Bastard, he thought.
“Where are we going?” Rook’s eyes found Bishop’s in the rearview mirror.
Bishop said, “There’s an old bomb shelter buried behind Fin’s dad’s house.”
“Really?”
“I’ve never been there. I think Fin practically lived in it for a couple years.”
“Does Kyle know about it?” She sounded worried.
“No. Fin went out of his way to keep it a secret.”
“Not from you.”
Bishop sighed. “He went back to it once, in spirit. I was helping him come down and he was there. I don’t think he remembered telling me.”
“I meant he must trust you.”
“Yes, he does.” Did anyway.
At the Tanner residence, Bishop cruised by to see that nothing was going on. He parked a short distance away and shut off the engine.
“Wait here.” Taking Fin’s keys, he moved off into the shadowed lawns, cutting along the shortest route to the densely wooded portion of the Tanner’s lot.
Chez Tanner was among the largest houses in its upscale neighborhood. The streets all curved and snaked, leaving some irregular pockets of property undeveloped. Mature trees had been left in place wherever possible, and some of the larger orphaned parcels, like the one at the back of the Tanners’, were almost forest primeval.
Bishop slipped silently in among the massive oak and maple trunks. From what Fin said, he’d know he was near the hatch when the leaning tree and its neighbor formed an ‘X’ through the Tanners’ sliding doors.
To achieve that view he had to fight into the middle of a massive forsythia. Beneath its drooping fronds, partially obscured by dry leaves, waited the hatch. After determining which of Fin’s keys would open the padlock, he went back to the car to get his friends.
*** *** ***
On the way down through the cement and steel shaft, Rook counted 18 rungs on the ladder, then she was in the fallout shelter proper. It was an enormous metal tube, like a drainage culvert. The walls were curved steel that met in an arch about eight feet overhead. The floor was also metal, made up of mesh panels with storage underneath. On her left stood a set of bunk beds, on her right, a desk with a bunch of clutter, surmounted by shelves. The narrow walkway led down to a tiny kitchen/dining/living room, about ten feet square. Hopefully the door at the far end led to the bathroom, or Rook thought she might regret her decision to hide here.
The decor tweaked Rook’s love of mid-century modern design, apart from the gaudy mint color of the walls. Rebellious teenage Fin had done his best to obscure the cool, retro features with hippie trappings and pot fumes, so the overall effect was peculiar.
Bishop managed to get Fin’s inert form down the ladder in a fireman’s carry, and deposited him on the lower bunk. Rook thanked him, assured him they would be fine, Fin just needed to sleep it off, and locked the hatch from the inside after he left. She plugged in Vesuvius and curled up with Fin. “What now?” she said.
“I don’t know. We can ask Fin,” Vesuvius suggested.
“No, we can’t,” Rook explained. “He can’t wake up.”
“There was one time Fin hadn’t been going to work, and Bishop kept him from getting fired. Gave him herbal tea to bring him around and told him what to say to his boss. I guess it worked. I was surprised Fin bothered because he hates his job, but at least he started getting up again.”
Vesuvius went on. Rook let herself be lulled by his mild voice, not really listening, stroking Fin’s face. Despite exhaustion, her thoughts buzzed.
Rook propped herself up on her elbow and looked at Fin. Obviously Brian Shaw was responsible for his current mental state, but surely not the physical. She ran her fingers over his forehead, through his hair, wondering what he’d run into that fucked him up. Had it been Kyle? Marcus? Maybe he’d been at work when the building exploded. She remembered telling him she didn’t want him to rescue her, but was glad to think he tried anyway. Lifting his uninjured hand, she kissed the palm.
Rook was pretty sure she hadn’t needed this long to recover from her interrogation. When the hell was he going to wake up?
She needed to look at his eyes, hoped they would show some spark of life. Gently, she peeled open his left eye. It stayed open, glassy, the iris a slight halo of green rimming the enormous black pupil. His right eye was the same. They weren’t focused on anything in particular, but they were steady.
