The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle]
Page 8
Kerbaugh wagged a finger toward the northward darkness and said, “We’ll start at that end. I want to check every one of these … things.” He headed up a corridor in the center of the floor and Papier followed, apprehensive about leaving the security of the stairway but also amused to watch Kerbaugh clutch his white tunic to his thighs, away from the grimy monstrosities on either side. The lantern, against the procession of braces and frames and wingnuts and humps and muscley springs, sent macabre shadow forms marching in the opposite direction down the stone walls on either side. Papier longed for his tidy office in New Chicago.
Near the north wall the collection of machinery ended, and the two investigators entered a clear area of flooring. Before them stood one last massive black sculpturework of metal, shrouded in white sheeting and resembling a theatrical dragon paraded down the streets by children on holidays. Kerbaugh set the lantern on the concrete and strode to one end of the machine. He grabbed a corner of the sheeting and pulled slowly, turning one forearm over the other and letting the drape roll up into a bundle.
A sinister black steel skeleton was revealed, an apparatus dominated by five consecutive upright braces. There were giant wheels on each side used for manual operation: In the guts of the hardware were cylinder rollers and inky beds of lead inscribed in bas relief with illegible markings.
“This,” announced Kerbaugh, “is a printing press!”
Papier was stunned. It was obviously true. All about lay the implements of printing: barrels of ink, shelves of paper in varying sizes, thicknesses, and colors, and a long counter stocked with pens and ink bottles and magnifying glasses and straight-edges and dozens of Government forms—or careful copies of them. Papier was amused by his own tinge of sadness—well, the assemblage was a monument to an individual’s ingenuity—and he wondered how the handsome machine would meet its end. By sledgehammer? They had brought no dynamite—this wasn’t that kind of Government expedition.
When Kerbaugh returned to the lantern he exploded with profanities: “Well if this ain’t a roll in the shit!” He was staring with disbelief at the front of his tunic, which was spattered with dozens of oily spots. He rubbed the damaged fabric between his fingers.
Papier approached the lantern to inspect his own clothing but there was nothing to see in the dark material. At that moment, though, he felt a droplet hit his face and a sting spread through his left eye. He rubbed at the eye socket, spat on his hand, and rubbed again. When the pain subsided, Papier grasped the lantern by the overhandle and lifted the light high. He squinted, and an examination of the ceiling confirmed his suspicion: Droplets of a clear liquid, probably turpentine, kerosene, or gasoline—he could smell it now—were falling rapidly from the rafters.
Kerbaugh seemed transfixed by the shower. “Papier,” he intoned, “directly above us is the dining room. Someone has spilled fuel over the floor. A lot of fuel. We must go up and have a look.”
It was then that the scent of woodsmoke hit Papier’s nostrils, and he obediently bolted south down the corridor with the lantern. He was near the foot of the stairs when Kerbaugh halted him with a shrill cry: “Don’t … leave me … in … the dark!”
Papier turned and held the lantern high to show him the way. Kerbaugh stood motionless in the spot where Papier had left him, a quivering toadstool beside the black press. Abruptly, the entire front of Kerbaugh’s tunic turned gray, and a river of liquid gushed down his right leg. Deciding that Kerbaugh was not going to follow, Papier turned again and bounded up the stairs. The wooden steps were sopping with flammable liquid, and when he crashed against the door at the top his fears were confirmed: It had been locked by key from the outside and, it seemed from the impact, there was a heavy object against it.
For a moment Papier thought a burst of herculean strength might open the way, but reason intervened, and he splashed down the steps wondering what ideas Kerbaugh might have. He saw no flames yet, but the smoke was getting awfully thick.
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18
The Lovers
Dear Moberly,
When I script these words they are no less painful for being able to look at them. You’d think me quite the pig poker for leaving you with just writings, but I fear that my tongue would never make it through the explaining that needs doing—why I am gone by the time that you read this.
I can see now that for me to stay any longer would mean disaster for us both, and to once again be the destruction of a loved one, well, the guilt would kill.
