killed? John’s research had not provided an answer to that question. His greatest fear—other than being caught—was that Orc would take hold of John’s own body as its old host was dying. But it seemed to him that Arthur was somehow a perfect fit for the demon, and that it would have to spend time finding another suitable host before it could walk the earth again. He hoped that was true. There was only one way to find out. He raised the knife, tensed his muscles, and took another step toward the bed.

  There was a crash from somewhere downstairs that sounded like a sledge hammer splintering a piece of wood. Someone was shouting. Lingelback, thought John. They’ve been discovered. Arthur twitched and inhaled sharply, starting to wake up. Just like that, the opportunity was gone. Concealing the knife behind his back, John slipped into a closet next to the bed and pulled the door most of the way closed. He left it open a crack so he could see out, hoping that Arthur would not decide he needed something from his closet.

  Arthur awoke fully, threw back the covers, and rolled out of bed. He slept in the nude. John was treated to a close-up view of Lord Orc’s sizeable backside before Arthur threw on his robe and hurried to the bedroom door. John averted his eyes, but the image was already burned into his retinas.

  He heard more shouting downstairs. There were several crashes that shook the whole house, and then the shouts cut off abruptly. Then it was silent. Arthur opened his bedroom door and looked down the hall.

  Whatever he saw caught him by surprise, so much so that John felt his reaction as if the very air in the room had started to vibrate. Heavy footsteps echoed on the staircase. Someone was coming—several people. Arthur shut the door, stepped backward to the center of his room, and prepared to confront them.

  More noises. Doors were being broken down. A woman was screaming. John heard Bowers’ voice, calling for help from the room next door. It sounded strange, hearing Bowers cry for help. A second later Litton was calling out, too. Then there was a heavy thump as something hit the wall.

  Arthur’s door burst open in a shower of splinters. A man stood at the door, wearing a light-blue shirt and jeans. His head was covered with short brown hair; he was not one of the Society. He had kicked the door in and was now aiming a rifle at Arthur.

  Arthur didn’t react. He stood there in his bathrobe, appearing completely unafraid. The intruder stood in the doorway, pointing his weapon at Arthur’s chest but not moving.

  “Who are you?” Arthur asked quietly, almost as though he was talking to himself. John guessed that he was rummaging through the man’s head for information. “And where did you come from?”

  Still the intruder stood in the doorway, breathing heavily but otherwise motionless. His eyes did not blink. John could sense the force of Arthur’s will, holding the man where he stood.

  “I see,” Arthur whispered. “I see what this is.” His whisper turned to a shout. “Nathaniel! Don’t be a coward! Come and get me yourself!”

  The man in black twitched once and his eyes turned red. Blood oozed from his eyes and dripped thickly down his cheeks in the moment before he crumpled to the floor.

  John checked his foil hat to make sure it was still in place. Even if his thoughts were hidden, he was afraid that his breathing would give him away. Who was attacking the Society? And why did they have to choose tonight—tonight!—to do it? John had been so close.

  Two more men in blue rushed into the room, followed quickly by two more. Each one held a military rifle, and they appeared competent with the weapons. They were exceedingly well-armed. Arthur reached out indiscriminately to paralyze everyone nearby. John, still hidden in the closet, found that he was unable to move. He felt his body tilt forward and was fearful that he would fall through the open closet door, but his head caught against the inside of the low doorframe and he leaned there, immobilized, unable to do anything but watch through the narrow opening of the closet door.

  The four men, caught in the same trap that had frozen John’s muscles, fell stiffly to the floor. At the same time, another person strode past them and stopped just inside the doorway. He looked familiar, although John couldn’t place him. He appeared to be on the younger side of middle age, perhaps in his forties, but his hair was silver. He looked down at the corpse of the first gunman and shook his head.

  “Arthur,” the silver-haired man hissed. His lips were curled back from his teeth in a feral snarl.

  “Nathaniel. Changed your clothes, did you?”

  John knew that name, as did every member of the Society. Arthur’s old acolyte, who had been taken away by Urizen and used as a tool in the demon’s plots. John knew that Nathaniel had killed Ed’s wife and later taken on the form of a gnome to torment Ed, but he had never met the man in person. He didn’t look like the picture of Nathaniel on Arthur’s bulletin board, where he kept photos of the people who interested him. The man in the picture was one-eyed and scarred.

