Ascent

by Thorby Rudbek

  “Hello, Mr. Paxson. My name is Ed Baynes. I’m from the National Unusual Incident Team. I’d like to talk to you about what happened tonight.”

  “You-you mean me accident?” Harry replied hoarsely.

  “Is that what you think it was?”

  Harry did not reply.

  “Look. I know you’ve never seen me before, but you have to realize that I want to hear from you exactly what you saw and heard, no matter how crazy you think it will sound to me.” Ed paused, trying to gauge the effect of his words. “This isn’t the first time this has happened. I know; I saw the hole they drilled through a businessman’s pleasure cruiser just a couple of days ago.”

  “I didn’ see much.” Paxson spoke reluctantly after a brief delay, and his expression became perhaps a little less guarded. He looked anxiously at Baynes and noticed a look of patient understanding. “The first thing that happened, was me cab lit up like it was under a bank of spotlights on Broadway. Then the light went out – pitch black, it was – and so did me engine, the air brakes, and everything else. I felt kinda floaty, then the cab went head-over-heels. I think I were knocked out for a bit. When I looked around, I were out of the cab, lyin’ on the ground by this rock. I was thinking I must’ve popped me belt – always wear it – and crawled away from the wreck, but no, I remember undoing it earlier when I was reaching for a CD to play to help me stay alert.

  “It was a bit blurry – I could hear something weird. I shook me head and wished I hadn’t. It got lighter again. There was this bright light, kinda like a searchlight... only thinner’n’ stronger, coming right out of the ground. It started way up the slope from me... must have been near the road, I reckon. Then it moved down, behind the rock. I realized it was coming from up in the sky, not out of the ground, then. It got closer, an’ as it did, I could hear this noise easier ... kinda like eggs frying. Then it must have hit the diesel tank and ‘wham’! It blew up. I don’t remember nothing after that, not until I woke up here.”

  “Thanks, Harry. I can imagine it now,” Ed smiled reassuringly. “So, do you think you were thrown out of the cab?”

  Harry nodded.

  “I landed one side of this rock; me tractor landed the other.”

  “The paramedics said that rock probably saved your life.”

  “A few more inches and me head would’ve been smashed on it. Save or dispatch – a close call! Didn’t do much for me other bones, though, now did it?”

  “True.” Baynes suppressed a smile as he reviewed the mass of surgical bandages and casts that festooned the poor truck driver’s body. “So, how high would you say this beam of light extended?”

  Paxson’s face took on a thoughtful expression. “Dunno really, I weren’t really looking at the top; I were more worried about where the business end was going!” He paused for a moment. “I’d ‘ave to say that I didn’t notice no top. I guess that means it was pretty high up.”

  Ed nodded in agreement. “Thank you, Mr. Paxson; you’ve been most helpful.” He got up.

  “But, who was it?” Harry started to speak quickly, as he realized that Ed was about to leave. “Why did they jump me an’ try an’ kill me?”

  “I really can’t say, Harry.” Baynes rested his hand on the bed. “The interesting point is – they didn’t succeed.” He raised his eyebrows as if to emphasize the matter. “Just concentrate on getting well. Is there anything you need?” This was said as he was walking towards the door of the private room.

  Harry looked uncertain how to respond.

  “They did let you contact your family, didn’t they?” Ed probed gently as he stood by the exit.

  “Well, I didn’t want Carrie to worry; I thought I’d call her in a few days, when I’m feeling a bit better,” Paxson confessed. “Besides, we can’t really afford for her to fly out, not and have to shut down her business for a while, too.”

  “But she’d want to come if she knew?” Baynes walked back to the bed.

  Harry smiled, despite his situation.

  “Nothin’ would stop her!”

  “You realize how long you’ll be laid up? Probably months.” Ed could see that Harry Paxson hadn’t really considered how badly he had been hurt, and how long it would take for his multiple fractures to heal, not to mention the possible complications of internal injuries that might become evident in the next few hours. Baynes reached into his jacket and took out his wallet as he leaned against the wall by the bed.

