Signalz

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Absolutely. Describes it right down to the silver head with the Septimus sigil and rhinoceros-hide wrapping. Whoever wrote this either had enough access to our archives to allow him to create a monumental hoax, or…”

  “Or it’s true?”

  Slootjes gave his head a violent shake. “But it can’t be true. I need to delve into the archives for verifications. I’m sure I can find ample evidence of fakery.” He rose and placed the envelope on Ernst’s desk. “In the meantime, you read it. You mustn’t simply take my word for it. You must read it for yourself while I comb the archives. We can discuss it further tomorrow.”

  So saying, he made a hurried exit.

  Ernst stared at the envelope. He didn’t want to read what was inside. Even if it was pure fiction, he didn’t want to read about his grandfather, a revered actuator in his time, losing faith with the Order. Nor did he want to read about him disappearing forever.

  But Slootjes’s description of the memoir’s contents echoed his own worst fears: that the Septimus order had been fooled and duped for thousands of years, and that in the end the One would betray them all.

  He snatched up the envelope and settled back to read.

  FRANKIE

  P. Frank Winslow stared at the mess he’d made of the bedroom.

  He’d found a solid steel curtain rod and used it to smash the ceiling plasterboard over the dresser where the gap had existed. Once he’d ripped that away he found himself facing steel-reinforced concrete. No way was he going to get through that, not without a jackhammer.

  Where had the gap gone? How could it be open one minute and then gone without a trace the next?

  He wanted to scream, he wanted to cry, he wanted to break things. But most of all he wanted a drink—he’d start with water, but after that he’d go for vodka, gin, Scotch, anything. He wasn’t going to be choosy.

  In the kitchen he filled a glass from the faucet and gulped. Gah. Tasted funny. Could water go stale? Maybe a little ice would help. He looked around for the refrigerator and didn’t see one.

  No fridge? How was that possible? In fact, he didn’t see even a space for one. The kitchen had been laid out without a refrigerator. He went through all the drawers and cabinets and found glassware and dishes and utensils, but no canned goods or edibles of any sort except packets of thick crackers.

  He unwrapped one of those and inspected it. Looked okay. No mold or anything like that. He bit into it. Damn. Like rock. He tried again and broke off a chunk. It tasted like…like nothing, really. A hint of salt but otherwise he might have been munching on a chunk of that broken plasterboard from the bedroom ceiling. So damn hard—

  Wait. He’d done some research for a time-travel story he’d written that involved going back to the Civil War. This stuff was just like what soldiers ate back then—hardtack. Keep the crackers dry and they lasted forever. The soldiers use to soak them in water to soften them up and make them more edible. Hardtack was also what they fed prisoners back then.

  Was that what this place, this town, this city was—a prison? But if so, where were the prisoners?

  None of this made any sense.

  He put the big questions aside. He’d figure them out later. Right now he had to master his immediate environment.

  Even though he wasn’t hungry, which was odd because his usual routine was to graze all day, he knew he needed sustenance. He put a few crackers in a bowl and covered them with some of the stale water. While they were soaking, he figured he’d check out the apartment above again, the one that had been his in another time and place.

  Going up, he marveled once more at the graffiti-free stairwell. Back in the apartment bedroom, the floor near the corner remained perfectly intact.

  He wandered back to the front room. What was he going to do? How did he get back to his own reality?

  He’d seen an elevator door down the hall. He checked and found it working. He hit the button marked L and the car headed down. A button below L was marked B but wouldn’t light. It had a keyhole next to it so maybe it needed to be unlocked before it worked.

  The elevator let him out in some sort of lobby. Small. A couple of easy chairs and an empty reception counter. He spotted a door to a lighted office behind it but found it deserted. Filing cabinets and a desk sporting an old-fashioned mechanical typewriter, but no human. He checked the filing cabinets—empty.

  His gaze wandered to the mechanical typewriter. Not even electric—totally manual. He pulled open a drawer in the desk and found a thick ring of keys, which probably opened every apartment. Another drawer contained a stack of typing paper. He stared at the paper a long time.

  Well, why the hell not? He hadn’t written a single word all day and missing his Daily Duty was adding to his jumpiness.

  Well, “Daily Duty” was what he called it in public. In private he called it “the Disease,” because that was what it was. P. Frank Winslow couldn’t not write. When he wasn’t actually putting words on the screen, he was thinking about the words he was going to put on the screen next time he sat down. He’d mentioned it to a doctor once who called it a form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Always thinking about writing was the obsessive part; his inability to stay away from the keyboard was the compulsive component. The doc said OCD was treatable.

  But Frankie couldn’t afford treatment. Oh, he could afford the pills, but treating the OCD might very well drop his word count. Many times he found he couldn’t stop and he’d go past the 2,000-word target—often enough to bring his annual word count to somewhere in the neighborhood of a million.

  A million words sounded like a lot, and it was, and he divided them up between his pseudonyms—thrillers under his own name, horror-SF as Phillip F. Winter, and paranormal romance as Phyllis Winstead. But after his agent and the taxman took their cuts, and he helped pay for his mother’s assisted living back in Pennsy, all he could afford in the city was that crummy walk-up on Avenue D that now he missed so much. Yeah, he could have shared a place with someone, or found nicer digs in the outer boroughs, but both of those choices were anathema. P. Frank Winslow lived and worked alone, and NYC was the only place to do it.

