by Tad Williams
"Let's talk about something else for a moment," he said, noting that she had moved a little closer still, so that her thigh, beneath dress and ruffled petticoat, was pushed against his. "Why do you think your father wants to kill me?"
"Oh!" Her eyes widened, as though she had entirely forgotten the danger that half an hour earlier had driven her to terrified weeping. "Oh, Paul, I couldn't bear to lose you, but I'm so frightened!"
"Just tell me why you think I'm in danger."
"My friend told me. You know, my friend."
Paul grimaced. "Yes, I know. Your ghost. What exactly did he tell you?"
"Well, he didn't really tell me—he showed me. In the same manner he showed me you, sitting in your room." She frowned—prettily, he thought, just like in the old books. Was it an automatic product of being raised in an old-books sort of way? "Paul, what is a grail?"
"Grail?" It was not the sort of thing he was expecting to be asked. "A grail . . . right, it's . . . it's a mythical object." Despite his university lit. courses and a dozen lectures on the pre-Raphaelites, his recall was embarrassingly vague. "The Holy Grail. I think it's supposed to be the cup that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper. Something like that. It features in a lot of medieval legends—all that King Arthur stuff." He sounded, he thought, like the kind of nonreading, philistine American he and his friends had always mocked. "I think there are other meanings, too—some cauldron from Irish folktales—but I can't quite remember. Why?"
"My father was talking about it with those cruel men who work for him, Finney and Mudd."
Paul shook his head. "You've lost me again, Ava."
"My friend—he showed me them talking in the mirror. Or rather, he showed me Finney and Mudd in the mirror, and they were talking to my father, who was in a mirror big as a wall. He was in the mirror tor them just like he is for me."
Finney and Mudd talking to their boss on a wallscreen, Paul thought. So Ava's phantom could not only trick those spying on her and Paul, he could also spy on the spies in turn. "And?"
"My father told them that the Grail was again within reach. And so perhaps it was time for you—he called you 'that Jonas character'—to disappear."
Paul was desperately trying to find threads of sense in this great, ragged tapestry of incomprehensibilities and folly. "People use the term 'grail' sometimes to mean something important, Ava—a project, a goal. I don't know what it would have to do with firing me, though, or even why your father should concern himself with such a small detail." He smiled to show his resignation to his own comparative insignificance, but she was not amused or reassured.
"He wasn't just talking about sacking you, Paul." She was stern, as though he had become the larky pupil and she the teacher. "Nickelplate—Finney—said they were ready whenever my father gave the word, and Mudd said, 'It won't matter much to anyone, anyway. All he's got is an old mother who won't last much longer. She's in no shape to raise a fuss.' I'm quite sure that's how he put it."
Something as cold and startling as a wet hand clutched his innards; for a moment, Paul felt dizzy with sudden panic. Nobody talked that way about terminating someone's employment, did they? It sounded like a crime drama. Surely there had to be some innocent explanation. Surely.
Aloud, he said, "She's gone now. My mum. She just died,"
"I'm sorry, Paul. It must very painful for you." Ava's eyes turned downward, showing a great expanse of dark lash. "I never knew my mother. She died when I was born."
He looked at her carefully. The flush of excitement had pinked her pale skin above the high collar of her dress. "You wouldn't . . . you didn't make this up, did you? Please tell me, Ava. I won't be angry, but I have to know."
Her hurt was as raw and obvious as a child's. "Make it up. . . ? But, Paul, I would never lie to you. I . . . love you."
"Ava, you can't. I've told you."
"Can't?" Her laugh was shrill, painful to hear. " 'For stony limits cannot hold love out'—your William Shakespeare said that, didn't he? I remember it from Romeo and Juliet."
Which is exactly why I wouldn't have taught that play to a lonely, impressionable young girl, he thought. Her other tutors have a lot to answer for. "I have to think, Ava. This is . . . this is quite a bit of information." The inadequacy of the phrase was laughable. "I need a little time to sort things out in my mind."
