Abe was trying to figure out where his house was, and he was pretty sure he had it pegged. He was prepared to take issue with the short distance there seemed to be between his house and the tower in the same way as a man might argue with the scale on a map for making a mile look like an inch when the view was obstructed by clouds and the movement of the elevator seemed to slow. As there was no apparent means of support left for the elevator, naturally, Abe imagined that it was reaching the apex of it's climb and, though he knew that the previous car-load had reached some destination, was preparing to fall back to earth.
Grisly notions of shattered glass and gold filled with a horrible, bloody Abe-custard landing in the street outside his mother's window were banished when, with a clicking sound, the elevator entered another stone shaft. Abe had not been aware of how quiet it had become until the sounds of the elevator once-more being hauled up on the pulleys and chains that moved it returned. It was strangely comforting, even though the light had all but vanished and the elevator was actually swaying from side to side a bit within the shaft.
Abe stopped being scared of plummeting to his death and began to be scared of what he was going to find when the doors opened. Until recently he'd never been out of Highmark, and at least when he went into Underton he had known something about what he was getting into. What he was going to find when the doors opened could be absolutely anything.
The arrow finally hit the “D” and there was a loud ding. Abe drew the hammer back on his gun and stepped back from the doors as they began to slide open.
The light was brighter than anything Abe had ever seen.
“He's got a gun!” a muffled voice shouted and two man-shaped things rushed into the elevator pointing huge black things at him. They had barrels like a rifle but where much larger and sleeker, having the look all over of polished metal but in a matte black. The objects – they must have been weapons – matched the uniforms of the men, all bulky and black and synthetic looking. They had helmets on with dark glass covering their faces.
“Drop the weapon, sir!” It was the most disrespectful sir Abe had ever heard in his life, and there was so much strange distortion from the helmets that Abe couldn't even be sure which of the two had spoken.
“You mean this?” he said and tilted the gun a bit.
“GUN!” one of them shouted and rushed forward, grabbing Abe by his jacket and throwing him face down to the floor. Abe's pistol was kicked away, the black boots hitting his fingers painfully (and, he doubted it was an accident either). He felt the barrel of one of the weapons in his back while the man who had thrown him down roughly slapped against his sides and legs. He slapped against Abe's ankle and found his knife, pulling it free and tossing it out of the elevator, and then the men said something he couldn't understand and smashed something heavy into the back of his head.
Abe did not, as he expected was the idea, black out. He said, Ow!” very loudly while one of the men grabbed him under his arm and lifted him to his feet. He glanced back and saw the other man aiming at him.
The other man said “don't even think about it,” and Abe didn't know what he meant, but to be safe he didn't think of anything while they dragged him away.
2.
Abe was taken out of the elevator and then a second man joined the one dragging him and between them both he was carried down a hallway. He was disoriented by a number of things, not least of which was the blow to the head, but through the haze he was feeling he was able to observe that the walls were white and appeared to be made of giant bricks. The floor was a carpet that covered every inch of the floor and was short and worn-looking and the color of the outer edge of mold: a kind of sickly pale greeny-blue. There were a lot of doors and the light came from bars in the ceiling that burned, as far as Abe and his aching head were concerned, brighter than a thousand suns.
There seemed to be dozens of men, most armed and wearing the black outfits. Abe was somewhat relieved to observe, when they removed their helmets after apparently concluding that he was no threat, that they were men, albeit large and with uniformly-absurd haircuts. They stood him up and pinned his arms behind his back and he felt metal on both wrists and then somebody put something over his head and he couldn't see anything.
He felt something sharp in his arm and in a moment the thing over his head became irrelevant because Abe suddenly couldn't keep his eyes open.
3.
It was a small and very regular cell that Abe woke up in. He had all his clothes except his shoes, which struck him as a very odd choice indeed. His feet were cold and so he took off his jacket and wrapped it around his feet and wondered what in hell he was in for. If he had heeded Roods’ warning more fully, he wondered, would he have been greeted the same way he had been? Would it have been worse? That was difficult to imagine.
The back of his head hurt quite a lot, but mercifully the light in this room came from a single sphere of glass overhead that seemed only about as bright as a good lantern. It was one of the only features of the room. The same white painted bricks made up the walls, and there were no windows. The door was metal and also painted white with small doors cut into it to provide (Abe hoped, for he was ravenous) food. Inside the room were a shelf with a soft sheet of something with the consistency of bread and a bucket. The cell was slightly smaller, over all, than the elevator had been, and Abe hoped that when this door was opened it wouldn't result in another awkward search or blow to the head.
Abe sat on the poor excuse for a bed (after overcoming his initial trepidation at the strange mattress) and realized that his situation, should he ever get home and try to describe it, would sound like the ramblings of a madman. And actually, not just any mad ramblings, but mad ramblings Abe and everyone else had heard before.
