Fugitives of Chaos

by John C. Wright

  "I want to dream about escaping."

  "Then dream of flight. The walls and windows of the Great Hall are set with spells and wires of cunning make, to set alarms to blow should any forbidden hand intrude. Only the heavy door through which you first entered is unwatched. I grant you shall recall this when you wake."

  7.

  That Sunday we had chapel.

  At breakfast, I began sniffing and snuffling and wiping my nose with a handkerchief. Mrs. Wren made a comment that I should not have been out yesterday so lightly dressed, and handed me a packet of paper tissues.

  Mrs. Wren was hungover, the first time (so far as I could tell) this week. Was this a sign that they were relaxing their guard?

  They did not know I knew they were watching me, and so this might be a slip-up on Mrs. Wren's part.

  Unless, on the other hand, this was deliberate, not a slip-up at all, in which case her comment was meant to tell me that they knew I knew they were watching, and now they wanted me to know that they knew I knew.

  In the first case, I should continue to act as if I did not know I was being watched, because she might not realize that she just let slip that they were watching. But if the other case were the case, I should either act like I knew they knew, but did not know that they knew I knew, or else just act like I knew and I knew that they knew.

  Of course, on the third hand, I had been running over snowy lawns where anyone looking out a window could see, and left footprints that would last till the next snowfall. Maybe Mrs. Wren was just making the comment any adult would make talking to a child with the sniffles.

  Comedy is easy. Intrigue is hard.

  As we were queued up outside the chapel to go in, I put my hankie in my pocket, which still held my many little notes. Certain of them suddenly grew brighter in the utility aspect, and I was able to snatch them with my fingertips and fold them into the hankie.

  I drew the hankie out again, sniffed, and dropped it at Quentin's feet Quentin stooped, gentleman-like, and made a show of returning my hankie to me. When I got it back, the slips of paper were gone.

  I said, "I am ever so grateful when a kind gentleman returns something I have dropped."

  He said, bowing, "Always at your service."

  The ones I had passed him read, in no particular order, "Behind," "this building," "CD," "Bushes," "6,"

  "feet," "stairs."

  It is possible that Quentin would look for six stairs or six bushes, rather than in the bushes six feet away from the stairs behind this building. He might not know what I meant.

  But I submit that it was impossible for anyone reading the notes in my pocket to know what I meant until I stood in front of the chapel and passed the note. The same words would have had a different meaning ten minutes ago, while I was in front of the main Manor House.

  And he could not know, Quentin had no need to know, the CD contained Miss Daw's Fourth Dimensional music, which had been used, while I was imprisoned, to nullify my powers. It was useless to him.

  I do not know what sign Quentin passed to Colin, but Colin gave one of the most memorable performances of his career, and probably got in as much trouble as a kid can get in without being sent to reform school.

  In the middle of the service, Colin leaped atop the back of the pew, flung out his arms, and shouted, " I'm converted! I've seen the light! Jesus save me! Amen, brothers!"

  And as Boggin and Fell rose up to get their hands on him, Colin skipped and jumped from pew to pew, shouting and carrying on, " Servants of dot ol' Debbil, youse betta jus'b'ware! Judgment Day is a-coming! The Great

  Star Wormwood falleth from the Heavens, and one third of the seas shall be as blood! And, lo, I beheldeth a great serpent with seven heads, probably the same one Hercules killed earlier, and I wonderedeth if he woreth seven hats when it raineth! "

  He jumped from the altar to the font, to the rail, kissed the statue of the Madonna, slapped the baby she held, and made a break for the front door.

  He went out the door, Boggin and Fell went out after him, Miss Daw rose to her feet, her pretty face scarlet with indignation, Mrs. Wren got out her hip flask and sneaked a drink while no one was looking, and Mr. Drinkwater also walked out the front door, covering his smile with his unwounded hand. Dr.

  Foster, at the lectern, sighed, turned the page, and continued reading from Ec-clesiastes, mumbling slightly, too dignified, really, to notice the interruption.

