“I’m more than right. We haven’t been over this whole place yet, having been here more like an hour than a week, but so far I haven’t come across any big parking lots, either. Place this size must take hundreds, maybe thousands, of people to run. So far, outside of the rail yards, all I’ve seen are rent-a-cops and gate guards. Oh, that’s a lot over there, but it’s for what? Ten? Twelve cars, tops.”
“Maybe they bus them in from town,” Brandy suggested, thinking.
“That whole town would have to be here, and there’s no sign of it. That town would be bigger than it is, just supporting the work force this place must take. I mean, two jail cells, two little cafes, one gas station, and a grocery store that was a real mom-and-pop operation? Come on. That town isn’t real. The whole damned thing’s a front, run for this operation by folks out of work for years with the logging bust, taking their money and being their whores. It’s bought and paid for, so nobody looks too close and nobody notices things out of the ordinary. How they get up the tax assessor I don’t know, but bigger fish than him have been bought and paid for. If I remember, this was the state where that Indian swami and his cult took over and ran a whole county for years.”
“That doesn’t answer your question,” she pointed out. “Where are the people who work here? Who are they and where do they live?”
“Even better. Where in here do they process a couple hundred live turkeys?”
The rent-a-cops had been real active in patrols, but if they thought anybody was inside who shouldn’t be, they didn’t act like it. They were easy to dodge, even though the streetlights within the complex were well thought out. The real problem was the sheer size of the place, and the inability to really get a look inside those massive buildings. Many were lit; it appeared as if the biggest one in the back was active and at work, although there was no sign of life outside nor any crowd of cars or whatever anywhere around.
The buildings, too, were mostly wired with elaborate burglar alarms and remote sensors and switches. It wouldn’t be easy to get into one that wasn’t lit up and in operation.
We did eventually find a parking lot attached to a large one-story structure, but it looked more like the headquarters for the state police, with maybe a dozen plant-security cars parked there and spaces for at least as many more, along with spaces where regular cars were parked. At least the cops commuted.
Without a full tool kit, with jumper wires and pliers and glass cutters and the like, it was unlikely we were going to break into any of the buildings. Worse, sometime the next day we were sure to be missed by the folks down at the town, and while they might figure we scrammed, they would also be thinking of the plant and grounds here. I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend much time around here like this. The black stuff smelled and itched like crazy, and there was no food, and no evident water, either. We’d spent so much time on getting in, we hadn’t even thought about getting out.
“Let’s get over by that big building that looks like it’s open,” Brandy suggested. “Maybe we can find some way to see in.”
“Sounds like a good plan to me,” I agreed, just wanting to get something out of this experience. We headed over that way, but then had to drop as a door leading inside the building opened and two people walked out, both dressed casually although not in any particularly recognizable fashion. One was a big man, fat but imposing, sort of the kind you expect to see either selling door to door or driving one of Oregon’s ubiquitous pickup trucks; the other was a slender woman of medium height. They were engaged in an animated conversation, and I couldn’t make out a word of it. It sure as hell wasn’t English.
“Sounds like a record bein’ played backwards,” Brandy whispered, and the fact was, it sounded just like that, only very natural, very conversational.
They passed quite near us, oblivious to our presence, but we stared hard at them. The woman, for example, looked very young, yet she had shoulder-length hair that looked snow-white and a smooth, dark complexion that was hard to make out in the available light. The big man had a face that seemed dark and covered in hair; not just a beard, but more like a monkey’s face, and his arms showing beyond his short-sleeve shirt were also the hairiest I’d ever seen. I resisted the impulse to check the moon to see if it was full, although I never really believed in werewolves.
They went to another building, and the big man took out some keys and opened a small box set in the door, and punched a combination that sounded like a push-button telephone being dialed. Then he opened the door and they both stepped in and switched on lights.
“Want to jump into the fire?” Brandy asked. “We’ll probably get caught, but it’s the only way.”
