After breakfast, Norge would be waiting. He took the three new recruits to their jobs and watched them as they worked. Some days they sorted and tested parts that looked like they had been taken out of electronic equipment. Seymour had taken a transistor radio apart once, as a teenager, and he recognized the capacitors and transistors and various other parts that he saw in the sorting bin.
Other times, they worked in a metal shop where steel sheets were cut and formed into metal boxes like the one Seymour wore chained to his neck. The scraps from this process were thin, razor-sharp curls of steel which were carefully collected and stored in boxes. Fleming once made the mistake of picking one of these bits with his hand, and ended up spending half an hour getting his hand sewn back together by Dr. Whitehead. He didn’t touch the metal scraps after that, but he did wonder why Norge insisted on keeping them instead of throwing them away.
Fleming woke up to the morning alarm one Friday morning and listened to the hum. The hum didn’t bother him so much anymore. He got up and used the toilet and got dressed, thinking about how much he liked Fridays. He had no way of knowing what day it was, so every morning he imagined it was Friday. This did wonders for his mood.
On the way to breakfast, he thought about food, and food reminded him of Big John. For the first time it occurred to him that in all the unnumbered weeks they had been imprisoned in this place, he had never once seen John Solano. Or any of the Society’s women, for that matter. Fleming had seen nearly every other member of the Society, but not John. Was he being held somewhere else, separated from the others?
Seymour passed a dark side-passage. Maybe it was because he had Big John on his mind, but for an instant Seymour was sure he had seen the silhouette of a large man lurking in that passageway. He stopped, backed up, and looked again, but there was no one there. All he could see was the reflected glow of the blinking light on his collar. Seymour rubbed his eyes. Could he have imagined it?
The rest of the way to the dining hall, Fleming couldn’t shake the idea that someone was following him. Finally, just outside the dining hall, he turned quickly and caught a glimpse of someone walking quickly away through the dim tunnel. He was a large person, even bigger than Croaker Norge, but he moved very quickly.
“John,” Fleming whispered. He looked longingly toward the dining hall, where the smell of breakfast was beckoning. If he didn’t eat now, he would have to go hungry until lunch. With a sigh of regret, he turned to follow the dark figure.
It was not easy to keep up. Fleming hurried after the mystery man, who seemed to know the maze of tunnels very well. He turned left at the end of the hall of sleeping cells, took the second right into a corridor drilled through solid rock, up a gentle slope and another right turn into a straight, concrete-walled passage with bright white lights mounted overhead on metal brackets. From there, he followed a narrow passage where there were no lights at all. By this time he was quite lost, and there was no sign of Big John, or whoever he’d been chasing.
The hum was growing louder. He shook his head to clear it. His stomach was complaining again. Breakfast would be halfway done by now, and he was hungrier than ever. He should turn back.
But which way to go? The tunnels were confusing. He backtracked down the brightly-lit hallway, but couldn’t remember which way he had come from before that. All he could do was pick a direction and try it. So he wandered for a while, sometimes choosing the left way and sometimes the right. A part of his mind reminded him that he should always go the same way; after that he kept going right.
He walked for a long time. After making several turns that he was pretty sure were wrong, he found himself in a long passage that curved to the left and slanted sharply upward. After a short distance it straightened out and he could see a dead end up ahead, marked only by a bright, horizontal line of light. The hum was so loud that it vibrated his gut and made him feel like his insides were squirming to break out of his skin.
There was a breeze, too, cool and refreshing after so long in the poorly ventilated spaces he’d become accustomed to. He could feel it blowing through his hair, which was an odd feeling. He wasn’t used to having hair.
The line of light was dazzling and yellow. He came closer, breathing in the fresh air. Had he found a way out? Surely they would have guards at every exit… but then again, the Horsemen didn’t seem to care that he was wandering about.
