The Long Twilight (44 page)

"Shut up," Trait snapped, and he did. "Florin, somehow you've managed to take over the dream machine and use it against us. I don't claim to know how; I'm just the fellow who follows the wiring diagrams. But Eridani's right: you're tinkering with forces that are too big for you. All right, so you've walled us up in concrete. You've showed what you can do. But you're caught too! The air will start getting foul in a matter of minutes; in a couple of hours, we'll be dead—all of us! So back down now, before it goes too far, before it runs away with you! Get us out of this and I swear we'll make an accommodation with you! We were wrong—"

"Shut up, you damned fool!" Van Wouk yelled. "You'd blabber your guts to
him
? We don't need him! Smash the machine!"

I squeezed a careless burst at the door at his feet; he leaped and yelped and a red patch appeared on his shin.

"Next one's higher," I said.

"Rush him!" Van Wouk squealed, but he didn't move; I raised my sights and was squeezing when he broke and scuttled for it. Trait backed to the indicated door. Eridani, looking pale but calm, started to make a pitch but I chipped the door frame beside him and he faded back.

"Bardell, you know how to rig the dream machine?" I said.

"Y-yes, certainly, but—"

"I'm going back," I said. "You're going to help me." I went to the door the others had disappeared through, closed it and shot the heavy barrel bolt, came back and sat in a chair beside the control panel.

"Florin—are you sure?" Bardell was shaking. "I mean—wouldn't it be better if we did as they said? Disabled the infernal machine?"

"Listen carefully, Bardell," I said. "One wrong move and no more sweet you. Got it? Now start things moving."

He tottered to the board, flipped keys and punched buttons as if he knew what he was doing. A row of red lights went on.

"It's hot," he said, as if he hated saying it.

I picked up the gadget with the wires attached. There was a power pack that went into my pocket. The rest clipped to my collar just under my right ear, with a little pink chip in the ear itself.

"What program?" Bardell asked in a quivery voice.

"No program. Just fire me up and let me run free."

"It might kill you! What if you die—?"

"Then I made a mistake. Now, Bardell."

He nodded, and reached for a switch. Something jabbed inside my head. I felt dizzy, and wondered if maybe this time I'd made my last mistake. The ceiling went past, then a wall, then Bardell, looking sad and worried. The floor drifted into view, another wall, then the ceiling again, nothing spectacular, just a nice gentle processing.

Bardell's mouth was moving now, but I didn't hear any words. Then I speeded up and everything blurred and I shot off into space and burned up like a meteorite in the atmosphere, leaving a tiny ember that glowed red, then cooled and went out, slowly, lingeringly, reluctantly, amid a clamor of forgotten voices reminding me of blasted hopes and vain regrets that dwindled in their turn and faded into nothingness.

I opened my eyes and she was sitting across the table from me, dressed in a form-fitting gray outfit with bits of silver and scarlet braid on the shoulders. The table was smooth and white and not perfectly flat, like a slab of hard-carved ivory. The walls behind her were in many shades of russet and gold and tawny, textured like the bark of a Shaggy-man tree. There were sounds in the air that weren't music, but were soothing for all that. She looked at me with compassion and put a hand over mine and said, "Was it bad, Florin?"

"Bad enough, Miss Regis. Glad to see you looking so well. How did you get from there to here?"

She shook her head. "Oh, Florin—I'm afraid for you. Are you sure what you're doing is the right thing?"

"Miss Regis, I'm winging it. I wouldn't tell anyone else that. Funny thing, but I trust you. I don't know why. Who are you, anyway?"

She looked from one of my eyes to the other, as if I were hiding somewhere behind them. "You're not joking, are you?
You really don't know
."

"I really don't. We've met before: in a beer joint, in a library. Now here. What is this place?"

"It's the Temple of Concord. We came here together, Florin, hoping to find peace and understanding. You've been under narcomeditation for many hours. Seeker Eridani let you come with me— but I sensed you weren't really yourself." Her hand held mine tighter. "Was it a mistake, Florin? Have they hurt you?"

"I'm fine, my dear," I said, and patted her hand. "Just a little mixed up. And every time I try to unmix myself, I step off another ledge in the dark. Sometimes it's Big Nose and his boys, sometimes Diss, the lilac lizard, and now and then it's you. I have a kind of line on Van Wouk, and Diss explained himself more or less plausibly, once you accept the impossible. But you don't fit in. You aren't part of the pattern. You aren't trying to sell me anything. Maybe that would tell me something if I just knew how to listen."

