DeVille's Contract

by Scott Zarcinas

  When she looked at him with those big unblinking eyes, Louis immediately understood the depths to which he found himself. He had been wrong a moment ago; he was up the goddamn creek without a paddle and a canoe.

  “It’s not what you’re thinking,” The Master said, sensing his unease. “We’re not hiring an assassin. It’s impossible to kill someone who’s already dead; and besides, you’d never get near him, even if you could. His demise is not what we’re after, only his power. At least long enough to allow as many of the Freedom Fighters to escape, and whoever else wants to join us. We just want to put a hole in his net.”

  Louis almost jumped out of his seat and blurted, Are you blind? There is no escape! Your own goddamn White Rabbit has said so herself! Instead, he gritted his teeth and watched Frank O’Lynn pace back and forth between the piano and door.

  “The Boss only has power over his citizens because they yield it to him. That’s why he puts so much stock in signing individual contracts. It serves as a reminder that we’ve voluntarily signed a working agreement. Only problem is, it’s for 24-hours a day for eternity. It’s our life, our soul. He has all his citizens nailed to a paper crucifix.”

  The Master paused to gather her thoughts. Just how did she intend for billions of employees to break an unbreakable contract without ending up in one of the Chambers of Eternity? Louis thought. Mass protests? Strikes? It just wasn’t feasible, no matter how many Freedom Fighters there were. The Boss held all the cards.

  “The Boss has never in the history of LeMont renegotiated a contract once it’s been signed,” she said. “Power is all he knows. Without it, he loses his identity, his sense of who he is. Even if The Tower is destroyed and the sky-vault collapsed around our whiskers, he still won’t relinquish it. To him, that’s tantamount to throwing himself in the Fires of Oblivion.”

  Behind her, Frank O’Lynn went to inspect the bookshelves, as if had heard it all a million times before. Even though every book was the same, he seemed more interested in browsing through the titles than listening to what she had to say. Finding one that took his fancy, he carefully opened the cover like a librarian researching a delicate manuscript of historical importance, then moved around the coffee table without saying a word and handed it to Louis. Though kept in pristine condition, the yellowed pages felt thin and fragile, like French pastry. Frank O’Lynn drew his attention to several lines on the inside cover. Someone had written a message, maybe the author. “What language is this? It looks Gaelic,” he said.

  “You’re looking at the oldest language in the universe, Tongues.”

  “You expect me to read this?”

  “Take a closer look. You might be surprised.”

  Dubious, to say the least, Louis read the first line: Grnklpmrph nlw frpztk. Just as he had suspected, complete and utter nonsense. “This isn’t a language. There’s no vowels, no sentence structure, no grammar. Not even a goddamn conjunction. It’s nothing but gobbledygook.”

  As patient as a mother teaching her son the alphabet, The Master told him to try again.

  Shaking his head, Louis moved down to the second line hoping he would have more luck. It was worse: Zwlkbdlvrpmh. He gave up, and offered the book back to The Master, but she refused to take it. “What are you laughing at?” he asked Frank O’Lynn.

  If Louis had hoped to wipe the smile of the guinea pig’s face, he had failed. “Don’t get too upset. To be sure, you’re making the commonest mistake everyone makes when reading Tongues.”

  “Which is?”

  “You’re reading it in your head,” The Master said. “The language is phonetic. It’s meant to be vocalized; that’s why it’s called Tongues. Interpretation comes from hearing the sounds, not visualizing them.”

  Louis returned to the first line and read it aloud, stumbling over the unfamiliar sounds, which to his ears sounded like a baby gurgling his first words. “Grnk… lp… mrph nlw frp… ztk.” Suddenly, as if by magic (and it really was like goddamn magic), he caught a flash of insight into the meaning of the words. It wasn’t a direct interpretation as such, like Italian into English, but more like a visual translation of the words into a picture. Upon hearing the full sentence, an image of a pyramid-like mound of rubble popped into his mind. “I think I know the first line,” he said. “The building is destroyed.”

