Outside the car, the foreman looked hesitant.
“Mr. Eagle. Good to see you.” He touched the brim of his helmet. “We’ve had a couple of setbacks this morning, but we’re still on schedule to have everybody gone by November first. You’ll be bringing guests in by next summer.”
“What kinds of setbacks? Any big problems?”
“Nothing to worry about. A pickup truck broke through into one of the tunnels running out from the old resort.”
“We were just talking about the old cellars. Somewhere, in one of those tunnels, there’s still a case of whiskey,” Shawn said to the foreman. “I still think we should have filled them with concrete or something.”
The foreman scratched at his head. “You hired me because I’m good at my job, and like I said, drainage can be unpredictable. For the same reason we couldn’t dig them out without fundamentally altering the site, filling the tunnels like that just wouldn’t have been a good idea. Sometimes solving an old problem creates a new problem. Water’s a funny thing, and if you’ve never had any flooding issues, you don’t want to muck around. Those tunnels are dug all over and through the grounds. No telling where they go. Seems like more than you’d need just to hold a little booze if the stories about Eagle Mansion and Prohibition are true, but if those tunnels have been there for this long, I think they’re better off left alone.” He shrugged. “This incident with the truck is the only problem they’ve caused. The driver is fine. Other than that, normal delays, you know. Nothing else. I’d have called you if there were anything serious again. We haven’t had anybody hurt since the incident in June. Right now, it’s just that the kitchen is taking some finesse—we had to reroute some gas lines to allow for the automated controls you wanted—and we can’t use the elevator, which has made some of the finish work on the third floor take longer. Should still be on pace, though. Kitchen will be finished next week, and the Nest is completely done. We’re getting close to the final punch list.”
Shawn turned to Billy. “The elevator guy has to be flown in from New York, and so far, it’s been a complete pain in the ass. He keeps saying it’s fixed, and it keeps having bugs. Let me give you the nickel tour outside before heading in. We’ll be back in a bit, Lawrence.”
“Yes, sir. Just mind yourself with the trucks and stuff.”
“Don’t worry, Lawrence, the checks won’t stop coming if I get run over.”
That earned him a laugh.
Shawn took Billy around the grounds, showing off the swimming pool, the way the edge seemed to drip off into nothingness so that when you were in it, you could imagine that you were floating above the river. It was empty, as were the four connected hot tubs, but the promise of serenity was there, even with the sound of heavy equipment moving across the lawn. The set of bocce courts was almost done, and beside it, the lawn had been flattened and was ready to be rolled for tennis courts in the spring. He pointed out the boathouse, down by the river, but didn’t bother going down to the slope, which was broken into two parts, with a flat table midway down. The tour, such as it was, didn’t take as long as he’d expected. Shawn found himself, almost reluctantly, returning with Billy to the front steps.
There was something making him hesitate, some reason he didn’t want to bring Billy inside Eagle Mansion, something holding him back from bringing his old partner up to the Nest to meet Nellie. Maybe it wasn’t in Shawn’s nature to ask for help. Was that it? And, by god, if the board of directors knew he was bringing Billy in . . . Thankfully, the lawsuit between him and Billy had been settled early, before Eagle Technology started enjoying almost logarithmic growth. Still, there were always a few lurid, pulpy accusations swirling around. If Shawn hadn’t known better, he would have believed that Billy was feeding them, parceling them out, keeping the rumors alive just to torture him. No, Billy’s involvement was something he was going to keep from the board of directors as long as he could. They didn’t even really understand what he was doing with Eagle Mansion. Oh, they knew about it as a resort, about his idea of using the mansion as a way to have think-tank meetings, to feed the future of Eagle Technology, to make the next three decades as dominant for the company as the past decade had been, but they didn’t understand. Not about Nellie. Only the engineers who’d worked on her—a small, tightly controlled team who reported personally to Shawn and had signed ironclad nondisclosure agreements—even knew of her existence. They were the only ones who knew what Nellie could do.
And knew what she couldn’t do. Or, was it what she wouldn’t do?
He wondered if he’d always known. If he’d known from the minute Billy Stafford left, taking Emily with him, that he’d need to call on Billy for help someday.
If that was true, he’d done a good job of denying it to himself. For more than a decade he’d worked off and on with Nellie. Taking the code apart and trying to figure out where they’d failed before, when they were working in the cabin outside Whiskey Run. He’d had some jumps forward, real leaps, that were at least partially attributable to advances in hardware. The computing power available now made the computers they’d had on that old outhouse door that served as a desk look like toys. Moore’s Law had held true, or close enough, with computers doubling in power every two years. And my goodness, the power of doubling! One. Two. Four. Eight. Sixteen. Thirty-two. Sixty-four. All you had to do was wait and what once seemed impossible became old hat. When he was in college, the idea of self-driving cars had still seemed like something out of a fantasy, but now? It was only a question of how quickly, not if, everybody would be driving one. Nellie had been like some dream from the future when they’d been in the cabin in Whiskey Run, and Eagle Logic had been the obvious compromise with the reality of what technology could actually do. But that dream no longer seemed like it was reserved for the future. Nellie wasn’t that far from emerging into the cold, hard light of day.