"We shouldn't have come here," she whispered. "Let's leave now, Florin. We won't go any further with it. It was a forlorn hope—"

"That's the best kind, Miss Regis."

"Can't you call me Curia?"

"I can't leave here now, Curia. I don't know why, but that's what the little bird called instinct tells me. What I have to do is break down a few doors, peek into a few dark places, intrude in some sanctuaries, unveil a couple of veiled mysteries. Where should I start?"

She got paler as I spoke. She shook her head and her grip on my hand was almost painful. "No, Florin! You can't! Don't even speak of it!"

"It has to be that way. Just point me in the right direction and stand back."

"Come with me—now. Please, Florin!"

"I can't. And I can't explain why. I could talk about dummies with bashed heads and Nile green Buicks and little voices back of the ear, but it would take too long, and wouldn't mean anything anyway. See, I'm learning? All I know is I've got to keep pushing. I don't really have any evidence, but somehow I sense I'm rocking something on its foundations. Maybe the next push will bring it down with a smash. Maybe I'll be caught in the wreckage, but that doesn't seem so important." I stood, feeling weak in the knees and with a faint, distant buzzing in my skull.

"I see I can't stop you," Miss Regis said. All the life had gone out of her voice. Her clutch on my hand loosened and I took it back. She stared ahead, not looking at me.

"Through there," she said, and lifted a hand to point at the big carved bronze door across the room. "Along the corridor to the black door at the end. It's the Inner Chamber. No one but the anointed can enter there." She still didn't look at me. She blinked and a tear ran down the curve of her cheek.

"So long, Miss Regis," I said. She didn't answer.

The door was big and black and lumpy with sculptured cherubs and devils and vindictive-looking old men with beards and haloes, plus a few sportive angels hovering about the crowd. I fingered the worn spot at one side and it swung back with a soft hiss on a room walled with green tiles. Van Wouk, Eridani, Trait and the rest were grouped around a chair beside the panel with all the dials. No lights were lit on the board now. The door behind them that led to the stage sets was open. Bardell lay on the floor, breathing through his mouth rather noisily. The dummy with the bashed head was seated in the chair.

I said, "Ahem," and they all turned around as if they were mounted on swivels.

"Mother of God," Wolff said, and made a magic sign in the air. Van Wouk made a sound that wasn't speech. Eridani flared his nostrils. Trait cursed and reached for his hip.

"Naughty, naughty," I said. "Try anything cute and I'll turn you into an ugly redhead with a bad complexion."

"This has got to stop, Florin," Van Wouk blustered, but weakly. "We can't go on this way any longer!"

I sidestepped and glanced at the door I had just come through. It was just an ordinary door, splintered around the lock, with a blank surface of ordinary concrete behind it.

"I agree," I said. "In fact, we can't go as far as we've gone, but you notice I didn't let that slow me down. Now, who wants to spill the beans? Eridani? Wolff?"

"The truth?" Van Wouk made a noise that might have been a laugh being strangled at birth. "Who knows what the truth is? Who knows anything? Do you, Florin? If so, you have the advantage over us, I assure you!"

"The machine must be disabled, put out of action once and for all," Eridani said in a cold voice. "I assume you see that now, Florin?"

"Not yet," I said. "What's the matter with Bardell?"

"He fell down and bumped his head," Trait said in a nasty tone.

"Wake him up so he can join the party."

"Forget him, he's unimportant, merely a hired flunky," Van Wouk spoke up. "We're the ones who're in a position to deal with you."

"Who taught him to operate the dream machine?"

"What? No one. He knows nothing about it."

Bardell groaned and rolled over. At my insistence, Eridani and Trait helped him up and walked him up and down the room until he threw them off and rubbed at his face and looked around at the company assembled.

"They tried to kill me," he said in a voice like broken bottles. "I told you they wanted to kill me, and—"

"Quiet, Bardell," I said. "I'm about to try an experiment. You can help."

"What do you mean?" Van Wouk blurted. "You, and this . . . this—"

"Yeah. I admit Bardell doesn't have a lot going for him; but you boys don't seem to like him. That makes him a pal. How about it, Bardell? Will you throw in with me; or ride it down in flames with Van Wouk and company?"

