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

by Michael Stiles

  “You have to turn it off the right way. If you cut off the wave generator before the radio is disabled, you’ll make everybody’s head explode.” Joy frowned at him, trying to see if he was speaking figuratively or literally. “I’m serious,” he elaborated. “Brains exploding. You have to ramp it down gradually.”

  “Okay,” she mumbled. None of this was making sense to her anyway. “Can you do it?”

  “That’s why I’m here. If these two gentlemen would please be on their way…” He waited until Halliwell and Ludd had exited the room. “This will take a few minutes. I recommend you get out of here. Quickly.”

  Rayfield was looking intently at the man’s face. “Hold on a minute,” he said. “Don’t I know you?”

  “Come on, Rayfield,” Joy said. She checked on Sarah, who was waking up and groaning. Joy helped her sit up. A pool of blood was spreading from the nearest piece of the big Horseman, and Joy didn’t want to have to touch it. “Sarah, honey, we need to go.”

  Sarah looked at the body on the floor, then at Rayfield, then at the gray-haired swordsman. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Rayfield came with me, don’t you remember? Come on.” She helped Sarah to her feet and they started back up the passage toward the Horse Room, as the man with the sword began turning dials and flipping switches with the confidence of one who knew exactly what he was doing.

  * * *

  Perla’s shot missed Arthur by a mile. Her ears rang with the echoing noise of it, drowning out the sound of his laughter. He stood triumphantly over her and Flem, shaking with maniacal glee. His smile was a fearsome thing to look at. Perla’s hands were trembling too much to try again; she dropped the gun.

  Arthur bent down to whisper in her ear. “I could have escaped any time. The Society is still mine.”

  Perla was terrified of the big man with his enormous, round head. Her inability to assemble even the simplest thoughts was not helping matters. But something about what he said caught her attention. “Why didn’t you, then? Why stay in the chair?”

  “I am very, very patient,” Arthur said. “There are always things you can learn, if you watch and wait. For example: Do you know Nathaniel’s weakness?”

  Perla shook her head. She could see the gun, lying several feet away on the ground. There was no way to reach it. Flem might have been able to, but he was still kneeling and staring at the floor.

  “Trivial to exploit, if you know how. Every person is vulnerable in some way. It just so happens that―”

  Arthur broke off in mid-sentence and looked to his left—Perla’s right—just as a huge person barreled into him from that direction. It was the big man she had seen earlier; he had been standing in the middle of the room but hadn’t seemed important at the time. The two men fell and tumbled as each one tried to get on top. Flem scrambled to his feet and watched, mouth agape, as they fought. Arthur’s attacker had been holding a knife, which fell from his hand and slid across the floor.

  Perla kept her distance from their fight. Anyone who wanted to attack Arthur couldn’t be all bad, but that didn’t mean this guy was a friend. He looked familiar, but her addled brain couldn’t place him. Muscular build, dark hair in a short buzz-cut, slightly crooked nose. He was very quick in spite of his size, and was a good fighter, but Arthur was apparently fighting back with his mind as well as his fists. The two men grunted as they rolled and struggled for the upper position.

  While this was happening, Perla became aware that the hum had changed. It was no longer a constant, low pitch, but was rising and falling in a slow rhythm. The high note made her head hurt, and the low one made her feel sick to her stomach. She looked at Flem, who still had not taken his eyes off of the fight. He looked dazed, not himself, but it appeared that Arthur no longer had control over him. He looked at her, finally, and mouthed the words “Big John.” Perla nodded, more confused than ever.

  Big John managed to get on top of Arthur, pinning him down under his considerable weight. Arthur snarled like an animal, pummeling John with his fists but unable to squirm his way free. “Stop it, Arthur,” said John.

  “How did you hide your intentions from me?” Arthur hissed. “You meant to murder me all along!”

  “Not the whole time,” John said. “Only after you got too big for your britches.”

