The Music of the Machine (The Book of Terwilliger 2)

by Michael Stiles

  It got warmer as they went deeper underground—warm enough to make him sweat heavily. He felt his armpits dripping under his shirt. The lower they went, the more the passages looked like caverns instead of manmade tunnels. There were drawings on some of the walls. Some of the paintings were crude, like caveman art. Fleming had once seen a documentary on television about prehistoric cave paintings in Spain. A lot of the pictures looked like those. But others were ornate, even beautiful. Whoever had done those had worked a long time on them. There were pictures of people wearing the clothes of a hundred different countries, and pictures of people being slaughtered by men in military uniforms and gas masks. One image showed people sleeping on bricks in a ruined wasteland. Another image showed children in coffins with flowers in their hands. On one wall there was an enormous painting of the Beatles that looked quite lifelike. On another, a forest was being devoured by fire as people fled in terror. Yet another showed children playing in a meadow—a pleasant scene, but beneath the meadow were several dark and hungry-looking apes digging their way up toward the surface.

  After a long walk they entered an enormous, circular chamber, at least twenty feet high and thirty feet in diameter. The room was lit by incandescent bulbs around its perimeter, and its ceiling was shaped like a flattened dome. Seymour looked up and stopped in his tracks when he saw that ceiling. On it was the largest painting of all: a half-finished image of a rearing horse, painted all in blue. It was shown in profile, so only one eye was visible. That eye was a deep, penetrating red that seemed to glow fiercely in the half-lit chamber. Behind the horse was a field of blue-green grass. The sky in the painting was full of storm clouds, parted in the middle to reveal a single red star in the dark sky. A huge scaffold was set up beneath a section that appeared to be in progress. Seymour had never seen the Sistine Chapel, but he had read about it. This room reminded him of that.

  At the center of the room was a raised platform upon which were two chairs, like a pair of medieval thrones, placed back-to-back with a space of six feet between them. But these were not thrones; each chair was bolted to the floor and had chains welded to it, so the person who sat in it could be confined. Both chairs were unoccupied.

  He only had a few seconds to take this in before one of the guards nudged him, softly but insistently, toward the far end of the room. The Society men were being lined up against the wall. Firing squad, that was the first thought that crossed Seymour’s mind, but it didn’t make sense to kidnap thirty men and drive them around for hours just to shoot them all. Their kidnappers had something else in mind.

  All of the prisoners he could see were men. He didn’t know where they’d taken the women. He didn’t want to know. He saw Burkholder nearby, looking dazed, with eyes that weren’t quite focusing in on his surroundings. Larson was there too, snarling silently at his captors but not resisting. Lingelback, Litton… everyone he knew was there except for two men: John and Arthur. Where were they?

  They waited there a long time, still unable to speak. The silence was eerie, and the blue horse overhead glared down at them with its terrible red eye. The Society men grew visibly tense as they waited. Fleming tried controlling his breathing to calm himself. It didn’t work. After twenty or thirty minutes, he heard the sound of footsteps approaching down the corridor through which they had entered the chamber. The footsteps were slow and confident, the clicks of nice, expensive shoes on smooth stone.

  A figure appeared in the doorway, visible only as a silhouette as he paused to look at his prisoners. Then he stepped into the room and walked to the center of the chamber to stand between the two metal chairs. It was the silver-haired man Fleming had seen at Society House. Nathaniel wore a blue shirt and jeans, just like the other men.

  Nathaniel stood there a long time in silence, looking at each of them in turn, before he finally spoke. “You belong to me now,” he said. “Orc tried to claim you. He trained you a little. He trained me too, at first. But I got stronger. Now I have beaten Orc, and you are mine.”

  A palpable wave of shock passed through the Society men. They would have protested and grumbled if they’d been able to speak. Nathaniel waited for the disturbance to die down.

  “You think I’m lying,” he continued. “You think nobody could be stronger than Orc. Well, look at this!”

