Sink: Once Upon A Time

by Perrin Briar

Aaron’s eyes glinted.

  “We haven’t checked them yet,” he said.

  “Who?” Cassie said.

  “The lord’s family,” Aaron said.

  “The kids are too young,” Zoe said. “They wouldn’t qualify for the test anyway. No way a kid that age could pull something like this off.”

  “But there is still the lord and lady,” Bryan said. “I suppose we should do them too, otherwise people would accuse us of favoritism.”

  “Shall I go get them?” Zoe said.

  “No,” Bryan said. “I’ll do it. If anyone should get the blame, it’s me.”

  40.

  “WE’VE ALMOST concluded the experiment,” Bryan said.

  “Excellent,” Lord Maltese said, setting aside the book he’d been reading. “Any results? Can you tell me what this was all in aid of now?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Bryan said. “At least, not yet. There are a couple more participants we have to examine.”

  “Then you’d best get on with it, hadn’t you?” Lord Maltese said. “The sooner you finish, the sooner we can all get on with our lives.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Bryan said.

  “For what?” Lord Maltese said.

  “To conclude the experiment,” Bryan said.

  Lord Maltese’s eyes moved to the side in thought, and then snapped up as he realized what Bryan was saying.

  “You’ve got some nerve,” he said. “You asked me to trust you, to run an experiment on the town, without telling me what it was you wanted to do, and this whole time you planned on subjecting my wife and I to the same test? I must insist you tell me what the purpose of the test is. Right this instant.”

  “That would undermine the test,” Bryan said. “I don’t mean any offense. But if the people heard that you didn’t have to undergo the test, and they did, what kind of message do you think that would send them?”

  The lord pursed his lips. He didn’t like it, but he couldn’t deny Bryan’s logic.

  “We ought to just do the test,” Lady Maltese said, setting her knitting aside. “Get it over with.”

  “Fine,” Lord Maltese said. “But I’ll go first. If I decide it’s something unsuitable for my lady wife, then I will refuse to let her take part.”

  “Fair enough,” Bryan said. “But I can assure you, it is not something you need to worry about.”

  “I’ll fetch the children,” Lady Maltese said.

  “There’s no need,” Bryan said. “They’re too young to take the test.”

  “At least we’re spared that much,” Lord Maltese said.

  They followed Bryan out of their chambers and down the stairs to the corridor outside the test room.

  “If you’ll take a seat,” Bryan said to Lady Maltese. “We won’t be a minute.”

  Lady Maltese took a seat, careful to arrange her skirts around her.

  “We will be parted but for a moment, my dear,” Lord Maltese said.

  He turned the smile he aimed at his wife into a grim scowl as he entered the room. The lord folded his arms and appraised the room.

  “So?” he said. “This is it? Four boxes on a table?”

  “Yes,” Bryan said, taking his place behind the table. “If you’ll approach, please. As you can see, there are four boxes. What I want you to do is very simple. I’ll say a color, and you’ll open that box color. You’ll take out the object inside and, if you can, tell me what its purpose is.”

  “Very well,” Lord Maltese said.

  “Yellow,” Bryan said.

  The lord approached the box and lifted the lid. His face registered surprise, followed by a frown, his eyebrows performing their full range of movement. He picked the object up. It was a cellphone, not that the lord knew that. He pressed the screen, the top and back. It was an alien object. There was no power, the battery long dead.

  “What is this?” Lord Maltese said.

  “That’s what you need to tell me,” Bryan said.

  “I’m sure I have no idea,” Lord Maltese said. “A weapon of some kind?”

  “Good guess,” Bryan said.

  “I’m wrong?” Lord Maltese said.

  “Yes,” Bryan said. “Though it could be used as a weapon, I suppose. In dire situations.”

  “Have I passed the test?” Lord Maltese said.

  “I’ll reveal the result in a moment in the great hall,” Bryan said.

  Lord Maltese pressed his lips together.

  “Very well,” he said.

  He put the cellphone back in the box and replaced the lid. He turned on his heel and headed back toward the door to the corridor where his wife was waiting.

  “Where are you going?” Bryan said.

  “To tell my wife it’s nothing to be afraid of,” Lord Maltese said.

  “I’m afraid you can’t go back out to speak with her,” Bryan said.

  “Why ever not?” Lord Maltese said.

  “It undermines the experiment,” Bryan said. “None of the others could go back through those doors. You can’t either.”

  The lord’s eyes narrowed.

  “This had better be worth it, that’s all I can say,” he said.

  “It will be,” Bryan said, bluffing.

  Lord Maltese left through the adjacent door and entered the main hall.

  “What are we going to do?” Zoe said. “This is a nightmare.”

  Their little test had been a colossal waste of time and effort. There was nothing they had learned from this experience, and with just Lady Maltese remaining, it looked like it wasn’t going to be useful after all. What was Bryan going to say when he addressed the people?

  They would be angry. A mob might form. They were already annoyed at the family, blaming them for Cynthia’s murder, maybe even for Jeffrey’s death for all Bryan knew.

  “We did our best,” Zoe said. “We’ll just have to face the music when the time comes.”