"Do you not care for me, Paul? Not in the slightest?"
"Of course I care for you, Ava. But you're talking about something much larger and a hell of a lot more complicated." As she colored and brought a hand to her mouth, Paul felt shamed. By her standards, he had used very strong language indeed. "Look, Ava, I just don't know what to think about all the things you've told me."
She put her hand on top of his, cool, dry fingers startling against his skin. "You think . . . you think I might be mistaken, don't you? Worse, you think I might be . . . what is the word? Hysterical? Mad?"
"I think you are a good and honest person." There was nothing else he could say. He squeezed her hand and gently removed it before standing up, then had a sudden thought. "Could . . . your friend . . . could he talk to me? Would he?"
"I don't know." Her composure was a thin facade covering something like devastation. Paul Jonas was glad he could not see the whole of it. "I will ask him."
The flickering light woke him up.
After a long, agonizing night, he had at last fallen asleep, helped or hindered by more wine than usual. His first disjointed thought was that the window blinds had somehow gone on the fritz and were jigging up and down, semaphoring him with the harsh and unwanted light of morning. It was only after he had dragged himself upright that he realized the arrhythmic flash came not from the window but the wallscreen.
A call. . . ? he thought dazedly. Why didn't it ring? A charge of fear went through him. A disaster. Emergency warning system. The tower's on fire.
He scrambled out of bed and dragged open the blinds. It was still deep night, the miniature city below still dark, the orange lights of the oil derricks the stars' only rivals. No flames were sweeping up the shiny black side of the tower toward him, nor were there any other signs of something amiss. It must be only a malfunction.
"Paul Jonas."
He spun around, but the room was empty.
"Paul Jonas." The voice came from nowhere in particular, as quietly intrusive as a buzzing fly trapped in a windowsill.
"Who . . . who is that?" But he knew even as he asked. The last traces of his cloth-headed grogginess vanished. "Are you . . . Ava's friend?"
"Avialle," the voice breathed. "Angel. . . ." The wall-screen flickered again, then bloomed with color. Ava filled it—not the Ava of this moment, but an Ava in full if ersatz sunlight, crouched beneath a tree spreading crumbs for the birds that surrounded her like a crowd of admiring Lilliputians.
"Who are you?" Paul asked. "Why do you talk to Ava—to Avialle? What do you want from her?"
"Want . . . want . . . safe. Avialle safe." It spoke with a strange, aphasic slur. Pity would have pulled at him, except something about the shambling, inhuman voice also scared him to death.
"And who are you?"
"Lost." It moaned, a strange staticky roar. "Lost boy."
"Lost . . . where? Where are you?"
For a long moment there was only silence as the image of Ava rippled away, replaced by unevenly shimmering bars of light. "Well," it replied at last. "Down in the black, in the black black black." The moan came again, a stutter of harsh sound. "Down in the black well."
All the hairs on Paul's body stood upright. He knew he was awake—every quivering nerve told him so—but the conversation had the terrible downhill feel of a nightmare.
He searched desperately for something to build on. "You want to keep Ava . . . keep Avialle safe, is that right? Safe from what?"
"Jongleur."
"But he's her father! What would he do to her. . . ?"
"Not father!" the thing groaned. "Not father!"
"What are you talking abo
ut?" The family resemblance was plain, although what was hawklike and cruel in the pictures Paul had seen of Felix Jongleur was softened and sweetened in the daughter. "I don't understand. . . ."
"Eating the children," the voice moaned. "Jongleur. Grail. Help them. Too much pain. And. . . ." The bars of light began to flicker more rapidly, until they nearly became a solid burst of radiance. Paul found himself staring helplessly. "All the children. . . ."
The light strobed even faster, a white rush so bright that as he stared even the walls of his room fell away. Then somehow he was toppling forward into the light, into a brilliance that had no ending, and the haunted voice was all around him, powerful and lost.
