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

by Melody Clark

  Surely trying to predict the answer would doom the results.

  From eaves to entablature, light never seemed to reach the fullness of the oldest house, with all its cavernous depths and challenging corners. There was always, to Edward, a heavy chill in the air. He couldn’t imagine living in the narrow margins between a roaring hearth and a ferocious winter.

  Yet Croftdons had lived that way for an unthinkable number of seasons. They had huddled in the dark like little more than ignorant ancients, bribing the immortals for a return of the sun. Warmth came only in full spring and summer, gilding the landscape like deliverance at dawn. Discovery of the world outside was guided and defined by this seemingly miraculous return of the light.

  The modern era, this blip of time, now allowed them to stand on a higher place and look back across all the years they had climbed. The earth still warmed. The skies lit up. As it had on the day his 12th great grandfather had been born – as it had on the day of his own birth – and the day he left – and the day he had returned. But they could measure it all now. Did that make it more meaningful? Were they any less ignorant?

  Could they understand it better given a second look? But did they want to look? And the answer to those questions defined the danger in this whole rose-colored glasses rule of discovery.

  Edward watched as Andrew gently set down the SAGE2 tote on the cleaned-off paint tray table in the great hall that had evolved into a front parlor.

  “As we’ve said, Dad, the idea is that everything has memory,” Andrew explained. “If something exists, it has a rudimentary form of consciousness that is the actual structure of the object. Memory is structure, or structure is memory. Consciousness somehow imbues form. That’s the theory.”

  “The very basic theory,” Edward said, as Thomas came around his side. “With hardly any verifiable evidence. Which is why I have had zero confidence in the static item recon.”

  “Until recently,” Andrew said, grinning. “Eddie culled some fascinating recon just yesterday, didn’t you, Eddie?”

  Edward flipped him a sardonic stare. “Very subjective data.”

  “Very subjective data that almost made him jump out of his skin,” Andrew added.

  Eddie added a smirk to his stare at Andrew. “But that’s why we’re changing the process, so we don’t have the experimenter effect added in – to the same degree anyway.”

  “So, you’re saying,” Thomas said, “you’re concerned about bias toward certain results.”

  “Yes,” Edward said. “Coloring what we receive by subjective expectation. That’s why we moved everything here to the old house, into less familiar circumstances. That’s why we needed a change of model, as our earlier test indicated had just two experimenters. One of us can color the recon in evaluation, in choice of function, in many ways. The percipient and the apparatus operator will always know what the study object is.”

  “My brain has just hit capacity,” Thomas said. “I glean that a third person helps.”

  “Exactly. In this instance, it also gives us a way to work up to our enviable goal,” Andrew said. “That will be more persuasive to Eddie when he next jumps out of his skin.”

  “Are you channeling Tad today full stop?” Eddie asked, continuing to smirk.

  Andrew grinned in reply. “The Toad would have been much ruder than that and you know it.”

  “True.”

  “Very well, boys,” Thomas said, “consider me your third team member. What do I do?”

  “Edward will be the percipient. I will run SAGE2,” Andrew said, handing their father the focus cap. “Dad, you can place the focus cap on or near the object being perceived.”

  “And I’ll blindfold myself so I can’t pickup visual cues,” Eddie said, sitting down in the chair he had drawn toward them. He pulled the mask over his eyes, adjusting it to shut out all visual information.

  “See anything?” Andrew asked.

  “The future looks black.”

  “Excellent. Dad, go ahead and choose a focus object for Eddie to target.”

  “This is fun,” Thomas said. “Now, Eddie, no peeking.”

  Andrew stared drily over at Thomas. “That’s kind of the idea, Dad.”

  After several moments of sitting there in relative darkness, Edward felt a shock of warmth around his face. He had a sense of gold-red reflected in his eyes. The color kaleidoscoped around his narrow field of vision. The warmth felt palpable, invoking a sense of pressure around his face.

  “Are you near the tri-tiered stained glass window?” Edward asked.

  “Yes, I am!” Thomas said. “Excellent. You got that one.”

  Eddie considered the circumstances against the data. “I may have just heard you move that way. Your footsteps make noise over the floor. The sense impressions could have been an easy inference from archived memory.”

  “Spoil sport, that’s no fun,” Thomas said.

  Andrew shrugged. “That’s part of the process, Dad. Tell you what, Edward, keep your mask on and put in your earplugs. I’ll direct you with touch. Dad, go outside and select something, just as you and I discussed before. Remember? Then we can test.”

  Thomas laughed a little. “Just what I was about to suggest, actually. I have just the thing.”

  “Make sure it’s an object I’m not expecting at all,” Eddie added.

  “Will do,” Thomas said. “Give us a moment.”