  John couldn’t see Arthur’s face, but it sounded like he was sneering as he spoke. “This is just like you, isn’t it? You could never attract disciples of your own, so you try to steal mine. You always were a parasite. A worm.”

  “Better a worm than a snake,” Nathaniel shot back. “You’re the last one. I already have all the rest.”

  “A
nd whose body is this?” said Arthur. “I had heard that Terwilliger killed your old body. At least you have two eyes now.”

  Nathaniel giggled. “All the better to see you with!” he crowed.

  John could see beads of sweat forming on Arthur’s bare head. Even as they talked, the two men were at war with one another. John could feel their effort as they strained against each other. It felt like electricity crackling in the air.

  “I made you who you are,” Arthur said. The strain was audible in his voice now, but he still had not released his grip on the four men who still lay motionless on the floor, the grip that also prevented John from moving a muscle. John could feel his eyes drying out. “I was the Kitty who guided you. And you have the… the gall to do this! To take everything I’ve worked so long to build. You could have helped me overthrow Urizen and save the world, and instead you―”

  “Help you?” Nathaniel spat on the carpet. “I have much better plans for you, Orc. I’m taking you to my house.”

  John could see Arthur shaking with the effort of resisting whatever Nathaniel was trying to do to him. He would never have believed that anyone could defeat Arthur—Lord Orc—in this way, but it was happening. He felt Arthur’s hold on him weakening, and found that he was able to move again. Still, he stayed in the closet and focused on staying silent. Now, even more than before, he knew he had to stay hidden.

  Nathaniel was smiling now, a wide grin that showed all of his teeth. With one final effort, he overwhelmed Arthur. It was over. The four men Arthur had immobilized got to their feet and aimed their weapons at Arthur. Nathaniel stepped over the body of his dead comrade, which still leaked blood onto the floor, and stood face to face with his old mentor. “Now you’re mine,” he whispered.

  John stayed in the closet and watched them handcuff Arthur’s hands behind his back. He did not resist. Arthur stared at nothing, utterly defeated. John wondered if his mind was broken. Once he was bound, they walked him out of the bedroom and downstairs to the front door. One of the men dragged the corpse of their fallen comrade.

  After they had left, John waited for a full minute and then went to the door to look out at the hallway. What he saw made him feel sick to his stomach. The hall was empty. All the doors were ruined, broken down or otherwise forced open. Society House was silent.

  John crept downstairs. The house was dark except for the hall light he’d left on. Every one of the bedrooms upstairs was empty. Downstairs, the house was a ruin. Clearly, the men of the Society had put up a good fight. There was a dark stain on the kitchen floor that looked like blood. But if anyone had been killed during the assault, Nathaniel had taken the bodies with him. The library had been emptied, too. All of their research, years of research, all of it was lost.

  He continued down to the basement, and the sub-basement. Not a single soldier remained. Nathaniel had taken everyone.

  The Society had been broken.

  * * *

  When Danny woke up, he had a terrible headache but felt a little less addled than before. The sky was gray and dim overhead. He couldn’t tell whether it was dawn or dusk. It struck him at that moment just how loud the jungle was. There was a high-pitched drone of insects that he’d always noticed before, but now that he was alone it seemed more deafening than ever.

  In spite of his headache, he tried to reach out for human thoughts. As before, the effort caused him a great deal of pain but got him nowhere. It was like losing one of his senses, a sense he’d always relied on and taken for granted.

  He urinated against a tree, washed his face, put on some bug juice, and only then noticed the PRC-25 radio sitting on the ground next to his buttpack. He had to think for a minute to recall where it had come from. Gradually the events of the last couple of days came back to him. The earliest thing he could remember was Achtenberg stepping on a booby-trap. Before that… he remembered nothing at all.

  No sound of static came out of the handset when he switched it on. That wasn’t reassuring. He pushed a button to tune in to Volpe’s first preset frequency, pressed the talk button, and hesitated. He had no idea where he was, or who was nearby. What if some sneaky men in pajamas happened to be close enough to hear him talking? But after a while he decided there probably wasn’t anyone nearby. The bugs usually quieted down when people were moving around. “This is Private Danny Chan,” he said into the microphone. “Can anyone hear me?”

  Silence. He waited half a minute and tried again. “This is Private Chan, calling anyone in range. I need help. Can anyone hear me?”

