While the other two conferred secretly again, he went to pass the time at the inbuilt shelves, where every inch of space was taken with books from a familiar author, Miles N. Boon. Unbelievably, every title was identical. There were hundreds of copies of the same book he had found in the honeymoon suite, Secrets Of A Chambermaid, and just as he was about to pull an old, leather bound copy off the middle shelf, The Master gestured toward the sofa and asked him to take a seat.
Louis crossed in front of the piano, careful not to upset the figurines on top, and sat down, as irritated with the plastic sheeting under his butt as the lumpy discomfort of his tail. Tiffany politely waited, then sat on the piano stool, her back to the keys, paws clasped on her lap. Frank O’Lynn paced back and forth in front of the coffee table, too excited, or too agitated, or both, to sit. Louis shifted while he waited for one of them to say something, goddamn anything, his butt rubbing against the plastic sheeting and making a squeaky noise that reminded him of something he hadn’t heard since he was alive. Something that used to make him laugh until his belly hurt when his grandfather made that same sound at the dinner table (to his grandma’s pretend horror). When it was obvious neither of his hosts were going to get the conversation moving, he said, “Won’t Santosa miss his little helper?”
Tiffany moved to speak, but Frank O’Lynn butted in. “Who do you think taught Miss Elaine how to Zip?”
Tiffany smiled patiently, then added, “Mr. Santosa is in row B of the LeMont auditorium right this minute. He thinks I’m sitting right next to him. In fact, I am. We’re both listening to your address to shareholders at the AGM. A rousing speech, too, I might add. Everyone is captivated with your remarkable insight and vision for LeMont.”
Louis looked at her, then at Frank O’Lynn, then back at Tiffany Tidbits. Though not as melodic or chirpy as the Irish guinea pig, her voice was accented with a likeable European twang, maybe Italian, maybe Spanish. It was only a trace, mind you; he certainly couldn’t use it as an excuse for misinterpreting what he had just heard. “Am I to understand that there are two of us? Here and at the conference center?” he asked.
“Not quite. There is only one you and one me, but with Zipping we can appear to be in two places at the same time. Would you like me to explain?” The Master grabbed one of the doilies with the pattern of a sunflower and began to trace its outline with her claw. “Zipping is like a flower. If we start with a central circle, the corolla, then begin to draw its petals, each time starting at the center and returning to our point of origin, then the next, then the next, we can work our way around the corolla until its covered with petals.” She continued to trace the crochet sunflower with her claw. “When we Zip time, the corolla is our point of reference from which we move out in the same way as we draw a petal. Then, when we’ve finished what we had to do, we arc back toward the corolla and end up back at the point of departure. The petal – our timeline – isn’t compromised, as you might be thinking. Time is always moving forward. It’s just that we end up back where we started, free to draw another petal whenever we want, as many times as we want.”
Louis eyed the crocheted sunflower. Her claw had stopped tracing its outline. “That’s all well and good for a Master. But for your average guy in the street, it’s not exactly important in his day-to-day existence, is it?”
Tiffany put the doily back on the coffee table, and said, “Things are not as they seem. Each one of us actually exists in an infinite number of places at any given moment. We just choose which one of the infinite moments we wish to experience.”
Louis shifted in his seat again, this time careful not to make the farting sound again. “What would be the point of choosing to be in hell?” he asked. “It’s self-defeatist.”
Frank O’Lynn stopped pacing back and forth. “LeMont International Enterprises,” he said. “It’s not hell anymore.”
“Whatever. It still makes no goddamn sense why I would choose it over paradise.”
Tiffany now answered. “Unfortunately, most of our decisions are made subconsciously or habitually. We’re generally not aware of our decision making processes, only the consequences of them. That’s why we think things happen to us or against our wishes, why we generally see ourselves as victims of circumstance.” Frank O’Lynn was pacing again, scratching furiously at a fleabite on his neck. “Like putting your head inside the lion’s mouth and then getting upset when it takes a bite,” she added.