A man is attacked by strange humanoid creatures with unusual weaponry and muffled voices. They drag him along brightly lit corridors and hit him and poke him with needles (his arm was sore where they had injected him with something). He comes to in a room with no discernible features and... Abe wracked his brain to try and remember how the crazy stories he'd heard ended. How did they wind up in Highmark?
For once he wished he'd spent more time reading dime novels about abductions. At least he could take some comfort in the knowledge that they got back at all. In fact, if his perception of the booksellers' shelves was any indication, so many of them made it back that he probably had nothing to fear. Aside from the probing. He fervently hoped that the probing had been entirely made up.
He was imagining a complicated scenario in which he would agree to write very detailed and horrific descriptions of the probing he was forced to endure if only they wouldn't actually administer any. It would be their little secret, he'd say, and the mysterious negotiator would be absolutely convinced by his sincerity and trust-worthiness. Abe would take notes on precisely how they wanted the probing bits of his dime-novel written and then he'd be sent on his way.
This went on for some time, and was the reason why he shouted, “we had a deal!” when he heard the door open.
Chapter Twenty: The great escape
1.
“And what deal was that, dear?”
The voice sounded like that of a friendly older woman, but Abe couldn't tell precisely because it had been the smaller door set within the door proper which had opened, and through which all he could see was a light blue dress with cow drawings on it. The smaller door was roughly knee-high, and was probably for the purpose of administering food to prisoners. There was no food on offer, though, but there was a distinct food-like smell which the so-far-unbreakfasted Abe found quite appealing.
“Oh, nothing, miss,” said Abe. And then, much more quietly, “just quietly going mad...”
“What was that?” The woman had the practiced yell of a mother. “How's your head, mister?”
“It's been better...?” Abe wasn't sure what the protocol was for being in prison, but the welcome he had received upon disembarking from the elevator had not prepared him for
friendly-sounding women inquired after his health.
Something came through the little door and landed on the floor of the cell. A moment later a woman's face was visible. She wasn't as old as he'd guessed from her maternal concern and fashion sense. He'd guess that she was probably somewhere between his age and his parents now that he could see her, whereas before he had been prepared to surmise that she was actually between the age of his parents and death. “Well, if you want to see about cleaning it up, you're going to have to put that on.”
Abe looked at the thing from where he sat on the weird bunk and then slowly unwound his jacket from around his feet and got up. The floor was terrifically cold against his feet, and Abe sucked breath through his teeth as the shock of the chill hit him. Thankfully it got better quickly, and the next step was hardly cripplingly painful at all. He bent down and picked up the object.
It was a black box about the size of a deck of playing cards attached to a strap with an open latch. “Goes around your ankle,” the woman said helpfully.
“Why?”
“Well, you're not allowed out unless you wear it.”
Abe knelt down and straightened out the strap as if he needed to test that it would go around his ankle, even though it was obviously too big to fail to encircle even the largest of ankles. On Abe it could possibly have functioned as a belt. “But what is it?”
The woman hesitated for a moment. “A bit of a tracking device, in case you make a run for it is all.”
“I suppose that's fair enough.” Abe put the black box against his ankle and the straps circled around him on their own, latching and constricting like a belt tightening itself until it fit tight around his ankle. Then the whole device turned until the box was sitting just above the front of his foot in what was probably the least-obstructive position possible.
Abe slid a finger behind the band and found it to be remarkably tight. The fabric was something entirely foreign to him, too. A sort of woven black fabric that shined more than it should and gave the unpleasant impression of being very hard to cut or damage. Nothing to do for it now, Abe stood up just as a very large deadbolt was thrown and the larger door opened.
It was impossible not to notice how very thick the door was as it swung out, rather similar to the door on a bank vault. This was no great surprise as the whole room felt like a secure prison cell. The surprise was on the other side of the door.
2.
The room Abe was sitting in was very comfortable. It was, in fact, difficult to accept that he was only a few dozen feet from the unforgivingly cold and stark cell; that he could actually see the bunk from where he was sitting now. All the walls in the building were of the same large brick construction, but that was where the similarities ended.
The walls of the cell were painted the same faded white that had covered the walls Abe observed when he was taken off the elevator. Outside the cell, the walls were painted in different colors in each of the large, open rooms, and there were paintings and child's artwork and mirrors mounted on the walls in an inviting but not quite tasteful way. The floors were the same, but where the cold floor of the cell had been unadorned, beyond the heavy door there were a variety of rugs, not to mention some sort of grating along the bottom of the walls that shot warm air across the ground. And furniture...? Well, it wouldn't be terribly impressive for the furniture to be more comfortable than the slightly-padded bunk in the cell, nor would it be a great challenge for there to be more of it, but if the decorator of the area outside of the cell had set out to deliberately heighten the contrast, he or she could not have done a better job.
