by David Walton
He stepped out in front of us, legs spread wide. Alex screamed, but I kept running. If we stopped, we had no chance. We had to get past him.
The man with no eyes straightened his arms out in front of his body and clapped, as if smashing two cymbals together. A shock wave of some kind knocked me off my feet. I saw Marek, Jean, and Alex go down as well. I sat up, dizzy, struggling to get to my feet again. Jean was on the ground next to me.
I pushed myself up to my knees just as the man with no eyes clapped again. I felt the side of my head strike the concrete. The last thing I saw before everything went black was the circle of varcolacs advancing all around me.
CHAPTER 30
DOWN-SPIN
I called Terry Sheppard from prison and told him what I had learned from Peyton, particularly how the police had been given my name by an anonymous caller. Terry doubted it would do any good with the verdict this late in the game, but if new information came to light, he said, it could certainly help with the appeals process. That wasn’t very encouraging, but I left him to it. He said he would track the information down, but I was left with the distinct impression that he wasn’t in a great hurry. It was evening, and I knew there wasn’t much hope of getting any New Jersey state cops assigned to the case on the phone, and not much hope, even then, of getting them to help. They wanted me put away; they weren’t going to admit to anything.
So I was surprised when only two hours later I was pulled out of my cell and brought to meet two visitors. The visitors were Terry and an investigator he had put on the case—introduced only as Bill, someone he said he hired often. Bill apparently knew his business, because he’d already somehow gotten a hold of a recording of the anonymous tipster’s call. They both looked exhausted.
“Looks like you were right,” Terry said. “They did originally act on the basis of a tip. Unfortunately, that fact is not obviously significant to the case, which hangs more on forensic evidence than on eyewitness testimony. If the police had found the tipster, that might just mean they would have one more person to speak against you.”
“But who was it?”
“We don’t know,” said Bill, who looked a little like Terry, but without the mustache. I wondered if they were related. “She didn’t leave a name, and the call was traced back to a pay phone at the Lakehurst Diner Restaurant.”
“She?” I asked, remembering Peyton’s ghost.
“Yes, it was a female caller,” Terry said.
“When did this call come in?”
“2:07 PM. After you found Vanderhall’s body, but before the New Jersey cops connected with the Media cops. Probably about the time you were down in that bunker.”
“Well, can I hear it?” I asked.
“Hear what?”
“The recording of the call.”
“Not much to it,” Bill said. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and pressed a few buttons. A female voice spoke out of it.
“Yes, I’m calling with information about a murder.”
“Can I have your name, please?” asked another female voice.
“It’s about Dr. Vanderhall. He was killed last night, and I saw who did it.”
“Let’s start with your name, please,” the voice said calmly.
“Don’t you want to know who the murderer is?” the caller asked.
“I’d like to know who you are. If you’re afraid, we can protect you, but we can’t protect you if we don’t know who you are.”
“It was Jacob Kelley. He was the murderer.”
“We will certainly look into that. Now, can you tell me your name?”
Bill shut off the recording. “The caller hung up after that. Not much to go on, except that she fingered you for the crime. So it’s probably someone who knows you.”
“I know who she is,” I said dully.
“You recognized the voice?”
“As soon as she spoke,” I said. “Didn’t you recognize it?”
Terry bit his lip and slowly shook his head. “No . . . though it sounds a bit familiar.”
“It’s Jean Massey,” I said. “Jean Massey is the murderer.”
CHAPTER 31
UP-SPIN
The blackness swirled, lighter blacks competing with the darker ones. I couldn’t feel any part of my body, but I was still conscious. As my vision cleared, I could see sparks in the darkness, not like stars, which were always far away, but more like fireflies. They were white, tiny, and moved quickly, blinking off and back on again. I tried to track the movement of one, but found that I couldn’t. What were they?
The more I watched, the more I could sense there was a pattern to the movement, and I thought I could discern some meaning in it. Colors. Texture. Temperature.
The constant motion was making me feel sick. I tried to close my eyes, but I found that closing them didn’t make any difference to what I could see. The motion seemed to intensify. The more I watched, the deeper I could see into the cloud of lights, and now I was watching millions or even billions of them. Not only that, but I could see forward and backward in time, as well. I saw that each light was not eternal, but had a lifetime, interacting with other lights, altering their shape and their purpose. In fact—and this came like a jolt of new sight, a pattern coming into focus—the whole constellation of lights was connected. It was a single system.
As soon as I realized that, I saw that this system of lights was just one of many, and that each system had its own span of existence through time. The systems interacted with each other, trading millions of lights among them, composed of different sets of lights from one moment to the next, but still tracing out a continuous path as a single system.
Was this how the varcolac saw the world? What were these systems I was seeing? Humans? The varcolacs themselves? Or were these only the beginnings of more complex ideas? Perhaps the systems I was now perceiving were only cells or bacteria. As this thought occurred to me, my sight leapt to the next level of complexity, and I saw systems of systems, each composed of trillions upon trillions of lights, and I knew that I had not even come close to the end. The concept now in place, my vision jumped back, and back, and back again, perceiving each departure as a new combination of particles, all intertwined, all shared and traded, yet somehow distinct.