  “Not bad for a first timer,” The Master said, and Louis was relieved to hear no trace of cynicism in her voice. “It actually says: When The Tower does fall. What do you think the next line says?”

  Louis was already onto it, reading it aloud. “Zwlk… bdl… vrp… mh.” The image he got was of a large man, a human, standing before a crowd, but it wasn’t clear enough to be sure. “The man addresses the people,” he said, then added as an afterthought: “He might be a priest.”

  “I believe you’re a natural, Mr. DeVille. You have the gift of interpretation. With a bit of practice you’ll even be speaking it.”

  The line, Louis learned, actually said: He will come, and as he struggled through the remaining sentences, eleven in all, several images came to mind, like he was running his eye over a movie reel one frame at a time. He saw the collapsed building, then the man (priest?) addressing the crowd. Next, the man was in a tunnel, but some of the crowd (Louis still couldn’t see the image clearly enough, just shadowy forms) had shunned his invitation and stayed put. Those that had followed seemed to be dancing and singing. For an unknown reason, he was reminded of the early Christians singing joyously in the Coliseum while the centurions released the lions. Then the image seemed to become disjointed and blurry, lost in translation, so he moved on to the last few lines. They evoked images of paradise beyond a wall of flames, which frightened him initially, but then, with the utterance of the final word, an image of a baby cradled in a giant hand came to mind and he was awash with a sense of peace he hadn’t felt since the days on his grandfather’s farm, when he used to awake to the dawning sun through the bedroom window.

  The Master then handed him a piece of paper on which she had written the exact interpretation of the lines. As he had begun to suspect, it was a poem:

  When The Tower does fall

  He will come

  Inviting us to follow.

  Take the chance,

  Escape the morrow,

  Return with him who’s lived,

  And he’ll break with song, “Lo’ thou art a dance.”

  Belief will take us to a land

  Beyond our wildest dreams.

  Into the Fire we shall go

  To be saved unto His hand.

  The Master had even added “Miles N. Boon” at the bottom, like a quote.

  When The Tower does fall, he read, He will come. It sounded like a goddamn prophecy. Did The Master expect him to believe this horseshit? The Tower had been around for millennia and didn’t even look like falling down. Of that he was as certain as he was the Money Tree would never sprout cash; and who the hell was the priest referred to in the second line? The goddamn White Rabbit? Some kind of savior, like Moses leading his people out of slavery into the Promised Land?

  The Master motioned toward the book. “Did you know that you’re holding the very first copy of the very first edition ever printed? It’s the most ancient book in LeMont. For that alone it’s priceless.”

  Now that was something he could relate to, worth. Something like this belonged in a bank vault, not in someone’s private collection gathering dust on the shelves and losing value. He put it carefully on the coffee table.

  “But it’s the poem that dwarfs its financial value,” she said. “It’s proof that the White Rabbit has been with us since the very beginning, before The Tower was even built, when LeMont was still a warren of tunnels and caves in the rock face. We know that because Miles N. Boon was one of the founding citizens, and the only author The Boss allowed into print.”

  Louis scanned the lines of Tongues on the inside cover again, then glanced at the paper he was holding, the English version The Master had written. “
But the poem doesn’t even mention the White Rabbit.”

  He heard Frank O’Lynn chuckle, and for a horrid flash thought Smiggins had snuck in through the door. The Master told him to look again, so he read the whole thing once more. Still seeing no mention of the White Rabbit, he read it for a third time, now feeling stupid. He even read it backwards, but no, not a goddamn thing. Absolutely-totally-undeniably-nothing. “You’re reading it horizontally,” The Master said, noting the frustration on his face. “Read down, not across.”

  Louis followed her advice and was struck with what he read. Well goddamn and bugger me. The first letter of each line spelled the word he had been looking for:

  When The Tower does fall

  He will come

  Inviting us to follow.

  Take the chance,

  Escape the morrow,

  Return with him who’s lived,

  And he’ll break with song, “Lo’ thou art a dance.”

  Belief will take us to a land

  Beyond our wildest dreams.

  Into the Fire we shall go

  To be saved unto His hand.