I did say “once again.” Some of the story I told ya, about the letter I shipped around asking for money and maps, and how it all arrived as in a fairy tale. Hoo. I told ya not all of why I wanted to run.
There was a woman arrived more than a year ago in Camp Blade, woman I had thought to wed named Nora Londi. Midday break each day, we would push up through the forest on the hill above town—the best place from which to spot wanderers. We would scatter our shirts and trousers enough to make an appreciable blanket. And then once exhausted on the spread—sorry, but I want you to know all of this tale—she would tell me the stories of her journey.
In that, she was like many who passed through the camp. Beaten people, weathered by working their way across the country. But really stronger for the effort. And I envy their experience, me never having left Camp Blade. They all have stories, ya, and it was Nora Londi what told me one of the most curious.
Five years ago, she tells me, she was working Sector 1—a farming outpost called New Bern—barning on a tobacco farm. (I gully that’s where she got so fond of good smoke.) She was hefting in the curing barn, which was racked through with cross beams. She would have to monkey up the cross beams to the top, hang a stick load of tobacco leaves, and then climb back down for the next one. That until the barn’s full. The leaves would drip juice on her, she’d tell me, until she looked like a slug at the end of the day.
So third day out, all the guys at the barn are looking at her funny. Supposed to be one person on the barn floor handing her racks of tobacco leaves, but there’s five of ‘em this morning, most of the guys just kicking dust while one or two works. Then there’s eight of ‘em, and then about twenty, and then she gave up on hanging tobacco—something was up.
In comes this big ol’ pig woman named Pawga—she’s the mule boss at the stable, almost wider than she was tall. Nora could hear her breathing from the top of the barn. And the guys start yellin’, and the money comes out, and she’d seen this all before—it was a dog fight, only she was one of the dogs, her and Pawga. She wasn’t meant to win this one, either. Nothing was on her side—not weight, not the betting, not the foreknowin’ of the fight.
So she just dived from the cross beams and hit the dirt, rolling toward the corner where there was some old tools. She goes pushing through this rusty junk till she finds a cloth bag the size of a brick, and it tears away like nothing, it’s so old. And inside, damn if it isn’t a rusty log chain like they use for tractor hauling.
This woman Nora is a muscler, y’unnerstand. She takes the log chain an’ starts spinning it over her head, then letting out a little more, and a little more, and the tip end is movin’ pretty fast, like a buzz saw. Then she steps forward and, well, she never did want to do Pawga any harm. She probably didn’t want the fight any more than Nora did. The guys were the ones what wanted to see a fight.
Hoo. Well, bear-busting with such a story, this is where I start to go wrong. When it’s lights out at Camp Blade all are asleep, or at least staring from their bunks at the ceilings. But for some of us these rules were flexible—for the Badgers, and for those of us with access to goods traded on the black market. Those people being Supply drivers or warehousers such as myself who know how to rework bills of lading.
We had built a hideaway in the heart of the warehouse, a cramped little room created by the careful stacking of shipping crates. It was protected by a maze of outer walkways that could be shifted or obliterated in a moment by a forklift driver.
Oh, they hooted so much they were snorting ale foam out their noses, all but Sgt. Krieger. He was kind of quiet and sober through the telling.
And the next day I learn the why of that: The pig poker jails her for the killings, hoping he’d gain a stripe for it.
That’s when I went gullybonkers and wrote the letters, sending them out in supply shipments. I did lie a bit in the letters, but there were friends to protect, and I needed the extra measure of sympathy or no outsider would have thrown assistance, do you think?
The night I was ready to leave I pounded Sgt. Krieger in his bed with the backside of a logger axe. The Badgers’ve got to know it was me, so the telling of it makes no difference now. I pounded Sgt. Krieger until ya couldn’t tell him from the mattress.