Rook straddled Fin and put her face right in front of his. If he was in there at all, he would see her. Her breathing slowed and her heart rate dropped. She stared into his eyes and felt herself disconnecting from her body. Letting go, she plummeted into Fin’s mind, using his open eyes as a doorway.
Chapter Thirteen
TOWERS
A Completer, an Unknowing angel with Shadowed Wings,
Shall heal the Divided Man and restore Light upon the Earth
from New Revelations by Reverend Brian Shaw, unpublished
Rook took several moments to steady herself, and looked around. Ash everywhere. Like being inside an urn. It covered the ground as far as she could see. The gritty, gray ash and an overcast sky were the sum total of this cold world. Whatever had been here was gone.
A large black bird flew in wide, silent circles around her. Rook wasn’t certain when it arrived, but knew it wasn’t of this place so she tried to approach it. It landed to wait for her.
Rook edged closer to the raven, fearful of spooking it. The bird didn’t act nervous, but when Rook came within ten feet, it launched itself. It circled, far out of reach.
The ash was too fine to even hold bird tracks. She looked up at the raven. Keeping a furtive eye on her glossy black guide, she moved on.
Her movement away from the spot distressed the raven. It swooped past her, over to the magic spot. Instead of landing, it hovered, beating up clouds of gray grit with each stroke of its huge wings. As soon as Rook moved back that way, it gained altitude and calmed.
Confident there was something special about that location, Rook tried to open her mind a bit wider.
The fine dust took a long time to settle in the stagnant air. Not that a little extra haze was notable with such breathtaking scenery.
The less she focused on this as Fin’s remains, the easier it became to believe she could solve this puzzle. The ash, in such huge quantity, reminded her of Mount St. Helens, Pompeii, the surface of the moon.
Idle consideration of what strange artifacts might be concealed almost yielded to the next random thought when she abruptly realized it meant something. The raven had shown her where to dig. She dug, certain this was the solution. It had to be.
Her excavation was soon gigantic. A nice neat hole with sheer sides was out of the question — she flung the gray sand as far as she could, creating a sloping bowl with a dense cloud above it. The granules packed painfully tight under her fingernails. Her mind brimmed with grisly images of what she might unearth: bones, macabre statuary, gobbets of gray matter, pyramids, bedrock...
She stopped. She’d descended several feet and found nothing. The raven had gone higher to avoid the ash cloud, and she took its silence as approval. Rook was now concerned that her mood could be pivotal in locating anything, and worse, she might influence the nature of the discovery. She tried to center herself, calm down, and, above all knock off the morbid visualizations. She resolved to find something she wanted to find, although she couldn’t be sure what it would be.
Another minute of digging, and a shape revealed itself at the floor of her pit, an object with tidy right-angle corners. A rectangular block of dark sandstone. Within seconds she exposed it completely, along with parts of several litter mates.
It made perfect sense. Building blocks are elemental and universal. Whether to take this experience literally or symbolically had no real effect on the interpretation, but what was she supposed to build?
“Maybe that too will become obvious, if I’m patient.” She set to digging again, widening her work area
until she had a few dozen blocks. That seemed to be the lot, so she began stacking them up at the bottom of the pit.
The process revealed that each block was in fact not rectangular, but slightly curved. They only fit together when set in an arcing wall.
Since there weren’t many blocks available, Rook kept the first course short. As she placed the first block of the second course, she felt something akin to deja vu. As if she were ever so slightly more awake. She laid in the next stone, and it again felt as if an unknown fog began to clear.
She added more blocks, taking stock of the effects. By the time she began the third course images accompanied the heightened awareness. Jittery and unstable flashes, but more substantial with each stone added to the wall. They were connected, but too ephemeral to identify.
With half the blocks stacked up the impressions persisted well enough to form a flickering silent movie, and Rook could see what they showed: her. In the coffee shop, at the Shamrock, being kidnapped.
