Family Secrets (The Nocturnia Chronicles Book 2)

by Thomas F Monteleone

  “Then where did he think his Hidden World came from?”

  “He said it was already there, that it’s much, much older and totally different from either of our worlds.”

  “So according to Bluthkalt, occultium keeps us separated from the Hidden World too?”

  Orin shook his head. “No. It was already separate and so it stays separate. But that’s all just part of his craziness. Not his craziest idea, however. He went way too far with that one and scared most of Nocturnia half to death.”

  “You mean the Scar, right?” Cal said.

  Orin nodded. “Yes. The Scar.”

  “I can’t imagine you Nocturnians being scared of anything,” Emma said.

  “Yeah?” Ryan added. “And what’s the Scar?”

  “Wellll,” Orin said, and Ryan thought, Another “Wellll” and I’m gonna scream! “Bluthkalt said that Nocturnia's occultium was slowly being destabilized by the Silent Ones. He claimed that when the destabilization reached the critical stage, all the world's occultium would explode and fuse into a glasslike substance. The result would be the complete dissolution of the barrier between the worlds, destroying both, leaving only the Hidden World, a dimension of strange geometries with no place for humans or Nocturnians.”

  Strange geometries? In his dream this morning Ryan had seen a weird building where the walls met at impossible angles. Was that an example of the kind of “strange geometries” Bluthkalt had been talking about? Was that why the doctor’s name and the building were in his dream? Had he had a vision of the Hidden World?

  But how? And why?

  Ryan was just about to ask when Cal pointed through the windshield at an open-bed truck heading in the other direction.

  “Hey, is that–? Yes, an Armagost Farm truck. Duck guys!”

  Ryan did just that, but kept his head high enough for a peek at the driver.

  “Ergel!”

  “What’s he doing way out here?” Emma said.

  “Heading toward the protest,” Ryan said, “but I can’t see him carrying a ‘Save The Sheeple!’ sign.”

  Where was he going? Wherever it was, Ryan had a feeling it meant bad news for him and Emma.

  16

  Ergel spotted Dillon at the protestation march – Dillon and his mother, Master Simon’s wife. So Ergel stayed in the trees, watching the boy, sure he’d contactify them two runaways. Why else would they all be gatheratin’ here if not to be together? Maybe to make fun of Ergel? What fun that would be. Larf and larf about how they pulled a fast one over on the dumb troll.

  Not so dumb. Ergel found you.

  Well, almost found you.

  Because Dillon mostly stayed near his mother, and neither of the brats approached him.

  Ergel didn’t understand. And then he did: the brats wasn’t there. They’d already left.

  But how had they got here in the first place? The hunting preservation was far from any homes. Too far to walk. The only way to get here was to motorvate.

  And that meant someone was hiding them.

  Ergel had heard of no-carns that hid humanses and helped them pass as lycans. But they could be anywhere. He didn’t know where to even begin searchifying.

  Disappointed, he headed back to the truck.

  He had to be back before his guard duty started. As the newest to joinify the Uberalls, Ergel had been assigned the nightshift. Usually nossies got the job – they didn’t like the sun and preferred to sleep in the day and stay up all night anyway. He suspected the Uberalls was testicating the new troll, to see if he’d whine and complain. Well, Ergel weren’t no whinicater. Leastways, not about guard duty. He had other matters to rumicate.

  The big question that itched him all the way back to the Uberall compound was whether or not to tell Master Simon about his son’s duplicification now… or wait till Ergel could show up with the two brats and prove it. Because if by some small chance he turned out to be wrong, he would be feeling Simon’s wrath, and Ergel wanted no parts of that.

  Maybe much better to wait. Because he had suspicions about someone back at the compound. That fixator Uberall, Teddy. A nosy rotter, that one. Hadn’t he mentionated that Ergel had arrived in one of the farm’s trucks? He wouldn’t be keepin’ an eyeball on Ergel now, would he? Well, then, Ergel would have to keep an eyeball right back on him.

