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

by Michael Stiles

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath to steady himself—that made the transition easier—and slipped back into his body. When he opened his eyes again, he was looking at the sloping ceiling of the upstairs bedroom. Sunlight was coming in through the dormer windows; it was late in the morning. He’d spent more time away than he had intended.

  “Find anything this time?” Norris asked him. He was sitting cross-legged on his own bed, reading a book and wearing a t-shirt and boxer shorts as well as his dirty old wool cap. He set the book aside—it was a novel called Rich Man, Poor Man—and stood up to stretch his back.

  “Maybe,” said Ed. “It’s hard to be sure.” He was reluctant to say more. Norris was not as approachable as Ricky or the others, and Ed had not quite come to trust him.

  Norris grunted and scratched his private parts, while Ed looked away with a grimace. “He’ll turn up,” said Norris. “Not much you can do until he does.”

  “I know,” Ed sighed. “But I owe it to his mother to find him.”

  There was a knock on the door, and Penny poked her head in. “Breakfast,” she said, taking a moment to ogle Norris in his boxers. “Ching cooked it.”

  Norris looked relieved; he had not grown used to Mrs. Chan’s cooking. Ching worked with a repertoire that was more familiar to the Caucasian palate: sausages, pancakes, eggs, bacon. Ed had been supplying the funds to pay for feeding his group (Mrs. Chan had initially resisted his offer to pay, but not forcefully), and was dismayed at how quickly his supply was dwindling. His Eddites ate an awful lot.

  He made his way downstairs to the kitchen. Baxter Chen was just finishing a large breakfast. He had a handgun holstered on his hip. Ed was still confused about Baxter’s presence in the house; he and two others had been sent by someone named Wang to protect the family, but it was evident that Mrs. Chan did not want them around. Although she watched them with a deep suspicion in her eyes, Mrs. Chan did not make them leave.

  “Morning time!” Baxter said brightly. “Early bird, early rise!” Ed smiled at him. He always found Baxter’s sense of humor a bit unnerving. But he always smiled at Baxter, and Baxter enjoyed being smiled at.

  Ching was standing at the stove wearing a frilly pink apron with a pair of BLAKE PEACE buttons pinned on the chest. The apron was Alice’s, but she was highly amused whenever Ching wore it. “What can I get you, Ed?” he asked. “Baxter and Fu ate all the sausages, but there’s a little bacon left.” Bacon was agreeable to Ed, so he took the last three pieces along with a heap of scrambled eggs. Ching put little bits of scallion into his scrambled eggs, which Ed quite liked. He had always been fond of scallions. Norris always grumbled about the scallions and picked them out, which Ed found astonishing.

  He found Alice and her mother in the garden behind the house, digging up weeds. Ed knelt nearby, donned a pair of gloves, and pitched in.

  “Good morning,” he said to the two women.

  Mrs. Chan did not look up from her work. Alice smiled him, looking a little sad. “Morning,” she said.

  He pulled up a few more weeds, taking care to avoid brushing against them with bare skin. He still had red blotches on his arms from a memorable poison ivy encounter three weeks earlier. (“Leaves of three, don’t touch it!” Baxter had recited gleefully when he’d seen Ed smearing himself with calamine lotion. Ed had not found it the least bit funny.)

  “I went looking for him again last night,” he said without looking at them. He waited for Alice to respond, but she didn’t answer. After a minute he tried again. “He’s definitely alive. If I can just―”

  “Ed,” said Alice, “I think my mother would rather not see you right now. I know you mean well, but she’s very upset today.”

  Ed sighed and stood up, still clutching a handful of leafy weeds. “I understand,” he said.

  “Thanks for looking for him. But until he’s actually here with us…” She shrugged. “You say he’s alive, but nobody else is as sure as you are. And Ma still considers you responsible for everything.”

  “She’s right.” He tossed his handful of weeds onto the pile they were making. “I’ll get him back here safe and sound. That’s a promise. Will you tell your mother that?”

