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

by Michael Stiles

  “And the President, right?” said Ed.

  “You ask too many questions, Bismuth,” Leonard muttered.

  “Asking questions is smart,” said Watership. “Bismuth is smart enough to be careful what he shares outside this room. Sharing secrets can get people killed.” He didn’t look at Ed, but the subtext of his statement was clear. “We don’t discuss ODESSA or Gemstone operations with the President. Bob Haldeman briefs Nixon when there’s something he absolutely must know.

  “I called you here,” Watership continued, “because it’s time for the next Gemstone operation. You’ve heard of Emanuel Wilson?”

  “The reporter,” said Leonard.

  “He’s a hack,” Watership retorted. “The more we learn about him, the fishier he smells. We think he’s working for the wrong sort of people.”

  “Who do you consider the wrong sort of people?” said Ed.

  “Brezhnev. We think Wilson is a Soviet agent. Releasing the Pentagon Papers isn’t something a patriotic journalist would do, and Wilson isn’t smart enough to break a story like that on his own. Somebody else is pulling the strings. The President wants to know who that is.”

  Leonard was practically quivering with excitement. “Another break-in?” he asked.

  Watership ignored him. “Bismuth, you did good work with that safe. I had my doubts, but you came through. It wasn’t your fault the operation fell apart. Are you up for another surreptitious entry?”

  Ed looked from Leonard to Watership, wondering once again what he’d gotten himself into. Both of these men were clearly crazy. “Of course I am,” he replied, trying very hard to sound like he meant it.

  * * *

  Sarah had stopped kicking and screaming once it became clear that she would not be getting away. None of the men in blue paid any attention to her as her captors dragged her down through the dimly-lit tunnels. The man with Kajdas’ face led the way, skipping along with a flashlight in his hand. He hummed a happy tune as the beam of his light danced across the walls, illuminating bizarre murals and writing. The movement of the light made her dizzy. The pain had subsided a bit, fading to an ache in the back of her head that throbbed with each heartbeat.

  Perla had been taken down some other branch off of the main tunnel. She had gone silently, without resisting, which struck Sarah as being quite unlike her. Now it was just Sarah and the blue men, with Kajdas doing his strange flashlight-dance ahead of them.

  The tunnels carried them deep into the ground. Concrete walls changed over to bare rock. Sarah shivered in the chilly air. One of the men put a blanket over her shoulders, but she shrugged it off stubbornly. Better to be cold. The vibrations became stronger as they went deeper into the earth. The feeling in her stomach was terribly unpleasant and it took a lot of effort to keep from getting sick.

  After a long descent, they reached a large, natural cavern. Electric lights had been wired up and placed along the base of the walls, providing just enough light to make out the size and shape of the chamber. The room was roughly circular, perhaps thirty feet in diameter, with a ceiling that rose up fifteen feet overhead. The whole ceiling was covered by one enormous painting: a blue horse with a bright red eye. The painting was not quite finished, and she could see a metal scaffold near the far end of the room where the horse’s hindquarters were still in progress.

  “Welcome to the Horse Room, Sarah,” said Nathaniel. He looked like Kajdas, but Sarah knew who he was.

  At the middle of the room were two big chairs, heavy and thick. One was empty. In the other sat a man she had met once before, and had hoped never to see again.

  “Arthur,” she whispered.

  The big man raised his bald head to look at her. She could tell that he recognized her.

  “I should have known you would be behind all this,” Sarah said. “Is this your kingdom down here? Do you think you’re some kind of king?”

  Arthur didn’t answer. He merely gazed at her until Nathaniel spoke.

  “The king,” he said. He laughed softly to himself. “Check-mate. The white king is captured. But where is the black one?”

  It was only then that Sarah noticed the chains glimmering in the faint light. Arthur was wrapped in them, bound tightly to the chair.

  “The black king is in the white house,” Nathaniel said. He came closer and whispered in her ear. “Ed is there, too. He will find the black king for me. Or… maybe the king has already captured him!”

