Signalz

by F. Paul Wilson

  As they hit the outskirts of Troy, Donny broke the silence.

  “Drop me off at one of the airport hotels.”

  “What? You’re staying?”

  A nod. “Yeah. Got some unfinished business here.”

  “Oh? Like what?”

  “Let’s just leave it at that, okay?”

  Was he trying to be mysterious? He wasn’t terribly good at it.

  “You said someone needs to take Septimus down. You’re not planning something stupid, are you?”

  He grinned. “Me? Stupid? In a way I wish I were. The thing is, I don’t have any sort of plan yet, so I want to stay here and work on one.”

  “You can work on it back in the city.”

  “Nope-nope-nope. Their stockpile is here. That’s the key to whatever they’re planning. That’s where I can hurt them.”

  “You’re one guy, Donny, and they’re many. They’re the kind of people who find some wormhole to another planet and use it to hide their supplies. They operate on a whole different level than we know or can even imagine.”

  “That’s why it’s got to be an excellent plan.”

  Donny was adamant about staying so they stopped at a La Quinta outside the Albany airport. Hari admitted to herself that she was worried about him—worried enough that she accompanied him inside and continued trying during the registration process to talk him into coming back to New York. She even followed him to his room.

  “We’re better off investigating the signals.”

  “The signals?” He shook his head. “That’s the cosmic end of this. I can’t deal with cosmic. What I can deal with is real-world stuff like trucks and trailers. I just have to figure out how.”

  “Okay, look,” she said. “Will you promise me one thing? Promise me you won’t get in their faces. Promise me you’ll keep arm’s length and do whatever you do anonymously. You said yourself these people are dangerous. Look what they did to your brother.”

  She hated to bring that up, but Donny wasn’t some black ops veteran, he was just a hacker, and she had a sense that Septimus ran broader and deeper than either of them could imagine.

  His expression darkened. “And that’s why they have to pay.”

  “Have it your way,” she said and started to turn away.

  “Hey.” He spread his arms. “After all we just went through and not even a hug?”

  Okay, he had a point.

  They clinched but he held on and whispered in her ear. “We could finish what we started on that other world. People have the Mile-High Club. We could inaugurate the Interplanetary Club.”

  Hari broke the clinch with a laugh. “You never give up!”

  He winked. “As Septimus is about to find out.”

  He keyed his door open and waved as he entered. Hari walked down the hall and out to the parking lot where she stopped and looked up at a sun that had risen late this morning and, if her intuition was right, would set early tonight.

  Why was she leaving Donny alone in that room? The world was in the process of ending and here was a good guy—a little young, maybe, but well into adulthood—who truly wanted her. This moment might never come again.

  She turned and headed for his room. By the time she knocked on his door, she had her blouse fully unbuttoned. She delighted in his shocked expression when he opened it and saw her

  “I’ve got an hour,” she said, pushing him back into the room. “Don’t waste it.”

  ERNST

  The sun had risen late.

  The Change was upon the world.

  At last.

  Ernst had been anticipating this any day for the two months since he had last seen the One. Apparently the stars or planets had aligned or the gears of the multiverse had reset. Or not. All that mattered was that it had begun.

  The One’s time, the Order’s time, and most important, Ernst’s time was at hand. Though he wished the One had given them warning. Even the Council had been left in the dark.

  It may have begun in the Heavens as predicted, but instead of basking in the glow of this momentous occasion, Ernst Drexler was forced to deal with the Order’s more mundane issues.

  Yesterday he’d informed the Council of Slootjes’s determination to tell the membership that the Order had been played for fools for millennia, that they’d been misled by the dupes on the Council of Seven who repeated all the lies they’d been fed.

  And now this morning, Council member Patel had stopped by the Lodge with a pronouncement: “Loremaster Saar Slootjes has been designated a Threatening Presence.”

  A loremaster receiving the Threatening Presence designation was unheard of—unprecedented in Ernst’s experience. It amounted to a death sentence: a Threatening Presence had to be eliminated at all costs, by whatever means necessary.

  Naturally it came down to Ernst Drexler, as the Lodge’s actuator, to deal with any member labeled a Threatening Presence. But on today of all days…it didn’t seem right.

  “The Change has begun,” Ernst told Patel. “Surely that makes this all moot.”

  “Oh, quite the contrary,” Patel said. “He will raise doubts about the Order’s place in the post-Change world. He will tell them we won’t be ascendant in the new order. We can’t allow him to create a crisis of faith within the membership. We haven’t been stockpiling food for no reason, you know.”

  Wait…what?

  “Stockpiling food? Where?”

  “Beyond the Leng passage. There’s no place safer.”

  “Why wasn’t I told of this?”

  Patel gave his arm a condescending pat. “You’re an actuator, Ernst. Not your concern. These matters are best left to the Council.”

  Officially Patel was right, but Ernst’s father had always said an actuator’s job was to make things happen for the Order, and this had happened without him.

  “I’m hardly rank and file.”

