In this state and with gunfire sounding below, she presses the shard against her right wrist, presses, and with one fluid swipe, with a Beethoven symphony soaring somewhere within, the deed is done. She drops the shard and gazes into the white depths of the slice, the cloven flesh exposed, bloodless, before blood begins to well and spill. The stream of crimson glory cascades slow and steady over the ridges in the palm of her hand, filling them before dripping out and down to smear liquid death over the broken glass below. Panic sets in, that unspeakable and unbearable understanding that it is about to happen, that death is standing just outside the next minute. She sits down, leans against the wall and experiences a moment of giddiness before calm supersedes everything.
Death has always fascinated Lexi Montaigne, the vast unknown, the joy of learning something no one can tell her, and the ecstasy of becoming . . . something else. The blood clots quickly but the gaping slice allows too much pressure to permit thick blood to dam it.
What greater joy can one know, she has often wondered, than to become something new?
Her vision fades and the world slows. Lexi of the time-shaft watches with stoic detachment from within, perceiving everything. But then the suddenness of the door bursting open shocks her, dislodging her from Lexi Montaigne.
The woman’s pulse wanes to the stillness of death.
Lewis, gun in hand and sweat glistening on raging face, takes in the blood-drenched floor. His eyes land on the woman sitting there like the Crucified Christ brought down from the cross, a blood trail proceeding from her destitute form. He moves for her with mouth agape but a sound downstairs rips his attention to outside the bathroom and he runs away to a window.
He jumps to the ground and bolts for the truck. Satisfied, Lexi turns her potent gaze upon the time-shaft, looking weeks ahead to the once and future Day of Wormwood.
Inside the facility again, she watches the Device belch amethyst streams of radiant lightning, vaporizing the brimstone. She sees the control screen as it calculates coordinates to destroy the meteor beyond the harbinger Wormwood. As the Device builds and prepares to fire, Cotes, no longer interrupted by Lexi Montaigne, strides up to it and shuts it down.
The star beyond Wormwood falls. Its waves of ionized gases sweep the globe.
Had she lungs, Lexi might sigh or perhaps scream. Instead she moves back into the time-shaft and out of this latest damned alternate universe. She ponders events once more, considers the vast complexity of consequences and the interplay of the numerous variables, the parties involved. There seems no end to the intricate web, a veritable Gordian knot of Time that stands beyond even her capacity to untangle.
The quandary seems to be based on the fact that when she alters one variable, an entirely new set of parameters appear in consequence. It seems to her now that if she could remove the factors leading to Cotes being in the facility on that fateful day then she could prevent the parameters that lead to the devastation his ignorant actions allow to happen.
She travels along the time-shaft to various time-space positions, searching for the apropos moment to intervene. A lengthy search proves fruitless.
Trying a new tack, she observes the unfolding of events in space, until stumbling on a stellar mass black hole in the spiral system. Its sheer mass and profound vacuum of energy destabilizes every other element within 15 parsecs, even energizing her apathetic essence.
She reaches out with a shoot of amaranthine vitality, and staggers under the onslaught.
Data—galaxy-vast, infinite in scope—pours out of this black hole, threatens to overload Lexi with sheer enlightenment. To know, to comprehend the incomprehensible thrusts her into another transmutation, this time into the nexus of the universe itself. In this latest phase of her evolution, she reaches through the pleated curtain of data and perceives a glorious solution. There were more variables at play than she had considered in the four futile attempts thus far.
Virgil a disembodied voice caresses the ether.
Virgil was the key player in this Game of Fate; it was he who had helped to make Cotes the obsessive man he was, and it was he who had led Howard Hughes to learn of and then fund the Tower, thereby ensuring its continued location at Arfion where the SCIA would have knowledge of it and where it could—possibly—one day destroy the secret meteor beyond Wormwood.
And it was Virgil who’d led Lexi to the obsession that culminated in her transformation.
The Day of Days then is December 6, 1941.
She understands this instantly, and it is as if the day has been waiting for her all along, an unsung date just longing to be known. Lexi races along the time-shaft as a starling of light, traversing the event horizon.