  “Here’s my card.” He wrote a twelve-figure number on the back. “Just call the number on the front, give them my name and quote the authorization code that I put on the back.” He placed the card in Harry’s one un-bandaged hand. “I’ve already arranged for all your expenses here to be covered.”

  Harry suddenly looked a great deal less worried.

  “The people on the other end of the line will arrange for her flight out here and for a place for her to stay. They’ll even make arrangements for running the business if necessary, and if possible,” Ed conceded. “I can’t guarantee that part.”

  Harry looked at him in amazement.

  “There’s just one catch. And it’s important. Vitally important.” Ed paused to make eye contact. “You can tell... what’s her name again?”

  “Carrie.”

  “Yes, Carrie. You can tell Carrie about this incident, but neither of you must tell anyone else. We’re talking about National Security here.”

  Paxson nodded, after a moment’s thought. He put Ed’s card down carefully on his chest and held out his hand to his new benefactor.

  “Scout shake, huh?” Ed grasped the hand firmly but carefully with his left one, but did not move it, out of concern for the battered body to which it was connected.

  “Yeah…”

  “I’ll be seeing you again, Mr. Paxson.” He paused at the door once more and saw the stress fading a little from the colourful Harold. “Look after yourself.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Train or die – Penchetan

  Richard industriously scraped the last of his scrambled eggs off the plate and leaned back in his chair with satisfaction. He licked his lips and picked up his half-empty glass of orange juice. Two loud thumps on the front door startled him as he began drinking, causing him to spill a little juice down his chin and onto the table. He put down the glass and mopped up the juice as his aunt jumped up remarkably energetically and hurried out of the kitchen to see who was visiting at such an early hour.

  Someone stepped in with a stamping of heavy shoes or boots and started to talk to Enid in a low voice. Richard strained to catch the words, but beyond the fact that the visitor was a man, only the muffled murmuring of voices could be discerned. This went on for a couple of minutes, then the heavy boots could be heard again as the visitor came clomping down the wooden-floored hall. Richard’s aunt stepped back into the kitchen, followed closely by a small, heavy-set, bearded man who introduced himself as Ralph Stoner, the man who was to have brought Richard’s luggage up from the general store the night he arrived from Boston.

  “Sorry I didn’t get your stuff here until Sunday,” he said, after the introductions were concluded. Richard noticed, with a kind of bemused amazement, that Mr. Stoner’s eyebrows seemed to jump up and down in unison with the pacing of his words. “I get kinda busy Saturday nights.”

  “No problem,” Richard replied easily, sensing this apology was not the real reason for the visit and wondering what there was to do in Redcliff to keep anyone busy on a Saturday night. He picked up his glass again, intending to finish off the juice.

  “Some other people were real busy last night. They were too late to do any good, though. You haven’t heard?” Mr. Stoner was enjoying himself. “You wouldn’t be sitting there so calmly if this kitchen were facing the other direction. You’d still be able to see the smoke pretty well then, even though the fire’s just about out now.” He forced a smile, which had the effect of making his face look sinister, instead of friendly.

  Richard put down his gl
ass hastily. He jumped up, ran to the window in the living room and looked out. White smoke billowed above the trees in the distance. He grabbed the window-sill for support, and heard the blood roaring in his ears. Somehow he knew instantly that the fire was located in the school, and that it was not an accidental conflagration.

  “Who did – I mean – H-how did it happen?” Richard stammered, keeping his face towards the window as he heard Ralph saunter into the room behind him.

  “Well now, as I heard it,” Ralph began, too absorbed in his story-telling to notice that Richard seemed to have suddenly become very nervous, almost as if he knew more than he reasonably could about the source of the smoke. “The fire chief said something about Jack Wright working late last night preparing for some chemistry demonstration... Dropped a bottle of something nasty and... Poof! The whole place went up in flames. He only just got out in time himself.”

  Richard started to relax, hoping against hope that perhaps his first conclusion was erroneous; then he became tense again, as Mr. Stoner continued.