“I don’t want to do anything but get out of here,” I answered truthfully, but I followed her as she approached the newly unlocked door and tried it. It opened, straight into a small reception room with a desk, chair, and phone, but there was no sign of the hairy man and the white-haired woman anywhere. “They could leave and lock us in here,” I whispered.
“Uh uh. There’s fire exits, and there’s a phone I bet don’t go through town,” Brandy responded. “We’re better off than we were and we get a chance to look around. Come on.”
There was a sudden sound of starting machinery, the lights dimmed for a moment, then the whole building started to shake as whatever it was that had been turned on got up to speed. We cautiously approached the inner door, opened it, and peered into a still-darkened warehouse. It was hard to see anything on the floor of the place, although there were catwalks high above that had small lights on them, and far off along one side was a glass picture window at catwalk height that was lit up.
We went along the wall, hitting a stairway up to the catwalks, and both of us got up on it a few steps and tried to see into the darkness of the warehouse floor.
“Sam,” Brandy said uneasily, “I swear that the whole bunch of dark there just moved.”
We went further on up the stairway to a metal porch that seemed well above the floor and just below the catwalk level. We were on the opposite side from the picture window and couldn’t even really see it from where we were, so it was unlikely we’d be spotted.
Whatever was happening, it took a tremendous machine to do it; and that machine seemed to be under the floor of the warehouse. I stared into the blackness in the center of the place that should be visible, at least in outline, to me at this point but wasn’t, and I saw what Brandy had talked about. The darkness seemed almost a solid mass, and it appeared to be shifting, moving, changing shape and form. It was weird, whether real or some kind of optical illusion.
Old Sam Spade and Phil Marlowe had never had to face anything like this.
There was another start-up-type whine, and suddenly the center of the warehouse wasn’t dark anymore, although I’m not sure just what it could be called. In the center of the darkness, there appeared another, flatter darkness. Sorry, that’s the only way I can describe it. It was shiny but nonreflective, like a mirror, and the only reason it could be discerned at all was because it was framed by a pencil-thin outline of blue light. The blue was quite clear, but gave off no radiant light, so the rest of the warehouse floor was still bathed in darkness. Every once in a while, across the surface of the mirrored blackness, small trails of blue light would shoot like stars on a summer night.
It scared the living shit out of me.
“It’s invaders from Mars or something,” Brandy breathed. “My God—did Little Jimmy know about this?”
“Not at the start, not when he hired us,” I managed, unable to keep my eyes off the strange thing on the floor below. “I think maybe he found out more than was good for him before he canned us, though.” What would make a weasel like Little Jimmy write off over two million? This might. The deal was clear. You call off your dogs and take a long vacation in the tropics, and we’ll bail you out and keep you off the bust list.
The crazy thing was, I was ready to believe in Martians or whatever with no real effort, even that they’d hole
up in a place like this. Where else? They’d be kind of obvious in downtown Philadelphia. But the Martians involved in a drug deal and double-crossing a Mafioso? That I couldn’t handle. Not yet.
The big mirror changed. It seemed to fold in on itself, like a file card being crimped in the middle, then go through itself, and when it finished there wasn’t one mirror but two, the other intersecting the first at a clean ninety degrees. Now there were more folds, each section folding in, and the thing began to take on a crazy pattern, not regular at all. It reminded me almost of those pictures you see of those old English gardens with the hedges cut like a kid’s maze. But this thing was in three dimensions right here on a warehouse floor, and it was turning.
“Let’s get out of here,” I told Brandy. “We don’t know how big and complicated that thing’s gonna get, and how safe is safe. That pair up there is up and beyond that floor behind glass. We’re not. We don’t know where safe is. Maybe it’s just gonna take that plastic powder and instantly make forty million plastic Jesus statues, but I don’t like to be this close to it until I know a lot more.”
“Yeah, okay,” she answered huskily.
