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

by Michael Stiles

  “They can go invisible,” Rayfield said thoughtfully. “Wish the Guru taught me that.”

  Joy found a door nearby that led to a small storage space, and they spent the next few minutes dragging all three men inside. The one she’d hit with the bat was still breathing, but the other two weren’t. The corpse, the one who’d been dead when they’d arrived, had a long, bloody slash in his throat. The bodies were limp and awkward, but they managed to get them into the closet and force the door shut. Rayfield hit the doorknob repeatedly with his rebar until it fell off. When they were done, he sagged against the wall to catch his breath.

  “You all right, sweetie?” said Joy.

  “Just feel weak,” Rayfield said. He scratched his head and then gasped.

  Joy hurried over next to him. “What’s wrong?”

  “That ain’t good,” Rayfield was muttering. He slid down until he was sitting on the floor with his head in his hands. “Not good, not good.” But he would say no more in answer to Joy’s questions.

  “It’s the hum,” said Joy. “We need to go towards the source. Find out what’s causing it.” Her stomach felt queasy, and the brief glimmer of hope she’d felt as they had prevailed over the blue men was quickly disappearing into a cloud of despair.

  Rayfield remained slouched against the wall a moment longer, catching his breath. Then he got to his feet, set his jaw and took the lead again. “I’m ready, Bunny-bun. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Dalton Whitehead knocked on the door to Nathaniel’s chamber and poked his head inside. “Something’s happening at the front door,” he said.

  Nathaniel sat on a bench against the far wall. His eyes flickered back and forth, watching through the eyes of his men elsewhere in the caverns. His silver hair was growing long and unkempt, making him look more than ever like an Old Testament prophet. The doctor let himself into the room and stood in front of Nathaniel, waiting patiently but making himself as conspicuous as possible.

  “Dibble is dead,” Nathaniel said after a long silence. “And now two more have gone quiet.”

  “I think we’re under attack,” Whitehead said.

  “The men never look where I want them to,” Nathaniel muttered. “Of course we’re under attack. Someone has found my house. But it’s not him.”

  Him. Nathaniel hardly seemed to care if someone had found their tunnels. All he cared about was Terwilliger. “You’re obsessed with that man. He’s not worth all the trouble you’re wasting on him.”

  Nathaniel focused his eyes on Whitehead, glaring at him so fiercely that the doctor had to look away. “I need what he has! None of this will work unless I have him on my side.”

  Somewhere in the depths of Whitehead’s mind, a tiny voice spoke. Crazy, it said. He’ll kill us all. Why am I following him? The thought made him dizzy. The doctor closed his eyes and let the hum wash over him until the dangerous voice went silent. “If it’s not Terwilliger, then who’s found us?”

  “I’m sending one of my very best men to find out.” Nathaniel paused for a long moment, until Whitehead took his eyes off the floor to see if his leader had gone vacant again. But Nathaniel was looking straight at him. “One of my smartest men, who will know how to be sneaky and not get killed.” He looked at Dalton with his head at an odd angle.

  “I…” Whitehead stammered in confusion until he realized that Nathaniel was giving him an order.

  “Go!” The command came out as a scream. “Find them!” Whitehead hurried out of the room, tripping over his own feet.

  He rushed through the cavern, going not toward the front door but in the opposite direction. There was a passageway, forbidden to most of the Horsemen, that led to a second way out. Only a few of them knew it was there; the rest couldn’t even see it. Dalton made his way down that passage, bumping his head several times on the low ceiling in his haste. With every bump the voice in his head spoke a little louder: Crazy. I shouldn’t be here. I’m supposed to be at Johns Hopkins. The voice was insistent, but the hum pushed it out of his mind again.

  It was almost dark outside. Whitehead popped up out of a vertical tunnel that ended at a heavy iron grate, perfectly concealed in the tall, brown grass. He breathed deeply, enjoying a few moments in the cool air outside as he made his way up toward the front door. He could tell that something was wrong as soon as he reached it; the door was ajar and no one was there to conceal it. He went back inside, then closed it firmly behind him and made his way down the steps until he reached the first crossing.

