The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) (34 page)

“No, no,” he said. “You have found the path, I think. I have a different purpose here today.”

“Do you have enough water, grandfather?”

“Are you in need, Little Brother? I’m not sure I can share my little water with you. We see each other, but through a veil. You have not yet returned to this world, I think. Our water and your water are now different.”

“We have enough. I asked only for you, grandfather.”

“Yes, yes, I have enough. There is a spring near here. I see the woman warrior is with you. So she succeeded. She found the missing companions.”

“Yes, Chantal found us.”

“But I see only four of you. My old eyes aren’t what they were, but I looked for five.”

“One of us fell, grandfather. We buried little Alvin in the other world. He chose … a different path.”

“Yes, now I understand. We all have our own paths to follow, and his has ended there. That is the way of it. It is for your fallen friend that I am here to pray, I think. I will pray that his soul finds peace, even in that strange world.”

“Thank you, grandfather Emilio,” Bucky said.

“Yes, that is what I will do.” Emilio paused a moment, wondering which prayer would be best. “Meantime, Gilbert and his grandmother guard the gateway behind you. They keep a good watch that no harm follows you. More than once while I sat here, I have heard their drumming and singing. But when you have come back, you must let them seal the doorway behind you, the doorway between the worlds.”

“Yes, grandfather. Is there anything we can do for you, now?”

“No, no. I’m very glad you came by to see me. Just be sure about closing the gateway behind you.”

“Of course. I hope we see you again, grandfather.”

“Of course. In whichever world.” The old man smiled again, nodded reassuringly, then closed his eyes and began to chant an old prayer song, softly. Matthew indicated it was time for the four of them to continue down the path.

As the sound of old Emilio’s prayer song faded behind them, Matthew and Chantal now felt themselves flowing together, again, into a single act of perception, of love and forgiveness and joy in the realization that this state of consciousness, now induced for such a brief moment, might in fact be a preview of what human consciousness was in the process of evolving into, a new frontier in demand of a whole lot more exploration, exploration that could only be conducted in cooperation with the plant helpers, the psychoactive molecules. And they were here, together, among the first to walk the beaches of these unexplored shores.

And then she understood what Matthew was now ready to do. Her eyes brimmed with tears. “Can you, really?” she asked, without speaking. “Bend them both?”

He smiled back. “They’re the same thing, really. What we call time and space already curve together. The key is not to try and force anything. It’s more like finding the curve, and riding it. Next time, you’ll do it.”

Then, aloud to the others, “Don’t settle back, now. This is where we make our move. Everybody with me?”

“Where?” asked Bucky.

“How?” asked Skeezix.

“Just hang on, now. There, ahead of us and a little to the left. See the doorway?”

“I see about a hundred doorways,” Skeezix replied.

“The big swirling mirror thing with the green light flashing the number eight at the top. See it?”

“Oh, yeah. Wow. Was that there before?”

“It’s always been there,” Matthew smiled. “But you don’t see it till you need it. Don’t let go of each other, now. We’re going to take a step together in that direction. You with us, Bucky?”

“Nobody back home is going to believe this. But yes, I’m in.”

The singing chorus they heard changed now to a kind of harmonic sigh of joy.

“Good. A few more steps. That’s it. We’ll come back here again, some day. Whether together or each in his time, I can’t say. But for now, all together. Ready? In we go.”

And they did.

* * *

They stepped out of the vortex into a control room a bit like Worthy’s, only smaller.

“Finally,” said a version of Matthew — with longer, frosted hair and a silver suit — standing up on a raised platform above them, at waist level. In fact, all the technicians sat at desks and consoles along a ledge several feet above them, as though the four travelers had materialized on the stage of a kind of intimate amphitheater with ramped seating, shaped like the inside of a giant teacup.

“What kept you?”

“Matthew Hunter Eight, I presume?” Matthew asked the man who could have been his mirror image, if Matthew were to do his hair like a glam-rock guitarist and dress entirely in silver garments that threw off rainbows like old compact discs hung in the tree to scare off hawks and pigeons. And white moon boots.