  “I should’ve put you out in the garden,” said Arthur. “I should have exiled you after you failed to kill the cripple.” Then his eyes widened even further, making him look very much like a gigantic bug. “You sabotaged that mission, didn’t you? You intentionally…” He sputtered for a moment, red with rage. “And you hid it all from me! I should have… should have…”

  Perla never got to hear what else he should have done. The hum rose to a deafening scream. Perla saw, too late, that Arthur had been feeling around over his head with his left hand until he found the knife. He slashed with it, slicing John’s forearm. John said, “Gaah!” and clapped his other hand over the wound to stop the bleeding, giving Arthur the opportunity to roll on top of him. Arthur pinned John down and stabbed the blade downward toward John’s chest with all his strength.

  The blade stopped inches above John’s chest. Perla could see Arthur trembling as he tried to force himself to complete the motion and plunge the knife into John’s heart, but he couldn’t make it move. He trembled, breathing heavily and grunting like an animal. John, still clutching the cut on his arm, watched Arthur with a look of intense concentration. Arthur stayed that way, poised over John with the knife, until John gently took the weapon out of his hand.

  “Killing this body won’t do you any good,” Arthur said. “I’ll just get another.”

  “Maybe,” said John. Then he punched the blade deep into Arthur’s chest, leaving the handle sticking out of him. Arthur roared with pain and anger; blood and saliva dripped from his mouth onto John’s shirt until John pushed him off. Arthur tried to pull the knife out, but its handle was slippery with blood and he couldn’t hold onto it.

  The hum rose once more to a deafening scream.

  “You killed him,” Flem said softly.

  John, still breathing hard, laughed until he started coughing. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I did.”

  Flem stood up and looked down at Arthur. “Right on.” Then he sat down on the floor again and put his head in his hands.

  John turned to Perla. “We’ve met before. I never forget a redhead. Polly? Peggy?”

  Perla opened her mouth to speak, but suddenly she couldn’t remember her own name. The hum had taken it away.

  39

  The Black Lake

  A wind like a hurricane was blowing through the trees. The clouds were thick and dark overhead, as if they were about to burst forth with rain, but no rain came. Danny looked uneasily at the sky. Something was troubling Ed greatly, and that trouble was manifesting as threatening weather in his mind. From somewhere beyond the clouds came a deep droning noise, so low that it was more of a feeling than a sound. It filled him with dread. The sound made him feel alone, like being stranded in the jungle with enemies all around. That was a thought that terrified him.

  But he had been alone and scared before. He was the Burning Devil. Danny made himself put one foot in front of the other and kept going.

  He found the big tree that held Ed’s oldest and deepest memories. The tree stood firm against the wind, hardly swaying except for its topmost branches. Its leaves, like all the foliage here, had a blue cast to them that was dulled by the dark gray ceiling of clouds.

  A red-haired girl was standing by the big tree. She was probably close to Danny’s age, although he had a hard time estimating the ages of white people. As he came closer, he saw that she was pale and had dark circles under her eyes.

  “You’re his friend,” she said.

  Danny nodded. “He doesn’t have enough friends anymore.”

  “Your family thinks you’re dead.”

  “They’re supposed to think that. For now. Who are you?”

  The girl
wrapped her arms tightly around herself and shivered. Danny read the thoughts flowing out of her mind. They were disjointed and confused, and the golden sparks of thought that danced around her head were laced with something else: little black threads appeared now and then and quickly vanished.

  “Penny,” she said. “I’m an Eddite.” Danny couldn’t help but smile when he heard that name. Penny seemed offended. “That’s what Norris calls us. I didn’t make it up.”

  Danny caught a hint of something rotten on the wind, like the exhaust of a car that was burning oil. He wondered if the smell was related to that deep droning sound. “Eddites. Followers of Ed? How many of you are there?”

  “Seven,” said Penny with a sigh. “We haven’t heard from Ed in a long time. He was staying at your house for a while, but then he left. So we all went home, like, to our homes. Jonathan still meets with us here every night. To teach us. He teaches us the things Ed didn’t want us to know.”