  The smell of blood was in the air. Whitehead knew that smell. He had smelled a lot of blood in his career. Thinking about his work before coming here was difficult with the hum interfering with his thoughts. He’d been a psychiatrist at Hopkins before Charles Witherspoon had recruited him. Then Nathaniel had arrived. It was difficult to remember exactly what had happened after that.

  Around the next corner he found the source of the smell. There was a large bloodstain on the floor, appearing almost black in the dim light. No, not just blood. There was water, too. It looked like someone had just been mopping. But of mop and mopper there was no sign.

  Without warning, Dalton felt the unpleasant presence of Nathaniel in his mind. The man liked to see what his men were seeing, and would look through their eyes from time to time. Whitehead hated the feeling, even though he was supposed to consider it an honor.

  Whitehead tripped over something that rolled away with a metallic clink. He picked it up and looked at it: a ball of metal, slightly flattened, small enough to fit comfortably into his hand.

  A doorknob.

  He turned and saw a door to his right with a broken piece of metal where the knob should have been. The knob in his hand fit, but the pieces were too damaged for him to force the door open. He was bending down to get a closer look when he heard something heavy strike the other side of the door. Boom, followed by another boom, and then the door flew open. It struck Dalton in the face, knocking him backward. He fell on his tailbone with a grunt.

  Terrance Chisholm was standing in the doorway looking quite disheveled. He was one of the youngest Horsemen, in his early twenties. Terrance was holding a mop over his head like a weapon, and the wet fibers were dripping everywhere. “They found us!” Terrance said.

  Dalton peered past Terrance into the storage room behind him. “Somebody in there with you?”

  “Lingelback and Dibble. I think they’re dead.”

  The doctor pushed Terrance aside to see for himself. Sure enough, both men were very much dead. Lingelback had a cracked skull: blunt trauma. Dibble’s throat had been slashed, but Dalton had already seen that. “Who did this to them? Did you see the intruder?”

  Chisholm was looking rather unsteady. “Girl. Blonde.”

  Whitehead gave him a sidelong glance. “A girl?”

  Terrance nodded. “Mean girl. About this tall.” He held a hand up five feet in the air, the height of his own shoulder.

  “That’s not very tall.”

  “She had a baseball bat.” He rubbed his head, where a large and unsightly bump made him look a little like a cartoon character who’d been hit by a falling anvil. “I gotta lie down.” With that, he passed out on the floor.

  * * *

  Sarah followed John through a dizzying maze of tunnels. He seemed to know his way very well. There was an occasional wrong turn, but he always managed to regain his bearings and keep going. All the while, they didn’t see a single Horseman. Sarah assumed this was because they were all attending Nathaniel’s meeting. After a long walk through gently descending hallways, they came at last to a long, straight corridor with cinderblock walls that were painted white.

  “The medical area,” said John. “Empty at the moment. These are all examination rooms.”

  There were at least a dozen doorways. “So many of them,” Sarah said.

  “They’ve got some kind of experiment going on. The doctor, Whitehead, is doing tests on some of Nathaniel’s men. They’re using the machine to put idea
s into their heads, to try to control them. If you see the guys with the collars, they’re the ones Whitehead is still working on. When he’s done doing his thing, the collars come off.”

  “Did you say there’s a machine? What kind of machine?”

  “You can hear it,” said John. “That’s what the noise is. There’s a machine somewhere down below that makes the hum.”

  Something had been bothering Sarah for a while now, but with the hum playing tricks with her mind, it was hard to bring the thought up to the surface. “We keep going down. Deeper into the tunnels. Shouldn’t we be going uphill?”

  John sighed. “We should. Yeah.” He kept on walking, turning down another hallway that sloped gently downward.

  “Well, then,” Sarah said, as if the question was settled. “So we should turn around and go back up.” She hesitated. “Toward the surface.”

  “That would be the smart thing to do.”