Bardell looked from them to me and back again. "Now, wait just a minute, Florin—"

"The waiting's over. Now we act. Are you in, or out?"

"What are you going to do?"

"Make up your mind."

He gnawed his lip; he twitched. He opened his mouth to speak, he hesitated.

Trait laughed. "You picked a poor stick to lean on, Florin," he said. "That's not a man, it's a bowl full of jelly."

"All right, I'll help you," Bardell said quite calmly, and walked over to stand beside me.

"Trait, will you never learn to keep your stupid mouth shut?" Eridani said in a tone stamped out of cold, rolled steel.

"Sure, be tricky," I said. "It adds to the game." I waved a hand. "Back against the wall, all of you." They obeyed, in spite of no guns in sight.

"Bardell, fire up the dream machine."

"But—you're not linked to it."

"Just get the circuits hot. I'll take it from there."

"I demand you tell us what you intend doing!" Van Wouk growled.

"Easy," I said. "Up to now I've just been along for the ride. Now I'm taking the wheel."

"Meaning?"

"Somebody along the line dropped hints that I was responsible for the certain anomalies. The old 'monsters-from-the-id' idea. According to that theory I've been the prime mover as well as the prime victim—unconsciously. I'm moving the action over to the conscious area. The next trick you see will be on purpose."

Eridani and Van Wouk made simultaneous inarticulate noises; Trait pushed away from the wall and stopped, poised. Bardell called, "Activated!"

"Don't do it, Florin!" Van Wouk barked. "Can't you see the terrible danger inherent—" He got that far before Eridani and Trait charged me, heads down, legs pumping. I stood where I was and pictured a knee-high brick wall across the room, between them and me.

And it was there.

Trait hit it in full stride, did a forward flip and slammed the deck on his back like a body falling off a roof. Eridani checked, skidded, hands out in front, his mouth in a tight little
moue
of anticipated pain; he smacked the bricks and tumbled over mewing like a stepped-on cat.

"For the love of God!" Van Wouk blurted and tried to crawl up the wall behind him. Eridani bleated like a sheep, mooed like a soprano cow, rolling around and clutching his shins. Bardell clucked like a chicken in the throes of an epileptic seizure. Trait just lay where he was, as inert as a dead horse.

"That'll be all from the menagerie for the present," I said, and pictured them not there anymore. They weren't.

"Now we're getting somewhere," I said, and imagined the side wall of the room out of existence.

It disappeared obediently, leaving a porous surface of concrete in its place.

"Go away, concrete," I wished; but it stayed put. I threw away the other three walls and the roof and the floor, furniture and all, exposing rough concrete on all six sides of me, glowing faintly with an eerie, violet glow.

I tried again, harder. Nothing.

"OK," I said aloud, and my words hit the blind walls and fell dead. "Let's try a little concentrated effort." I picked a spot on the wall and told myself it wasn't there. Maybe it got a little hazy; but it didn't go away. I narrowed my focus down to a spot the size of a dime. The violet glow dimmed there; nothing else. I tightened down to a pinpoint, threw everything I had at it—

Zigzag cracks ran across the concrete, radiating from the target. A large chunk fell, letting in gray light and curling tendrils of fog. The rest of the wall collapsed like damp pastry, almost soundlessly. I picked my way across the soft debris, into swirling mist. A light gleamed ahead, a fuzzy puffball in the gloom. As I came closer, it resolved itself into a streetlight, an old-fashioned carbide lamp in a wrought-iron cage on a tall cast-iron pole. I stopped under it and listened. Someone was coming. A moment later Diss, the mauve monster, strolled into view, dapper in black evening dress.

"Well, well," he said, somehow not sounding as casual as he might have. "And how did you get
here
?"

"I didn't," I said. "You're in your cubbyhole, two lights from Sol, and I'm driving matched nightmares down that ol' Street of Dreams, remember?"

He trotted out a light chuckle for my benefit and put it away again, almost unused. "You failed to fulfill our agreement," he said in a tone that suggested feelings that were hurt, but not fatally.

"Maybe it slipped my mind. I've learned a few tricks since then, Diss. Like this." I turned the lamppost into a tree and set the crown afire. The flames leaped up into the night, crackling merrily. Diss hardly twitched an eyebrow—or the place where an eyebrow would be if he had an eyebrow.