“Naturally, here we think of me as Matthew One. To us, you’d be Matthew Eight,” said the Matthew in the silver mylar suit.

“Naturally.” Chantal’s Matthew set down her heavy aluminum case. “I see you’re working on interdimensional transportation.”

“Purely defensive, initially.”

“You’ve had some problems.”

“How can you tell?”

“I see armed guards with flamethrowers and some kind of beam weapons, and enough nozzles in the walls and ceiling to flood the place with some kind of disabling gas in a hurry. Or is it liquid nitrogen?”

“As you say, we’ve had a few uninvited guests,” answered the Matthew with the big, frosted hair and the white plastic belt to match his moon boots. “At this point, we’re all replicating that magic moment
near the beginning of an infant’s life when it occurs to him he might actually be able to climb out of his crib and see what’s outside the nursery door.”

“We appreciate the friendly welcome. To tell you the truth it’s been a bit of an exhausting journey. I don’t suppose there’s some place we could rest awhile? Maybe a source of fresh water?”

“Water we can provide,” the other Matthew nodded, signaling for one of his people to fetch. “But I’m afraid there’s no rest for the wicked, as we say in these parts. For reasons I don’t have time to explain, we’ve got to get you people moving. We can dampen the dimensional displacement oscillation for a while, but not forever — even with your Apache friends helping from the other side, which we do appreciate. And the problem is that the homing signal shut down a couple hours ago, which means if it follows the usual pattern it won’t be on for at least nine more hours.”

A small person brought them white metallic cups — heavier than aluminum, possibly platinum — then poured them brim-full of cold water from a fur-covered pitcher.

“Thanks,” Skeezix said.

“You’re welcome,” the pitcher purred.

“Much as I’d love to offer you a nice relaxing methylene cocktail and sit around comparing notes and chatting about the light creatures,” the Other Matthew continued, “we don’t have that much time. I can send you all across, but without the signal I can’t guarantee where the hell you’ll end up.”

“The … homing beacon?” Matthew asked.

“Unfortunately, targeting a transport into your dimension is extremely difficult. I’m sure the arachnids have lost plenty of their saucer craft trying to figure out how to maintain control in that environment. That’s why we use the little orbs. Low cost, expendable, able to tolerate a lot of Electro-Magnetic clutter. I’ve got to hand it to you, your microwave fog is a highly effective defense.”

“Defense?” asked Chantal.

“No one is quite sure what stopped them the first time, back in your year 1908. There are things in the universe — hell, things right here in our own helix — that are far more wondrous and terrifying than the arachnidae, believe me. Things that use the big spiders as throwaway assault troops. You don’t think the spiders developed all those technologies themselves? And it’s hard to get much out of them. But whoever they came up against back in 1908, he must have had some heap big medicine.”

“No name?”

“They only refer to him as ‘The Serb.’ Since then, the way you’ve woven a net of microwave radiation around your whole planet apparently screws up their communication and navigation quite wonderfully. My understanding is when they sent their next set of scout ships across in 1947, even your primitive radar guns played havoc with their controls; they crashed left and right. Since then your web has grown really impressive. I’m surprised your populace is willing to put up with the toxic spillover, though. Don’t your people complain about the side effects?”

“Every child has to have her cell phone.”

“On that diffuse a set of frequencies? How on earth do you shield? You’re not finding your brain cancer rates skyrocketing? Along with cataracts, sterility, SVS?”

“Hm?”

“Spontaneous Violence Syndrome?”

“Oh, that,” Matthew nodded. “The Powers That Be actually find that useful. They recruit for it, issue a whole lot of guns and uniforms and badges, turn them loose to bash in the skulls of the pot-heads. There’s a lot of denial.”

“It’s not just a river in Egypt, my friend.”

“It is not.”

“Children with microwave cell phones,” said the alternative Matthew in the iridescent metallic jumpsuit. “Someone make a note of that. Scan for correlations to brain cancer, cataracts, SVS. We can publish on that.”

“So you can’t get us through?” asked the visiting Matthew.