Finally, I opened my eyes. At first, I thought I was simply viewing the next level of complexity, the systems upon systems, and I suppose I was. But there was something hard and cold against my face. I had hands again, and legs. I was back in the real world, at least as I understood it. My face was pressed against a concrete floor, and I could see the pebbly, sand-colored surface, feel the rough texture on my cheek and forehead. There was light coming from somewhere above me, and a persistent buzzing sound, like a high-voltage electric fence.
I lifted my head and looked around. I was still underground, somewhere in the accelerator ring structure. It was an enormous, dimly lit, concrete room, and I recognized it. It was a sub-basement below the collider ring, an access room for the electric power coming into the collider from the grid. Thick bundles of cable stretched across the floor, running in different directions and across each other. The bundle that ran right in front of me was thicker than my leg and a riot of different colors, all twisted together. Near the walls, the bundles converged, forming super-bundles that passed into conduit pipes. Banks of switches covered one of the walls, out of reach.
All of the crisscrossing bundles of wire divided the floor into spaces of different shapes and sizes, like a skewed chess board. In many of these spaces were people, one person to a space, lying asleep or unconscious. To my right, I saw Marek and Alex, each in their own spaces. To my left were four more people, the sight of whom made my breathing quicken and my heart rate spike. It was my family—Sean, Claire, Alessandra, and Elena, lying there as if they’d just gone to sleep for the night. None of them was moving, but I could see their chests rise and fall with each breath. They were alive.
CHAPTER 32
DOWN-SPIN
I pa
ced my prison cell, drawing irritated looks from my cellmate. I had to get out. The next day, a jury of my peers would pronounce their verdict, and the more I sat around in prison, the more convinced I was that the verdict was going to be guilty. I was pretty certain I knew who the real murderer was, but it was too late to prove it to anyone—at least, not until a lengthy appeal process—and in the meantime, Jacob was out there somewhere, trusting her.
Why had she done it? I had no idea. Money? Power? Fame? All of those were possible, if she could have controlled the technology Brian had discovered. It promised a solution to one of the first dreams of science: unlimited energy. And that was only the least of it. What might one do with a device that could alter the Higgs field? Control the random probabilities of the universe? There was evidence that quantum fields stretched through time as well as space . . . could one undo a bad decision? Unexplode a terrorist bomb? It would change the world.
It seemed likely that Jean had been Brian’s newest girlfriend, and I suspected she had been involved in the science all along. She had probably written a lot of the subroutines that interacted with the Higgs projector’s core module. I didn’t know how she had killed him, exactly, but given what I did know, I could imagine how she might have done it. I knew the varcolac could appear and disappear at will. He wasn’t human, of course, but it demonstrated a basic truth about matter: it wasn’t as solid and real as it appeared to be to us. Mass itself was a quantum property, delivered to a particle via the Higgs field the same way a magnetic field could deliver an electric charge. If you could manipulate the local Higgs field with enough precision you could walk through walls, change your weight, possibly even reverse gravity. If Jean could do those things, it would have been easy for her to shoot Brian and then escape the locked room. Though she also might have had the skill to hack the logs and frame me.
But it didn’t matter how she had done it. What mattered was that I was stuck in here while a murderer ran free and my family was in danger. Tomorrow the jury would deliver a verdict. I was pretty sure that verdict was not going to be in my favor, which meant that this was my last night in this temporary holding cell. Tomorrow I would be moved to whatever maximum security prison they reserved for murderers, which I might never leave again.
It was only then that I remembered the sheaf of papers Terry had given me. I started paging through them lethargically, not sure what I was supposed to learn. He had said my double told me to read it carefully, but I wasn’t sure what I could find that would matter at this point. Why didn’t he just tell me what he wanted me to find instead of hiding it in a mountain of thick legal documents? I was feeling abandoned and sorry for myself. If there had to be two of me, why couldn’t I have been the one on the outside instead of the one stuck in jail?
My mind wandered as I flipped pages. Peyton had described the ghost woman he saw as ethereal and thin, but he admitted that the street lights had been mostly behind her, putting her in silhouette. Peyton’s description of the ghost’s disappearance—and the fact that she hadn’t left any footprints—certainly suggested a varcolac. Was it a female varcolac? Or the same varcolac manifesting a different parody of a human body? If so, why had no one else seen it? Why was it there? Peyton’s story provided more information, but instead of shedding any light on the overall mystery, it just made it more opaque.
Finally, I reached a page that was a little bit thicker than the others. The text was just another unintelligible legal case document, but I could tell from the thickness and texture that it didn’t belong. I ran a finger across it, and the legal text disappeared. Smartpaper.