  Quentin and Vanity got up and walked outside to watch the chase scene. I stayed dutifully at my prayers, while Victor leaned over and looked at the workbook where Dr. Fell had been doing sums.

  From outside, Colin pounced on a coiled green garden hose and wiggled it around his head, screaming, "

  And behold he that worketh wonders in my name shall pick up snakes and receive no hurt from them. Watch this! Ow! Fuck! That goddamn bloody snake just bit me! What kind of piss-ant religion is this, making promises to a child!" He pantomimed being attacked by the garden hose. It really was quite funny, and I had to stifle a laugh, or give away the fact that I could see through walls.

  "Come along, Mr. mac FirBolg. We have all had just about enough," I heard Boggin saying.

  " Stand back! I am about to start speaking in tongues! Rafel mahee amek zabi almit! Papa Satan!

  Papa Satan aleppe!"

  Of all things, it was Mr. Glum, tottering and unsteady on his peg leg, who hobbled up in the slippery snow be-hind Colin and fell on him with a tackle. Colin writhed and screamed and frothed, calling them all sinners and condemning them to damnation and hellfire.

  This time I was watching Quentin, through the wall. He did not retrieve the CD. I saw him walk back to the bushes behind the chapel, kick around in the snow until he found the disc, and then kick the snow back over it. He broke off two twigs from the bushes and laid them across the spot to form an X.

  Since we were the only ones in our particular pew in the chapel, I leaned over and whispered to Victor:

  "Can you make something to play a compact disc?"

  Victor smiled. "Build? No. Too complex. Get? Yes. Take time."

  "When?"

  "Christmas. Have to go into town."

  It was December sixteenth. Christmas was nine days away.

  Of course, if Quentin crept out one evening, the CD without a player would be no use to him; if Victor got a disc player, the player without a disc would be no use to him; neither of them had sworn any particular oaths not to do these things.

  Do I need to mention that Victor always smelled nice? When I leaned forward to whisper in his ear, I could scent the scent from his hair. He shaved, and used aftershave, but even without that, there was always a healthy, clean, out-of-doors kind of smell to him. I really wanted to kiss his nicely shaped ear while I had my lips right there, but I didn't. I was the leader, after all, and leaders cannot fraternize with their troopers, or show favorites.

  8.

  I was tempted to do everything myself, since I could look around in the fourth dimension and see if anyone was coming, and I took a risk any time I communicated to someone; words could be heard by Boggin; notes could be seen by Miss Daw, and maybe by Erichtho.

  Boggin, dragging Colin by the ear, stepped back to the chapel door and called out in a loud voice, politely asking Mrs. Wren to accompany him.

  I decided to try to kill two birds with one stone. Maybe Colin's distraction was big enough to hide more than one message.

  Victor got up and walked out when Wren did. Miss Daw and I were the only two people left in the chapel. Dr. Foster continued to mutter and mumble, something about whether the Second Person of the Trinity had two natures or one nature, and whether that nature was shared with the Father or issued from the Father.

  I heard Victor, outside, say to Dr. Fell, "Sir, why must we waste our time with this superstitious nonsense? The concept of an infinite being is self-contradictory."

  Fell said, "Quite right. And any such being who craves adoration from people like me is hardly worth adoring
, if I understand what that word means. Well, Boggin does not seem to be about. Still, we mustn't have you running around unsupervised."

  "Sir, we could go to the lab. There is a variation on the Millikan experiment I would like to try. May I use the apparatus? You could supervise me there."

  "Very good. Come along."

  Vanity and Quentin did not escape so easily. They were herded back into the chapel. Vanity was seated next to me, then Quentin, then Miss Daw.

  Without moving from my position or raising my head, I used a higher sense to stare at Vanity.

  Immediately, she looked over her shoulder.

  Vanity had not been imagining it. She really could tell when people were looking at her.