He was sure of it now: it was daylight. Fleming hurried forward. The hum grew more intense, filling his head with sound. He thought he heard something else within the hum—a sort of whispering, although he couldn’t make out any specific words. There was a sort of beauty to the sound. He felt like the hum was trying to communicate something to him, something important that he needed to understand.
At the end of the tunnel was a door. The light was coming from a small gap at the bottom. Instead of a knob it had a big, complicated metal latch that took him a moment to figure out. He’d expected it to be locked, and was quite surprised when the latch turned easily in his hand. The door swung silently inward, revealing a blindingly bright landscape outside. The sun shone so brightly that he had to close his eyes. The hum increased. He felt his whole body humming along with it. The hum was trying to speak to him.
Outside the door was an open, grassy field. It was comfortably warm. A gentle breeze stirred the grass and carried a scent of distant rain. There were mountains not far away, huge mountains. He was out—he was free.
But he was still hungry. He turned to look down the tunnel into the darkness. If it was this easy to escape, he could do it at any time. He could go back and get some breakfast, rest a bit, and set out later when he was in a better condition to travel.
Besides, he still had to find Big John. It would be best to do more reconnaissance, maybe gather the support of a few allies. And the sun was so bright! He would have a much better chance of getting away under cover of darkness. He slipped back into the tunnel and closed the door quietly behind him. It took a couple minutes for his eyes to adjust again. The hum sang in his mind. How had he ever found it annoying? It was a beautiful sound, infusing everything around him. He started down the tunnel without looking back.
* * *
One Friday morning, Alan Spence did not show up for work. Fleming and Larson spent the morning stacking heavy wooden boxes in an unused storage area in one of the deeper levels. The boxes were filled with bricks of a white, rubbery material, each brick wrapped in clear plastic. Norge sat in a chair off to the side and watched them working with his pale gray eyes, occasionally licking his lips so they never dried out. Fleming wondered if the man secretly had gills as well. He wanted to share this joke with Larson, but was afraid of what Norge would do if he heard, so he kept it to himself.
“Better stop smiling, Flem,” Larson said, grinning in the smug way that always made Seymour want to hit him. “Croaker doesn’t like smilers.”
“I wasn’t smiling,” Fleming said.
“Be quiet,” Norge said, giving Fleming a small but painful shock to the brain. Larson didn’t get a shock, or else he hid it well. Croaker Norge seemed to like Larson better than Seymour.
The finished stacking the boxes in that room and moved to another one, where they stacked more boxes. The monotony made Fleming nostalgic for his old job as a garbage man, as grueling as that work had been. After several hours they took a break for lunch. Then there was one of the strange movies in the Horse Room, followed by exercise with Mr. Tinch. All of that time, Fleming saw no sign of Spence.
Halfway through the hour-long exercise session, Nathaniel came to watch. He sat in the second metal chair, with his back to Arthur. Arthur was still chained to his own chair, where he sat and stared at nothing all day long. No one had ever seen him anywhere other than in that chair, nor had they seen him eat or drink. But he was still alive, so they must have been feeding him something… unless Orc was able to keep Arthur’s body alive without food or water. In all the weeks Nathaniel had kept Lord Orc chained to his chair, not
a single hair had grown on Arthur’s head. He was still as bald as ever.
Croaker Norge entered the Horse Room next. He whispered something to Nathaniel, who nodded. Both of them looked straight at Fleming. That did not seem like a good thing.
Norge came over while the Society men were doing jumping jacks. He came over to Fleming until he was close enough for Seymour to smell his breath. The man even smelled like a fish. Seymour stopped his jumping jacks and stood there, breathing heavily, wondering what Norge wanted from him.
“You have anoth-anoth-another job to do,” Norge said quietly. “C-c-c-cleanup. You’ll want to w-wear gloves.”
Fleming followed Norge to the upper tunnels. He recognized the long, bright hallway, and after that he remembered the tunnel that sloped upward toward the door to the outside. This time, though, there was no horizontal line of light at the end of that tunnel. When Fleming got there and opened the door, he understood why.
