14

by Peter Clines

  “Right,” said Clive, “but it’s a bunch of stuff that’s all part of the same system.”

  Nate got close to the wall of tubes. He could feel Debbie’s hand hovering near his arm, ready to pull him back if something happened. There was another rack of glass fuses—if they were fuses—past the first one. Behind those he could see more wires and cables and something like a tire wrapped in copper wire. He stepped back and looked over at the panel of switches and buttons. It looked like the controls for a Victorian jumbo jet.

  “So a hundred and twenty years ago,” he said, “someone built a big machine in the middle of Los Angeles and disguised it as a building. Why?”

  “Not even in the middle,” said Veek. “There’s a great map on the Library of Congress website from 1909. A hundred years ago this wasn’t even the suburbs. Hollywood was still a big field. Heck, the official roads ended over at Temple Street.”

  Nate looked at the banks of machinery and instruments. “So they built it far away from everything,” he said. “On the far coast of the country, on the outskirts of a city that was only a few thousand people. They probably never dreamed it would get this big, that Kavach would end up dead in the middle of everything.”

  Something clicked. It echoed through the apartment. Roger’s hand hovered by the controls.

  They all closed in on him. “What’d you do?” said Nate.

  “Flipped a switch,” he said. “Don’t worry, bro, I’ve got my hand over it.”

  “You idiot,” snapped Veek. “We don’t know what this thing does.”

  “Only way to find out is to do something,” said Roger. He nodded at the six large dials. “Check it out.”

  The first dial hadn’t budged, but the needle on the second one had shifted over by four thin lines. The next needle was still moving, creeping across the round face. Two of the bottom ones hadn’t moved. The needle on the last dial had tilted in the opposite direction.

  “You’re right,” Roger said to Tim. “Some kinda load-balance or something for the power lines.”

  “Still stupid,” said Veek. “That could’ve been the self-destruct switch or something.”

  “Naaah,” said Clive. “Self-destruct’s always a big red button.”

  Roger and Debbie chuckled. The corners of Veek’s mouth twitched. “Still think it was a stupid move,” she said.

  A big truck drove by on the street outside. It blended with the hum of the machine. The low rumble made the floor tremble.

  Roger studied the dials. “Can’t figure out what they’re measuring, though.”

  “I thought you didn’t know power stuff,” said Nate.

  “Don’t, but I know the basics.”

  “None of us know this, though,” said Tim. “We don’t know what this thing does, or how much one switch affects it doing its...whatever it does.”

  A cloud crossed the sun and the windows grew dim. Nate glanced up at the sky. As his eyes moved he saw Debbie looking at the chandelier. Veek and Tim looked back and forth at the corners of the room.

  The rumble of the truck was still going. It got louder. It swung the chandelier. It shook the floor. The loft was quivering on its legs.

  “Quake!” Clive called out. “Get out from under the chandelier.”

  Debbie dashed to her husband. Tim took a few long strides and pressed himself against the door. Roger and Veek, California veterans, stood their ground and waited to see how bad it got.

  Nate’s gaze came down from the sky—a sky burned into his mind—and looked at the building next door. He could see it through the trembling panes of glass. While he watched a little girl walked by a window. She held a bright blue plastic cup at chin height with both hands.

  “Roger,” he said, “flip the switch back.”

  “What?”

  Nate pointed at the panel. Roger’s hand had drifted away from the switch but was still close enough to be sure which one he’d flipped. “Put it back.”

  The dishes in the sink began to clatter. The vase of flowers on the table toppled and water splashed to the floor.

  “It’s a fucking earthquake, bro.”

  “It’s not an earthquake,” shouted Nate over the rumble, “it’s the building! Put the switch back!”

  Roger’s finger stretched out, settled against a tiny lever, and flexed. The switch snapped down. A small spark flashed around the rim of its base and vanished.

  Two of the needles leaped to zero. The last one, the slow one, paused for a moment and then reversed its swing. It inched its way back up to its start position.

  The rumble faded. The clouds cleared away outside and the sun beamed through the window. A few seconds later, the only sign of the disturbance was the creak from the swaying chandelier. Then it stopped and there was silence.

  “Holy shit,” muttered Tim.

  Nate looked out the window again, up at the sky. The rest of them exchanged glances and took tentative steps. “Everyone okay?” asked Veek.

  “Think I wet my pants for real this time,” said Roger.

  “You’re not alone,” murmured Debbie.

  Veek punched Roger in the arm. “You are a fucking idiot, you know that?”

  “Hey,” he snapped, “how was I supposed to know it was a fucking earthquake machine? You think somebody’d label the switches for something like that.”

  “It wasn’t an earthquake,” said Nate. He was still staring out the window.

  “How can you be so sure?” asked Tim.

  Nate turned from the window. He looked up above the control panel. A square of polished wood, a foot on each side, still remained there. Clive’s Allen wrench jutted out from the center of it. The silver steel looked out of place against all the wood and brass. “Can you reach that?” he asked Roger.

  Roger glanced at the ladder, still stretched out on the floor by the kitchen. “Think so,” he said. “Might be a little tricky, but I think I can use the A-frame now that I know where the keyhole is.”