  “Miles N. Boon was the first prophet. Not only did he predict the construction of The Tower, but also its demise,” The Master said. “The White Rabbit inspired him to write that poem, as well as Secrets Of A Chambermaid.”

  Louis remained speechless, and hadn’t as yet stopped reading up and down the lines of the verse. “But this is an interpretation. This could just be a freak coincidence.”

  “That’s the glory of Tongues. It’s the seed from which all languages sprout, the only language that can be translated directly, word for word, without the subjective interpretation common to all its derivatives. If I were to translate it into German or French, or any other language you can think of, even obscure languages that are now obsolete, the word White Rabbit will appear vertically down the verse. Believe me, we’ve done exactly that. It’s there every time.”

  Louis scratched his snout. It was obvious then; the White Rabbit couldn’t be the ‘He’ referred to in the second line, unless Miles N. Boon was prophesizing the Second Goddamn Coming. But that didn’t sit right either. If this poem was genuinely as old as it looked, the White Rabbit had probably come and gone from LeMont as many times as it wished. Good God, he himself had seen it twice already. Which left him with a blank. “I still don’t know how I’m supposed to help,” he said. “If you ask me, you should be looking for the guy who wrote this. You’ve got time on your side. You’ll find him eventually. There’s nowhere else for him to go.”

  “That’s just the point, Mr. DeVille,” The Master said. “Miles N. Boon vanished shortly after he wrote that poem. He didn’t even attend the book launch.” Then she shot him a glance that drilled straight through him and left him feeling hollow. “Everyone that’s seen the White Rabbit has disappeared. You’re the only one that’s remained to tell the tale.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Secrets Of A Chambermaid

  LOUIS sat back with a thousand and one things racing through his mind. Despite his best efforts to shrug them off, The Master’s words remained to taunt him like a Snipe pinned to the back of his jacket he couldn’t reach: Everyone that’s seen the White Rabbit has disappeared. Was that furry ball of fluff some kind of goddamned Pied Piper, hypnotizing the citizens of LeMont toward the cliff and into the Fires of Oblivion? The idea was certainly plausible. Had he not himself been seduced by her allure? Had he not been gripped with total obsession when he chased her down the boulevard?

  Louis shifted in the seat and fiddled with his tie. Why couldn’t the damned rabbit have left him alone in peace? All he wanted was to get on with his After Life, earn some extra cash on the sidelines, get a nice apartment near the piazza, go to a restaurant or the cinema when he felt like it, and maybe even spend a weekend or two relaxing at the Country Club. That was goddamn it. Nothing else.

  Then he was struck with an idea, something that appealed to him immensely. He could just deny that he had seen the White Rabbit. Wipe the memory from his mind. Simple as that. Heaven’s above, women did that sort of thing all the time, all the women he had slept with that was. “It didn’t happen,” they usually said when they were getting dressed, sometimes with an involuntary shudder. “We didn’t do anything except talk about our work and our partners. Just two adults having a conversation,” and that had been just fine with good ol’ Louis Hugo DeVille. Except it wasn’t. He couldn’t deny what he had seen or done, it just wasn’t in him. A pragmatist at heart, he knew he could only outrun reality for a finite period before it hunted him down like the lawyer of a pregnant mistress. Like it or not, the White Rabbit was now as much a part of his world as the goddamn whiskers on the end of his snout.

  “I was chasing the White Rabbit when you and Santosa picked me up and took me to The Tower,” he said.

  “I suspected as much,” The Master said. “You had that look in your eyes I’ve only seen with two types of emotion, love or desperation. The White Rabbit has that effect on everyone who sees her.”

  Louis chuckled to himself, still fiddling with his tie. Desperation, he was certainly familiar with that. Love? Well, he wasn’t so sure anymore. It was hard to remember ever having those sorts of feelings for his wife. Okay, forty years ago when they had first started dating (More than forty years now, Louis, my dear. Time goes faster when you’re having a ball in the After Life), love might have been mixed in there somewhere, or what he thought was love, that weird obsession to always have the object of your desires constantly by your side. They had chemistry, she used to say back then, and he would laugh. Dianne Nitro and Louis Glycerine.