It wasn’t illegal for prisoners to have smartpaper, so at first I wondered why my double had gone to the trouble of concealing it. Then I realized what it must be. A copy of the Higgs projector. My double must have come to the same conclusion I had—that the jury was unlikely to find me innocent of the charges. If I wanted to get out of prison, I would have to accomplish it another way.
When the lights dimmed on the cell block at nine o’clock, I climbed into my bunk, but I didn’t sleep. Using my body to block what I was doing from casual view of any guards that might walk by, I experimented with the Higgs projector, figuring out what it could do. I didn’t have much time. I had to act that night, while I still could.
It wouldn’t be easy. The walls of my cell were metal, and beyond them were other cells. There were armed guards and locked gates and video cameras and fences with razor wire. I waited until the midnight shift change, wanting to act during that confusion, however slight an advantage that might give. I stood right next to the door of my cell, watching. Prison is a predictable place, with strict schedules and discipline. The advantage to the guards is that it reduces stress and complaints and fights among the inmates. The advantage to me was that I could know exactly what would be happening at any given time.
I held the Higgs projector against the door. It had an electromagnetic lock, not a mechanical one, controlled from a central switchboard in the guards’ room. In general, this type of lock was more secure, because it was immune to picking. But magnetism, however strong, was driven by the exchange of subatomic particles. I ran a small subroutine I had discovered during my experimentation and heard a satisfying click. The door drifted subtly ajar.
I couldn’t turn invisible or walk through metal bars or teleport outside the prison. What I could do wasn’t much, considering, but I hoped it would be enough.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Hey!” I banged on the bars. “Guard!”
The guard was a big white man gone to fat, and not the most conscientious of the staff. His name was Leary, or Leavy, or something like that. He came lumbering over with a sour expression on his face. “What’s the problem, Kelley?”
I pushed the door open, showing him. “Some idiot forgot to lock my door,” I said. “I’m getting out of here tomorrow; I don’t want any trouble on my last day.”
Leavy’s face went from annoyed to astonished in a moment. He slammed the door in my face and rattled it to make sure it was secure. “Musta left it a little open,” he muttered.
“What, no thanks?” I shouted at his receding back. “I’m going to tell the shift manager how ungrateful you were!”
I hoped that would be enough incentive to make him report the incident, or better yet, to go find a maintenance guy to check the door, so he could pass off the problem to someone else and still be able to say he’d done everything he could. Regardless, though, I had to act now. I popped the lock again.
This time, however, I walked straight out and over to the next cell. I popped that lock, too, and opened the door. “Time to party,” I said. I didn’t wait for a response. I ran from cell to cell, unlocking them all and swinging open the doors. These weren’t hardened criminals; most were either awaiting trial or in for less than five years. Being caught trying to escape would add a lot of time to their sentences. For many of them, it wasn’t worth the risk, and they stayed in their cells, or shouted at me to get back in mine before I got somebody shot. There were enough mischief-makers, however, glad for a chance at freedom, or even just to relieve some boredom and cause some trouble, that the block was soon full of prisoners. My ruse had already gone unnoticed much longer than I’d been expecting, so when a siren started wailing, I wasn’t surprised.
“Let’s go!” I shouted. The door to the cell block was also electromagnetic, so I popped it and held it open while the others rushed through, yelling and whooping war cries. Once they were all out, I quietly walked back to my cell and shut the door.
It took the prison guards almost an hour to round up all the escaped inmates. A few of them had been pepper sprayed, a few were bruised or bloody, but nobody had been shot, and nobody had actually escaped. Before they could figure out who to blame, however, they needed to find another place for the prisoners on my cell block. They couldn’t very well leave us where we were, since there was clearly something defective with the locking system. I only hoped they did so before anyone studied the securit
y cameras too closely and saw what I had done. The place was in chaos, with Leavy pompously telling anyone who would listen how he had followed the proper procedures.
The problem was, the prison was already overcrowded. They couldn’t just move us to another wing, because the other wings were all crowded, too. In fact, prisoners were sleeping in the gymnasium and on the floor in classrooms, since the dormitories weren’t large enough to house the population. It was a statewide problem, and the prisons didn’t have the budget to build new wings. I thought I knew where they would put us. In fact, I was counting on it.
After another half-hour of deliberation and several arguments between angry officials, they made the decision I’d been waiting for. They decided to house us in the temporary modular jails they had just had shipped in. The new jails were like trailers—mobile plug-and-play units that were apparently a lot cheaper than permanent structures. They were completed and supposedly secure, but had not yet been officially approved by the security committee. Best of all, they stood at the very edge of the prison compound.
The decision was made. We were shackled, shouted at, and told to leave our personal belongings behind, since we’d be returning to our usual cells the next day, once they sorted out the lock problems. Some of the prisoners, still riled from the near-escape, gave some trouble, but I went along meekly.
They took us five at a time, three guards pushing us in the right direction, while a fourth checked our names off a clipboard. One by one, we were unshackled, led into a tiny, one-person cell barely larger than a bathroom stall, and locked in. The guard with the clipboard yanked on each to make sure it was secure.
