Martin was coated with sweat and grime and splinters by the time he’d made the jagged hole big enough to crawl through. Again, he tried to look away from the emptiness within the wall, but this time the sight captured his gaze, and he stared helplessly into it, the lack of a reference point making him feel dizzy and horribly disoriented, as if he were drifting in the vastness of space with no way to tell up from down, left from right. This sensation, combined with exhaustion, the pain of his broken arm, and too much caffeine blazing through his bloodstream, was enough to make him feel lightheaded. He swayed a little on his feet.
Chloe steadied him, her hands firm on his upper arms. “You don’t have to be a hero, Martin,” she said, glancing into the hole briefly and then tearing her eyes away, disturbed. Her voice diminished a bit when she spoke again. “I can go in. You’ve done enough.”
Martin regained his equilibrium, with difficulty. His head was still buzzing. “No,” he said, startled by how weak it sounded. He cleared his throat of dust and tried again. “No, I’ll go. At least I’m…somewhat ready for it.” That wasn’t true, and he knew it. One look at the others told him that they knew it, too. It was the only leg he had left to stand on. He didn’t want to go in there, of course, but he would rather die than let Chloe go in by herself.
She stared at him now, her jaw set, her hands still clamped to his arms. Her expression was one of thinking something over. Finally, she said, “Well, you’re not going in there alone. I’m going with you.”
Martin protested, but it was mostly just for show. He was ashamed to admit it, but her words had caused a great surge of relief through his aching body. No, he didn’t want to go in, and no, he didn’t want to endanger Chloe, but the thought of stepping into that blackness all by himself made him almost paralyzed with terror. What if he was sucked into some other dimension and never heard from again? After all, he had no experience with vast featureless voids—he had no idea what was going to happen in there. If something horrible was going to happen, he would rather have Chloe there with him. Perhaps it was cowardly, but it was the way he felt. He glanced over at her, and simply nodded. He hoped she could see the gratitude shining from behind his eyes.
She turned toward the others. “Well, keep watch on Ivan, and look out for those other wackos from the church,” she said. She picked up the flashlight she’d dug out of the cupboard earlier, flicking it on and off to check its brightness. Then she took Martin’s hand and stepped toward the hole. She was shaking a little, but she stood very straight and tall. “We’ll scream if we need help. If we don’t come back…” She looked around at the others, half-smiling. “Well, I don’t know what the hell you should do. Close the hole up, for one.” She smiled fully then, and Olivia and Seth laughed, nervous and tense, but genuine. Chloe put her free hand on the edge of the hole. Testing the waters. Martin was right beside her, feeling the throb of her heartbeat through her hand.
He looked at her strong profile in the dimness. “Here we go,” he said, and when she nodded in return, he began clambering into the blackness, Chloe tight at his heels.
* * * *
For the first few moments, Martin couldn’t see or feel anything, other than the scratch of the cast on his left arm and the soft flesh of Chloe’s fingers enclosing his right hand. It wasn’t hot, and it wasn’t cold. They were walking forward, so they must be walking on something, but to Martin even the unseen floor beneath them felt insubstantial.
“Turn on the flashlight.” The sound of his own whisper seemed as loud as a scream, and he nearly jumped out of his skin. Despite his nervousness, he still noticed that his voice seemed odd and flat, with no echo—because there’s nothing for the sound to bounce off of, he thought grimly. Why the hell did we come in here? There’s nothing. A second later, the flashlight came on.
In the meager yellow glow, he caught a glimpse of Chloe’s pale, frightened, but determined face. A sheen of sweat sparkled on her cheeks and forehead. He wished he could say that he would have felt better if she hadn’t come, but just the sight of her in the blackness—as tired and terrified as she was—was mightily reassuring. He squeezed her hand tighter.
Very slowly, Chloe shone the flashlight all around the space. They were still moving forward—if direction could be said to mean anything here—but when they turned and trained the flashlight back the way they had come, Martin found that he couldn’t see the hole they had climbed through. Panic began to nibble at the edges of his consciousness, but he fought hard to keep it at bay.
Maybe they had just walked farther than they thought, and the light couldn’t reach all the way to the hole. The thought calmed him a little, but not much. Freak out later, he told himself, his teeth clenched. If you explore this black hole and then can’t find a way back to the real world, then you can panic but not before.
They continued moving, following the flashlight beam as it pierced the darkness ahead of them and side-to-side, looking in vain for something to illuminate. Martin could hear Chloe’s quick, shallow breaths very near his ear. “Is this what it was like when you looked in the first time?” She was whispering instinctively, he knew; somehow the place discouraged shouting, probably because of the disturbing way it wanted to soak up sound like a sponge.
“You can see why I didn’t want to tell you about it,” he whispered back. He wasn’t even sure if they were still moving; he could feel his legs moving, yes, but the lack of scenery made it appear as though they were walking in place. The thought was strangely comforting; perhaps at this very moment they were standing just inside the hole in the landing wall, with Olivia and Seth just a few yards away.
