“Hey! I made all the mistakes, didn’t I? Even fell in love with the dame that iced my partner, and that’s worse than anything you got to show. Now, your old lady, she loves ya and depends on ya. You gonna let her go down like this? She saved your neck a couple times, and she still feels all this guilt stuff about all this bein’ her fault. It’s your turn now, hot shot.”
I turned to get away from him, but other figures stepped out of the woods and stared me down. I knew them all. Marlowe, Archer, the Continental Op, Nick Charles . . . Everywhere I turned there was another, and they were all saying, “Your turn now, hot shot. You’re the big brain, Sam, you’re the top gun, Sam, you figure it out.”
“What the hell can I do? I don’t even know where I am or who sent me here or how! You didn’t break out of jail, any of you, you were all bailed out!”
“There’s always something, Sam, if you look hard enough,” Spade responded. “You keep it up and something always turns up.”
“Sam? Sam!”
“Uh, wha—? Leave me alone, all of you!”
“Sam—wake up!”
I opened my eyes groggily. It was still pitch-dark. “Huh?”
“Listen! Wake up and listen!”
I tried to clear out the cobwebs and listen as she said, and I heard something, something odd, off in the distance. A sound, like a cross between a hum and a crackling noise. I was suddenly awake. “The meadow! It’s coming from the meadow!” I was on my feet in a moment and she followed. I looked around, unable to see a thing. “We ought to get over there—if we can find it in this darkness.”
“I can,” she responded, and took my hand.
It was about half a mile through the woods, but she led me like she had the eyes of a cat. It was no big deal in the daytime to follow a trail that was worn and blazed by you in the first place, but I hadn’t realized how little she’d been depending on her eyes and how much on other things. She felt that path, and she was unerring and confident.
We reached the edge of the trees and I stopped her, and we both crouched down. There, up on the rise, was a pattern I had seen only once before and never expected to see again, outlined clearly against the darkness. Rotating, folding, revolving panels of blue light surrounding a mirrored darkness, moving around and around, folding this way and that.
“Think somebody’s coming for us, after all this time?” she asked me.
“I don’t know, but maybe we shouldn’t wait to find out.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“If they can come out of that thing, we can go in it.”
“Yeah—but we don’t know where we’d come out.”
“Yes we do. Someplace other than here. Come on!”
We ran for it, not caring about the exposure or thinking about anything else. Someone had opened the cage door, and might discover that and close it at any moment. It didn’t occur to me to wait to see who might emerge; the fact was, there was no certainty that anybody would emerge. It might be intended for us to enter, if we had the nerve, or it might even be that somebody else had to use this siding to get someplace else entirely and it might vanish for an eternity at any minute. I had to use their tracks, but by damn it was my train!
“Which way do we go once we’re in?” Brandy called as I pulled her along.
“We went left to get here, so we’ll go right,” I told her. “Just hold tight. The odds are we’re gonna get sidetracked again, but maybe this time somebody will remember us!”
Okay, Spade, you just keep that sucker there another twenty seconds and I’ll take the leap!
We reached the edge, and it was still folding and unfolding into those impossible patterns with increasing speed. There was no hesitation; I went right in and grabbed Brandy’s hand, tight.
We were once again standing in something that seemed to be a revolving door; but this time I wasn’t scared and confused, I was desperate. Once again, scenes of landscapes seemed to flash by as various panels approached, but if you kept moving, kept walking through them, you didn’t exit but continued on through that maze. All of the scenes seemed to be totally different than any I remembered, but it had been so long ago and a life away and I neither could be sure nor cared.
We were suddenly not alone in the maze of panels. She was tall, real tall—seven feet, maybe—and incredibly thin, and her face was white, not like I was white but like those Japanese dancers—only this looked like her natural color. Her lips, nostrils, and eyes were all jet black, and she was wearing some kind of long satin dress down to the ground, all a brilliant purple. She spotted us and started for a moment, then just nodded and went on past into the direction from which we’d just come. There was nothing else to do but nod back and give a casual wave with my free hand.
