A Room in the House of the Ancestors Books One and Two

by Melody Clark

  “I guess so. But what’s with all this lamb and boiled crap? And that haggis stuff. And toad in the hole? And their fish stares back at you from the plate, yo! Don’t even get me going on their stupid idea of a hamburger.”

  “Now, there has to be enough American fast food around here to last you a lifetime,” Edward said.

  “Yeah, but that’s not good food. That’s Mickey Dee’s shit. Man, I want California barbecue! I need enchiladas! I miss chili fries with cheese and onion! I’m jonesing for some serious tacos.”

  “That’s not exactly health food, you know.”

  “Hell, I’d trade my favorite treads for a foot-long veggie sub right now!”

  Edward couldn’t hold back the continued stream of giggles. “Okay, okay, I get your point. You’re homesick for food.”

  “Yeah!” Stewart said. “Man, Uncle Eddie, I can’t tell you what a relief it is to talk to you. My mom gets her feelings hurt when I say it to her. Dad just looks at me like I’m spoutin’ Chinese or some shit. I feel weird here.”

  Edward nodded. “Welcome to the club. We’ll just have to work through that, won’t we?”

  Stewart shrugged, shrinking back into the booth. “I guess.”

  “Speaking of your dad, he obviously loves you. He talks about you all the time.”

  Stewart smirked. “My dad’s pretty okay.”

  Eddie grinned to himself, tossing a glance around him. “Please don’t ever tell him I said this, but yes, he is.”

  Stewart laughed even harder. “Yeah, he said not to tell you the same thing. I guess that’s what it’s like to have brothers, huh? I don’t know, on account of I’m the only kid.”

  Edward smiled sympathetically, nodding in understanding. “I grew up that way too. For most of my life, I thought I was an only child. We both suddenly have this big family. It seems strange. So maybe we can figure stuff out together, okay?”

  “That sounds like a good idea,” Stewart said. He looked around and lowered his voice. “But yo, callin’ ’em bangers instead of sausages? Who says that shit? That’s nasty!”

  Eddie had barely recovered from the laughter when Tad returned to the table. Edward sat back as the server presented their tray and settled the teapot beside it.

  “I see my son has been reciting his color commentary on the strange customs of the indigenous English,” Tad said, seating himself on the third side of the booth triangle as the tea pouring commenced. “Perhaps you can impart some basic English skills to him. I don’t believe I’m saying this, but yours are definitely superior to his.”

  “Oh, his English skills are fine. He’s just street talking. It’s a working class hero thing,” Edward said. “He’s obviously a bright young man. He’s smart and funny. Clearly, he must take after his mother.”

  “Yeah, I get great marks in school!” Stewart said, looking to his dad. “Uncle Eddie is cool! He knows LA and basketball and hockey and everything.” He looked back toward Edward. “So Dad says you write really complicated computer software. What do they do?”

  “I didn’t write it by myself. Your Uncle Andrew has created it along with me. It’s kind of a long story, but the program helps people work together. They can just think and share things, through the computer.”

  “It’s like computer telepathy or something?” Stewart said, his eyes grown big again.

  “More like empathy,” Edward said. “We put a kind of thinking cap on each person and they share vague thoughts and strong feelings.”

  “Could you put the cap on a dolphin?” Stewart asked, chewing into a scone.

  “I suppose. I doubt we’d be able to comprehend a lot of information, though. Or that she or he could perceive a lot from us.”

  “What about a rock? Or like Stonehenge? Or the Titanic even?”

  “Stewart, let your uncle drink his tea before you badger him to death with questions,” Tad said.

  “No, it’s okay,” Eddie said, “we’ve actually been talking about something similar. It’s an idea. A theory. Not a particularly workable one, but you never know.”

  “Some people think all things in nature communicate, you know,” Stewart said, “I was watching it on the History Channel.”

  “Yes, I know that theory,” Eddie said, “I don’t particularly subscribe to it, but I’ve heard it.”

  “You think Stonehenge thinks?” Stewart asked, making short work of the scone before launching into another.

  Edward smiled. “I kind of doubt it. I don’t think bluestone has much cognitive ability.”

  “But maybe it does! And we could test it! And we could setup your computer and put the thinking cap on Stonehenge!”

  “Well, first,” Edward said, “you’d need government permission.”

  Stewart sat up straight in his chair. “Could we get it, Dad?”

  “Do I look like a government official to you?” Tad asked. “I have no clue.”

  “Probably be more useful to start with the dolphin, though,” Eddie said. “At least it’s alive.”

  “What about something that used to be alive?” Stewart asked, guzzling his tea like it was water. “Like a mummy? Or a regular old dead guy?”

  “Hold on, Stewart, when you’re building a theory, you start at the likely and move out from there,” Edward said. “I think you’d waste a lot of time checking out the thoughts of dead stuff rather than focusing on living things like people.”