“Oh, we can send you
somewhere
. But how long a carnival ride were you looking for? It’s going to be so much more pleasant if we can deliver you to a targeted destination on a long-wave carrier beam. We know you got the homing device I sent through the vortex, because it’s been on about half a day, every day. What we can’t figure out is
why
it’s on only half a day. I specifically wrote that it should be connected to your computer circuit so it would resonate all the time.”

“We did connect it to the computer circuit, after checking to make sure it wasn’t going to write new code, erase our memory banks, something hostile.”

“Wise precaution. ‘Trust but verify,’ as a great man once said.”

“Since then it
has
been on all the time.”

“I’m telling you,” insisted the transdimensional Matthew, tossing his Skittle-frosted bouffant hair provocatively — his nifty silver suit diffracting a rainbow of matching colors every time he moved — “we get the low-frequency signal nice and clear for about 10 or 11 hours most days, then it’s off for half a day, except one day a week when it frequently doesn’t come on at all.”

“By the way, how did you get the homing device to us through the vortex, if we didn’t have any homing device for the homing device to lock onto?”

“Time-shift displacement. Technically, I didn’t send you the homing device till after it was already there, so there
was
a homing device to lock onto when we sent you the homing device. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with living organisms. When they arrive out of the time-shift, they’re non-functional.”

“Dead?”

“Well … more or less. Pretty much.”

“Matthew, the store is closed at least 14 hours a day, all day on Monday, now,” Chantal prompted Matthew. Her own Matthew. “How long after Marian locks up do the computers go to sleep mode?”

“Maybe twenty minutes of non-use. Sometimes she runs a defrag program that scales them back to ‘hibernate’ when it’s done, which would draw even less power.

“Wait a minute,” asked the guy in the silver suit. “Your computers
put themselves to sleep?
”

“Sure.”

“Why?”

“To save energy, of course.”

“To save … Oh my God, that’s right. You don’t have Tesla coils, you’re on some kind of Hertzian system with electricity moving through, like,
wires,
aren’t you?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Hundreds of miles stepped up in high voltage cables? Rationed and metered? They actually
charge
you for electric power?”

“They sure do.”

“So they’re off all night. Of course. Except for some kind of minimal …”

“She’ll only do a hard shutdown on Sunday nights, and even then not if someone’s likely to be in on Monday, playing catch-up on the new stock,” Chantal explained. “Most nights they’ll be in a sleep or hibernate mode, so pressing any key will bring them on again without going through a hard re-start.”

“Thank you. We’ll publish on that, too, it could explain a lot of things. Somebody make a note: ‘computer sleep and hibernate mode,’ I love it. And there’s no one there now, no one you can reach who can turn them back on?”

“I’ve completely lost track of time, I’m afraid,” Matthew replied. “But if the signal has been down for two hours I’m going to assume it’s about 9 in the evening at the store. Our version of the store. The chances Les or Marian would be there — our Marian,” Matthew nodded to the red-headed Marian clone sitting at one of the consoles, wearing bright red lipstick and dressed like one of the Cat Women of the Moon, a nod she acknowledged with a half-smile — “is pretty slim. But how are we going to reach them, anyway, by cell phone?”

He laced the last two words with sarcasm.

“That would work,” nodded Matthew Eight.

“It would?”

“Do you have one?”

“I do,” Chantal volunteered

“Give it a try,” said the Other Matthew. “This whole room is a carrier amplifier.”

“Do I need, like, a … dimension code?”

“All taken care of,” said Matthew Eight, waving his hand in the air to activate some kind of glowing, peach-colored, laser-generated holographic heads-up switchboard. “Dial ten or twelve digits, whatever you’re used to.”

Chantal dialed the store. Across however many dimensional barriers, she got the message machine sitting on Marian’s desk right away.

“Hello, Books on Benefit is currently closed. Our hours are from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. If you’d like to leave a message …”

“Marian? Les? If you’re there, pick up, please, it’s very urgent. We need someone to bring the computers back online.”

Silence.

“So much for that idea,” Matthew sighed. Chantal’s Matthew.

“There’s got to be a way,” Chantal insisted. “The system is still powered up, after all, it’s just in sleep mode. All we need is somebody to push an ‘Enter’ key.”