  He prided himself on having no illusions and no literary aspirations. Not these days, anyway. Starting out, he’d planned to make a big splash in the literary world, but decided to hone his writing chops in genre fiction first. He found it came naturally, and he made money at it, so he kept writing the stuff. It got to the point where he couldn’t afford to take off the extended time he’d need to write that big serious novel—the bills arriving every month wouldn’t want to hear about it.

  He doubted now that he’d ever really had the capacity to explain the human condition. Hell, how could he explain something that had always baffled him? So instead he’d settled on simply trying to make the reader turn the page. He figured he was destined from the start to write pulp, and so he accepted his fate. His target became the gut, not the intellect. He was pressing readers’ buttons to trigger visceral responses, and he was good at it. If readers felt like they’d been on an emotional rollercoaster after finishing one of his novels, cool: job well done.

  And as for the old Where do you get your ideas? question, he had a simple answer: dreams. His subconscious had a seemingly endless reserve of stories it told him while he slept, which he transcribed into novels while awake.

  He needed to write and realized he could write about all this, adapt what had been happening to him. Make a sci-fi story out of it. Trapped in a deserted prison city in an alternate universe.

  Yeah.

  Just a few pages…just to take the edge off…

  But he had to figure out how to use this damn typewriter first.

  BARBARA

  Well, Ellie had been right. The sunlight shining through those white globes created a spectacular display.

  The globes had rolled out of the passage at a steady pace and I dutifully stacked them one by one against the window until all the panes were covered. They must have numbered abo
ut a hundred by then.

  I spent the rest of the day wandering aimlessly from room to room. I knew I should eat to keep up strength but my churning stomach rebelled at the thought of taking a single bite. I called Bess to see how she was doing but she still sounded borderline hysterical and kept insisting I leave Ellie and stay with her. But I couldn’t do that. I may have dozed off in a chair at some point—I’d been up all night, after all—but I wasn’t keeping track of time so I couldn’t be sure.

  And then the light of the setting sun had reached the window and lit up the globes, changing their color from white to every shade imaginable, painting the opposing wall with a magical light show. An old rock album my father used to play—he never threw out his scratchy vinyl LPs—had a psychedelic song with lyrics about a valley of trees with prism leaves that broke the light into colors “that no one knows the names of.” Bad English on their part but it perfectly described what I was seeing. Some of the colors splashing on that wall were like no hue I’d ever imagined. I’d never taken LSD, but I wondered if someone on an acid trip might experience colors like these.

  Finally the sun set and the light show faded.

  I wandered to the kitchen where I heated up a can of chicken noodle soup and forced myself to eat.

  Night had fallen by the time I returned to Ellie’s room, but a street light shining outside was now illuminating the globes from below, creating intricate designs on the wall and ceiling. As I gazed at the patterns, I noticed an odd stippling. I stepped to the window for a closer look at the globes themselves and saw that they’d developed finely speckled defects in their cores. An effect from the sunlight?

  Finally, I could take the silence no longer. I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled a short way into the passage. I hadn’t brought the penlight and inky blackness stretched before me.

  “It’s me, Ellie,” I called.

  Her voice echoed back. “I know.”

  “I’m not coming in, I just wanted to check on how you’re doing.”

  “I’m fine, Mother.”

  “Are you ever coming out?”

  “I’ll be ready to leave day after tomorrow.”

  “Day after—? Why so long?”

  “Certain things can’t be rushed, Mother. But we’ll go out for a nice walk then.”

  A walk? Looking like that? She couldn’t be serious.

  I let it pass. She was talking about something a day and a half away. A day and a half of this horror would feel like a lifetime.

  To change the subject I said, “The colors were as beautiful as you said they’d be.”

  “I’m glad. I wish I could have seen them.”

  “By the way, your globes have developed little specks at their centers.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “Good?”

  “It’s part of the process.”

  “What—?”

  “I’m tired now, mother. I need to sleep. You should sleep too.”

  “Oh, yes, well, right…”

  Dismissed again.

  “Night, Mother.”

  “Good night, Ellie.”

  I backed out in a daze, nearly undone by the surreality of the situation…saying a casual-sounding good night to my daughter who’d been turned into some sort of hideous arachnid and was hanging onto the wall of a cave at the end of a passage to some sort of alternate dimension. Was I losing my mind, or was it already gone?

  Back in the room I noticed that the specks within the globes seemed larger. A closer look showed they had indeed grown, and had sprouted many wriggly little legs.

  HARI

  They’d rented two rooms—two—at the Renaissance on State Street in downtown Albany, had a big dinner of steaks and a delicious Ripasso, and then she and Donny went their separate ways.

  Hari had just finished rearranging the umpteen pillows on her king-size bed and settled back to browse the movie selections when someone knocked on her door.

  “Now what?” she muttered as she padded across the room and peeked through the peephole.