Chapter 47
Time and space abate to black vaporous clouds, languishing on the other side of the event horizon. She arrives naked in a mound of snow just outside the Batavia Primary factory. With intangible faculties she feels the lacy growths of snowflakes and knows the pattern that connects each and every one. What had once baffled her in complexity now seems no more complicated than a paper-mache vase.
The air passes through her at a serene 3.2 mph with just a whisper of warning on its back. Silent as a neutrino she traverses along the fresh powder. She leaves no footprints, feels no cold, but she is visible: someone five stories up, is watching.
It feels right and good to be here as the lightning movement of data flows through her, allowing Lexi to envision her relevance in the grand scope of reality.
She reaches the doors, feeling the eyes of Virgil Montaigne spying on her. Like air through a screen, she passes through the massive doors. After entering the basement where Dorl conducts his personal affairs, she scans for life-forms. There is only one person here, a woman in her late twenties who is busy conducting chemical tests on the latest shipment of fluids, combining and altering the distillate liquids into a compound the government will later designate Lot 111.
Lexi inhales all the knowledge this place had to offer. “Genius,” she whispers. In a moment in which she fears she might be repelled by a solid psyche, she merges with the female chemist. The merging is seamless—nothing like it had been with Cotes—almost as if this woman has been created specifically to receive her.
Once Lexi has consumed and filtered the life of this chemist, she fires as few synapses. A slender hand obediently hovers in the air before her, gleaming like boiled bone under the pale light. There is a tender fragility to this hand and to this arm, a sort of wholesomeness. Lexi smiles despite the strain of containing her essence within a human body.
Now this Lexi of the time-shaft/chemist woman amalgam—Miss Drol—stands and scans the pharmacy behind her, searching for the completed Lot 111, which Lexi knows from Miss Drol’s memory, possesses the chemical name of Somna Oblivis Hydrochloride. SOH.
A voice from the silky shadows of the basement stays her hand.
“You want to take the blue vial to your left,” says the clear accented voice. “That is SOH concentrate. You will need it. Virgil is . . . tenacious.”
There is something familiar about this voice.
“You are making an honorable sacrifice,” the voice interrupts her thoughts. “To become one with Miss Drol is to remain forever as Miss Drol.”
Grabbing the blue vial, she turns to look upon Dorl.
He walks out of the shadows like a dream crossing the barrier into waking life. Lexi—Miss Drol—does not ask. “I am like you now.” The words linger heavy in the air between them.
Dorl smiles. “It’s strange. I see many things. I never saw you coming.” He sighs. “You will have to hide now, like me. Forever.” Dorl steps close and appears to vibrate as his various constitutions collide and bond, ever dancing the quantum eclipse. “What you do, do quickly, and be sure no agents follow. The explosion is coming. Go, now!”
He blends into the darkness. Miss Drol senses the stench of fate in the air, the heady scent of numerous combustible elements preparing to ignite. She climbs the steps in a haze of shadows under the flow of heat
from ancient furnaces. On her way out she grabs an umbrella.
Outside the world is silent and still, every bush and tree a montage to melancholy.
She walks as Batavia Primary explodes in her wake her, flaming debris floating down all around, sizzling where it meets snow. Miss Drol cranks open the frilly black umbrella and sets it low to conceal her face as she crosses the street in a rush to flee the crumbling tower.
Sirens wail across town, racing from the Batavia Police Station behind screaming fire engines. She jogs across the slick sidewalks to 17 Vernon Avenue.
A smile creases her face as Miss Drol tries the knob at 17 and finds it unlocked. Virgil’s paranoia has not yet begun. She enters and closes the door behind her. Moves through the two story home, careful not to disturb anything. Every window receives a once over; those found open are closed and locked, along with the front door. When satisfied that the agents she knows will come this very night will at least be slowed, Miss Drol departs.
She walks under the deep shadow of the umbrella through chill air to the Office of County Records building on East Main. Gusts follow her in, mixing with the rank mustiness of old dead paper; the air seems uncertain which aroma should dominate.