"The Grail. Eating the children. So many. . . ! Hurting them!"
His senses were afire with sensation, but he was helpless. He could do nothing as the light streamed over him, through him, scorched into his eyes and turned his brain to a knob of clear crystal. Faces began to appear, children's faces, but it was no simple stream of images: he knew these children, felt their lives and stories even as they flew past him like a flock of sparrows caught up in a hurricane wind. Hundreds of tiny spirits flowed through him, then thousands, each one a node of painful darkness in the sea of shining light, each one precious, each one doomed. Then, out of the whirling darkness, a new shape began to form—a great silvery cylinder floating in a vault of black emptiness.
"The Grail," the voice said again, imploring, mourning. "For Jongleur. Eating them. Ad Aeternum. Forever."
Paul found his voice, though he had no lungs to drive the air, no throat in which to form the scream.
"Stop! I don't want to see any more!"
But it did not stop. He was lost in a storm of suffering.
He woke up on the carpet with the true light of morning streaming through the window. His head felt like something rotten that had been imperfectly balanced on top of his neck. Even an extra-strong cup of coffee and a small handful of painblockers did nothing to make him feel more human. He was miserable.
He was also terrified.
There was no explanation for what he had experienced. He did not insult himself by pretending it might have been a bad dream—the details were too sharp, his waking position on the floor in front of the wallscreen too telltale. But there was no simple way of understanding. The thing that had contacted him was no ordinary hacker, that was laughably clear. He didn't believe in ghosts, especially ghosts who appeared on wallscreens. So what did that leave?
Paul sat by the window with shaking hands. Below, he could see one of the corporation's hovercrafts arriving at the esplanade just below the tower, the ship's cheerful white-and-blue paint at odds with his own current viewpoint—that the ferry was basically a larger version of Charon's boat, conveying passengers to a Hades in which Paul was already a resident.
He roused himself. The sight had given him a longing to be somewhere else, anywhere else. He could not spend another day inside the great black building. He needed to move, to get out. Maybe then he could think properly.
As he dressed he felt a pang of worry and sorrow for Ava. If he simply disappeared, even just for the morning, she would be frightened. He was reluctant to ride all the way up to her house, frightened that he would never be able to pull himself away from her, so he called and left a message with one of Finney's many assistants. "Mr. Jonas has business to take care of because his mother in England has died. He will be out for the day. Please ask Miss Jongleur to study her geometry and read two more chapters of Emma. Lessons will resume as usual tomorrow." Hanging up, he felt the same sort of guilt he had experienced as a child skiving off school.
I have to get out, he told himself. Just for a while.
Walking from the elevator across the huge atrium lobby to the front doors, Paul could not resist looking around to see if someone was following him.
But isn't that just what you aren't supposed to do when you leave Hades? What was that from, the Orpheus legend? That you weren't supposed to look back?
Whatever the case, he was not being followed by either weeping ghosts or dark-suited security personnel, although the vast lobby was so full of people it was hard to tell for certain. The wash of commingled voices echoing from the marble walls and down the crystalline, pyramidal ceiling was like the roar of an ocean, like the rush of childish faces that had invaded his sleep now made into sound.
He paused for a moment in the plaza before the front doors to look up at the tower, a mountain-high finger of warped black glass, a million darkly translucent plates trussed and polished. If this was indeed the gate of the netherworld, what kind of fool was he even to think about coming back? He had planned a day's research trip, since he was afraid to access the larger net from within the J Corporation matrix, but what was there to draw him back at all? A doomed girl? It would take someone with a lot more power in the world than Paul Jonas to break her free from that cage. Something called the Grail, some threat to the world's children? Surely he could do much more from the outside, perhaps as a secret informant to some serious investigative journalists, than he could ever manage under constant surveillance.
Should I just take off? Just go? For God's sake, what job is worth this madness, this kind of paranoia?