  Donny.

  She pulled open the door and there he stood with a bucket of ice and a very large bottle of Patrón Silver.

  “Room service,” he said with a grin.

  If he was thinking he could ply her with tequila and join her between the sheets, he had another think coming. He didn’t know about her hollow leg. But the tequila looked good.

  The room was listed as “deluxe”—hey, Art was paying—and had a little sitting area. Very soon they were relaxing with glasses of Patrón on the rocks.

  “So let me ask you something,” Donny said.

  Hari made a face. “Are you going to ruin this with chatter?”

  “Seriously, I like to get to know the people I’m working with.”

  Here we go: Let’s see if we can soften her up.

  “Why?”

  “I just do. So tell me: Are you a cat person or a dog person.”

  “Do I look like a cat lady?”

  “I said ‘person.’”

  “Neither.”

  “No pets?”

  “Didn’t say that. I have a pet crab.”

  “Can we be serious, maybe just for one minute?”

  “I am serious. Her name is Pokey and she’s an Atlantic blue crab. Callinectes salpidus. Means ‘beautiful swimmer.’”

  His face took on a look of wonder. “You’re serious.”

  “I am. Pokey and I got off to a rocky start. I added her to my fish tank and she gobbled up a couple grand worth of tropicals I had there. I was planning on sautéing and eating her as a soft shell during her next molt but grew attached. I can’t say we’re good buddies, but we’ve achieved détente.”

  His expression remained dubious as he added more Patrón to both their glasses. “Seriously? You have a pet crab?”

  “I believe I’ve answered that.”

  He said nothing for a few heartbeats, then, “Okay, this is where you ask me about my pets.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t care about your pets.”

  Okay, that sounded harsh. She hadn’t said it to hurt him, and she might have found a gentler way to phrase it were it not for the tequila mixing with the wine from dinner—in vino veritas and all that—but no matter: It rolled right off him and he launched into a lengthy discourse on how he’d always had a dog as a kid and would have one now if his schedule would allow it, blah-blah-blah. He kept the tequila flowing while he rambled.

  His eyelids were at half-mast as he concluded his doggy dissertation with a jarring non-sequitur: “The Septimus people have marked someone for death.”

  “Whoa!” Hari said. “Where did that come from?”

  “I was visiting a dark web chatroom last night and this guy who calls himself ‘Belgiovene’ said it looked like he was going to be doing ‘another freebee.’ I’ve been tracking this guy since February when he talked about an ‘easy-peasy freebee’ that involved pushing a guy into the Hudson and watching him go down for the third time. That’s exactly how Russ died.”

  “Your brother?” Hari remembered the name from yesterday. “You think he killed your brother?”

  “Sure as I can be without actually witnessing it. When someone asked him why for free, he said an organization he belongs to targets a person now and then and taps him to do the dirty work.”

  “And you think that organization is Septimus?”

  He shrugged. “The timing and everything else fits.”

  He started to pour himself more Patrón but she stopped him.

  “I think you’ve had enough. You’re already slurring.”

  “You’re right. I don’t want it to affect my performance.”

  “What performance?”

  “You know—you and me…later.”

  “Oh, you’ve definitely had too much.”

  “No, just enough.”

  “You do realize, don’t you, that I’m old enough that, had I been a promiscuou
s teenybopper, I could be your mother?”

  He blinked. “You’re saying you’re fifteen years older than me—so that makes you, what, like, forty?”

  “I—older than I. And yes, I’m guessing fifteen is about right.”

  He gave a lopsided grin. “Well, you sure don’t look it. I’d put you at thirty, tops.”

  She repressed a laugh. Yeah, right.

  “Flattery will get you everywhere—almost.” She grabbed his arm and pulled him to his feet. “Off to bed with you, my friend.”

  He grinned. “Just what I was talking about!”

  She opened her door and guided him into the hall. “I mean your bed—alone.”

  “What?” He looked genuinely shocked. “You mean we’re both in this nice hotel far from home and we’re not going to hook up?”

  “I commend you on your grasp of the situation.”

  “Well, at least walk me back to my room.”

  “I already have.” She pointed across the hall. “There’s your door.”

  Now he put on a hurt face. “Seriously?”

  “Don’t take it personally, I just don’t like beards.”

  He rubbed his stubbled jaw. “No?”

  “They chafe my thighs.”

  She quickly closed the door to hide an evil grin.

  Let him take that to bed.

  TUESDAY—MAY 16

  HARI

  “Do you feel as bad as you look?” Hari said as Donny dropped into the passenger seat.

  She knew she probably didn’t look so hot either. She never slept well in a strange bed, and last night had been especially restless.

  “Worse,” he mumbled. He looked around. “Hey, I don’t remember having an SUV yesterday.”

  He looked different somehow…and then Hari realized he’d shaved his stubble.

  Oh, no. Did he really think they might “hook up,” as he’d put it? She’d always hated that term.

  She decided not to mention the facial hair. The truth was, part of her restlessness had involved wondering if she should have let him into her bed. She might have fifteen or so years on him, but they were both adults, far from home, as he’d said. Where was the harm?