Louis had encountered a similar philosophy in one of the self-help books Lady Di had left lying around the penthouse. He had found it on top of the TV next to her reading glasses one night, assuming it was one of the many crossword books she was forever filling in. Then he had spotted the title, Know Thy Self, and picked it up, disgruntled at the latest rubbish she was stuffing inside her head. Needless to say, he didn’t even get past the first paragraph. “There are no victims,” the author had boldly claimed. It was a goddamn joke, pure and simple, the dribble of another backyard guru trying to push his version of the meaning to life onto any fool stupid enough to read his horseshit.
Any goddamn idiot can get published nowadays, he remembered thinking at the time, and glanced at the bookshelf, then back at The Master. “You can’t seriously expect me to believe that I’m guilty of things that happen beyond my control,” he said.
The Master remained as motionless as one of her many figurines on top of the piano. “You are connected to everyone and everything around you. In as much as you are innocent of what happens, you are also guilty: they are two sides of the same coin. Though the connections may seem invisible, there exists an intricate link between everything.”
Louis wondered how long he would have to sit and listen to The Master prattle on. Miles N. Boon’s Secrets Of A Chambermaid had more goddamn appeal than what was being offered to him here. Still, what could he do? As long as this was the only safe haven from the peelers, he would smile and nod and say all the right things and pretend he was interested in what she was saying. Good God, he had had forty years of practice with his wife. This should be a goddamn breeze. Then, when the heat was off, he was out of here. Make like a tree and leave, his mom would have said. In fact, he would do more than that. He would be down the boulevard and waving goodbye to the loony Freedom Fighters quicker than a… well, goddamn bat out of hell.
In the meantime, he had no choice than to sit and take it. He watched Frank O’Lynn pace back and forth like a caged hyena while The Master remained perched on the piano stool, paws on her lap, eyes big and unblinking. He had to admit she wasn’t the meek, timid little mouse he had originally assumed. He’d had her penned as the kind of woman too scared to leave the house without a chaperone, like his mother in the years after his father had died.
What a waste of a life. At sixty-four, Margaret DeVille hadn’t had a goddamn clue what to do with the freedom she was given when her husband had unexpectedly collapsed onto the bedroom floor while swinging his size elevens into her head. You would have thought it a cause for celebration, but it wasn’t. Although she never said so, Louis knew she blamed herself for his premature demise. Her cage was guilt. Perhaps she shouldn’t have let the dinner get cold. Perhaps she should have been more submissive; then he wouldn’t have had to exert so much energy in giving her what she deserved. Perhaps her skull shouldn’t have been so hard either. But Louis suspected it was more than that – she had been praying for freedom for years, and now that God had answered she suddenly didn’t want it anymore. The responsibility was just too overwhelming. Consequently, she turned into a hermit several years before a massive stroke finished off what Hugo DeVille had started all those years before (despite the coroner blaming fifty years of chain smoking, he never explained why she smoked a goddamn pack a day). Encamped in the Brooklyn apartment she had lived most of her adult life, she watched TV all day and received no visitors. Even he gave up calling around on the old girl toward the end. In a sense, she had reminded him of one of those budgerigars that could be trained to sit on your finger
and talk: after being locked away all her life, she had been too afraid to explore outside when the door was left ajar.
Louis now toyed with his pinstripe tie. He guessed his initial assumptions about Tiffany might have stemmed from the lingering pity he felt about his mother. In some ways they were as similar as sisters. In other ways, they were as far apart as New York and LA. “My mother always said the same thing,” he said, getting back to what The Master had just been saying. “Everything’s connected. She never spoke of it as karma, and never in front of my father, although that’s what I knew she was talking about. She used to call it balancing the books. I called it horseshit.”
If The Master was upset with his cynicism, she didn’t show it. “That’s why you are where you are.”
Louis kept fidgeting with his tie. “Meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning, you’re here because the choices you made led to the inevitable consequences of you being here.”