Alan Spence’s body was leaning against the door. It fell to the ground when Fleming pulled the door open. Spence’s head was fifteen feet away, barely visible in the tall grass. In between were several of the sharp metal bits, shining in the sun, along with various bits of stuff that had, a short time earlier, been part of Spence. His shoulders and severed neck were charred, and there was a strong smell of cooked meat that made Fleming’s mouth water, as much as he tried to stop it. Two vultures were circling overhead, but had not yet come down to have a taste.
“Clean it up,” Norge said. “Don’t leave any tr-tr-tr… Don’t leave anything.”
This was the first time Fleming had ever seen Norge pitch in and help. The two of them wrapped Spence’s body in a sheet of plastic. They put his head in a garbage bag and carefully picked up the metal scraps. Seymour found the remains of the steel box from Spence’s collar, which had evidently been the source of the metal bits. Fleming began puzzling out what had happened. The box had exploded when Spence had left the tunnels, sending the sharp ribbons of metal through Spence’s neck. His head has been sliced clean off of his shoulders. Seymour touched the box against his own neck.
“It’s a radio bomb,” Fleming said. Norge didn’t respond, but Seymour knew it was true. They could trigger the box to explode any time they wanted. Spence had been blown up when he tried to escape. The same would have happened to Fleming if he had attempted to leave. And Norge wanted him to know it. They finished cleaning up and carried the pieces of Spence inside. When Norge shut the door, Fleming was hit with the sudden certainty that he would never see the sky again.
“Th-that’s why we save the bits of m-m-metal,” said Norge as they carried the body back through the tunnels.
“What?”
“Y-you were wondering about the m-metal,” Croaker Norge said. “As for your other question, no. I do n-not have gills.”
16
Blake Peace
Ed’s little group of followers cheered him when they saw him come around the corner. There were seven of them now. The sound of their cheering should have lifted his spirits, but seeing them camping at his doorstep just added to the weight that was already making his shoulders droop. He wished they would leave him alone. Seeing them made him feel like he had a responsibility to them that he didn’t know how to live up to.
“Blake!” one of them called. “Where did you go?”
“Did you go to fight Urizen?” said another. Ed recognized him by his red hat, which he still wore in spite of the warm weather.
“When is the battle coming? We want to fight with you!”
“Death to Lord Xenu!” yelled one man, earning angry looks from several others. Someone muttered an uncomplimentary comment about Scientologists. Ed had no idea who Xenu was, and didn’t want to know.
The red-haired one with freckles hurried up to Ed before he reached his front steps. “Hey, man,” said the red-haired fellow, “want one of these? I had them made over on Bleecker.” He handed Ed a button, one of those round pin-on buttons that usually held some kind of clever saying or political slogan. Ed held it up to take a look. It had a hand-drawn picture of Ed’s bearded face on it, with the word BLAKE at the top and PEACE at the bottom.
“Blake Peace?” Ed asked.
The man nodded enthusiastically. “Blake Peace!”
“What does that mean?”
He shrugged, still smiling.
“What’s your name?”
The young man broke into an excited smile at the fact that Ed wanted to know his name. “I’m Eugene Webster. People call me Ricky.”
Ed frowned. “Why do they call you Ricky?”
Ricky seemed taken aback. The smile faded from his face, replaced by a look of utter confusion. “Because… it’s my name. Ricky.”
“You live around here?”
Ricky shook his head. “Seattle. I hitchhiked.”
“Long way to hitchhike,” said Ed. “It’s good to meet you, Eugene. Ricky. I’m Ed.”
Ricky broke into another smile. “Nah. You’re Blake!”
Ed sighed. “My name is Ed Terwilliger. If you’re all going to keep sleeping outside my door, you should at least know my name.”
“Twooger,” Ricky tried.
“Close enough.”
“You should just go by Blake. Easier to remember. My brother always says you want people to remember your name without having to think about it. He knows all about marketing and all that stuff. Your name is like your brand. Nobody would ever remember Twooger Peace, but Blake Peace is easy.”