The greatest contrast, however, was harder for Abe to describe. There was an open, airy sort of freedom about the home outside the cell that colored his memory of his confinement so that, even after repeatedly confirming that he had only been locked up for a few hours (and most of that had been spent sleeping) he still felt like he had spent weeks in that small room. There were open windows with bright sunlight streaming through gauzy curtains, and the rooms were separated from one-another by function and different rugs rather than things like walls. It was really just one giant room with some careful suggestion of smaller units, and yet, between the carpets and the large, soft chairs and couches, it managed to feel cozy and airy all at once.
Abe luxuriated in the warm air on his feet and the soft chair to which he was guided while the lady, clucking away his objections maternally, examined his head wound. But once she'd cleaned it up a bit and handed him two tiny white circles of what appeared to be chalk, insisting he swallow them with a glass of water, he really had to stop enjoying the change of scenery and ask some questions.
Like, “I don't mean to be rude, Miss, but I wonder if you can tell me what's going on.”
And she tried to. Apparently she was an old hand at this.
“First of all,” she said, “my name is Myrtle Creech and my husband Walton is the keeper of the clock tower.” When Myrtle said this it was the first time that Abe had noticed the very slight curve to the walls. This entire level of the building seemed to be circular. If the sun hadn't been shining so brightly through the windows, he would have been able to see that he was several stories up, as well, but quite likely nowhere near the top of the ever-narrowing tower.
“The title's ceremonial, and it's Walton's job to oversee the elevator, mostly. Downstairs is where the elevator from your world stops, and it's up to Walton and the other boys to make sure everyone who comes up is supposed to. Anyone without the proper clearance, like you, my boy, gets held for a spell and then dropped back down with some... light reprogramming.”
By this time, Myrtle had offered Abe a bowl of soup and a sandwich, which he had heartily accepted. Which explains how he was able to spray soup out of his mouth in response. “Reprogramming!?”
Myrtle used a napkin to wipe her face and held another out to Abe. “Ought to know better than to give 'em soup while I'm talkin' about the reprogramming,” she said with a sigh.
“What does that mean?”
“Bit of light electrical... you know...?” She twirled her finger beside her temple.
Abe's eyes went wide. “Why?”
“Scrambles things up a bit, I reckon.” She shrugged. “Keeps a bunch of you lot from coming up here.”
“Why would anyone from Highmark want to come here? And why would it be bad if they did?”
“We've only got so many cells.”
She hadn't answered his first question, but at least part of the answer became readily apparent as Abe sampled his sandwich. In all his years of attending dinners in Highmark, in going to parties hosted by the wealthiest and most powerful people in all of town, he had never tasted anything so good in all his life. Maybe it only seemed so exquisite because he hadn't eaten in so long, but after his first bite he found himself positively salivating at the prospect of another. The bread was so soft and yielding, contents so perfectly succulent, flavors so savory and evocative... the sandwich was almost synesthesic, tasting for all the world like sunshine through the leaves and dust of a summer day... tasting like hard-won victory.
“Sir,” said Myrtle, “you're drooling.”
Abe wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and forced himself to put the sandwich down. It wasn't easy.
“So people from Highmark aren't allowed here?”
“Not usually, no. I'm no expert, you understand, but I don't think we've ever allowed anyone from your... place... to stay up here. Slippery slope, I imagine.” She took a sip of her tea before adding, “I wouldn't even be comfortable letting you out except that we have to have all sorts of shots because of Marshall's job.”
“Shots?”
“For the diseases,” she said.
“I don’t have diseases! And what about the people who were on the elevator before me? You're not holding them.”
“There were no people on the elevator before you, sir.”
“Of course there were! I saw them get on. Are you trying to tell me that the elevat
or dropped them off somewhere else?!” Abe stood up abruptly, the wicker chair with the thick comfy cushion nearly toppling as he did. “Don't think that because you have amazing sandwiches and look down on me because of where I live that you can just dismiss me, madame! I will not have it.”
The tone of Myrtle's voice was very much like that a mother would use to talk to an irate toddler mid-tantrum. “Calm down, there, Mister... you don't want to lose your ankle because you got a little bent out of shape, now do you?”
“I most certainly--” Abe only just now heard what she actually said, apparently. “Lose my ankle...?”
Myrtle looked shamefully down at Abe's ankle.
“I thought this tracked me if I tried to run.”
“Well, it does,” she said. “And it monitors your heart rate and your distance from the clock tower.”
“When do we get to the part where I start losing limbs?”
At least she had the decency to look ashamed as she said “if the distance or your heartbeat gets too great, the explosives go off.”
“And by 'go off' you don't happen to mean fall off...”
“I'm afraid I happen to mean explode.” In response to the look on Abe's face she said, “well, you'd be surprised how much slower someone runs with a foot blown off.”
Abe must have only looked more aghast.
“It's just me and Marshall here, and we're not as quick footed as most fugitives!”
“It's not just you and Marshall here, there were a dozen men waiting for me! They had giant rifles and armor and...” he touched the back of his head, still tender and, under the hair, most likely bruised purple, “...abusive tendencies and things.”
“That's only because we were warned about you. The Lady thought there might be a dangerous person following her, but it was only you.”
Highmark Page 14