  I looked away, looked back, looked away, looked back___

  Every conspirator under the age of majority should learn Morse code. It would save a great dead of time and trouble. Under my breath, so low that only Vanity could hear it, I hummed the tune to Baa-baa black sheep, have you any wool?

  With each note, I looked at her with either one, two, three, or four of my higher senses, either from her left or right, front or back, from above or below. I had to run through the little song once or twice till she caught on.

  Dr. Foster forgot where he was in the service, and went back to the beginning again. So we had plenty of time. Miss Daw may have been irked that I was humming to myself during the service, but, on the other hand, we had both heard this part before, not half an hour ago.

  9.

  Sunday afternoon: Colin was in detention for the rest of that Sunday, and apparetly, for the rest of his life; I went to the library; Victor was in the schoolroom lab, apparently having just a fine time with Dr. Fell, frowning over experiment results. Vanity and Quentin sat in the Common Room doing math homework.

  Vanity made a little chart, a four-by-six matrix, and put the first twenty-four letters in the alphabet in it.

  Then, while I looked at her first through one sense then another, at different angles and directions, she wrote out: Write names of staff teachers hide in var cache when not watched a ap cymru b boggin c sprat d daw e wren f fell etc.…

  Immediately after, Vanity wrote out a dozen names on little slips of paper while Quentin rummaged up a number of small watertight containers from his room: a pop bottle, some plastic baggies, a little soapdish with a snap-shut lid.

  Then they dressed up in their snow things, filled their pockets with this litter, and went outside to play a combination of soccer and snowball fighting, with just a little bit of hide-and-seek.

  Even had Miss Daw been watching Vanity cipher, the note would have appeared to be of very little use to Vanity, or to me, and the act of hiding the names of various staff members in various places around the grounds would seem meaningless. I do not know if even Miss Daw knew that we had assigned letters to our various cache spots. For example, spot A was the little courtyard where the bench circled the stump of an oak. There was a hollow spot between two roots.

  I did not see Vanity hide any of the notes. She could tell when people were watching, and she waited till no one was.

  But seeing Quentin pelt Vanity with snow, so that she was breathless with cold and laughter, and watching the somewhat playful grabbing and tackling and tickling they imposed on each other during their hide-and-seek made me sure Quentin was going to try to steal a kiss. As far as he could remember, his first.

  Once or twice it looked like he was building up the nerve to do it. But Vanity looked a little worried, and kept glancing at the upper windows of the north wing, where Colin was in detention, as if she were thinking of him.

  10.

  The library had a typewriter. From the tongue-clucking comments I had overheard from the cleaning staff (some of whom were Cornishwomen from across the Bristol Channel), this was certainly the last typewriter in the British Isles, maybe in the world. Everybody else, everywhere else, used computer word processors.

  I had permission from Mrs. Flinders, the librarian, to use it, and I typed up what I am sure was the worst resume of all time. I had no idea what was supposed to go into a resume, or what one looked like.

  I was sure that some book in the library might have the information on how to write such a thing, so I spent at least an hour combing through Middlemarch and Emma and War and Peace, looking for scenes where characters went to find jobs. Unfortunately, most of them seemed to be aristocrats, who did not seem to have to work for a living, or else got a job (as Pierre did) through knowing the Freemasons. Great Expectations was no help; neither was A Christmas Carol. Nor was Plutarch's Lives, nor any of the histories of saints. Apparently none of these famous people in their famous lives ever had to get a job.

  On the theory that resumes had only been invented after the French Revolution, I went to the books in the modern section. I spent half an hour looking over Ulysses by James Joyce, and certain books by T.

  S. Eliot and e. e. Cummings. Our copy of the first book must have contained printer's errors, and a lot of them. There were nonsense words and run-on sentences on every page. In one of the chapters, the printer had left out all the punctuation. I am certain the author must have sued the printing company for putting such a thing out on the bookshelves with his name on it.

  The other two books were not anything I could make sense of. The Dewey decimal number indicated that they were poetry, but I knew what poetry was. Poetry was Milton; poetry was Keats. This was goofy rubbish. I assumed such books had gotten into our library by mistake, perhaps as a prank.