  Eddie sat back in the comfortless chair and tried for a moment to relax. He slipped in the earplugs to provide an extra barrier to unintended stimulus. This reassured him he would not be able to track a target through secondary auditory input, even unconsciously.

  After a good five minutes and change of sitting there in darkness and near-silence, Edward felt a hand on his arm, signaling to him that percipient impressions might be about to flow through.

  The oddest impression he received was the most vivid – an overwhelming odor of sweetness. Baby powder sweetness. They had gleaned olfactory input before from subject to percipient, but never object to percipient. The sweetness blended into a musky lightness. A young man’s aftershave, like Brise d'Océan or Arôme de Nuit. And then candles – a heady, circular aroma of hot melting candlewax.

  “Olfactory input,” Edward said. “Very strong.”

  Something tiny and cold grasped hold of his fingers, as he realized he cradled near him a whole being as if for warmth. He could feel in his arms the warmth and weight of an infant.

  Someone before him, someone he somehow knew to be the vicar, anointed the baby’s forehead. Words poured forth, shimmering through as from a tinny speaker at an old drive-in movie:

  you may daily be renewed by his anointing Spirit,

  and come to the inheritance of the saints in glory.

  The blue satin christening gown-clad infant in his arms looked up – bright and shining blue eyes stared up at him. Tiny. It almost felt like the boy and the baby comprised a unity – a past and future bonded in the present. The warm weight against him, as if it trusted him. Nothing had ever completely trusted him before. Nothing had truly belonged to him as much before.

  The eyes of the percipient whom Edward was receiving stung with tears – the world around him grew cloudy, all except for the tiny face on the child he held whose forehead now dribbled with its father’s tears coalesced with sacramental oil from the hand of the priest.

  “Dad, please,” he begged to his father who stood beside him. “I’ve not asked for anything from you, ever before. Please. Just this once.”

  “We’ve spoken of it, it’s decided,” John Croftdon’s voice snapped at him like a fall twig breaking deep beneath the brush. “Now be a man and keep quiet!”

  “But just an hour or so, Dad.”

  “An hour will not make the parting easier to bear,” John Croftdon said sharply.

  “Don’t take my son!”

  But he felt the pull of hands, hands
with absolute authority. There would be no second chance, no added hour, no time to forget for a few moments more.

  The SAGE percipient Edward heard a baby cry – a sound like a thousand daggers tearing at his heart. And then a young girl’s shrill scream – feeling her crumple beside him, clutching at his leg.

  “Dad!” the person whose impressions Edward was receiving screamed out, other arms wrapping around him, forbidding his moving.

  “Go now!” John Croftdon ordered someone else, and then hissed at the boy he held, “You are embarrassing us all!”

  “God damn you!” he screamed back, pulling himself free to run, feeling a hopeless agony to catch up with a distant fleeing figure.

  He could still smell the sweetness, still feel the cool sticky cling of tiny fingers. The warm weight of trust. Of something his own. His very own.

  “Tommy, please,” he heard his mother’s tearful voice whisper beside him. “I know – I know –”

  “You don’t know!” he snarled back, pushing her away.

  He heard the glass church door clatter shut and he could no longer hear the baby’s cries. Through the glass wall he watched the woman carrying the infant away vanish behind a car. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t hear, he couldn’t touch – only the scent and warmth remained.

  Edward hurled the cap away, yanking the mask from his face, pulling the earplugs out. He kept to the chair for an instant or two more, fighting to compose himself, trying to calm himself. Struggling to not recall.

  Climbing from the chair, he rushed into the small bathroom at the end of the house’s main room. Edward cast himself across the sink. He bore up against a series of wicked dry retches that tunneled through him like a bomb blast after a pile-driver followed by a German blitzkrieg.

  He didn’t know how long it had lasted – how much time it took the pain to fade away. He clung to the short porcelain sink, some relic from the 30s. He ran enough water to wash his face clean.

  Edward breathed in and it hurt to do so. He had experienced a very real physical reaction to the perceptions of the object – the object he now was certain he knew the identity of.

  He pushed through the door to reenter the great room. Thomas, his father, smiled at him, then pulled off the cap from his head. He set it down on SAGE2.

  Eddie felt utterly lost for words that could hope to mean enough convey what welled up inside him to say. He whispered, “I’m so sorry–”

  “What the devil are you sorry for?” Thomas asked, his voice tightening around the words. “You were an even greater victim than your mother and I.”

  Eddie shook his head. “Sorry I ever doubted. I just -”

  “You weren’t in a position to know anything, son,” Thomas said.

  Edward stood there, awkward and uncertain of what to do or say. Grown men didn’t grasp their fathers and weep copiously. Adult men didn’t express themselves with the words he wanted to sob out to his father. Didn’t cling to him with this depth of realization. And Thomas was not a man to share things openly.

