Danny was standing next to a window. He pulled the curtain aside and looked out at the lights of the city outside. In the distance, down a wide avenue, he could see the brightly-lit dome of the Capitol building.
“I’ll call you back,” he said, not because he meant it, but because he felt funny just hanging up. Then he ran back to the bedroom and opened the dresser to find all of his clothes folded neatly in the drawers. The phone started ringing again as he was packing his duffel bag. He ignored it.
Having spent a good deal of time in the field, he knew how to travel light. He was packed and ready to go in less than five minutes. He took the phone off the hook to silence it, then shouldered his bag and left.
* * *
Seymour unlocked the door to the kitchen, which was empty except for the lingering smell of food. It smelled like a mixture of broccoli, animal fat, and used cat litter. Perla held her nose while Flem found a couple of metal cups and filled them with water, and they drank while they caught their breath.
“That’s the thing about the machine,” said Flem. “It needs a female to make it work.”
Perla finished her water and went back to refill her cup. “Are the controls too complicated for a man?”
“Nah, the controls are simple. A man can do that. Not too much, you’ll get a cramp in your gut. See, when Brown Mike first put it together, he hooked himself up to it. He sat in the chair and put the helmet on and tried to send out a message. Damn near blew everybody’s eardrums out. Then he figured out that you have to put the helmet on a girl instead. Nathaniel says the male mind is tuned to receive the female wavelength, and verse visa.”
“Vice versa,” Perla said absently.
“But Nathaniel didn’t have any women. He went to talk to the two daughters of the guy whose body he took over, but they wouldn’t come back here with him. I guess they could tell something was wrong. But do you know who had women? Arthur.”
Perla set her glass down on a wooden counter. “You mentioned that earlier. I thought Arthur’s Society was all men.”
Flem looked embarrassed. “The members are all men. But there were some women there, too. They lived in the house and helped clean up, and they…” He started blushing furiously. “They took care of Arthur when he was, you know…”
“Got it.”
He looked relieved at not having to say it. “Yeah, which was pretty often. He’s not all human, you know? Well, Nathaniel took the Society girls and he locked them up to use with his machine.”
“And you want to get them out.” Perla couldn’t help but smile.
“We can’t leave them here.”
“Of course we’re not leaving them here. How many?”
“There were six. I don’t know if they’re all still… still here. But I do know where he keeps them. The maintenance guy knows where everything is.”
They washed the worst of the grime from their faces, after which Flem led the way back up to the higher levels. It was warmer here than down below, and the hallways looked like they could have been in the basement of any government building. Without the hum, Perla could feel the power of logical thought returning to her. It was like taking off a blindfold.
There was no need for stealth. They did not pass a single one of Nathaniel’s men. The corridors were empty. Perla wondered where they had all gone. In few minutes they came to a passage that looked familiar.
“Isn’t this where they kept me?” She recognized the hallway. Hers was the first door on the left.
Seymour nodded. “Ladies’ detention wing. We need to be quick. I’ll get the doors open while―” He trailed off, suddenly turning rather pale. “Oh no.”
Perla looked around nervously. “What?”
“The keys. They’re not in my… I must have set them down somewhere.”
Perla smacked her forehead. “You lost the keys?”
“Not lost! I must’ve just put them down and then forgotten exactly where.”
“Seymour, that’s lost.”
“The kitchen!” He turned and looked back the way they’d come. “I unlocked the door to the kitchen. They’re probably still there. We’ll just go back and… what’s the matter with you?”
Perla was looking past him at the Horseman who had just come around the corner. Seymour spun around to face him. “Larson,” he said.
“Flem,” Larson said, grinning. Perla did not like that grin. “He wasn’t at the front door.”
Flem took a step backward. “Who?”
“Nathaniel. You said he wanted us there. I think you lied.” The other two men, Lingelback and Bowers, came around the corner and joined him, and they did not look pleased.