Miss Drol’s footsteps echo against the high puke-green ceilings that seemed to ooze in this flame-broiled heat. There is only one clerk—apparently the rest have taken off early to lurk among the ruins of Batavia Primary.
Straight up to the counter Miss Drol marches, lowers her umbrella. The woman behind the counter looks up. Her mouth mocks the letter ‘O’ as she removes her glasses. Little eyes gaze up at Miss Drol as bone dry fingers snarl at the lenses, wiping them clean. Spectacles nice and clear, the clerk returns them to her face, and promptly jerks, squinting severely. Her chair crashes against the floor as she backs up, hands leading the way as she flees towards the exit. In her haste, the clerk slams head first into a support column and slumps unconscious to the floor.
Miss Drol sighs as she recalls Dorl’s words: You are like me now. You will have to hide.
She spends the next hour pouring over the shelves and filing cabinets, removing every tangible record of Virgil Montaigne and burning them all in a metal wastepaper basket. With movements as swift as thought she uses laughably arcane machines to forge a new identity for Virgil, an entire life created in the span of an hour, including: a license and birth certificate, work records, and even a few outstanding tickets for realism.
With the new dossier in hand Miss Drol retrieves her lacy funereal umbrella. Concealed in its shadows she walks outside. Though she won’t know it for another few hours, the clerk is kind enough to lend her Chevrolet to Miss Drol.
It is the hour of twilight, when the last stubborn embers of light fade to gray. Sirens made dull by distance wail as Miss Drol makes her way to Vernon, eyes darting in search of the agents to come. She turns onto Vernon, pauses at the end of the street to send out invisible feelers, which return with the joyous news that she is not too late. After trudging through the snow she enters his house, each move calculated to avoid the slightest sound, though she is aware Virgil is already lost to liquor.
In stealth she walks up to within feet of Virgil’s golden wing back chair. She reaches out and touches his whiskered face. He is younger than she has ever seen him, barely into his thirties; a boy in a man’s body, weary of the world already.
She removes the syringe swimming with concentrated SOH and plunges it into Virgil’s neck. The blue fluid instantly colors his veins and surrounding flesh with azure patches of bruised oblivion. Spasms take him, the blue swathe stretching thin as it courses through his nervous system and breaches the blood-brain-barrier. At last the paroxysm ceases. The man goes still, his system overrun with SOH and booze.
Miss Drol tries to haul him up but stumbles with the effort. She smiles. Despite possessing a compendium of knowledge sufficient to make her the Queen of Data, she lays claim to no more than the physical strength of a human—a petite one at that.
The smile flees as she senses a disturbance on the other side of the city: federal trucks have arrived at the station, trucks filled with men wearing fedoras. As she drags Virgil out of his chair, she is aware that the agent in charge across the city is demanding Captain Colson’s cooperation, insisting the man provide a list of employees of Batavia Primary.
Even as she drags Virgil out through the door and over the snow, the agents come for him down Main. With a mighty effort and not without a half dozen expletives, Miss Drol shoves Virgil up into the clerks’ pale green 1939 Chevrolet Coupe. The trucks with the agents turn down Vernon, their headlights illuminating neighbors’ cars and houses until someone in charge corrects this egregious newbie mistake. The lights are all doused.
Miss Drol turns to make sure the prostrate man in the back seat is still breathing. There is no precedent for the amount of SOH he has been given. Satisfied by his snores, she eases the Chevrolet out of the driveway and down the street away from the encroaching agents.
She smiles with her entire face, each silken crease a mound of merry flesh, the whole of her essence exulting in the knowledge that perhaps, in this fifth descent, she has succeeded in the absence of violence, where before she had failed in four brutal attempts.
On Route 5 she flicks on the lights and radio; it is going to be a long trip and she feels like listening to some Beethoven.
Chapter 48
1941
Virgil felt like he had just run a marathon after swimming across Lake Erie. Through the raging pain and sickened senses he struggled to rise. He fell twice.