  Because that Teddy had seemed awful glad at what he’d seen on that TV, just about the time the runaway girl had been on the screen. Maybe just coincidation, but he could be connected. Maybe he was even the human spyer…

  Hadn’t the boy brat said something about thinking he saw his brother? What if Teddy was that brother? Ergel didn’t care if he’d passes the not-human test, if Ergel could identificate him, he could use him to catch the brats. And then not only would Master Simon owe him, but so would Lir Falzon.

  What a pretty situation that would be.

  Ergel grinned. Oh, yes. Ergel was most certainly going to keep an eyeball – both eyeballs, actually – on Teddy the fixator. Ergel’s eyes were big. And they didn’t miss nothin’.

  17

  Try as he might, Ryan wasn’t able to turn the conversation back to Bluthkalt until everyone was seated around the Jantz’s dinner table. Before that, they had to answer all Mrs. Jantz’s questions about the sheeple hunt and the protest.

  “Why are you so interested in that monster?” Emma said.

  “You’d be interested too if you’d had my dream.”

  “You were talking about Doctor Bluthkalt?” Irina said as she ladled out vegetable soup.

  “Wellll, why not?” Orin said. “Emma and Ryan had never heard of him, and there’s so much to tell. I mean, he had quite a fall, didn’t he? I mean, going from man of the year to hunted madman.”

  “In the car you mentioned something called ‘the Scar,’” Ryan said. “What was that?”

  Irina looked dubious. “It’s complicated. Orin did you tell them about his Hidden World theory?”

  “I sure did.”

  “What about his Silent Ones theory?”

  “Didn’t get to that one.”

  “Well, the Scar story will make more sense if they know that first, don’t you think?”

  “You’re right as usual, my dear.” He slurped some soup and smacked his lips. “My, this is good.”

  “The Silent Ones?” Ryan prompted.

  “Oh, yes. Wellll, Bluthkalt said that his research had convinced him that the Silent Ones didn’t originate on Nocturnia. He said they came from the Hidden World.”

  “How’d they get here?” Ryan said. “Like Ambrose and Cal – just sort of fell through?”

  Orin shook his head. “He never really said. Don’t forget: This is all the blather of a crazy mind. The devil is in the details, as they say, and only Bluthkalt’s deranged imagination had those. He said they’d been banished from the Hidden World, that they’re trapped here on Nocturnia and desperately wanted to get back to their own dimension.”

  Cal said, “That’s why they’re supposedly destabilizing the occultium – if they can destroy it, they can also destroy the dimensional divide between Nocturnia and Humania, obliterating of both worlds and–”

  “Wait,” Emma said. “Why will that ‘obliterate’ us?”

  Ryan thought he knew. “Because both worlds occupy the same place in different dimensions. When those dimensions merge, two objects cannot exist in the same space. The result is the destruction of both.”

  Orin was grinning. “Smart lad we’ve got here.”

  Ryan thought it was pretty obvious but stopped himself from saying so.

  “Thanks, Mister Jantz.”

  “Like I told you: Call me Orin.”

  Emma looked unconvinced. “But wouldn’t the Hidden world be destroyed too?”

  “No,” Cal said. “According to Bluthkalt, the Hidden World occupies its own separate dimension independent of the Veil, so it wouldn’t be affected. When the occultium goes, and Humania and Nocturnia are destroyed, only the Hidden World will remain,
leaving the Silent Ones free to return to it. They’ll have only one place to go: home.”

  Could it be true? Could that be the frozen wasteland that Ryan saw in his dream? The Hidden World? Or was it somewhere here on Nocturnia?

  “Was he ever able to prove any of this?” Emma said, stealing Ryan’s next question.

  Irina laughed. “Of course not. But then, no one could prove him wrong either.”

  Orin grinned. “That’s how crazy geniuses work. They can’t prove themselves right, but you can’t prove them wrong.”

  “Welll,” Cal said – Not him too! Ryan thought–”a whole load of occultium exploded.”

  “But that didn’t prove the occultium was unstable,” Irina said. “Bluthkalt blew it up.”

  Ryan had to know. “What’d he do?”

