400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  There was nothing in the room except a console of moderate size, being not much larger than a Steelcase office desk typical of the era, with several built-in keyboards and monitors. Messraunt’s initial impression was that if this was the device, it could have been easily relocated to the university by a professional moving crew, thus saving him the bother of the trip, which at this point was threatening to turn into an overnight venture, for he had misjudged the shortness of daylight in the northern part of the state, and now found it further exacerbated by the steep crowding peaks all around. He did not much wish to be caught here in darkness, and he promised himself he would be down those seven flights of stairs and out of the complex well before nightfall.

  Despite the unpromising state of the console, which was only slightly less bulky than the card-punch machines in the academic records office, Messraunt seated himself in the spring-shot office chair and found the small operator’s key which the Dean had given him. With little hope of access, he nonetheless found the ring-shaped slot in the console control panel, inserted the key, turned it, and waited in resignation for nothing to happen.

  And in fact, no sound came from the console, and nothing in the room gave any sign of responding to having been unlocked. It was not until several minutes later, when he rose from the still cold console and walked to the window to see if he could spot his car in the small lot below, that he noticed puffs of smoke drifting from the distant stacks of the physical plant. They were so infrequent that he wondered if they had always been there and he had simply not noticed them before; but after several minutes he convinced himself they were thickening, growing more constant. Within ten minutes, white plumes drifted steadily from the several stacks and showed no signs of tapering off. Somewhat more agitated now, Messraunt inspected the console and discovered that a single cursor had begun to throb on one of the monitors. He tapped a key on the keyboard but to no effect. Somewhere far away he thought he heard a dim whining sound, and then the lights came on.

  Through the panoramic windows he saw the whole complex come to life. The huge dull dormitory buildings, with their slits almost too narrow to be windows, held a cold glow deep within. An unpleasant light to study by, he thought. The avenues and walkways between the dorms were cleverly lit by narrow strip-lamps embedded in the paths and walkways, as if to provide safe paths for students or workers hurrying home at night. But hurrying from where? And who exactly would inhabit this complex or campus? The narrow road that brought him here through the mountains was hardly up to the task of supporting a steady flow of student traffic; and in the entire complex, he had seen nothing but the one small lot where he had parked his own car. At any rate, this rush of light had the unwelcome side-effect of deepening the gloom around the valley, and he thought it was going to be harder than ever to judge exactly when it might be best to leave. This fearful premonition could not have been more wrong.

  In the glare and gloom, Messraunt thought another transformation had come over the campus—one whose reality he found impossible to judge. To him it looked as if the streets themselves had begun to retract. The paths between the dormitories looked like deepening grooves. At first he attributed this to the raking light, which made small depressions look like black canyons, but then he received unexpected confirmation from his senses. A flurry of disturbed specks, the agitated black bodies of rats and squirrels, began to flood from the buildings and across the streets, rushing about in blind panic, the more survival-oriented or level-headed among them heading for the sheltering woods. The crows remained strangely silent, hunched and clinging to the rooftops without lifting a feather.

  The console gave a bleep, calling Messraunt back from the window. There was now a command awaiting his attention:

  USER NAME:

  Messraunt sat. With trembling fingers, he entered: HANNEMOUTH

  The machine accepted this, then offered up its challenge:

  PASSWORD:

  Slowly, Messraunt copied a long string of characters from a sheet the Dean had provided.

  The car, he said later, was probably destroyed the instant he pressed the ENTER key, although he was not to verify this until his headlong flight down the seven sets of stairs had ended with him rushing out of the main building, treading on the tails of a swarm of terrified rats. His account of that mad descent is fragmentary at best, and made little sense even to those who had the patience to force him to repeat it. He spoke of the stairs themselves shifting, spinning, folding in and interlocking on themselves like bits of an Escherean puzzle. The central stairwells, he suggested, changed positions several times as he plunged between floors; and he felt himself fortunate not to have been crushed in the moments of vast change. He realized halfway down that the seventh floor might have remained stationary, an unaltered seat for its pilot or programmer, yet by that time there was no thought of return, no matter what might lie below.

  What he saw from ground level was if anything even more harrowing than what he had seen from above, when the tower blocks had begun to slide along the grooved streets and clash together, then swing ominously toward his position. From ground level, those huge blocks he had mistaken for dormitories, had if anything begun to accelerate, crashing together, locking and unlocking, forming configurations he had not the leisure nor the desire to study at such close range. Such immensities should not move at such speeds! The sound of reconfiguration was like mountains crashing and calving. And the tall shapes, closing in, pulled the darkness even closer. All at once he recognized the wisdom of the embedded light paths, for between the colliding titans shapes it was impossible to tell which trails were safe to tread. They lit and darkened with a pattern that only seemed illogical or indiscriminate to a terrified mind, and gradually he realized that only reason would see him through this madness—that all this was, in fact, by design, and could he but comprehend it, he might drive out of here unharmed.