  In any case, I found nothing in the modern works that told me how to write a resume. I asked Mrs.

  Flinders for help, but she had only the vaguest notions.

  A resume was supposed to boil down your life experience to one sheet of paper. My sheet was blank.

  A resume was supposed to list your experiences. What experiences was I supposed to have, at my age, me, a young girl who had never worked a day in her life? With a student body of only five students, there were not any clubs or intramural sport teams I could boast of leading.

  If my resume had been entirely honest, I am sure some of the entries would have been eye openers:

  • First woman explorer in hyperspace

  • Participated in failed escape attempt from your institution

  • Discovered your true identity

  • Escaped with my brain intact after your people tried to erase,my memory

  • Eroded Grendel's desire to blot out my memory by batting eyelashes

  • Object of lust and unlawful desire by many men, including Boreas, Grendel, and maybe even Colin

  • Cooked my own breakfast, once. Burnt eggs.

  So, in case you are wondering; no, my resume was not honest. It contained some tepid information about my grades and did not fill up even half a page. Looking at it, I wondered how anyone my age ever got a job. I certainly would hot let someone with no experience near any heavy machinery, mine, factory, or office. Small wonder half of England was on the dole.

  And in case the context doesn't make it clear, I was writing it for Mulciber aka Lord Talbot, the man who owned the estate I lived on.

  I wondered how a person who makes a mistake on a computer erases it. Erases the magnetic tape it is written on, I suppose. I have also heard certain computers correct one's spelling as one types. That sounds like utter magic to me; I would have to see it to believe it.

  But I wished for such magic that Sunday afternoon as I sat typing. I was using carbon copy paper, and my fingers were all stained blue from the ink. Every misspelled word required me to throw the whole sheet out, and the carbon, as well. This was particularly annoying when the last word on the page was the misspelled one.

  I also did not know how to close a resume. I put Sincerely Yours, Amelia Windrose at the bottom, as one would in a letter. I am sure that was wrong, but I did not know what was right, and neither did Mrs.

  Flinders.

  11.

  Patience or no patience, there were some risk
s I could not avoid. I thought that the risk was now as low as it was going to get. Anyone watching me type endless copies of the same wretched resume over and over again no doubt fell asleep long ago, or hanged himself in despair.

  I typed this note: There is one who has betrayed you. The name is in a bottle buried beneath the roots of an oak stump in the small courtyard between the N and E wings of the main Manor House.

  I took out the carbon copy and the original. Since the inky carbon paper contained a slight imprint of the words, I tore the carbon paper into shreds.

  I was relying now almost entirely on Miss Daw's reluctance to turn me in. I had no doubt that Miss Daw might have seen the notes. She could easily have seen what Vanity had been doing all afternoon. But I had little to lose; she knew already that my memory was back.

  I went to the Headmaster's office to get some stamps. We needed the Headmaster's permission to send out letters.

  Boggin (I saw through the wall as I walked past the north wing) was still patiently lecturing Colin, while Colin (no doubt) was saying nothing but, "Go on."

  No one was in the office but Taffy ap Cymru. He was seated at a desk smaller than Mr. Sprat's, with his feet on the table.

  I showed him my resume, and the business card from Lord Talbot aka Mulciber, and explained I had a legitimate reason for sending out a letter.

  I gave him my brightest smile and tried to look as innocuous as possible.

  He frowned, looked amused and annoyed at the same time, and slowly climbed to his feet, then sauntered over to a locked drawer, where he took out a book of stamps. He actually had to sign a little book saying who was getting the stamp and why.

  I also asked for a second stamp to place on a second envelope, this one addressed to the school, which I wanted to place inside the first envelope, to speed Lord Talbot's answer.

  1.

  I was back less than ten minutes later.

  "What is it now?" asked Mr. ap Cymru.

  "I have a question about the mail," I said. "May we talk privately? I mean, really and truly privately?"