  Two men were holding her arms, but they weren’t holding her very securely. She yanked her right arm free and punched Nathaniel in the eye. He shrank back with a high-pitched squeal. “Not my eye!” he growled. “Not my eye!” The men quickly seized her arm and forced it behind her back until she feared her shoulder might come out of joint.

  “That was for shooting Ed,” Sarah hissed at him.

  Nathaniel leaned in close. “I never did that. Kajdas did that.”

  “It’s all the same to me, asshole,” she said.

  He closed his left eye. The other one began to glow a deep red, just like the eye of the horse overhead. The red glow made her feel even more nauseated than before. “You’ll learn to respect me,” he said. “And then you’ll learn to love me. Won’t that drive Ed crazy?” He chuckled softly. “This is your house now, Sarah. Make yourself at home.”

  * * *

  They took Perla through a maze of narrow tunnels until they came to a long hallway with doors on either side. One of the men opened a door on the left side, and they waited politely for her to go inside. She did so without complaint. They closed and locked the door behind her, and she was alone in the silent, chilly cell.

  She cooperated because there was no point in fighting them. She was pretty sure she could have beaten her two guards in a fair fight, but there would be no such thing as a fair fight here. Beating up two of them would bring a dozen more. Perla would wait until the right opportunity to make a move. She hoped Sarah would have enough sense to do the same. It would be best to try to escape together, but Perla would be just as willing to escape on her own to find help. First, though, she needed to understand her predicament.

  The cell was a tiny room with smooth, gray walls. Its door was steel, with a small window that gave her a view of an identical door across the hall. She couldn’t see whether either of her guards had remained outside. There was a panel at waist-level that was wide enough to fit a tray of food. She tried the doorknob, quietly—not to get out, not yet, but to confirm that they had locked it. It wouldn’t turn.

  After that, she took a self-guided tour of her cell. This did not take long. The room was lit by a single bulb in the ceiling, protected by a wire cage. There was a cot with a thin, moldy cushion. It was so filthy that billows of dust filled the air when she sat lightly on the edge. She coughed for a while and covered her nose and mouth with her sweater. There was also a toilet. It wasn’t the porcelain kind she was used to, but stainless steel, and a sink was built into the top of it. That struck her as unsanitary, but at least she had a water supply. She tested the faucet; the water that came out looked clean. She tasted it, then took a long drink. It might make her sick later, but water was something she couldn’t do without.

  She sat down carefully on the cot again, waving her hand as though that would somehow clear the dust. There was more coughing, followed by a few minutes of feeling like she was about to cry. She clenched her jaw until the feeling went away.

  Nothing happened for a long time. She grew quite hungry. Hunger made her irritable. The more irritable she became, the more she wished that she had cracked some heads while she’d had the chance.

  Now that she had time to think about it, she realized that she could feel the vibrations that Sarah had complained about. She’d been feeling it ever since getting out of the car, but it hadn’t been obvious to her until now. It was a deep hum, a note so low that she could feel it down in the pit of her belly. As soon as she became consciously aware of it, she found it hard to think of anything else. And that made her eve
n more irritable.

  Someone knocked on the door a while later: a quiet tapping of metal on metal. “Don’t come in,” she called. “I don’t have any clothes on.”

  There was a jingling of keys and the door swung open, revealing a short and somewhat stocky man in the same blue clothes the other men had been wearing. There was a metal collar around his neck, with a little red light that flashed once every few seconds. He saw her sitting on the bed, fully clothed, and disappointment was evident on his face. “Nathaniel said to bring you dinner.” He placed a small metal tray on the floor in the corner, just inside the door.

  The door didn’t squeak when opened; the hinges had been oiled. Perla made a mental note of that fact. “Thank you.” She smiled at him, but it didn’t seem to have any effect. “Where’s my friend?”

  “Not here. Somewhere else.” He seemed distracted, like there was a lot going on in his mind—except he didn’t strike her as the sort of man who ever had a lot going on inside his mind.