I took her hand and together we went down the stairway. I could see the door only a few feet beyond the end of the stairs, since it not only showed light around the edges but even had a little red exit sign illuminated above it. That thing was still twisting and turning, faster and faster now, and I knew we were in a race. I had my eyes only on that door now, and, naturally, I missed the bottom step and fell onto the cold concrete floor of the place, Brandy falling on top of me. I was hurt, but not enough to matter, and Brandy got up and reached out to help me up, taking my hand in the near darkness. I found it, took it, and was just pulled to my feet when one of the edges of that blue and black thing folded and hit us like a revolving door.
Suddenly I could see Brandy, and she could see me, very well. We both had glows of the blue stuff all around our bodies, making us stand out, but all around us were constantly changing walls of blue-framed blackness. I gripped her hand tight, fearful that we would never again see each other if I let go, and looked for the door and the sign. There was nothing, nothing but constantly changing panes of black mirror framed in blue. Only they weren’t mirrors. They weren’t anything. One swung around on us before we knew it and passed right through us. I braced, expecting to be slapped down by a solid swinging door, but there was no sensation at all. It just came, passed through us, and went on its merry way.
I don’t mind admitting that I was scared to death—not only being trapped in that thing, but scared, too, that I would lose Brandy’s hand and my only remaining touch to anything real. She held my hand just as tight, and I could tell that the same thoughts were going through her own mind.
It did no good whether you stood still or started walking; the endless series of blue-outlined panels kept moving anyway, so I pulled on her hand and started walking in the direction I was certain was the exit door. With no physical sensation, the light show lost some of its threatening aspects. The effect of moving, though, was unnerving, since all of a sudden it seemed as if everything stopped shifting around but you were boxed in with a cube of blue-outlined squares. Stepping through brought you to another cube, then another, then another.
I tried to call to Brandy, but she seemed unable to hear me, and I saw her own mouth form words but bring no sound. In fact, there was no sound at all anymore, not even the sound of the big motors driving this, whatever it was.
There was no choice. Stay still, and you stood in a box, so you moved through them, panel after panel, side after side, trying to move out of the thing. I mean, the warehouse was big, but it didn’t seem all this big.
Suddenly, we stepped into one and stopped, for beyond the panel to our left there was a solitary metal desk at which sat a man. He was wearing some sort of gray uniform, but he looked quite ordinary; an older man with a walrus moustache and, of all things, a monocle. The desk itself had some sort of device built into it that looked to me like some kind of sound-mixing console, with hundreds of little dials and levers. He looked up from the panel, stared at us for a moment, then moved a control. We started toward him, but he took the monocle from his eye and said, “Frabishsnap!” and threw a long lever. His voice sounded quite odd and amplified badly, like over a poor loudspeaker system.
Suddenly the whole cubic structure shifted, and now, even though we were stopped, the panels came at us faster and faster. Every once in a while one would blink on, for just a moment, then blink out before we could go to it.
A parched desert landscape with nothing alive under a blanket of eternal clouds . . .
A jungle scene, thick and lush, with the remnants of some tropical monsoon washing down from the growth that blocked all views . . .
A reddish-brown landscape, with tremendously high grass of some pink color stretching off into the hills as far as the eye could see under a blue but unnaturally light sky . . .
There weren’t too many of these, although I had the distinct impression that I was actually seeing far more than the few sunlit scenes. It was quite possible that most of what I was seeing was, in fact, the inside of dark buildings at night.
There was a sudden, disorienting shift in balance and point of view, and we both got dizzy and fell . . . onto wet grass. Sound hit me like a full orchestra, although it was only the basic sounds we all live with and the rustling of wind in the trees.
“Brandy?” I whispered. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah. I think so. You?”
“I’m suddenly feeling it where I tripped on that last step. I have a hunch I’m gonna be bruised for a while, but I feel okay otherwise.” I sat up and looked around. “Where in heaven’s name are we, though? And how did we get here?”