  The smell was growing stronger. Danny wrinkled his nose. “Such as?”

  “How to hurt people. How to kill.”

  “With your mind?”

  Penny nodded. She looked exhausted. No, beyond exhausted. Burned out, like she had been pushed to her emotional limit. “Ricky and Norris are watching the holes. I’m supposed to protect the tree.”

  “Protect it? From what?”

  “Urizen. Nathaniel. And the blue men. You’re the first person who’s come around. And you’re not blue.”

  She trailed off and started walking away, and Danny followed her. Down into a grassy valley, then up a hill until they reached a plateau that offered a beautiful view of the forest. Just as they reached the highest point, a man’s voice called out: “Penny! You’re supposed to stay at the tree!”

  The young man had a red knit cap on his head that badly needed a trip through a washing machine. He stood with a chronic slouch and looked like he was ready to lie down and go to sleep on the spot. His thought-sparks were pale green, with the same hints of black that Danny had seen mixed in with Penny’s thoughts.

  “Nothing ever happens at the tree, Norris,” Penny said. She turned to Danny and said, “Jonathan has the boys watching the holes all the time.”

  “Boys?”

  “Norris and Ricky and Tim. They help Jonathan guard the holes. Krista and I watch the tree. There’s Ricky now.”

  The second man approaching from the far side of the plateau had red hair and freckles, and he looked even more tired than the other two. “How long have you three been here? Do you ever sleep?” Danny asked. They all gave him blank looks. None of them knew how long it had been. It was hard to tell how much time was passing in this place, while their bodies were meditating in the physical world. “You need to rest. And eat something.”

  Ricky was staring toward the far side of the plateau. “We’ll rest when it’s all over. Jonathan is trying to save Ed right now.”

  “From what?” said Danny. “What’s happening to him?”

  “The infection,” Norris said. “Urizen touched him and the black smoke got into his brain.”

  Danny glanced at the sky again. “Black smoke. Ed said he saw smoke coming out of my head.”

  At once, all three of them moved away from him. Suspicion instantly clouded their eyes. “He saw it coming from you?” Ricky said.

  “Something wasn’t right about him. I tried to…” He didn’t know whether these three knew that he could read minds, and this didn’t seem like a good time to mention it. “I tried to calm him down, but he was saying things that didn’t make sense. Something’s wrong with his head. That’s why I came here.” As he said this, he was watching their thoughts with alarm. They were not contemplating harming him, not yet, but they weren’t exactly friendly either. The black sparks were troubling; he had never seen such a thing before.

  “He doesn’t need your help,” Norris said. “He’s got Jonathan.”

  “And us,” Ricky added.

  Danny did not respond. He had just noticed two long, dark holes in the ground at the far side of the plateau, so black that they seemed to swallow up what little light was coming in through the clouds. They had to be the holes Penny had mentioned. He walked over to the nearest one and gazed down into the total blackness inside.

  “Stay away from that,” Norris snapped, catching the sleeve of Danny’s t-shirt. Danny pulled away and tugged his sleeve back down to cover up his tattoo.

  “I’m only trying to help,” he said.

  “Jonathan went in there,” Penny said. “He told us to stay away. He said he’s the only one who can go inside without going crazy.”

  Danny looked into the hole again. “He’s in there? What’s he doing?”

  None of the three had an answer to that, or even looked like they cared to contemplate the question.

  “All right,” Danny said. “You wait here. I’m going in.”

  * * *

  Two men were waiting for Ed at the razor-wire fence when he arrived. Both were wearing light blue shirts over a pair of blue jeans. One was short and one was tall, and the tall one had a long, recent scar across the front of his forehead. They looked wary but not fearful as he approached them.

  “Terwilliger!” the taller of the two men called out. “Come with us.”

  Ed didn’t like being told what to do. He was already feeling irritable; there was a constant, droning sound that he had begun to notice when he’d first arrived in town. The sound was making him grouchy, and he didn’t much like the looks of these two. “Why don’t you tell me your names first? Does Nathaniel let you keep your names?”