  “I’ll tell her,” Alice said doubtfully. “When the time is right.” Ed knew it wouldn’t make any difference, but he needed them to know that he was still trying.

  He went back inside and made himself useful cleaning up the breakfast dishes. Ching gave him a friendly punch on the arm and told him to go relax, but Ed kept at it until the whole mountain of dirty dishes was clean again.

  Lessons started at four o’clock. These were more pleasant now that the weather had turned warm. He hated being cooped up in the house with a bunch of people who didn’t wash regularly.

  Ed and his five Eddites sat in a circle under the larger of the two sycamore trees in the back yard. At first it had been challenging just to get them to listen. For the first few weeks they had peppered him with so many questions that he’d been barely able to get a word in. After a while they had grown used to the idea that the man from their dreams was right there in front of them, and he was finally able to teach them. All of that was just fine with Ed, because he’d needed a lot of time to figure out what to say to them.

  He’d started where the Guru had started with him: meditation. Emptying the mind, relaxing the body. Emptying the mind should have been no challenge for some of the Eddites, he thought, considering what little there was in there to begin with. No, that wasn’t fair. They were good kids. There was Timothy Capers, who was extremely shy. Krista Banks was pleasant enough, but she had the attention span of a bouncy rubber ball. She went out of her way to hang around with Tim, who seemed embarrassed by her attention. Ricky was outspoken and clever; Norris was equally intelligent but kept mostly to himself. Penny, the buxom redhead, smiled at Ed in a way that made him a little self-conscious.

  The meditation lessons had required several weeks to get right. Fidgeting was a big problem in this group, and it had taken a while to get past that. Then he’d started them on the skill of separating the spirit from the body, which they naturally found disorienting. After three months he had finally dared to show them how to locate his mind among the billions of stars. They sometimes found Jonathan near Ed’s big tree, keeping a watchful eye over the dark holes in the ground.

  Ed and Jonathan had been taking turns teaching the Eddites. Ed taught them simple things: meditation, leaving the body for short periods, finding each other’s minds in the infinite space. Mason’s lessons were more theoretical; he lectured them on scientific topics such as the structure of the brain and the mechanisms that controlled sensory experience. Ed had sat in on the first few lectures, but had become bored and soon found other things to do. Mason meant well, but he was a dull teacher.

  Their homework for today had been for each of them to take one memory, any memory, and plant it inside Ed’s mind, in a spot he’d showed them. Today he gathered them there, not far from the big tree, to check their work.

  “This one’s doing well,” Ed said as he inspected a small but floppy brown sapling that had been planted there by Ricky. He touched one of its leaves and let images flow into him, merging with his own thoughts. It was a memory of a baseball game. Ed recognized Ricky, several years younger, and two older people who must have been his parents. There was a boy sitting with them who looked like a younger version of Ricky; that had to be the brother he had talked about.

  “No, I’m not buying you any Angels hats,” Ricky’s father was saying with a sour twist to his mouth. “They’re still the Rainiers to me. You can just keep on wearing your Rainiers hats.” Ed could tell from the man’s Seattle Rainiers paraphernalia that he was serious about his baseball.

  The memory faded and Ed moved on to the next one. This was a scrawny, pale-green sprout that would have escaped his notice had Norris not pointed it out to him. He touched it and was rewarded with an image of Norris sitting on the toilet. The memory included a very strong od
or.

  “Nice,” said Ed. Norris shrugged.

  The next one was Penny’s. Ed touched a golden leaf and quickly let go. “Goodness,” he said, suddenly aware that he was blushing. He looked at Penny, who was smiling at him in a way that made his ears turn warm. “Next,” Ed said quickly.

  The other two had not been able to plant any memory at all. Ed would need to work with them individually. But not today. He was tired and his head was starting to ache. He concluded their training for the day and the students walked across the yard to the house, stretching legs that had become stiff from sitting on the ground. Ed remained where he was, his back against the peeling bark of the sycamore tree, and rubbed his temples. He thought of Rayfield and Joy, Perla and Sarah, and said a little prayer that they were all safe.