  “...Funny thing, though, those fancy sprinkler things didn’t even come on until after the fire trucks arrived. If they had, it would have just ruined the lab. As it is, there’s not much more than a couple of walls left standing of the whole school. And it was only built four years ago, too.”

  Richard managed to get his emotions back under control enough to turn away from the window and back towards Mr. Stoner and Enid, who had followed him into the room.

  “Well, Richard, it’ll probably be a few days before they decide what to do about classes, so you’ll have time to look around the town and get properly settled in,” his aunt began, trying to take a positive attitude. “I’d show you the sights myself, but you’d probably have more fun with someone your own age.”

  “He’ll not be needing you to show him around!” exclaimed Ralph, with another of his evil grins. “That new girl at the school will do that, I’m sure.” He turned to Mrs. Schroder. “He was talking to her all lunch hour Monday, so I heard.” He winked at Richard.

  Richard managed to smile, then excused himself, saying he was curious, and that he wanted to go and see the damage for himself. Once he was outside and out of the line of vision of his aunt’s nearest window, he could no longer restrain himself, and he broke into a mad dash down the road towards Citadel, determined to know for certain.

  Much as he expected, there was his fascinating and mysterious new friend Karen, sitting cross-legged on the rather patchy lawn, waiting for him. He vaulted over the fence, feeling his muscles stretch and strain at the unaccustomed exercise. As he threw himself down on the ground a few feet from her and gasped a ‘good morning,’ he noticed that her entire outfit was blue this day, instead of grey.

  “It is a whole good day, not morning!”

  “Right…” He tried to follow this rather unusually phrased correction. “There’s no school today,” he continued, once he had caught his breath, feeling all the while that the comment was superfluous. Suddenly the alternate meaning of his brief sentence hit him, and he realized that he had unintentionally said something facetious.

  “I know,” she replied calmly, with a smile that showed small, even teeth, and dimples. It was the first time, as far as Richard could recall, that he had seen her smile with such confidence.

  “Did you...?” he began, uncertainly.

  “Do you think it was a wrong?” Karen looked at him, a shocked and surprised expression on her lovely face, her blue eyes wide with candour.

  “I don’t know. I just thought”.... Richard looked at her again closely, as if for the first time. Is this really the quiet teenager I met just two days ago? How could a young girl engineer the destruction of the school, and not only that, but make it look like an accident, too?

  “Richard, you must know I would not do wrong thing,” Karen seemed to be responding in part to his unspoken questions, suggesting once again that she knew his thoughts as they crystallized in his mind. “Citadel would be very dangerous if it was taken from me by fighting persons and used as weapons; Citadel would cause most damage to this world. Tutor told me that many times. I am sure that it is importance to keep Citadel safe than no burn this school - or a thousand schools.”

  Richard pondered this for a while, then, after rejecting a half-dozen half-formed questions, said finally: “How do you know you can trust me?”

  “Let me explain.” She paused to try to collect her thoughts. “This is difficult... in English.” Another pause occurred, during which Richard realized, with a sensation of chagrin at his slowness in reaching this conclusion, that she was probably not from anywhere in North America originally.

  “I achieved… a connection, no… ‘minimum joining’, yesterday… I could feel your thoughts – Yes, that is how I should say it.” She looked at him and grinned.

  He could not help smiling back, her happiness at successfully explaining something so obscure to him in a language that was clearly not her native tongue was quite infectious.

  “You do not understand more yet, but I know you will continue to help Karen,” she predicted, inclining her head towards him slightly. “I thank you, Richard Fletcher.” She regarded him silently, her expression one of tremendous gratitude.

  “On Monday…” Richard paused, partly to make sure she had finished, then continued, once his mind had finally caught up with what she had said and implied. “When you looked at me, your eyes seemed blue, but when you looked at Mr. Wright, or anyone else for that matter, they looked grey.”

  “Oh! Tutor told me this would happen, but I did not know that it did. I was trying to be… more little than I really am… how do you speak? Not noticed–”

  “Inconspicuous,” Richard suggested helpfully.