  He stepped off the platform as two of his men entered the room pulling a third person between them, a big bald man who stood with straight back and proud eyes. Arthur’s face was bruised and he wore only a torn white bathrobe, but to look at him you would think he was the one in charge of this place. Fleming felt a stab of guilt at what he and the others had tried to do. As much as he had wanted to see Arthur dead, it infuriated him to see Lord Orc held prisoner in this way.

  “This is your leader,” Nathaniel told them. “This is the man you followed. Look at him now.”

  They walked Arthur to the chair and he stood in front of it, looking at his Society with an unreadable expression. He looked like he wanted to speak. But after a long moment, Arthur sat in the chair silently.

  The men in blue wrapped the chains around him and pulled them tight. Nathaniel locked them in place with a huge padlock. The metallic click of the lock, and the clanking of the chains, echoed for a long time in the wide chamber.

  “Urizen is getting stronger,” Nathaniel said, turning to face the Society once more. “He is making plans, commanding armies, infiltrating governments. Starting revolutions. He is still hidden. But he won’t stay hidden much longer.” He looked down at Arthur, who sat in the chair with his head still held high. “This man thought he should be the one to defeat Urizen. He would remake the world as a new Society, with himself at the head. But you all know the truth. That has happened before, hasn’t it? Orc has defeated Urizen a hundred times in the past. A thousand. And every time, Orc becomes what he once despised. The old Orc becomes the new Urizen.

  “But this time is different. This time, I’m here. I am going to break the Cycle. But that can’t be done by killing Orc and Urizen, oh no. Oh, no!” He smiled at them with yellow smoker’s teeth. “The first step is to imprison these demons. Both of them. Lock them up where nobody will ever find them. That’s the first step.”

  He paused to let them all wonder what the second step might be. Seymour heard one of the Society men sobbing quietly. The sound embarrassed him.

  “The first step,” Nathaniel continued, “is not to kill them. That doesn’t happen until step three.”

  Arthur sat in his throne, staring at the wall over their heads. His bald head reflected the blue of the painted horse overhead. Seymour thought he saw the muscles in his jaw tighten. Other than that, he was perfectly impassive.

  “The demon,” said Nathaniel, “needs a home. It needs a human body to do its work. Step two is to make sure there are no bodies for the demons to use!” He smiled and looked up and down the line of men against the wall. “But there are lots of people up there.” He gestured up at the ceiling. “Billions of people. If we kill Orc, what will he do? He’ll just go up there and find a new body. Unless… unless there are no bodies left for him to use.”

  As he spoke, two of the men in blue emerged from the shadows, each carrying something metallic that clinked like chains.

  “So many people up there,” said Nathaniel. “Any one of them could be a new host for Orc or Urizen. As long as there are people, the demons can live forever. Every free person is a danger to us. So we will give them two choices. Join us, or be slaughtered.”

  One of the men came up to Seymour. He was a big man with gray eyes that were open very wide. The man placed one of the chains around Fleming’s neck and locked it in place with a loud click. It fit snugly but did not cut off his air. Only then did Fleming understand that it was a collar. The metal was not cold; it was unexpectedly warm. Once it was in place, the man inserted a key into the collar and turned it until it clicked. A red light began blinking under Seymour’s chin. He could just see it if he twisted his neck.

  “Loo
k up at my painting,” said Nathaniel. “You are no longer the Society of the True Judgment. You are my Horsemen. You are responsible for carrying out step two. When you are ready, you will go out and recruit new Horsemen. Every one of you will be a commander of one of my armies, as long as you’re good. When my armies are big enough, then it’s time for the killing.”

  One at a time, each member of the Society was fitted with a collar. The red lights all blinked rhythmically—not synchronized with each other, but each at the same rate. Like heartbeats.