Rather than upset or unnerve me, our encounter with the strange-looking woman reinforced my feeling that this thing wasn’t operating for us. I didn’t know much about her, and wasn’t sure I wanted to, but we owed that tall woman for this chance.
Suddenly we spotted another woman behind a panel, but this one was different. She was small, slight, wearing a uniform that looked like a cross between Star Trek and the Bolivian navy, and if you overlooked the spiked purple hair and the slight puglike snout below her eyes, she looked relatively normal. She was also sitting behind a table that looked like a mixing board, and she was wearing, of all things, a monocle.
We kept walking, but we were suspended nonetheless, unable to reach the next panel no matter how we tried. I felt Brandy tighten her grip as she realized what had happened—even she could see that far—and I watched as the woman saw us, frowned, and looked at her board. I got the distinct impression that our looks, even our nudity, didn’t faze her in the least, but that the fact that we weren’t on the timetable was simply not done.
She was a lot younger and, I suspect, a lot less experienced than the old guy we’d hit on the way out who’d sent us to the Garden, and I could tell she was trying to figure out just what to do. I stopped walking, as did Brandy, sensing my intent, and we stood there patiently and waited for her to make up her mind. She looked up and saw us standing there, and I gave her a disgusted look and shrugged. I could sympathize with her problem, but how she solved it was of vital concern to us. We weren’t supposed to be there, but we were acting like we were, and not at all scared or withdrawn; nor did we, as we were, exactly look like major threats to the organization. We weren’t, after all, totally black-clad individuals trapped in the system. Finally she activated her intercom speaker.
“Glifurtin sworking on ka pau maw?” she asked in a low, guttural growl, or at least it sounded something like that.
I hadn’t the slightest idea what she said, but, what the hell, if she expected me to speak her language I had every right to expect the reverse. “G.O.D. Western Distribution Center, McInerney, Oregon, United States of America,” I shouted back, surprised that I could hear my own voice.
She looked at her board and fiddled with a couple of dials. “Oh, English. How jolly quaint,” she growled. “What line number? I don’t have you on my board set.”
“Beats me,” I responded. “You people were supposed to take care of that. We just use this thing, we don’t know how to run it.”
She cleared her throat, which really sounded menacing. I now had a new definition for calling somebody a real dog. “Terribly sorry, there’s been a mistake somewhere along the line,” she replied. “I’ll take a stab at it with what I see and what you gave me, and if it’s wrong you can get them to reroute you.” She pushed some levers and turned some dials and we were back off into the revolving doors of blue rectangles again.
Some of this network of whatever it was, was obviously on all the time, but not between all the right places. Of course, the Garden hadn’t any machinery at all, or at least I didn’t think so, but it might have been buried deep underground. The fat hairy man and the silver girl from what seemed so long ago had obviously gone in to turn their station on, either because it was needed as a way st
ation to send somebody further, or because they were going to send some of that trainload of stuff somewhere else.
We stepped out of the pattern—not really of our own accord any more than we’d exited into the Garden—where the girl with the monocle had sent us. It was quite dark, and we were clearly inside a large building, but I knew almost immediately it wasn’t our warehouse. The floor of the warehouse had been poured concrete; this floor was very rough stone, maybe stone block. “We’re not home,” I whispered to Brandy, “but the thing’s still going. Want to get back on?”
“Why bother? She said she was sendin’ us where they spoke English and where people looked like us. So what if it ain’t home? What we got that we hafta go back there for, anyway? Let’s see if we can get outta here before they find us.”
“You’re sure?”
“Nope, but so what? They ain’t gonna send us back and just let us go. Next time might be someplace a hundred times worse, or maybe back to the Garden.”
“But we have nothing!”
“And we got more back home? Come on.”