  “I’m Perla.” She smiled again. This time he noticed the smile and shrank back from her. She didn’t smile at men very often; perhaps she was doing it wrong.

  “Flem,” he mumbled. Perla frowned at his nonsensical reply until he added, “That’s my name.

  “Thanks for dinner, Flem. Next time I’ll buy.”

  He looked at her blankly, nodded, and started to leave.

  “Hey,” she said, not because she wanted to talk to him but because she didn’t want to be alone. He paused in the doorway, looking at the floor. “What is this place?”

  “Nathaniel’s house,” he said.

  “He’s the one-eyed guy, right?”

  “Not anymore. He has two now.”

  “Oh. All-righty.” There was a long silence, except for the hum. “Is this part of the Army base?”

  “You mean the Arsenal?” Flem shook his head. “They don’t know we’re here.”

  “How can they not know?”

  He shrugged. “I guess they forgot these tunnels were here. We hide the entrances so they can’t find us.”

  She thought back to the last moments before being captured by the men in blue. “I couldn’t see the door. Or the men.”

  “Yeah. We can make the door so people can’t see it. Nathaniel showed us how.”

  “And you can do the same thing to hide yourselves?”

  “Nuh-uh. Nathaniel does that. He can hide us, as long as we’re not moving too fast.”

  “How?”

  Flem suddenly became anxious. “I’d better go. Can I go?”

  “You can go,” Perla said, trying not to laugh at the way he had asked her permission.

  The door clicked shut behind him and she was alone with the hum once more. She took the cover off the tray and found a surprisingly appetizing meal: small pieces of some kind of meat, potatoes that had been diced and sautéed, and peas. There was no silverware, so she used her fingers. When she was finished, she put the tray in the corner and sat on the cot with her back propped against the hard wall. She wanted to lie down, but the idea of putting her head anywhere near that disgusting mattress was not acceptable to her. So she took off her sweater, rolled it up behind her head, and dozed sitting up.

  She wanted rest more than anything, but there was something she needed to do first. It had been a few days since she’d spoken with Joy. When Perla had first gone back home to Colorado, they had talked on the phone every day. After a while, their conversations had slowed to once every two or three days. The last time Perla had tried to call was the morning after Sarah had arrived on her doorstep, but no one had picked up the phone either at Joy’s apartment or at her office. Now there was no way to contact her directly. But she thought there might be a way to contact her indirectly.

  Perla closed her eyes, slowed her breathing, and went to outer space to look for Joy’s mind. The hum made it difficult to focus; she felt constantly on edge and had trouble concentrating. It took several tries to float out of her body and into space. When she did manage to do it, the hum came with her, filling her mind with its endless sound.

  Joy was easy to find, both because her bright yellow aura was hard to miss, and because Rayfield’s deep purple world was right next to it. She settled down on the ground, squinting slightly in the glow of millions of yellow flowers. Joy’s mind was all flowers, as far as the eye could see. Rayfield’s mind burned overhead like a purple sun, warm and comforting. Perla found a spot where the memories were young and fresh; the ground was fertile there and memories would take root easily. Since they had never made arrangements to meet in this place, there was only one way Perla could think of to communicate with her.

  The memories were fresh in Perla’s mind. She formed them into plants and placing them carefully in the soft ground. Perla’s memories were rust-colored and subdued. She planted several in quick succession, hoping to leave enough of a trail for Joy to follow. When she was done, a dozen dark-red saplings grew among the countless yellow flowers. Perla went straight to Rayfield’s mind and did the same thing. They might not notice immediately that memories had been planted in their minds, but she could think of no other way to let them know.