  10

  Unexpected Help

  A cold wind was blowing through the gray trees. It gusted unpredictably, swirling through the forest and carrying dead leaves with it. Ed walked through the forest, stopping whenever he heard the sound of a falling tree in the distance. That sound was coming more and more often.

  He had seen something like this before. When Nathaniel had started training him, they had sometimes met inside the Guru’s mind. Ed supposed that the Guru was a link between himself and Nathaniel; perhaps that had made it easier to use as a meeting place. Later, when Nathaniel had begun destroying the Guru from within, Ed had watched that mind deteriorate, trees falling dead as the forest receded. In the end, the Guru’s mind had become a barren wasteland.

  The same thing was happening to Charles Witherspoon now. Already, large sections of forest had been leveled. Occasional earthquakes shook the ground, and when the ground cracked open Ed could see a darkness in the cracks that was more absolute than any darkness he’d ever seen in the physical world.

  Witherspoon was dying. And in his mind was the only clue that might lead Ed to the weapon Kajdas had been preparing. If the old man died, that knowledge would die with him. Ed quickened his pace, touching trees in a systematic way so he wouldn’t retrace his steps. Somewhere in this place was the information he needed.

  He touched the trunk of a tree and let its memory flow into his mind. The tree contained a memory of a wedding—the wedding of Witherspoon’s older son, David. That was the last happy time they had spent together. After David was married, he had brought his new wife to Virginia to visit his aging parents a couple times a year. Once they’d had children, the visits had slowed, then stopped. Ed had watched all of this through Witherspoon’s eyes over the course of several weeks. He couldn’t experience what the old man felt—all he could do was watch the images—but he could imagine what it must have been like. This was the first time Ed had ever delved so deeply into another person’s memories, and it was a little too intimate for comfort.

  In the physical world, Ed sat in the chair next to Charles Witherspoon’s bed. Emma brought him food and coffee from time to time, and checked on her husband to see if he needed anything. Charles would wake occasionally to eat a few bites of food, but would close his eyes before long and drift off to sleep.

  The ground shifted and he fell. A few paces ahead, one of the larger trees groaned and leaned sideways, opening a dark hole where its roots pulled free of the ground. Inside that hole was a black emptiness. Ed shied away from it and moved on.

  He was focusing on the younger trees, which would be the more recent memories. Many of these were dead or dying where they stood, as though they had never properly taken root. Those that still lived were mostly full of mundane things—trips to the supermarket with Emma, mealtimes, evening walks through the neighborhood. Of the memories that had to do with the Bureau, most were simply replays of the same types of scenes over and over: meetings with a hundred different men, afternoons spent at a desk reading reports. Once or twice, Ed had caught a tantalizing glimpse of things that seemed relevant to his search. He caught the name Raoul in a report about something that had happened in Memphis, and thought of the red-haired man Kajdas had brought in to help him in Toronto. Kajdas had introduced him as Ralph, but hadn’t Maggie called him Raoul? Ed wondered if there was a connection. The memory was too short for him to learn any more.

  The next tree he touched caused him some disorientation. He found himself in a forest, but this one was full of vibrant greens and browns rather than the grays he had become used to. Witherspoon was talking to a man Ed recognized from his dark days in Los Angeles. Albert Wensel was his name. He had been Kajdas’ superior in the FBI. Ed recalled having a very unpleasant meeting with him once.

  “I’m a forgiving man,” Witherspoon was saying. “But I can’t say the same about the man I answer to. First Candlestick, and now this.”

  Candlestick. Ed still knew almost nothing about it, except that it had been the operation that had drawn Nathaniel into Kajdas’ web. It was Candlestick that had resulted in Eleanor’s death. Hearing that word made him grind his teeth.

  “People are asking questions, Albert,” Witherspoon was saying. “Mr. Hoover is asking questions, and the last thing our sponsor wants is the Director poking around in his business.”

  So Ed was right: whatever Kajdas had been up to, it was not known to the men at the top levels of the FBI.

