Blind Lake

The voice of authority. She winced and departed with a wounded look. Ray stepped into the nearest elevator and pushed the sublevel-five button, the closest approach to the O/BEC gallery. He assumed he had a certain margin of time in which to work. Once the civilian staff had left the building Shulgin would dispatch a crew of inspectors, but the storm would slow that process to a crawl.

Klaxons reverberated deep in the courses in which the elevators rose and fell. He was four stories under the Mi

Power failure. In a few seconds the backup systems would kick in.

Even now, Ray thought, shouldn’t there be emergency lights?

Apparently not. The darkness was absolute.

He took his server out of his pocket, but even that device had ceased to glow. He might as well have been blind.

Ray had never liked dark, enclosed spaces.

He put his hands out to orient himself. He backed into a corner of the elevator, adjoining walls to his left and right. The burnished aluminum surfaces were cold and inert to the touch.

This won’t last, he told himself. And if the power failure did continue, it could only be bad news for the O/BECs. The pumps would fail, the liquid helium would stop flowing, the temperature in the platens would rise above the critical -451 Fahrenheit. But a dissenting voice inside him said, The fucking thing’s got you now.

Hang on, he told himself. He had arrived at the Eye full of certainty and with a sense of his own power: he had come here by a series of irrevocable steps, fueled by his conviction that the O/BECs were source of everything that had gone wrong at Blind Lake. But the building had stolen his momentum. He was locked in a box, and his confidence began to seep away into the darkness.

I’m not here for myself, Ray thought. He had to keep that in mind. He was here because the gullible children who had been placed under his charge were playing with a dangerous machine, and he meant to stop them whether they liked it or not. That was essentially a selfless act. More than that: it was redemptive. Ray had made a mistake at Sue Sampel’s house and he was prepared to admit it. He took a certain pride in his willingness to look at a problem realistically. Maybe everyone else had been blinded by cupidity, denial, or fear. Not Ray. The device in this building had become a threat and he was going to deal with it. He was performing an act of such fundamental moral necessity that it would wash clean any mistakes he might have made in the process.

Unless he had come too late. The elevator was motionless, but Ray imagined he could hear the building creak and groan around him, deforming in the darkness. Whatever we woke up, Ray thought, it’s powerful; it’s strong, and it’s gaining a sense of its own strength.

Methodically, he rolled up one leg of his trousers. Ray had left Sue’s with the bloody knife still clutched in his hand. He hadn’t wanted to let it go or leave it behind. The knife, the act of using it as a weapon, had made what followed both possible and necessary. That was when he had formulated his plan to penetrate the Eye using Charlie Grogan’s all-pass tag. He had started driving to Charlie’s with the knife next to him on the passenger-side seat of the car, an untouchable thing decorated with threads of Sue Sampel’s blood. Then he had pulled over to the side of the road, wiped the knife clean with a disposable tissue, and carefully strapped the blade to the calf of his left leg with a roll of duct tape from the glove compartment. It had seemed like a fine idea at the time.

Now he wanted the knife in his hand, ready to use. Worse, he couldn’t help thinking that he might have left some blood on the blade after all; and the idea of Sue Sampel’s blood touching his skin, invading his pores, was grotesque and intolerable. But in the absolute darkness of the stalled elevator he had a hard time finding the loose edge of the tape. He had wrapped himself up like a fucking mummy.

Nor had he given much thought to the physical problem of peeling what seemed like a quarter-mile of duct tape off his hairy leg. He was almost certainly taking some skin off along with it. He drew deep, gasping breaths, the way Marguerite had learned to do in that Lamaze class they had attended before Tessa’s birth. He was leaking tears by the time the last layer of tape came loose, and when he jerked that away it took the knife with it, slicing a neat little chunk out of his calf along the ankle.

That was too much. Ray screamed in pain and frustration, and his screaming made the stalled elevator seem much smaller, unbearably small. He opened his eyes wide, straining for light — he had heard that the human eye could register even a single photon — but there was nothing, only the sting of his own sweat.

I could die here, he thought, and that would be very bad; or, worse, what if he was wrong about the Eye, what if Shulgin found him here after the crisis had passed, raving and with an incriminating weapon in his hand? The knife, the fucking knife. He couldn’t keep it and he couldn’t get rid of it.

What if the walls closed on him like teeth?

He wondered whether — if it became necessary — he could successfully kill himself with the knife. Like a Bushido warrior, falling on his sword. How badly, how quickly could he hurt himself with a six-inch blade? Would it be more efficient to slit his wrists or stick himself in the belly? Or should he try to cut his own throat?

He thought about death. What it would be like to sink away from his own untidy self, to drift deeper and deeper into the static and empty past.

He imagined he heard Marguerite’s voice in his ear, whispering words he didn’t understand:

ignorance

curiosity

pain

love

— more evidence, as if he needed it, that the O/BEC madness had already infected him…

And then the lights winked back on.

“God! Fuck!” Ray said, momentarily dazed.

The elevator hummed to life and resumed its journey downward.

Ray discovered he had bitten his tongue. His mouth was full of blood. He spat it out onto the green tiled floor, rolled his cuff down over his bleeding ankle, and waited for the door to open.

Twenty-Nine

“Maybe she went to look for her mother,” Elaine said, but when Chris called Tessa’s name there was no answer, and the brightly lit ground-floor corridor of the clinic was empty as far as he could see.

He took out his pocket server and spoke her name again. No answer. He tried Marguerite. Also no answer.

“This is just spooky,” Elaine said.

It was worse than that. Chris felt as if he had stepped into one of those nightmares in which something absolutely essential had evaporated in his hands. “What room is Sue in?”

“Two-eleven,” Elaine said promptly. “Upstairs.”

“You ring the duty nurse and ask her to look for Tess. I’ll find Marguerite.”

Elaine watched Chris sprint for the stairwell. Elaine herself wasn’t terribly worried. The kid was probably down in the cafeteria or off riding a gurney cart. “Quite the family man,” she said to Vogel. “Our Chris.”

“Don’t begrudge him what he found here,” Vogel murmured. “It could end at any time.”

He discovered Sue Sampel very nearly asleep, alone in her darkened room. “Marguerite left already,” she said. “Chris? Is that you? Chris? Is Marguerite lost or something?”

“I can’t raise her server. It’s nothing to worry about it.”

She yawned. “Bullshit. You’re worried.”

“Go on back to sleep, Sue.”

“I think I will. I think I have to. But I can tell you’re lying. Chris? Don’t get lost in the dark, Chris.”