  The tall one grunted in annoyance. “Johnson Shackleford,” he said. “This is Jim Boothby.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Ed lied.

  Shackleford took a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket and held them up for Ed to see. “You going to be difficult?”

  Ed offered his hands. “No. But put them on me if you want.”

  Shackleford put the cuffs back in his pocket. “Come on, then.” They walked along the fence until they came to a hidden gate. Someone had cut through the chain links and devised a hinge that blended in perfectly with the rest of the fence, so it was hard to locate even after he knew where it was. Shackleford and Boothby opened it to let Ed through, then led him toward a bump in the ground some distance away across the grassy field.

  The bump turned out to be a sizeable hill with a doorway dug in the side. As they came closer to it, Ed noticed a change in the constant drone that came from somewhere deep underground. “What is that noise?” he said.

  Shackleford opened the door and motioned for Ed to enter. “The hum,” he said.

  “It doesn’t like me,” said Ed. As soon as he entered the doorway, the hum began to fight him. He could feel it pushing into his consciousness, carrying commands and images directly into his mind. It told him to stop resisting, to surrender and submit peacefully to Nathaniel’s will. In response, he could feel his mind resisting it, pushing back against its commands. He had spent a great deal of time resisting the influence of Nathaniel and others like him, and he supposed the training had given him a hard-wired resistance to the hum. The sound grew stronger, rose in pitch to force him to submit, and his mind fought against it until it reached a painfully high note. He felt like his head was about to burst. Then the hum dropped abruptly back to nearly nothing before starting to rise again. Boothby cast an uneasy look toward Shackleford, who was trying not to let Ed know that he was frightened. Ed got the feeling they had never heard the hum act this way before.

  They walked down a long stairway that led deep into the earth. Boothby led the way and Shackleford followed behind, with Ed between them. They navigated a maze of clean, well-lit tunnels that had been constructed during the Second World War, according to what Ed had learned about it. As they made their way down, the tunnels changed to what appeared to be mineshafts carved through the rock. He saw, in a couple of spots, remnants of a rail track that had been abandoned long ago. They passed sever
al men in the blue clothes of Nathaniel’s Horsemen; these men watched as Ed passed, but no one spoke. Finally they came to a steel door that was painted blue. Boothby pressed a button on the wall and waited.

  Ed had already known what to expect, but it was still a shock when Tom Kajdas opened the door. He wore a shirt and tie, same as always, but his shirt was wrinkled and discolored and the tie was frayed at the edges. His silver hair was bedraggled and wild, and his eyes didn’t look like Kajdas’ eyes at all. He looked more like a feral animal than a human being. An artist’s caricature of the man he had once been. “Ed,” he whispered.

  “Nathaniel.” He took a deep breath to calm the sudden terror that gripped his heart.

  “No tricks?” Nathaniel looked to Shackleford and Boothby. Even Shackleford cringed slightly under his gaze. “No friends?” Both men shook their heads. “Good. Good! Come in.” He stepped back and made room for Ed to enter his chamber. There was not much light to see by, with only a single yellow bulb hanging from a bracket in the middle of the room, but Ed could make out drawings and writing all over the rough walls. Nathaniel shut the door and fastened a huge deadbolt. Then he turned to face Ed. In the near-darkness of the chamber, his right eye gave off a soft red glow, just like the gnome.

  Ed looked around the room and saw that they were alone. “Where’s Sarah?”

  “They’re bringing her here,” Nathaniel said. “Be patient.” He cocked his head to the side in a way that looked very un-Kajdas-like. “We have a deal, right? She goes, but you stay.”

  “That’s the deal.”

  “You stay forever. No cheating.”

  Ed had given a lot of thought to how he might weasel out of this deal. No solutions had come to mind. He was beginning to think that he really would end up staying here, a mindless slave to Nathaniel’s hum. “No cheating,” he said.

  “You look worried. Don’t worry. I’ll make you forget her. You’ll forget everything except me.”

  “I don’t want to forget.”