It was nearly impossible to see in the place, so we ran into a wall before we knew we were at it. It seemed made out of even rougher stuff than the floor, more like natural stone. A cave or something like that. We went along it, away from the still-twisting display, until we came to a large double door. It was locked, and so were a number of doors we also found. There didn’t seem to be any way out of the damned place.
We looked back at the transport display, but it seemed to be slowing noticeably now, more or less reversing its previous contortions, until, very quickly, it was the simple cross, then the single screen, then just a tall blue line, and then there was only darkness. The vibrations and rumbling of the great machine died down, then all was silence.
A strip of light suddenly came on at the far end and far up the wall, and I could see a little. It appeared to be a balcony cut out of the rock wall, and, moving a bit, I could see that there were stone stairs cut in that side, leading up from the floor. It was definitely not the place we’d left, but it clearly served the same purpose. I could see no other stairs, although there were massive doors cut into the side where we’d tried to exit—doors clearly locked and barred now.
“It looks like that stairway or nothing, babe,” I told Brandy. “They got this one designed for an exit up top. Stay with me against the wall, and let’s get over there so we can find it in case they turn the lights out again.”
The funny thing was, there was just enough light to see the whole expanse of the place, and there was nothing really to see. The whole floor looked as barren as the unadorned meadow back at the Garden. Wherever the machinery was that worked that thing, it was well hidden.
“I think we got to chance those stairs and that door now,” Brandy said worriedly. “You got to figure they’ll lock this place tighter’n a drum when they go.”
It was a good point, although I didn’t at all like the idea of going up there and being on the same level as the operators, with it lit up like that.
The stone floor and stairs were cold, and we climbed quickly to just near the top. I barely had time to think that before we’d had that long stay in the wild, neither of us could have made this climb without wheezing.
As expected, there was a door at the top and, well down the balcony walk, there was a second, open door and to its right a viewing window just like back in the warehouse. As before, there was little time to think about our next move and no time to debate it; we bounded up and opened the nearby door and entered a narrow passageway, still of that same stone block. At the end was yet another thick wooden door, this one with a lock on the inside, and I threw it and we stepped outside.
It was still dark. I suspected they did all their transportation stuff when it was dark and there would be few around to wonder about the funny noises and vibration or get too curious about it. The area was lit up, though, with either torches or some kind of oil lamps. It looked pretty primitive, but nothing got around the fact that it was pretty cold outside and that there was a slight wind to boot. Not wintry or snowy weather, but it sure as hell wasn’t the sort of weather you could be comfortable with if you had no clothes on, and I said as much to Brandy.
“We might as well go back and try and bull our way through, then,” she answered, accepting the obvious. “We sure can’t hold up out here for a night.”
I turned, and immediately saw a flaw in the new plan. The damned lock was spring-loaded and the door was solidly shut behind us. I looked around, but there wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere.
“This is a kick in the head,” I noted sourly. “All that crap we went through to keep from being picked up, and now that we decide it ain’t worth it, we can’t even get arrested. Can’t even find anybody to arrest us.”
“We could just hunker down here and wait for them,” she suggested. “I didn’t see no other way out of there. Be kinda hard to lie our way outta this, though. Damn! If we only had somethin’ to pick that lock with!”
“We could freeze waiting for them. Let’s see if we can find somebody to surrender to.”
We walked along what I first thought of as a stone porch, and more of the place seemed to come into focus. It wasn’t just a big stone building; this thing was a castle, like they had in Europe, and what we were on was called, I think, a battlement. All around I could see other buildings of dark stone, but aside from the fact that they all looked like travel posters of Austria, there was little to be learned from them.
Before we found a stairway or entrance, we heard the door open well behind us, and turned and went back. Two figures emerged, and after making sure that the door was secure, turned to walk away.
I took a deep breath. “Hey!” I called out loudly. “Help!”
The two figures stopped and turned, and we started toward them.
“We took a wrong turn and, boy, are we in trouble!” I yelled.
