7. The Cage
Beyond the gates lay a courtyard, a circular expanse of brick surrounded by a garden of untended shrubbery. Beyond its littered expanse a building loomed, pairs of windows bracketing a portico three stories high. Amidst the portico's four pillars stood a weathered statue of Columbia. As I helped Edmonton down from the wall I considered the bulk of the skyhook in the tall grass. It remained where it had fallen.
"You okay?"
"For the moment." Edmonton answered, looking upward toward the statue. He removed his own arm gear. To both her sides stairs of marble wound, the lady's once lovely form dingy in half kneel. Holding an engraved stone scroll at the base of the steps, the spirit looked away toward the sea. Together we approached.
"And the seed of the Prophet shall sit the throne,
and drown in flame the mountains of man."
I read, puzzling over the dirt encrusted words. "What do you think it means?"
Edmonton shrugged, blond mop all askew as he nursed the leg. "Who knows? Another spot of mystical humbug." At the landing above blue doors met us, trimmed in peeling gold leaf. Testing them with the barrel of my Broadsider, I found them unlocked.
"Why do I think this isn't a good sign?
"Because you're observant. Curiouser and curiouser this 'Lamb' of Comstock's grows."
The doors parted to a round atrium, at whose tiled center stood a much smaller marble of the Tower. Behind it a single dim bulb glowed, while off to the sides of a new set of double doors statues of Washington and Franklin kept watch. Sword and key hung in hand. War and Science, I thought.
"Danger! Do not approach the Specimen," a sign warned. Another added: "Past this point 12-hour Quarantine! Approval Chief Scientist Lutece." Posted in even greater prominence above the next doorway... Specimen is Dangerous!"
The broken chairs and tables that lay strewn about the chamber's circumference attested to this fact. Fabric and splinters dotted the floor. Investigating downed partitions, shattered lamps and marred walls, I came upon a rack of white coats off to the side. The kind scientists like to wear to look smart. Coming alongside me, Edmonton stooped to retrieve a sheaf of half burnt notes, strewn from a notebook across the tile. Beneath Saint Washington's gaze he brought them into his sight and read.
"I guess even in a restricted area these crackers need someone to clean floors. Those politicians and scientists don't bother what they say around me because they think I'm some half-lettered colored boy. But I can tell they scared outta their wits by that thing they got locked upstairs, yes, Sir. They got a tiger by the tail, and they don't know whether to hang on...or run." He paged forward to inside the cover. "Ty Bradley."
Fingering the moth-eaten lab coats, I looked to him. "Tiger by the tail?"
Edmonton looked upward to the door, then over Columbia's head to the heights above. "It seems their Lamb is not as pacific as perhaps her moniker might convey." Upon the tile I saw what could only be bloodstain.
Abandoned by the years these doors creaked, moving slowly under our force as we passed through. In the gloom beyond we found ourselves side by side upon the burnt indigo of a carpet. Sparks flew from broken electrical cables to our right, while a caustic tang hung in the air. The corridor, arched, receded some fifty feet, its sides supported every ten by conforming buttresses. Along its length smoke billowed from obtuse machinery. Broken desks adorned the walls. At the end, beneath a singular yellow light fixture hung a chalkboard with four figures sketched in white silhouette. About us I could hear strange groans and creaking, such as the whole chamber might collapse at any moment. Everywhere there were fallen electrical lines.
As we approached the chalkboard Edmonton began kicking office doors open, finding their desks ruined and contents similarly deserted. At the blackboard the corridor split left and right. The chalk figures increased in size from left to right, alongside them an x-ray of two hands. One by one they depicted a 'morphology' of a female 'entity' in her growth, ages 1, 5, 11 and 17. Illegible chalk in a woman's longhand adorned the left side of the board.
"It looks like a Goddamned tornado hit this place." I whispered. Warily Edmonton looked about, then back at the chalkboard. To the right we advanced, weapons drawn.
The blackboard hung upon a partition, about which we pressed to find another sign: "Past this point 72 hour Quarantine! Approval Chief Scientist Lutece." To its right lay a generator control panel. Down the passage to its left light was flashing and the smell of burnt air pungent. What we found was unlike anything I'd ever seen.