  “Lady Maltese is still waiting in the hall,” Cassie said.

  “Go get her,” Bryan said. “The sooner we get this over with, the better.”

  Cassie moved to the door, opened it, and asked Lady Maltese to come in. She looked supremely confident when she entered—a far cry from the locals who they’d seen all day. That was what came with having power and authority, Bryan supposed. You grew used to wielding it, until it became a part of who you were as a person.

  “Where do you want me?” Lady Maltese said.

  “In front of the table, please,” Bryan said. “It’s very simple. I say a color, and you open the matching colored box. You tell me what the object inside is and its purpose, if you can.”

  “Okay,” Lady Maltese said.

  “Red,” Bryan said.

  Lady Maltese moved to the box at the end and lifted the lid. She was surprised, her eyebrows rising. Then she smiled, her relief palpable. She reached inside and picked the item up. It was a digital watch. There was a crack on its face, but that didn’t remove its purpose.

  “It has numbers on it,” Lady Maltese said. “So I’d guess something to do with counting?”

  There was a pause.

  “Thank you,” Bryan said. “That was excellent. Please go through to the great hall. We’ll be in shortly.”

  “Was that it?” Lady Maltese said.

  “Yes,” Bryan said. “That was all.”

  Lady Maltese replaced the box’s top and crossed the room to the door and left.

  The family were silent once she had gone. They were still taking in what had just happened.

  41.

  THE HALL quietened to silence as Bryan and his family took to the raised dais. Only their footsteps made any sound. Bryan wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. He stood side-on to the crowd so he could address them as well as the lord and lady.

  “Is your test complete?” Lord Maltese said.

  “It is,” Bryan said. “We have tested everyone of the appropriate age and we have discovered who we were looking for. But first, let us explain our process and how we went
about it so you might all understand how we came to our final result.”

  Bryan took a deep breath to calm his nerves.

  “It began with Jeffrey, the inventor,” he said. “The fact someone so talented might exist here of all places was next to impossible.”

  “Why’s that?” Roland said.

  “Sorry?” Bryan said.

  “Why was it next to impossible for someone like the inventor to exist down here?” Roland said.

  It sounded confrontational, but really Roland was helping him. He didn’t want the crowd to turn on Bryan just because of a few unexplained holes in his story.

  “Thank you for the clarification question,” Bryan said. “The answer is because here, there is a population of a thousand. On the surface we have billions, and even then, it took many hundreds of thousands of years for us to receive a person capable of what your inventor was—Isaac Newton.

  “When faced with the problem of how planets moved around our sun not in a circle, but an inverted ellipse, he went away to his house for several months and came up with a completely new form of mathematics to explain it.

  “We then had to wait several more hundred years before someone could greatly improve on his ideas—Albert Einstein. But even they could not see the future and build items related to it. I was taken in with Jeffrey’s legend too, but what he reportedly did was actually impossible.”

  “Then how do you explain how the inventor could do these things?” Lord Maltese said. “Clearly he had some ability.”

  “No,” Zoe said. “We now think someone else built these items and made it look like Jeffrey had come up with them.”

  “Why would someone do that?” Lord Maltese said.

  “To give themselves some protection,” Bryan said.

  “Why would they do that?” Lord Maltese said. “Why wouldn’t they want to be known as a genius?”

  “Because they’re not a genius,” Aaron said. “They’re an excellent engineer from the surface. That’s all.”

  Murmurs broke out amongst the congregation.

  “From the surface?” Abigail said. “Are you sure?”

  “Very sure,” Bryan said. “That was why we had this experiment.”

  “Why did you run the experiment the way you did?” Lady Maltese said. “I don’t see how it can show you much, beyond how creative the participant is at guessing the use of a given object.”

  “Except, of course, that wasn’t what we were really testing,” Bryan said. “We didn’t care if the person could figure out what the use of their item was. That wasn’t our real test. We were testing something entirely different.”

  “There wasn’t much else within the test, was there?” Lord Maltese said.

  “On the face of it, no,” Bryan said. “But there was if you think back clearly. The real test was the participant’s reaction to what was in the box.”

  “The person’s reaction?” Lord Maltese said.

  “Yes,” Bryan said. “The human mind is exceptionally good at distinguishing emotions. We might disagree with very subtle emotions, but the big explosive ones—anger, happiness, confusion etc—are almost always universally agreed. That was why there were four of us, the whole family, in the room. We were each gauging the participant’s reaction to the item in the box. If we all agreed what the emotion was—which we almost universally did—then we knew who we were looking for and who we could safely ignore.

  “There were a couple of participants in this very hall who we considered potentials for having come from the surface. Why? Because their expressions were not what we were expecting. They may very well have shown surprise at what was in the box, who wouldn’t with the futuristic fantasy objects we’d put in there?

  But it was the reaction to that surprise that we were really looking for. How did they feel about being surprised? Angry? Confused? Those emotions would have been totally understandable given the situation. But relief? Satisfaction? Happiness? These are not likely. And that is what we used to identify the person from the surface.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask everyone?” Lord Maltese said. “I’m sure the person from the surface would have admitted where they came from.”