  “He blew up a mountain range.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right,” Orin said. “The Spinal Range in the northwest corner of the Afric continent is mostly occultium. Wellll, it used to be a mountain range. Bluthkalt said that was where occultium destabilization was most apparent. He created a new element he called cardonite he said would stabilize the occultium. He set up a lab in the mountains to manufacture this cardonite stuff and then… wellll, it instead of no one knows for sure what happened, but the whole southern half of the Spinal Mountain Range exploded and burned, killing thousands.”

  “Good thing that part of the world is so hard to live in,” Irina said. “If the foothills had been more populated, he might have killed a million or more.”

  Orin was nodding. “And if the reaction hadn't burned out, it might have destroyed the whole continent. As it was, a huge valley of blackened glass is all that remains of that portion of the Spinal Mountains.”

  “People call it the Scar,” Cal said. “Bluthkalt’s cardonite started the reaction.”

  Orin handed his soup bowl to Irina for a second helping. “The thing was, you’d think Bluthkalt would have gone into hiding after something like that. But no. He was out, strutting about, saying that this vindicated his theories. It was – what was the word he used, dear?”

  “Incontrovertible,” Irina said.

  “Right. Incontrovertible proof that occultium really was becoming unstable.”

  Irina smiled, “But as for the rest of the world, it was incontrovertible proof that he was unstable.”

  “Right. All he’d proven was that he’d found a way to blow up occultium. And so all his cardonite was destroyed and its manufacture banned forever. Bluthkalt was arrested, tried, convicted of mass murder, and sentenced to disassembly.”

  “Disassembly?” Emma said, making her disgusted face. “What–?”

  “He was a pluriban, dear,” Irina said. “They’re put together from parts of others–”

  “You know,” Ryan said, nudging her. “Like the Frankenstein monster?”

  “–and so they have to be taken, well, you know, apart for a death sentence. I don’t approve of the death penalty, but in Doctor Bluthkalt’s case – I mean his being a mass murderer and a pluriban to boot – I wasn’t so sure it was a bad thing.”

  The disassembly part didn’t jibe with what he’d been told at the Uberall compound.

  “But I heard that Falzon–”

  “Right, right,” Orin said. “Things didn’t go as planned. During Bluthkalt’s transfer to a more secure location before his disassembly, he escaped. A huge reward was placed on him, dead or alive, and time was of the essence.”

  “Why?” Ryan said.

  “Because he was a pluriban. He could build himself another body, transfer his mind into a new head, and disappear into the Pluribus Union. No one would be able to find him.”

  “Did…did they catch him?” Emma said, leaning forward, her food forgotten.

  Ryan knew the answer, but he was glad to see his sister so into the story now.

  Orin shrugged. “Well, yes and no. He came to Falzon in his new body, looking for help. It’s said that Falzon doubted he was really Bluthkalt at first, but then he offered all sorts of proof. His old co-researcher, Doctor Koertig, confirmed that these were things that only Bluthkalt could know.”

  “So what happened?” Emma said.

  Ryan knew, and relished saying it. “Falzon stepped on his head and crushed it like an egg.”

  “Ew!” Emma said, leaning away from him. “Ew-ew-ewwww!”

  “It’s true,” Orin said. “Falzon became a hero. And after they found Bluthkalt’s abandoned former body, they gave Falzon the reward money, which he used to help build his Uberall movement.”

  “Speaking of Falzon,” Cal said. “Dillon told Cal and me that he’s gone back home to visit his family. This could be the best time for him to get word to Telly that you two are okay.”

  “I hope he can,” Emma said. “Telly must be worried sick.”

  But Ryan couldn’t help wondering what a rakshasa reunion must be like. With their short tempers and all, did they ever fight? Or just hang out around a barbecue grill?

  18

  Kolkut

  Yeti-Rakshasa Commonwealth

  Falzon stood on the balcony of the central keep of his father’s estate, performing a centuries-old breathing exercise to clear his mind and flush away his growing aggressive urges. Looking down on the steaming city of Kolkut where its millions of lower castes swarmed like beetles, Falzon recalled his childhood days when he roamed its narrow alleys looking for trouble. Memories of the many battles for supremacy from those days brought the hint of a smile to the corners of his viperfish mouth. Saliva dripped from his long teeth and he wiped it on the sleeve of his uniform.