—Anton
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19
Above the Village
Nora Londi squinted at the circle of light in the ceiling of her cell. There was a familiar “friend” at the rooftop door: her hat. It hovered there, a brown fedora, a little misshapen and discolored from its recent drenching. As her eyes adjusted, she understood—it was wobbling atop Loo’s tiny head.
Loo shoved the rope ladder through the hole, and it bounced and settled into a herky-jerky swing that caught the attention of the llama Diego and his two compadres.
Loo called down, “Oo-oo. Oo-onga.” And Diego replied, “Hoorma. Hoong.” Slowly he turned his dignified gaze to Londi. “Go … up,” he said.
Londi climbed the ladder into a blinding, arid whiteness. As she stood stunned in the outside air for the first time in a week, Loo pulled up the rope ladder and stuffed it into a canvas satchel. Londi took her hat from Loo’s head as the wiry little woman worked. Londi was unsure whether she would be allowed to keep it. How much of a prisoner was she? She glanced inside the hat, then slapped it against her thigh, flipped the hat onto her head, and pulled the brim low to shield the sunlight.
Loo seemed not to notice. She wrinkled her nose at the stench of excrement wafting from below. In manic movements, she unlaced the leather ties on a second sack and withdrew a sling, a large Cred Faiging pulley-and-tripod assembly that fit over the door-hole in the ground. A hand crank was bolted to the side of the tripod. In a few minutes Diego had been winched to the surface, and he stamped and harumphed in the bright midday.
Something was about to happen, something in this peculiar little village had been decided, and Londi and Diego were edgy.
From under the hat brim, Londi studied the canyon. There was the waterfall to the east that she had heard thundering for days. She had only seen the far edge of it through the little circular windows. Now she took in the whole of it—an awesome white fist pounding the turbine. Far to the west the lake grew mirrorlike, reflecting the shocking blue sky and red-brown rock walls dotted with a scattering of scrubby trees. It was a stark and unnatural juxtaposition, this meeting of sheer canyon and manmade lake. Surely, underwater the vertical walls continued their plunge; the lake had to be hundreds of feet deep. Just below there was sandy embankment, a beach—and that probably was manmade as well.
In her days underground, Londi had envisioned more of a bustling village around her, a small hillside metropolis. But there was little to see. A chicken cackled by. To the west there were a few whisps of smoke rising from disguised chimneys. Occasionally a dark naked figure would appear among the rocks and melt into the shadows again. There had to be other structures dotted about the rocky slope, but from this vantage point they were either not visible or were well camouflaged.
Londi judged the narrow lake to be a hundred feet below, and then thought it might be five hundred feet. It was disorienting not having a familiar object down there by which to judge the scale. It was the same gazing upward. That vegetation at the canyon rim—were they pygmy shrubs, or a stand of giant spruces? Londi felt dizzy.
Loo clutched the hair on each side of Diego’s neck, murmured into his ear, then leaped onto his back. A set of long, folded wings dangled from her right shoulder by a strap. Londi noted that Loo had left the tripod in place, as if it would be needed again, and she deduced that they would be returning “home” eventually. That is, at least Diego would return; the rope ladder she had used had been bagged up.
As she steered Diego up the gorge wall, Loo could not resist running her fingers through the llama’s soft fur.
“Hey, Diego,” Londi called ahead, “maybe she thinks you’d make a nice rug.”
The large beast stopped in midstride and turned his head, right front paw still poised in the air. “No,” the animal managed to say after much thought. “Hoom. You … go in soup.”
There. So Diego was as cranky as she was. But Londi was feeling better in the sunlight, fresh air, walking again.
At times the path meandered in an obliging gradual ascent, but more often it rose alarmingly straight up the rocky wall. Londi found the gravelly ground unpredictable under her hiking boots, the loose pebbles sliding too easily. She paced herself in short and careful strides, which was just as well, the breathing being more difficult at this altitude.
An hour into the climb, the trio scrambled up onto an outcropping that allowed an overview of the village below, and Londi was astounded at the elaborate layout. Like her cell, the several dozen structures scattered about the hillside were built in natural-looking, sloping formations, their walls made up of indigenous rock. From a great distance, she knew, they would be invisible.
