Signalz

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Obviously you’re wrong,” she said.

  “I’m not. I’m…” He ran out of words.

  “Think about it: We saw them pull trailers up, we saw them come down without them, so that means the trailers are still up here. We simply have to find them.”

  Hari took her time on the way back down, and somewhere near the halfway point they spotted a break in the trees that hadn’t been apparent on the way up.

  “Gotta be it,” Donny said.

  The road didn’t branch here, but two well-worn ruts angled off through the underbrush between trees. Hari hesitated to turn in, unsure about backing out. She pulled onto the shoulder—extra wide here—and parked.

  “Let’s reconnoiter on foot,” she said.

  Donny pointed to the pavement as they crossed the road. “Lots of heavy traffic turning here. Gotta be the place.”

  Hari wasn’t so sure. With the cliff face looming above them, she didn’t see any place to go. She did see fairly fresh tree stumps that had been sawed off a ground level. Someone had cut a path through here not too long ago.

  But to her amazement, the trail ended abruptly at a sheer rock wall.

  “This is impossible,” Donny cried, slapping his palms against the granite or whatever the hell these mountains were made of. “Look at the tire ruts! They run right up to the rock—right up to it! It’s as if it was lowered over the trail like a curtain.”

  A perfect description. The tire ruts didn’t stop a foot before the rock face, they didn’t stop an inch before it: They stopped against it—as if the rigs had driven straight through solid rock, unhitched their trailers inside the mountain, then driven out again.

  The perfect impossibility of that gave her a deep, uneasy feeling. Because it looked like that was exactly what had happened. Which made no sense.

  She did a slow turn, looking for an answer. Her world was numbers, and numbers made sense. They didn’t lie. People might try to make them lie, but in the end they always told the truth.

  As she completed the turn she noticed with a start that Donny had disappeared. Just like the trailers.

  “Donny? Don—?”

  “Coming,” he said as he trotted up the trail toward her, waving a tire iron.

  “What’s that for?”

  “It’s got to be a trick.”

  He stopped before the stony expanse and hammered at it with the iron. It made just the kind of clank one would expect from steel striking solid stone. Moving back and forth he kept striking the stone until finally hurling the tire iron back down the trail with a frustrated howl.

  “There’s got to be an answer!”

  “Of course there is,” Hari said. “We just don’t know it. Yet. We get back in the car and inspect the road with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “But the tracks clearly show heavy traffic turning in here.”

  Hari started back toward the car. “We keep looking.”

  And look they did, up and down the mountain road, but found nothing. Being on the east side of the hill, they lost the light early and were forced to call it quits.

  As they headed back toward Albany, Donny said, “Didn’t Sherlock Holmes say something about eliminating the impossibles or the like?”

  She knew that one. “You mean, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’? That one?”

  “That’s the one. I feel we’ve eliminated the possible, so that leaves us with impossible.”

  “‘Impossible,’ by definition cannot be, so what we’re really left with is the improbable.”

  “Sounds like word games, but I’ll play. What’s the next step?”

  “We find a hotel, eat, sleep, and get back to the industrial park first thing in the morning.”

  “How do we know there’ll be another convoy?”

  “Did you see the size of that warehouse? I’m guessing they’ve got a lot of whatever to move and I don’t see them wasting any time.”

  He grinned. “Hotel, huh? How many rooms we renting?”

  She had to laugh. “You’re kidding, right?”

  A wider grin. “Well, one room would save Art some money.”

  She pointed to the radio. “See if you can find a classic rock station. Maybe they’re playing Aerosmith.”

  “Aero…?” His brow furrowed, then he laughed. “Oh, I get it. Dream On, right?”

  “Riiiiight.”

  At least he knew that one. But then, everybody knew Aerosmith.

  BARBARA

  I’m ashamed to admit that it took me a couple of hours to muster the courage to enter the passage. I spent much of the intervening time with my head under the arch, calling to Ellie. Apparently, in her panic, Bess had dropped her penlight and it remained on, lighting the end of the passage with a faint glow.

  As for Ellie, early on she answered once with a faint “…busy…” and went silent after that.

  Finally, I could put it off no longer. I had to find my daughter. I lowered myself to my hands and knees and, fixing my gaze on the glow ahead, began a slow, careful crawl—careful in that I kept my back slightly arched to prevent it from going into spasm. When that happened, it rendered me useless, sometimes for days.

  As I moved I noticed a slight incline. Viewed from the arch, the tunnel had seemed level, but from within it definitely tilted upward. The soft, faintly warm airflow persisted and, as I approached, the glow slowly expanded to illuminate the terminal section of tunnel wall surrounding it, leaking into the chamber beyond.

  I slowed. I felt winded. I couldn’t see how it could be due to exertion because I walked regularly, so it had to be nerves. After witnessing Bess’s reaction, did I really want to see Ellie—the new Ellie—being herself?

  I had no choice. I had to push on.

  Ellie’s voice echoed down the passage. “Is that you, Mother?”

  “Y-yes.” My mouth had gone dry.

  “Don’t come in here.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “But—”

  “I upset Bess. I don’t want to upset you.”