  Wensel looked deeply ashamed. “You have my word,” he said. “It won’t happen again.” Ed remembered Wensel as an overbearing, intimidating man. It said something that he was so visibly cowed by Witherspoon.

  “I know it won’t,” Witherspoon replied in a grandfatherly tone. He reached out and patted Albert’s shoulder affectionately. “I’m sure you’ll do fine from now on.” Then he turned and walked away through the woods. As soon as Witherspoon turned his back, Wensel and everything else behind him faded to darkness. Ed could only see what Witherspoon himself had seen that day; the memory couldn’t show him anything beyond that.

  He followed the old man through the forest until they came to another man who waited some distance away. The man turned when he heard Witherspoon approaching.

  Ed knew that face, but couldn’t recall his name. He’d seen that face on television many times: wiry hair, horn-rimmed glasses, bold nose and broad chin. His head was very large.

  This man and Witherspoon walked together, and Ed found himself left behind in the darkness behind Witherspoon’s memory. He hurried to catch up.

  “…a strange place to have this meeting,” Witherspoon was saying. “Why here? Why a park?”

  The other man spoke with an accent that Ed had trouble placing. German, maybe. “Mr. Nosgrove was specific in his request, as always, but did not say why.”

  “I could be of more help,” said Witherspoon, a bit gruffly, “if I knew more of what you and Mr. Nosgrove are trying to do. I had no control over Summit. None. That’s why it failed. If you would share more of your plans, let me sit in on some of your meetings―”

  “The less you know of Mr. Nosgrove’s plans, the safer you’ll be,” said the man in glasses.

  Witherspoon was growing visibly frustrated. “I know enough to get into trouble, to be implicated if any of his plans ever become public. But I have no real authority.”

  “What would you do if you were in charge?”

  The question made Witherspoon hesitate. “I would do things very differently if it were up to me. I always thought Summit was a foolish idea. I would have killed that program outright. And this Novus concept…”

  “Novus,” said the man in glasses. “You should forget you ever heard about that one.”

  “It’s utter insanity,” Witherspoon insisted. “The sort of idea only a madman would come up with.”

  “The concept is based on legitimate science.”

  Witherspoon shook his head. “I’m not saying it wouldn’t work. It simply isn’t right. If Nosgrove were to do it on a larger scale, it would be… well, we shouldn’t be contemplating such a thing in America.”

  “So you don’t approve of Elmer’s ideas?”

  “I don’t approve,” said Witherspoon, “of using Americans as test subjects.”

  “Felons. Prisoners. Drifters.”

  “They’re still human beings. And who knows what effect this experiment will have on their brains? We don’t know what this will do to them in the long run. Candlestick should have
served as a warning. When you mess around with mind-control, you never know what might happen. Novus is a terrible mistake. It should be shut down. And when you see Mr. Nosgrove, you can go right ahead and tell him I said that.”

  “I have never seen Mr. Nosgrove,” said the man with the glasses. “Have you?”

  Witherspoon faltered. “No. He relays all his orders through others.”

  “So you have no idea who he really is. For all you know, I could be Elmer Nosgrove. And you just told me quite openly that you oppose his methods. If I were you, I would be a little more careful. Or you may end up like Albert Wensel.”

  A sharp pop rang out somewhere behind them, then another. Gunshots. The man in the horn-rimmed glasses appeared unconcerned, but Witherspoon spun around in alarm. “What’s this? You promised me you wouldn’t do this!” He lurched into something resembling a run, although his aging legs would only carry him so fast.

  Witherspoon came to a gravel parking lot, empty except for a single brown sedan. Next to it lay Albert Wensel, a deep red stain spreading on his chest. He was staring at the sky with empty eyes as Witherspoon hurried over to kneel at his side.

  * * *

  The memory ended and Ed found himself back in the dying forest. There were other saplings nearby, containing memories that had to be quite recent. He touched another one and let the image fill his mind.

  * * *