by Perrin Briar
“Why did you run the experiment the way you did?” Lady Maltese said. “I don’t see how it can show you much, beyond how creative the participant is at guessing the use of a given object.”
“Except, of course, that wasn’t what we were really testing,” Bryan said. “We didn’t care if the person could figure out what the use of their item was. That wasn’t our real test. We were testing something entirely different.”
“There wasn’t much else within the test, was there?” Lord Maltese said.
“On the face of it, no,” Bryan said. “But there was if you think back clearly. The real test was the participant’s reaction to what was in the box.”
“The person’s reaction?” Lord Maltese said.
“Yes,” Bryan said. “The human mind is exceptionally good at distinguishing emotions. We might disagree with very subtle emotions, but the big explosive ones—anger, happiness, confusion etc—are almost always universally agreed. That was why there were four of us, the whole family, in the room. We were each gauging the participant’s reaction to the item in the box. If we all agreed what the emotion was—which we almost universally did—then we knew who we were looking for and who we could safely ignore.
“There were a couple of participants in this very hall who we considered potentials for having come from the surface. Why? Because their expressions were not what we were expecting. They may very well have shown surprise at what was in the box, who wouldn’t with the futuristic fantasy objects we’d put in there?
But it was the reaction to that surprise that we were really looking for. How did they feel about being surprised? Angry? Confused? Those emotions would have been totally understandable given the situation. But relief? Satisfaction? Happiness? These are not likely. And that is what we used to identify the person from the surface.”
“Why didn’t you just ask everyone?” Lord Maltese said. “I’m sure the person from the surface would have admitted where they came from.”
“No,” Bryan said. “We don’t believe they would. They’re so used to hiding in plain sight, so used to acting, that we would never have been able to identify them, not without the latest in detection technology from the surface. We just had us.”
“Then who is it?” Lord Maltese said. “Save us the suspense and reveal to us who this mysterious surfacer is, who has so successfully been hiding amongst us all these years.”
“Very well,” Bryan said. “But the result might come as quite a shock.”
He took a deep breath and turned to face the lord’s family. Finally his eyes shifted to the figure sitting beside the lord in her high backed throne-like chair.
“It’s Lady Maltese,” Bryan said.
42.
A DEATHLY silence filled the great hall. You could have heard a pin drop. One thousand pairs of eyes turned as one to look at the Lady Maltese, whose face was carved from stone.
The lord smacked his fists on the armrests of his armchair and got to his feet.
“This is outrageous!” he said. “We give you food, lodging, the use of our guards and our great hall, and you accuse my wife, Lady Maltese, of being from the surface? She and her family have been here for generations! Her family can be traced right back to the very origins of our town. Why, if you go to England on the surface I’m sure you’ll find she has evidence of her roots going back even farther.”
“Yes,” Bryan said. “I believe you.”
“Then why are you pointing the finger of accusation at my beloved?” Lord Maltese said.
“Because she may not originally be from her noble house,” Bryan said. “She may have taken the original noble daughter’s position in the household, may have usurped her place, all in an effort to take control of the town. She is from the surface. She is the one with the engineering abilities.
“Do you think me a fool?” Lord Maltese said. “Don’t you think I would have noticed—that someone would have noticed—if my lady was from the surface?”
“You don’t find what you’re not looking for,” Bryan said.
“How would she even be able to do what you say?” Lord Maltese said. “She runs a household. She does not have the time to design such things, even if she were capable.”
“She retires every day, does she not?” Zoe said, stepping forward. “To her chambers, where she likes to be alone to sit and contemplate. And knit. She showed me some of her knitting once. I was astonished. I’ve never seen a faultless piece of work like that before. It was unlike anything a human can do, without fault.
“It was made by a machine. She will have it hidden in her chambers somewhere, I’m sure. She put it on while she sneaked out of her rooms and into Jeffrey’s tower, plying him with alcohol laced with a sedative, to send him to sleep. She encouraged him to draw what he dreamed, but they were normal dreams, and of little meaning. Simple lumps and shapes we’ve all had over the years.
“Meanwhile, she drew the detailed designs. She even made them. All while Jeffrey slept. And when she was done, she returned to her chambers, where she put away the knitting machine and took up the needles. She never really knitted a single stitch. All this could be forgiven, of course. A little harmless covering up. We could all understand that.
“But it’s not all she’s done over the years. She killed Jeffrey, no doubt in an attempt to conceal her tracks, by letting Jeffrey take the fall for the murder, just as he had taken credit for her inventions. But it was she who killed Cynthia in town, all to distract attention from the dragon she either installed here or simply manipulated.
“We’re not sure how she did that, how she brought the T-Rex here from another world, or if it was blind luck the dinosaur came here at the same time she did, but in either case, she took full advantage of it. She altered the dinosaur so it could breathe fire, to make it more of a danger to this town with its wooden walls. She controls the monster somehow, perhaps via an implant in its brain. Such things aren’t unheard of on the surface.”
“I don’t believe that,” Lord Maltese said. “Any of it.”