Seymour was trying hard to stay calm, but his upper lip was starting to sweat. “Maybe he just got busy and couldn’t wait. You should hang around and see if he comes back.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” said Larson. “You lock her up and come with us. We’ll find the boss-man and see if you were telling the truth. How’s that sound?”
Flem’s eyes were darting this way and that, looking for a way out. Perla was afraid he would do something macho and stupid, but he surprised her.
“In you go,” Seymour said, opening Perla’s cell door. She shook her head just a tiny bit; she couldn’t bear to go back into that cell. Flem gave her a gentle shove. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he whispered, so softly that she could barely hear. “I promise.” Then he closed the door. He couldn’t lock the deadbolt without the keys, but that didn’t matter: there was no handle on the inside.
Perla paced from one wall to the other and back again, feeling like she couldn’t get enough air. She knelt by the air vent and breathed deeply. The flowing air wasn’t fresh, but it was cool and it helped her calm down a bit. He would be back. Flem wouldn’t break a promise. She managed to slow her breathing to a normal rate. It would be okay. He would get rid of the others, find the keys, and come back. She could wait. Perla willed herself to patience and calm, staring at the single light bulb in the ceiling inside its metal cage. The little filament in that bulb was like a tiny ray of hope. She gazed at it and emptied her mind of all the scary thoughts. There was still a little spark of hope burning inside her, just like that little bulb on the ceiling.
And then the lightbulb went out.
* * *
Every time Joy tried to look back, Norge kept pushing her forward. She was quite annoyed with Croaker Norge and almost as annoyed with the big guy for not doing something. What was he waiting for?
As they walked, Norge was whispering orders to the other two. Joy couldn’t make out every word, and his stutter didn’t help, but she was able to catch some of it. He wanted the two Horsemen to take their prisoners to something he called the Guest House, which did not sound like a happy place. He had something else to take care of and would join them shortly. “I’ll be done in a jif-jiffy.” Then he waited to let the others go ahead. Joy reached the end of her length of twine and was jerked backward, and only then did she realize that Norge was now holding the other end. She was quite literally at the end of her rope. Rayfield and Sarah kept going; they noticed her absence, but the Horsemen kept prodding them forward. Soon, Joy was alone with Norge in the cold, dripping cavern. He put his face very close to her ear and spoke softly.
“The other-other-other gal, she belongs to the boss. But you…” He drew the rope so tight that her hands tingled. “You and I are goin’ for a ww-ww-walk.” He walked her to a place where the path forked, and took a passage to the right that led steeply downward. There was a sound of rushing water from that direction, and the further they went, the louder it became.
Where is that man? She kept trying to look around for any sign of Ed’s large friend. Would he follow her or Sarah? Probably Sarah, because he knew how much Ed cared about her. That meant Joy was probably on her own.
They came to a dead-end next to a swift underground stream. A little bit of artificial light came in from the passage up above, but there were no lights wired down here. Joy could m
ake out a faint glimmer of a reflection from the water, just a few inches from where she stood, and there was a roaring waterfall somewhere close by. The noise was loud enough to cover any noises, such as screams, that might otherwise be heard echoing through the tunnels.
Norge was so close behind her that she could feel his bulk pressing against her back. “Been waitin’ for a chance to bring one of the g-g-gals down here,” he said into her ear. He no longer bothered to whisper.
He was a solid man, and fairly tall. Joy estimated his height to be around five-foot-ten, which made him eight inches taller than she was. She had no chance of overpowering him. But she did know one really good trick. Before she could use it, though, she really wanted to get her hands untied. “What are you going to do to me?” she asked. She already knew the answer, but it didn’t hurt to buy a little time by getting him to talk.
“Have some fun, th-th-then you go swimmin’ like a fishy.” He reached around and grabbed her in a very personal location, and she made an involuntary sound of disgust.