As the sun moved across the sky, Londi trudged upward, staring into the llama’s hindquarters. She grew to envy the animal’s precise, unerring paces. She also envied Loo’s leisurely ride, but Londi knew she herself would be too heavy for a llama on this terrain, even for a brute the size of Diego. She sweated heavily into her shirt and the sweat burned away quickly in the dry air. A steady breeze began drifting up from below, which seemed to make Loo restless—she was turning, looking down, then toward the sky and the canyon rims, and down again.
Londi was in such a daze—her mind fixed on thirst, her vision now crisscrossed with hallucinated shooting stars—that when the group stopped, it all seemed so absurd. Loo dismounted; Diego quietly sat back on his haunches. Let’s go, Londi wanted to say, up the canyon! But she was incapable of speech. Her throat felt so dry and crackly that it might bleed.
And then her exasperation began to fade. Slowly she realized that they had arrived at their destination, a dangerously sloping ledge little wider than the trail itself. There was an opening in the rock here, a cave entrance in the shape of a sagging triangle, and Loo disappeared into it. Londi turned and gazed down into the gaping gorge to test her theory and, yes, the village below had vanished.
Diego interrupted her concentration, nudging his wet snout into the back of her hand. “No … way out,” he said. It was a plaintive voice, as if he were worrying about her thoughts.
Londi wiped her nose. “Hoo. You bounce up a mountain without thinkin’—instinct. Me, I suck in the territory. Gotta look around, map it out. Instinct.”
When Loo returned she looked dispirited and afraid. The fingers of her left and right hands were intertwined and pressed into her crotch. She watched the cave apprehensively.
And then the figure emerged. He stood seven feet tall, humped and husky, a grotesque assemblage of flesh. The man brought a musky scent into the odorless outdoors. It was a muscley body, yet unattractive. The skin was an astonishing, blinding white.
Londi riveted on the face: He had a protruding, bovine jaw topped by a long flat nose with tear-shaped nostrils. Propped on that nose was a pair of sunglasses with mirrored lenses reflecting twin vistas of the canyon below. His head darted left and right hyperactively, and wild Nordic-yellow hair surrounded a pair of tiny horns protruding from the top of his head. He was naked, and a large sc
rotum waggled between his legs, dwarfing his little nub of a penis.
“Hello,” came a throaty voice. While Loo quivered, Diego stared meditatively into the gorge, pretending disinterest.
Londi found words, and they seemed inept the moment they tumbled out: “Do you live here? Have we come to see you?”
“This is where I live,” the monster rumbled. “And you are here at my invitation. I am your leader.”
Londi decided she was being toyed with. Information came hard in this community, and it rankled her not knowing where she stood.
“You’re not my leader,” she ventured, remembering that she had snatched the red badge off of the inert body of Red Boss in the waterfall netting. “I’m a Government Transport deputy, and they’ll be looking for me by now, I ‘spect. Armed searchers, probably, from over there at Blue Hole.”
The behemoth snorted and squinted toward the sky. “Do you play chess by any chance?” he asked. He did not wait for an answer, assuming it to be no. “You are check-mated, Nora Londi. I have you covered from all sides, no matter what you say or pretend. You, dear red lady, have stumbled upon a canyon that you may never leave, a canyon that I rule quite adamantly. Just ask Loo, here. There was once a little misunderstanding between us about decorum, wasn’t there, Loo? And now you’re missing your tongue.”
Loo stared intently at her toes.
The hunched man cocked the left side of his face toward Londi, his two mirror-covered eyes being well separated by the protruding snout. He rubbed at his crotch and continued, “About that Government work of yours—well, we all know that ain’t so, don’t we? Red Boss was with the Government. Was.
“Red Boss’s dead, ya know. We’ve got his head on a stake now, up by one of those trails above the waterfall. We really must discourage the inquisitive, and Red Boss is serving us this final duty. And as for the rest of him…”