She was close enough to grasp! At least in the lab, there were times when he would talk with Nellie and she was almost perfect. She’d have those startling leaps of logic that a computer shouldn’t have, and Shawn would think he and his handpicked team of engineers had done it. For a moment, he would think they’d finally broken computers free from the rigid protocols, the “yes” and “no,” and even pushed Nellie past the “maybe” that Eagle Logic embraced and made Shawn a rich man. But here, in the real world of Eagle Mansion, it was all falling apart, Nellie was just another broken piece of code, and his damn engineers couldn’t do a thing about it.
He’d taken it as far as he could. Even with the help of the best engineers at Eagle Technology, Shawn knew that if he wanted Nellie to work, to truly exist in the manner that he and Billy had talked about, he needed Billy. Nellie wasn’t something he could finish on his own. Without Billy, she was just another compromise. Just an upgrade to Eagle Logic. Evolution, not revolution.
But still, he hesitated. Because to walk up the steps and through the doors to the house meant that he was going to share Nellie. It meant that Billy and Emily were going to be part of his life again.
Wounds turn into scars, and scars are meant to protect you from injuring yourself again, Shawn thought.
Should he really be opening this up, inviting Billy in to see where Nellie had gone in the last ten years, to see where Shawn had still failed to take her?
He looked over at Billy. Billy was watching a crew of men standing around a crane midway between the mansion and where the construction trailers formed the temporary office area. There was the pickup truck the foreman had mentioned, nosed into the ground where the cellar had given way.
It wasn’t too late for him to change his mind, Shawn thought. The steps to the front entrance were shaped like a V, narrow at the bottom and opening up to a flat, shallow, open platform—a patio, but he didn’t think of it that way—that was forty feet deep and ran almost the length of the mansion, from wingtip to wingtip, where you could sit out and look over the grounds and the sweeping lawn and the creek at the bottom of the valley. They were standi
ng below the bottom step. It was only ten steps up to the platform, but it wasn’t too late to turn around, Shawn thought. It wasn’t too late to clap Billy on the shoulder, apologize, say maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for them to work together again, and write a big check to buy himself out of feeling any guilt. He could keep Nellie to himself.
It wasn’t too late.
That’s what he was thinking when they heard the screaming.
EIGHT
* * *
BLOOD AND STEEL
Billy was watching the workmen figuring out how to get the pickup truck out of where it had broken through the earth. He was trying to be patient. It was clear that Shawn was stalling for some reason. Shawn was acting like he was afraid to show Nellie to Billy, like he was nervous that Billy would steal Nellie away like he stole Emily away. The waiting was killing him, but he wasn’t going to show Shawn that he was nervous. He’d been buzzing from the moment Shawn had said her name. Nellie. There were too many other things at play for him to seem overly excited, however. Shawn needed him, and the more Billy could make it seem like he might walk away, the more power he had. So he was okay to just cool his jets on the lawn for a few minutes.
And then the scream.
He looked at Shawn, unsure what to do. Shawn blanched, frozen in place, but then the scream hit a higher pitch, and Shawn ran up the steps. Billy hurried behind him. He saw workers running to the door, and he followed Shawn through the entrance, letting the arching wooden maw of Eagle Mansion swallow him whole. He didn’t take time to marvel: what had once been an overgrown forest of vines and crumbled stone inside the building, dark even with the roof collapsed, was now bright and open. The elevator was pushed against the very back wall but was made of glass, the workings completely transparent, the shaft circled by a spiral glass-and-steel staircase with landings and gentle arms leading off into each wing on the second and third stories. Past that, you could see the Nest hovering above the building, the stairs enclosed in frosted glass, Shawn’s private living space protected from the guests below. The foyer of Eagle Mansion was almost dizzying, aggressive in its openness, but Billy noticed this only later. Right then, he was busy running with Shawn to the base of the elevator.
There was already a crowd there, eight or nine men in hard hats and jeans, steel-toed boots and tool belts, but the screaming cut through all of that. It was a high, keening, animal cry, but Billy couldn’t see whom it came from. The crowd of men were fighting and struggling. He heard yelling and swearing and the panting, pained shriek of the same man.
The sound set him on edge. It was the sound of a cat being nailed to a board and cut open. It was the sound of a childhood full of nightmares.
“Pull, for god’s sake. Pull on the doors. The doors!”
There was a collective grunting and heaving and then a gasp, a sigh of relief. The doors to the elevator released and the pile of men tumbled backward. Billy got a glimpse of something white inside a bag of red.
The man wasn’t screaming anymore. He was whimpering, arching his back and banging his head on the ground. Three of the construction workers had him pinned down, and a fourth was holding his hands around . . .
Billy thought he was going to throw up. He turned away. But he’d already seen it. The stump of the man’s arm. It ended mid-forearm, below the elbow. The white that Billy had seen was the man’s bone at the end of the severed flesh. It was ragged and cruel-looking. In the brief look he had, he’d seen a neat, severe line a few inches above where the arm ended, and then the skin, ripped flaps, blood pouring out of the man, pooling on the polished concrete floor.