  The sky was still luminous, traced with violet, as he turned to find his car and discovered instead a solid wall where it had been, and some occluded champing action taking place in the shadows there. Moments later, as the immensity retracted, he saw a wafer-thin glimmer of something where rubber and metal mingled, hugely compressed, and the humble imprint of a General Motors hood ornament was all that remained to identify his car.

  At that point, a newly devout pedestrian, he ran.

  The luminous trails were reliable only as long as they lasted, and Messraunt claimed that somehow he knew he was in a battle of wits with the Hannemouth Bequest. If there was any sense to them, it was something deeper than logic—something closer to an animal wit, more like the flashing luminosities by which cuttlefish communicate. It was as if he were watching neurons firing in a vast brain, synapses at macroscopic distances. He was running along ganglia, with dark and incomprehensible thoughts clashing above him, threatening at any moment to “forget” him altogether. He felt this battle of primal wits was all too evenly matched: One small brain (his) against the entire complex and its strange synthetic process. More worrisome than a battle of wits, however, was the thought that this brain might be diseased or even (he knew nothing of its maker) essentially mad. How long had the Hannemouth Bequest lain abandoned? Its ruination had rendered it unreliable. Consider the rats. Consider the squirrels and crows! Twigs, hair, feathers, fragments of eggshell, animal droppings, detritus—such organic matter had clogged the works and slowed the processes to such an extent that the machine could hardly be called efficient. And yet it could hardly be argued that it was doing…something. Grinding on, pursuing its processes, with a harsh new grating sound that reminded him of nothing so much as a grinding clutch, a gear that had somewhere slipped. He heard a spine-cringing sound that reminded him of metal being filed from a damaged brake-drum. Something, somewhere, was stuck; and pushing up against something larger. Two behemoths crunching and grinding against one another until one must give. His teeth almost shattered from the sound.

  Messraunt felt the ground shake in a new way. He sensed a
new color of light, and saw his shadow cast before him on the gate that had come up suddenly, with the shaggy woods beyond. Turning at the threshhold, he was in time to see a ghastly pall of explosive light flare up from the direction of the physical plant. That was bad enough, but silhouetted ahead of that light was something worse—an incomplete form which the massive structures had been shaping, like a half-formed thought, an incomplete gesture, loaded with intention but falling (barely) short of actual expression. He hid his eyes from that, and from the molten light that began to pour out of it, and ran out through the gate, into the mercy of the woods.

  Somewhere down the road, dragging to a halt, he realized that he had been expecting the final punctuation of an explosion, yet none had come. It never crossed his mind to turn back. He was entirely done with the Hannemouth Bequest, and his recommendation to the Dean of the university would be brief.

  Yet the Hannemouth Bequest was not yet done with Messraunt, nor apparently with us. For as he stumbled through the woods and reached a clearing where the last light of day still held some influence on the sky, he heard wings flushing out of the night, and looking up saw a flock of silent, purposeful crows winging between the trees, heading in the very direction in which he was headed. It was not their silence that always ended Messraunt’s account of his investigation. It was their formation. For bedraggled as they were, singed and smoking from whatever conflagration they had fled, they flew with sinister purpose, each holding a specific point as if positioned there by some inconceivable dot-matrix printer. Some were missing. There were gaps in the message. Messraunt often spelled it out precisely, for emphasis.

  Here is a sample scrap of paper attributed directly to his hand.

  HELL_ WOR_D

  * * *

  “Evaluation of the Hannemouth Bequest” copyright 2006 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared online at Flurb #1 (Fall 2006), edited by Rudy Rucker.

  AN EVENING’S HONEST PERIL

  Sitting at the entrance to the Tomb of Abomnis, dangling her legs like tempting morsels over the dark and moaning stony mouth, Jinrae thought she saw the head of a black-haired man rise into view at the crest of the hilltop behind her. She leapt to her feet with her sword drawn and ready.

  Echoing her startled cry, a raven swept up and over her, flapping twice and then gliding toward a distant tumble of faint brownish buildings in the middle distance.

  Stop jumping at shadows! she told herself.

  Settling back down, she watched the black fleck merging with the evening sky. The sun had just gone down beyond the town of Cowper’s Rest, pulling daylight after it, triggering lights in the villas. The ravenspeck circled and landed somewhere in a farmer’s field. Scattered red flowers nodded in unison, bowing to a breeze she couldn’t sense herself. In the far, far distance, an olive smudge gave little hint of the horrid marsh it heralded.

  Groans came from the tomb, groans and the rattling of chains to greet the coming night, but they struck no answering note of fear in Jinrae. Once the sound would have chilled her, a weirdly welcome pang, but these days, even in the worst places, she rarely found anything strong enough to cut through the numbness that enwrapped her. Vague dreads wrestled in the back of her mind, ones she didn’t care to name. She felt she was seeing the seams of the world tonight.

  Someone was coming. A silvery glint on polished mail faintly limned a figure stalking across the plain at a pace that would have maddened her if she’d had to tolerate it. Thankfully, they would not be travelling any great distance on foot tonight—although if it came to that, she had sufficient scrolls to quicken even the slowest feet. Aye, she carried boots of speed and hasty syrup and portalismans; besides which, numerous powerful friends would come to her summons, although she intended to rely on no resources besides her own at this point. It was hard, alone, but better in the long run. The last few days had taught her a great deal about her vulnerabilities, skills she had neglected through too much reliance on others. Or, at least, on one other. Hard lessons, late in coming, but not lost on her.