  “But it would be so cool to try. You know I might want to do that when I grow up.”

  Tad laughed. “Here’s your next generation.”

  “Or maybe you’ll be a doctor, like your dad,” Edward said. “He does really important stuff. He saves people’s lives. He saved mine.”

  “You did?” Stewart asked, looking to Tad.

  “Well, sort of,” Tad said, laughing.

  “No sort of about it. That beats all the cool computer programs in the world. Without people like him, nothing else would get done.”

  Stewart nodded, looking over at his dad. “Yeah, it does, huh?”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  Stewart noticed something from afar. “Dad, the beatbox arcade game is open. Can I go play? Mom lets me.”

  “And I suppose this calls for an outlay of cash from my pocket,” Tad said, peeling out the bills from his pocket and sliding them across, “Bring back my change.”

  “I will,” Stewart said, grabbing the cash and launching off in the opposite direction.

  Tad cleared his voice in dramatic fashion. “It goes without saying, of course, that neither of us will mention outside of this establishment any of the nice things we have said about each other while here.”

  “Nice things? I didn’t hear any nice things.”

  Tad raised his teacup in salute. “Hail fellow well met.”

  The bigness of Croftdon House lent it a sense of detachment from time – independent of whatever hour of the day or night it was outside. Edward affixed to his laptop, while he focused on his work, barely noticed the night until his monitor seemed to brighten and the darkness to envelop the room.

  Stem cell analogs in nature, Edward typed into the search engine and then hit enter.

  After a moment or two, presented with a range of options, he scanned the list. None of them complied with his criteria, except for one. “This is interesting,” Edward said to Andrew, where he sat at his own computer. “Somatic cells.”

  “You mean like stem cells?” Andrew observed the screen over Edward’s shoulder. “We were talking about utilizing something like that in the vertical field chamber’s fluid compartment, weren’t we?”

  “Yes. If we scale out from neurons, it would be an obvious focus point,” Edward said.

  “You were actually considering that?” Andrew asked, laughing while lifting an eyebrow at his brother. “You seemed highly skeptical when we discussed it earlier.”

  “I’m still extremely skeptical, but I
was talking to Stewart about communicating with active versus inactive cells. He seemed interested. I thought it might be an interesting point of inquiry. And we’re at a still point with SAGE2 until my gear arrives from Boston.” Edward clicked to bookmark the page he was on. “I’ll hang onto the link just in case.”

  As he clicked through, the center of his screen lit up with an email icon.

  Edward clicked on the envelope which unfolded into a list – what looked like a table of contents for a larger document. The one note attached read, “Here it is, Eddie. Steel yourself, it’s ugly – Best, Ken.”

  Edward swallowed so hard he could only hope that Andrew hadn’t noticed. “This is something I’ve been waiting for,” he said softly, beginning to scan.

  Crimes and rumors of crimes, Edward thought to himself, scanning down the list.

  The words on the screen pierced past his denial like nettle out of low brush. He only felt the sting at his heels. He let the information through a little. Andrew was still standing there.

  After a long pause from Eddie, Andrew seemed to sense something.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to your reading. That looks to be huge,” Andrew said. “If you need anything, you know where I am.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Edward said vaguely. “Goodnight, bro.”

  “Goodnight,” Andrew said, patting his brother’s shoulder before leaving the room.

  When he sat alone, Edward leaned closer to the screen. He consciously lowered his shields a little more. He knew it would be necessary and yet he feared the repercussions.

  Wendell’s paranoia had become increasingly obvious for a period of two years. Things arose that had infused Edward with multiple causes for concern. The man whom Edward had once regarded as his father morphed into a creature he barely recognized – a creature bound by misunderstanding, bitterness, and hatred formed around old pain.

  Concerned for Wendell’s safety and sanity, Edward had hired the private detective to inquire into places he had been forbidden to look. He thought, for awhile, Wendell was being duped by others. That Wendell had been influenced from outside, spurring on his paranoia – his growing lack of trust – in anyone, in everyone, in him.

  Industrial espionage appeared to be the least of it.

  Graft, bribes, intimations of possible murder, sin after sin, crime upon crime. It repelled down the page like a cascade of agonies, one just following the other.

  Tears escaped him before he realized they were there. He swept away one or two before he surrendered the attempt. The darkness around him was a blessing. His tears could be hidden. His sobs small enough to be absorbed into silence. He thought he had been prepared. Honestly, he had. But the depth of even half of it was beyond his capacity to fathom.

  “Eddie.” Thomas’ voice came from the door.

  Edward glanced in the direction of his name. He tried to make himself sound normal. “Yes?”

  “Ken sent it to me, too. He thought that I should – know.”

  Edward grasped hold of the edge of his desk, wondering if the room truly was spinning or if he was just dizzy at the impact. “That was probably wise,” he said softly, slowly. “You know, no matter how cynical I become, it’s never enough.”

  “It was dreadful to read – the little I did read of it.”