Ivan, too, don’t forget about him, his brain helpfully supplied.
Martin hadn’t forgotten, but he had to admit the whole Ivan situation depressed him more than anyone could have guessed. If he was right, and those church people had used some kind of weird supernatural hypnosis to force Ivan to the dark side, then Martin was at a loss as to how they were ever going to be able to get him back to normal. It wasn’t simply a matter of persuasion, or deprogramming; apparently more esoteric methods were going to be called for, and Martin didn’t have a clue where to start. Would he have to make the church people zap Ivan back to his old self? Was that even possible at this point? He sighed, the sound of it seeming to seep out into the endless darkness.
With the flashlight picking up nothing but more nothing, Martin finally opened his mouth to suggest that they try to make their way back to the hole. This was looking like a useless enterprise; besides that, the emptiness was really starting to get to him.
Before a sound had escaped his lips, he heard a loud clunk. Chloe gasped and swore, and the flashlight beam went wild for a second.
Martin swiveled toward her, his heart hammering. In the pitiful glow, nothing at first seemed amiss. Chloe, her brow furrowed, was standing a foot or so from him, her hand partially covering her face. “What happened?” he asked.
Chloe took her hand away. A trickle of blood was making its lazy way down from her left nostril, meandering over her lips. “I hit something,” she said. Her eyes looked black in the feeble light.
“Where?” Martin looked frantically around, but nothing looked different. He could swear, though, that for a second the space felt different, more like an enclosed finite room and less like a limitless blank expanse. He wondered if it was just his imagination.
“Right here in front of me, Martin.” She was training the flashlight dead ahead, but of course there was nothing to see. She wiped the blood from her chin and then reached a hand out, tentatively. Less than eighteen inches from her face, her hand stopped, flat, in midair. As if to pound home some point, or to prove something to herself, Chloe slapped at the invisible barrier a few times, the sound of flesh hitting solid concrete. She smiled. “I think it’s a wall.”
Martin reached out, vaguely sheepish, but then he felt it, too, cold and slick and
substantial. First Ivan with the door and now this, he thought, not without humor. It’s the amazing house of invisible walls.
Chloe was laughing now, the sound steady enough but edged with almost hysterical relief at the strange, but no longer limitless, proportions of the room beneath the stairs. “Come on, we can follow the wall,” she said, handing Martin the flashlight and pressing both palms against the wall, almost caressing it as though it was a holy relic. “We can tell how big the place is then.” Martin could hear the grin in her voice. “Told you there was just a room back here.”
The flashlight bobbing in his good hand, Martin leaned one shoulder on the wall and began sliding along, Chloe right behind him, her arm draped loosely around his waist. The continuing solidity of the barrier as they moved made Martin less and less anxious with each passing step. This close to the wall he could even smell the dry dust of the concrete intermingled with the earthy tang of mold. It seemed like the sweetest smell in the world.
It wasn’t long before they hit a corner and changed direction. Martin could almost begin to see the dimensions of the room becoming clarified in his mind’s eye, a black space of frightening aspect but no longer one of endless proportion. What was this place, he wondered, and what sort of spell was it under that rendered it invisible?
By Martin’s mental calculations, they had navigated about half of the room when Chloe suddenly tugged at his shirt. Martin trained the beam on her. “Feel the wall here. Is there a door or something?” She was whispering again.
Martin turned and peered around her, as though he’d be able to see anything other than darkness. The sight of so much nothing was still unsettling, even with his shoulder braced against an obviously solid wall, but he was slowly getting used to it. Maybe this is sort of what it would be like to be blind, he thought.
He could see Chloe’s white hand closing around a rounded chunk of nothingness, and then he heard a squeak and a faint rattle. She snatched her hand away. “I don’t think it’s locked,” she said. Her breathing was fast and shallow, making Martin think of a bird’s heartbeat.
In the flickering glow of the flashlight, he looked up into her dim features. She concentrated, focused on the spot where the doorknob should be. Her hand shook, very slightly. Martin wanted to take her hand, lead her out of this place, patch up the wall and never speak of this again. The last thing he wanted to do was touch the darkness where the doorknob was, speculate on what might be lying in wait behind this new layer of mystery. His throat was dry. “Should we open it?” he rasped.
Chloe looked at him, blinking slowly as though processing her words. “I guess we’ve got to,” she said. Her voice was a ghost’s. “I’m pretty sure this wasn’t on the blueprint. We have to get to the bottom of it sooner or later.”
She had said what he most feared she would, but deep down he knew she was right. If they didn’t do something now, this would all just go on and on. “Yeah, can’t live forever, right?” His attempt at levity not only fell flat, but sounded positively ghoulish in the yellow circle of illumination. He was sorry he had spoken, but his defenses were rising; he was more afraid of opening that door than of doing anything, ever, in his entire life up to now. This was worse even than stepping into the hole in the landing wall, ten minutes ago or an eternity ago.
“I’ll go first,” Chloe said, taking the flashlight back from him. “Arm okay?”
“Yes.” It was throbbing a little, but fear was making the pain seem paltry by comparison.