“All right. Let’s say you’re correct,” he said, and shifted in his seat. “I’ve made my choices and now I have to live with them. It’s not as if I can do anything about it, is there?”
The Master was unmoved. “The gates of hell are always open, Mr. DeVille. Nothing is preventing you from leaving.”
Louis wasn’t having a bar of it. It was a hell of a lot easier calling the game from the commentary box than making the play on the field, wasn’t it? Not to mention a hell of a lot safer. “Besides one tiny little obstacle you seem to be forgetting,” he said. “The Fires of Oblivion.”
For the first time since she had sat on the piano stool, Louis saw, The Master moved. Barely perceptible, mind you, just a faint twitch of the whiskers and a spasm of the shoulders. “Belief determines the quality of your experience,” she said. Her expression was as rigidly stern as the creases in her dress. “A veil of illusion shrouds everything you see, and the veil is laid by nothing other than your own eyes. What you believe, you see. What you don’t believe, you don’t see.”
Another moment of silence passed between them. Awkward as any goddamn silence went too, he might add. Even Frank O’Lynn’s pacing was silent. “You’re talking about a leap of faith,” he said. “I only have faith in cold hard facts.” Then he added, after a second’s thought, “And myself.”
The Master faced Frank O’Lynn with her paw outstretched. Louis watched him hand over the note that had slipped out of his own pocket at the archway, the one with THERE IS NO ESCAPE written in neat cursive script. She was smiling with the kind of I know something you don’t look he used to hate whenever he saw the same thing in Lady Di’s eyes. “I must say, you’re the first prophet I’ve ever heard that doesn’t have faith in something greater than himself.”
Louis felt himself disconnecting from his mind, like was in conversation with someone on a mobile that had just moved out of range. Was this some kind of in-house prank? He had heard of doctors joking about erectile dysfunction and things that went wrong on the operating table. He had heard of pilots joking about near misses and faulty landing gear. White Rabbit Freedom Fighters obviously joked about weasels who became divine mystics and seers. “A goddamn what?” he said.
Frank O’Lynn was staring at the note over The Master’s shoulder. He had the look of a Catholic who had just seen a vision of the Holy Mary. “A prophet, Louis,” he said. “What else would you call someone who’s communicant with the White Rabbit?”
Louis glanced at the note, then at Frank O’Lynn, then at Tiffany. When he looked back at the note, a feeling he first experienced as a boy began to tingle through him. The old man’s wallet had gone missing from his overalls not long before his twelfth birthday, before his fascination with baseball cards had developed into a fascination with Playboy magazines. Naturally, good ol’ Louis was blamed for stealing it and spending the money on useless collector cards. Even his mother sided against him, and he had understood right there and then that his parents had no idea how great his fear of his father really was; yet no matter how much he pleaded his innocence, nothing could change them from believing he was a spineless little thief. Needles to say, he received a thrashing and went to bed with a grumbling stomach. The next morning when he came to breakfast, however, the wallet was sitting on the table next to the salt- and pepper-shakers. It had apparently fallen under the bed when his father had undressed the day before. His father didn’t apologize, and neither did his mother; but to Louis, seeing that wallet was proof he wasn’t a thief. It wasn’t until he was married, however, that he really understood the insidiousness of that feeling, something that was more addictive than the goddamn death sticks his mother committed suicide with. Justification.
The note with THERE IS NO ESCAPE made him feel that way now. It was irrefutable evidence. He wasn’t mad. He wasn’t suffering from Post Traumatic Death Syndrome. The Master and The Partridge believed he had seen the White Rabbit, not as some figment of his delusional mind, but as something real and tangible. “I am right!” he felt like screaming. “I am goddamn right!” Better still, better than any blue diamond pill, this feeling had no hangovers.
“I’ve also received other notes,” he said. “Invitations actually. To the Mansion of Many Rooms, wherever that is.”