  “Yes, that is word – right word. ‘Inconspicuous’. I can make people lose thinking towards me, by… helping them be… bored with me.” She stopped again to gather her thoughts. “It is hard to explain. I tried to do this for the first thing, last week, when I started to go at the school. It is tiring, and so far I can only make one or some of two ‘somebody’s at once lose thinking, so I have to move from the one somebody to the two somebody as soon as I have bored with the first.”

  “You expect to get better at this?” Richard was amazed.

  “I hope so. If I do not, these ‘somebody’s I have told you about will try to take me away from here, and they will try to get into Citadel. Maybe they will get harm. Or other ‘somebody’s will.”

  “If Citadel is that powerful,” he suggested, looking a little apprehensively at the huge black bulk behind Karen. “Can’t you use it to protect yourself?”

  “No,” she replied, sadly. “Citadel is much a not known thing to me, and Citadel does not work as well as Citadel used to do. I lost Tutor, and lots of other things will fail now, if I cannot get him back.”

  Richard was baffled. “You lost your Tutor? Get him back? You mean this ‘Tutor’ didn’t die? It wasn’t a real person, just a thing?”

  “He seemed like a someone – a ‘real person’ to me. He was my teacher; he looked after me when Daddy died. He was… my only friend.” Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked down at her hands.

  Richard looked too, noticing again the flawless skin and perfectly formed nails. He got up, his resolve forming as he spoke.

  “Let me see Citadel,” he began, reaching down for her hands to help her to her feet. “Perhaps there is something I can do, something I–”

  He gasped as her hands touched his. Thousands of eyes were watching him from the undergrowth just beyond the road, and from within the gloom of the wooded area behind Citadel. Unknown enemies lurked just out of sight, threatening to pounce on him without warning and without mercy, to torture, torment and finally mutilate him beyond recognition and beyond hope of recovery, in their vain quest to extract the knowledge of Citadel which he simply did not have.

  Karen stood up quickly and pulled her hands away. The eyes vanished and the enemies evaporated lik
e tiny drops of liquid nitrogen on a room temperature stainless steel worktop.

  Richard shivered, as if in the cool breeze of recently vaporised gases from that same liquid nitrogen.

  “I’m sorry, Richard. I didn’t know that physical contact would join our thoughts like that.” She stood helplessly next to him, her arms seemingly pinned to her sides, her hands clenched tightly, and her expression truly desolate.

  He looked into her eyes and saw her helplessness revealed in them like a tiny flower sheltered in the first bare hollow in a vast field of snow, where the sun might warm it, or the next storm would surely bury it. Deliberately he reached for her hands again.

  “It’s all right; I said I would help you.” As his hands touched hers, the fear flowed into him again. This time, however, with a conscious effort of will, he found that he could withstand it. Deep below it, he could feel a spark of hope, working its way to the surface like a scuba diver, loaded with treasure, and almost out of air.

  She stared into his eyes for what could have been just a moment, or several minutes.

  “Perhaps you’ll be able to fix Tutor,” she suggested, once the fear had subsided a little more, and she turned and walked up the slope, still holding one of his hands. She led him through the gap between the garage and Citadel.

  “So there is a back door.”

  “Not exactly, not like the doors at school,” she said, glancing over at him as they walked hand-in-hand towards the blank wall between the turrets. They squeezed through a small space in a row of uneven and overgrown bushes that towered over their heads and then, before Richard had time to think, Karen led him straight into the wall.

  He reached out to stop himself and there was a slight shimmer. Somehow, he found himself inside the strangest place he had ever seen. All around him, underfoot and extending halfway up the walls, was a surface that looked like moss. It seemed to glow slightly with a light of its own.

  This was nothing compared with the upper half of the room, though. He gasped, trying to catch his breath as he looked up at the most spectacular night sky that he had ever seen. The stars were clustered together like great mounds of diamonds on black velvet; even the darker patches between the mounds were teeming with stars of a slightly lesser brilliance. It was, Richard realized, far brighter than the brightest night sky visible from anywhere on Earth; it was even lighter than an overcast winter’s evening in Boston, when the street lights were reflected back from the clouds hanging low overhead.