“I—I don’t know. Jesus, Sam! Are we on another planet or something? What the hell was that thing?”
I shook my head and looked around, then up. There, in the sky, was a very familiar-looking quarter-moon, the same moon you could see back east. “If it’s another planet, it’s one just like the one we left,” I told her. “That’s the moon, all right.”
She looked. “Yeah. It is, isn’t it? But—where’s the warehouse? Where are all the buildings, Sam?”
That was a very good question. I sat there a moment nursing my wounds, and tried to think. “Hypnosis, maybe. Some kind of hypnotic machine. All that spinning and whirling in the dark. Who knows where they took us? As a matter of fact, they probably never knew we were there. We just kept walking in a trance or something, and now we’re lost in those damned hills. I bet that’s it.” It made me feel a little better.
“I dunno, Sam. That funny dude with the eyepiece—did you see him, too?”
“Yeah, and heard him, for all the good it did. Looked like something out of comic opera, Gilbert and Sullivan or something. If you saw him, too, the odds are he was real, if nothing else was. That’s bad. It means somebody knows we were there.”
“Sam—maybe it wasn’t hypnosis. Maybe—this is crazy, but I can’t help thinkin’ of that train yard and them two dudes up in the tower switchin’ cars from one track to another. Suppose that thing was some kind of—railroad, I don’t know, whatever people from outer space or somethin’ might use. We kept goin’ on a track, or something, and then we came to a switch place, that little man bein’ in the same job as the train men. He sees us, knows we ain’t supposed to be there, and so he kinda, well, switches us. Switches us onto a siding or something like that. Just like they do with the trains.”
I thought about it, and didn’t like the thought at all. “If they’d dumped us in a desert or under that pink sky or if we had two moons or something, maybe I could buy it,” I told her, “but this is Earth. The odds of there being two moons just like that is pretty slim. No, I can’t buy it.”
She sighed. “Yeah, but if this is still the Oregon woods, then it’s hotter and wetter than I remember it bein’ not too long ago. You can cut this air with a knife. Sweet Jesus, Sam!
What did we get ourselves into?”
She was right about the heat and humidity, but it was too subjective a call for me to admit anything right off. “We got into something we shouldn’t have, babe. We shoulda cut and run when Little Jimmy gave us the ax, that’s for sure.”
She reached into her pocket and took out a crumpled pack of Kools and a small lighter.
“You better give ’em up again, babe. Might be a while ’til you see another pack,” I warned her.
“Shit on that. Never in all my born days did I need a smoke more than now. Just too bad it’s got to be tobacco.” She lit it and sat back for a moment. “God, that crud we lay in itches!”
That it did. I looked around the horizon, but all I could see were trees in all directions, although we were sitting in a clearing of sorts. I had been around enough to know that when it’s pretty dark, even a small town’s lights show up as a glow on the horizon; but there were no lights to be seen at all except the stars and the quarter-moon.
Then, off in the distance, I saw a flash; then it was gone. I had hopes for just a moment, but then the sound of distant thunder came to us, and the horizon in that direction seemed to blacken very quickly.
“Storm coming,” I noted. “Maybe our way. Just what we need.”
“The hell with it. If it comes here and rains buckets, I’m gonna strip out of these clothes and let it give me a shower, and maybe the clothes, too. Anything to get this crap off.” She took off her boots and stuffed the remaining cigarettes and the lighter deep in the toe, then set that boot on its side, away from the storm. That was one of the reasons I loved her. She was always thinking and always practical, even in the strangest situations.
The clouds rolled in like tar spread across the sky, blacking out the moon and stars. The wind picked up tremendously, and it wasn’t too long until I felt the first drops. Brandy was already stripping, I could see from the lightning’s illumination, and I finally decided that she had the right idea. If anybody came up and caught us now, I’d just as soon be nude and washed than covered with foul-smelling grime.
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