They stopped, then stared at us in wonder as we came clearly into view. I was afraid we might have another dog-girl or fat werewolf here, but the two at least looked human, although dressed in robes and hoods.
“Who the devil are you two?” the larger of the two demanded to know. “And what in heaven’s name are you doing skulking about here like that?” He was a man with a very cultured British-sounding accent and a very pleasant voice. It was a relief to find somebody in this network who didn’t speak gibberish first.
“I’m Sam Horowitz and this is my wife, Brandy,” I told them. “We’ve gotten caught twice now in that damned transport system, and this time they shot us here.”
The second figure gasped. “You came out of there?” It was a woman’s voice, with much the same accent.
“Yeah, out of the blue lights and the folds. Can we explain everything inside someplace? We’re freezing to death!”
“Yes, by all means, follow us,” the man told us. “This is most irregular. Most irregular. The abbot is not going to like this one bit.”
I turned to Brandy as we walked, and repeated, “The abbot?”
“I don’t know. Sounds better than the Costello, I guess.”
I knew what the title implied, and I think Brandy did, too. Abbots headed abbeys or something like that. Monasteries and convents and that kind of thing. With my background, I couldn’t be sure beyond that, and Brandy was raised Baptist, but I kind of suspected we were now in some sort of religious retreat, probably Catholic or whatever passed for Catholic wherever this was. The Middle Ages for sure, but monks and nuns in medieval Oregon? Either history was real wrong or Columbus had a great PR man.
We went down some stone stairs and reached a wing of the big building behind the main body, and the woman opened a door and entered while the man held it for us. It wasn’t tremendously warmer inside, but at least there was no wind.
The woman had gone on ahead, because we had a reception committee. There were three of them, each of whom looked about seven feet tall and three hundred pounds, and all three were wea
ring black robes with the hoods hanging down their backs, and all three had swords on thick black belts worn outside their robes. They all bowed slightly to the man, whose own robe was a rusty brown color.
“Take these two to a holding room without allowing them to be seen by anyone else,” he ordered. “Sister Elizabeth will be returning shortly with some clothes for them. No conversation with them, no questions. I will notify the abbot and then return for questioning.”
The three bowed again, then turned their attention to us. One of them motioned us to follow him, and the other two fell in behind. I didn’t feel too great about all this, but at least we had shelter, and somebody who knew the score was being forced to pay attention to us. The only thing I worried about was whether these guys would just decide we were a complication they didn’t need, and dispose of us, one way or the other. It was something I didn’t care to think about.
We were taken to a small room lit by an oil lamp with a straw bed and straw on the floor as well. It had a door but no windows, and after we entered, the door was shut; but it was clear that two of the silent giants had taken up guard duty on either side of the door just outside. I figured it was more to keep the curious out than to keep us in. We had no place else to go.
Sister Elizabeth was back in a few minutes carrying a bundle. These turned out to be a brown wool robe like the man had been wearing, a black robelike dress like the sister’s, and some boots. “I had to guess on the sizes,” she told us apologetically, “but at least it will warm you.”
She was a slightly built woman with a plain, very English sort of face, totally free of any makeup or jewelry, and her rust-colored hair was cut so short she didn’t have to comb or maintain it, although it would never win any prizes for hair styling. While we tried on the clothing, I couldn’t help but notice that Sister Elizabeth’s gaze kept returning to Brandy, and I had a suspicion that she might never have seen a black woman before. I kind of hoped that she hadn’t seen Jews down at the local Inquisition.
The clothes were baggy but serviceable; mine was thick wool and Brandy’s seemed to be cotton, and while mine ended just below the knee and hers almost dusted the floor, it was still okay. The boots were a different matter—not just for size, but because we hadn’t worn shoes of any kind in so long that they hurt and felt funny. They were soft leather, though, with a lot of give, and while both pairs were a bit large, they would do until we had the chance to get a better fit.
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