“That’s okay, fishy,” said Norge. “You can s-s-s-scream if you want.” He turned her around by the shoulders and began trying to undo her jeans. The gun he’d been holding earlier was nowhere in sight; he must have tucked it away somewhere. His hands were fat and clumsy, though, and getting her jeans open proved to be challenging. “Dang it, dang it,” he kept saying.
“I can take them off,” said Joy. “If you untie my hands.”
Norge rubbed his face against hers. She could feel the flaps of peeling skin scraping her cheek. “Okay, fishy,” he said.
“Yeah, really?”
Norge laughed into her ear. “Nah.”
“Real funny,” she said. Getting her hands free seemed to be an unlikely proposition, but the time seemed right to use her trick. She took a step back and brought up her knee as hard as she could, nailing him right in the acorns. He bent double and cried out in a very high-pitched voice, not unlike a seagull. There was a precarious moment in which she was in serious danger of falling into the water. She somehow caught her balance just as he lunged forward to grab her. She managed to slip away, running back up the passage as his momentum cause him to tumble head-first into the stream. Her gait was awkward with her hands behind her back, but she ran just as fast as she could go. Norge splashed around and hollered a stream of stuttered curses. Joy felt proud of herself for beating him, but quickly rethought her position when she remembered that her hands were still tied behind her back, there was a long line of twine still trailing from her wrists, and there was a high probability that Norge was still holding onto it. This was confirmed when she reached the end and felt herself being pulled sharply backward to fall down hard on her rump.
“I hate this stupid place,” Joy muttered. She hooked her leg around a stalagmite while Norge yanked on the rope, nearly pulling her arms out of their sockets. It felt like he was using the rope to climb out of the water. A moment later it went slack. She heard heavy footsteps splashing from the stream and struggled to get to her feet.
Joy ran as fast as her tired legs would carry her, which was still pretty fast. Norge couldn’t keep up, but she couldn’t get very far ahead, either. The rope was about twenty feet long: long enough to maintain a good lead, but short enough that she could hear him breathing and grunting in the darkness behind her. She went back to the tunnel where they had taken the right fork, and took the left one. She couldn’t hide from Norge, and she couldn’t run forever. Her strength was already ebbing. “Rayfield!” she called. “Sarah! Ed’s friend whose name I can’t remember!” No one answered, so she kept on running.
After another minute or so, Norge finally realized something that had occurred to Joy much earlier in their pursuit. He couldn’t outrun her, but he was heavy and he held her rope. All he had to do was stop, and she would be forced to stop also. She felt the rope go taut again, just after she rounded a tight corner, and then he began pulling her back to him. “I’m rrreeling you in,” he called.
Joy wedged herself into a crack in the wall, scraping her wrist against a sharp corner of rock. It was time, she decided, to reevaluate her options. No one was going to help her. She couldn’t escape Norge while he held the rope, and fighting him would not end well. And now her wrist felt like it had been cut open.
Cut open! She felt the wall behind her back until she found the spot where she had scraped herself. It was indeed quite sharp—sharp enough, perhaps, to saw through a thin piece of twine.
Norge was coming closer, keeping the rope stretched tight as he went. Joy began sawing the twine furiously against the sharp corner of rock. She felt some of the fibers splitting, but it still held her. Then Norge was upon her; his peeling face peeked around the corner. “Hello, fishy!” he said, at the same moment that the twine finally split. Joy kicked him in the shin and ran, rubbing her hands together to restore some circulation. Her wrists were raw and she could feel sticky blood on her hands.
With no rope to slow her down, she was much faster than Croaker Norge. Just as importantly, she could hide. She looked into several smaller side-passages for a good spot, finally settling on a spacious cavern with a lot of big things to hide behind.