  Now here was a fresh face, an adventurer in unblemished silver armor. It was Aynglin, just as she had seen him last, a bright orange plume bobbing from his helmet’s crest. He had not put by his violet trousers, nor the green slippers with curling toes; and she couldn’t fault him for it, since it lent him a quite distinctive (if not distinguished) appearance. She would be able to pick him out in almost any crowd.

  His coat, however, was another matter: dark and oily, clearly stripped from a greater gullock, but with patches of long greenish fur still clinging to the seamed hide.

  “Hi,” said Aynglin as he came to a stop at the entrance of the tomb. His eyes were the same shade of violet as his pants. “I mean, hail. Hope I’m not late. You said to meet you at twilight, right?”

  “Well met,” said Jinrae. “You’re right on time. You’ll have to lose that gullock hide, though. It would only bog you down where we’re going.”

  The ends of Aynglin’s mouth turned drastically downward. “Really? I heard this was the best.”

  She couldn’t suppress a laugh. “I hope you didn’t pay a great deal for it.”

  “No, I…I found it.”

  “Well, that should tell you something of its value. Someone didn’t think enough of it to lug it along or even throw it on their mule. A perfect hide is well worth its weight, but that one’s imperfectly tanned. See the hunks of fur, never quite scraped away? It’s the work of a not particularly promising apprentice. In the hands of an expert, this would have made a coat I wouldn’t mind wearing myself.”

  He mumbled a glum, “Oh.”

  “Anyway, let’s see what I’ve got that you can use.”

  She reached into a pack she’d dropped on the terraced hillside, and pulled out a cloak of sheer material, supple as silk but silvery as the scales of some freshwater fish swimming in light. She leapt down next to Aynglin, eliciting hungry moans from the lurkers in the tomb. Aynglin took a backwards step.

  “Don’t fear,” she said. “They’re bound within. Now put this on. It’s meadowshark.”

  “Really?”

  “You can keep that. And I’ll give you matching pants later, if you accompany me back to Cowper’s Rest. They’re not violet, though. They won’t match your eyes.”

  “That’s okay! I—these were just temporary till I found something better.”

  “Everything’s temporary. Don’t get attached to anything. That way you won’t suffer when you lose it. Which you will.”

  “Okay. I guess I’m ready.” The gullock coat lay in a heap on the gravel path. “Is this it? Just the two of us?”

  “It’s for the best,” she said. “You’ll progress much faster.”

  “But where’s your partner? Isn’t he…?”

  “Not anymore. Let me see your sword.”

  Aynglin unsheathed his blade and held it out to her.

  For a moment Jinrae felt painfully disoriented.

  The pommel held a faceted orange gem, inlaid with a rune of fire. The curved white blade was gnarlphin horn, lightly glimmering with imbued magic.

  She knew this sword. It was, if not unique, then one of a very few.

  “Where did you get this?” she asked.

  “From a stranger,” he said.

  “Masked? Anonymous?”

  Aynglin nodded.

  “May I touch it for a moment?”

  Aynglin hesitated, and she couldn’t tell if it was indecision or merely ignorance that held him back.

  “I only need to touch it in order to divine its properties,” she said. “You needn’t fear handing it over to me.”

  “I trust you,” he said simply.

  She put a gloved hand on the hilt, and turned so that the twilight gleamed along the blade. There was no inscription where she had feared to find one. But that meant nothing. Engravings melted away with the proper words muttered over them. Entire histories could be erased that way.

  Still, it hinted of something more than chance, and she knew t
he mystery would haunt her until she solved it.

  At that moment, the first star pierced the deepening twilight. A wolflike wind began to wail through the hills and the moaning in the tomb grew louder.

  She nodded at Aynglin and took her hand from the sword. “Keep that out,” she said. “You’ll need it. I’ll enter first and make sure there’s nothing nastier than I expect.”

  “Right behind you.”

  She stepped through the tomb entrance, into darkness deeper than at first seemed possible. Her eyes adjusted slowly to the distant flicker of torches. Aynglin shouldered past her before she could stop him and kept going, blundering on without yet realizing that she had come to a halt. She hurried up behind him in the narrow passage, in time to see him hesitate before turning to look back for her.

  “Oh, there you are.”

  “Go on,” she said.

  At that, he rushed forward. But there were already things rushing to meet him.

  They came on in a cluster, sliding and jostling in the passage that seemed too small for them. Wicked yellow eyes abulge, catching the torchlight; flattened catlike faces with venomous fangs and exposed claws like hypodermic needles. Aynglin raised his sword and slashed, first at one, then another. He hardly seemed to feel the claws that tore into him. Jinrae knew that as yet he had no concept of his own frailty. After twenty seconds, he was on the edge of death. By twenty five he would be gone, unless she intervened.