There was a new golden wing-back recliner at the edges of vision. He staggered over to it, plopped down with a loud sigh. Squeezing the bridge of his nose, he tried to mitigate the pulsating pain in his noodle—to no affect. Where am I? Who am I? He waited to rise until the blazing sun filtering through the windows became a sad memory of light. Then he opened the red oak door to the stoop and bent down to retrieve the paper, as though by habit. He wondered at his actions, at how he knew to do this when he couldn’t even say who he was.
Back inside he enjoyed the familiar thick crinkling of the paper against the pads of his fingers, the scent of fresh ink and the sound it all made when he flicked it open.
Why is this familiar but not my name?
He read the SCOTT CITY NEWS label and tried not to acknowledge the fact that it was unfamiliar. “Kansas.” He rolled the State on his tongue—it reminded him of the salty tang of play dough. Then he read the date: December 9, 1941. And then his still-blurred vision fell upon the fat black letters.
WAR!
“War?”
There was something apocryphal in that word. He didn’t believe it. He might not remember his name but he knew—by the intuition of a true American—that America was not at war.
A buzzer went off somewhere. Virgil fumbled into the kitchen after the sound, arriving just as it stopped. A glass of water stood sweating on the shelf, its glistening purity alluring, beckoning. He hoisted it, enjoyed the coolness of the sweating glass against his fingers almost as much as the rapture of the liquid flowing down his throat.
I like water. Simple, but it was a start, sure as sure.
This personal knowledge felt good, like sliding into an old pair of jeans, each faded contour hugging the flesh at all the right places and waving loose where appropriate. Through the bottom of the glass he saw that the shelf was lined with papers; important looking papers for their official insignias and extravagant signatures. Gasping for air after quaffing all the water in one liberal gulp, he set it down and picked up the papers.
Eyes perused the birth certificate first as though drawn to this document. “Maro Eyquem. July sixteenth, 1910. Scott City Hospital.” He raised his eyes and squinted against the humming bulbs overhead. “What a goofy name.” The documents seemed official enough, all the right signatures and seals and such, the social security card was even soft and pliable with age, the numbers gently faded. It was all here—his entire
life history.
Still, he didn’t believe it.
But what choice did he have? The final paper he lifted was a note, terse and enigmatic.
Take the 127 train from the Hlavni nardazi station in Prague on October 28, 1953.
Chapter 49
2012
Miss Drol let ten minutes pass after the bell rang before unlocking the three deadbolts and removing the oak bar. She looked out at the lone cloud in the late afternoon sky as it hovered past.
“Glorious.”
The Victorian-influenced BB Dakota jacket she wore was swallowed by an embellished pot-shaped umbrella so large and dark that it came down to her elbows.
These precautions had become old confidantes over the last seventy-one years.
Hands sheathed in leather grasped the package and dropped it inside. The clatter of clicking locks echoed through the foyer, followed by the rhythmic tapping of her Doc Martens against the gleaming oak floor. She enjoyed this part of her day, the simple act of retrieving a package, the joy of being wrapped in autumnal gusts. It reminded her of the World Series.
“I locked the shop up,” a black man with a flawless face said. Of all her employees, he was the only one who could ever sneak up on her. “Will that be all for the night, Miss Drol?” He sipped from a cup of tea—Earl Grey—as he waited for her answer. Calm as a sloth.
“When will the shipment of Somna arrive?”
“On the first,” he said. “Same time as the regimented capacitors from Indonesia.”
“Excellent,” she said. “We will be able to enter the Second Phase right after the Series. That will be all for tonight, Cotes.” As she marched by, he tipped his white trilby ever-so-slightly.
Back in her office where a soundtrack of ambient space trickled out of six XPlod speakers, she locked the door and sat down at the desk facing a bank of screens.
The box cutter slid over the top, slicing the throat of packaging tape, revealing the contents within. Miss Drol yanked out a book rolled in bubble-wrap, yet another item she had discovered on Amazon, this one with unrestrained mirth. Grabbing the remote, she clicked on the Ninth Symphony.
The Fifth Descent of Lexi Montaigne Page 27