  “And look where it got you, Louis my boy,” he said to himself.

  What a goddamn fool he had been. Every chemist knew that a reaction didn’t last forever. It petered out when balance was achieved, when all -the excess chemicals were used up and there was nothing left to interact anymore. That was the evolutionary joke. Man and woman, two opposite chemicals, met in an explosion of lust and believed that it would last forever. Granted, some reactions lasted longer than others, maybe a week, maybe a few months, and maybe if a couple were really lucky it would last for a year. But no more. The human condition didn’t have enough chemicals to react for any longer. Pretty soon balance was achieved. The love died. Other things dampened the reaction or took its place– children, mortgage, career – and what was once a highly volatile concoction of nitroglycerine was now a drab suspension with as much goddamn passion as a glass of flat Coca Cola. Something you just had to tip down the drain.

  He rested his head in his paws. Had he ever felt so goddamn hollow? “Are you sure Miles N. Boon can’t be found. He’s the key to all this. He has to be somewhere.”

  The Master, as immoveable as ever, said, “Believe me. The Freedom Fighters have searched every inch of rock in LeMont.”

  Louis dropped his paws and sat back, her words still echoing through his mind. Everyone that’s seen the White Rabbit has disappeared. The sense of hollowness seemed to be here for the long haul; just one more goddamn thing he would have to get used to in the After Life. “Even the chambers along Conduit Number 1?” he said.

  With Frank O’Lynn standing like a guardian angel over her shoulder, The Master nodded in affirmation. “The only place we haven’t been able to search is The Boss’s penthouse, but I suspect we needn’t bother. There’s only one explanation that has any merit.” She then motioned toward the doily-covered coffee table. The book on top of it was still splayed open to the ancient poem. “The evidence is in there, if you care to read it.”

  Although he was amused to think that Miles N. Boon had somehow left a trail of written clues to his disappearance, Louis couldn’t bare the thought of wading through the pages of some mushy goddamn love story. He was no private investigator, and he certainly had no interest in the rampant affairs of some fictional character. “Why don’t you just give me a synopsis?”

  Frank O’Lynn, now scratching a fleabi
te on his jaw, was aghast. “The story is written on several levels. How can you possibly get any idea of what it’s about from a synopsis?”

  Publishers make a living out of it, Louis thought, and shrugged. The Master then interjected, “I’m no literary agent, but let me give it a try.”

  Louis nodded a begrudging acceptance, noting the displeasure on Frank O’Lynn’s face, as though an abomination was about to take place.

  The Master drew a breath and said, “The story is set in a small French village. It centers on a poor chambermaid used as collateral to pay off her parents’ debts to a corrupt mayor, an indentured servant enslaved to the chambers she keeps tidy and her bedroom in the basement of the manor.” She paused for a moment before going on. “The mayor uses the manor to accommodate his powerful associates and make his shady dealings. For years the chambermaid is abused and neglected, until a mysterious stranger comes to stay. Unbeknown to anyone, he is a prince traveling back to his kingdom in the guise of a fur-merchant. He befriends the chambermaid and learns of her debt, which he promises to pay once he has fulfilled his duty to his father. As a reminder that she is in his heart, he leaves behind a white rabbit for her keep until he returns. But he never does. Little does she know, the mayor has ordered his guards to ambush the stranger in the surrounding hills and take his money.

  “Months later, she removes the rabbit’s collar and discovers a large diamond hidden on its underside, enough to pay for her freedom and keep her happy for the rest of her life. She runs to the mayor to tell him that she’s leaving. It’s New Year’s Eve, and the mayor has prepared a large bonfire in the garden to celebrate. Furious, he tells her that she is a fool to believe she’ll ever be free; whatever possessions she owns are rightfully his, including the diamond. To make his point, he tells her that the stranger is dead and then tosses the rabbit onto the bonfire. Despairing that she has now lost everything, the chambermaid throws herself into the flames.” She paused, as if wanting to add something more. “The story ends there.”