  “Do it,” said Nate. “Get these walls closed up.”

  “Hey,” said Veek. “Hang on. What’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong?” echoed Nate. “Did you miss that? This thing...this place is dangerous. We shouldn’t be fucking around with it.” He jabbed a finger at the Allen wrenches. “Close it and forget it.”

  “How are we supposed to forget about it?” said Debbie. “We live here. It’s all around us.”

  “Well, you have to,” said Nate, “because we can’t mess around with this thing anymore.” He looked at their faces, took in a breath to say something else, and shook his head. He walked past Tim, yanked the door open, and headed down the hall toward the stairwell.

  Veek chased him to the foot of the stairs. “Hey,” she called out. “What the hell’s your problem?”

  He stopped on the landing. “I just think...” He shook his head. “We shouldn’t be messing with this anymore. Whatever it is, it’s way beyond us.”

  “That’s why we’re looking,” she said. “To find out, remember? To learn what the hell this stuff is.”

  “Maybe it’s better not knowing,” he snapped. “Maybe this is one of those...one of those things men weren’t meant to know.”

  She frowned up at him through her glasses. “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened, I just think—”

  “Nate,” she said, “you’re freaking out. What just happened?”

  He shook his head.

  “You’ve been through an earthquake before, right? It’s sort of scary but they almost never amount to anything. Once I slept through one that—”

  “It wasn’t an earthquake.”

  She studied his face. “Why do you keep saying that?”

  Nate pressed his palms against his temples and shook his head. “This is nuts,” he said. “It’s just...it’s fucking nuts.”

  “What?”

  He looked at her. “When he flipped the switch and the ground started shaking,” he said, “you saw the sun go away?”

 
; She nodded.

  “It wasn’t clouds,” he said. “It was going out.”

  Veek blinked. She opened her mouth, shut it, then blinked again. “What?”

  “Right in front of my eyes,” said Nate. “It turned red, the whole sky got dark around it, and the sun started to go out.”

  Fifty Two

  Nate went into the office determined to get as caught up as possible. He’d been neglecting his work for too long, as the stack of mail crates proved. A fourth one showed up first thing that morning. It was mostly issues of the magazine, so it would go fast. For the moment, though, it just added to his pile. A pile now higher than his desktop.

  Halfway through the magazine crate Eddie showed up. The big man made a few clucking noises and shook his head while he made some comments about productivity. Nate tried to ignore him and kept typing in addresses.

  When Zack and Jimmy filed out for a quick smoke-break, Nate switched to his browser. He checked email and saw he’d gotten a response from someone at the city’s Office of Public Works about the building. It’d almost been a month since he put in a request to see the Kavach Building’s blueprints. He’d given up on it. Now he was nervous about what it might say.

  He looked at the news. There was no mention of anything happening to the sun. No unexpected eclipses or sudden dense cloud layers. One weather forecast said the spectacular weekend sunshine was going to last all week. There were no reports of an earthquake in Los Angeles. Not even a small one.

  As far as Nate could tell, whatever happened yesterday only happened inside Kavach.

  Which was insane. Grade-A insane, without a doubt.

  But it hadn’t been his imagination. The building had shook. He’d heard Tim talking with Mandy about it in the hall—with Biblical commentary from Andrew—after he’d retreated to his apartment. They’d all felt it. So had Mrs. Knight. He wondered if she was going to complain to Oskar about the disturbance.

  Oskar, Nate thought. Maybe we should’ve been listening to him all along.

  The machine in the building, the machine that was the building, had made the sun go dim. It made the sun change color and fade in intensity, like a candle wick sputtering in a puddle of wax. But only for people in the building.

  Maybe, he thought, it did something to the windows. Like polarizing lenses. Maybe the glass got dark and it made the sun look like it was fading.

  Except there had been the little girl in the next building. The girl with the bright blue plastic cup. She hadn’t been dark. He’d expected her to look up at the thing in the sky and scream or cry or react somehow. But she hadn’t seen it.

  I saw it.

  And that, he admitted, was the real problem. He’d lied to Veek. He hadn’t told her everything, because what he had seen up in the sky was real madness.

  The sun had waned, the sky had turned red and he’d caught a glimpse of...something else. It hadn’t been just a red sun freaking him out. There’d been something moving up there, something fading in even as the sun was fading out. Something bigger than any plane he’d ever seen, even the ones that sometimes roared by just overhead and blotted out the sky. It had been that big and it had been far away, like a blue whale soaring in the sky.

  A whale with bat-wings and a huge mass of...

  It had to be a delusion of some kind. Maybe it had been a balloon. He was so out of touch, it wouldn’t be hard to believe some custom blimp was flying around LA and he hadn’t heard about it. Probably advertising some new tentpole movie. It could’ve just been a picture on the side of a blimp. He glanced around his desk for a current issue of the magazine and wondered if there were any summer movies with big dragons or space monsters that had

  tentacles.

  That had been the snapping point. Seeing the dozens of tentacles drifting back and forth, moving up and down in the air—and they had moved. It hadn’t been a picture on a blimp. A blimp that vanished as soon as Roger threw the switch back.