  He waited again. Could the battery be dead? Had Volpe run the power down? Danny jiggled the battery cable, adjusted the antenna, and rapidly lost the little bit of hope he’d had left.

  The handset speaker crackled. Or he thought it did, anyway. It was hard to tell whether he’d imagined it.

  “Is someone there?” he said.

  “Private Chan,” said a man’s voice. Over the radio speaker the voice sounded tinny and full of static, but it was definitely a person.

  Danny blinked back tears of relief and heaved the deepest sigh of his life. He pressed the talk button and said, “Yes! This is Danny Chan. I’ve been separated from my unit and I need help. Who is this?”

  The voice spoke slowly and clearly. “I need you to listen and do exactly as I say. Can you see a place uphill from you where the stream bends to the right?”

  This seemed like an odd question, but the voice sounded urgent. “Yes. How do you know where I am?”

  “Pack up your radio. Get up and move to that bend in the stream. You will see a group of three trees to your left. Go around to the uphill side of those trees and take cover. Wait fifteen minutes and then call again.”

  “Who is this?” Danny asked him.

  “We’ll talk later. Get going.”

  The voice said no more. Danny sat for a minute, wondering whether someone was playing games with him. Whoever they were, they knew exactly where he was. He considered calling back. But the voice had sounded like it meant what it said, so he picked up his things and went where he’d been told. He found the trees and crouched down.

  Two or three minutes passed. Mosquitos were starting to bite, in spite of his bug repellant. He slapped at them, but they kept coming back. After a time, he heard the drone of the bugs quiet down. Someone was coming.

  Three men emerged from the forest, close to where he’d been a few minutes before. They wore brown clothes, the rough homemade clothing of local farmers. And they carried rifles. The men stopped at the stream for a drink and stayed there for a few minutes to chat. Danny was close enough to make out the sounds, but couldn’t understand the language. When they were done with their discussion, they waded across the shallow stream and continued through the forest.

  Danny waited behind the trees for another ten minutes. Then he powered up the radio again and called out on the same channel as before.

  “Hello, Danny,” the voice answered.

  “Who is this?”

  “My name is Lester. You can call me Les. I’m on your side. Can you trust me enough to do what I say next time?”

  Danny thought about that for a moment. “I guess that depends on what you ask me to do.”

  “It’ll get harder. For now, I need you to walk west. Put the hill on your right side.”

  “Hold on,” Danny said. “Cambodia’s that way, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  There was silence on the line. He waited for something more, but the voice seemed to be done talking. “Les?” he said at last.

  “Yeah?”

  “Shouldn’t I be going the other way? Like towards an American base?”

  “If you do that,” said Les, “you’ll be caught and tortured. My way is better.”

  “Oh.” Torture didn’t appeal much to Danny. “Les, what’s in Cambodia?”

  “The green monkey,” Les replied.

  That sounded vaguely familiar, although he couldn’t quite recall where he’d heard of such a thing before. “I’
m supposed to be looking for a green monkey,” he said. “What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you about that when we have more time. Walk for one hour, then call me.”

  Danny didn’t argue. He took a drink, filled both his canteens at the stream, and set off.

  * * *

  “It’s only for a couple more days,” Sarah said for at least the tenth time. “I’ll be back by the weekend. Most likely.”

  “That’s what you say every time you go off on another trip. When you said you wanted a job, I thought you meant somewhere close by. I don’t want you traveling all over the country.”

  “And why not?” Sarah folded her arms. That was always a bad sign. “It’s okay for you to go traveling with Ken Driscoll, but I have to stay home and make you casseroles?” Her voice was rising in anger. “Is that what you want from me? Casseroles?”

  “No,” said Ed. “I don’t want casseroles.”

  They were sitting near the big tree in the forest of Ed’s mind. In the physical world, Ed was in their Manhattan apartment while Sarah was in a hotel somewhere. Detroit, maybe. He couldn’t keep all her business trips straight anymore. It was almost time for their meeting with Rayfield and the others. Ed and Sarah had decided to meet early to catch up. It was better than calling long-distance. He had somber news to share with the others, and Sarah’s constant travel was not helping his overall state of mind.

  “Nathaniel will be looking for us,” Ed said. “Driscoll found us, so he can too. I want you to stay close so I can…” He trailed off, looking like he’d been about to say something that would piss her off.