  “Of course not. But trust me, you wouldn’t want to be saddled with the logistics of the problem. I’m constantly arguing and cajoling on the phone. Sometimes I want to hurl it across my office or bounce it off a wall. The truckers up in Albany are chronically behind in moving the shipments to safety, and that’s all Brother Riker’s fault. His lame excuse is that they can’t risk running more than ten trucks to the passage at once for fear of attracting too much attention. And just recently he thinks someone has been following the convoy.”

  “Still, I wish I’d known.”

  “And now you do.” Another condescending pat. “But don’t allow this to distract you. If the supplies aren’t secured in time, the rank-and-file members will suffer, not us. Just take care of the Slootjes threat. Inform the Council as soon as it’s done.”

  Ernst didn’t feel up to eliminating Slootjes. The loremaster wouldn’t be the first member of the Order he’d terminated. But in those cases he’d felt justified because he’d been eliminating a threat, either to himself or the Order. And, coincidentally, in all previous incidences he’d actively disliked, even loathed the target. He rather liked Saar, despite his tendency toward drama queen.

  Ernst would take another shot at dissuading him. If that didn’t work, he’d bring in Belgiovene.

  FRANKIE

  P. Frank Winslow stood in the cab of his building’s elevator, trying one key after another in the slot next to the bottom button on the control panel. He’d taken the keyring from the lobby office with no guarantee that it held the one he was looking for.

  He was desperate for a way back to his reality. He’d considered going floor to floor and room to room in search of another gap in a floor or ceiling, but put it off. He could always do that. What he couldn’t get out of his head was the last button in this elevator. Why was it locked?

  Finally one slipped in and turned.

  “Yes!” he cried as the cab started down. But down to where?

  Well, he’d find out soon enough. For all he knew, it opened into hell itself.

  He adjusted the weight of the 172-page manuscript tucked under his arm. Oka
y, so it wasn’t the Great American Novel, but it sure as all hell was the Great American Novella.

  He couldn’t be sure—not without a word processor to do the counting—but he guesstimated the novella’s length at forty-two or forty-three thousand words. He never dreamed he was capable of that kind of output. It seemed almost inhuman. But the words kept flowing faster and faster and his typing kept accelerating to keep up. The pain in his fingers had reached an excruciating level and then they’d gone numb. He looked at his fingertips. They weren’t bleeding but they’d been bruised a deep purple.

  He supposed he could have stretched the story another ten thousand words to put it over 50K and make it officially a novel, but that would be padding. Gilding the lily, as it were. Novella was the perfect length for this story.

  Now, to get it to a publisher.

  Frankie needed a shave and—he sniffed an armpit—a bath too, but most of all he needed to get this story back to his world.

  After maybe half a minute, the cab stopped with a lurch and the door parted. Frankie stood and stared. No, not hell. But maybe a passage to hell?

  Or a passage to somewhere else?

  A rough-hewn, squarish tunnel, maybe eight feet on a side, carved through dark stone, stretched ahead of him, curving off to the left. Smokeless flames flickered in sconces spaced along the walls.

  Okay, first question: Who lit the sconces? And second, what were the flames feeding on?

  What did it matter? In sharp contrast to the blah, semi-modern, characterless buildings on the surface, this tunnel looked ancient. And that gave Frankie hope. Because it might just lead somewhere else.

  Was it unreasonable to hope it led back to Manhattan—his Manhattan? Most certainly. Did he have a better route to follow? No.

  With the manuscript of the Great American Novella clutched to his chest, P. Frank Winslow started walking.

  ERNST

  “Winslow never came back,” Belgiovene said, slouching in the chair opposite Ernst’s desk. “It’s like he vanished from the face of the Earth. But don’t ask me to keep waiting for him. I spent the better part of a day and a half sitting in his crummy apartment with nothing to do. Damn near went crazy.”

  P. Frank Winslow’s laptop lay on Ernst’s desk. He drummed his fingers on its closed cover. Belgiovene had stated it was the only computer in the apartment. That didn’t mean Winslow hadn’t backed up his writing to a storage service like Dropbox, but no matter. He hadn’t called Belgiovene to his office to inquire about Winslow. The hack had been demoted to a secondary concern. Ernst had a much more delicate assignment for the killer.

  “Let’s put P. Frank Winslow aside for the time being. We have a more pressing concern.”

  “Oh?” His ennui was palpable.

  “The Council has designated our loremaster a Threatening Presence.”

  Belgiovene jerked upright in his chair.

  Now he shows some life, Ernst thought.

  “What? Slootjes a TP? That’s crazy.”

  “I was as surprised as you, but he’s been denigrating the Council and the Order itself, and at noon he plans to spread his vitriol to the entire membership.”

  The big man frowned. “What’s vitriol?”

  “A fancy word for ‘poison.’” Not entirely accurate, but better that than trying to explain sulfuric acid to this man.

  “Today? Of all days he’s chosen today to dump on the Order?”

  “I tried to talk him out of it but he’s determined.”

  He’d reasoned with the loremaster for half an hour but Slootjes might as well have been stone deaf for all the effect Ernst’s arguments had. When he’d informed him of the Council’s Threatening Presence designation, Slootjes pulled a pistol and ordered Ernst from the archives, saying he’d defend himself against whoever tried to stop his message.