The Master and Frank O’Lynn didn’t seem to be listening, just staring at the piece of paper like a couple of paupers who had received a million dollar check from a long lost uncle. Louis sat forward, reading the words upside down, and asked what it meant. Tiffany finally dragged her attention away. “I was hoping you might shed some light on it.”
“Me? I’m not the goddamn Master.”
“The message was sent to you. Only you can interpret it.”
Louis snatched the note out of her paws and reread it several times. “There Is No Escape,” he said, more for his own benefit than the others, as if hearing the words instead of seeing them would resolve the problem. He sat back, slouching into the plastic-covered sofa. “It’s no use. I can’t think of anything. Except that it totally refutes everything you’ve both been telling me.”
The Master’s demeanor didn’t change. Not even a Bond Martini, his wife would have said: neither shaken nor stirred. “It is obviously written on different levels. The meaning must be found outside the literal implication of the words.”
“A code?”
“More like a key.”
Louis sat forward and glanced at the writing again. Was there another way out of LeMont nobody else knew? Was that what the White Rabbit was trying to show him? “A key to what? A secret door?”
“You could say that.” The Master had that I know something you don’t look in her eyes again. “The door to your heart.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The Ancient Language
Louis sat motionless on the sofa, staring at the note and reading it over and over again. There is no escape. There is no escape. There is no escape. It was a key? To his goddamn heart? What kind of Lady Di, self-help horseshit was that? I tell you what it is, Louis my boy. You’ve been led into the desert on the promise of finding an oasis and then abandoned halfway there without a goddamn map or water. There’s nothing but bleak terrain. No way forward. No way back. No goddamn escape. You’re here for eternity and that’s that.
He struggled to remember another occasion when his hopes had been dashed more comprehensively than this. The first place he and his wife had tried to buy, a fabulous three-bedroom apartment in the Village. That had been bad. They had signed the contract, got the okay for the bank loan, and were only hours away from collecting the goddamn keys. Except the son-of-a-bitch owner didn’t put his signature on the dotted line, did he? Someone else came in with a better offer, literally at the last minute. Their dream had been stolen from under their noses (Gazumped, dear, I believe the terminology for that is gazumped). Of course, the owner kindly told them, they could have the apartment if they raised their offer. Tantalizing, except they couldn’t. It was just at the time he had resigned from his job and begun the process of establishing
the new company; so they had to let the apartment, and their hopes, go the way of the setting sun. Later, they managed to land another apartment, but the marriage never truly recovered from the loss, something he always referred to as their first miscarriage.
Pocketing the message from the White Rabbit, Louis made up his mind to do what he had to do. When stuck between a rock and a hard place, as his grandfather used to advise, there was only one option: go with what you knew. He sighed, knowing it wasn’t going to be easy. Eternity was a long goddamn time, but what other choice did he have? “I have an AGM to attend,” he said, and stood. His tail made a rrrrrrip sound as it pried away from the plastic sheeting. “I need directions to the hotel. I don’t know where I am.”
“I’ll do better than that,” The Master said. “I’ll Zip you over there. But first, sit back down. There’s something you need to hear.” Louis sighed and kept standing. What was the point? Nothing they did would make a goddamn bit of difference; the bad news would just keep rolling on for ever and ever. “Before you say anything, just hear me out,” she said, and waited for him to sit.
Louis eventually complied, sinking back into the cushions. He might be up the creek without a paddle, but at least he was dry and safe and still in a canoe.
“The White Rabbit Freedom Fighters are more powerful than you may think,” The Master said, as Frank O’Lynn returned to pacing back and forth between the piano and the door. “It’s taken thousands of years, but we’ve managed to infiltrate the highest echelons of power. The unions. The secret police. Every aspect of LeMont society is crawling with supporters of the White Rabbit, waiting for the right moment to strike. However, we’ve never been able to get close to The Boss. Nobody has. He’s deeply suspicious of everyone. We’ve been unable to get someone high enough on the inside. Until now.”
DeVille's Contract Page 20