  Edward leaned forward, resting his head against his folded arms. “I mean, I let him do this. All of this –”

  “Nonsense,” Thomas said.

  “But I did. I believed him. I believed what I knew could not be true because I needed to believe it. I accepted his delusions. His lies. He used me – my work, my trust, my belief, my youth to do all of this. How am I not as guilty as he is?”

  “Because you think you are,” Thomas said gently. “You didn’t even know about it and you still feel responsible.”

  Edward shook his head. “Nothing makes sense anymore. Every certainty I’ve never questioned … every inviolable absolute … It’s all come apart at the seams. All of it.”

  “I’m sure it feels that way,” Thomas said, touching Edward’s shoulder again. “Would you like to be alone, son?”

  Edward nodded weakly, covering his face with his hand as Thomas moved from him to take slow steps away.

  “Dad,” Edward said, his voice crumbling into dust.

  Thomas turned back around. He waited to see to which father Edward had been addressing – Wendell or Thomas.

  Edward reaching out a hand toward him. “Dad, don’t leave me. Please.”

  Thomas grasped Edward’s shoulders and pulled him against him. “Never,” he said. “Not again. I swear it. On my life.”

  Chapter Three

  He had talked to Thomas into the night, finally insisting his father go to bed just before 2 AM.

  Edward hadn’t slept at all until 3 AM.

  Edward sat in his own room, staring out the window at the moon glowing on the surface of a shallow rain pool. He fell asleep sitting up before he finally dragged himself off to bed. Coiled around blankets while wrapped up in nightmares, he surfaced out of one scary mind pageant after another. Dispelling each nightmare felt like casting out demons, one after the other, an exercise in exorcism that involved an hour between each one.

  Wendell had slaughtered innocents while Edward had slept serenely under his roof. There was no denying it now. Of course there would be excuses – every madman had his quiver of reasons, no matter how unreasonable they were to anyone else. Edward suffered the My Lais, one by one, as they dissolved into his murky unconscious. He resisted the lonely half-visions of genocides in his name. He realized, all the while, Wendell’s insanity had been a shared derangement. Wendell Bakunin had committed his sins with many criminal partners, chief among them John Croftdon.

  He barely remembered the evening as he lifted his head from the pillow. It took hot water and warm clothing to burn away the fog forming across his memory.

  Morning invading through the window now, Edward awakened to see his younger brothers rearranging outside furniture in the yard. Then he remembered Wilse’s birthday the next day – realizing he viewed ongoing preparations. Normal life continued – the world had not burned away. Edward rose to meet it.

  He slipped quietly out the backdoor.

  “Eddie!” James said, pointing at a box of slender wires in the distance. “Hand me the fairy lights wiring, will you?”

  “Sure,” Edward said, conveying the box to the younger man. “Need any help?”

  “No, Dad said Wilsey and I are responsible for this. It was our idea. We’re not to bother you or Tad with it. But he didn’t mention Andrew by name.”

  “Which is why I’m stuck out here doing this,” Andrew said, wrapping anchor tape around the trunk of a tree. “That and Dad said I could help.”

  “Well, then I can help you, Andrew,” Edward said. “I won’t be helping James, I’ll be helping Andrew –”

  “You’ll do nothing of the kind, Edward Thomas,” Thomas’ voice sprang on him from behind.

  “Like I said, sorry I can’t help you, Andrew,” Edward said, turning back toward Thomas.

  Thomas’s eyes smiled back at him with a fondly castigating light. “That’s better. Anyway, I need to speak with you. I’ve just spoken with my solicitor. He tells me there is little Wendell can do to force you to comply with his wishes.”

  Edward nodded. “Thank you for checking into that. I thought as much.”

  “Also,” Thomas said slowly, “we were correct. Because you were born here to British parents, dual citizenship is a matter of filling out the right forms. It’s always a matter of filling out forms, isn’t it? That grants you full status here and there as well. He will need you to fax in the form to tell him how you would like your name to read on the documents.”

  “I understand, thank you,” Eddie said, “And I really do appreciate all the trouble you’ve gone to for me.”

  Thomas laughed at
the comment. He slowly shook his head. “For God’s sake, it was no trouble, son.”

  “Dad!” James called over. “A lorry parked in the drive. Looks like a delivery. Great big packages.”

  “Possibly my computer equipment,” Edward said, heading around the house to the front.

  By the time Edward and Thomas reached the truck, the driver had offloaded a couple of stacks of duct-taped bulging cardboard boxes. A number of trips later, the delivered boxes stacked, Edward could see they were all the same size, a vision of precision much as Wendell Bakunin would have wrought. The very image of it said everything that Edward needed to know.

  “Who is the delivery for?” Thomas asked, approaching the driver.

  The delivery man checked his clipboard. “I must say, this is the strangest address I’ve ever seen. It’s to Edward Thomas NoLastName. There are 24 boxes in total.”