Before us rose a low circular platform of three thin steps, atop which was a rounded rectangular cage. Within were three red and gold desks, labeled left to right, "Transpose 1, Transpose 2 and Transpose 3." Upon a sign above the cage's entrance the entrance a red sign illuminated the white letters, "SIPHON PASSIVE." To either side machinery which I could only describe as lightning generators threw bolts of crackling current from their spherical crowns onto similar contacts upon the cage top, cracking like whips and illuminating the chamber in unearthly light. Cables hung everywhere. In three ampules atop the cage I discerned a luminescent, violet fluid, churning and somehow connected to the flows of current. In the dim light beyond the desks I now saw three more glass tubes, each with an artifact within. 'Age 4 Companion,' the label read, the curiosity being a Teddy Bear with an eye out. 'Age 11,' said the second, the token being a poetry book. Finally, 'Age 13,' read the third, along with the title 'Menarche.' A rag hung in state, stained pink.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you." Edmonton said as I reached for a handle, eyes admonishing. I pulled it anyway. Lightning leapt downward into the so-called poetry book, frying it. Edmonton sighed, hand on chin. Encouraged, I pulled the next, watching as the lighting struck into the stained cloth, coursing for several seconds while the stain disappeared. Each time I did so, I noted the sign above went out and the one below illuminated.
SIPHON ACTIVE.
"DeWitt..." Edmonton said as he examined the generator panels, casting a cautious eye toward the crackling current which illuminated the chamber like a massive stroboscope. "Please stop." He looked about. "If I'm not mistaken..." He said, gaze turning to the panel. "The current is flowing from here outward. I think we've found the power plant."
"Power plant?" I said aloud.
"Yes. I'm skilled in matters electrical you see, and I've...I've never seen anything of this magnitude. Like a thunderstorm of the greatest potency casting nonstop bolts down to a waiting antenna. Those cables we saw beneath us upon the Skyrail poles...remember what I'd said earlier about Finkton? I need to look at this for a moment as well as rest my leg." He was mesmerized, and he had a right to be. The laboratory was terrifying in its power.
"Come on." I said, but he'd slipped into an office at the side and was perusing a notebook. "DeWitt, these notes...the control panels. This is it. This can only be the power source of Columbia!" Withdrawing a black box from his pocket, eye to peephole he hovered it over the texts, making with clicks of his forefinger brilliant flashes. Faintly I heard a woman singing. As Edmonton poured over wiring diagrams, I found myself drawn outward.
#
To my right lay a chamber dimly lit. Following the girl's humming I left Edmonton behind, stumbled down a corridor into an unexpectedly dark room. Hung upon lines were pictures of a pretty brunette...pictures I recognized. A subsequent chamber held a projector with film wound on its reels. I approached...flipped the machine on to moving pictures of a little girl attempting to pick a locked safe door, then that same girl later in life. By the date but a year before. Adorned in a white dress, she was laboring before a chalkboard, rows and columns of letters yielding to her manipulation. Strangely the movies were all taken from behind. The last picture, again from behind, was of her painting the Eiffel Tower.
They'd been watching her...probably her whole life.
With the day expiring and Edmonton distracted I took a lift up, knowing that the time for gathering information was over and action at hand. The lift deposited me at its uppermost station, and as its doors opened I found myself in a long corridor. Double doors lay midway down and to the right. At this level I could hear music playing, a girl singing along to it. Passing through a red curtained chamber, I spied yet another sign upon the stone wall: WARNING: DO NOT APPROACH SIPHON WHILE SPECIMEN IS AWAKE!
Beyond it three ball-capped lighting antennas rippled with electricity, current flowing from somewhere deep in the guts of the place. Amidst them was set a fluid receptacle like the ones below, possibly of glass or crystal. Inside its volume that same luminous fluid churned. Gazing at its roiling mass I felt forbidding power. As below cables were strung everywhere. Amid wooden speakers diaphragms reverberated with the singing I was hearing. Beside one of them a doorway led onward, a gold trimmed curtain of blue hanging ahead. A sign warned that:
"The siphon is dangerous while leeching the specimen."