  A hand settled on his shoulder and he shuddered away from it.

  “Dude,” said Zack. “Chill. It’s just me.”

  “Sorry,” said Nate. “Off in my own world. What’s up?”

  Zack sighed. “I quit.”

  Nate sat up in his chair. “Sorry?”

  “I’m done. Packing up. I just sent Eddie an email.”

  “You’ve got something else lined up?”

  Zack leaned against the desk and shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “I just can’t take this anymore, y’know?”

  “I guess.”

  “It’s a mind-numbing job with shit pay and no bennies,” he said. “I think I’m losing an IQ point every week. I checked it out—if I’d been working for Jack in the Box all this time I’d’ve made another two thousand dollars and I’d have a health plan.”

  Nate had no response. He’d started working at the magazine six months before Zack.

  “Jack in the Box, man! That’s a better career path than this place.” He shook his head again. “I want to do something with my life, y’know? Achieve something. I can’t sit here doing data entry for another year and wishing something amazing would happen.”

  “Yeah,” said Nate, “I know what you mean.”

  * * *

  Nate paced in his apartment for an hour. Veek was going to be pissed at him. Pissed was her default setting, so he couldn’t imagine dodging it. He needed to apologize and he needed to tell her about the

  tentacles

  thing he’d seen up in the sky. Bugs terrified her. She had to understand him getting freaked out by something with wings that dwarfed football fields.

  Then Veek banged on his door. He realized he’d been pacing around without a shirt on and grabbed a nearby tee. Then he sniffed it, threw it toward the bathroom, and grabbed a clean one off the shelf. She banged again. “Hold on,” he yelled.

  He glanced through the peephole and saw Veek had turned into Roger. He unchained the door. “What’s up?” asked Nate. “I thought you always worked late.”

  Roger shook his head. “Told the best boy I was sick. Started coughing and sniffling at lunch. He let me go on the Abby.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Means he let me go early,” said Roger. “Know you’re having some issues right now, bro, but this is seriously fucked up.”

  Nate nodded. “I’m working past them.”

  “Good.” Roger held up a sheet of paper. “She translated the mystery note from your wall. Said it’s really authentic and creepy.”

  “What?”

  “She thought I was writing a script or something.”

  Nate took the sheet. It was covered in the neat, curvy handwriting so many women mastered and men almost never did. The top half was the message, recopied in the same Cyrillic that it had been on the wall. Below it was the translation in English.

  To Whomever Finds These Words,

  Thirteen years ago I made a discovery of the most shocking nature. Some men would quake at the nightmarish truth I learned. Others would lose their minds to the horror of it. Indeed, I have since learned, much to my dismay, of those who accept and embrace such horror, as a drowning man will sometimes embrace another and take the poor unfortunate down with him. In the face of such a destiny, perhaps such madness is to be expected.

  Yet I have chosen to resist, and I have been fortunate enough to find those men brave enough and strong enough to resist with me, and I am proud to call them my friends.

  Humanity shall never lay down and die. Humanity shall conquer every challenge it is given. Kavach is a monument to what we have achieved, and to the inextinguishable spark that is man.

  Do not falter. Do not doubt. Keep the needles at zero.

  Your Friend in Triumph,

  Aleksander Koturovic

  12 August 1895

  He looked up and met Roger’s gaze.

  “What the fuck, right?” said Roger.

  “Aleksander Koturovic,” said Nate. “That’s the name on the machine. It’s a perso
n.”

  “Yeah, saw that, too.”

  “What language is it?”

  “Serbian, but she said it’s old Serbian. A lot of people just use the regular English alphabet now, not the Russian one.”

  “Latin and Cyrillic.”

  “Yeah, whatever. See what it says, though?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “‘Keep the needles at zero,’” said Roger. “What d’you think that means? We just found a whole bunch of hidden dials and gauges and stuff.”

  Nate nodded. “All of them at zero.”

  “And everything went apeshit when I flipped a switch and made ‘em move, remember?”

  “Yeah,” said Nate, “I remember.”

  “Been thinking about this all day,” he said. “You get what’s going on here?”

  Nate tried to wrap his mind around the message and the machine. “We need to make sure the needles stay at zero.”

  Roger shook his head. “Think big,” he said. “Machine’s on and things are cool, right? Everything’s cool while the needles are at zero.”

  “Okay,” said Nate. “Right.”

  “That means all the shit that happened when I fucked with it—when the needles weren’t at zero—that’s what things are like when the machine’s not working. That’s what the machine’s stopping things from being like.”

  Roger tapped the piece of paper and it rustled between Nate’s fingers.

  “That’s normal,” said Roger.

  Fifty Three

  “Okay,” said Nate, “despite my little freak-out last weekend, we’ve learned a lot this week. I’m going to tell you my one new bit, and then I’m going to let Debbie tell you all the stuff she found.”

  They were gathered in the lounge for the Saturday meeting. It was a smaller group. Clive was working at a theater in North Hollywood, but he’d heard most of it already, and Andrew was at a prayer meeting. Mandy didn’t want anything to do with them after the building shook. Tim had gotten her to promise she wouldn’t turn them in to Oskar.