  Sarah stopped walking, with the idea of forcing John either to stop or let go of her hand. He chose to stop. “There’s one thing I have to do before I can take you out of here,” he said.

  Sarah folded her arms and glared at him.

  “It’ll only take a minute,” he said, a bit defensively. “I have to talk to somebody.”

  “Who?” Sarah had a sudden thought. “You’re not going after Nathaniel, are you?”

  “No. I’m not strong enough to do anything about him right now. I need to see Arthur.”

  “To let him go?”

  “I just want to have a word.”

  Sarah stared at him in disbelief. “That’s stupid.”

  “No. I swear I’m not being stupid. Arthur is a very dangerous man. In fact, he’s one of the two most dangerous men on this planet.”

  “I know all about that,” said Sarah. “Orc and Urizen. Ed talked about it all the time.”

  “See, Ed’s not as dumb as he looks. Arthur is Orc. He’s down here, locked up—at least for now. There’s a big opportunity there for whoever takes it.” He had that same guilty look on his face as when he’d admitted to killing the guard at the door. “It won’t take long, and then I’ll get you out of here. I promise.”

  Sarah considered her chances of escaping on her own, but she knew there was no way she could navigate these tunnels without help. “If you get us caught, I’ll strangle you before Nathaniel can do it.”

  “That would be best for everybody,” John said with a smile.

  They continued through the medical wing until they reached a curving corridor. It spiraled down like a corkscrew, leading deep into the ground. Every so often there was a light that had burned out, and they had to feel their way along for some distance in total darkness. With each step downward, Sarah felt the hum increasing in intensity until her nausea overwhelmed her. She had to stop for a moment to throw up. John waited patiently, looking like he was close to doing the same.

  The concrete walls changed over to rough rock at the bottom of the curving tunnel. This section looked like a mine, with marks on the walls where people had carved away the rock with tools. The smooth parts of the walls were covered in drawings, some very old and some that had to be quite recent. There were old mine cart rails embedded in the floor, visible but not protruding enough to trip over. Electrical wires had been attached to the ceiling with metal brackets, providing power to the light bulbs that provided a thin, yellow light. The path sloped downward steeply and they had to take their time to keep from slipping.

  “How long have you been down here?” Sarah said.

  John stopped and adjusted his hat. “Don’t know. Weeks. Long enough to learn my way around. I never stay long enough for the hum to get to me. I park my car about a mile away and come down to explore.”

  “That’s how we found the entrance. We followed you.”

  “Good work, detective.” John sounded genuinely impressed.

  “And you’ve stayed hidden that whole time? None of them know you’re here?”

  “Arthur does. The others haven’t spotted me yet, except for that guy at the door. May he rest in peace.” He began walking again, examining the artwork as he went. “Well, I did show myself to Jim Litton. He was one of mine before Nathaniel took him.”

  “One of yours?”

  “There were two factions in the Society of the True Judgment. There were my guys, and there were Kevin Larson’s guys. Larson is not a respectable individual.”

  That name rang a bell for Sarah. “I think I’ve met him.”

  “Probably. He went to the Guru’s house once or twice. He recruited me into the Society, but I figured him out pretty quick. When these Horsemen showed up and broke the Society, I was right in the middle of starting an insurrection.” He laughed. “Shortest insurrection in history.”

  Sarah slipped on a puddle and bumped into John from behind. His solid bulk stopped her from sliding any further. The tunnel just went on and on. “Sorry,” she said. “So what happened? When you let Litton see you?”

  “He started yelling. Tried to call for help. I had to make him forget he’d seen me.”

  “Did it work?”

  “He forgot that he saw me, and he forgot a lot of other stuff too. I might have messed up his noggin a little.”

  The passage leveled out and John pulled Sarah into the shadows to listen. Sarah could hear a rustling sound up ahead, the murmuring sounds of a crowd attempting to be quiet. She peeked around the corner to see the huge chamber with the horse on the ceiling. Somehow John had brought her around to a different entrance from the one she had used before. The men in blue were congregated there with their backs to John and Sarah, whispering among themselves as they waited for their leader to arrive. Sarah could just see the metal chairs on their platform at the center of the room: one holding Arthur, the other empty.