  Edward’s phone rang out from his pocket. Those prior moments had been burned into his memory like atomic flash burns against a wall, never to disappear. But if Edward saw that day in terms of war, he would always consider the sound of the phone ringing the distinctive carillon of the start of Wendell’s war.

  He glared in its direction, then yanked it from his pocket. He squinted at its face. KEN.

  “God, what the hell is this about?” he coughed out, at the very edge of tears. “I don’t fucking need this now.”

  “I can take it for you, son,” Thomas said.

  But Eddie shook his head and swallowed hard, as if shoving down everything that had happened in the last few minutes. “I’d better answer it.”

  Eddie moved out into the great room again, reaching for the chair he had just surrendered. He sunk into it and hit answer on his phone.

  Before Eddie could offer a greeting, the voice of his old assistant, Ken, leapt through the phone. “Are you okay?”

  “Barely, why?”

  “Arvo was run off the road. He’s in a London hospital. Major head trauma. It doesn’t look good.”

  It took Eddie a full moment to take it all in. “What the hell happened?”

  “I think we all know,” Ken replied.

  Thomas stood beside Edward again. “What is it?”

  Eddie glanced around, talking to Thomas. “Get hold of security. Bring in some people to guard the house. Someone just tried to kill Arvo Nurmi.”

  “I’ll get on it at once,” Thomas said, retrieving his own phone and walking away to make his call.

  “I’m still piecing things together,” Ken said through the phone. “I’ll call you later when I know more. Watch yourself.”

  “You, too,” Eddie said, ending the call.

  He leaned against an edge of table. He vied with the twin storm fronts building in his head. He had just been possessed by a thousand demons of the past and now he had to do battle with his own full-fledged Prince of Darkness. In between all of that, he was trapped without any way out but war.

  Andrew walked up. “Don’t take this on now. You need to unwind from everything you went through.”

  “Wendell’s not going to back down,” Eddie replied. “I have to figure out a way to retaliate and fast.”

  “You don’t know this is anything more than a terrible accident. Wendell’s earlier attacks may settle down into a tempest in a teapot sort of thing.”

  “Tempest,” Eddie said to himself.

  “Excuse me?”

  “What you said. It just gave me an idea.”

  “For what?”

  Eddie looked up at him. “The riptide script I mentioned. We can deploy it completely. Destroy his whole damned system. Not just some program data like before, but everything. The three cloud servers – the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, and the solemn temples.”

  “Oh, Tempest, I get it now,” Andrew said, his eyes growing wide and almost fearful. “But it sounds fairly extreme.”

  Eddie nodded, running his fingers back through his hair. “It is. And a massive undertaking. I’m going to have to get alone and focus. It has to be done stealthily and quickly.”

  “You can’t do bloody anything without a long break to decompile, especially after that intense a session. You sobbed. Your pulse rate read full panic.”

  “I’m fine now,” Eddie said.

  Andrew grabbed his arm. “You’re not fine.”

  “Just give me fifteen minutes to figure it all out. I will be fine,” Edward said. “Meanwhile, do me a favor. Remember what I told you about the riptide script? Go sweep it – dropkick him. Go to the library and pull it down once, all the way, just like we did before. But keep it down for fifteen minutes.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then wait for me to join you in the library.”

  Chapter Eight

  The moment he entered his bedroom, that enveloping quiet his focus demanded encircled him completely. He’d felt the whole of his life condensed into a moment and pumped through his nerves like a shock of hot morphine. And now he was trying to pick bits of paranoia out of the information about Arvo.

  He had only a few minutes alone with his thoughts before a text from Wendell came through: Do you know the dangerous game you are playing?

  Eddie grabbed his phone again and popped the line open, from text to voice. “I know you murdered Mom,” he yelled back through the line.

  “Is that what you believe?” Wendell asked harshly, in a raspy tone that suggested he had not spoken aloud in some time. “Well, believe it if you like, but know that I’ve rebuilt my defenses. To protect them from you.”

  Edward laughed with an anger that forced itself up from a hidden core. “You rebuilt something? You haven’t worked a day in your life, Wendell. You paid me peanuts –”

  “I paid you a respectable wage �
�”

  “You gave me nothing while you lived in paradise. You bullied and drugged me. And your sweatshop workers don’t believe in the lies you made me believe were true. They don’t love you like I used to.”

  “Nevertheless, they are fully capable of protecting my interests.”

  “And I’m more than capable of protecting ours. Plus I have a brother who is just as good as I am. All you have is your empire now, and you’re about to watch it burn.”

  “My people will shore up my system in under an hour,” Wendell replied, sounding bored by the conversation.

  “Then you’d better stop fiddling around, Nero. My money says that in 45 minutes, with what my brother and I can accomplish, your entire brain trust goes down.”

  Edward killed the line. He shut his eyes, considering the epic nature of the task he had just prophesied and the tiny number of his options.