  Upset? Bess had been horrified. But…

  “You’re my daughter. I need to see you. You can’t lock yourself away like this.”

  “It’s just for a little while. I’ve got things to do, and then I’ll be out.”

  But I needed to see her now, and I’d come this far, so I pushed ahead. Grabbing Bess’s penlight, I crawled into the dark chamber—a round floor about fifteen feet across, with a shadowy domed ceiling maybe ten feet high. I sat back on my haunches and fanned the beam around. A half dozen or so white globes the size of snowballs littered the floor, but no sign of Ellie. Where was she?

  “Hello, Mother.”

  Her voice came from above and so I angled the penlight in that direction…and froze.

  Ellie clung to the arching wall about three-quarters of the way up toward the domed center. She clung by long, spindly spider legs that had sprung from her back, slim, many-jointed legs, dark brown, gleaming like mahogany.

  With a cry, I dropped the light and crab-scrambled back to the tunnel opening. At least with the beam aimed along the floor, reflecting off those snowballs, I couldn’t see her.

  “Oh, Ellie!” I cried when I found my voice. “Oh, dear God, Ellie!”

  “I’m all right, Mother,” she said, her voice unsettlingly calm. “Really, I am. And believe it or not, I’m okay with it.”

  “But what is ‘it’? What’s happened to you? Who did this to you?”

  “Not so much a ‘who’ as a ‘what.’ As for the rest, I don’t know. I woke from the coma knowing a lot of things I never knew before, but I don’t know why I know them, or why any of this happened. But I sense some sort of purpose.”

  “How can there be a…?” I heard hysteria creeping into my voice. With a supreme effort I curbed it. “How can there be a purpose to…this?”

  “It originated from a place with a different set o
f rules, with a different logic, with different geometries.”

  I moaned. I felt so bad for her. “I don’t understand, Ellie.”

  “Neither do I, Mother. Not completely. I think causing confusion and fear and grief and dismay is part of it, and yet… I know I shouldn’t be okay with it, but somehow I am.” A sharp, bitter sound, a harsh imitation of a laugh. “Maybe you should have named me Charlotte instead of Eleanor.”

  “Charlotte…?” I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “My favorite story. You used to read it to me at bedtime.”

  What was she…? Oh, no.

  “Charlotte’s Web? Oh, Ellie, this is no time for…for…”

  “Or remember the time I tried out for the soccer team and they passed on me? Man, if Mister Grellson could see me now.”

  “Ellie, please!”

  How could she joke about this…this horror?

  “Just trying to lighten things up, Mother. You know the expression: Sometimes you’ve got to laugh to keep from crying.”

  I bit back a sob. Oh, my poor, dear, sweet child.

  “Is that what you feel like doing? Crying?”

  “A small part of me is crying—and screaming and shrieking as well—but it’s shrinking, and soon it will be gone.”

  The old Ellie? Was she talking about the girl she used to be?

  Just then another white globe dropped into view and rolled to join the rest. I retrieved the penlight and, drawing a deep, tremulous breath, angled it upward.

  Two of Ellie’s spider legs were poised before her with a smaller version of one of those white globes trapped between the tips. They were rotating the ball this way and that, forming it out of the silky substance flowing from the tips. As I watched, horridly fascinated, it grew steadily until it matched the others in size, at which point the legs released it to fall to the floor.

  “Wh-what are those?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Then why are you—?”

  “The legs seem to have a mind of their own.”

  I tried to hold it back, I was trying so hard to be strong for her, but as the legs started spinning another white ball, I couldn’t restrain the sob that burst from me.

  “Oh, Ellie, why you? Why you?”

  “I don’t know, Mother. Maybe I was the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time, but I don’t think so.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe I was destined for this. After all, I’ve never totally fit in.” A small bitter smile. “And now I really don’t fit in.”

  True, she’d never taken anything at face value. Questioned everything—everything. Her mantra was always There’s something else going on here.

  “The signal is a perfect example,” she said.

  “Signal? What signal?”

  “The noise that almost drove me mad that you and Bess couldn’t hear at all.”

  “It’s a signal? Of what?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I will.”

  “That man who carried you from the park…he could hear it too.”

  His words had convinced me that Ellie wasn’t having a mental meltdown. In light of what followed, a breakdown would have been far preferable to…this.

  “I know,” she said. “We who hear the signals are a rare breed. We’ll be visiting him soon.”

  “He told me his name but I don’t know where to find him.”

  “He goes by two names and I have his address.”

  I shook my head in wonder. “How do you know all this?”

  She smiled—a cold grimace. “My coma was very instructive.”

  The spider legs dropped another globe to the floor.

  Ellie said, “Carry as many as you can back to the room, Mother, and stack them on the window sill.”

  Was I being dismissed? I guessed so.

  “Why the window sill?

  “You’ll like the colors when the sun shines through them.”

  “But—”

  “Mother, please. It will begin in the heavens—soon—so I must be ready.”

  The globes had a slightly sticky feel and I gathered up as many as I could hold in one arm, then crawled back into the tunnel.