“Good. Stay very close.”
Wishing they had thought to bring a weapon of some kind—hell, even a bread knife from the kitchen drawer would have made him feel less helpless—Martin practically climbed onto Chloe’s back, wrapping his good arm and his cast-encased one around her rib cage, feeling her rapid heartbeat matching time with his own.
Chloe gripped the unseen doorknob with one white-knuckled hand. She hesitated for only the barest second, then turned the knob and pushed the door open.
Chapter Twenty-One
Lily arrived back at the church just as the sun was beginning to set. She was tired and discouraged, and even though she was loath to admit it, a little apprehensive. Even though she loved Mother and Father more intensely than she had ever loved anyone, even her own sister, she could not help but feel a tiny trickle of cold terror when she imagined what their reaction would be when they learned she had come back empty-handed from her daily expedition.
It was getting harder. She and the others convinced many people to see the light, and that was something to be proud of, but apparently this was still not good enough. Perhaps the people they already converted were the ones most receptive to persuasion. This was not a large town, and maybe the potential church members remaining in the population had simply been able to close their hearts more firmly to Lily and to the message of Bellwether that she bore.
At any rate, Lily had convinced no one today, and as the shadows lengthened across the parking lot, she slowly pulled at the glass door and went inside the church, her head slightly lowered, preparing for punishment in advance.
Neither Mother nor Father was in the main room as she entered, although a few of the other acolytes sat here and there, looking dejected. Lily wondered if they had the same unfortunate luck on their recruiting drives.
Or could it be, she considered, that they were still out of sorts from their setback the night before, and the loss of one of their newest members, as well as the forced escape of several new converts? Lily, of course, could not say it, but she felt the loss of Ivan more deeply than any of the others, and not simply because she had made the crucial first contact with him. She silently cursed those heathens from the white house for coming into her sanctuary and stealing Ivan away from her.
Wanting to face Mother and Father directly, and thus get any unpleasant consequences over with, Lily made her way toward the door to the back room, where she could hear Father deep in discussion with Mother, just as he’d been this morning when she left. As she approached, his voice grew louder, more heated. “You saw what you were able to do to those people last night,” Father was saying, the sound of his voice indicating that he was probably just on the other side of the door. “It was easy. All you had to do was touch them, and after a few seconds…” He let the words drift off. “You can take them much quicker now. Your power is growing greater and greater every day.”
After a silence in which Mother presumably answered him, Father spoke again. “I know you don’t want any undue attention. With your powers where they are now, it would only be a matter of hours before we could…”
Lily could feel Mother’s wrath beginning to seep through the door, and she backed up a step. She was expecting Father to become cowed again, to wither under Mother’s remonstrations, but this time he stuck to his guns. “You wouldn’t have to go far,” he insisted. “Just think of everyone who passes right by this door every day. Surely you can’t let that many potential recruits go to waste.”
A sound from Mother, still angry, but perhaps softening a little. Father pressed on, sensing victory. “Yes, yes! Think how much faster we can achieve your goals. We’d no longer have to rely solely on this pack of idiots we have here. We should take action immediately. We need to take matters into our own hands.”
There was a long pause. Lily’s heart was thumping so erratically that she could barely tell one beat from the next. Pack of idiots, she thought. Is Father talking about us? About me? Then Father was speaking again, apparently with complete confidence that his argument had won the day. “I promise I will help you, try to keep you hidden,” he said. Then, in deference, “I am so gratified that you agree. Shall we begin right away?”
A short pause. “Of course,” Father said.
There was another pause then, a long one, and Lily took advantage of it by knocking timidly at the door. She was more than scared now, she was terrified. What if Fat
her had been talking about her and the others? What if Mother and Father didn’t need Lily anymore? Her stomach clenched, and she felt as though she might be sick. At Father’s summons, she turned the knob and stepped into the back room.
She didn’t look up. “No new converts today,” she said, stumbling over her words in her haste to get them spoken.
There was silence from Father, and, of course, no word from the shriveled pile of tattered shawls that comprised Mother’s frail form. After a moment, Lily gathered the courage to peer up through her bangs, fearful of their wordless wrath. Father wasn’t looking at her, seemingly lost in solitary thought. Lily stood there, wondering if they’d heard, wondering if she should just turn around and leave the room, when suddenly Father said, “Don’t worry about it, Lily. You may go.”
Relief and confusion mingled with her already palpable sense of uneasiness. Nodding once in acknowledgement, she turned and stepped back out into the main room, closing the door gently behind her. She listened there for a few more minutes, but apparently Mother and Father were finished with their discussion, or sensed her spying presence, because she heard nothing more. Finally, she made her way over to a secondhand sofa near the front window and curled up on it, looking out into the dusk.
Mother and Father had a plan, that much was certain. Lily didn’t understand exactly what it was, but she didn’t think she liked the sound of it. Yes, the thought of more people joining the church was a pleasant one, but her poorly grasped concept of the method for obtaining them was making her profoundly uncomfortable.
Bellwether Page 15