  The mere hours he’d spent in his homeland felt like eternities. Anger and rage had been pressurizing within him and he knew he must control these emotions – especially when surrounded by so many family members as well as political associates from the Commonwealth. Control them until he would need to unleash them against Gupta’s champion.

  And he knew that confrontation was coming – even though none of his family or parliamenteers had suggested such a thing. Did they think him a fawning fool? He knew why they’d all cajoled him into taking this long-awaited visit to his home country. They wanted to rein him in like a backyard pony, to re-immerse him in the local affairs of state, and thereby disband his pan-national movement – the Uberalls.

  Never!

  A spike of molten rage rose in him like volcanic magma. Falzon exhaled a hot breath as he forced himself to remain in control. Somewhere in the distance, down by the offal-strewn shores of the River Hooly, a clock tower gonged the demise of the previous hour. Time to greet his adversaries.

  Entering his suite from the balcony, he addressed the family servant who stood by the door to the outer hall.

  “Let them in.”

  The servant, an elderly rakshasa with a withered left arm and a crooked spine, turned slowly and opened the double doors. Falzon regarded the servant with deserved contempt. In the old days such cripples would have been killed as infants; but now they were allowed not only to survive, but to grow old.

  We are getting soft like the rest of the world, he thought.

  But that would soon change. Falzon had plans for all the fools around him – and that included the group preparing to pass through his open doors. He regarded them, his head tilted to one side, with one eye focused on the group – an aggressive pose culled from the thousands of positions in the Rakshasa lexicon of body language, and he was certain no one would fail to notice.

  His father, Prannath, was the first to enter the chamber, quickly followed by Ashima, his mother, and Dheeraj, his younger brother. They all stood in silence waiting for him to greet them.

  “My family,” he said after a pause. “What a pleasssure to have usss all together like thisss.”

  Prannath, wearing his formal caste robe, approached him. “You know full well why we called this meeting.”

  “Before you confront Gupta.” His mother added her coda to the message.

  �
��You are wasting your time…and more importantly, you are wasting mine.”

  Dheeraj stepped forward to join his father. He was tall, but much thinner than Falzon. He wore a military uniform with a rank suitable to his high caste, but looked more like a merchant than a warrior. Falzon doubted his brother had earned his command position; he had always been less than forceful in his ways.

  “Brother, we need you here at home. The truce you forged is a fragile one without your presence.”

  Prannath held up a single taloned finger – it had been manicured to be less sharp and more decorative. “Without you and your tactical geniusss, General Toussaint and the Baronesss are beginning to forget themselvesss.”

  Falzon was quite aware of Toussaint’s recent saber-rattling. The popular zombie leader had been exhorting his native Necrotia along with the New Colonies in the North and the South to ally with their former enemy, the Nosferatu Federation. That would be for only one reason – to challenge the sovereignty of the Yeti-Rakshasa Commonwealth.

  “The General felt the wrath of our armiesss and hasss no desssire to do ssso again. He isss a liar and a fake! And asss long asss we ssstill have sssun in the sssky, the vampiresss are no threat to me.”

  Dheeraj adjusted the fall of his uniform jacket, stood tall and at semi-attention. “Have you been ssso busssy with your… your new ‘movement’ that you have ignored NF troopsss marshalling at the Eassstern border?”

  He looked like a boy playing solider and Falzon wanted to slap him. The only thing stopping him was the presence of their mother. The last thing he wanted to hear were her piercing shrieks of displeasure.

  “The nosssiesss have been there for yearsss. Better the Baronesss ussse ssstatuesss. They never move.”

  No one spoke for a moment, until Ashima edged past her husband to touch Falzon’s sleeve – a gesture that would earn anyone else a slash of his claws. No one dared touch the Lir. Ever. But she was his mother and enjoyed privileges such as no one else in the Commonwealth or anywhere else a rakshasa might dwell.

  “My ssson, I am not here to argue with you or discusss politicsss.” Ashima stared him directly in the eye. “Asss your mother I asssk you take up your resssponsibility asss your country’sss protector.”