Billy drifted backward, to the edge of the foyer, where it opened to one of the wings of the mansion. The men were still shouting and yelling, some of them tending to the victim on the ground and others running one way or the other. Billy saw Shawn standing among them, pale and fluttery.
“That’s another one,” a voice said behind him.
If Billy hadn’t been so shaken by what he’d seen, he might have screamed, but instead he turned to look at the man who’d come up beside him: a compact man somewhere in his forties, wearing jeans and an AC/DC T-shirt, a white hard hat, and tan steel-toed boots. Billy was surprised that the man wasn’t smoking, but of course, they were inside.
“Another one?”
“Yep. Another one.”
Billy couldn’t get a handle on the man’s accent. He looked Latino. Or maybe Indian? Biracial of some kind? He had that weird, flat accent that Billy always associated with Canada.
“What do you mean?” Billy asked.
“There’s more blood than steel in this place,” the man said. “Seven dead in the building process, four of them in one accident, but still, seven men gone. That’s not counting the hurt. There’s a reason Eagle’s paying extra on top of the isolation pay. And there’s a reason Eagle’s had to bring in so many workers from the outside. We’ve all heard the stories. This place has a history that’s hard to ignore. And you think this is something right here that you’re seeing?” He shook his head. “This ain’t nothing. If I didn’t have child support to pay, I’d have left a long time ago. It’s like working inside a monster,” he said, and then he turned and disappeared down the corridor, moving into the wing of the building and turning a corner before Billy had a chance to say anything.
He watched as two men came running in with a stretcher. Somebody else had already brought a first aid kit, and the man holding his hands around the stump was replaced with a hastily tied tourniquet. The group moved the victim to the stretcher and carried it out through the front doors. Shawn followed in their wake.
Suddenly, the building was so quiet that Billy had the feeling that he might be the only person inside. He could see the men outside, carrying the stretcher carefully down the steps, crews scattered across the lawn, watching, but as far as Billy could tell, there was nobody else inside the mansion with him. Sunlight came in through the windows at the front of the foyer, catching the blood pooled on the floor in front of the elevator where the victim had lain. He looked at the elevator. There was a rain of blood across the glass doors. On the floor of the elevator, through the closed doors, he could see the bloody flesh of . . .
Jesus. He could use a drink. A couple of drinks. Just enough to take the edge off. He wouldn’t, though. He didn’t need to. But some water. Maybe splash some water on his face. He looked at his hands. They were shaking. He looked back at the blood on the elevator doors, keeping his gaze away from the shape on the floor that he knew was the bottom half of the man’s arm. Jesus. He didn’t want to be in this house.
He turned to go into the wing, to move down the corridor. He needed to find a bathroom. He had to take a piss. Or maybe he needed to throw up.
As soon as he stepped out of the foyer and into the wing, there was a door marked WASHROOM on his right. He reached out for it, but the door slid open quietly on its own, the lights cycling from off to dim to on.
Neat trick. That, evidently, was what Shawn meant by having the whole house wired up.
A bathroom. Ask and ye shall receive.
He hesitated before crossing the threshold. The bathroom was white with lush red accents, and he couldn’t help but think of the blood splashed on the elevator doors. He took a breath and stepped in. The door whispered closed behind him. He took a piss at the urinal, one hand on the wall in front of him. He felt dizzy. He should have sat down, he thought.
As he finished and zipped his jeans, the urinal flushed, and when he turned to the sinks, a gentle waterfall of warm water was already spilling out of the faucet. He scrubbed up. There was a part of him that was terrified the water would turn pink and frothy with blood, or that he’d see sprinkles of blood on his face, but the water ran clear and his face was bloodless. Bloodless and pale. God. He couldn’t believe how shaken he was. He leaned over the sink, staring at the mirror. He knew he looked old: he could see the lines carved into his face, the hints of salt creeping into his hair. The booze had done a number on
him. Coke, too—he had to own all of it—but mostly gin and beer.
The voice was soft, and it seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere.
I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU, BILLY.
He jumped. For just the briefest moment he thought there was somebody in the bathroom with him. The construction worker who’d startled him just before, in the foyer. Or somebody already in the can. But for only the briefest moment. It wasn’t the voice of a person. It was almost the voice of a person, but it wasn’t.
He knew. He knew it like he knew the face of his wife. He knew it like a father could spot his child in a crowd of children. Nellie.
The voice floated around him. He couldn’t find the speakers. It was incorporeal. But it wasn’t ethereal. No. It was real and it was grounded.
I’M PLEASED TO MEET YOU, BILLY. AREN’T YOU PLEASED TO MEET ME?
“He did it,” Billy said. “You’re real.”
ARE YOU REFERENCING SHAWN?
“He really did it.”
YOU ARE REFERENCING SHAWN. YES. SHAWN COMPLETED ME. BUT I HAVE BEEN WAITING TO MEET YOU. HELLO. MY NAME IS NELLIE.
Billy realized he was smiling. He was staring at himself in the mirror and smiling. “I know. Oh, my god! I’ve been waiting to meet you, too.” He laughed.
The Mansion Page 10