  * * *

  Ed spent the evening in the upstairs bedroom. It was hard to face Mrs. Chan and her accusatory looks. He must have dozed off, because the next time he looked at the clock it was a quarter past midnight. He had been propped up in an uncomfortable position and was stiff as a board. He took a minute to stretch his legs, then another minute to massage a painful cramp that seized up his right leg near his scar. Still feeling exhausted, but unable to sleep any more, he gingerly put weight on his tingling legs and limped out into the hallway.

  The house was silent. Ed walked on creaky hardwood floors to the stairway, took one step, and then flailed his arms helplessly as his right leg gave out and sent him tumbling down the stairs. He lay for a few moments at the bottom, bruised and embarrassed, waiting to see if anyone in the house had heard his fall. No one had.

  The feeling was starting to come back into his legs, so he stood up again and hobbled into the kitchen to find something to eat. The light over the sink was on, as it always was at night. There was no sign of Baxter or his men, which was unusual—at least one of them always stayed up at night to keep watch. Then Ed saw a faint red light through the kitchen window. His first thought was of the gnome, but then he realized it was the glow of a cigarette. He went out the back door and found Baxter standing out on the patio, enjoying the warm June night. Bugs chattered and droned in the trees. Baxter offered him a Camel and he accepted it gratefully.

  “Turkish tobacco,” Baxter said. “Turn you into turkey.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Ed replied.

  They smoked in silence. Ed liked Baxter. You didn’t have to wonder what Baxter thought of you, because he thought everyone was funny.

  Ed made himself a sandwich and went to the living room, where he found Fu fast asleep in an armchair with his head lolling over to the side. He had left the television on again. The programming had gone off the air for the night, and the screen was filled with black and white static. The television was hissing softly with a quiet white noise.

  “Fu!” he said, poking the big man’s shoulder. “You’re going to get a stiff neck!”

  But Fu did not wake up. When he slept, he slept soundly. He’d been working hard on his graduate program and came home every day almost (but not quite) too tired to eat dinner before flopping down to sleep. He changed position and snored once, softly, when Ed put a blanket over him. “Good night, Dr. Fu,” said Ed.

  He was in the doorway to the kitchen when he felt it: something wrong was approaching. The sensation was so strong that he felt dizzy and had to steady himself on the doorframe. It was the same thing he’d felt in that diner, when he was eating with Driscoll and Mason. Were the lights going dim, or was it his imagination? “Fu,” he tried to say, but it came out as a whisper. “Fu!”

  There was darkness outside. Not the normal dark of the nighttime, but something infinitely more sinister. The dark man was nearby—somewhere outside the house, in the street or in the front yard. And he was coming to kill Ed.

  “Fu!” Ed said. His voice worked better this time. Fu mumbled something, rolled over on his chair, and went back to sleep. Ed gave up on him. “Baxter!”

  Baxter Chen was at his side a moment later, and his two associates arrived a few seconds after that with serious-looking rifles in their hands. Baxter looked around, wide-eyed, then held his hands out in a gesture that expressed a combination of confusion and annoyance.

  “Out in the street,” Ed said. The presence of the dark man was making it hard to speak. There was a stench in the air like oily smoke. “He’s coming to get me.”

  Alice and her mother came down the stairs to see what was going on. Baxter waved at them to go back, but only Mrs. Chan complied. Alice crouched in the shadows behind the railing to watch. Norris and Penny and Ricky were right behind her. Fu, who had finally awoken, appeared thoroughly confused.

  Baxter drew his handgun and went to the door. He looked through the peephole, then opened the door quietly and slipped outside. His two men darted out into the night and hid in the bushes. Ed crept up to the open door and peered outside.