“You don’t have to believe me,” Bryan said. “Look at your wife.”
The lord seemed unable to do so, afraid of what he might see on her face. Bryan felt sorry for him. What if there was confirmation on her features? What if she nodded and it showed him who she truly was? What if all these years had been a sham and a farce, an act, that she never really loved him. And the children…
The children.
They would be the greatest tragedy of all, conceived in a web of lies. They would be the living embodiment of her manipulation. Despite the difficulty, Lord Maltese finally began to turn and face his lady.
His expression turned stone cold and pale.
Lady Maltese had a small smile on her face, a smile that had no place on her delicate features. The family was right. She was from the surface.
43.
“THIS CAN’T be true,” Lord Maltese said. “Please tell me it’s not true.”
“It’s true,” Lady Maltese said.
The lord gave a whimper and staggered back. Someone might have planted a blade in his ribs. He looked at Lady Maltese like he’d never seen her before. Perhaps he hadn’t, at least not the real her.
Lady Maltese shifted her speech pattern, what Zoe suspected was her true accent. She recognized it as somewhere on the upper east coast.
“My lady,” Lord Maltese said. “Why are you talking like that?”
“Because it’s my real voice, you fool,” Lady Maltese said. “Don’t you recognize truth when you hear it? I’m forgetting. Of course you don’t.”
The lord stumbled back again, as if struck by a fierce blow.
“I love you,” he said.
“That’s what happens when one casts the spell of infatuation upon another, is it not?” Lady Maltese said. “The irrational inability to see what’s right in front of their noses.”
“But… how?” Lord Maltese said.
“How could I outwit a simpleton such as yourself?” Lady
Maltese said. “With great ease, as it turned out. How could I outwit the nitwits living in this town? With even greater ease. The real difficulty was trying not to lose my own wits in this place.”
The locals watched the scene like it was the climax to their favorite play. They were silent, gawping as the scene unfolded. The main players were the lord’s family, the most revered family in the whole town. To watch this play out was both fascinating and heartbreaking at the same time.
“But… why?” Lord Maltese said.
“Because on the surface, my whole life I’d been a nothing,” Lady Maltese said. “There’s no way I was going to let myself be a nothing down here too.”
“But you’re an engineer,” Lord Maltese said. “The things you can do… You could have been famous.”
“And still looked down on by my social superiors,” Lady Maltese said. “There is always somebody better. Never forget that. There is always somebody better to look down on you and sneer. I wasn’t going to put up with that any longer. I was going to be top dog down here, and no one was going to stop me from doing it. No one.”
“But how couldn’t someone recognize you for who you were?” Zoe said. “Someone would have noticed someone new turning up here. Just like they all knew we weren’t from here originally. Especially someone in your position—as a lady.”
“Which is why I had to be so careful,” Lady Maltese said. “The hardest part was getting that first job. Almost all work comes by reference. And so I had to befriend some of the locals, for them to assume who I was, who my family were. But that couldn’t last forever. I needed something more solid, more concrete if I was to climb the social ladder.
“But my story actually begins far from here, up on the surface. You can’t know what it is to want more than you have—really want more than you have—when you have nothing to begin with.
“You are right, I was an engineer on the surface. A good one, as it turns out. But I was nothing more. I wasn’t a wife, a mother, nor even a daughter after my parents were taken from me in a car crash the previous summer. I met men, but they used me and then became disinterested, wishing never to see me again. I was about ready to throw it all in, to toss myself off the building I was then working on. But there was a builder who spoke to me, talked me down. He smiled at me. A warm smile, and I was captivated by him.
“He took me to dinner, not at expensive restaurants—he couldn’t afford it, but I didn’t care for food anyway. I slept with him. And he was still there by the next morning. We saw each other often. And then, one day, he stopped calling me. I met him on the building site, but he was terse.
“I later found out the other builders knew about us, and he was embarrassed because I was his boss. I told him it didn’t matter to me, that only he mattered, that I loved him. But it didn’t matter. He’d already made up his mind. He wouldn’t see me again.
“I was so embarrassed. I thought he liked me. I felt a flash of anger then, not at myself, which was usually the case, but at him. I wanted to kill him, to stab him in the chest and tear out his heart just as he had torn out mine! It was the first, but certainly not the last, time I felt such powerful emotions. I wanted the ground to swallow me up, and it did, though not right then.
“I was making my plans to gut him. I had my knife and I was going to blindly stab him in the chest while no one was around. I was going to tear him to pieces, but it wasn’t to be, as, the night I was waiting for him outside his local drinking hole, I stood in wait in the shadows, and just when I was going to make my move, I felt a sudden pang of guilt.
“Could I do this, I wondered. Could I take someone’s life? And I hesitated. But it did not change my mind. I could do this, and furthermore, I would do it. I would do it in a way that they would write about in the newspapers, and I didn’t even care if I was caught. But I never got to carry out that first act of vengeance. The ground opened up and swallowed me whole.