  “No,” Bryan said. “We don’t believe they would. They’re so used to hiding in plain sight, so used to acting, that we would never have been able to identify them, not without the latest in detection technology from the surface. We just had us.”

  “Then who is it?” Lord Maltese said. “Save us the suspense and reveal to us who this mysterious surfacer is, who has so successfully been hiding amongst us all these years.”

  “Very well,” Bryan said. “But the result might come as quite a shock.”

  He took a deep breath and turned to face the lord’s family. Finally his eyes shifted to the figure sitting beside the lord in her high backed throne-like chair.

  “It’s Lady Maltese,” Bryan said.

  42.

  A DEATHLY silence filled the great hall. You could have heard a pin drop. One thousand pairs of eyes turned as one to look at the Lady Maltese, whose face was carved from stone.

  The lord smacked his fists on the armrests of his armchair and got to his feet.

  “This is outrageous!” he said. “We give you food, lodging, the use of our guards and our great hall, and you accuse my wife, Lady Maltese, of being from the surface? She and her family have been here for generations! Her family can be traced right back to the very origins of our town. Why, if you go to England on the surface I’m sure you’ll find she has evidence of her roots going back even farther.”

  “Yes,” Bryan said. “I believe you.”

  “Then why are you pointing the finger of accusation at my beloved?” Lord Maltese said.

  “Because she may not originally be from her noble house,” Bryan said. “She may have taken the original noble daughter’s position in the household, may have usurped her place, all in an effort to take control of the town. She is from the surface. She is the one with the engineering abilities.

  “Do you think me a fool?” Lord Maltese said. “Don’t you think I would have noticed—that someone would have noticed—if my lady was from the surface?”

  “You don’t find what you’re not looking for,” Bryan said.

  “How would she even be able to do what you say?” Lord Maltese said. “She runs a household. She does not have the time to design such things, even if she were capable.”

  “She retires every day, does she not?” Zoe said, stepping forward. “To her chambers, where she likes to be alone to sit and contemplate. And knit. She showed me some of her knitting once. I was astonished. I’ve never seen a faultless piece of work like that before. It was unlike anything a human can do, without fault.

  “It was made by a machine. She will have it hidden in her chambers somewhere, I’m sure. She put it on while she sneaked out of her rooms and into Jeffrey’s tower, plying him with alcohol laced with a sedative, to send him to sleep. She encouraged him to draw what he dreamed, but they were normal dreams, and of little meaning. Simple lumps and shapes we’ve all had over the years.

  “Meanwhile, she drew the detailed designs. She even made them. All while Jeffrey slept. And when she was done, she returned to her chambers, where she put away the knitting machine and took up the needles. She never really knitted a single stitch. All this could be forgiven, of course. A little harmless covering up. We could all understand that.

  “But it’s not all she’s done over the years. She killed Jeffrey, no doubt in an attempt to conceal her tracks, by letting Jeffrey take the fall for the murder, just as he had taken credit for her inventions. But it was she who killed Cynthia in town, all to distract attention from the dragon she either installed here or simply manipulated.

  “We’re not sure how she did that, how she brought the T-Rex here from another world, or if it was blind luck the dinosaur came here at the same time she did, but in either case, she took full advantage of it. She altered the dinosaur so it could breathe fire, to
make it more of a danger to this town with its wooden walls. She controls the monster somehow, perhaps via an implant in its brain. Such things aren’t unheard of on the surface.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Lord Maltese said. “Any of it.”

  “You don’t have to believe me,” Bryan said. “Look at your wife.”

  The lord seemed unable to do so, afraid of what he might see on her face. Bryan felt sorry for him. What if there was confirmation on her features? What if she nodded and it showed him who she truly was? What if all these years had been a sham and a farce, an act, that she never really loved him. And the children…

  The children.

  They would be the greatest tragedy of all, conceived in a web of lies. They would be the living embodiment of her manipulation. Despite the difficulty, Lord Maltese finally began to turn and face his lady.

  His expression turned stone cold and pale.

  Lady Maltese had a small smile on her face, a smile that had no place on her delicate features. The family was right. She was from the surface.

  43.

  “THIS CAN’T be true,” Lord Maltese said. “Please tell me it’s not true.”

  “It’s true,” Lady Maltese said.

  The lord gave a whimper and staggered back. Someone might have planted a blade in his ribs. He looked at Lady Maltese like he’d never seen her before. Perhaps he hadn’t, at least not the real her.

  Lady Maltese shifted her speech pattern, what Zoe suspected was her true accent. She recognized it as somewhere on the upper east coast.

  “My lady,” Lord Maltese said. “Why are you talking like that?”

  “Because it’s my real voice, you fool,” Lady Maltese said. “Don’t you recognize truth when you hear it? I’m forgetting. Of course you don’t.”

  The lord stumbled back again, as if struck by a fierce blow.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “That’s what happens when one casts the spell of infatuation upon another, is it not?” Lady Maltese said. “The irrational inability to see what’s right in front of their noses.”