Leeching?
Around another partition I came to new chalkboard, green instead of black, scrawled upon its smooth surface an ascending white line. Upward over the years of a childhood it ran until a sudden lurch upward at 13 years... "Menarche." Afterward the line labeled "Power Readings" fell...but picked up again vigorously after a year. A label below noted "Siphon Installed." Scratched in yellow capitals to its right, underlined three times, were the words "FACILITY UNSAFE."
The singing faltered.
This girl was no girl at all. As Bradley had said, the scientists knew it. Comstock knew it. Laslowe knew it. Did Edmonton know it? Another sign froze me in my tracks.
"WARNING: DO NOT TOUCH THE SPECIMEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE"
followed by:
"PAST THIS POINT, 168 HOUR QUARANTINE Approval, the Prophet."
I pressed onward.
The funny thing about being dead is that it is the same no matter how it happens...lights out. End of line. Faced with treating with a demon or eating a Morello bullet, I chose the latter. Beyond a utility room I found another lift, unexpectedly functional. It carried me upward.
The lower floors had been stonework, decorated with burnt tapestries, carpet and wooden furniture. Here there was nothing but tiled wall and the groan of Columbia's steel structure. It felt as though I were in the bowels of a ship. For a few moments I was lost, until I found a sign with six rooms annotated upon it below a single glowing light.
"Dressing Room."
I exited the central structure to a wooden catwalk.
Walking the floorboards about the statue's internal structure, I found an antechamber with a camera pointed at a shielded window. Beside it protruded a lever. With a pull the panel lowered to reveal a room adorned by green wallpaper, golden flourishes and a white chalk matrix upon a black chalk board. I'd seen it in the films. I took a moment to ponder her work, looking at intricacies of numbers arrayed against letters. At the same time I heard a noise outside and froze, realizing after a moment it was only Columbia's ceaseless wind. The silence caused me to wonder why the Columbians weren't storming the tower. How could they have not seen where we were going? Edmonton had intonated that this place was important to Columbia, perhaps the utmost. Were they that afraid?
I climbed the catwalk's slope upward until eventually I found the placard "Dressing Chamber." Opening the hatch with a spin of wheel I found another camera focused upon another iron plate. A single lever protruded before it. A sign upon the wall warned "'QUIET! WHILE SPECIMEN IS PRESENT' by Order of the Columbia Science Authority."
I pulled it and the window lowered to reveal a red paneled room...and a humming girl. Behind her upon the wall hung an exquisite painting of the Eiffel Tower at sunset, while in her hands she held a postcard of the same. Dressed in a white blouse, blue skirt and matching scarf, she was the very likeness from Laslowe's card. This was no demon...she was an angel. She turned toward me and with her right hand brushed her hair, blue eyes looking directly into mine. My heart stopped but she seemed blissfully ignorant of my presence. Upon the chamber's walnut panels charcoals of a strange, birdlike creature were pinned, while books sat piled four high upon her lacquered desk. She'd been smiling at the postcard but suddenly jolted and looked at her right hand. Holding it aloft, I could see a silver thimble upon not her pinkie but a stub. With a flex of her knees she grimaced...shook the pain away.
Leaving the card behind upon the desk she stepped out, and best I could I gave chase, ascending the outer catwalk, finding after a relieved moment a stairway that brought me to a new vantage point. This panel opened to a view of her library.
As the window opened she stood across the chamber looking away from me, daydreaming beneath a blue-curtained panoramic window that overlooked the vastness of clouds outside. She'd started humming again, the same hymn I'd heard before. To her sides wooden stairs descended, while beneath her and all about the long chamber shelves of books ran in neat cases, each stack adorned in gold leaf and floral filigree. As I watched my hand fell upon a notebook. Absently I opened it, finding it to be the study of a scientist named Rosalind Lutece. Lutece, I thought...the scientist. And a woman.
Following her script with my fingertip, she seemed to speculate: 'What makes the girl different?' Her words asked. 'I suspect it has less to do with what she is and rather more with what she is not. A small part of her remains from where she came. It would seem the universe does not like its peas mixed with its porridge.'