Joy’s father had once taken her to see the power substation that supplied electricity to their neighborhood. They had pulled up outside the fence, and he’d explained to her how it all worked—how the station stepped the voltage down from transmission levels down to the voltage that was supplied to the houses. She remembered being impressed by the heavy wires and enormous insulators. This chamber reminded her of that substation, except that it appeared to have been constructed decades ago, and it had recently been ruined—possibly as a result of the earthquake that had happened only half an hour earlier. Part of the ceiling had caved in, causing visible damage to the electrical equipment. The wires and transformers had once been mounted on an old wooden frame that raised them several feet above the ground, but the cave-in had put too much load on the frame, which was bent and sagging. A broken wire was rubbing against a metal bracket, spitting out occasional showers of sparks. Another damaged wire was resting precariously on top of a ceramic insulator that had cracked and looked like it might give way at any moment. The air was filled with an electrical buzzing and crackling. She was hesitant to get too close to the wiring, but she could hear Norge huffing and puffing in the passage outside. She got down and crawled underneath the sagging wooden frame, hoping to conceal herself. But it was too late.
The round silhouette of Croaker Norge appeared in the doorway. “There you are, fishy,” he said. “I can see your cute little t-t-tail.” He crouched down next to her hiding place and leered at her. Joy treated him to a kick in the nose, and he withdrew. She crawled along the length of the frame until she was directly under the sparking wire. That was as far as she could go without getting burned.
Norge grabbed her foot. He was no longer making jokes; he looked quite upset with her. “That hurt,” he grumbled.
“Sorry,” Joy said reflexively. In fact, she wasn’t sorry at all, and she regretted saying that she was. She jerked her foot free of his grip before he could drag her out into the open. A shower of sparks from the loose wire rained down on her. She felt countless little pinpricks on her back as the sparks burned through her shirt and into her skin.
Norge squeezed himself under the edge of the wooden structure, holding onto her foot as he did so. With his free hand he seized a metal post that stuck up out of the floor, using it as leverage to drag her toward him. He was too large to fit into the space she had managed to get into; there was only a narrow gap through which he could only squeeze one fat arm.
More sparks came down, causing more tiny burns on her back. The wire was right above her. Most of its length was still wrapped in rubber; only the last couple of inches were exposed. She said a quick prayer, then grabbed the rubber-coated part and pulled. As she had hoped, there was enough slack in the wire to be useful. She thrust the exposed part at Norge’s hand. Unfortunately
for him, Norge chose that exact moment to withdraw his hand and stick his face into the narrow opening. The wire contacted him in the neck, smoking and sparking as it burned deep into his flesh. The smell of ozone and roasting meat filled the air. He twitched and jerked; little bolts of electricity danced around his head and around the hand that still held the metal post. All the electric lights went out. The only source of light was the multitude of tiny lightning bolts crackling around his head. Joy watched, mesmerized, as his hair stood up and danced. Then the lightning vanished and the wire went dead, leaving her in total darkness next to the smoking body of Croaker Norge.
* * *
“It’s about control,” said Nathaniel. His mannerisms were very similar to Kajdas’, as though some part of Tom was still able to manifest itself. He was taking Ed deeper into the caves, through twisting natural passages that had, in some places, been widened or expanded by human tools. “Urizen hates free will. He wanted an army, but he didn’t want an army that could turn on him. So he had Mike build a machine. Urizen planned to use it to create an army of mindless men who would do anything he wanted.”
“What are you going to do with it?” said Ed.
“Same thing.”
Ed paused to examine one of the paintings on the wall. He had seen the image before, in one of his father’s old books: a hulking, man-like thing, with a long tongue and reptilian features. It stood between two stage curtains, with stars shining like spotlights. The original had been painted by William Blake on a panel of wood. This reproduction, sketched in dull colors on the rough stone wall, was recognizable if not particularly fine.
“I did that one,” Nathaniel said with an almost childlike pride. “Recognize it?”
“Ghost of a Flea,” said Ed. It was one of Blake’s Visionary Heads, a series of paintings he had made of people and other beings who had appeared to him in visions. He looked up from the artwork. “Where are we going?”
“To see what happened to Mike Ludd.”
The Music of the Machine (The Book of Terwilliger 2) Page 59