  It appeared they had arrived just in time. The crowd erupted in cheers, and Nathaniel appeared at the far end of the room leading a man with a black bag over his head.

  “Who is that?” Sarah whispered into Big John’s ear. John shrugged.

  Nathaniel held up a hand to signal for quiet as he stepped onto the platform. His silver hair—Kajdas’ hair—had grown long and wild. “Horsemen!” he shouted. “This is it! I’ve completed my set!”

  Many of the men in blue cheered and waved their arms. Those who weren’t cheering stood with slack jaws and blank faces. These were the ones who wore the flashing collars.

  “You have all come to know Orc,” Nathaniel continued, rubbing the top of Arthur’s big, round head as if it was a good-luck charm. “Now I have a new pet. Look at Urizen!” He yanked the black bag off of the other man’s head, revealing a face that Sarah had never seen before. He was pale, with a large bald spot on the top of his head and a fringe of greasy black hair around it. Could that really be Urizen? He didn’t look particularly fearsome.

  “Cruller,” Nathaniel said to his followers. “That’s what he calls himself. Terwilliger found him for me. Now he’s mine, and into the chair he goes!” He shoved Cruller into the empty chair. Immediately two of his lieutenants began wrapping the heavy chains around him. One of them spit into his face for good measure; Cruller didn’t react.

  “The first part is done,” Nathaniel said. “We have them, and we will keep them here. Now it’s time for the second part. Because we can’t kill these two until it’s time!” There was a sound of general disappointment from the crowd. “No, not yet! Because the real danger isn’t the men. It’s inside the men. If we kill their bodies, the demons will be free! They will find someone new, and the Cycle will go on! Unless…” He swung his head from left to right, gauging his crowd and pausing for effect. “Unless… there is nowhere for them to go. Our two guests would like for to kill them so they can move into someone new. That’s what they want. But we won’t give them what they want.” He smiled at Arthur, who continued to stare straight ahead. He was, in fact, looking straight toward Sarah and John.

  “We are almost ready to deploy,” Nathaniel went on. “To go out
into the world and show them who we are. The Machine is ready. Four more Machines will be done soon. And when they are, we will go out and fill the world with our music!”

  The blue men cheered. There had to be more than a hundred of them, although Sarah couldn’t be sure.

  “Those who won’t listen to our music will listen to our bullets and bombs!” Nathaniel shouted, nearly screaming to make himself heard. He basked for a moment in the adulation of his men. Then he froze with wide eyes. His mouth moved silently as though he was whispering to someone. He frowned and raised his voice again to speak to the crowd. “I was just informed that our visitor has been spotted. Those of you who knew William Dibble will want to see the face of the man who killed him. Whoever finds this man, and brings him to me alive, will get a prize.”

  The hum swelled to a high pitch, as it had done before, and an image of a man’s face appeared before Sarah’s eyes. Big John shuddered as he saw it too, just as the same transmission went out to all of Nathaniel’s men.

  “No,” Sarah said, no longer bothering to whisper. The Horsemen were making enough of a racket that there was no way they would hear her. “Not him.”

  The face in the transmission was Rayfield’s.

  * * *

  Rayfield and Joy walked past an empty dining hall, where the lingering smell of food made Rayfield’s stomach growl. He was awfully hungry. The cafeteria was empty, as were all the tunnels they had explored so far. Joy had decided that it would be best to walk around with confidence, rather than sneaking, because no one would question a person who acted like they knew where they were going. Rayfield was skeptical that this tactic would work, but he was wise enough to keep his mouth shut. He knew when to argue and when to go along. He didn’t like arguing, especially with Joy.

  Beyond the dining hall they came to a fork in the tunnel. The left passage was dimly lit and sloped sharply downward; the right one remained level and was well-lit.