Ed frowned. “I guess I’ve never thought about it like that. Hey, have you guys seen Sarah lately?”
Ricky stared at him dumbly.
“Sarah. Long, brown hair―”
“Oh! You mean your wife!”
“She’s not―”
“I saw her here yesterday, maybe two days ago. I think she was looking for you. But she had to leave again.”
One of the two women in the group came closer. Pretty and curvaceous with a hint of lingering baby fat, she didn’t look old enough to be camping outside of a complete stranger’s house all summer. Most of his followers were very young; Ed wondered if their parents had any idea where they were. “She’s never home, that girlfriend of yours,” the young woman said. “You deserve a girl who stays where you want her.” She smiled at Ed, and he felt himself blush.
“I—I n-need to get going,” he stammered, backing up the steps.
Ed had a vague hope that he would find something from Sarah inside—a note, maybe. He was disappointed to find everything just as he’d left it. The place was too quiet, so he opened the window to let in some ambient noise from outside. The city had a distinctive sound to it, a combination of distant traffic and other noises that was comforting in a way. Nothing like Los Angeles. He liked New York, although he wasn’t sure he wanted to stay there through another winter.
A meeting with his friends was scheduled for that evening. It wasn’t time yet, but he wanted to clear his head. He lay on his bed and let his mind drift upward and out of his body. The ceiling unfolded above him, revealing a purple sky full of stars in a multitude of colors. A wind tore at him as he floated in the darkness—not a wind made of air, but a force that would have pulled him away into infinity if he had allowed it to. Nathaniel had warned him about that wind, a long time ago. If it took you, he had said, you would never find your way back. You would fly out beyond the stars and float forever in eternal darkness.
But the wind didn’t carry him away. He went to his own subconscious mind, a world of beautiful mountains and blue-tinged forests where every living thing held a part of what made him who he was. He settled to the ground at the edge of the deep forest and sat cross-legged, listening to the sound of the breeze through the tree branches.
His serenity only lasted a minute or two. A twig popped from somewhere within the woods, and he thought he heard the sound of footsteps in the leaves. Ed got to his feet silently and crept toward the shadows of the forest. It was too dark in there to see anything clearly, b
ut he could make out the shape of a human figure, slowly walking toward him.
He continued to hide behind a flowering bush, but she came out into the light and headed straight toward him. It was Sarah.
“You know you can’t hide,” she told him. “I can tell exactly where you are. I just watched you fly in.”
He stood there awkwardly, uncertain of what to say.
“Oh, shut up,” she said, then rushed up to kiss him. She led him into the forest to a secluded spot, where they made the most of the time they had before the others showed up for their meeting.
Afterward, tiny green shoots sprang out of the ground where they had been lying together. Sarah smiled, touched one of the seedlings, and blushed at the vivid image it brought to her mind. “I missed you,” she said. Ed noticed that she was having trouble looking him in the eye.
“Me too. When are you coming home again?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged uncomfortably. “You… you were right about Lester Myles. There was something he wasn’t telling me.”
This admission was quite surprising to him. He felt an unwise urge to say that he’d told her so, but held his tongue instead.
“He was just testing me,” she said. “To see if I could be trusted. Now that he trusts me, he gave me a promotion and a raise.”
That was not what Ed had been expecting. “A promotion? Does this mean you’ll be home more often?”
She picked up another rock and tried to make it float. It wobbled for a moment before it fell. He wondered if she was only playing with rocks so she wouldn’t have to look at him. “I don’t think so,” she said at last. “I may actually… have to travel even more.”
Ed worked hard on masking his frustration. “I see.”
“And I had to agree to a couple things.”
“Such as?”
“I can’t tell anybody about what I do at work. And I… I sorta agreed to stay on for a year,” she said sheepishly, looking and sounding very much like a guilty Theodore Cleaver.
The Music of the Machine (The Book of Terwilliger 2) Page 23