“Yes!” she screamed, “It’s me! I’m here!” She increased the pace of her construction, feeling some glimmer of warmth now with the imagery, a contentedness at her presence. The wall was right. The goal came clearer with each added block, and she could visualize the finished structure. She could see the connection to an early, innocent sense of self. She could see the countryside that would surround the tower, lush and teeming. Painfully, she could also see she was out of blocks.
The wall was only five courses of seven blocks. The raw material was depleted already, along with her own reserves. She had worked furiously, whizzing from despair to elation and back.
She huddled against the wall, needing to stay in contact with it but needing to rest. She could sense a shift in the emotions emanating from the blocks. Fear, drawn from an awareness of vulnerability, mounting rapidly. Rook was too exhausted to help.
The bird landed atop the wall and cawed, frightened. Rook was despondent at her inability to continue, but she couldn’t understand the bird’s fear.
A quick look around cleared that up. Something moving fast below the surface of the dust, out near the rim of the large crater she’d made.
It followed the curve, not converging with her position, so her surprise didn’t instantly crystallize into fear. The thump behind her caused the crystallization and also the shattering into razor slivers of panic.
She saw the next one form almost directly overhead in the lingering dust cloud, coalescing from the airborne particles into a matted, hairy animal, like a mutant opossum. It dropped onto the ashes.
She fled for higher ground, but remembered the unseen creature moving like a shark through the powdered ash and saw the hopelessness of running away. She stopped moving and tried to think. The two beasties near the wall had not pounced yet. When she glanced their way they slunk back. They looked hostile and vicious, but not bold.
Rook knew what they were. The dim knowledge lurked around her that these were dust trolls. They hadn’t been present at first because they were part of Fin’s juvenile subconscious. With the rebuilding underway, elements of his psyche were reappearing. These were a defense mechanism, like mental antibodies.
She whirled and backpedaled to keep from being surrounded as the ugly rat-tailed monsters rained down. “It’s me! I’m trying to help!” she yelled, but nothing changed.
The creatures became much braver in groups. They closed in, too many for her to outmaneuver, coming up from the ground and shaking the dust off their whiskers. They fell from the sky, piling up four deep all around her.
She was about to be overrun. The sheer mass of trolls pushed those nearest to her ever nearer. The raven swooped on her and blotted out the chaos with its wings.
A twisting moment of vertigo, and she could see again. She was someplace else. The ground was a thick matting of dark pine needles and long black feathers. Tall evergreens pressed in from all sides, their green so dark it was nearly black in the moon-and-stars light. She could hear a coyote yipping in the distance, occasional calls of night birds.
The air was so much cleaner here without all the sand and ash flying around. Rook ruffled her hair, shaking the grit out of it. She brushed off her clothes as well, then sat on the ground to pull off her boots. They were packed full of the stuff like she’d been playing in a filthy sandbox. After thumping the boots together a few times to dislodge as much debris as she could, Rook slipped her feet back in and laced them up. She thought about scattering the little mound of pale ash, but decided to leave it as a landmark in case she got lost in this new place.
Rook threaded between the trees, avoiding the faerie circles of luminescent mushrooms. A sign nailed to the trunk of a dead tree caught her attention. The letters danced and shifted before settling down. NO TRESPASSING.
They could tell Rook didn’t take them seriously, so they rearranged themselves and spelled, BEWARE SNAKES. When they saw she was undeterred, they tried one last message, RAVEN SEASON.
Rook left the sign scrambling to evoke a frightening warning and moved deeper into trees. A chilling fog settled on the ground and the woods grew noisier. Animals chattered and shrieked, twigs snapped.
This wasn’t Fin’s mind anymore, so it must be her own. Which confused her, because although presumably she spent a good deal of time in her own mind, this wasn’t familiar. She was dredging up everything she could from Psych 101 when she came to the edge of a clearing. A gingerbread house stood in the middle, complete with candy cane porch railing, pancake roofing and lemon-gel windows.