Somewhere outside I heard a thump...perhaps a creaking. I tried to tell myself it was the wind and not a hatch being opened...anything to dissuade me of the idea that Columbia had found us. Nearly a dozen men were dead by my hand already, and how many by Edmonton's? There would be no talking my way out of this sin...its wages was death.
Again, I took to the catwalk but despite my searching I could find no way in. At the top of the accessway, however, I did find an unlocked hatch. Forcing its corroded hinges open with effort I emerged upon the heights outside of the monument. The wind was howling at near gale force, while around me the city heights were visible through the cloud tops. Below but far too close a heavy Columbian gunship was holding station.
"Holy shit..." I heard myself cry as the wind stung my face, unbalanced by the frigid heights. I had to be close, I thought, closing my eyes...knowing that if I could chance the damned Skyhook, I could climb a ramp and some stairs. Keeping my back to the statue's metallic skin I inched up the ramp that followed Columbia's left shoulder, forcing myself against the wind step by step. Near the top a flight of pierced metal stairs led upward to a hatch, one ajar in the statue's head. With my back away from the chain link 'railing' that was at most decorative, I made my way up to the entrance and pulled myself inside.
I took a moment to catch my breath. Inside the utilitarian steel of the statue's upper corridors, I discovered more hatches, one stenciled with the phase 'Door must remain closed at all times.' With hands nearly frozen I spun it open. Within it I found a translucent emerald curtain. Circumnavigating its diameter, I discovered an opening, inside which I noted a brass plate twenty feet in diameter. Across it loomed another opening. As I stepped onto the pan, I heard a snap of metal...saw one of the four chains that suspended it come free in slow motion. I was falling.
I bellowed, only to slam onto something hard and sturdy. Struggling for a better grasp, I clambered onto what I soon realized to be a varnished railing. Looking upward I found a brunette, her blue eyes returning my gaze. At her bosom was clutched an overly large tome of Homer's Odyssey like a security blanket.
All I could think to say was, "Hello."
Whatever I might have chosen to diffuse that moment, 'hello' wasn't it. She shrieked, pedaling backwards toward the window, book flying into the air and crashing into the bookcases. Her fright startled me and with a howl I lost my grip, falling a good ten feet to a thud upon my back.
Something broke my fall, a table or couch or my head. Terrified, the girl came to the railing looked down in utter disbelief. Seeing I was unfortunately still alive, she yanked a book from her shelves and hurled it at me, the think flapping and coming apart as it struck me in the chest. Dashing down the railed stairs, she stopped and hefted another grimoire…Homer…her aim entirely too precise.
"Hey, knock it off! Knock it off! Will you stop it?!" I bellowed as books pelted me. "Will you stop it! I'm not here to hurt you!" Brandishing above her slight shoulders an improbably massive text concerning the 'Principles of Quantum Mechanics,' she came at me full bore, rearing back at the last moment to strike. For some reason she stayed her blow.
"Who are you?!" I heard
I groaned, and looked over my upraised hands, seeing her breathing heavily, terrified. Hand raised, I rose from the red carpet. "My name is…DeWitt. I'm a friend. I've come to get you out of here." I reached out to touch her shoulder.
"Get away!" Violently she shirked and brought the book down upon me full force. Despite her determination I'd gotten upright, and she had the strength of a gnat. I caught her hand, noticing again the thimble silver upon her shortened finger. In terror she struggled, but my grasp dissuaded any renewed attempt to introduce me to modern literature. I didn't do anything else but hold her assault at bay, simply looking at her until she realized I really wasn't going to hurt her. My heart was pounding.
The fear lessened upon her face, then seemed to melt away. Her hand lowered. I heard the book slip from her fingers and strike muffled the carpeted floor. "Are you…real?" Her words were barely audible, barely a whisper. Outward she reached to touch my face, lower lip quivering. Touching me seemed to shock her,, as if she'd truly not expected me to be real. She glanced at her hand, then back to me.
As her fingertips found my face anew, I touched the warmth of her hand. "Real enough."