“I ended up here, in this backward world. I was depressed when I first arrived, not recognizing it for the opportunity it represented. I dug, using tools when I could, my hands when they broke. I was demented with desperation. I thought I’d been punished and sent to hell for what I was planning on carrying out. Then I realized just how much of an advantage it could prove to be someone from the future.
“I wiped out an entire family in order to fill that blank space of my backstory. I became Judy, the eldest daughter of a poor family on the outskirts of town, the only survivor of a savage attack. The town will remember the murder of the Moseleys. Ostracized and forgotten by this town, they provided me with the ideal opportunity to set myself up as a part of your town. I’ve always had a skill with accents, not that it ever proved more useful than a cheap party trick in the past. But now, finally, it might be of use.
“The townsfolk turned on each other, eventually finding the killer in the mad but harmless local Potty. He wasn’t guilty, of course, but he fit the roll of a savage killer easily enough, especially when I gave them the eyewitness testimony the prosecutors so desperately needed. And then it was a simple matter of hanging him. In my quieter moments I find myself thinking I saw the flash of realization in his eyes as the rope tightened. But of course, he was unable to speak, even without the rope around his neck.
“Potty was quite mad, useless to the town. He became like a mascot. I did everyone a favor—including the luckless Potty—by having him put down. And in his death, I was reborn. I was given the position of chambermaid in the noble Marsh family’s castle, who took pity on me. It matters little how lowly a position one holds at the beginning of a career, I find. It matters only how lofty a situation one ends up.
“And there was only one position I had my eye on: that of lady of the town. And I saw my opportunity in the ridiculous, but well-meaning clause that haunts every lord: that any member of the town may take the lord’s position. But there was a catch, if one checks the small print. Anyone wishing to ascend must at least be married to a noble of sufficient rank. It was a wrinkle, but a minor one.
“I was struck with luck as I had a more than passing resemblance to the daughter of Lord Marsh. Even the young Lady Marsh noticed. She used me on several occasions to dress in her clothes and attend events as herself, events she had no interest at all in attending. She never knew she was lining the innards of her own coffin when she did that.
“I took full advantage of the situation and used the opportunity to practice my impression of the young lady, even going so far as to assume her mannerisms and speech patterns. She was more than thrilled with my performance, and even gave me pointers on how I might improve. I did not require her directions. I pretended to incorporate them in any case. It’s remarkable how people see themselves in comparison to how others really see them, don’t you think? It’s always likely to be less flattering than one expects.
“And so, there I was, with the means and ability to take the young lady’s position and social status. What is a young ambitious lady to do when so freely given the tools she requires to carry out her plans? The wealth and power I’d always desired were close at hand. The young lady met her end with the sharp business side of a shovel.
“A small, but tender funeral was held for the unfortunate Judy Moseley, the last of her name. She had lived more in the past year than she had the previous thirty. Now it was the young Lady Marsh’s turn.
“My new adopted mother recognized something different about me, of course. She was born with more brains than her daughter. But she also recognized the need for someone to take her daughter’s place, or else have to wait another generation and hope her daughter’s offspring wouldn’t be as dim as her own.
“Real change never comes from within. It comes from outside, from the ostracized, from the downtrodden. Because someone, eventually, rises up and tells everyone what they don’t want to hear, what they don’t want to know. And sometimes they say it without even needing to open their mouths at all. The lady knew that. Though she never condoned it, she never punished me
either.
“Next, I needed a partner. My surrogate mother introduced me to many men of noble birth and I found them all to be powdered boys, not men. The town would look to a man, a real man. He needed the appearance of a tough leader, even if he wasn’t one. And he needn’t be of high birth. I could now provide the required title. It took some convincing on my part for my new mother to accept, but eventually she acquiesced.
“I discovered my future husband in the stables. I’d know him for quite some time when I was a chambermaid, though we never conversed much. He was a hard worker, his silhouette chiseled, and I admit I felt more than a stirring of my loins whenever I looked upon him. Yes, it was partially for selfish reasons that I chose him. I bedded him to ensure he knew what he was doing between the sheets—the one requirement I needed of him.
“I decided to play the role of the shy girl who shows her true colors only in the bedroom. It was a stereotype, but as we all know, stereotypes exist for a reason. It worked like a charm. And when he began to come to me, at first creeping in through my window at night, I rationed out what I did to him, so he would always be thinking about what he would receive next time, and the next time, and the time after that, until eventually he was wrapped around my little finger tighter than a worm on a hook.
“Convinced he would do whatever I bid of him, I told him I loved him, that my heart was full of him and I needed to have him as my husband. He had his reservations, but he agreed. We were going to challenge the lord for control of this world, when I realized we would not have won the support we required if we wanted to overthrow it and bring it under our power.
“And it was then that he came, a dark angel. A cloaked figure, who promised me I could achieve everything I wanted, and more. He would provide me with the need for a new lord to arise, and in return, he wanted me to work on something for him. A piece of machinery. I agreed.
“The next day, we heard tales of a monster coming from the caves and snatching people in the middle of the night. And as time went by, it became clear: there really was a monster. And it was then that I realized what the cloaked figure had done.