  Ed was next. It took her a long time to find him; she passed right by his mind twice without realizing it. His blue-green world had changed to a dark gray. As she came closer, she saw that it was entirely shrouded by clouds. These were not normal, healthy clouds. They stank like foul smoke, and they formed a thick barrier that was impossible to penetrate. Every time she tried to push her way through the cloud-barrier, the suffocating density and stench of the clouds forced her to turn back. Finally she gave up and returned to her body, shivering on the floor of her cell. They had turned the lights off. Perla refused to cry—crying was completely out of the question. If her eyes were watering a bit, it was just from the stinging foulness of those clouds.

  * * *

  “Look, he was bald all along!” Nathaniel walked around Arthur’s chair, running his fingers along the heavy chains. Sarah watched him with trepidation. “Orc,” he whispered. “Can you turn into a black snake and slither away, like Blake said you could? I’m waiting to see that.” He waited. “No, I guess not.”

  Arthur sat in his chair, looking at nothing.

  “Quiet now, aren’t you?” Nathaniel said. He scratched Arthur behind the ear and murmured something that sounded like “Good kitty.”

  “People will be looking for me,” Sarah said.

  Nathaniel turned to face her. “Who will? Ed?”

  “Maybe.”

  Nathaniel smiled with Tom Kajdas’ tobacco-stained teeth. “I’m lucky you came to me, then. You can be bait.”

  The headache was still going strong in the back of her head, although she no longer felt like she was going to faint. Her courage had drained out of her when she’d realized that her power would not be any help. Nathaniel’s other men had left them alone for the moment, but she could hear their footsteps out in the tunnels. Sounds carried a long way in these caverns. She looked into his eyes for as long as she could. But his gaze was intense, and she eventually had to look away. “He’s been trying to find you for months. All you had to do was tell him where you are. He would have come.”

  “Along with his new friend,” Nathaniel said. “I don’t like his friend. His friend. Who is his friend? He has to come alone.”

  She looked at Arthur, seated in his chair on the platform. He was ignoring their conversation, or perhaps he was unable to hear them. He looked barely conscious. “But why?” she said. “You already killed Ed’s wife. Now you have me. Why can’t you leave him alone?”

  “Because the Prophet named him. Palamabron is the name Blake gave him. He is to break the Cycle, the endless game between Orc and Urizen. But he doesn’t know how. I know how, and so I want to help him.”

  “By killing the people he cares about?”

  Nathaniel took a step closer to Sarah, and she took a step back. “By killing everybody. Everybody except my own. Pretty Eleanor was the first
. She was so pretty. You look a little like her, did you know?”

  Sarah was aware of that fact, and was not happy to be reminded of it. “I know.”

  “She was so special to be the first. It had to be her, so he would become what he needed to be. Now he has become. He’s ready.”

  “For what?”

  “For what?” he said, mocking her. “I am going to become him.”

  The way he said this disturbed her deeply. “I don’t understand.”

  Nathaniel pointed at his own chest—Kajdas’ chest. “This is temporary. I’m renting. Soon I’ll move out. To a permanent home.”

  “You want to possess him.”

  Nathaniel didn’t say a word; he just looked at her.

  “But you already did that.”

  “Rintrah,” said Nathaniel. “Rintrah made me get out.”

  “You mean Big John.”

  “Yes. That won’t happen again. With this new body, I have a new brain. It works better than the old one.” He turned his head and sniffed the air. “Dinner.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Sarah said.

  “I didn’t ask if you’re hungry.”

  “Is the other chair for Ed?”

  Nathaniel blinked his eyes slowly and turned his head to look at the empty chair behind Arthur’s. “You’re not a stupid girl,” he said. “Don’t ask stupid questions.”

  34

  Beethoven

  Dark clouds boiled and churned overhead, blocking out the stars. A cold wind swayed the treetops and rustled the tall, blue-green grass at the edge of the forest. The wind carried an unpleasant smell, not so different from the burning odor that Ed associated with the black smoke. The smell put him on edge.

  Mason had listened patiently while Ed told him about his dinner with Kissinger, and the subsequent meeting with Watership. Jonathan looked exhausted; Ed wondered how long it had been since he had slept. “Did you learn anything about Novus?” Mason said.