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“Laughter in the blackness. And then, the plunge of the knife… No, Margo. Nobody would want those memories.”
And then Menzies himself laughed. But it wasn’t his voice. No: it was another voice, another voice entirely: a hideous, dry chuckle.
A sudden dreadful shock burned through the gathering lethargy. No. Oh, no. It couldn’t be…
Menzies sat in the chair, looking at her intently, as if gauging the effect of his words.
Then he winked.
Margo tried to pull away, opened her mouth to scream. But even as she did so, the feeling of lassitude intensified, flooding her limbs, leaving her unable to speak or move. She had a desperate realization that the lethargy wasn’t normal, that something was happening to her…
Menzies let his hand fall away from hers, and as he did so, she saw-with a thrill of horror-that his other hand had been concealed beneath. It held a tiny syringe, which was injecting a colorless liquid into the IV tube at her wrist. Even as she watched, he withdrew the syringe, palmed it, then replaced it in his suit jacket.
“My dear Margo,” he said, sitting back, his voice so very different now. “Did you really think you’d seen the last of me?”
Panic, and a desperate desire to survive, surged within her-yet she felt utterly powerless against the drug that was spreading through her veins, silencing her voice and paralyzing her limbs. Menzies swept to his feet, placed a finger against his lips, and whispered, “Time to sleep, Margo…”
The hated darkness surged in, blotting out sight and thought. Panic, shock, and disbelief fell aside as the mere act of drawing breath became a struggle. As she lay paralyzed, Margo saw Menzies turn and hasten from the room, heard his faint yelling for a nurse. But then his voice, too, was subsumed into the hollow roar that filled her head, and darkness gathered in her eyes until the roar dwindled into blackness and eternal night, and she knew no more.
Chapter 18
Four days after their meeting with Menzies, the sound-and-light show was finally installed and ready for debugging, and that night they were pulling the final cables, hooking everything up. Jay Lipper crouched by the dusty hole near the floor of the Hall of the Chariots, listening to various sounds emerging from the hole: grunts, heavy breathing, muttered curses. It was the third night in a row they’d worked on the install into the wee hours of the morning, and he was dog-tired. He couldn’t take much more of this. The exhibition had basically taken over his life. All his guildmates in Land of Darkmord had given up on him and continued with the online game. By now, they’d leveled up once, maybe twice, and he was hopelessly behind.
“Got it?” came DeMeo’s muffled voice from the hole. Lipper looked down to see the end of a fiber-optic cable poking out of the blackness.
Lipper seized the end. “Got it.”
He pulled it through, then waited for DeMeo to come around from the other side. Soon DeMeo’s blocky figure, backlit and faint in the dim light of the tomb, came huffing down the passageway, cables coiled about his massive shoulders. Lipper handed him the cable end and DeMeo plugged it into the back of a PowerBook sitting on a nearby worktable. Later, when the artifacts were all in place, the laptop would be artfully hidden behind a gilded and painted chest. But for now, it was out in the open, where they could access it.
DeMeo slapped the dust off his thighs with a grin, then held up his hand. “High five, bro. We did it.”
Lipper ignored the hand, unable to disguise his irritation. He had had just about enough of DeMeo. The museum’s two electricians had insisted on going home at midnight, and as a result he’d found himself on his hands and knees, acting as DeMeo’s damn assistant.
“We’ve got a long way to go,” he said in a sulky voice.
DeMeo’s hand dropped. “Yeah, but at least, the cabling’s been pulled, the software’s loaded, and we’re on schedule. You can’t ask for better than that, right, Jayce?”
Lipper reached over and turned on the computer, initiating the boot sequence. He hoped to hell the computer would see the network and the remote devices, but he knew it wouldn’t. It was never that easy-and besides, DeMeo was the one who set up the frigging network. Anything could happen.
The computer finished booting and, with a sinking heart, Lipper began sending pings over the network, checking to see how many of the two dozen remote devices were missing and would require time-consuming troubleshooting to locate. He’d be lucky if the computer saw half of the peripherals on first boot-up: it was the nature of the business.
But as he moused his way from one network address to another, a sense of disbelief stole over him. Everything seemed to be there.
He ran over his checklist. It was impossible, but true: the entire network was there, visible and operational. All the remote devices, the sound-and-light apparatus, were responding and seemed to be perfectly synchronized. It was as if someone had already worked out the kinks.
Lipper rechecked his list, but with the same result. Disbelief gave way to a kind of guarded jubilation: he could not recall a single job where such a complicated network was up and ru
“How’s it look?” DeMeo asked, crowding up behind him to peer at the small screen. Lipper could smell his oniony breath.
“Looks good.” Lipper edged away.
“Sweet!” DeMeo gave a whoop that echoed through the tomb, just about blowing out Lipper’s eardrum. “I am the man! I’m a freaking network monster!” He danced around the room, doing an ungainly buck-and-wing, pumping his fist into the air. Then he glanced over at Lipper. “Let’s do a test run.”
“I have a better idea. Why don’t you go out and get us a couple of pizzas?”
DeMeo looked at him in surprise. “What-now? You don’t want to do an alpha?”
Lipper certainly did want to do a test run. But not with DeMeo breathing down his neck, whooping in his ear, and acting like an ass. Lipper wanted to admire his handiwork quietly, in a focused way. He needed a break from DeMeo, and he needed one bad.
“We’ll do a run after the pizzas. On me.”
He watched as DeMeo considered this.
“All right,” DeMeo said. “What do you want?”
“The Neapolitan. With a large iced tea.”
“I’m going for the Hawaiian double pineapple with honey-glazed ham, extra garlic, and two Dr Peppers.”
It was typical of DeMeo to assume Lipper gave a shit what kind of pizza he wanted. Lipper pulled out two twenties, passed them over.
“Thanks, bro.”
He watched DeMeo’s form labor up the stone staircase and vanish in the gloom. The footsteps echoed slowly away.
Lipper breathed in the blessed silence. Maybe DeMeo would be run over by a bus on the way back.
With that pleasant thought in mind, he turned his attention back to the computer’s control panel. He moused over each peripheral device in turn, checking to see that it was alive and functional, surprised again that each one responded perfectly, on cue, as if somebody had already debugged the network for them. DeMeo, for all his wisecracks and shenanigans, had actually done his job-and done it perfectly.
Suddenly he paused, frowning. A software icon was jumping frantically in the dock. Somehow the main routines for the sound-and-light show had loaded automatically, when, in fact, he had specifically programmed them to load manually, at least during the alpha testing, so he could step through the code and check each module.