A submerged part of Rook’s mind jumped up and yelled that this was exactly what she’d been looking for. The perfect building material — lightweight, easy to work with and just as easy to replace — whip up a batch in the kitchen!
Rook wasn’t sure there would be enough, or what it might mean to pull down structures within her own mind. She couldn’t think of anything else though, and decided to give it a go. She would stop if it hurt or she felt like she was losing memories or forgetting how to do algebra, or any other overt signs she was harming herself.
The gingerbread was spongier than she would have liked, and smelled rancid, but she quickly tore down the roof and stacked the pieces in a pile. It didn’t hurt at all.
Looking around for an obvious portal into Fin’s mind got her nowhere, and depression slammed back. The swirling blackness she felt materialized as a swarm of ravens, circling and swooping, no sound but the rustle of wind in their wings. Untold numbers circled low out of the black sky, then swept around and were reabsorbed into it. The largest swooped down, snatched a block of gingerbread and flapped up and out of sight. Immediately the others followed suit and Rook shrieked, “No goddammit! Filthy scavengers! Shoo! Fucking crows!” She wanted to save some of her blocks, but the birds weren’t easily spooked. She pressed among them and grabbed one, and felt vertigo again.
A moment later, Rook was back at Fin’s wall. The ravens ferrying the gingerbread blocks here dropped them before melting away in heat shimmers. Rook regretted calling the birds filthy crows and mumbled a lame sounding thank you. She set to work, keeping an eye open for dust trolls.
Inevitably she ran out of blocks and needed to return to the cottage in the clearing for more. A raven transported her and sat patiently while she worked. When the ferrying began again, Rook went back to Fin, feeling she was making progress. She was horrified to see dust trolls swarming his wall, devouring the gingerbread and threatening to topple the other blocks.
Rook’s fury was palpable. She raged at the dust trolls and grabbed one as it scuttled past her. A feeling more unclean than anything she’d ever experienced, worse than anything Marcus ever wrought, engulfed her and she gagged. The dust troll turned in her grasp and hissed. The raven pulled her away to safety again.
The cottage was torn down to its foundation. Rook knew she would have to obtain materials someplace else, but she was exhausted. Only the thought of the dust trolls ruling Fin’s mind got her moving. The birds were gone, the forest quiet. She encou
ntered more signs whose shifting messages warned her of everything from mudslides to land mines. The more dire the warnings, the thicker the woods, the more apprehensive Rook became. She took that as a sign she was on the right track.
Not at all comfortable with what she was discovering about herself, Rook concentrated instead on what she was discovering about Fin. Obviously he was interrogated much more intensely than she had been. What did Shaw think Fin knew? Lost in reverie, Rook almost passed by the tower without noticing it.
Tall and octagonal, made of red brick, and covered with ivy, it was reminiscent of an academic building. She circled it twice but found no door. Looking to the top, Rook noticed a single small window, empty beneath the pointed slate roof. In the eaves she could see ravens nesting. Instinctively she knew the tower housed a princess. A weak, overprotected princess waiting around for a handsome prince to rescue her. Incapable of realizing he wasn’t coming. That he was catatonic, trapped in the rubble of his own tower. All she had to do was climb down.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.”
Of course it couldn’t be easy.
“Princess!”
Still nothing.
“Brook!”
Rook knew she wasn’t going to get an answer. The ivy formed a natural ladder, but she was suddenly certain she was afraid of heights. Although the thought of scaling the wall terrified her, she would have to do it. She reasoned she couldn’t be safer than in her own mind, but knew how untrue that was. Standing at the base, she studied the best route up. No reason to rush, after all. Perhaps there was another tower nearby, with a more convenient entrance? The ravens gave her reproving looks, and she knew she had to quit stalling.
Miss Brandymoon's Device: a novel of sex, nanotech, and a sentient lava lamp (Divided Man Book 1) Page 16