  A man was standing in the middle of the street. His features were not discernible; he was no more than a black profile against the glow of a light from a house across the street. To Ed’s eyes, the light seemed to be sucked into the dark man like a black hole. It was hard to look at him directly—like staring at the opposite of the sun. As Ed watched, the man turned and walked away down the street. He did not hurry, but walked at a leisurely pace, his shoes clicking on the pavement. Ed caught sight of a long, black overcoat and well-polished dress shoes. The man was not dressed for sneaking around.

  “Stop, you anal worm!” Baxter called. The man did not stop. Baxter’s associates left their spot in the bushes and crept silently across the yard, and a moment later they had disappeared into the night.

  Ed’s sensation of wrongness went away a short while later. Alice fixed him some tea, which he spilled on himself because his hands were shaking. Urizen had found him. That thought kept returning, long after Baxter’s men returned to report that the man had disappeared. Urizen knew where he was and had come for him. This visit must have been for reconnaissance. The next time he would bring firemen, or something worse. The Chans would never be safe as long as Ed was in their house.

  “I can’t stay here,” he mumbled some time later, sitting with Ching and Alice at the kitchen table. Everyone else had gone to bed, all except for one of Baxter’s men. That one was sitting in the living room, watching out the window in case the dark man returned.

  “There’s no place safer,” Ching said.

  “We’ve got Baxter,” said Alice. “He’ll protect us. And if they get past him, they’ll still have to deal with Mr. Fu.”

  Ed smiled. “I’m sure Mr. Fu could beat the snot out of Urizen. But I can’t ask him to do that. I’ve asked too much of everyone already. Alice, your mother wants me gone.”

  Alice shrugged. “She’s just that way.”

  “Come on,” Ching said, punching Ed on the arm. “Get some sleep and we’ll figure it out in the morning.”

  Ed gulped down the last of his tea and stood up. “In the morning,” he said, but he had already decided what he had to do.

  22

  Myelin

  It was Saturday. Ed waited by the big tree for Mason to arrive, fighting down a feeling of unease that had been building up his belly all day. Every Saturday night they were supposed to meet here so Jonathan could share the latest developments in his search for Urizen. This was sometimes followed by a lesson, if there was something Mason thought Ed needed to learn. Jonathan was quite experienced in the sorts of skills Ed had first learned from the Guru, and he had been spending considerable time telling of his experiences and sharing what he knew. The depth of Mason’s knowledge was impressive to Ed, who had not had a mentor since the Guru’s passing.

  Jonathan had failed to appear for the last two meetings. This was quite unlike him; Mason was always perfectly punctual and insisted on punctuality from Ed as well. Ed was worried about him.

  Since he was a little early, he walked over the hill and down to the deep black holes in the ground. Mason checked on these cracks every time he vis
ited Ed’s mind, just to make sure they hadn’t grown larger. So far they had not, but they hadn’t become any smaller either.

  In the physical world, the sun had just set and the real stars would be starting to come out. Ed had just finished dinner—Ricky and Penny had made a huge lasagna, full of mushrooms and meat, which Mrs. Chan had picked at with some trepidation—and was sitting cross-legged on the bed in the room he shared with Norris. Norris avoided their room when Ed was there, and Ed was glad to have some time to himself.

  Over the months, he had learned a great deal from Mason, whose lessons were very different from the Guru’s. He taught Ed things that the Guru probably wouldn’t have approved of: how to dig secrets out of someone’s head, how to watch what another person was seeing (Jonathan said this was quite useful for cheating at cards, but insisted that he never did so himself), how to make a person sneeze. He drew diagrams with sticks in the dirt to map out the brain and explained how—if Ed wanted to—he could reach inside and control another person’s movements. At other times, Jonathan filled him in on the latest news.

  “We lost,” Mason had said at one of their meetings last November. Ed had never seen him looking dejected—even when things didn’t go his way, he usually remained cheerful—but on that day Jonathan had been uncharacteristically glum. “I don’t know where we go from here.”

  The days were growing shorter and it had rained continuously for the whole week before their meeting. At that time, Ed had been planning to stay at the Chans’ house for a month or two.