  Ernst fixed Belgiovene with a pointed stare. “So I’m afraid it’s up to you to—”

  “Take him out? Me?” Belgiovene leaped from the chair. “No way. I don’t whack a brother. That’s a line I will not cross. Find somebody else.”

  And with that he strode from the office.

  Ernst watched him go, then sighed.

  I guess that leaves me.

  He’d work himself up to it. On today of all days, the beginning of what he had worked all his life to bring about, he was being forced to eliminate a brother of the Order. He could almost hate Slootjes for putting him in this position.

  He nursed the negative feelings, certain that the more he thought about it, the easier it would become.

  BARBARA

  My mind still reeled from all that Ellie had just told me. We’d strolled the Coney Island boardwalk—down past the Parachute Jump and then back—looking like any normal mother and daughter out to breathe the salty air. But as we walked she’d filled my head with tales that were anything but normal.

  She spoke of vast, unimaginably huge forces that spanned the multiverse. So vast and so few in number that they needed no names. Lesser beings with their need to classify and codify had concocted tongue-twisting designations, but the entities answered to no one, not even each other. They searched out worlds populated with sentient and sapient beings where they could toy with the inhabitants. Competition for these worlds put certain entities in conflict as one would try to usurp control of a world controlled by another.

  Earth was one of those worlds in contention, and the histories of its civilizations had been warped and woofed by the influences and subtle intrusions of these entities.

  “Our little corner of reality is about to change hands,” she said. “The people who support the new landlord are delighted that the Change has begun. Those who support the departing landlord are terrified.”

  “But where are you in all this?” I said. “You’re just a girl from the Midwest. Why you?”

  “I was a girl from the Midwest who could hear the signals and was bathed in the Prime Frequency. Depending on one’s perspective, I was the right girl in the right place at the right time, or wrong girl in the wrong place at the worst time.”

  “So if you hadn’t been standing in that spot in the Sheep Meadow at that moment, none of this would have happened?”

  “Correct.”

  I felt suddenly weak and dropped onto a nearby bench.

  “So it’s my fault?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I was determined to find the origin of that awful sound I’d heard.”

  “But I could have stopped you, or at last made you put it off till the next day…or delayed you even an hour.”

  “I didn’t know it would sound again, or what would happen if it did. And you certainly couldn’t know. So guilt is not an option here.”

  “But it’s ruined your life.”

  Her expression remained impassive. “It changed the life I had. Now I have a new life.”

  Anger flashed through me. Whatever she’d wanted for herself in the future, whatever plans and dreams she might have had were all gone now, ripped from her. And she didn’t seem to care.

  “How can you be so…so…so accepting?”

  She stared at me with those non-Ellie eyes. “What makes you think I have a choice, Mother? What’s done is done. I can’t change it and neither can you. I have a task to complete and then I am free.”

  My heart leaped. “Free? You’ll be back to normal?”

  “I will be free to do whatever I wish, but…normal? This is my new normal, Mother.” She held out a hand to help me to my feet. “Come. We are due back in Manhattan.”

  “Due?”

  “No one there knows I’m coming, but I’m needed.”

  We retraced our steps to the elevated D train and rode it to the Grand Street stop where we walked a block or two to Allen Street. From there we passed through an area full of Asians that I assumed was part of the city’s Chinatown.

  Eventually we turned down a side street lined with red-brick-fronted former tenements. Ellie stopped before a massive, ancient-looking three-story building of ston
e block that could have been a bank or a fortress. Its windows were deeply recessed within solid granite walls. Atop a set of wide granite steps, an intricate seal was suspended above a heavy inlaid door.

  “What is this place?” I said.

  “A lodge of the Ancient Septimus Fraternal Order. I’m needed inside. There’s something I must do.”

  “Please don’t tell me all these horrors have happened to you just so you could show up here and do something!”

  She shrugged. “It’s possible. Maybe I was pushed toward the Sheep Meadow so the signal would prepare me for this. Or…maybe I brought this on all by myself and am being sent here simply because I happen to be handy.”

  I wanted to scream. I couldn’t bear the thought of my Ellie being used…a tool.

  She started up the steps and I went to follow but she turned and stopped me. “I must do this alone. You don’t need to see this. You’ve had to see too much already. Wait at that coffee shop we passed on the corner. Have a nice cappuccino and I’ll join you when I’m finished.”

  “But—”

  “They don’t allow women, Mother.”

  “But you’re—”

  “They’ll make an exception for me.”

  So saying, she turned and ascended the steps. I watched the heavy door close behind her, but I stood fast.

  Have a nice cappuccino? I don’t think so. That was my daughter in there. Alone.

  I wasn’t going anywhere.

  ERNST

  “Excuse me, Mister Drexler,” said the acolyte from the reception desk. “There’s a young woman here to see you. A teenager, actually.”

  Ernst broke from his reverie. He’d been working on a plan for Slootjes’s elimination—the manner of his death, the disposal of his remains—but getting nowhere. And time was running out.

  “A teenager? Asking for me?”

  “She didn’t ask for you by name. She asked to see the man in charge and, well…she said you had need of her services before noon.”