"There's something wrong with your badge," the woman said. He could see the ferry's gangplank just the other side of the security-glass air-lock door, but the door itself did not open.
"What do you mean?"
The young woman frowned at the symbols dancing on the inside of her goggles. "It's not cleared for departure from the island, sir. I'm afraid you'll have to step out."
"My badge isn't cleared?" He stared at her, then back at the gangplank, only a few meters away. "Then keep the damn thing."
"You'll have to step out, sir. There's a security hold on it. You can speak to my supervisor."
Before a half-dozen sharp words were out of his mouth, the security guards—exactly the sort that he had half-expected to be following him through the tower lobby—had escorted him to a quiet office for, as they put it, a quiet chat.
It was at least a little solace that afterward he was allowed to walk back out of the departure area and back to the tower by himself. Security hadn't been ordered to do anything to him, not even detain him, as long as he stayed on the island. A little solace, but not much.
Conscious that he had sweated himself rank inside his coat and shirt despite the cool of the morning, Paul stood inside the lobby elevators, full of terrified indecision. Did this mean they had heard him after all, talking the J Corporation equivalent of treason with the master's daughter? Or might it just be a fluke?
He had to see Finney. If he didn't, if he simply did as he wanted so desperately to do, returned to his room and got shatteringly drunk, he would be admitting that he deserved this treatment. He had to act innocent.
Finney's assistant kept him waiting twenty-five minutes. The spectacular view across to the city—a city now heart-breakingly out of reach, although it seemed so close he might reach out and prick his finger on the Riverwalk Spire—did little to soothe him.
When he was finally allowed in, Finney was finishing a call. He looked up, his eyes as always strangely hard to see behind his spectacles. "What is it, Jonas?"
"I . . . they wouldn't let me leave the island. Security."
Finney looked at him calmly. "Why?"
"I don't know! Something wrong with my badge. They said there was a security hold on it, something like that."
"Leave it with my assistant. We'll sort it out."
Paul felt a gush of relief. "So . . . I can get a temporary replacement or something? I've got some things I have to do in New Orleans." In the silence, he felt the need to make it more compelling. "My mother died. I have arrangements to make."
Finney was looking at his desk, although the desktop appeared to be bare. He nodded distractedly. "Sorry to hear that. We can make arrangements for you."
"But I want to do it myself."
Finney looked up
at him. "Fine. As I said, leave your badge with my assistant."
"But I want to go now! Go off the island, deal with things. I mean . . . you can't keep me here. Not just . . . keep me here."
"But, my dear Jonas, what is your hurry? Surely you can make arrangements by net more efficiently. And these procedures might seem silly to you, but I promise you they're deadly serious. Deadly serious. Why, if someone tried to get onto the island—or off it, for that matter—without a valid badge, I wouldn't even want to think about the kind of terrible things that might happen!" Finney gave him a slow smile. "So you just sit tight, will you? Be a good boy. Entertain Miss Jongleur. We'll straighten everything out . . . in time."
Back in the elevator, Paul could hardly support his own weight. He stumbled to his room, turned off the lights, carefully and definitely shut off the wallscreen, then sat in darkness broken only by a pane of light tilting out from the crack between window and blind and tried to drink himself into oblivion.
He could see his own fingers touching the button of the elevator, see the dawn light bleeding into the corridor disappear as the doors swished shut behind him—he could see it, but he could not quite feel it. The drunkenness was still on him, a twisted, feverish disconnection. He did not know what time it was, only knew it was morning, only knew he could not take another night of such monstrous dreams.
The door hissed open, revealing the inner door. He leaned against it, resting his head on the cool frame while he clumsily entered his code and pressed his hand against the palm reader. Dizzy, he remained leaning for several stupefied moments after the lock had clicked.
One of the parlormaids looked up in surprise as he stumbled through. In her wide-eyed gaze he saw an entire factory of deceit. "You're real," he said. "So you must be a liar."