  “No matter what you think, Mother,” I heard her say behind me, “I’m still Ellie. I know what a good mother you’ve been, and how patient you’ve been with me over the years. And I still want my Blanky—not in here, this isn’t the place for Blanky, but out there, I’ll still need it.”

  I was sobbing when I reemerged into Ellie’s old room, but I managed to arrange the half dozen globes on the window sill as she’d said. Their stickiness proved an asset because they stuck to the glass as well as each other. As I was finishing, another globe rolled from the tunnel and stopped outside the arch. And then another and another. I gathered them up as they arrived and added them to the rising pile that was gradually covering all the window panes.

  The sun was high and not hitting the glass, but the window faced west; the setting sun would eventually light up the globes.

  You’ll like the colors when the sun shines through them…

  Would I? I wasn’t so sure. In fact I doubted it very much. What did I care about colors? My Ellie, my baby, had been changed into a monster. By whom? Was it because of something she’d done—or I’d done?

  At least she still wanted Blanky. That part of her lived on.

  I bunched it up, buried my face in it, and sobbed.

  ERNST

  Ernst Drexler returned from his meeting with the Council of Seven and slammed his office door behind him.

  Was he being paranoid, or was the Council up to something: planning something, or already running some operation without telling him? He was one of the Order’s top actuators, damn it! He should be kept current on all the Order’s activities.

  Ernst told himself he shouldn’t allow these free-form suspicions to distract him, but he couldn’t let it go. He’d find out what they were up to and—

  A knock and Brother Slootjes entered without waiting to be summoned. They’d known each other long enough to dispense with such formalities.

  “Alone?” Slootjes said. “Good.”

  Ernst recognized the manila envelope cradled in his arm: the memoir from Mrs. Novak. The loremaster looked shaken. That was not good. Ernst’s stomach turned.

  “So you’ve read it?”

  Slootjes nodded. “I have.”

  “And?”

  “It’s quite intriguing, even disturbing, one might say.”

  Ernst was finding the loremaster’s penchant for creating drama more vexing than usual today.

  “As disturbing as Winslow’s novel? Spit it out, man!”

  Slootjes dropped into a chair and looked lost for a few seconds. Then he shook himself.

  “If true, it’s a shattering document, but I’m a long way from being convinced of its authenticity.”

  “Did you ever believe it could possibly be true?”

  “We both know the Order has its enemies, but I’m finding it hard to imagine them expending this amount of time and effort to perpetrate such an elaborate hoax.”

  “Details!”

  “Very well.” He tapped the envelope. “This purports to be the memoir of a British immigrant who graduated MIT in 1903 and went to work for Nikola Tesla at his Wardenclyffe tower. It’s common knowledge that J. P. Morgan promised to finance Tesla’s broadcast power project, but balked when he realized he would have no way to charge for all the electricity Tesla would be transmitting through the air and the Earth. Atkinson says the Order secretly took over the financing of the tower when Morgan backed out.”

  “Can you verify that?”

  “Probably, but I haven’t had time. There’s too much else going on in this so-called memoir. According to Atkinson, the tower was successful in transmitting wireless energy, but in doing so it was thinning the Veil, allowing influences and entities to pass from the other side. He states that toward the end he and your grandfather witnessed untold
horrors existing on the other side, horrors that would invade our world should the Veil be permanently rent. It says Rudolph realized the Order had been duped into lending a hand in its own destruction. But before he could return to report his findings to the Council, he…he disappeared.”

  “‘Disappeared’ how?”

  Slootjes’s gaze shifted away. “I’d rather you read it yourself. The events grow increasingly disturbing through the course of the narrative and by the end are downright fantastic. I’m not sure I believe it, but the fact remains that no one saw your grandfather leave Wardenclyffe. In fact, he was never seen again.”

  Silence hung in the air.

  Ernst didn’t know how to respond to that…his grandfather’s unexplained disappearance had been a blow to the Order and even worse for his family. Ernst’s father, Ernst the first, had confessed to him of being traumatized, feeling he’d been abandoned by the father he’d worshiped. But since grandfather never surfaced again, despite the Order’s best efforts to find him, he was presumed dead, the victim of fatal happenstance or foul play.

  But no one had ever mentioned vanishing into thin air.

  Finally he cleared his throat. “It must be a hoax. That scenario—that we are dupes who are unwittingly bringing about the annihilation of humanity—mimics the propaganda the Enemy’s apologists have been spewing for generations.”

  “Yes, I know,” Slootjes said, nodding vigorously, “but the parallels between this and that fellow Winslow’s novel are alarming, to say the least.”

  “He’s a crank.”

  “Not so this Charles Atkinson. The devil, if you’ll pardon the cliché, is in the details, and he gets certain details right. He accurately describes the chew wasps your grandfather put on display here. He even goes so far as to say that after Rudolph disappeared through the Veil, he is the one who drove his touring car back to the city, parking it behind this Lodge with his cane on the seat.”

  Ernst grabbed the cane from where he always left it leaning against the wall. In 1906 it had been returned to Germany where Rudolph’s son, Ernst the first, his father, had still been a boy in his early teens. That Ernst eventually passed it on to his own son. Ernst loved this cane.

  “He…he mentions the cane?”